Author: admin

Tonight at 9 pm ET, Fox
Business Network’s The
Independents comes in with Part I of a two-installment
Stories of the Year package, leading off with discussion about
2013’s bombshell revelations about the National Security Agency’s
spying activities. Former NSA general counsel and Bush-era
Department of Homeland Security official Stewart
Baker does not agree with this word “spying,” and
generally does not share the same antipathy toward federal
surveillance activities as the show’s co-hosts. The resulting
interview is…contentious.

The left-right panelists, former Kerry/Obama aide Mark Hannah and GOP
Deputy Communications Director Sarah Isgur Flores, compare
the two major parties’ ongoing civil wars, and later try to outdo
each other in not answering the question, “Would you legalize
weed?” Reason Senior Editor Peter Suderman
talks about—wait for it—Obamacare! And TV’s Andy Levy, from the great
Fox show Red
Eye, talks about the best filibusters and/or celebrity
meltdowns of 2013. Syria also gets a mention in there somewhere, as
does the word “statists” (twice!).

It is a very good television program, which I can state with
confidence because it’s already done! I may lurk in the open thread
here, just to police the
Kmele Foster fanclub activity….

The
Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies
report, Liberty and
Security in a Changing World, is now online. One of the
chief recommendations is that the NSA no longer be allowed to
monitor the phone calls of nearly every American. However, the
panel did suggest that private companies hold that data which could
be queried later by the NSA. Below are some preliminary assessments
of it from various civil liberties advocates:

Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“The president’s panel agreed with the growing consensus that
mass electronic surveillance has no place in American society,” EFF
Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl said. “The review board floats a
number of interesting reform proposals, and we’re especially happy
to see them condemn the NSA’s attacks on encryption and other
security systems people rely upon.  But we’re
disappointed that the recommendations suggest a path to continue
untargeted spying.  Mass surveillance is still heinous, even
if private company servers are holding the data instead of
government data centers.“ (emphasis added).

American Civil Liberties Union:

“We welcome this report, which advocates for many of the ACLU’s
positions, including an end to the government’s dragnet collection
of telephone metadata and its undermining of encryption standards,”
said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil
Liberties Union. “NSA’s surveillance programs are un-American,
unconstitutional, and need to be reined in. We urge President Obama
to accept his own Review Panel’s recommendations and end these
programs.”

In October, NSA Director Keith Alexander testified
before Congress that stopping the mass surveillance of 
Americans “would result in this nation being attacked.”

Starkly disagreeing with that assertion, Review Group panel
member Michael Morrell
told reporters:

“I do not believe, as a 33-year intelligence officer, that our
recommendations will in any way undermine the capabilities of the
US intelligence community to collect the information it needs to
collect to keep the country safe.”

In his ruling
against the NSA surveillance program on Monday, Federal
District Court Judge Richard Leon wrote:

“The government does not cite a single instance in which
analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an
imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any
objective that was time-sensitive in nature. I have serious doubts
about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of
conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving
imminent threats of terrorism.”

It’s official. A lot of Congressoids are against domestic
spying; the judiciary has ruled against it; and now the executive
branch represented by Obama’s handpicked review panel is
(partially) against it. Time to stop. And, oh yes, thank
you Edward Snowden.

It looks like the imprisoned members of activist
punk group Pussy Riot will be freed soon. Russia’s
parliament passed a Putin-backed prisoner amnesty bill on Wednesday
by a margin of 446 – 0. To make it official, Putin will need to
sign the bill into law tomorrow.

The bill is expected to free around 2,000
prisoners, many of whom have not committed violent crimes or are
first-time offenders, minors or mothers of young children. A
last-minute amendment tacked onto the bill adds additional
prisoners, including the Pussy Riot duo as well as
the Arctic
30 Greenpeace activists, who have been charged with hooliganism
but are still awaiting trial.

According to NPR, the
amnesty, which has been timed
to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Russia’s
constitution, “has been largely viewed as the Kremlin’s
attempt to soothe criticism of Russia’s human rights records ahead
of the Winter Olympics in Sochi in February.”

Even if the law is passed, though, Russian authorities have up
to six months to process the releases. Prison officials
have indicated,
however, they are ready to immediately release Pussy Riot’s
remaining members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria
Alyokhina. 

Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina were arrested alongside a third
member of the band, Yekaterina Samutsevich, in March last year for
a protest performance in the Orthodox church. Samutsevich was
released on probation shortly thereafter. The remaining members
continued to make international
headlines during their imprisonment; particularly
Tolokonnikova, who published an open
letter detailing brutal “slavery-like conditions” in a
Mordovia prison. 

Some activists, including Pussy Riot, have expressed their
skeptcism about the announcement. Petya Verzilov, Tolokonnikova’s
husband, told the Guardian, “They
[Tolokonnikova and Alyokhina] are slightly sceptical of course.
When you’re living in these conditions it’s hard to think about the
Duma passing some bill, and it seems like it could never happen, so
it’s a big surprise for them that it does actually seem to be
happening.”

Additionally, some opposition lawmakers and human rights groups
have said the bill doesn’t
go nearly far enough. It doesn’t free most political prisoners
or those charged with more serious crimes.

Valentin Gefter, director of the Institute of Human Rights

said the bill is “very narrow and decorative in
character.” As it stands, the amnesty is expected to cover less
than 2 percent of Russia’s prison population. 

In comparison with Barack Obama’s clemency record though,
Putin’s amnesty bill is remarkably liberal.

Five years into his presidency, Obama has granted
just 39
pardons – a record lower than that of both Bushes,
Clinton, Reagan, Carter and Nixon (and virtually every other
president.) As Reason’s Jacob Sullum wrote earlier
this year:

With the exception of Washington’s first term, then, Obama so
far has been stingier with pardons and commutations than any other
president, especially when you take into account the growth of the
federal penal system during the last century, the elimination of
parole, the proliferation of mandatory minimums, and the
concomitant increase in petitions. This is a remarkable development
for a man who proclaims that
“life is all about second chances” and who has repeatedly described
our criminal justice system as excessively harsh.

As Fox News notes though,
the problem seems to be, in part, a larger trend of presidential
pardons gradually declining over the 20th century. They argue the
Justice Department is a main culprit:

Margaret Love, a lawyer who served as the U.S. pardon attorney
in the Bush and Clinton administrations, said… the Justice
Department has become “unremittingly hostile” to the pardon
process.