They really ARE watching you!

Somehow I hadn’t seen a lot of media this week. Between preparing for ALA and writing my Little Brother essay I have managed to avoid reading depressing things about the state of our government and intellectual freedoms! But this morning this gem popped into my mailbox: Backward at the FBI, from the opinion pages of the New York Times. It talks about sweeping changes to the FBI operations manual that will give them a lot of new powers and an increased ability to invade our privacy. Some of the changes include:

• The ability to go through household trash of anyone to find things that will “pressure that person to assist in a government investigation.”
• Conducting a lie detector test on an individual, again with no evidence required.
• Using surreptitious surveillance squads on anyone repeatedly. Currently they are only allowed to do so once.
• Covert “proactive” infiltration of groups – FBI agents can attend up to five meetings of any group with no evidence that said group has done anything wrong without disclosing their identity before some unknown rules on “undisclosed participation” go into effect. These rules are not public.

Basically the new policies expand the powers of the FBI to investigate individuals for no reason with fewer oversights. Now I know some people will feel like this is good. The FBI needs to be able to operate freely in order to enforce the law and find bad people and all that. But the FBI aren’t always the best judge of right and wrong. There are reasons why we have constitutional protections. George Zornack mentioned a case filed by the ACLU from 2007 claiming that:

...an FBI agent infiltrated several California mosques and ‘indiscriminately collect[ed] personal information on hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent Muslim Americans in Southern California.’ The suit charges that the agent collected info on the sex lives of mosque members and attempted to provide them illegal drugs, and that his rhetoric about ‘jihad and armed conflict’ disturbed their prayer services.

Environmental activists and groups have also been under an odd amount of increased surveillance. Why do we need to give up civil liberties to protect polluting corporations?
As much as I appreciate a lot of what President Obama has done and is continuing to work to do I am flummoxed at his lack of action against the director of the F.B.I., Robert Mueller. It also makes me angry that my representatives haven’t done anything about it, nor did they seem to be concerned about the recent abuses of power when Mueller went before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.

These are the types of things I feel like we need a nation of Marcus’ to fight! What do you guys think?

Big Brother is Watching You

We have talked a lot about what schools should be allowed to do to children. Videotaping them in classrooms is something that has gained a lot of support in some circles, but how about this? Taking pictures of them through their laptops in their own home.

This lawsuit was already settled once but it keeps getting bigger and bigger. Kids keep coming forward and more evidence keeps sprouting up. Basically this school district gave all of its kids laptops with a tracking anti-theft feature that will allow them to take photographs of someone who has stolen the laptop in order to find it. This technology was recently used to find a thief by Cory Doctorow’s blog, Boingboing, and it was funny to read about and see the pictures of the thief, since he was a thief. So the software is legitimate and has actually worked to return stolen property to owners before. The problem arose when the school was discovered using it after one student’s missing laptop was recovered. The monitoring was never turned off and the student discovered hundred of photos of himself using the laptop. Not only did the school system not inform students that this was in use, but they started taking pictures of students in their homes without them knowing and using them to justify disciplinary actions. Without parental knowledge or consent.

We will likely never know what prompted the administrators to start doing this, how they justified their actions or even how often they used it. They have denied everything time and time again and lawyers keep showing more and more evidence contradicting their claims of innocence. This makes it unlikely we will ever get a clear idea of the story. One of the administrators was accused of downloading nude photos of students taken by these cameras to her own computer.

"Discovery to date has now revealed that thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots (.pdf) have been taken from numerous other students in their homes, many of which never reported their laptops lost or missing,” attorney Mark Haltzman wrote in a Thursday federal court filing.

What a nightmare for these kids! Personally I think these administrators should be prosecuted. Holding the district fiscally responsible for damages is not nearly enough of a deterrent to tell administrators how strongly we feel that this is wrong. I know that educating teenagers is a difficult job, but how far are we willing to let these people go? Should they really feel so justified in having carte blanche over their students' private lives that they think this is in any way ok? What do you guys think?

YouTube and Revolutions

We talked a lot about children last week and what constituted being “harmful to a minor.” I thought about that when I read this article in boingboing.

During a protest in Syria in April, a 13-year old boy, Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was separated from his parents. The people were protesting the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, who has not been shy about violence against peaceful protesters.

The whereabouts of Hamza were unknown for more than a month, then his mutilated and tortured corpse was returned to his parents. He had been beaten, burned, whipped with cables, shot in the arms and castrated. His family made a video of his injuries, the camera slowly panning across his body while the narrator describes his wounds, according to various media sources. This video was posted on YouTube and has galvanized protests in Syria and beyond, making the young boy a martyr and his family heroes, although his father has since been arrested.

You Tube took down the video, but then reinstated it after review. According to the Nation,

“YouTube, which is owned by Google, has company guidelines banning shocking or graphic content. “We make exceptions,” the spokesperson added, “for videos that have a clear educational, documentary, scientific or artistic value.”’

Reading about what happened to this young boy is horrifying enough, I have no wish to watch the video. But I am lucky enough to live in a country where I won’t be tortured for peaceful protest. Probably. With this video being up on YouTube, it is viewable by anyone with an Internet connection, including, of course kids. Even boingboing, known for being a very liberal blog, states on their site “it is extremely disturbing and not appropriate for viewing by children.” What do you think? Was YouTube right to reinstate the video? Or should the description be enough? Does the cultural significance of the reaction to the horrifying way in which Hamza was killed make it ok to be viewed by minors, in a library?

Boingboing

The Jerusalem Post

The New York Times

Last night I couldn’t sleep. Partly because I knew I had a lot of work to finish up today and I was nervous about it. Partly because I had woken up from a bad dream in which I completely forgot about my neighbor’s fifth cat (which doesn’t exist) when I fed them this weekend and it was dead. But mostly because I started reading Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. In the wake of another extension of the powers of the Patriot Act I found it an especially interesting read, particularly with the controversy over the “secret interpretation” of Section 215, which is said to give the FBI much wider surveillance powers than some lawmakers believe we would be comfortable with, were we to know. Creepy, and not unexpected.

The interesting thing is, in Little Brother, the main character is a teenager who is a computer whiz with some great leadership skills. When the Patriot Act, surveillance, and protecting the people goes too far, it is the teens who mobilize and shout not to trust anyone over 25! However, while I was reading it I was thinking that teens and people in their early twenties are much less likely to care about their privacy than we did when we were their age and now. Many teens and young adults post everything about their lives on Facebook with little care as to who sees it, according to many of the articles we have been reading. Then again, maybe it’s just the good for nothing teens I know and my 34-year old attitude problem. What do you guys think – would teens be likely to notice or care if DHS increased surveillance? Or did Doctorow simply transfer his Gen X mentality into the body of a present-day teen?

One of my tasks as a graduate assistant this past semester has been to keep tabs on any library related issues brought up before the state assembly. The majority of them were budget issues that were obviously important, but not really that interesting. One guy, however, proposed a bill that immediately put my back up. His name is David Yarde and he is a representative from District 52, just north of Ft. Wayne. House Bill 1100 read as follows:

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana:
SOURCE: IC 35-42-4-14; (11)IN1100.1.1. --> SECTION 1. IC 35-42-4-14 IS ADDED TO THE INDIANA CODE AS A NEW SECTION TO READ AS FOLLOWS [EFFECTIVE JULY 1, 2011]: Sec. 14.
(a) As used in this section, "registered sex offender" means a sex offender (as defined in IC 11-8-8-4.5)whois required to register under IC 11-8-8.
(b) A registered sex offender who knowingly or intentionally enters a public library (as defined in IC 36-12-1-5) commits sex offender library trespass, a Class D felony.
(c) It is a defense to a prosecution under this section that the registered sex offender:
(1) entered the public library on an election day for the purpose of voting; and
(2) spent no more time in the public library than was necessary for the registered sex offender to vote.

In plain language the bill meant to bar sex offenders from public libraries. Luckily this bill died in committee, never being brought to the floor. Likely someone did a fast internet search and found that the Supreme Court had already struck down a similar law in New Mexico. I emailed Representative Yarde to ask what had prompted his authorship of the bill, genuinely hoping that there was at least an incident that provoked this bill and that it was just an ill-considered, knee-jerk reaction to an individual’s behavior. I have yet to hear back from the representative beyond a form letter assuring me that he pays attention to all comments. If he or his staff ever do email me back I will update his blog with his comments.

But I bet nothing happened, and this was just an easy-to-author bill that he assumed would make him look good and that no one would argue against. After all, who wants to be supportive of sex offenders? And I am just as sickened and disgusted by rapists and child molesters as everyone else; but if we are to have a democratic society then we have to provide everyone with the same rights. If a person has served their time for their crime and are allowed to walk free again, we cannot suddenly decide to restrict their access to information. People who are already living on the margins of society do not get better if we decide to marginalize them even more – they get worse. Anyone who has gone to prison has a difficult time finding a job. Someone who has gone to prison and has to register as a sex offender has a crazy difficult time finding a job and living their lives on the up and up. Imagine them trying to do it without access to a public library!

As it says on page 37 of the Intellectual Freedom Manual, "A democratic society operates best when infomration flows freely and is freely available, and it is the library's unique responsibility to provide open, unfettered, and confidential access to that information. With information available and accessible, individuals have the tools necessary for self-improvment and participation in the political process." How can we expect people to get better when we deny them the tools they would need to better themselves and participate in society?

What do you guys think? I can’t imagine a logical argument for banning all sex offenders from all public libraries, but does anyone want to give it a shot?