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Romney Favored ‘Wiretapping’ And ‘Monitoring’ Mosques In 2005

By Zack Beauchamp on Sep 13, 2012 at 6:00 pm

Though presidential candidate Mitt Romney criticized President Obama (falsely) for being insufficiently supportive of free speech rights during attacks on American diplomats in Egypt and Libya, Romney himself has ran into trouble on related issues before. In 2005, while governor of Massachusetts, Romney called for the warrantless wiretapping of Massachusetts mosques in order to identify terrorism suspects. Speaking to the Heritage Foundation, a right wing think-tank in Washington, D.C., Romney proposed a wide-ranging surveillance program that encompassed both mosques and foreign students from “terrorist-sponsored states”:

How many [students] are coming to our state and going to those institutions who have come from terrorist-sponsored states? Do we know where they are? Are we tracking them? …How about people who are in settings — mosques, for instance — that may be teaching doctrines of hate and terror. Are we monitoring that? Are we wiretapping? Are we following what’s going on?

Because Romney was selling his idea as a means of identifying places from which extremist doctrines are disseminated rather than keeping track of individuals already under suspicion, it would seem to imply that police should be bugging mosques that aren’t already known to house radicals. Without prior suspicion of a crime leaves open the possibility that the type of monitoring Romney proposed would have been warrantless. Romney attempted to downplay this possibility in a subsequent interview, telling Fox News’s John Gibson that he supported devoting more resources to practices already in use rather than developing new surveillance techniques and that FBI wiretapping of mosques currently required probable cause.

Regardless, Romney walked back his proposal after it caused an uproar among Massachusetts Muslims and civil libertarians at the time, who believed the proposal was discriminatory and violated Muslim-Americans’ right to freely practice their religion.

Authorities that followed Romney’s prescribed course failed dismally. Earlier this year, the Associated Press ran a Pulitzer-Prize winning series about a massive, secret spying operation conducted by the New York Police Department (with CIA assistance) against local Muslims. Among other tactics, the NYPD spied on local mosques without warrants or probable cause. The NYPD generated no actionable leads, harmed real counterterrorism intelligence-gathering efforts, and prompted a Justice Department review over potential civil rights violations by the NYPD.

Justice

ACLU Sues On Behalf Of PA Man Arrested For Recording Police Officer

By Guest Blogger on Jul 19, 2012 at 5:30 pm

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Pennsylvania resident Gregory Rizer, who was arrested in January for recording a police officer aggressively questioning his quadriplegic friend. The officer also confiscated Rizer’s cell phone.

When Rizer complained to the mayor’s office about the arrest, the Point Marion Police Department arrested him at home and charged him with violating Pennsylvania’s wiretap law, which bans audio recording unless all parties consent. The district attorney has since removed the charges and returned Rizer’s cell phone – without the recording. The ACLU argues that Rizer was within his rights to record the officer because “the state’s Wiretap Act does not apply if the person being recorded does not have a reasonable ‘expectation of privacy.’” ACLU cooperating lawyer Glen Downey explained,

“The explosion of technology that allows almost every citizen to document and record the interactions between police and civilians makes it incumbent that both the officers and those seeking to record them understand that officers cannot shield themselves from public scrutiny by invoking wiretap laws. Police officers performing their official duties do not possess the requisite reasonable expectation of privacy necessary to be covered by the statute.”

There have been reports from across the country of police officers interfering with cell phone recording of their actions. Earlier this month, the New York City Police Department put out a flyer warning against a couple who record “stop-and-frisk” searches in the city. New York’s ACLU chapter released a phone app, “Stop-and-Frisk Watch,” to help New Yorkers hold police officers executing these controversial searches accountable.

Last week, New Jersey’s ACLU chapter released a similar app, “Police Tape,” an Android phone app that allows users to discreetly videotape and record police officers. The app also explains American civil rights and allows users to send recordings to ACLU databases for backup storage.

– Ben Sherman

Alyssa

‘Homeland’ Open Thread: Three Questions

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 3, 2011 at 11:07 am

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 2 episode of Homeland.

My deep and abiding love for the Homeland pilot, which I think is the best pilot of the new season by several orders of magnitude, is already a matter of public record. But I wanted to lay out a couple of questions for discussion:

1. Do we think Carrie is insane? She’s clearly not entirely mentally healthy. From her totally inappropriate advances towards Saul in a moment of desperation, to her disregard for the law, to her somewhat uncomfortable if perhaps justifiable decision to watch the Brodys have sex. But did she really hear what she thought she heard in that Iraqi prison? And is she mistaking nervous habits for signaling? Clearly, figuring out whether Carrie’s seeing clearly or seeing things that aren’t there will be one of the key conflicts of the story. And getting the balance between making her fragile but also more than the sum of her illness will be critical in making her a compelling character rather than just a stereotype.

2. Is the balance the U.S. has on civil liberties and wiretapping right? It seems that Carrie’s right that something’s going on with Nicholas Brody. But she discovered his hand signals by watching publicly available footage of him — not by sending a team she’s paying herself swarming all over his house. The show seems, so far, to be walking another important but tricky line, arguing that you can take threats seriously and pursue leads aggressively without compromising civil liberties and going outside the legal procedures you need to obtain a wiretap. That means you need more people with actual Iraq experience and more respect for their expertise, not more exceptions to the law.

3. Can we sympathize with a traumatized soldier who is also a traitor? We don’t know for sure that Brody is a sleeper agent (though it’s going to be an interesting season if he turns out not to be). Maybe the deepest secret he has is that he was forced to kill his fellow captive, and we’re going to have to see him work through that. But by presenting him as someone who, in addition to maybe betraying his country because he was tortured and brainwashed, cares about that fellow captive’s widow, is relearning how to have sex with his wife, and is building a relationship for the first time with his son, Homeland is giving us a mental workout in exploring the reactions we’re supposed to have for veterans.

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