Tag Archives: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

I Know Things Are Getting Strange When I Agree With The ACLU

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The following statement is posted at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) website:

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the U.S. government engages in mass, warrantless surveillance of Americans’ and foreigners’ phone calls, text messages, emails, and other electronic communications. Information collected under the law without a warrant can be used to prosecute and imprison people, even for crimes that have nothing to do with national security. Given our nation’s history of abusing its surveillance authorities, and the secrecy surrounding the program, we should be concerned that Section 702 is and will be used to disproportionately target disfavored groups, whether minority communities, political activists, or even journalists.

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of 2023. We call on Congress to significantly reform the law, or allow it to sunset.

The phone number of the Congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121.

Good News For All Americans

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A friend of mine used to refer to the ACLU as the Anti-Christian Lawyers Union. At times it did not seem as if she was far off target.

On October 2, Life News reported on a lawsuit brought by the ACLU in South Carolina to prevent the state from working with religious organization in its foster care program.

The article reports:

A federal court on Friday upheld South Carolina’s decision to do the right thing: continue partnering with faith-based foster care ministries that provide loving homes for children. In Rogers v. Health and Human Services and Maddonna v. Health and Human Services, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued Governor Henry McMaster to try to stop the state from working with religious foster agencies.

On Friday, a federal court shut down these attempts to shutter faith-based foster care, rejecting challenges to South Carolina’s efforts to protect children in foster care and the families who serve them. These decisions will make it easier for all foster families in South Carolina to find an agency that meets their unique needs and for more foster children to find loving homes.

“These two rulings from the U.S. District Court represent significant wins for religious liberty and South Carolina’s faith-based organizations like Miracle Hill, which will be able to continue their crucial mission of connecting children in foster care with loving homes,” said Governor Henry McMaster. “These victories will directly benefit countless children by further ensuring that faith-based organizations will not be forced to abandon their beliefs to help provide critical services to our state’s youth.”

South Carolina works directly with families seeking to foster and adopt children in crisis situations, serving children and families from all backgrounds. The state also partners with an array of private agencies that help find and support more families for foster children who need a safe place to live. Governor McMaster issued an executive order protecting the religious freedom of foster agencies in South Carolina. However, the ACLU recruited individuals to sue South Carolina over the inclusion of a single faith-based agency, Miracle Hill. Rather than reach out to any other organization or to the South Carolina Department of Social Services, the plaintiffs went straight to federal court.

Our Founding Fathers strove to insure our right to practice our religion faithfully without government interference. The ruling in this case supports this right. It also helps provide children a safe place to live.

It’s Time To Let FISA Die–It Is Being Misused

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On Friday, Just the News posted an article about the misuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to spy on Americans.

The article reports:

The FBI improperly used a controversial surveillance tool on a United States senator, as well as multiple state officials, court documents released Friday have revealed.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) secured an opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) determined that the bureau made improper use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702, a tool allowing for the warrantless surveillance of foreigners abroad.

The FISC opinion, according to The Hill, states that “[i]n June 2022, an analyst conducted four queries of Section 702 information using the last names of a U.S. Senator and a state senator, without further limitation.” The FISC opinion does not name the individuals in question.

It further stated that in October 2022, “a Staff Operations Specialist ran a query using the Social Security number of a state judge who “had complained to [the] FBI about alleged civil right violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police.”

Section 702 of the Act was adopted in 2008 and grants the Intelligence Community considerable powers to surveil foreign actors, though critics have contended that the tool has enabled improper surveillance of Americans.

The article notes:

“The FBI continues to break the rules put in place to protect Americans, running illegal searches on public officials including a U.S. senator, and it’s long past time for Congress to step in,” he continued. “As Congress debates reauthorizing Section 702, these opinions make clear why fundamental reforms are urgently needed.”

The article concludes:

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of the year and Intelligence Community leaders have urged Congress to renew it, though the revelations of misuse have led some lawmakers to adopt a hostile stance on such an action.

Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz in July introduced a resolution to support allowing the measure to expire on time.

“The persistent abuse of Section 702 of FISA underscores the disturbing trend of our federal government being weaponized against its people. The blatant misuse of warrantless surveillance powers targeting Americans’ communications should not be accepted or reauthorized. We must uphold national security without sacrificing the constitutional rights of our fellow Americans,” he said at the time.

I agree.

The ACLU Actually Supports Civil Rights

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On Thursday, Just the News posted the following:

Last week, attorneys for the ACLU wrote a letter to Judge Analisa Torres of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York objecting to the court declining to unseal the search warrant application and related judicial documents filed in connection to the raid of the home of investigative journalist James O’Keefe, founder of Project Veritas.

In November, federal prosecutors obtained and executed warrants to raid the homes of three Project Veritas journalists, including O’Keefe, and seize their electronic devices. O’Keefe was handcuffed by FBI agents during the search of his home and required to stand in the public hallway of his apartment building dressed in his underwear, according to court documents.

In December, the magistrate judge assisting Torres in the case declined requests to unseal the search warrant materials, arguing the government’s stated interest in protecting both the integrity of an ongoing grand jury investigation into Project Veritas and the privacy of uncharged individuals named in the documents outweighed the public’s interest in accessing the information.

The magistrate judge’s opinion led the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) to file a motion calling on the court to unseal the materials.

The ACLU’s new letter expresses support for the RCFP’s objection, noting that a significant amount of information about the government’s investigation has been made public since the magistrate judge issued her order.

If you remember, the FBI search of the home of James O’Keefe happened about the time it became known that James O’Keefe had been offered a copy of Ashley Biden’s diary (see story here). The raid on James O’keefe at his home appeared to be another example of the federal government attacking someone they perceived as a possible enemy or person who might release negative information about people (or relatives of people) in the Biden administration.

The article at Just the News concludes:

Through the Microsoft search warrants, which were unsealed in March, the government seized nearly 200,000 Project Veritas emails and other files, many of which were unrelated to the Justice Department’s purported reason for initiating the warrants.

The Justice Department has contended there’s probable cause to believe Project Veritas was involved in stealing the diary and transporting it — a claim denied by the sources, who have consistently said it was abandoned at the Florida house, and O’Keefe’s legal team.

Calli (O’Keefe’s attorney, Paul Calli,) has accused the FBI and Justice Department of a witch hunt targeting a media organization openly critical of the Biden administration, arguing the government is violating the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and the Privacy Protection Act.

“The ACLU has taken a righteous and principled stance regarding the government’s desecration of the First Amendment,” Calli told Just the News. “Project Veritas is grateful for the support of the ACLU and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.”

Calli added, “Sadly, partisan political activists like those at the New York Times, and others in the for-profit, credentialed, cloistered, legacy media, as well as blogs like the Columbia Journalism Review, have not woken to the threat to all journalists.”

Calli has previously told Just the News that the government doesn’t want to unseal the search warrant materials for Project Veritas because federal prosecutors and FBI agents lied and misled in them to obtain warrants from judges.

The Justice Department declined to comment for this story.

The politicization of the Justice Department in America will eventually become a problem for both political parties. It is good to see the ACLU getting involved in this case.

Insanity Reigns

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The Patriot Daily Wire is reporting today that the Biden administration is considering a plan to offer immigrant families separated during the Trump administration $450,000 per person in compensation. This was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal.  American soldiers killed in action do not even receive that much.

The article includes a portion of The Wall Street Journal article:

The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents families in one of the lawsuits, has identified about 5,500 children separated at the border over the course of the Trump administration, citing figures provided to it by the government. The number of families eligible under the potential settlement is expected to be smaller, the people said, as government officials aren’t sure how many will come forward. Around 940 claims have so far been filed by the families, the people said. -WSJ

Welcome to America where the government thinks money grows on trees. How about helping our homeless veterans and others before helping people who are here illegally?

The article concludes:

“It is a complicated, complex piece of litigation” – trying to resolve hundreds of separate lawsuits at the same time, and “sometimes even more complex to try the cases” said Margo Schlanger, who ran the civil-rights office during the Obama administration at the Department of Homeland Security and now teaches at the University of Michigan law school.

What will the reparations crowd think of this?

This is not acceptable.

 

The Long Reach Of The Government Just Got Longer

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The Patriot Daily wire is reporting the following today:

The federal government is issuing warrants from compliant Google to turn over anyone typing in certain search terms.

But they assure the American public that they can be trusted. Just like the federal government assured Americans they would not abuse the secret FISA courts to spy on innocent Americans!

We now know that crooked feds were spying on Donald Trump, his family, his campaign and his presidency using the secret courts to obtain warrants.

Frankly, I use Duck Duck Go as a search engine. I am not sure if they have been hit by warrants yet.

The article includes the following excerpt from a Yahoo News article:

The U.S. government is reportedly secretly issuing warrants for Google to provide user data on anyone typing in certain search terms, raising fears that innocent online users could get caught up in serious crime investigations at a greater frequency than previously thought.

In an attempt to track down criminals, federal investigators have started using new “keyword warrants” and used them to ask Google to provide them information on anyone who searched a victim’s name or their address during a particular year, an accidentally unsealed court document that Forbes found shows.

Google has to respond to thousands of warrant orders each year, but the keyword warrants are a relatively new strategy used by the government and are controversial.

“Trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes.

“This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation,” she added.

The government said that the scope of the warrants is limited to avoid implicating innocent people who happen to search for certain terms, but it’s not publicly disclosed how many users’ data are sent to the government and what the extent of the warrant requests are.

This may be what eventually will change the focus of the American Civil Liberties Union to protecting the First Amendment rights of Americans, which is what they should actually be doing.

Our Justice System Has Become Political

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Yesterday The Washington Examiner posted an article telling the story of the people who were arrested in Washington on January 6th. It’s not a story that aligns very well with the constitutional rights of Americans.

The article reports:

Many participants in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots are being held in solitary confinement in Washington, D.C.’s city jail, a situation that’s drawing scrutiny from Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bob Casey and the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Department of Justice has charged 510 individuals in connection with the Jan. 6 breach, which began when supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol with the intent of trying to stop the certification of Electoral College votes for Joe Biden as president.

After Jan. 6, Washington, D.C., jail officials decided that all Capitol riot detainees be held in “restrictive housing” as a safety measure for the accused. However, the accused found themselves in solitary confinement 23 hours a day before their trials even started.

“I do not believe in solitary confinement for extended periods of time for anyone,” Warren, a Massachusetts senator and former Harvard Law School professor, said of the Jan. 6 rioters when asked by the Washington Examiner.

I very rarely agree with Senator Warren, but she is right in this case.

Even the ACLU has weighed in:

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has recently drawn criticism for favoring liberal causes over its tradition of representing unsympathetic clients and causes, is also weighing in on the side of Trump protesters being held alone.

“Prolonged solitary confinement is torture and certainly should not be used as a punitive tool to intimidate or extract cooperation. We’re pleased to see that message is getting through to Senators,” Tammie Gregg, deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told the Washington Examiner in a statement.

If you remember, Paul Manafort, President Trump’s campaign manager was kept in solitary confinement. He was put in jail for mortgage fraud, not usually considered a crime worthy of solitary confinement. Our Justice Department has become politicized in recent years. If that does not change in the near future, living in America will be like living in a dictatorship–if you hold the wrong political views, your civil rights will not be respected.

How To Ensure A Rigged Election

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Breitbart reported Monday that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging the practice of checking signatures on absentee ballots to make sure they match the signature the voter has on file.

The article reports:

Signature matching, a process whereby county election boards verify the authenticity of the ballot by matching the signature to that of the voter, is facing increased legal challenges from various voting rights groups.

In Indiana, for example, the board matches the signature “on a provided affidavit printed on the outside of a return envelope.” There remain countless instances of boards rejecting ballots due to discrepancies in the signatures. Over 550,000 ballots were rejected in the 2020 primaries alone for several reasons, one of which included mismatched signatures.

The practice is now facing legal challenges in states like Indiana, where a federal judge last week determined signature matching to be unconstitutional, as boards are not required to alert the voter, nor do they provide an option to address the suspected error.

Under U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker’s ruling, state election officials in the Hoosier State can no longer reject a ballot that contains a mismatched signature “without giving proper notice to the voter and without providing means to contest the decision,” as USA Today detailed.

Similarly, groups in Ohio, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU of Ohio, are lodging a similar challenge, asking the courts to end the signature matching process as it currently operates, referring to it as a “flawed” system. Voters, the groups contend, should have “sufficient notice of purportedly mismatched signatures and the opportunity to fix those mismatches when boards of elections mistakenly reject their ballots and ballot applications on the basis of signature mismatches.”

Real News Or Fake News

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An article was posted at The Federalist today with the following headline:

“Fake News Claiming Border Checkpoints During Hurricane Harvey Is Why Americans Hate The Media“

So what is this about?

The article reports:

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a grossly inaccurate and inflammatory statement in response to the unremarkable news that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol would not close any internal checkpoints in Texas during the hurricane.

“As people seek refuge from hurricane Harvey, they are likely to have to go north or west of Texas and would have to go through a checkpoint. By keeping checkpoints open, the Border Patrol is putting undocumented people and mixed-status families at risk out of fear of deportations,” said Lorella Praeli, the ACLU’s director of immigration policy and campaigns. “This is a disgusting move from the Border Patrol that breaks with past practices. The Border Patrol should never keep checkpoints open during any natural disasters in the United States. Everyone, no matter the color of their skin or background, is worth saving.”

The problem is, there are no checkpoints in the areas affected by the storm, and no one fleeing Hurricane Harvey will encounter a Border Patrol checkpoint. The closest checkpoints are about 80 and 50 miles southwest of Corpus Christi and cover northbound routes from the Rio Grande Valley. No one fleeing the hurricane or the flooding along the coast would be headed north on these routes because they don’t lead inland to higher ground.

So basically, the statement by the ACLU is false.

Related articles in other media report similar lies:

It’s no surprise that partisan left-wing outlets like Daily Kos would run hysterical and false coverage under the headline, “Border Patrol is trying to arrest undocumented immigrants fleeing Hurricane Harvey,” but Quartz is supposed to be rather more mainstream. Timmons is Quartz’s White House correspondent and an alumnus of The New York Times and BusinessWeek. She appears to be a professional journalist and should by all accounts be credible. Yet she has written a story—in fact, re-written an ACLU press release as a legitimate news story—that has almost no credibility. How did this happen?

The article concludes:

This in turn reinforces to ordinary Americans the sense that the media has so badly lost perspective about Trump that they are willing to lie and fabricate stories in order to attack a president who is otherwise vulnerable to a plain reporting of the truth. In short, this is why Americans don’t trust the media.

No person familiar with the U.S. Constitution opposes freedom of the press. However, it would be nice if the press used that freedom to honestly report the events of the day. I don’t mind if reporting is biased, as long as the reporter admits his bias. However, outright lying is an entirely different thing. There is no relationship between anything the left-wing media is reporting about President Trump or his administration and the truth. That is a very dangerous place for our country to be. Unless Americans develop their own reliable news sources, they will be too uniformed to vote intelligently.

I am reminded of a conversation with a friend a few years ago. This friend relies strictly on The New York Times as his news source. I asked him about two stories that were relatively important. He knew nothing about either one of them. It is sad when readers of a newspaper with a legacy like The New York Times can be considered uninformed voters. Bias in the media has as much to do with what is not reported as it does with the slant of what actually is reported.