While WitnessLA didn’t go dark on Wednesday for the SOPA blackout (too much jails stuff going
on to even consider it), the protest seems to be helping.

If you’re unfamiliar with the fuss about SOPA—the Stop Online Piracy Act—and its little sister PIPA …. the Protect IP Act, let writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky explain it all to you.

Shirky, who is one of the smartest people breathing on all things web, was asked to do an “emergency TED talk,” to address the issue of SOPA (and PIPA) in plain terms.

You can find it here.

And then if you want to take action, go here.

In next week’s issue of the New Yorker (April 11), the magazine’s legal writer, Jeffery Toobin, has a MUST READ story about SCOTUS’ view of campaign reform.

It is an interesting and important read, but not exactly a cheery one:
Below I have posted a few salient clips but the whole thing is worth your time:

Eight of the current Supreme Court Justices are known for their zeal in questioning lawyers. That tendency was on display last week during the oral argument over the constitutionality of an Arizona law known as the Citizens Clean Elections Act, a law that attempts to do a little something about campaigns in which one candidate has a great deal more money than the others. Roughly, the law says that the ones who are outspent should receive a modest subsidy from state funds. By the end of the questioning, however, it had become clear that a majority of the Justices will probably declare the Arizona law unconstitutional. In apparent frustration, Justice Stephen G. Breyer departed from custom and allowed himself a despairing comment about the Court’s treatment of campaign-finance laws, which he has long, and mostly futilely, defended. “It is better to say it’s all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don’t know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another,” he said.

[SNIP]

In many other respects, this Court’s commitment to free speech is admirable. Earlier this year, Chief Justice John Roberts gave voice to the best American tradition of tolerance when he (along with seven colleagues) overturned a damage award against a fringe religious group. The Westboro Baptist Church, which, as it happens, is more of an extended family than an actual church, had launched one of its odious anti-gay publicity stunts near a funeral at which a mother and father were grieving the loss of a son in Iraq. Understandably, perhaps, a judge had awarded five million dollars in a civil suit brought by the father, but the Court recognized that such a judgment threatened the free-speech rights of all unpopular groups. “Speech is powerful,” Roberts wrote, but it was the Court’s duty “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

The problem is that there is more than one way to stifle public debate. The idea behind limiting campaign contributions and expenditures is to insure that the voices of the wealthy don’t drown out the voices of those who are less well off. A surreal moment during the Arizona argument summed up how peculiar the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence has become. Springing a well-planned trap, Roberts told the lawyer defending the Arizona law, “I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission Web site this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, ‘level the playing field’ when it comes to running for office. Why isn’t that clear evidence that it’s unconstitutional?” To many ears, levelling the playing field hardly sounds like a sinister activity, worthy of the Supreme Court’s ultimate sanction. Indeed, as recently as 1990 the Court upheld a campaign-finance law because of “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” But the Court explicitly overruled that decision last year in the Citizens United case. For better or for worse, Roberts is right: leveling the playing field is now verboten.

JERRY BROWN SIGNS BILL SENDING THOUSANDS OF NONVIOLENT PRISONERS BACK TO JAIL TO SERVE OUT THEIR TIME

Yeah, I’m sure this sounded great on paper. And I’m all for doing whatever is necessary to reduce the California state prison population. But all this new plan seems to be is simply moving prisoners around in some kind of shell game strategy in which the county jails take the hit instead of the state prisons—a hit that LA’s county Jail system, for one, really cannot take right now.

Here’s a clip from Jack Dolan’s story for the LA times.

Tens of thousands of felons convicted of nonviolent crimes would serve their time in county jails instead of state prisons under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday evening.

The measure is designed to reduce the number of inmates in California’s chronically overcrowded state lockups and keep relatively low-level offenders closer to their homes, where drug treatment and mental health services are believed to be more effective.

Supporters hope to save taxpayers money by lowering the number of offenders who return to prison and by housing many parole violators in less expensive county jails.

“For too long, the state’s prison system has been a revolving doorr for lower-level offenders and parole violators who are released within months,” Brown said in a news release. “Cycling these offenders through state prisons wastes money, aggravates crowded conditions, thwarts rehabilitation and impedes local law enforcement supervision.

Sounds dandy. Unfortunately, however, the county jails have even less in the way of rehabilitation and other programs than the California prisons, so this bill is going to help our recidivism rate how exactly?

We need sentencing reform if we want to reduce CA’s prison population.

….AND SPEAKING OF SENTENCING REFORM, THERE IS THIS FROM FORBES MAGAZINE

Here’s a relevant clip from the Forbes report:

…Republican governors and lawmakers pushed for many of the policies that put low-level drug offenders and nonviolent felons behind bars and extended sentences for many convicted criminals. But with the GOP in control of more financially strapped state governments, a growing number of Republican elected officials favor a review of the sentencing laws that contributed to a fourfold increase in prison costs over two decades.

The total cost of incarcerating state inmates swelled from $12 billion in 1988 to more than $50 billion by 2008.

Newly elected Republican governors in Florida and Georgia are among those pushing sentencing reforms. Brent Steele, a Republican state senator in Indiana, concedes that lawmakers share the blame for driving up state prison costs in recent years. High-profile crimes prompt lawmakers and governors to adopt ever-tougher criminal sentencing, such as three-strikes laws that impose minimum mandatory sentences for those convicted of a third felony, no matter the offense.

“But with that eventually comes the time when we run out of prison space,” said Steele, who is sponsoring a criminal justice overhaul in his state, prompted by budget concerns. “So what do you do? You concentrate on incarcerating those we’re afraid of and not those we’re just mad at.”

I want that last sentence on refrigerator magnets so we can give ‘em out in Sac’to.

Once again, in California, we not only cannot persuade our Republican lawmakers to go along with sentencing reform—we can’t get the Dems show a little spine on the topic either.

(Dear Georgia and Florida Repubs, can’t you talk sense to these people? Seriously. It would mean a lot to us.)

SUPREMES CONSIDER WHETHER BLOGGERS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR WORDS (AND CAN BE SUED FOR DEFAMATION)

Uh, yeah. Of course they can be and should be. And it’s time the issue was addressed.

UPI has the story.

A high-profile defamation suit by a former U.S. Department of Agriculture official against a prominent conservative blogger may test the role of libel laws in the brave new world of the Internet, as one newspaper writer suggests.

Or it may be just an opportunity to reinforce the notion, shocking and strange as it may seem, that bloggers should actually be held legally accountable for the truth of what they say — like trained journalists.

The case in the District of Columbia Superior Court involves former USDA official Shirley Sherrod and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who posted a video online purporting to show Sherrod’s prejudice against whites as she addressed the NAACP in Atlanta.

Sherrod was forced out of her job, but the NAACP released a full video of the speech showing the portion posted online was taken out of context. Sherrod was actually making the case that all people need to be helped, regardless of color.

Of course if bloggers are eligible to be sued successfully for defamation, then they should also be eligible to be protected by journalist shield laws.

I’m just sayin’.

LA’S RANK AND FILE CITY WORKERS AIM TO TELL MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL WHERE THE BUDGET CUTS ARE HIDING

On Sunday, a group of city employees who are fighting being furloughed ” sent out an informational press release, which they stated was” a direct effort to bring to public light, the true cause of the City’s budget crisis…”

The group listed a bunch of areas the city could look to for additional funds rather than laying off city workers (like, say, themselves.) This list includes things like collecting those half a billion in back taxes that the city is owed and a similar amount uncollected fees.

The group includes employees from the Los Angeles World Airports (LAWA), the Department of Transportation, Department of General Services and Department of Public Works. They have, they said, made this move apart from their unions.

AN ADVOCATE FOR “JURY NULLIFICATION” IS INDICTED FOR JURY TAMPERING

File this under Prosecutors Gone Wild. Benjamin Weiser for the NY Times has the story.

Julian P. Heicklen sat silent and unresponsive as his bail hearing began one day recently in federal court in Manhattan; his eyes were closed, his head slumped forward.

“Mr. Heicklen?” the magistrate judge, Ronald L. Ellis, asked. “Mr. Heicklen? Is Mr. Heicklen awake?”

“I believe he is, your honor,” a prosecutor, Rebecca Mermelstein, said. “I think he’s choosing not to respond but is certainly capable of doing so.”

There was, in fact, nothing wrong with Mr. Heicklen, 78, who eventually opened his eyes and told the judge, “I’m exercising my Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.”

Indeed, it was not his silence that landed Mr. Heicklen, a retired Pennsylvania State University chemistry professor, in court; it was what he had been doing outside the federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street.

Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood there and at courthouse entrances elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience.

That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates a law against jury tampering.

Since Mr. Heicklen didn’t target any particular jurors or in any way try to influence the outcome of any particular case, the jury tampering charge seems a bit of a stretch. (cough) firstamendmentviolation (cough, cough)

In fact it seems that Heicklen didn’t even give his leaflets specifically to jurors but to random people going in and out of the court building, hoping to hit some jury members among those he approached.

If you read the rest of the story you’ll see that Heicklen is something of a character. But fortunately for many of us, being quirky isn’t, as yet, a federal offense.

FACEBOOK AND JURIES

It seems that Facebook is being used by attorneys—both defense and prosecutors—to determine whether or not individuals are suitable for jury placements. The Wall Street Journal has the story. Here’s a clip:

Prosecution and defense lawyers are scouring the site for personal details about members of the jury pool that could signal which side they might sympathize with during a trial. They consider what potential jurors watch on television, their interests and hobbies, and how religious they are.

Josh Marquis, district attorney of Clatsop County in Oregon, did background searches on Facebook to help pick a jury for a penalty trial last summer to determine if a convicted murderer should get the death penalty. He was looking for clues on how potential jurors might feel about the defendant, a man who killed a couple as a teenager in 1988. The jury imposed the death penalty.

Jury consultant Amber Yearwood in San Francisco found that one potential juror in a product-liability case last year held strident opinions on a host of issues, and dispensed unsolicited medical and sex advice. “Often juries offer opinionated people like that the perfect opportunity to wield their influence,” said Ms. Yearwood. The prospective juror was bounced….

If I had to choose one novel above all others to represent the glories of American literature it would be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It’s not perfect. Many critics, myself included, believe that Twain stumbles slightly when he reintroduces Tom Sawyer in the last quarter of the book. But, like the flaws purposely woven into Navaho rugs so as not to displease the spirits, the fact that this masterpiece has one or two dangling threads only serves to humanize Twain’s incandescent genius.

This week, however, week, NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Montgomery, Alabama, decided it was going to improve on Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by removing some of the icky words notably found in the text.

First among those words is, of course, the “N” word. Nigger. This appears 219 times in Huck Finn. NewSouth has decided to replace the offending word with “slave.”

The publisher has also replaced “injun”—as in Injun Joe”— with “Indian.”

As my friend Tod Goldberg put it on Facebook: “In other news, the latest edition of The Things They Carried will no longer contain mention of the Vietnam war.”

NewSouth’s editing gambit is exactly that mind-bendingly stupid.

Another pal, David Ulin, had this to say in the LA Times:

To give their project credibility, NewSouth teamed with Alan Gribben, chair of the English department at Alabama’s Auburn University, to do the clean-up job. According to Publishers Weekly, Gribben was motivated by his own deep discomfort over the novel’s language and by the reactions of younger readers. “After a number of talks,” he told PW, “I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person, they said we would love to teach … ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ but we feel we can’t do it anymore. In the new classroom, it’s really not acceptable.”

I agree: The N-word is not acceptable -- although I’m not sure “slave” is much of an improvement, with its unthinking conflation of servitude and race. Like professor Gribben, I’ve discussed “Huckleberry Finn” in the classroom, and it is always difficult and awkward to work around that word. This, however, is precisely why it needs to remain part of our experience of “Huckleberry Finn.”

Literature, after all, is not there to reassure us; it’s supposed to reveal us, in all our contradictory complexity. The fact that it makes us uncomfortable is part of the point — like all great art, it demands that we confront our half-truths and self-deceptions, the justifications and evasions by which we measure out our daily lives.

Huck is a perfect case in point, a rebel who can’t reconcile his love for the escaped slave Jim with his cultural indoctrination, who goes back and forth about whether his companion is fully a human being.

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he announces when he finally decides the matter. The choice of words is telling, since in choosing not to return Jim to slavery, Huck articulates the central moral argument of the book. This is the point Twain is making, that there is a difference between custom and conscience, between social convention and the ethics of the individual. At the heart of this is the issue of language, the words we use and how we use them, and what they tell us about the reality we construct.

The passage below from Huck Finn—that Ulin quotes in part— is one of the most important in American letters. To remove the “N word because of its obvious offensiveness is to willfully deny the central point that Twain was making about our nation’s horrifically injurious past in which a boy could, no kidding, believe that he would be condemned to hell for considering a black man a person.

Whitewashing that historically truthful moment in Twain’s book is what causes the real damage-–not the appropriate and contextual use of the wounding word in question.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter- and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather, right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”- and tore it up.

Yes, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn draws blood.

It’s supposed to.

PS: Both the NY Times and the LA Times have editorials on the matter in their Thursday editions.

AND IN OTHER NEWS….DR. ATUL GWANDE ON SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE

Gawande’s 2009 New Yorker article on the topic, “Hellhole” is important and unforgettable. He recaps and expands on the issue on Democracy Now.

OHIO PRISONERS GO ON HUNGER STRIKE AFTER 17-YEARS IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

And while we’re on the subject:

… Four prisoners at the supermax Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown have gone on a hunger strike to protest their solitary confinement. Their only demand: that they be moved to the state’s Death Row.

The prisoners—Bomani Shakur, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Namir Abdul Mateen—were sentenced to death for their involvement in the 1993 prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio, in which a guard and several inmates were killed. They have now been in 23-hour-a-day solitary for more than 17 years. Based on the nature of their crime, they are being denied the privileges given others on Death Row in Ohio, and condemned to permanent isolation.

The Youngstown Vindicator has the more complete story.

In his column in Wednesday’s LA Times, Steve Lopez reports that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department—presumably with the okay of Sheriff Lee Baca—has instructed its deputies not to talk to reporters from LA County’s main news outlet, namely the Los Angeles Times.

Or something like that.

Here’s the relevant section on Lopez’s column:

The latest [LASD/Lee Baca] head-smacker involves an e-mail from one of Baca’s captains ordering deputies not to speak to the L.A. Times. As my colleague Robert Faturechi reported Tuesday, the captain’s directive came just a few days after the paper ran Faturechi’s story on the fact that Baca had launched a criminal investigation in Beverly Hills — which has its own presumably competent Police Department — on behalf of a political donor.

It was outrageous enough that Baca took the unusual step of sticking his nose into a case Beverly Hills police had already decided was a civil matter. But then his department puts out the word to punish The Times for doing its job?

Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore claimed the e-mail had nothing to do with The Times’ Beverly Hills story.

Yeah, OK.

Whitmore also claimed The Times wasn’t being singled out.

Hmmmm. Then why did the e-mail instruct deputies to forward media requests to headquarters, “Specifically any LA Times requests.”

“It’s vernacular,” Whitmore told me. “It’s shorthand. I know it sounds silly.”

Um, yeah. Really, really silly. And really disingenuous.

But, hey, we’re living through a month in which the US Air Force just announced on Tuesday that it is barring its personnel from using work computers to view the Web sites of The New York Times and more than 25 other news organizations and blogs.

Why? Take a wild guess.

Yep. You got it. Wikileaks.

I’d say all this madness was due to some new contaminant in the water, but the east coast/west coast nature of these dismayingly wrong-headed occurrences pretty much leaves that out.

Dunno. Bad moon rising.

The hysterical reactions by seemingly sane people on the topic of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange grow ever more deeply disheartening.

But there are, fortunately, a few people talking sense, among them Ron Paul and Tom Hayden, two men who would find themselves at opposite ends of many questions. But on this crucial issue they agree. Similarly, Salon’s lawyer/columnist Glenn Greenwald finds a kindred spirit on the matter on former Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith:

LYING IS NOT PATRIOTIC

Texas Congressman Ron Paul spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives on Friday where he passionately defended Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Here’s a clip from reporting by the Atlantic Wire:

“Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?” asked Paul. He went on to compare WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers, explaining how both exposed American wars that were based on “lies.” He also asked his colleagues which events caused more deaths, “Lying us into war, or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?”

At the end of his speech, Paul asked his listeners 9 questions, which are as follows:

Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed’

THE LYNCH MOB MOMENT

Tom Hayden is just as impassioned as Paul, although his approach is calmer. Here is a clip from the analytical essay that he sent out to friends on Wednesday about what he calls The Lynch Mob Moment.

We know that conservatives are extremists for order, but why have so many liberals lost their minds and joined the frenzy over Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? As the secrets of power are unmasked, there is a growing bipartisan demand that Julian Assange must die.

Once-liberal Democrat Bob Beckel said on FOX, “there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch.” Center-liberal legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN that Assange is “absurd”, “ridiculous”, “delusional”, and “well beyond sympathy of anyone”. The Washington Times called for treating him as an “enemy combatant”; Rep. Peter King of the Homeland Security Committee who wants him prosecuted as a terrorist; and of course, Sarah Palin wants Assange “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”, or a wolf in Alaska.

This is a lynch-mob moment, when the bloodlust runs over. We have this mad overreaction many times since the witch-burnings and Jim Crow, including the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, the Nixon-era conspiracy trials, the Watergate break-ins, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.

Most Americans now know that those frenzied periods of scapegoating did nothing for our security, which instead damaged our democracy and left in their wake a secretive National Security State.

There is wisdom in expecting calmer heads to prevail in the WikiLeaks matter, but what can be done when the calmer heads are going nuts or hiding in silence?

Do the frothing pundits remember that we have a legal system in which the accused is entitled to due process, legal representation and the right to a defense? The first obligation of our threatened elected officials, bureaucrats and pundits is to calm down.

Hayden acknowledges that wholesale release of the WikiLeaks documents could do damage:

I can understand the reasonable questions that reasonable people have about this case. It is clearly illegal to release and distribute the 15,652 documents stamped as “secret.” Why should underground whistleblowers have the unlimited right to release those documents? There is a risk that some individuals might be harmed by the release. There is a concern that ordinary diplomatic business might be interrupted.

But he also reminds us what we have thus far gotten from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks:

1. WikiLeaks disclosed 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 about Afghanistan so far. No one died as a result of these disclosures, one of which revealed another 15,000 civilian casualties in Iraq which had not been acknowledged or reported before;

2. Fragmentary orders [FRAGO] 242 and 039 instructed American troops not to investigate torture in Iraq conducted by America’s allies;

3. The CIA operates a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan;

4. A secret US Task Force 373 is assigned to nighttime hunter-killer raids in Afghanistan;

5. The US ambassador in Kabul says it is impossible to fix corruption when our ally is the corrupt entity;

6. One Afghan minister alone carried $52 million out of the country;

7. US Special Forces operate in Pakistan without public acknowledgment, apparently in violation of that country’s sovereignty;

8. America’s ally, Pakistan, is the chief protector of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

9. Following secret U.S air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants, Yeme’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General David Petraeus, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”

10. U.S. government contractor DynCorp threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment. Bacha bazi is the Afghan tradition of “boy play” where young boys are dressed up in women’s clothing, forced to dance for leering men, and then sold for sex to the highest bidder. DynCorp has been previously linked to child sex trafficking charges.

CORRECTING THE MEDIA FALSEHOODS

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (who also happens to be an attorney trained in Constitutional law) has been stalking the absurd inaccuracies put out by major media outlets—like, for example, Time magazine— when they report on the ongoing WikiLeaks story.

Read and grow angry.

IF ASSANGE IS GUILTY WHAT ABOUT THE NY TIMES? WHAT ABOUT BOB WOODWARD?

On Friday, former Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, posted 7 “thoughts” on the matter of WikiLeaks. They are all worth reading, but here are the first three:

* I find myself agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified. I certainly do not support or like his disclosure of secrets that harm U.S. national security or foreign policy interests. But as all the hand-wringing over the 1917 Espionage Act shows, it is not obvious what law he has violated. It is also important to remember, to paraphrase Justice Stewart in the Pentagon Papers, that the responsibility for these disclosures lies firmly with the institution empowered to keep them secret: the Executive branch. The Executive was unconscionably lax in allowing Bradley Manning to have access to all these secrets and to exfiltrate them so easily.

* I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at the New York Times. What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with a few redactions, for all the world to see. Would our reaction to that have been more subdued than our reaction now to Assange? If so, why? If not, why is our reaction so subdued when the Times receives and publishes the information from Bradley through Assange the intermediary? Finally, in 2005-2006, the Times disclosed information about important but fragile government surveillance programs. There is no way to know, but I would bet that these disclosures were more harmful to national security than the wikileaks disclosures. There was outcry over the Times’ surveillance disclosures, but nothing compared to the outcry over wikileaks. Why the difference? Because of quantity? Because Assange is not a U.S. citizen? Because he has a philosophy more menacing than “freedom of the press”? Because he is not a journalist? Because he has a bad motive?

* In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward, with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like. I have a hard time squaring the anger the government is directing toward wikileaks with its top officials openly violating classification rules and opportunistically revealing without authorization top secret information….

A few days after administrators from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs made idiots of themselves by telling students that tweeting, linking, posting or otherwise traceably conversing about WikiLeaks would harm their future career prospects, Columbia has suddenly come to its senses and realized that their earlier career advice made them look….really, really bad.

So they’ve walked back their original POV and become more embracing of….oh…free speech and that sort of thing.

Wired has the story. Here are some clips:

Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.

“Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government,” the Office of Career Services wrote.

Now, SIPA Dean John H. Coatsworth has clarified the school’s policy and issued a ringing endorsement of free speech and academic freedom.

“Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution,” Coatsworth wrote in an e-mail to the SIPA community Monday morning (full e-mail message below). “Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences.”

SIPA Professor Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East expert who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, went even further in repudiating the memo.

“If anyone is a master’s student in international relations and they haven’t heard of WikiLeaks and gone looking for the documents that relate to their area of study, then they don’t deserve to be a graduate student in international relations,” Sick told Wired.com in an interview.

Now if Attorney General Eric Holder, who appears to have gone actively insane on the topic, will have a similar come to Jesus the 1st Amendment moment.

JAMES FALLOWS AT THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY HAS A CONTEST FOR THE BEST WIKILEAKS QUOTE

No, he’s not downplaying the seriousness of the leaks Fallows assures us, it’s merely that there are some damn good quotes hiding in that quarter of a million document flood.

INTERPOL HAS ISSUED AN ALERT FOR THE ARREST OF WIKILEAKS’ FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE

Assanges mother is pretty distressed. Reuters has the story.

The mother of Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Wednesday she was distressed by an international police alert for her son’s arrest and did not want him “hunted down and jailed.”

Global police agency Interpol issued a “red notice” on Tuesday to assist in the arrest of Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, who is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual crimes.

Assange, 39, a former computer hacker now at the center of a global controversy after WikiLeaks released a trove of classified U.S. diplomatic cables at the weekend, denies the Swedish allegations…..

MEANWHILE…a “hacktavist” who calls himself Jester has claimed credit for crashing the Wikileaks website two days in a row, reports the LA Times..

HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYERS LEONARD WEINGLASS AND MICHAEL RATNER JOIN DEFENSE OF WIKILEAKS

Leading US human rights lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and Michael Ratner, have joined the defense team for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, writes Tom Hayden.

Hayden also writes that the US Justice Department is seeking indictments on espionage charges [against Wikileaks] from a grand jury quietly impaneled this week in arch-conservative Alexandria, Virginia.

Why is this drama important? Not because of “life-threatening” leaks as claimed by the establishment, but because the closed doors of power need to be open to public review. We live increasingly in an Age of Secrecy, as described by Garry Wills in Bomb Power, among recent books. It has become the American Way of War, and increasingly draws the curtains over American democracy itself….

A WITNESS LIES, A MAN IS CONVICTED, THE 9TH CIRCUIT IS BORED, VETERANS ARE FURIOUS.

The NYT Times Adam Liptak has the story. Here’s how it opens.

Elven J. Swisher wore a replica of a Purple Heart on the witness stand when he testified that the defendant had tried to hire him to kill three federal officials.

Asked about the medal, Mr. Swisher pulled a document from his pocket to show that he was entitled to it and many others for his service in combat in the Korean War.

Mr. Swisher said the defendant, David R. Hinkson, an armchair constitutionalist with eccentric views about the tax code, had asked him how many men he had killed. “Too many,” Mr. Swisher recalled saying.

All lies. Mr. Swisher had never seen combat, had killed no one and had served without distinction. The document was a forgery. Mr. Swisher has since been convicted of lying to federal officials, wearing fake medals and defrauding the Department of Veterans Affairs of benefits for combat injuries.

But the jury knew none of this, and with Mr. Swisher’s testimony it convicted Mr. Hinkson of soliciting three murders. He was sentenced to 33 years for those crimes, along with 10 years for tax evasion, and he is serving his sentence in the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.

When Mr. Swisher’s lies came to light, Mr. Hinkson challenged his convictions for soliciting the murders. The jury had believed him guilty of more than loose talk, he said, only because Mr. Swisher had falsely presented himself as a battle-hardened killer.

But the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled against him last year by a 7-to-4 vote.

Mr. Swisher’s lies, the majority said, were no big deal…..

Read the rest and opine.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CLINICS WORK TO TAKE UP THE SLACK IN SOUTH LA

With MLK Medical Center not due to reopen until 2013, residents of surrounding South LA communities are relying for basic health care on overcrowded underfunded neighborhood health clinics.

Neon Tommy has visited several of those clinics and has returned with reports about at how these desperately-needed community health faculties—and the patients who depend on them for critical services—are getting by.

In one of the stories, Ryan Foughnder and Kaitlin Parker spent time at a Lynwood women’s clinic and found the place barely hanging on in terms of funds, but proud of the quality of care it was providing.

MORE THAN 1000 LAUSD WORKERS WILL LOSE THEIR JOBS WITH LATEST ROUND OF CUTS.

The LA Times reports.

THE CITY AND CHIEF BECK WANT TO HIRE MORE COPS, BUT THE LAPD UNION SAYS PAY OVERTIME FIRST

Joel Rubin and David Zahniser have the story—and it’s an interesting one.

Here’s how it opens:

It came as little surprise this week that the influential union that represents Los Angeles’ rank-and-file police officers waded into the debate over hiring more police during a major financial crisis.

What caught people off guard, however, was the union’s conclusion that the hiring should stop.

Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul M. Weber, in an interview and an opinion article submitted to The Times, called on the city’s leaders to suspend their current policy of hiring new officers to replace those who resign or retire. It is a stance that, on the surface, runs counter to the union’s traditionally staunch support for a larger police force.

Instead, Weber said, the department should shrink itself in order to use its scarce funds to restore overtime pay that has been cut because of the city’s budget woes and to fill some of the hundreds of civilian posts at the Los Angeles Police Department that have gone vacant.

Police Chief Charlie Beck said the union’s plan would jeopardize public safety. “We’d all like to return to a time where officers are paid for the overtime hours they work,” he said. “But it is not in the interest of public safety to do that” by thinning the ranks of officers.

And Matt Szabo, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, added, “It’s hard to imagine how the union is motivated here by the public’s safety,” noting that the LAPD has pushed down crime significantly in recent years.

As you may or may not have heard, the FBI is now very worried that bad guys are texting and Skype-ing and Facebook-messaging each other (Duh!), and that law enforcement can’t wiretap these forms of communication the way they can cell phones, land lines, email and the like.

Okay, one can understand the concern.

As a consequence the feds want to change a one or two things.

Many critics are flagging this as a privacy issue. But it’s much worse than that.

What the FBI and other law enforcement agencies involved are really looking for is the ability to control the design of the technology itself.

Charlie Savage of the NY Times has a very good grip on the basics of what is being proposed. So begin by reading his story.

Here’s how it opens:

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

[BIG SNIP]

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.”

Dempsey is not exaggerating.

The Feds are asking to change and approve the next generation architecture of such technologies as Skype, Facebook. and others, in such a way that limits peer-to-peer communication.

Not good.

The discussion Monday on Patt Morrison’s show was particularly good—and alarming— on the topic. So listen.

(Susan Landau, formerly of Sun Microsystems, now at Harvard, and Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Initiative, are both especially good on the show.)

This is only the beginning of the conversation. It is an issue that is very much worth your attention.

SO, EXACTLY WHAT PART OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT DID JUDGE HILLERI MERRITT NOT UNDERSTAND?

Friday’s LA Times editorial explains it all:

A unanimous panel of California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal has at last cleaned up a shameful legal mess, ordering L.A. County Superior Court Judge Hilleri G. Merritt to end her prior restraint on the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier this month, after first granting The Times the right to photograph a criminal defendant appearing in her courtroom, Merritt changed her mind and ordered the paper not to publish the lawfully taken picture. The Times, showing more respect for the law than Merritt did, obeyed her order while it appealed, first to her to reconsider and later, when she refused, to the higher court. On Thursday, that court inevitably concluded, as it was required to, that she had violated the 1st Amendment.

Writing for himself and two colleagues, Judge Sanjay T. Kumar produced a stark reminder of just how far Merritt had strayed from well-established law in waging her campaign against open courts and a free press. Riffling through citations, the court noted that “an order enjoining publication of a photograph of a suspect in a pending court proceeding is classic prior restraint of speech.” Publishing “lawfully obtained, truthful information about a matter of public significance cannot be restrained unless it is necessary to protect a state interest of the highest order.” And the “barriers to prior restraint remain high and the presumption against its use continues intact.” Not once, as Kumar made clear, has any appellate court concluded that those barriers could be overcome in a case such as this…

Read the rest.

And here’s the news story by Andrew Blankstein on the same topic.

And here is a previous LAT editorial on the matter.

AND here’s what Wired Magazine had to say earlier this month.

By the way, it is not entirely comforting that a criminal court judge hearing high profile cases has such a high-handed and faulty an understanding of the legal principal prohibiting prior restraint.

FYI: The photo above is from an LAPD handout of murder defendant Alberd Tersargyan—whose in-court photo—taken originally with the permission of the judge—was the one in question.