If this does not scare the crap out of you and prove we have lost our freedoms whenever "they" decide we have, I don't know what will.

The price of fear over freedom. We get the government we deserve.

Security, liberties clash in 'Strange Culture'

An artist's plight in the face of the War on Terror sounds the alarm for Americans to ponder the curtailment of freedom of expression.

By Carina Chocano Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

November 9, 2007

The conflict between policies that support national security and those that protect civil liberties are embodied in the bizarre, terrifying story of Steve Kurtz, an artist, activist and State University of New York at Buffalo professor for whom a personal tragedy led to a Kafkaesque nightmare courtesy of the War on Terror.

On May 11, 2004, Kurtz was days away from shipping his latest installation to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art when his wife and collaborator, Hope, died in her sleep of heart failure at age 45. A distraught Kurtz called 911, but when police found petri dishes of bacteria in his apartment, they alerted the FBI, which had a field day with the tin foil on the windows (to block out the light for daytime sleeping) and an invitation to an art show that contained "Arabic writing."

Kurtz was removed from his home, his cat was locked in the attic for days without food or water, and agents in hazmat suits trashed the place like fraternity brothers on a bender. His wife's body was flown around the country and subjected to several autopsies, and although it was found that she died of natural causes unrelated to the harmless bacteria Kurtz had purchased on the Internet, Kurtz was labeled a "bio-terrorist" as the government strained to come up with criminal charges.

Eventually, Kurtz and his collaborator, Robert Ferrell, a genetics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, were charged with federal mail and wire fraud, civil charges that the government was able to pursue as criminal under the Justice Department's expanded powers over American citizens.

Lynn Hershman-Leeson made and released "Strange Culture" before Kurtz's case went to trial, and the film is as much a rally for attention to Kurtz's plight as it is a sounded alarm for Americans to ponder the severe curtailment of freedom of expression and information by the government in the name of security. Among the dangers the film warns us about are the ways in which the umbrella of national security can be used to promote other agendas, particularly corporate and government interests that are sometimes challenged by artists, activists and other citizens.

Kurtz, a founding member of a collective called the Critical Art Ensemble, had for years worked on exhibits aimed at educating Americans on the political, scientific and economic realities of the genetic modification of foods -- something that affects all Americans but that few of them know very much about -- and attempts by corporations to patent and control life forms. What's chilling about the case is that government officials persevered in the face of no evidence of criminal behavior because his work was inconvenient.

Because Kurtz's case has not yet gone to trial and he is forbidden to discuss the facts of the case, the part of Kurtz is played by an actor, Thomas Jay Ryan. Tilda Swinton plays Hope, Josh Kornbluth plays a colleague of Kurtz's who is denied tenure because of his political views and Peter Coyote speaks for Ferrell, who in the course of the case suffered a stroke. Swinton and Coyote also discuss their views, as themselves, regarding how the expansion of the Justice Department's powers under the Patriot Act threatens to gag American freedom of expression. In one chilling scene, Kurtz's students refuse to sign a petition supporting him for fear that they'll end up on a government list and see their careers thwarted. As sad as it is to realize that youth activism in this country is dead, it's sadder still to find yourself agreeing that they have a point. Just look at what happened to Kurtz.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

"Strange Culture." MPAA rating: Unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes. In limited release.

The original review/article is here:http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-et-strange9nov09,0,1989258.story

How to get involved: ARTIST FACES 20-YEAR CHARGES IN POLITICALLY MOTIVATED CASE
Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund ...... http://www.caedefensefund.org/

And: Where oh where the fuck is the obnoxious, lazy, asshole mainstream media (especially broadcast) on this one? Those corporate ass-kissing, lazy, faux-journalist, dollar-fuckers. If you still aren't convinced, we are on the fascist speed boat to hell. It's our turn to rot there the same way we have condemned millions of others before us in our shameful history: (bye bye democracy in Iran, Burma, Pakistan, Russia, Chile ...) what a bunch of hypocrites we, the-police-states-of-america remain.

Technorati Tags:
film, cinema, LA Times, participatory democracy, voter responsibility, Strange Culture, Critical Art Ensemble, Steve Kurtz, War on Terror, War on Free Speech, War on Free Expression, Police-states-of-america

Man Arrested for Declining to Show His Driver's License

One more example of the small ways our liberties have been eroded and which continue the trend toward a de-facto police state.

"Michael Righi was arrested in Ohio over the weekend after refusing to show his receipt when leaving Circuit City. When the manger and 'loss prevention' employee physically prevented the vehicle he was a passenger in from leaving the parking lot, he called the police, who arrived, searched his bag and found he hadn't stolen anything. The officer then asked for Michael's driver's license, which he declined to provide since he wasn't operating a motor vehicle. The officer then arrested him, and upon finding out Michael was legally right about not having to provide a license, went ahead and charged him with 'obstructing official business' anyways."

A state of ignorance of the law, the constitution, bill of rights (and the civil liberties granted by these documents) combined with overwhelming consumerist capitalism and apathy about our rights as citizens leads to loss of those liberties as much as the illegal domestic spying activities of the US government. Bless those Slashdot geeks, nerds and code-heads who really get it.

The Slashdot post on the story here: http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/07/09/03/1449200.shtml

Technorati Tags:
civil liberties, Ohio, 4th amendment, illegal search and seizure, Bill of Rights, Constitution, liberty, freedom, loss of freedom

Cracking the Hermetic Seals: Press starts acting like reporters instead of stenographers — Better Late than Never

What's Leaking Out of the White House
By Peter Baker, Washington Post
Sunday, April 8, 2007

Shortly before leaving Moscow after four years covering Russia, I was granted a rare audience by a top Kremlin official. As we talked about Vladimir Putin and his relationship with President Bush, the Kremlin official compared the Bush team to the Bolsheviks and laughed at how secretive their White House appeared. "They've adopted some of our techniques with the press," he said.

For most of the past six years, journalists covering the White House have indeed been forced to master the art of Kremlinology. The famously disciplined and leak-averse Bush team succeeded at hermetically sealing the building, keeping behind-the-scenes machinations, well, behind the scenes. Deprived of any genuine information about how the institution operated, reporters were left to extrapolate what was really going on based on who was standing where at a Rose Garden photo op.

But something surprising has been happening in the past few months. The hermetic seal is showing cracks, and now the most disciplined administration in modern times has begun to see its internal workings seep into public view. Bush's shake-up of his Iraq team appeared in the newspapers before he was ready to announce it. His fight with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over plans to send more troops to Iraq played out on the front page for weeks. Secret memos by his national security adviser and his old defense secretary showed up in print. And unnamed officials put out word that Bush's new defense secretary tried unsuccessfully to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"You always have more leaks when you have a combination of a late term and big controversy," observed Marlin Fitzwater, the only person to serve as press secretary to two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "Between the war and the last two years in office, I think it's pretty normal to have this kind of increase in leaked material. You've got to remember that the primary motivation for most leaks is that people want to influence the policy or the president when they're not otherwise able to do so. At the end of a term and in the middle of a controversy is when you can do that."

None of this means that the White House is suddenly leaking like a sieve. This is still not the most transparent institution; extracting information can be maddening at times. Just two months ago, as the Super Bowl neared, the White House refused to reveal what kind of television the president would watch it on. And in fact, many disclosures that have come out lately seem to have originated from other agencies in the administration. But it signals that the White House is no longer able to enforce its will on all corners of government quite as efficiently as it once seemed to do.

"Discipline is enforced by fear, and there's not a lot of people right now afraid of the president, politically afraid," said Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary for President Bill Clinton. "The Joint Chiefs, the Republican leadership, former aides are not worried about political retribution from the White House. They're a paper tiger."

Indeed, the toughest criticism of the Bush White House these days seems to emanate from those who were once on the inside and are no longer reluctant to speak out. Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, told the New York Times this month that he is "so disappointed in things" that he has concluded that Sen. John F. Kerry was right about Iraq. John R. Bolton left his post as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and within weeks complained that the administration was not being tough enough on Iran and North Korea. Kenneth Adelman, a former confidant of Vice President Cheney and adviser to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, now denounces his erstwhile friends for running the worst administration in modern times.

Some of what is happening now was commonplace in past administrations. During Clinton's tenure -- and, I'm told, during those of his predecessors -- it was possible within limits to gain insight into how the White House worked. Reporters who had a question about economic policy could call the president's economic adviser, those writing on health care could call his domestic policy adviser, those with legal queries could call the counsel's office. None of those officials in the Bush White House returns reporters' calls.

In the past, it usually became known who was being considered for the Supreme Court or top administration posts long before any announcements were made. Options for welfare policy and diplomatic initiatives were effectively vetted in the media before landing on the president's desk. At times, that put Clinton's disarray on public display, but on many other occasions, it helped air dissent and further legitimize debate.

"Within reason, it's healthy for the system," Lockhart said. "You can't govern through the newspapers. But you also can't govern with six people in the room. You have to strike a balance." In the first two years of Clinton's presidency, "there was too much public argument," he added. "But by the end of the administration, the balance was pretty good."

Bush didn't think so, and he came into office determined to do things differently. Leaks, in his view, were a sign of a disorderly White House. Nothing should get out that was not supposed to get out. And his ability to make that stick through so many years suggested an unusual solidarity among his team. Bush remembered people in his father's White House coming to him as the president's son to complain that they had no access to the Oval Office. The son vowed not to repeat that management pattern and believed that by keeping an open door, there would be less incentive for aides to go to the media to be heard.

"You've got two polar extremes there," said Trent Duffy, a former Bush spokesman, comparing his White House with the previous one. "The main reason the Bush White House was able to maintain such a level of discipline was largely because they and the vice president's office were really in sync and there wasn't a lot of freelancing, versus the Clinton White House, which was the opposite."

Still, as Duffy noted, the signature disagreement of Bush's first term did eventually become public -- the struggle over the Iraq war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on one side and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other. The losing side in that struggle, Powell's State Department, was more likely to leak, a pattern that irritated Bush and the West Wing.

Every White House engages in strategic leaks that are planned and authorized at the top -- information placed without fingerprints to advance a particular goal or undercut a rival. Some aides in the Clinton White House kept a list of whose turn it was to receive a leak of an initiative that the president was soon to announce -- if it's Tuesday, it must be USA Today. Those sorts of meaningless 24-hour scoops were designed to maximize coverage of something the White House wanted covered on the theory that the recipient media organization would play up its "exclusive" and others would chase it.

The other kind of authorized leak can blow up on a White House, as the Bush team discovered when an attempt to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war, triggered a special counsel investigation that ultimately led to the indictment and conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

But it is the unauthorized leak that every president rails against and, in the end, finds impossible to stop. Now Bush sees it happening more often. In the past few weeks, for example, The Washington Post reported on internal e-mails sent by White House aide Elliott Abrams blasting the president's nuclear agreement with North Korea. And the New York Times detailed an effort by Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert M. Gates, to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a proposal blocked by Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Those are classic Washington stories, where debates on important issues of unquestionable public interest are aired in the open, something that might not have happened all that long ago. Duffy said that may stem from a somewhat more open environment fostered in the past year by White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and press secretary Tony Snow, who are not wedded to rote talking points.

Rather than shun the media, Snow has made a point of putting the president and top aides out for more interviews as well as off-the-record meetings with journalists. "It's obvious the White House is doing things they didn't do in the first term," Duffy said. "Tony has a totally different approach."

Snow also hasn't sweated garden-variety leaks the way others used to. After Bush recently held an unpublicized meeting with a Russian general accused of war crimes in Chechnya, a government official leaked it to Human Rights Watch, which tipped off The Post. The resulting publicity prompted the White House to disavow knowing about the general's past and to swear off any future contacts.

The Russians were annoyed. No doubt they wished the old Kremlin techniques were still in effect.

bakerp@washpost.com

Peter Baker is a Washington Post White House correspondent.

Original article here.

Freedom demands openness and transparency, a type of courage and willingness to share truth despite fear. Fascism and hegemony require secrecy, lies, closed-systems, obedience to authority, manipulation and playing on fear. We are at a crossroads as a nation. Do we choose fear or freedom?

Amerika The Fascist Police State: How I learned to stop resenting the Patriot Act and started learning to love kissing the ass of the fascist in chief

First, the prophecy of Ben Franklin (paraphrased):

Those who trade freedom for security deserve neither.

After reading the anonymous editorial/column below, a streaming of consciousness emerged starting with a famous, controversial (naive) Beatles song, but the similarities end there:

Back in the USSR — Amerika.
Big Brother is here and
His names are George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Robert Mueller, Tom Delay, the FBI, law enforcement, credit card companies, corporate america, republican wingnuts, dittoheads, moral majority, evangelical christian, theocratic fervor, the health care system, insurance companies ....
and you Amerikkkan Lemmings stand by
sucking your thumbs and
Voting for your Amerikkkan Idols and
Praying to your imaginary fairy tale fathers
with flowing beards sitting on clouds.
If this does not scare the bejesus out of you and
tell you
how far down the fascist rabbit hole we have fallen ... then
you do not deserve democracy Amerika the lemmingful.
America that used to care about ideals and democracy and justice --
now Amerika the pathetic joke rapidly becoming a third world dictatorship.

One of the scariest editorials I have ever read. The implications are enormous.
Can you say AMERIKA the FASCIST POLICE STATE?

My National Security Letter Gag Order
I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government.

Friday, March 23, 2007

By Anonymous

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

Footnote by the WP:
It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

From the WashingtonPost.com

PS: Doesn't the guy on the left side of the movie poster eerily remind you of someone who currently occupies an ENORMOUSLY influential position in the white house -- in fact, maybe it looks like two of them, one elected, one not. Both dangerous.