His delivery is over the top for my taste, but the points he brings up about the law itself, about the holes in the President’s logic, and about the telecom immunity portions are dead on. The President is lying about the role of this bill and the immediacy of action. In fact, this bill could die tomorrow and the surveillance begun under the PAA would be in force until the next President comes into office. The President and the Republicans are putting on a show, prioritizing telecoms and their own lawbreaking over you, me, and the rule of law in our land.

It would be nice if those law-and-order conservatives who scream about immigration laws would step up and treat big companies with big donors the same way. The law here is clear. All I ask is that the President and the Republicans follow it and speak truthfully about it.

It’s a remarkable thing that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee is writing an explanation of the RESTORE Act at the Huffington Post. What’s also remarkable, but not surprising considering the Republican influence in the media, is that he’s blogging because neither he nor any other senior Democrats could get Time Magazine to print a response to a factually incorrect article by Joe Klein that distorted the provisions of this important legislation.

Go read it, as it explains the safeguards and balancing that the RESTORE Act does in order to keep the government from spying on private citizens, political opponents, or businesses and allows our agencies to spy on terrorists and other foreign nationals.

Remember, 9/11 changed everything:

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

Liars.

Update: Someone over Atrios’s place points out that assuming other telecom companies went along with this program when Qwest turned it down, this program failed to prevent 9/11. There is a lot of conjecture here (program implemented by other telecoms, it was implemented a meaningful time before 9/11), but the fact that these companies are lobbying hard for amnesty for violating any laws seems to indicate that they’ve done something they’re worried about. This program seems to fit those parameters…

After reading about the recent bomb “scare” that happened at Logan Airport, where an MIT student was nearly killed by police because she wore a breadboard and a battery on her sweatshirt as a piece of wearable art, my reaction was that the Boston police severely overreacted. Others, including some friends, disagreed.

I thought about this some more, and I stand by my original reaction. This isn’t to say that I don’t understand the concern created by batteries and wires on an unknown person in an unknown configuration. I get that. Several things, however, bother me greatly about what happened here.

First, the escalation to weapons drawn happened after she was asked by an airport employee what it was and after she responded that it was art:

A Massachusetts Port Authority staffer manning an information booth in the terminal became suspicious when Simpson — wearing the device — approached to ask about an incoming flight, Pare said. She did not respond when the employee asked her about the device she was wearing, so the employee repeated the question, police said.

Simpson then said the device was artwork and left the counter and walked around the terminal area, causing some employees to leave the building in fear, police said.

This happened before the police were involved, and the student answered honestly. Clearly, the airport staffer didn’t believe her. The obvious question is, then, what do I think should’ve happened next in a situation where the employee didn’t believe the person. I don’t know, because everything I can think of assumes a certain amount of common sense or minimal bravery from the staffer. Really, though, I think this falls on the trooper or the system here that doesn’t have a step between staffer fear and guns drawn, twitch and you die mode. At least have someone trained look. If that’s deemed too unsafe, have an expert sitting in the security office and use one of the myriad cameras that cover the airport terminals and grounds.

Second, I have an issue with charges being pressed in this case. It’s asinine. She didn’t have a bomb, nor was it intended to be a hoax device. A hoax device shouldn’t be whatever an airport staffer imagines to be a bomb. It should be a device intended to look like a bomb. Since we don’t teach people in school or through fancy government PSAs what bombs look like (indeed, the government is attempting to remove directions and specifications on actual bombs and bomb building from the Internet and libraries), this is essentially a “you scared people” law. It’s dumb. Ignorance on the part of others shouldn’t put you in jail.

Third, why is wearing this to an airport more dangerous to the public than wearing it on the T? Walking down the street in Boston? Going to the movies? Going to breakfast in the dining hall at MIT? In other words, if the place were not the airport, does your opinion of the police reaction change? If a bystander/staffer in one of those places thought Simpson had a bomb, would you want the police doing the same thing there? If she went to a nightclub (scenes of some horrific bombings in Europe in the 80s and 90s)? Shouldn’t our estimation of whether she was wearing a bomb and how the police should react remain consistent in most public places?

Fourth, and most troubling to me, is that the security here, if you want to call it that, is based entirely on the the quality of the finish. In other words, if her art had looked like this:

… it apparently would’ve been OK (it contains more or less the same components). The thing is, it could still have been a bomb. Objectively, there’s no difference… blinking lights, battery, wires. But, it’s in a nice case. (here’s the back of the Defcon badge above).

So, if you’re a terrorist, apparently you can walk into Logan if your bomb is in a nice plastic box. That’s your security.

It’s absurd that our society has gotten to the point that fear makes ignorance and leaping to conclusions OK. And that it makes it OK for a major in the Massachusetts State Police to get in front of a podium and say this:

Simpson was “extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used,” Pare said. “She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”

You can argue that the police have to protect themselves, and I’d agree. But they’re also supposed to protect us, and that means putting their lives on the line. I remember being at a wedding in 2000. At our table was a member of the NYPD bomb squad. He was complaining about how most of his calls were obvious false alarms. Someone leaves a box of donuts on the subway and it becomes a suspicious package. He was joking that they just walked up to them and kicked them and said, “Yup, it’s a box of donuts.” I presume he wasn’t entirely serious, but I also got the impression that they didn’t break out the robots and remote detonation gear for every call.

The fact of the matter is that these are low probability events. Very low. The most recent example of a public, small scale bombing in the U.S. was the Atlanta Olympics bombing. Prior to 9/11, cops seemed to take context into consideration. Now, we’ve ratcheted up the fear so high that everything is a threat, every shadow hides a terrorist, and everyone’s fear is actionable intelligence.

Is this really the world we live in? Or is it the world that we’ve scared ourselves into? I believe it to be the latter. Someone needs to make the case that it’s the former, because I see no evidence of it. Educate me in the comments below.

More on this, including some great roundups of background, at the Machinist blog and Boing Boing (loads of links).

Update: Some interesting items in the comment thread. First, illustrating the problems with the hoax device law:

Boston police pulled this same stunt with Joe Previtera, a nonviolent protester, in 2006. He was doing a silent imitation of the famous photo of the hooded guy standing on a box from Abu Ghraib. The police arrested him — as far as anyone can tell, because they disliked his politics — and claimed that the speaker wires hanging from his wrists constituted a “hoax device.”

Again, there’s no way no one on the police force, or even in the crowd present at the time, didn’t know that the wires were part of the original images from Abu Ghraib.

Second, from a Fark thread comes this image, which pretty much sums the whole thing up for me:

I guess that’s what the police believe our world should be. But only at the airport. Outside the terminal building. On a traffic island.

This is one of the best answers he gave in an interview with Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com. This is a major challenge we face as a nation with regard to terrorism, the balance between security and civil rights. His answer is the best one I’ve heard, period.

It saddens me that it even has to be an issue — the fact that “defending the Constitution” even has to be an issue in the presidential race.

But there is an audience for this. This is really important. This is not a narrow audience. This is a broad audience. This is an audience that will surprise you if articulated well. We can win on this.

A campaign for president allows you to have a megaphone here on a national scale to talk about these things, at a time when this crowd, if it continues, can enable you to stop them, do even more than raise the issues. But secondly, if I don’t win this thing, I want everyone else to be talking about these issues.

I think it reaches into a conservative constituency who ought to care about this as much, and does in many ways. So it gives us a chance to do that.

I carry every day, and have for 26 years, a copy of the U.S. Constitution given to me by Robert Byrd [takes Constitution out of his back pocket]. And to me, what could be more fundamental? With all due respect, I care about health care, education, global warming. But if you get this wrong — what do you got? A trade association. Who wants to be president of a trade association?

And this [holding the Constitution] is the spark, the illumination, it is, if I may so say, the envy of many around the world. We have been a guiding set of principles. What is going on with the rule of law isn’t just happening here. . . Other countries are saying, “We can do this, too.” So there has been an erosion in the world with the rule of the law. Having led the world in the rule of law in the post-World War II period, and having nations reluctantly moving in the direction we were moving in, and they now see the U.S. has retreated, and they are making a hasty retreat themselves.

Josh Tucker [of NYU] makes the point about the Soviet Union collapse — You can make the case that it was military, and that was part of it, but he believes and I believe that it was the rule of law. It was Eastern European countries recognizing that this was a total sham, beginning with the Prague Spring and 1956. The Soviet Union collapsed because it rotted from within, they just rotted without the rule of law. So in addition to the other factors, this has international reverberations, beyond just what happens in our own country.

GG: Well, it is good to see the real passion and conviction that you obviously have for these constitutional issues.

CD: I will never forget, it was a night in New Hampshire back last fall, and I’m talking about health care and talking about education and something else — and I said “I just want to share with you something I care about.” And I talked about this and the room exploded. And I was startled and I realized, “God, people really do care.” I thought I was the only one who did. You sound very arcane when you talk about the Military Commissions Act. But this really reasonates [sic. -- sujal].

The brackets above, except for the very last one, are in the original piece on Salon.com. They are not my additions.

This is why how we debate changes like the current FISA bill matter so much. We are the standard bearer for the Rule of Law. The United States should stand for that, so when we see our Vice President playing Constitutional games (not part of the Executive??) or the President taking shortcuts around the courts and around Congress, we need to stand up. Dodd’s consistent stand on this issue is another reason I’m supporting his candidacy.

The only way he can get this message out is if he can stay in the race and make a strong showing in the early primaries. He needs to be part of the debates, on TV and in the campaign. Until public financing happens, that means he needs money. Hit the blue button on the left and donate to his campaign today.

The rest of Greenwald’s interview with Dodd is pretty good, and he asks some tough questions, especially about the FISA debates. Worth reading the rest.

His special comment addresses Chertoff’s vague warning about Americans being at greater risk of attack based on his gut feeling. He also talks about the government report that reported that al-Qaeda has rebuilt it’s operational strength. Great job Bush is doing on that war on terror, if that’s true…