Obamas' Recovery.gov Privacy Policy Changed Today

6-23-2009 Washington DC:

I'm not sure how many folks visit Recovery.gov Obamas' site which explains all about things he is doing to revitalize America, but today there was a change made to their PRIVACY POLICY which folks may want to read.

I've found a wonderful site which tracks changes in various policies of websites and to read the Recovery.gov Privacy Policy change please CLICK

Enjoy,
eAdvocate

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DC- Future Dangerousness

5-5-2009 Washington DC:

The tricky sex offender case that could trip up one of the judges on the short list to replace Souter.

Barack Obama has said he wants a Supreme Court nominee who will think hard about how his or her rulings will affect people's daily lives. "I will seek someone who understands that justice isn't about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people's lives—whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation," Obama said Friday.

When he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Obama also worried that "democracy could be dangerous," and "that the majority could be 'unempathetic'—that's a word Barack has used about the concerns of outsiders and minorities," as Geoffrey Stone, former dean of Chicago's law school, told Jodi Kantor in the New York Times on Sunday.

Sometimes, these values can be in tension with one another. Protecting the rights of a minority can mean exposing the majority to potential risk. That tension is very much present in a 2004 opinion in which Judge Diane Wood participated, a case called Doe v. City of Lafayette. Wood, a 58-year-old Clinton appointee, is at the top of just about everyone's short list because of her reputation as being supersmart and her ability to go toe-to-toe with Judges Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook, two of the other big intellects of her court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit. The opinion Wood joined in Doe v. Lafayette was written by Judge Ann Williams, who is getting some play for the Supreme Court, too. (Reagan put Williams on the district court, and Clinton elevated her to the appeals court.)

Doe is a tough one: It's about a convicted sex offender who cruised a park in Lafayette, Ind., admitting to "having urges" about a group of kids he saw there, although he didn't actually molest them. The city banned him from its parks. The district court upheld the ban based on his criminal record, his own deposition, and his psychologist's testimony that while she thought he'd learned to control himself, she couldn't guarantee he wouldn't offend again. The ruling Wood joined, and Williams wrote, defends the rights of what may be the most despised minority of all: pedophiles. But John Doe's thoughts took him right to the brink of harming real kids. Williams and Wood framed the case as being about Doe's freedom of thought and his right to some procedural protection. The other judges, who eventually overturned their ruling, framed it as being about his dangerousness. Which was it?

John Doe, as the court calls him, had a long history of sex offenses, most involving child victims. In 1978 and 1979, he forcibly had oral sex with a 10-year-old in the locker room of a school and with a 12-year-old in a school parking lot. He was arrested for masturbating in view of children in 1986; for peeping into the windows of an apartment in 1988; and for beckoning three boys to come into an alley, asking whether they wanted oral sex, and then unzipping his pants in front of them in 1990. He was on house arrest from 1992-96 and on probation until January 2000. He had no convictions on his record after 1991.

In January 2000, Doe's probation officer got a call reporting that Doe "had been 'cruising' parks and watching young children." Doe, in a deposition, explained that he parked his car across from Murdock Park and saw a group of kids on the baseball diamond. Doe says "I stood there and watched them for a while, probably 15 minutes, maybe a half-hour, I said to myself: I've got to get out of here before I do something, I left."

Pause there for a moment: Doe didn't hurt the kids or even approach them. He turned around and got out of the park. Then he paged his psychologist and told her he was upset.

In other words, this is a man with a terrible mental illness who desperately tried to control himself—and who, in this instance, succeeded. But the rest of his deposition reveals just how close to failing he came. Asked why he went to Murdock Park that evening, Doe answers: "I guess I was, for whatever reason, I was in the mood of cruising." He admitted that he was looking for kids and that he was having urges. In response to a question about what he was thinking when he walked into the park, he answered:

When I saw the three, the four kids there, my thoughts were thoughts I had before when I see children, possibly expose myself to them, I thought about the possibility of, you know, having some kind of sexual contact with the kids, but I know with four kids there, that's pretty difficult to do. It's a wide open area. Those thoughts were there, but they, you know, weren't realistic at the time. They were just thoughts.

When John Doe's probation officer got the anonymous tip about the cruising, he took it to the police chief and other city officials, and they decided to ban Doe from Lafayette's parks and schools. The ban had no end date, and it covered a sprawling territory, because Lafayette's park system includes large parks, small neighborhood ones, a golf course, a baseball stadium, and several pools.

Doe didn't question the city's decision to ban him from the schools. But he wanted to go to the parks to play softball, go on a company outing, and (this one is harder) watch the teen baseball league play games. So Doe challenged the ban on two grounds: Under the First Amendment, on the premise that he was being punished for his thoughts. And under the 14th Amendment, arguing the ban took away his right "to enjoy and wander through a public park."

The district judge who got the case ruled in favor of the city, based on Lafayette's interest in protecting the health and safety of its residents. A three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit heard the case on appeal. In a 2-1 split, Wood and Williams reversed the district court, finding that the decision to ban Doe from the public parks violated his First Amendment rights, while Judge Kenneth Ripple dissented. Williams wrote the majority opinion. Eleven judges of the 7th Circuit then reheard the case. (This second round is called en banc.) In an 8-3 ruling, the en banc majority reversed Williams' initial ruling. In this second round, Wood and Williams dissented, along with Judge Ilana Rovner. Ripple's dissent became the majority opinion, and Posner and Easterbrook joined it, along with five other judges.

Ripple's majority opinion for the en banc court frames the city's ban as punishing Doe not merely for his thoughts, but for "thought plus conduct." Ripple writes:

The inescapable reality is that Mr. Doe did not simply entertain thoughts; he brought himself to the brink of committing child molestation. He had sexual urges directed toward children, and he took dangerous steps toward gratifying his urges by going to a place where he was likely to find children in a vulnerable situation.

To characterize the ban as directed at 'pure thought' would require us to close our eyes to Mr. Doe's actions. ... We cannot ignore, nor can we say the law somehow commands the City to ignore, Mr. Doe's pedophilia and the history of his battle with that affliction.

Williams' dissent, on the other hand, points out that this is "a rare case where thoughts, as distinct from deeds, become publicly known." Williams notes: "It is clear on this record, that absent Doe's thoughts (and arguably his status as a pedophile …) the City would be uninterested in Doe's decision to go to the park that fateful day." We don't normally restrict people's liberties based on their thoughts, Williams argued, and we shouldn't; this is "a cornerstone of the criminal justice system," and it's a crucial limit on government power.

Williams also points out that the city's ban could actually disserve its goal of keeping children safer by deterring other sex offenders from seeking therapy. And she offers this analogy: "By way of comparison, courts would not sanction criminal punishment of an individual with a criminal history of bank robbery (a crime, like child molestation, with a high rate of recidivism …) simply because she or he stood in the parking lot of a bank and thought about robbing it."

But in other settings, the law does allow for punishment based on future dangerousness. In 2000 and 2002, the Supreme Court twice upheld a Kansas law that provides for the civil commitment of a convicted sex offender, after he has finished serving his criminal sentence, if a court finds that he "cannot control his dangerous behavior." The majority opinion in the Doe case relied on those Supreme Court rulings. When I called Yale law professor Robert Post, a First Amendment scholar, he brought up the Kansas law, too. "If you can be kept in jail because of future dangerousness, why couldn't you be kept out of a park?" Post said. "It's a mischaracterization to say this has anything to do with this man's thoughts. The case should be decided on the basis of his dangerousness."

Geoffrey Stone, also a First Amendment expert, says the problem with the case is that Doe didn't frame his appeal correctly. He failed to argue that he'd been banned from the parks without due process—a hearing or a chance to appeal. And so Williams and Wood had to "meld the due process and First Amendment arguments together." Stone cautioned me not to make too much of the case. "I suppose it's of interest because people will say Judge Wood doesn't care about the dangers pedophiles pose to society. But that is a wild misreading. The dissent is really about the need for appropriate procedures and limitations before the city imposes a ban like this. And that's a perfectly reasonable position."

It's striking that Wood and Williams weren't afraid to rule in favor of a sex offender who had made his struggle for self-control clear. That doesn't surprise people who know Wood. "You couldn't find a more principled person," said my friend Aleeza Strubel, an employment-discrimination lawyer who clerked for Wood. "She didn't make decisions based on what the reaction would be."

Wood has taken other bold stances: The right is already after her for her 2001 ruling in NOW v. Scheidler, which allowed a lower-court judge to prevent anti-abortion protesters, nationwide, from blockading clinics. Wood's ruling made novel use of federal anti-racketeering law, and the Supreme Court overturned her in 2003. You could argue that this is precisely the sort of flat-out liberal, unafraid jurist the court now needs. Or you could argue that this is one fight the Obama administration could do without. Either way, the White House should take a look at Doe v. City of Lafayette. If it hasn't already. ..News Source.. by Emily Bazelon

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Credit-reporting business is ruining America

2-7-2009 National:

The new administration might have thought the right thing to do was to “hit the ground running.” The only ground that was hit was comprised of the collective bodies of the population as they were pounded economically and emotionally downward by elitist leaders who do not live in the real world.

Someone in Washington, D.C., should stop, look and listen to the victims who are supposed to be the basis of democracy and power: We the people.

So far, the new administration has succeeded only in missing the opportunity to exact accountability from financial giants, derailing the possibility for change so ardently promised.

Change cannot begin until someone breaks the stranglehold of credit-reporting businesses on our society. They are the largest purveyors-for-pay of confidential information and the greatest risk to national security and privacy in the nation, trumping the FBI and the CIA with lack of oversight.

They make money, first by charging financial institutions to participate in data collection and sharing, then by assessing the victims (us) for reports; by negotiating the fate of the victims (us) with so-called credit counseling and bankruptcy lawyers and organizations.

They fuel their not-so-distant cousins, collection agencies, as the basis for usurious credit-card rates and provide excuses for a variety of consumer overcharges. Even the government Web site to which people in danger of foreclosure are directed contains an up-front disclaimer as to absence of HUD responsibility and liability involving the performance of another industry the reporting services helped to create, the credit counseling firms listed as “resources.”

The practices of credit-reporting bureaus should be audited and their powers limited, even outlawed. They gather and release information on everything from health care to utility payment lateness without regard to the accuracy of information or extenuating circumstances. They further profit because consumers are forced to pay fees to view and track their own information.

The process of correcting erroneous information is daunting, so much so it is often necessary to pay a lawyer or other advocate in order to rectify or expunge data.

Credit reporters have spawned an entire industry under an often-shady umbrella of debt relief. When an entity becomes so powerful people must engage the services of a third party to negotiate the terms of their credit reputation, something is radically wrong. Credit-reporting companies seldom, if ever, will negotiate directly with the client, referring them to equally uncooperative credit-card companies.

It should be criminal to base insurance rates, credit-card rates, jobs, loans, and other life-altering circumstances on the basis of one’s credit score.

The fine print on the signatory portion of an employment application should not be allowed to contain language that permits a credit-history check. The inference is if one does not pay bills on time, he or she is dishonest or more likely to steal from an employer.

Criminal-background checks might be warranted for some occupations, but a credit check only provides another opportunity for job discrimination against protected classes and an already economically compromised population.

What good will it do to create 500, 5,000 or even five million jobs for people who have been unable to pay bills, many of whom have been in foreclosure, if they can be denied employment based on their sure-to-be-negative credit reports?

Why have all bailouts been targeted to the top of the financial pyramid without demanding full audit and demonstration of good faith from lenders? They should be required to provide examples of outcomes for the mortgage victims they should have already helped with monies already “donated.”

Shouldn’t any future “help” be based on performance by the Citis and Bank of Americas of the world? What about the credit-card interest rates they have been allowed to exploit that helped drive people to the edge of economic destruction in the first place, rates upwards of 29 percent? The fines, penalties and fees involved in pre-foreclosures and credit-card assessments often exceed actual goods purchased by victims.

Why are credit companies and other institutions not required to give back some of the fruits of their usurious rates and — relieving borrowers of payments for six months or more to allow them time to take advantage of the jobs that are promised?

Banks and other lenders now can enjoy borrowing at interest rates of less than 1 percent and already have received bailout funds.

Why are they not forced to pass part of the bargain on to those trying so desperately to hold onto shelter and provide food for their families?

Surely lenders could still make a profit at a 3 percent rate, extending mortgages to a term of as many 40 years rather than the current maximum of 30.

Doesn’t it seem more economically feasible to help people with thousands in mortgage payments, just as with Section 8 housing, through the “rough spots,” rather than foreclosing and attempting to find eligible new buyers for several-hundred-thousand-dollar vacant homes?

I trust someone in our security administration is tracking how many foreign interests are purchasing distressed homes and businesses. Many of the banks have already been taken over by other countries, and our international indebtedness has been well-documented and publicized. We might not need a war to lose our country.

Just as early settlers purchased Manhattan from the Indians at bargain basement prices, depriving Indians of their land, the wholesale purchase of our real estate, our very geography by foreigners, will effectively steal America from Americans.

It will be interesting to see what kind of change the Obama administration ultimately renders: Deliverance from the ground up, or more abysmal economic, social and occupational enslavement from the top. ..News Source.. by NANCY WALTZ Times Guest Columnist

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Obama: I'm sorry, so sorry

2-4-2009 Washing DC:

George W. Bush was reluctant to admit any mistakes in eight years.

It took Barack Obama just 14 days. And once he started Tuesday, he didn’t stop.

“I screwed up,” Obama told CBS in very un-presidential terms about Tom Daschle, whose nomination for Health and Human Services secretary had imploded a few hours earlier.

Tax problems come and go in Washington, just like dinged-up nominees. But Obama seemed to sense Tuesday that Daschle was different, much more serious — a true threat to Brand Obama that opened him up to charges of hypocrisy.

So in a barrage of five back-to-back television interviews, he said he was willing to “take his lumps.” He complained of a “self-induced injury.” He promised to fix the problem.

And he didn’t even try to talk anyone out of the conventional wisdom — that Daschle and his free limo rides were like the living repudiation of everything Obama campaigned on for two years.

Instead, he tried to get one message across with the force of his contrite words — that he really did mean what he said when he ran for president about cleaning up the capital.

“I'm here on television saying I screwed up. And that's part of the era of responsibility, is not never making mistakes, it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you don’t repeat them and that's what we intend to do,” he told NBC.

On CNN, he went a little further: “Look, ultimately, I campaigned on changing Washington and bottom-up politics. And I don't want to send a message to the American people that there are two sets of standards, one for powerful people, and one for ordinary folks who are working every day and paying their taxes.”

A story like Daschle is hard to make go away, and that’s plainly the realization that both Obama and the former Senate Majority Leader came to. Yet if Obama had known about Daschle’s tax problems for a month, did he simply misjudge just how sharp the public backlash would be?

Obama’s team might well be asking the same question of Daschle.

It wasn’t until Tuesday morning that the South Dakotan deduced that the furor was not about to ebb, and if anything was intensifying.

But once Daschle, who has been involved in the highest levels of politics since serving as an aide to former Sen. James Abourezk in the early 1970s, did see the storm, he recognized the threat it posed to his mission.

“He understands politics as well as anyone, and he knew that it was going to be virtually impossible to be the health care champion he wanted to be,” said one source close to Daschle. “The issue is bigger than him, and his withdrawal reflects his fundamental loyalty and integrity.”

For all the mea culpas, Obama did leave himself some wiggle room. While Obama’s tone was plainly contrite, there were ambiguities in his comments.

“We're going to make sure we fix it so it doesn't happen again,” he told CNN, without explaining precisely what problem he was fixing, nor precisely how it would be fixed.

His plans to fight the impression of a “double standard” clearly don’t involve revisiting the tax issues which dogged Timothy Geithner’s nomination as Treasury Secretary.

In fact, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested that Geithner’s underpayment of about $34,000 in taxes was no longer a proper subject for discussion. The reason: he was confirmed last week, slipping over the finish line just before the back-tax controversies arose over Daschle and Nancy Killefer, Obama’s pick for chief performance officer who stepped aside yesterday as well.

“Mr. Geithner has gone through a process,” Gibbs said at a briefing for reporters. “The process has guided Mr. Geithner to be the Secretary of Treasury of the United States of America.”

One “fix” Obama may have been alluding to could require him being less hasty in publicly naming nominees who have yet to complete the vetting process. In the CBS interview, Obama acknowledged being “very eager” to put Daschle to work on health care.

The former senator’s nomination was announced December 11, apparently before Obama people dug into the ex-senator’s financial affairs. Obama reportedly learned of Daschle’s tax underpayment in early January, but the president professed full support for the nomination until Tuesday.

In a similar turn of events, Obama touted his pick for Commerce Secretary, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson at a news conference in Chicago on December 3 – but Richardson was out by January 5, citing an investigation into alleged pay-to-play contracting in his state.

Still, after sustaining the worst public embarrassment of his new presidency, Obama seemed philosophical, exhibiting confidence he would get back on track. “That’s the nature of this thing,” he told CBS. “We were pretty good about being on message for two weeks.

But it also forced him into saying, less than a quarter of the way into his first 100 days, that he was not acceding to the ways of the capital. “Well no,” he said on NBC of Daschle’s departure, “I don't think Washington wins.” ..News Source.. by JOSH GERSTEIN & JONATHAN MARTIN

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DC- Obama Selects Pastor, 26, to Head Faith Office

1-30-2009 Washington DC:

President Obama has named Josh DuBois, the 26-year-old who ran religious outreach for his presidential campaign, to head the White House's new office of faith-based programs, a White House aide said today.

DuBois, who has worked as an associate pastor for a small Pentecostal church in Massachusetts and received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University, was widely expected to get the position and is considered close to the president, for whom he also worked in the Senate.

DuBois's appointment to run the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships -- first reported today in the New York Times -- is the first publicly known detail about the future of the office, which partners with faith groups on social service issues and helps advise them on applying for federal funds.

Obama aides have said the president's effort will expand the faith-based office at the White House. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives made a priority of placing faith offices within federal agencies, but was criticized by some former high-ranking staff for becoming politicized.

It's still unknown whether Obama's faith-based effort will include the same amount of staff at the agencies -- including the Justice, Labor and Education Departments -- or how he will juggle concerns some faith-based social service groups have voiced about being forced to compromise their beliefs in order to compete equally for federal funding. Obama has come under fire for saying he would reverse a Bush executive order allowing faith-based groups to discriminate in hiring based on religion, but then largely halting comment on it.

DuBois is a familiar face to faith activists.

DuBois "is a very close confidant and adviser to President Obama, so this demonstrates the president is very committed to working with faith groups and organizations in this country," said Burns Strider, who ran religious outreach for Hillary Clinton's campaign and now does faith-based political consulting. "He's put a trusted adviser to run it so it can hit the ground running."

The faith-based office will remain, as it did under Bush, within the Domestic Policy Council. There will also be faith outreach staffer in the Office of Public Liason.

DuBois also worked for U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) and was raised in Nashville. ..News Source.. by Michelle Boorstein and Michael D. Shear

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DC- White House exempts YouTube from privacy rules

Note: Often there are overblown concerns over cookies, short term and long term cookies, and no matter how you set your browser to exclude or include them, there is no setting to stop your computer from tracking the URLs (websites you have visited) in the computer's Index.dat file. However, the use of other programs such as CCleaner (available free from FileHippo.com) can eliminate any cookies, URLs and reset Index.dat file so that your Internet whereabouts are then unknown, on your computer. Unfortunately, the sites you have visited may have kept a record of your visit (or their hosts may have) which you cannot erase. So, the best you can do is to run a CCleaner type program -at least at the end of the day- then reboot your computer, that will leave it clean. You may also consider one of the anonymous type programs / services (ex: Anonymizer) which effectively fake out the sites you visit leaving a record which really doesn't pertain to you. However, be forwarned, use of those pgms / services is now beingf frowned on by Yahoo (for one) and they warn you that your e-mail address may be terminated for using anonymous services.

1-23-2009:

Update: 12 hours after posting this story, the White House (partially) reversed itself. The rather dubious YouTube only waiver from federal web privacy rules has been maintained, but the White House website has been updated to limit the exposure of visitors to YouTube's tracking efforts to only those people who actually click the play button on a YouTube video. For more details on the new changes, read this blog post.

The new Web site for Obama's White House is already drawing attention from privacy activists and tech bloggers. While the initial focus has been on the site's policies relating to search engine robots, a far more interesting tidbit has so far escaped the public eye: the White House has quietly exempted YouTube from strict rules relating to the use of cookies on federal agency Web sites.

The new White House Web site privacy policy promises that the site will not use long-term tracking cookies, complying with a decade-old rule prohibiting such user tracking by federal agencies. However, the privacy policy then reveals that Obama's legal team has exempted YouTube from this rule (YouTube videos are embedded at various places around the White House Web site).

While the White House might not be tracking visitors, the Google-owned video sharing site is free to use persistent cookies to track the browsing behavior of millions of visitors to Obama's home in cyberspace.

No other company has been singled out and rewarded with such a waiver.

In a blog post back in November, I criticized the Obama transition team's Change.gov Web site for its use of embedded YouTube videos. At the time, I stated that the practice might violate long-standing federal rules that forbid federal agencies from using persistent tracking cookies on their Web sites. It turns out that I was wrong: the transition team was technically not a federal agency and thus not bound by the anti-cookie rules.

Now that Obama is president, his official Web site is required to abide by the cookie regulations. Furthermore, as of Wednesday afternoon, several YouTube videos have been embedded on the White House blog. As soon as a visitor surfs to one of the blog pages that contain a YouTube video, a long-term tracking cookie is automatically set in the user's browser--even for those users who do not click the "play" button.

Someone on the Obama legal team seems to have read my previous blog post, as they've modified the White House privacy policy to specifically exclude YouTube's tracking cookies from federal rules that would otherwise prohibit their use:

"For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a 'persistent cookie' is set by third party providers when you click to play the video.

This persistent cookie is used by YouTube to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel's office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie."

YouTube and cookies
Each time a new user visits YouTube, a unique permanent tracking cookie is issued by the Web site to the user's browser, which it stores. Whenever the user later revisits YouTube, that cookie is transmitted to the video-sharing site, allowing it to identify users and monitor their video viewing habits.

YouTube is also able to set and access a user's tracking cookie when she visits a third-party Web page that has embedded a video stored on the YouTube site (such as a blog or other Web site), even if the user never clicks the play button.

The moment that the flash file containing the video player is downloaded from YouTube's servers and displayed in the user's browser as part of another Web page, the cookie is transmitted to YouTube's servers. Considering how widespread the practice of embedding YouTube videos has become, this gives Google an amazing amount of data on the Web-browsing activities of hundreds of millions of Internet users--many of whom may not realize that such tracking data is being collected.

The White House policy is not being followed
The YouTube-related text in the new White House privacy policy implies that not all users will be tracked by YouTube. The policy notes that:

"If you would like to view a video without the use of persistent cookies, a link to download the video file is typically provided just below the video."

As of Thursday morning, this statement is false.

In multiple tests by this blogger with both Internet Explorer and Firefox, merely visiting pages on the White House blog causes YouTube to set a long-term tracking cookie in the browser--even if the user does not press the play button to start the video. After eight months, this cookie will be automatically deleted by the user's browser--unless, of course, the user visits another Web page somewhere else on the Internet containing a YouTube-embedded video, in which case, the eight-month cookie clock is reset. Given how widespread YouTube video embeds have become, this cookie essentially lasts forever.

While it is obvious that I am rather critical of this entire affair, I am willing to give the Obama Web team the benefit of the doubt in one area: the fact that their current Web infrastructure does not deliver on the promises made by their privacy policy.

The Obama White House Web site is only two days old, and so it is certainly possible that the team simply hasn't gotten around to deploying a more privacy-preserving system for YouTube video embeds. Protecting users who do not click "play" from automatically receiving a cookie is certainly possible; the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2008 released a wrapper script for YouTube videos that provided this very feature. Let us hope that the Obama team deploys such a technology in due course.

Can YouTube be justified as a "compelling need"?

For the past 10 years, federal agencies have been prohibited from using tracking cookies on their Web sites, except in a few special cases. The Office of Management and Budget rule M-03-22 states that:

"Agencies are prohibited from using persistent cookies or any other means (e.g., web beacons) to track visitors' activity on the Internet except .... [when there is] a compelling need."

The question we must now focus on is this: Is the need for Obama to use embedded videos hosted by YouTube (and not, say, another company's video-streaming platform that does not force cookies upon its users) a use that can be reasonably described as compelling?

Presumably, this has been justified on the basis that YouTube forces cookies on the visitors of any Web site that embeds one of its videos. However, while Joe or Jane blogger has no bargaining power with YouTube/Google, the federal government certainly does.

In just the past couple weeks, YouTube has launched dedicated pages for both the House and Senate to show off their own videos, and the site also recently started allowing users to directly download copies of some videos. This latter feature has not yet been widely deployed across the site, and is seems to be limited to videos posted by Obama's team.

Given the famously close connections between Obama and Google, you'd think his tech team could negotiate for a cookie-less way to embed videos. At a technical level, this would be an easy enough change, even if it would deny Google the ability to collect even more information on millions of Americans.

Cookies and other federal agencies
Finally, the new White House YouTube rule may have a far broader impact on the way that federal agencies use Web 2.0 content. Simply put, if another federal agency embeds a YouTube video in its Web site without first having the agency's legal team issue a waiver, have federal rules been violated?

Up until this week, federal agencies have been free to embed Web 2.0 content in their own sites without any real need to consider the privacy risks posed to end users. The fact that the White House Counsel has felt it necessary to issue such a waiver for YouTube videos appearing on the White House Web page could be reasonably interpreted to mean that such a waiver is now required for all embedded Web 2.0 content that might force cookies upon end users. This is certainly new legal ground.

Consider, for example, the Transportation Security Administration, which has posted YouTube videos to its blog numerous times over the past year. Its privacy policy makes no mention of YouTube cookies. Could this lead to issues for the TSA Web team, or perhaps even congressional investigations? Given my own history with TSA, I certainly hope so. ..News Source.. by Chris Soghoian

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The Citizen's Briefing Book has closed

1-19-2009 Washington DC:

Much to my regret it has been announced that the "Citizen's Briefing Book" has closed, somehow it seems it was not open long enough, all of us need to watch for these opportunities and when they happen get the word out to everyone ASAP. I vow if notified I will do it so please keep me informed..... eAdvocate

Quote:

Every day, the President receives books filled with facts and recommendations to be considered while crafting and enacting policies.

The Citizen’s Briefing Book—a project that has enabled everyday Americans to share their expertise and insight with President Obama—has been a tremendous success so far.

Michael Strautmanis, Director of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs for the Transition, was particularly impressed by the enthusiastic response the feature has elicited.

“We have had an unbelievable response—over 70,000 people participated, half a million votes, and tens of thousands of wonderful ideas,” Strautmanis said.

Watch Mr. Stratumanis’ reaction below:



The Citizen’s Briefing Book will be open for ideas, comments, and voting until Sunday at 6pm. President Obama will later receive the Citizen’s Briefing Book: a unique compilation of the ideas and feedback submitted completely by the Change.gov community.

We’re eager to carry this community’s enthusiasm forward in the coming months and years. We invite all Americans to join the new administration online at WhiteHouse.gov after President-elect Obama is sworn in.

..Source..

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Obama's "Citizen's Briefing Book."

1-15-2009 Washington DC:

Obama's Transition Team has started what they call the "Citizen's Briefing Book."

Here is how they explain it:

Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate or comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will be gathered into a Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama after he is sworn in.

My Review of Existing Issues:
Today, I began looking at what is already out there as to Sex Offender Concerns and Issues, what I found is not what the Transition Team is looking for. There seems to be a main theme among those folks who support reform for sex offender concerns, and that is, that the Adam Walsh Act violates the ex post facto clause, without clarification.

Let me say this, that the Adam Walsh Act (AWA) -on its face- does not violate any constitutional provision whatsoever, it is quite clear folks do not understand constitutional provisions and how they may be violated. If it were in violation -on its face- then courts would have overturned it entirely. That has not happened.

All laws when enacted are prospective, meaning they apply to folks convicted as of the date the law became effective, and thereafter. Immediately that tells us that AWA is not ex post facto on its face; this is not some subtle point it is something folks need to understand.

Now, when a new law (AWA) is applied to folks convicted BEFORE the date of enactment, then it MAY be a ex post facto violation. One more thing is needed, the law MUST FURTHER PUNISH according to what courts have declared to be punishment; courts -so far- have not declared AWA provisions further punishment. Therefore, despite all personal beliefs, mine included, AWA is not an ex post facto law, legally speaking.

This is the main case on ex post facto laws:
CALDER v. BULL 8-1-1798 Question:
This is the source of all ex post facto cases: The court holding a law is a ex post facto violation if any of the following have occurred:

1st. Every law that makes an action , done before the passing of the law, and which was innocent when done, criminal; and punishes such action.

2nd. Every law that aggravates a crime, or makes it greater than it was, when committed.

3rd. Every law that changes the punishment, and inflicts a greater punishment, than the law annexed to the crime, when committed.

4th. Every law that alters the legal rules of evidence, and receives less, or different, testimony, than the law required at the time of the commission of the offence, in order to convict the offender.

AWA or SORNA, that is the question:
In addition, supporters have missed a very important fact, that the Adam Walsh Act has many Titles, only one of them pertains to registration, SORNA is the name they have given that PORTION of AWA affecting registration issues. While many folks, in commentary, refer to AWA and actually mean SORNA portion, here in the Citizens Briefing Book EVERYONE MUST BE CLEAR in explaining what their objection pertains to.

The reason for clarity is, AWA has many good portions (i.e.;. child pornography for one) and anyone in Congress seeing a claim that "AWA is unconstitutional" will ignore such claims knowing it to not be true. So folks lose an opportunity to get their point across because they were not clear.

How many stories are currently told:
OK, after reviewing everything I could find, I can count on one hand the number of stories that have value towards sex offender concerns. Here is why I say this, folks are complaining -whining so to speak- about laws being bad and repeating those claims time and time again. Very few tell stories that show how SORNA harms people in their daily lives, those stories are issues, real issues. Something Obama can grab onto and make changes in laws to accommodate and relieve the harm.

What should folks focus on:
Now, if folks remember, at Halloween Obama was walking with one of his girls in the park, and reporters began to harass them, Obama asked them to stop. That is a story and at that time I pointed it out to folks to remember this when discussing RSO issues. That is the kind of issue this Transition Team is looking for to present to Obama. FAMILY HARASSMENT, Obama is sensitive to that, hence the story of him and his girl in the park.

Further, when Obama was elected President-Elect, who did he bring on the stage with him? His FAMILY, again he is sensitive to FAMILY ISSUES. In addition, when his Grandmother died, where did he go? FAMILY ISSUES. I've pointed these out in my blog from time to time. REMEMBER "FAMILY" tell story that involve family and how they are being harmed, harassed, etc. These are real issues not screaming that laws are ex post facto, that my friends is a waste of time.

KEEP FOCUSED!

The bad guys, the haters:
Next, I also noticed that there were folks who hated the fact that RSOs or their family members were, as they put it, complaining. And some even called folks names. Then I see a few supporters, spending time arguing with these folks. This is a MAJOR mistake, allow folks to have their opinions, just ignore them. If you do not ignore them, then those who review issues (Transition Team) will not want to help those who are arguing and bypass good issues.

The bad folks who call names, allow them their opinion and name calling, and I promise you, the transition team will ignore them and focus on the RSO issues if they spend their time simply getting issues in for consideration. Remember what the Transition Team said "The best rated ideas will be gathered into a Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama after he is sworn in."

The best rated:
THE BEST RATED, which means more of your time must be spent on getting RSOs, family members, and supporters to vote in order to get issues "BEST RATED" so DO NOT WASTE time, get the message out to others, work together with other supporters, set aside any differences, teamwork even if you don't like someone on the team.

So remember, stories: My father and I went walking in the park today and someone noticed me from seeing my picture on the registry, as that person walked by, they spit at me but caught my father in his face. That folks is a story, and notice, no mention of AWA violating the ex post facto law.

Remember, stories showing who is harmed and how! Stay focused, stories is what the transition team will bring together and present to Obama.

Good luck to everyone:
eAdvocate

CLICK to goto the Citizens Briefing Book

NOTE: Megan's law became a law by her Mom telling her story. Jessica's law became a law because her story was told. Every law that is named after a victim became a law by telling the victim's story. TELL STORIES of harm to FAMILY members...

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OH- Obama friend plans to be ally outside administration

1-6-2009 Ohio:

If you had to pick one person in Cincinnati who might have a ticket for a top job in the administration of Barack Obama, David Singleton would not be a bad choice.


The same could be said for his wife, Verna Williams.

He is the executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center in Cincinnati, a nonprofit law office in Cincinnati that works for reform of the state's criminal justice system, representing the rights of those in prison and those who have served their time while helping them re-enter society.

She is a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and a former vice president of the National Women's Law Center, a legal advocacy group for women.

Both have close ties to the soon-to-be president and his wife, Michelle Obama. Singleton was Obama's classmate in Harvard Law School's class of 1991; Williams struck up a friendship with Michelle Obama at the same law school several years earlier.

Singleton had a hand in introducing his former law school colleague to Cincinnati, when, in the summer of 2004, he hosted a fundraiser for Obama's U.S. Senate campaign that gave Cincinnati Democrats their first look at a man who would soon be their presidential candidate.

Later, he helped state Sen. Eric Kearney and his wife, lawyer Jan-Michelle Lemon Kearney, also personal friends of the Obamas, organize some fundraising events in Cincinnati for Obama's presidential campaign.

'Both ordinary and extraordinary'
Bringing Obama to Cincinnati back in 2004 - about two weeks before Obama made a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston that cemented his status as a rising political star - "opened a lot of people's eyes around here," Singleton said.

"They were impressed by his obvious intelligence, but also by his ability to connect with people, one on one," the 42-year-old lawyer said. "A man who is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time." Singleton had seen those qualities years before at Harvard Law School.

"Barack was always seen by the rest of us as a little older and a little wiser than the rest of us," Singleton said. "And he was about five years older than most of us. He was approachable, friendly. And clearly a star."

Jan-Michelle Kearney - who, like Singleton, was a Harvard Law School classmate of Obama - called Singleton and Williams "two brilliant, wonderful people."

"To meet them for the first time, you would never know how accomplished they are," said Jan-Michelle Kearney, publisher of the Cincinnati Herald. "They are fun to be around."

Williams, Jan-Michelle Kearney said, is still very close to Michelle Obama; the two of them were mock trial partners at Harvard Law School.

"Whenever Michelle was in town, she'd ask for some private time with Verna," Jan-Michelle Kearney said.

Williams declined a request to be interviewed and the Obamas could not be reached for comment on their relationship with the Cincinnati couple, but Singleton spoke recently about his law school friend. He made it clear that while he supports Obama and believes he will make a good president, he himself is satisfied to watch from afar.

It is easy to picture Singleton, who lives in Kennedy Heights with his wife and daughter, playing a role in an Obama Justice Department or elsewhere in the administration. But Singleton said that is not going to happen. He and his wife have tickets to the inauguration and are looking forward to watching their friend be sworn in as the 44th president, but, when it is over, they will come home to Cincinnati.

"This is where I am meant to be," said Singleton, sitting in his cluttered office at the center's East Ninth Street headquarters.

"I think the world of Barack Obama," Singleton said. "Nothing has pleased me more than to watch him succeed. And I think he will succeed as president. But my place is here. This is where we are raising our family. This is where I can do the work I want to do."

'Couldn't stand' Cincinnati
Singleton did not always think so highly of Cincinnati.

The Asheville, N.C., native left Harvard Law School 17 years ago and took a career path similar to Obama's in many ways. He, like Obama, could have landed a high-paying job in a Wall Street law firm. Instead, he worked for three years at the Legal Action Center for the Homeless in New York City and then spent seven years as a public defender in Harlem and Washington, D.C.

Singleton came to Cincinnati in 2001 when his wife was hired to teach at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He worked at a private law firm before being named executive director of the Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a nonprofit funded by foundation grants and individual contributions.

Back then, he could not have imagined a day when he would say that he would want to make Cincinnati his home forever.

"I couldn't stand this community when I first came," Singleton said. "It was a harsh transition. I just saw it as a place of narrow-mindedness, a hidebound legal system. Not the kind of place where people who do my kind of work would be welcome."

But he said that he quickly found that there are other lawyers in town who shared his passion for justice, and learned that a lawyer who speaks for prisoners' rights could have a fair hearing.

"I've seen us make tremendous progress," Singleton said. "There is much more to do. And I want to stay here and do it."

The center had a major legal victory earlier this year when the Ohio Supreme Court decided that an Ohio law banning convicted sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school or day care center could not be applied retroactively to those who were convicted before the law was passed in 2003. Singleton's firm had represented two such convicted sex offenders in the case.

"That was satisfying, to see justice done," Singleton said. "The single biggest problem we have at the center is the perception that we are a prisoners' rights law firm. That is not what it is all about. It is about seeing that prisoners have a chance to rehabilitate and become a part of society again."

Singleton said he believes Obama would understand his desire to stay here and continue his work.

"I think it is possible that, if I wanted to, I could go to Washington and work in the new administration," Singleton said. "Barack Obama doesn't need people who support him just in Washington. He needs them in places like Cincinnati, too." ..News Source.. by Howard Wilkinson • hwilkinson@enquirer.com

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DC- Another first; Obama to webcast inaugural ball

There is no doubt that Obama sees the importance of the Internet in daily life. That fact may play an important part in future laws governing sex offenders, and may be used as a defense against harsher Internet laws when they are not needed. Take note!

1-6-2009 Washington DC:

On inauguration night, Barack and Michelle will make their first stop – and dance their first dance – at a ball that will be Webcast to living rooms and community centers around the country as part of the Presidential Inaugural Committee’s plan to make this the most accessible swearing-in in history.

Some of the tickets will go free to District of Columbia residents, and some will be offered to grassroots supporters around the country.

Planners are borrowing from the house-party concept that the Obama campaign used to bring the excitement of the trail into the homes of grassroots supporters.

"This is an Inauguration for all Americans," Obama said in a statement. "I wanted to make sure that we had an event that would be open to our new neighborhood here in Washington, D.C., and also neighborhoods across the country. Michelle and I look forward to joining our fellow Americans across the country during this very special event."

The event, one of 10 official inaugural balls, will be held at the Washington Convention Center.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee is calling it “the premiere event” of the night, and trying to validate that by making it the new president’s first stop.

“The ball will also feature a robust interactive component, including webcasting and text messaging,” the committee said in its announcement. “The PIC will release more details soon about using technology to allow Americans who are attending neighborhood balls across the country to participate actively in this celebration.” The idea is to bring the excitement of the ball to unofficial celebrations in living rooms and municipal centers around the country.” ..News Source.. by MIKE ALLEN

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DC- President-Elect Obama Announces Key Department of Justice Posts

These are the people in Washington which will have the most influence in administering laws and court cases affecting sex offenders during Obama's time in office.

1-6-2009 Washington:

WASHINGTON - Today, President-elect Barack Obama announced that he intends to nominate the following individuals for key posts at the United States Department of Justice: David Ogden, Deputy Attorney General; Elena Kagan, Solicitor General; Tom Perrelli, Associate Attorney General; and Dawn Johnsen, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.

President-elect Obama said, "These individuals bring the integrity, depth of experience and tenacity that the Department of Justice demands in these uncertain times. I have the fullest confidence that they will ensure that the Department of Justice once again fulfills its highest purpose: to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. I look forward to working with them in the months and years ahead."

The announcements made today are below:

David Ogden, Deputy Attorney General
Ogden is currently a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr and serves as the Department of Justice Agency Review lead for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. Ogden was nominated by President Clinton to serve as Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division from in 1999 and served in this capacity until 2001. He was awarded the Edmund J. Randolph Award for Outstanding Service in 2001. From 1998 - 1999, he served as Chief of Staff to Attorney General Janet Reno and as Counselor to the Attorney General from 1997-1998. From 1995-1997, Ogden served as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, and from 1994 -1995 served as Deputy General Counsel, Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Defense. Ogden was a partner at Jenner and Block in Washington, DC from 1988-1994 and worked at the law firm of Ennis Friedman & Bersoff from 1983-1988. He clerked for Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the U.S. Supreme Court from 1982-1983 and for Judge Abraham D. Sofaer in the Southern District Court of New York from 1981-1982. He received his B.A. in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 (summa cum laude) and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1981 (magna cum laude). He served on the Harvard Law Review from 1979-81.

Elena Kagan, Solicitor General
Kagan, the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law, is currently the 11th Dean of Harvard Law School. Kagan first came to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor in 1999 and became Professor of Law in 2001. She has taught administrative law, constitutional law, civil procedure, and seminars on issues involving the separation of powers. She was appointed Dean of the Law School in 2003. From 1995 to 1999, Kagan served in the White House, first as Associate Counsel to the President (1995-96) and then as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council (1997-99). In those positions she played a key role in the executive branch's formulation, advocacy, and implementation of law and policy in areas ranging from education to crime to public health. Kagan launched her scholarly career at the University of Chicago Law School, where she became an assistant professor in 1991 and a tenured professor of law in 1995. Kagan clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1986 to 1987. The next year she clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. She then worked as an associate in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly from 1989 to 1991. Kagan received her bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1981 (summa cum laude). She attended Worcester College, Oxford, as Princeton's Daniel M. Sachs Graduating Fellow, and received an M. Phil. in 1983. She then attended Harvard Law School, where she was supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated magna cum laude in 1986.

Tom Perrelli, Associate Attorney General
Perrelli is currently Managing Partner of Jenner & Block's Washington, DC office. He is Co-Chair of the Firm's Entertainment and New Media Practice and is a member of the Firm's Litigation Department. From 1997-99, Mr. Perrelli served as counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno, supervising a variety of civil matters at the Department of Justice. He subsequently rose to Deputy Assistant Attorney General (1999-2001), supervising the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division. In 2005, Perrelli was named one of the nation's 40 most promising lawyers under 40 by The National Law Journal for exhibiting "extraordinary achievements" in his career. He has been recognized as one of the leading media and entertainment lawyers in the United States by Chambers & Partners USA, named as one of 500 "New Stars" by Lawdragon in 2006, and named Best Intellectual Property Lawyer in Washington D.C. by the Washington Business Journal in 2008. Prior to joining Jenner & Block, in 1991-92, Perrelli clerked for the Honorable Royce C. Lamberth of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Perrelli graduated from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 1991, where he was managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. He received an A.B. in History from Brown University in 1988.

Dawn Johnsen, Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel
Johnsen is currently a Professor of Law at the Indiana University School of Law--Bloomington, where she teaches and writes about issues of constitutional law. Her recent publications on issues of presidential power include Faithfully Executing the Laws: Internal Legal Constraints on Executive Power, 54 UCLA L. Rev. 1559 (2007) and What's a President to Do? Interpreting the Constitution in the Wake of the Bush Administration's Abuses, 88 Boston U. L. Rev. 395 (2008). She serves on the board of directors of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. She served in the Office of Legal Counsel, U.S. Department of Justice, as the acting assistant attorney general heading that office (1997-98) and as a deputy assistant attorney general (1993-96). In that capacity, she provided constitutional and other legal advice to the attorney general, the President, and the general counsels of the various executive branch agencies. From 1988-93, she was the legal director of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL). She clerked for the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She received a B.A from Yale University in 1983 and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1986.

..News Source.. by TPM

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Obama - Open Government - Open for Questions (SEX OFFENDER ALERT)

1-2-2009 Obama Wants to Know:

Tired of registration laws? Tired of being treated as a second class person? Tiered of all that comes with being a registered person? Well, you know the laws, now President-Elect Obama wants to know what he can do about your problems. So, here is an opportunity to tell him how laws are affecting you. You can setup new questions or agree with questions already setup by someone else. Holiday's are over, get on this site, search for existing questions like "Adam Walsh Act" or "Sex Offenders" or anything else you think is related, then make your voice heard. DO NOT PUT THIS OFF see note from the Transition Team on that page, there is a cutoff date!
eAdvocate

Open for Questions

It's easy to make your voice heard -- and give and receive feedback on questions posed by the Change.gov community.

To get started, click on one of the topics to the left and check out some of the questions other people are asking. If you see a question you'd like to hear answered by the Transition, click the check box next to the question. If you don't find a particular question interesting or relevant, mark the "X" instead.

Got a question? Just ask. At the bottom of each page, you can click the "Submit a Question" button and add your two cents.

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Regrets? Bush has too few to mention

A man in denial, or trying to coverup his failures, still one in denial... How many have died in a useless war, how many are homeless and jobless, how many are without adequate health care, how many children have been left behind (many are children of RSOs), how many have lost their life's savings, how many have lost their homes which they spent a lifetime buidling, and on and on it goes... Will the country ever recover from the BAILOUT administration? Regrets, too few? It is time for a CHANGE!

12-23-2008 National:

Faced with a faltering economy and a precarious national security position, President George W. Bush made the best of a bad situation and sought to unite the country in spite of Washington’s toxic political culture.

That’s how Bush views his tenure in office, according to a recent round of exit interviews he and Vice President Dick Cheney have done as part of an effort to wind up their administration on a positive note.

Their argument is not entirely convincing.

“The president and his advisers are focusing an enormous amount of effort on trying to politically shape and spin the legacy to improve his image in history’s eyes,” said former White House press secretary Scott McClellan. “I am not surprised. There has always been great effort placed on the political marketing of this presidency.”

Bush and Cheney aren’t saying much that Americans haven’t heard before, in one form or another. But as the two men take full advantage of their last month in the bully pulpit, there are a few key themes emerging in their narrative about the last eight years.

They did their best with a vulnerable economy: “I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived,” Bush told ABC’s Charlie Gibson, glossing over his long record as a deregulator, which stretches back to his time as governor of Texas.

He continued, referring specifically to the housing crisis: “I’m a little upset that we didn’t get the reforms to Fannie and Freddie…people will say that this administration tried hard to get a regulator.”

“Hard” might be pushing it, since a reform bill never made it through the GOP-controlled Congress. But the administration certainly raised the issue, highlighting the potential market risks of overgrown GSEs as early as April 2001.

Dean Baker, the liberal economist who directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research, was incredulous at Bush’s attempt to displace blame onto his predecessor.

“If he was really troubled by any of the policies inherited from the Clinton administration he kept it to himself,” Baker said. “There’s plenty of blame to go on the Clinton administration. On the other hand, he’s been sitting there for eight years. It’s pretty hard to say there’s nothing you could have done.”

Bush has also cited his administration’s “52 months of uninterrupted job growth” as a feather in his presidential cap – though in many of those months job growth was tepid, falling below the rate at which experts say a healthy economy must grow.

Iraq was a grave and gathering threat: On defense policy, both Bush and Cheney have been especially assertive in backing up their records. They have even returned to one of their most familiar rationales to defend the war in Iraq: the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction,” Bush told ABC’s Martha Raddatz last week. “I did not have the luxury of knowing he did not have them. Neither did the rest of the world until after we had come and removed him.”

Though Bush added that he regretted faulty pre-war intelligence, Cheney was completely unapologetic on the subject and swatted down Karl Rove’s recent suggestion that with different intelligence the country might not have gone to war.

“As I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction…They also found that he had every intention of resuming production once the international sanctions were lifted.”

This narrative is something of a golden oldie for the Bush team: weapons of mass destruction were central to the original case for war, but eventually took a back seat to humanitarian-oriented arguments after inspectors found no evidence of a WMD program in the country.

Extreme measures have been necessary: Iraq isn’t the only subject on which Cheney is an unabashed defender of the White House’s national security policies. When it comes to surveillance and torture, he has firmly asserted both the effectiveness and the legality of the administration’s policies.

“I think those who allege that we’ve been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don’t know what they’re talking about,” Cheney recently told ABC’s Jonathan Karl, going on to argue that the waterboarding of 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was an appropriate measure.

The White House hasn’t always been so sure.

After a 2006 interview in which Cheney seemed to confirm that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded, the White House walked back his comments to avoid confirming the use of that technique, which in the past has been prosecuted as a war crime.

“The vice president says he was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives, and he was not referring to waterboarding,” then-White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said at the time.

This time around, Cheney left no wiggle room in his remarks.

Karl asked, “On KSM, one of those tactics [used]…was waterboarding….Even that you think was appropriate?”

Cheney answered tersely: “I do.”

Compassionate conservatism works: Bush and Cheney may be spending the lion’s share of their time defending their responses to the biggest contingencies of their time in office. But Bush is also returning to some of the themes that marked his first presidential run, circling back to the theme of compassionate conservatism – the bumper-sticker version of his approach to government that gradually disappeared in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

In an interview with National Review in early December, Bush defended this governing philosophy, which has taken a hammering from both the left and the right over the years.

“It wasn’t very well defended, but most people adhere to it,” Bush told the conservative magazine. “Compassionate conservatism basically says that if you implement this philosophy, your life would become better. That’s what it says.”

In addition to such abstract arguments, Bush has also tried to focus public attention on some of the often overlooked accomplishments that mesh better with the themes of his first presidential campaign.

“We’ve accomplished a lot in my administration. Like No Child Left Behind; 52 months of uninterrupted job growth; PEPFAR, which is the AIDS initiative in Africa; fighting malaria, where there's poverty; faith-based [programs],” Bush told Raddatz. “I mean there’s a lot that people will be able to judge this administration on.”

We don’t worry about history: For a man on a bon voyage tour, Bush has tried to sound unconcerned about how history will judge him.

“I’ll be frank with you. I don’t spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history,” he told Gibson. “I guess I don’t worry about long-term history, either, since I’m not going to be around to read it.”

The line is an echo of his famous response to Bob Woodward’s question about how history would judge the Iraq war. Then, as now, Bush replied: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” ..News Source.. by ALEXANDER BURNS

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Web Safety Group Wants Changes From Obama

12-11-2008 National:

The Family Online Safety Institute, whose members include AT&T, Comcast Corp., Google, Microsoft, Verizon and other high-tech firms urged the Obama administration on Thursday ramp up government efforts to protect children on the Internet. The group proposes naming a national safety officer to serve under the yet-to-be-named national chief information officer within the White House; creating a U.S. Internet safety council; and establishing a federal program to fund a range of online safety research and education projects.

"We need a paradigm shift in what we do, say and teach about online safety," FOSI CEO Stephen Balkam said in a release issued in conjunction with the institute's second annual summit in Washington. "We look to the next administration to provide leadership and support at the highest levels to help make the online world a safer place for children," he said. MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam, who keynoted the conference, said FOSI's call to action "is opportune with new leadership taking charge of the online safety for our nation’s children in a Web 2.0 world."

Read more about FOSI's recommendations here. ..News Source.. by Tech Daily Dose

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Obama Team Offers Tips For Internet Dialogue

12-3-2008 National:

President-elect Barack Obama's transition team is breaking new ground with Change.gov and the online conversations that the site is trying to generate -- but his staff wants to make sure that participants in the discussion are making the most of the opportunity to communicate their views and play by the rules. After reading through thousands of comments posted on the site in recent weeks, officials offered some tips on Wednesday.

Suggest Reading: Building the community: A guide to comments

1: Know the comment policy -- do's and don'ts of posting
2: Set up an account -- it helps build a sense of community for discussions
3: Rate other comments -- easy to use thumbs up/thumbs down buttons
4: Post a comment -- say something new; respond to someone else
5: Stay on topic -- if it's a discussion on the economy, discuss the economy

Not surprisingly, Web users commented on the post. One wondered how the team plans on moderating the discussions on Change.gov, noting that as commenting grows, "it may go beyond the capabilities of paid staff." Another said that over time, the administration "will figure out how to properly run this discussion." That individual suggested setting up live chats with a transition official and a system where citizen boards are created from the online community.

..Source.. by Tech Daily Dose

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If Obama Has the Opportunity to Appoint Our Next New Supreme Court Justice

11-12-2008 National:

Is He Right that Empathy Should Be A Core Criterion?

This past February, the Volokh Conspiracy legal blog drew attention to Senator Barack Obama's views on what his ideal Supreme Court nominee would be like, focusing, in particular, on two key comments by Obama:

"I taught constitutional law for 10 years, and . . . when you look at what makes a great Supreme Court justice, it's not just the particular issue and how they rule, but it's their conception of the Court. And part of the role of the Court is that it is going to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don't have a lot of clout. . . . [S]ometimes we're only looking at academics or people who've been in the [lower] court. If we can find people who have life experience and they understand what it means to be on the outside, what it means to have the system not work for them, that's the kind of person I want on the Supreme Court."

"We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

Now that Obama is President-elect, the Phoenix Business Journal reports, the Senate's second-ranking Republican, Jon Kyl, has taken the position that "if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, [Kyl] would try to block those picks via filibuster."

In this column, I'll argue that the dichotomy Kyl is suggesting between empathy and legitimate judicial decisionmaking is false - but also argue that Obama's remarks played right into Republican's hands by suggesting that Obama, too, may believe in just such a dichotomy.

The Problem with Kyl's Rhetoric: Empathy, Not Separation, Should Be the Default Stance in Judicial Decisionmaking

One of the law's most empathetic sentences - "Poor Joshua!" - was written by the famously liberal Justice Harry Blackmun. The case was DeShaney v. Winnebago County. Blackmun was dissenting from the Court's decision holding that a social services office could not be held liable, despite the fact that the office's employees had known Joshua's father was brutally beating him, yet done nothing to intervene. When repeated beatings finally left the four-year-old Joshua severely mentally retarded, a federal civil rights suit was brought on the child's behalf against the agency. Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, holding that Joshua had no case, and would receive no remedy, under the federal statute.

Blackmun made clear with his exclamation that he thought the result was not just wrong, but shameful - but at the same time, he expressed the view that the law had allowed the Court to rule the other way - in Joshua's favor. Specifically, Blackmun wrote that "the question presented by this case is an open one, and our Fourteenth Amendment precedents may be read more broadly or narrowly depending upon how one chooses to read them. Faced with the choice, I would adopt a 'sympathetic' reading, one which comports with dictates of fundamental justice and recognizes that compassion need not be exiled from the province of judging."

In other words, Blackmun did not fit Kyl's description of "empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents." Instead, it was Blackmun's view - and the view of Justices Brennan and Marshall, who also dissented -- both that precedent allowed a ruling for Joshua, and that compassion compelled such a ruling. His logic should lead us to ask whether, in the close cases that are the hallmark of the Supreme Court, the Justices' feelings for their fellow human beings - whether compassion, empathy, or sympathy - can play a role.

Conservatives should not be too quick to say "No" here - for liberal justices have not had a monopoly on empathy: Far from it.

Conservative clerks at the Court have been known to recite the grisly facts of the underlying crimes in their memoranda regarding whether the Court should grant review in death penalty cases - presumably with their Justices' blessing. And in 1991, in Payne v. Tennessee, Justice Rehnquist authored the majority opinion approving the use of Victim Impact Statements during the sentencing stage of death penalty trials - evidence clearly meant to cause jurors to strongly empathize with the victims. (This Term, the Justices will resolve a set of cases raising the question whether some victim-impact evidence - such as emotional videotapes of the victim's life - goes too far, and consider setting limits on such evidence.)

In Payne, there were two victims, a mother and her daughter; her three-year-old son, Nicholas, survived. The evidence that Rehnquist and the other Justices in the majority allowed to be presented came from the victim's mother - Nicholas's grandmother - who testified about the pain Nicholas had felt expressed after the deaths of his mother and sister. Justice Rehnquist did not say "Poor Nicholas!" but he might as well have. Justice Blackmun, in contrast, dissented.

These two cases show that empathy is not the monopoly of either side of the political spectrum - and that if we were to completely exclude empathy from the Court's decision-making, few of us would like the result. They also show that the question really isn't whether empathy plays a legitimate role in constitutional decisionmaking - both sides effectively concede that it does - but who receives empathy, and who is denied it.

Interestingly, Obama too showed empathy for a child, during the campaign, in the context of a constitutional case the Court resolved. The case, Kennedy v. Louisiana, raised the question whether the death penalty could, consistent the Eighth Amendment, be imposed for child rape. The victim was eight years old at the time of the crime; she was referred to by the pseudonym "L.H."

The Court said no; Obama said yes, for this was a sufficiently "heinous crime." In one sense, Obama was applying a theory he had developed as a constitutional law professor about what, if any, set of crimes can merit the death penalty. In another sense, he was saying, "Poor L.H.!" L.H.'s age when she suffered the crime was not far from those of Obama's daughter's; surely Obama would not have been human, had that fact not played at least some role in his view of the case.

The Problem with Obama's Stance: The Suggestion that Empathy Trumps - Rather than Complementing - Experience with Interpreting the Law

Virtually everyone empathizes with young children, but in some instances, extending empathy across group boundaries can be a challenge. Obama's view of empathy seems to draw upon John Hart Ely's idea of how the political process disserves "discrete and insular minorities," so that the Constitution and Supreme Court must intervene to protect them.

In particular, the remarks quoted above, Obama mentions his interest in Justices who know "what it means to be on the outside." He also mentions the need for a Justice "to protect people who may be vulnerable in the political process, the outsider, the minority, those who are vulnerable, those who don't have a lot of clout" - again seeming to echo Ely.

Obama's extension of Ely's ideas makes a great deal of sense in this context. If a subset of society is truly "discrete and insular"-living, in important ways, apart from the majority - then the rest of society will predictably have more empathy for its own members, than for the members of the subset, who will seem like strangers. Attending a gay wedding will bring home viscerally the importance of gay marriage. Going to school with African-Americans will shatter stereotypes about them. In contrast, de facto residential segregation, defining "black neighborhoods" and "gay neighborhoods," may defeat the empathy that arises from daily interaction, from natural friendships and relationships.

Importantly, because our society suffers from these empathy gaps, a focused search for empathetic judges may be necessary simply to ensure basic fairness for everyone, equally - a goal everyone, liberal and conservative, should believe in. When a society is full of barriers, empathy isn't a special liberal conceit; it's fundamental to preventing systemic injustice.

Where I think Obama goes wrong, however, is in his suggestion that our current federal judges so lack empathy - his crucial criterion - that lack of experience as a law professor or judge can be ignored in favor of "life experience." When Obama takes office, I hope that he at least gives such candidates a trial run on a federal appeals court before elevating them to serve for life on the highest court in the land.

That's because experience as a judge - and, especially, as a trial judge -- is life experience. And it is valuable for a Justice to have: Justices need to be able to foresee whether the solutions they craft, and the lines they draw, will be workable at a trial-court level and what their practical results may be. They also need to have the credibility to persuade their colleagues on the court - credibility that will be lacking in someone who has never handed down an opinion, presided over a trial, or written at length about a legal theory. Without credibility, empathy will do no good in the fight to move sentiments like "Poor Joshua!" into majority opinions, not dissents.

In sum, President-elect Obama should find or appoint empathetic trial court or appeals judges - rather than bypassing them to look outside of the judiciary or academia. Otherwise, he may guarantee the kind of votes he would like, but it is unlikely that he will find, in his nominee, his ideal Justice. ..Source.. by Julie Hilden, who graduated from Yale Law School, practiced First Amendment law at the D.C. law firm of Williams & Connolly from 1996-99. Hilden is also a novelist. In reviewing Hilden's novel, 3, Kirkus Reviews praised Hilden's "rather uncanny abilities," and Counterpunch called it "a must read.... a work of art." Hilden's website, www.juliehilden.com, includes free MP3 and text downloads of the novel's first chapter.

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Obama to preside over White House 2.0

11-9-2008 National:

WASHINGTON (AFP) — Get ready for White House 2.0. That's what many are expecting when President-Elect Barack Obama becomes President Obama in January and puts the power of his unprecedented Internet operation to work in the Oval Office.

Obama relied heavily on the Web for his victory over John McCain -- from organizing volunteers to fundraising to communicating -- and expectations are high he will turn to the Internet again to further his White House agenda.

"A lot of people are speculating," said Julie Germany, director of George Washington University's Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet.

"Will an Obama administration use its vast back-end system, its database, all of the online communities it developed, to actually mobilize advocacy?"

"It could, for example, email or text message or call people who live in certain districts to get them to lobby their senators and congressmen on issues that the Obama administration cares about," she said.

Micah Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com, a blog about politics and the Web, thinks it will -- or at least try.

"By giving people a sense that they really do have a stake and a say they will be much more motivated to do things in support of his legislative agenda because they'll feel like it's their agenda too," Sifry said.

"He is going to learn, either by succeeding or failing at this, that the more he partners with his supporters the more power he will have," he said

"The more he simply tries to push a message at them and make them do something the less power he will have," Sifry added.

Obama's first moves after winning the election would indicate that he plans to not only mobilize his faithful but also listen to them.

In an email sent to millions of supporters on election night, Obama thanked those who gave their "time, talent, and passion to this campaign."

But, he added, there was still "a lot of work to do" and he would "be in touch soon about what comes next."

Change.gov, the official website launched by the Obama transition team on Thursday, invites users to "share your story and your ideas, and be part of bringing positive lasting change to this country."

Under the headline of "Open Government," change.gov urges users to "Share Your Vision" via email and asks them for their email address and zip code, essential elements in building an online data-base.

Craig Newmark, founder of online classifieds site craigslist.com, served as a technology adviser to Obama and is an advocate for a more open and responsive government.

"In New York and San Francisco there are so-called '311' programs," he said. "The idea is that it's customer service for local government and if you need a pothole fixed you contact 311.

"Well let's start expanding 311 systems to all of government," he said.

"There's also the whole transparency thing," Newmark added. "The Internet is all about transparency. The first phase is the election campaign then, afterwards, getting some real grass-roots democracy in there."

David Almacy, who served as Internet and e-communications director for President George W. Bush, said the Internet is "a very powerful tool in communicating the president's agenda."

"The Internet is basically a 24-hour seven-day-a-week spokesperson," Almacy said. "While we're sleeping at night it's still available for those who are searching on energy legislation or the war on terror or the war in Iraq."

Almacy, who overhauled whitehouse.gov during his two years in the White House, making it a much more dynamic website, warned though that the Obama administration may find there are limits to how much it can do.

For example, "you're not allowed to place cookies on people's machines," he said of the electronic spies which gather information about users. "We had to work within the bounds that we were able to play with."

"There might be some people who would be less likely to trust the government as much as they trust their political campaigns," Almacy added.

Sifry said Obama "seems to have the right instinct but the proof is going to be in the pudding, as they say, in the details of how this plays out."

Germany agreed. "There's a huge difference between being a candidate and actually being in the administration, and a lot changes from the day you win an election and the day you're inaugurated," she said. ..News Source.. by Agence France-Presse

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