RJ Blog

This past weekend, a large group of Jewish Israeli teens attacked three Arab teens in Jerusalem’s Kikar Zion (Zion Square) while an even larger crowd of Israelis looked on. This attack was reported within hours of a firebombing of a Palestinian taxicab outside the Gush Etzion settlement of Bat Ayin. This pattern of violence reflects alarming and disturbing trends in Israeli society that threaten to tear the nation apart; erode the values of democracy, tolerance, and equal rights; and threaten the Zionist endeavor.

In September 2011, the Associated Press began its investigation of the New York Police Department’s specific targeting of American Muslims. Members of the NYPD were found to have spied on Muslim religious centers, workplaces and student associations at local colleges (some of which were not even in New York City), often without any evidence of wrongdoing. Upon learning of these privacy breaches, national religious leaders wrote a joint letter to Mayor Bloomberg under the coordination of the Shoulder-to-Shoulder Campaign, encouraging an investigation into the activities of the NYPD.

Over a month ago, the Senate leadership struck a bipartisan deal pledging to vote on a package of 14 judicial nominees, thereby momentarily addressing the pervasive obstructionism to judicial appointments. While this deal effectively stimulated voting on judicial vacancies, it did not even begin to address the urgent need for a real commitment to filling our nation’s benches. Judicial nominations have been subject to the worst kind of politics by placing the justice system for which we pride ourselves at risk for the purpose of partisan battles.

About a year ago, the United States finally killed Bin Osama Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. It didn’t take long for torture apologists to start claiming that brutal interrogation methods had yielded the information that led to the compound where the Al Qaeda leader had been hiding. At the time, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), said that “to the best of our knowledge … none of [the information] came as a result of harsh interrogation practices.” The debate over the value of torture as an information-gathering tool has been reawakened [...]

This week, the Supreme Court held, in United States v. Jones, that police violated the Constitution by using a global position system (GPS) device to track a suspect’s movements. In addition, the Court indicated that it may bring the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures into the modern era: though the Founders could not have predicted today’s technology, the rights with which all Americans are endowed are timeless. This decision was an important move to protect the basic rights of all Americans, and the Court’s conclusion that the use of a GPS tracking device constitutes a search and [...]

If you’ve been online today, you may have noticed that some of your favorite websites are a little different than usual. Google’s logo has a censor bar over it. Wikipedia, Imgur, and other sites have a splash page. WordPress has “censored” much of its main page. These changes are the result of a coordinated “web strike” or “blackout” against two pieces of legislation currently being considered by Congress: the “Stop Online Piracy” Act (SOPA) (H.R.3261) and the “PROTECT IP” Act (PIPA) (S.968). The primary aim of these two pieces of legislation is to curb copyright infringement on the Internet, something [...]

On New Year’s Day, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law. The bill, as I’ve noted before, contains two troubling provisions which threaten basic civil liberties. These parts of the bill together allow for the indefinite detention—without trial—of terror suspects, even American citizens, and their rendition to military authorities. President Obama had initially threatened to veto the bill over these provisions, but, with Sunday’s signature, he reneged on the threat. President Obama issued a “signing statement,” promising that his administration “will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.” While this promise is certainly [...]

Over the past year, the issue of warrantless GPS tracking has become increasingly prominent. In particular, a bipartisan bill – the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (H.R.2168/S.1212)- was introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) to require the government to get a warrant before tracking an individual’s movement through his or her cell phone, laptop, navigation device, or other forms of mobile technology. In addition, a case involving the constitutionality of just that was heard earlier this month before the Supreme Court. In this case, the police attached a GPS tracking device to the undercarriage of [...]

  As I’ve noted before, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the appropriations bill for the United States Armed Forces, contains troubling provisions that would empower the government to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects and render all terrorism suspects from civilian to military authorities – even if they are US citizens. There was a short-lived hope that the provisions might be removed, but events in the U.S. Senate yesterday indicate otherwise. Earlier this month, Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) introduced an amendment to the NDAA that would have removed the troubling provisions of the bill and replaced them with a call for [...]

This year, as every year, the United States Congress will be taking up a piece of legislation called the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). However, this year, unlike past years, there is a provision in the NDAA that would explicitly empower the federal government to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects. In other words, the government would be able to hold people for months, or even years, without having to charge them or set a prison term. In practice, a person could be imprisoned without ever being found guilty – all that would be necessary would be an official suspicion of terrorism. [...]

A decade ago today, the United States Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act. But before they voted for it, many members of Congress didn’t even read it. What they missed by not reading it was the risk that the legislation posed to our basic civil liberties – including a number of provisions that were recently reauthorizedby Congress and signed by President Obama. One provision allows the government to obtain “any tangible thing” it deems relevant to a terrorism investigation, despite the historical, constitutional protectionsthat require the government to demonstrate probable cause prior to infringing on an individual’s right to privacy.Another [...]