Topic: Law and Civil Liberties

Making Sense of Drug Violence in Mexico with Big Data, New Media, and Technology

By
Juan Carlos Hidalgo

Yesterday we hosted a very interesting event with Google Ideas about the use of new media and technology information in Mexico’s war on drugs. You can watch the whole thing in the video below.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest casualties from the bloodshed that besets Mexico is freedom of the press. Drug cartels have targeted traditional media outlets such as TV stations and newspapers for their coverage of the violence. Mexico is now the most dangerous country to be a journalist. However, a blackout of information about the extent of violence has been avoided because of activity on Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels.

Our event highlighted the work of two Mexican researchers on this topic. Andrés Monroy-Hernández from Microsoft Research presented the findings of his paper “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare” which shows how Twitter has replaced traditional media in several Mexican cities as the primary source of information about drug violence. Also, we had Javier Osorio, a Ph.D. candidate from Notre Dame University, who has built original software that tracks the patterns of drug violence in Mexico using computerized textual annotation and geospatial analysis.

Our third panelist was Karla Zabludovsky, a reporter from the New York Times’ Mexico City Bureau, who talked about the increasing dangers faced by journalists in Mexico and the challenges that new media represent in covering the war on drugs in that country.

Even though Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s new president, has focused the narrative of his presidency on economic reform, the war on drugs continues to wreak havoc in Mexico. Just in the first two months of the year over 2,000 people have been killed by organized crime. 

At the Cato Institute we closely keep track of developments in Mexico and we have published plenty of material on the issue, including:

Watch the full event:

Understanding Mexico’s Epidemic of Violence

And for those who speak the language of Cervantes, here’s a ten minute interview that Karla Zabludovsky and I did on CNN en Español about the Cato event.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General, International Economics and Development, Law and Civil Liberties, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Judge Strikes Down Bloomberg’s Soda Grab

By
Walter Olson

My new op-ed at the Daily Caller is their “most shared” this morning. Excerpt:

On Monday, Judge Tingling struck down the soda ban in a sweeping opinion that does everything but hand Mayor Poppins his umbrella and carpetbag. This wasn’t just a temporary restraining order putting the regulation on hold for a few weeks. The judge struck down the ban permanently both on the merits (“fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences”) and as overstepping the rightful legal powers of the New York City Department of Health…

[For] the mayor and his public health crew… the biggest reproach in the decision isn’t in being found to have gotten the facts wrong, it’s being found to have violated the law.

And if anyone is expected to know and play by the rules, it’s a nanny.

Michael Grynbaum, New York Times: 

[Bloomberg’s] administration seemed caught off guard by the decision. Before the judge ruled, the mayor had called for the soda limits to be adopted by cities around the globe; he now faces the possibility that one of his most cherished endeavors will not come to fruition before he leaves office, if ever. …

The measure was already broadly unpopular: In a New York Times poll conducted last August, 60 percent of city residents said it was a bad idea for the Bloomberg administration to pass the limits. 

The Times also profiles Judge Tingling and reports on reactions by the New Yorker in the street (not favorable toward the ban). Coverage from yesterday, including my podcast with Cato’s Caleb Brown, here. [cross-posted and slightly condensed from Overlawyered]

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

Rand Paul and Jim Webb on Congress’s Abdication of Foreign Policy Power

By
Benjamin H. Friedman

John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director displayed Congress’s disinterest in checking the president’s runaway security powers. Two months ago, when I wrote an article with the unwieldy title, “Will Obama’s Brennan Pick Shed Some Much Needed Light on Drones?” I wouldn’t have guessed that the answer would be yes; it will bestir Congress to finally force the administration to say clearly that it does not reserve the right to kill Americans at home with drone strikes, insofar as they are not engaged in combat. That statement came only thanks to whomever leaked the Justice Department’s summary memo on the topic, Brennan and Attorney General Eric Holder’s impolitic reluctance to articulate limits on the president’s power to kill Americans by calling them terrorists, and, of course, Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) resulting filibuster. The Senate predictably left Brennan’s other sins against civil liberties mostly unexamined. 

Paul’s hard-won “toehold of constitutionality” isn’t much to cheer about, even if we add to the spoils the administration’s vague agreement to be more open about its legal rationale for placing people on kill lists. This minimal defense of civil liberties and congressional privilege is what got Republican senators like Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz, Jr. of Texas, who seem to support unfettered executive discretion to kill in the name of counterterrorism outside the United States, to support the filibuster. 

Even that was too much restraint for the neoconservative right. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) read on the Senate floor a Wall Street Journal editorial calling Paul’s effort a stunt meant to “fire up impressionable libertarian kids” and assuring us that those targeted by drones here or abroad will be “enemy combatants.” McCain and the Journal spectacularly miss Paul’s point: the issue is whether the president should make that designation, chucking due process rights, without being checked by another branch of government. 

As McCain amigo Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) noted, the Republican caucus’ flirtation with civil libertarianism seems a situational consequence of partisanship. The same goes for Democrats. Were it President McCain doing what Obama is, far more than two Democratic senators (Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Pat Leahy of Vermont) would have voted against Brennan. During his filibuster, Paul asked what happened to the Senator Obama of 2007, who opposed torture and war by executive fiat. Paul suggests that those views were products of Obama’s then circumstance: not being president. Even that may be too generous. As I wrote in a recent book review concerning Obama’s counterterrorism record, “even when he took office, there was ample evidence that his dovish positions would not outlast their political convenience.” 

We can hope, I suppose, that Paul’s stance will increase Congress’s willingness to assert its constitutional war powers. Although he did not, as far as I know, propose specific restrictions on the use of military force outside of the United States, Paul did complain that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force against the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks and those that harbored them has become a permanent warrant for almost limitless executive war powers, a kind of escape hatch from the Constitution opened by presidential utterance of the word “terrorist.”

Read the rest of this post »

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Parsing AG Holder on Domestic Targeted Killing

By
Julian Sanchez

As I wrote on Thursday, I’m not really losing sleep over the prospect of domestic targeted killing, mostly because it seems as though it would be so manifestly politically radioactive even within the intelligence community that I doubt it could be done secretly, and would almost certainly provoke a constitutional crisis if it became public. That said, as Marcy Wheeler notes, if we look closely at the precise wording of Attorney General Eric Holder’s response to Sen. Rand Paul disavowing any such presidential prerogative, it’s actually phrased in a way that seems calculated to preserve a fair amount of wiggle room:

It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question. “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no.

Now, it’s true that Senator Paul often recurred to the example of a drone “dropping a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience” during his Wednesday filibuster, but it seems weirdly specific to give an answer that is, read strictly, confined to weaponized drones, as opposed to snipers or poison or what have you. More importantly, it’s not entirely clear what Holder considers to be the parameters of “engaged in combat.” During Paul’s filibuster, the senator often agreed that it would clearly be permissible to use defensive lethal force against someone “actively engaged in combat”—shooting down a plane on a heading to crash into a target, or killing a terrorist in the middle of a shooting spree. There’s nothing particularly controversial about those cases: in the latter instance, we’d expect police to do as much without any presidential orders.

But since Holder conspicuously omitted the word “actively,” it isn’t clear that this is what he means. The public hasn’t seen the detailed legal memoranda underlying the CIA’s overseas drone program, and so we can’t really know what to make of Holder’s statement without knowing what the government thinks it means to be “engaged in combat” in this non-traditional conflict. Though the Obama administration has (symbolically) abandoned the use of the phrase “enemy combatant,” the Bush Justice Department argued in 2004 that a “little old lady in Switzerland” who “gave money to a charity for an Afghan orphanage, and the money was passed to al Qaeda” might meet their definition of an “enemy combatant.” Could a citizen suspected of being involved in the planning stages of some future attack, then, be considered to be “engaged in combat” (perhaps even “actively”)?  Against the backdrop of the sort of examples Senator Paul was discussing, it’s presumably not what we’d intuitively think of, but then neither have the targets of our overseas drone attacks necessarily been “combatants” in the colloquial sense of one directly personally engaged in bearing arms. Again, until we see the memos and have a fuller understanding of the administration’s broader reasoning, isolated statements like Holder’s are difficult to interpret with much confidence.

Such definitional game-playing would not exactly be a novelty for this administration, which has apparently expanded the definition of “imminent threat” to cover people believed to be senior leaders of hostile groups, whether or not there is any evidence that they are actively engaged in planning some impending attack. And recall how another recent attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, managed to mislead Congress about President Bush’s warrantless wiretap program by silently redefining “the program the president has acknowledged” to mean “only the specific components he has already acknowledged,” even though these components had never been previously regarded as a separate surveillance program. So if this kind of hyperliteral close parsing of a few sentences seems like paranoid hairsplitting, it’s only because such word games appear to be par for the course when it comes to classified counterterrorism programs.

Do I think this means there’s some domestic assassination plan in the works? Certainly not. But I would not exactly be shocked if the attorney general had used a bit of careful lawyerly language to placate Senator Paul while leaving an opening for a future administration to claim that technically his disavowal of authority had been far narrower than it seemed.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

Code of the West

By
Tim Lynch

The legal battle between the federal government and the states over the legality of marijuana is returning to the news. Former DEA chiefs are calling on the Obama administration to crack down on the two states that recently approved referenda to legalize marijuana under state law, Colorado and Washington. Meanwhile, many other states are trying to legalize marijuana for medical purposes.

On that latter point, Cato will be screening the new film Code of the West next week. This film explores the political, legal, and cultural battles over medical marijuana in Montana. Watch local policymakers grapple with the myriad issues that arise when medical marijuana becomes legal under state law for certain patients. The film also tells the story of certain growers who try to establish businesses, only to find their establishments raided by federal law enforcement agents. Join us for this film screening and the policy discussion afterward.

Registration information can be found here.

Watch the film trailer here.  More information about Code of the West here.

Topics: 
Law and Civil Liberties

‘Undergrads Required to Lobby for Obama Policy’—-Cont’d

By
Walter Olson

As I noted in this space the other day, GWU law professor John Banzhaf on Monday sent out a press release boasting of having assigned undergrads to lobby for New York City-style soda bans or, alternatively, other ventures in “obesity policy.” Reactions include Katharine Mangu-Ward at Reason (“I’m gonna guess there aren’t a lot of libertarians in his class”), George Leef at Phi Beta Cons, and UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge:

I wonder what people would say if I made my students write letters to their congressman supporting Senator Shelby’s Dodd-Frank corrections bills? Actually, I don’t wonder. They’d say I was abusing my power. And they’d be right. Only someone blinded by their own self-righteous arrogance would fail to see the gross impropriety here.

Now Banzhaf has sent out another press release, which aside from tossing an inaccurate brickbat or two at my motivations for writing about him, takes care to specify—as his Monday press release did not—that students in the class are free to propose lobbying for at least some ideas that might count as deregulatory. The two examples he gives are as follows: “students could also ask legislators to reduce limits on the sale of items from food trucks [or] cut back on unnecessary food-related regulations.”

Whether liberty-minded students could actually get course credit for lobbying against food-related positions that Banzhaf favors—as distinct from seeking out some subtopic in the field where their views and his happen to coincide—remains unclear. If they are free to lobby against policies identified with the Obama administration and NYC’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, then that makes utter nonsense of the headline bannered over the press release Banzhaf sent out on March 4: “Undergrads Required to Lobby for Obama Policy.” So which is it? 

[cross-posted, with some adaptation, from Overlawyered]

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, Law and Civil Liberties

Mr. Paul Goes to Washington

By
Julian Sanchez

C-SPAN footage of Rand Paul's filibusterAs Sen. Rand Paul acknowledged early on in his epic 13-hour speech Wednesday (highlights here), his decision to mount an old-fashioned, talk-till-you-drop filibuster of John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA director didn’t really have much to do with Brennan personally. But neither was it really, at a fundamental level, about the narrow question of whether the president can “drop a Hellfire missile on your cafe experience” as you sit sipping a latte on American soil. If any citizens were realistically worried about that prospect, Attorney General Eric Holder has (somewhat belatedly) answered that question in the negative, prompting Paul to declare victory on that front.

But as Wired’s Spencer Ackerman observes, the spectre of Predators over Starbucks actually served to spotlight the “extraordinary breadth of the legal claims that undergird the boundless, 11-plus-year ‘war on terrorism’ ”—and to frame a much broader and more wide-ranging critique of that “perpetual war,” in which Paul charged that Congress has abdicated its responsibilities to an unaccountable executive branch. In Paul’s view, “we shouldn’t be asking [the president] for drone memos”—documents laying out the legal basis for the CIA’s targeted killing program, which the administration has finally, grudgingly deigned to provide to Congress, though not the American public—”we should be giving him drone memos.” As if to highlight the erosion of statutory checks on the president’s counterterror authority, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared that, after all, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed after 9/11 made no exception for actions “in the United States”—even though Congress had specifically rejected a request to include that phrase in the authorization.

The broadly positive reaction to Paul’s filibuster suggests, to me at least, that many Americans now fall outside the bipartisan Washington consensus that there’s little need for serious congressional scrutiny or debate when it comes to the War on Terror, and are relieved to hear that dissatisfaction echoed on the Senate floor. No longer as terrorized or shell-shocked as we were a decade ago, perhaps we’re becoming less willing to accept assertions that the public has no business knowing how and when the president may authorize secret killings in countries where we are not formally at war. If we want to get really radical, we may eventually begin to suggest there are proper constraints—if not constitutional, then at least moral—even on the killing of human beings who had the poor taste to be born in another country. We might question whether Americans are being well served when Congress spends less time debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act or the FISA Amendments Act than Senator Paul did (literally) standing on principle Wednesday night.

Is it absurd to fear, as some of Paul’s colleagues charged, that the president will begin launching drone strikes on American soil? Probably. But the point is precisely that we live under an administration so unwilling to acknowledge meaningful limits on what they may do in the name of national security that it was an exercise in tooth-pulling just to get a public disavowal of an absurd scenario that the government’s anemic targeted killing “standards,” taken to their logical extreme, would not appear to foreclose. The crucial message we should take from Paul’s marathon oration, then, may be this: If it’s absurd to pose the question that inspired his filibuster, surely it’s far more absurd that we’ve arrived, after a decade of complacency about government secrecy and unfettered executive discretion in the sphere of counterterrorism, at a point where the question would need to be posed.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Law and Civil Liberties

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