Tag Archives: US Supreme Court
US plays constitutional shell game with surveillance
Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the Obama administration’s top appellate lawyer, argued that a challenge to a 2008 surveillance law should be dismissed. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/us/double-secret-surveillance.html?pagewanted=all He said, a little comically in retrospect, that the human rights groups, lawyers and reporters who sought to challenge the law had no particular reason to think that their communications […]
Privacy group goes to Supreme Court to stop NSA
A privacy rights group, Electronic Privacy Information Center, plans to file an emergency petition with the Supreme Court on Monday asking it to stop the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/us/privacy-group-to-ask-supreme-court-to-stop-nsas-phone-spying-program.html?ref=us The group is taking its case to the Supreme Court because it could not […]
US Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, freeing nine states, mostly in the South, to change their election laws without advance federal approval even though racial minorities continued to face barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html?ref=us […]
US Supreme Court backs DNA database for citizens
“Make no mistake about it: because of today’s decision, your D.N.A. can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/us/supreme-court-says-police-can-take-dna-samples.html?ref=us The point of D.N.A. testing as it is actually practiced, he said, is to solve cold cases, not to identify the suspect […]
US Supreme Court considers gutting Voting Rights Act
The Supreme Court looks to strike down or otherwise gut a centerpiece of the Voting Rights Act. There will be far less scrutiny of thousands of decisions each year about redrawing district lines, moving or closing polling places, changing voting hours or imposing voter identification requirements in areas that have a history of disenfranchising minority […]
Dirty Babylon 