Is censorship without due process like security checks without probable cause?

Is the pursuit of safety worth relinquishing essential liberty? Civil liberties are being eroded at an alarmingly fast rate. Newspapers have been filled with examples of human rights being trampled in the name of protection and security. 

Wikipedia, Reddit, and approximately 7,000 smaller websites recently coordinated service blackouts to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) which were being voted on in the US Congress. The bills would have given law enforcement the ability to protect digital private property rights by blocking web content which might violate US law. The legislation would have threatened the 1^st Amendment right of free speech and allowed the federal government to censor certain websites without due process of law.

America’s government has lulled its citizens into a false sense of security. Flying is no longer merely about traveling from one city to another, but involves queuing for what feels like ages, placing all liquids of three ounces or less into quart sized bags, and stripping shoes, coats, and belts, along with all other loose objects, into a tray for scanning. This is followed next by the preverbal walk through the metal detector and/or body-scanner, and for the ‘lucky’ few – full body pat down by a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officer. For those refusing, they get the Rand Paul treatment. Flying in the ‘free world’ has become an expo of liberty in derogation.

Al-Qaeda has single-handedly eroded our essential liberty by giving governments a tool to prey on citizens - FEAR. In the name of security and safety, our government has chosen the means by which to protect us, the people, from terrorists. Fear has led to a proliferation of the “security industrial complex”.

The rise of the military [security] industrial complex: A recent report out of the UK put the Homeland Security Industry at a global market valuation of nearly $200 billion per annum. Despite the killing of al-Qaeda CEO, Osama bin Laden, economic woes and growing national debts, aren’t holding governments back on funding counter-terror activities. People have begrudgingly said government knows best and accepted a world with security checks, surveillance systems, and restrictions on travel and personal effects.

In spite of our government’s efforts, are we safer today than we were prior to September 11, 2001? The Department of Homeland Security can cite numerous cases of would be terrorists who have been disrupted in their plot to harm Americans. The Justice Department has deported, extradited, or tried dozens of terrorists. Yet, through all these interventions and billions of dollars spent both at home and abroad, America is as much at risk today as it was eleven years ago. The 9-11 Commission Report points out measures were in place to impede such attacks; however, an ‘infallible’ bureaucracy failed to react timely to overt indications of threats.

The most important change since 9-11 has been the securing of the cockpit door to prevent turning a plane into a ‘guided missile’. Studies have shown if terrorists cannot enter the cockpit and take control of the plane, then the worst damage they can inflict is bodily harm to passengers or blowing up the plane. People who become victims have a right of self-defence and tend to react if life and limb are in imminent threat. The best example is United Airlines flight 93, where the passengers reacted to the suicide hijacking by rushing the cockpit. The most lethal weapons in the war on terror is individual people, everyday heroes, not a government willing to use fear to erode personal freedoms and liberties.

The only way to stop the proliferation of the ‘security industrial complex’ is to stop feeding it! I want a leader who isn’t afraid to admit our government has lulled us into a false sense of security. I’d rather accept the risks of freedom, and have more freedom than the protection of an overreaching, ineffective and ever centralized bureaucracy.

Arizona shooting ignites debate over freedom of speech, right to bear arms & access to elected officials

A horrible and tragic shooting has struck the United States, only this time a member of Congress was shot in the head and is in critical, but stable condition. Six people were killed at a political event in Tuscan, Arizona on Saturday, 8 January 2011, including senior Federal Judge John Roll, a nine year old girl and four others. Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and 12 others were injured during the shooting. The accused is Jared Loughner, a 22-year old Army reject who was unemployed and living with his parents at the time of the tragedy. Loughner was reportedly rejected for reasons of mental unsoundness, a point which will more than likely be a defence to his two counts of federal murder charges and one count of attempting to assassinate a member of the United States’ Congress. Separate charges will ensue for liability under Arizona criminal law. Both Arizona and the US have the penal sanction of capital punishment as a tariff for criminal liability. In my opinion, the justice system should render justice and a capital penalty for the actions of the accused.

The greatest fear stemming from this shooting is (i) antigun legislation and (ii) access to all-ready-elite-members-of-congress being limited due to security - which is horrible for any ‘democratic-republic’, such as the US, Canada and many EU states. No crime is solved by more legislation - bad things happen to good people and that's a fact of life - as a society we cannot prevent all harm, as to do so would be to have safety without liberty or freedom. “If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom” – President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969). Rebuts to arguments concerning freedom, liberty and opportunity tend to be based on the notion of creating a more secure society. Think about it, health care legislation was passed in 2010 to give Americans the ‘peace of mind’ that they will not have to worry about what happens when they get ill or are the victims of a delictual liability. In the name of public safety and security legislation is being introduced in the halls of Congress to limit the scope of the Second Amendment and undermine a fundamental right enjoyed by Americans. Firearm ownership is a right enshrined in higher law, which is unlike a driver’s license for a motor vehicle, which is a privilege not to be abused. America’s third President and early advocate for limited government, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) proclaimed, “The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Rep Giffords was shot in front of a Safeway

Nationally sensationalized and emotionally devastating catastrophes tend to produce an outcry for reform and prevention. The Tuscan supermarket shooting is no exception. In a highly charged polarized environment, liberal bloggers began accusing former Alaska Governor and 2008 GOP Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin as having been the promulgating factor behind the assassination attempt of US Representative Giffords. Palin had listed the congresswoman’s seat on her “cross-hairs” targeted districts. If Palin’s rhetoric is “blood libel”, then perhaps the Democrats need to re-assess their own political free speech. In October 2010, American Vice-President Joe Biden told party stalwarts at a fundraiser in Minnesota that he was going to “strangle Republicans” who complained about the budget or how he encouraged supporters to “kill patriotic Republicans” who were using ‘procedure and substance to block a health care vote’ in the US Senate. Therefore, if President Barak Obama’s memorial conversation to the country about how “discourse has become so sharply polarised [...] we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do - it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds”, then he assumedly means both sides of the political spectrum. If this presumption is in the affirmative, then ‘Hollywood’ sensational ‘documentaries’, such as the one funded by top Democratic Party donor and billion George Soros, which celebrates left-wing terrorists who plotted to napalm Republicans at the 2008 GOP Convention (and encourages ‘freedom fighting’ tactics in ridding America of its second largest political party) a “wound” which does not serve to heal the widening partisan divide of the last decade. If the president wants to be a leader, then he himself needs to reign in members of his own party who have crept into militant like tactics before chiding opposition rhetoric. Otherwise it looks as if the president is but a mere politician preparing for another campaign.

A shooting is horrible, though it hasn’t taking long for politicians and the media to turn this random event into a national catastrophe. Let’s get the facts straight, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 46 individuals are victims of ‘murder’ every single day of the year in the US. Everyone with ‘bleeding liberal hearts’ need to lighten up see this in perspective of the larger picture of falling victim to over emotionalizing one tragic shooting over another. Let's not let one horrible event destroy the purity of our current democratic system.

The law concerning polygamy

Today while I was reading and annotating a few in preparations for my International Private Law tutorial I was reminded about an original aim of the Grand Old Party. In the mid-1800s there was wide-spread public hostility towards the practice of polygamy, meaning being married to more than one person concurrently. Joseph Smith, the founder and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), had a revelation in 1843 in which he called for men to marry more than one woman. Nine years later the Mormon Church officially announced polygamy was religiously superior to monogamy. Public outcry led to religious leaders, journalists and politicians denouncing the practice. The Republican Party, organized in Jackson, Michigan on 6 July 1854, had as their first national platform a denouncement of polygamy and slavery as “those twin relics of barbarism.”

The seminal case of polygamy came in England with Hyde v Hyde [1866] 1 LR-P & D, in which the Court declared marriage as being between one man and one woman. The leading American case is that of Reynolds v U.S. (1878) 98 US 145, in which the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a Mormon leader for polygamy by rejecting the appellant’s claim to religious liberty as protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. In the UK most legal rights and privileges concerning married and cohabitating couples have been extended to same-sex couples by virtue of the Civil Partnership Act 2004. The concept of only two parties being privileged to a marriage or partnership was preserved. The common law in the UK has made special allowances for bigamy on a case by case basis.

The concept of bigamy (having two spouses) at common law was and is no different than that of polygamy. The U.S. Model Penal Code, s 230(1) classifies polygamy as a third-degree felony and the offence subsists until all cohabitation with and claim of marriage to more than one spouse terminates. Aliens from other jurisdictions visiting the US or the UK will not be any violation of criminal laws, so long as polygamy is lawful in the alien’s nation of origin.