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For those of us who are concerned for the future of the internet here are three lists of companies and where they stand on the Stop Online Piracy Act. GoDaddy has recently dropped it’s support for the bill due to protests. Maybe if more people let their voices be heard through their wallets we can get congress to listen to the people for once.
Opponents
Disqus
AOL
eBay
Facebook
foursquare
Google
GrooveShark
Kickstarter
Mozilla
PayPal
Wikipedia
Reddit
Square
The Huffington Post
Craigslist
LinkedIn
OpenDNS
Tumblr
Twitter
Yahoo
Zynga
Defectors
Business Software Alliance (Includes Apple, Microsoft, Adobe Systems, Intel and more)
Records reviewed by Reuters show that Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy Corp., the nation’s second-largest gas driller, created a shell company, Northern Michigan Exploration LLC, that scammed hundreds of farmers in northern Michigan.
The farmers had signed leases with local brokers permitting drillers to tap natural gas and oil beneath their land. They were owed thousands of dollars in bonuses that had been promised in exchange, but none knew for certain whom to go after.
That’s because the company rejecting their leases hadn’t signed them to begin with. In fact, the company issuing the rejections wasn’t much of a business at all. It was a paper-only firm with no real operations.
One land owner, Eric Boyer-Lashuay, called to complain to the broker who had handled his lease. Northern, he recalls saying, is “a shell company … a blank door with no one behind it.”
Today, he puts it this way: “It was all a fake, all a scam.”
Reuters investigation has found that Northern voided hundreds of land deals, and was indeed a facade created so that one of America’s largest energy companies could conceal its role in the entire operation.
Chesapeake created one shell company that set up another, Northern Michigan Exploration. Next, Northern hired brokers who signed leases with residents such as Boyer-Lashuay, and those brokers were under strict orders not to divulge Chesapeake’s role.
The orders in Michigan came directly from the top, Chesapeake’s CEO Aubrey McClendon. In corporate filings that Chesapeake made public earlier this year, nine months after McClendon’s agents began signing Michigan land leases, McClendon is named as the chief executive officer of Northern, the shell company that voided hundreds of those leases.
President Barack Obama has called on other nations to improve corporate transparency, but under state laws governing corporate formation in America, privately held businesses aren’t required to disclose the individuals or companies who really own them.
Chesapeake’s own website advises land owners that their “main consideration” before leasing should be “to discover who will ultimately be producing your minerals.” But Chesapeake’s strategy made that extremely difficult for the Michigan land owners.
Legal scholars say the operation serves as an intriguing test case of the use of shell companies.
The tactics “raise moral and ethical questions about how entities can be used,” says Joshua Fershee, a contract law professor at the University of North Dakota.
Chesapeake, defends the need to use shell companies and front companies – contractors with local ties who do business on behalf of a larger corporation. John Lowe, a professor of energy law at Southern Methodist University, calls it “business as usual.”
One lawmaker, Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, says he will be “arguing for some intervention” to control the use of shell companies in such deals.
“Private property owners who enter into these transactions with good faith shouldn’t be getting duped by a front company,” says Grijalva, a member of the House Committee for Natural Resources. “It’s deception and you can’t call it anything else. It’s a good example where the intervention of government to require disclosure and binding contracts is needed.”
The effort to secure leasing rights in Michigan was part of Chesapeake’s national “land grab,” a term the company has used in its filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Chesapeake’s Michigan land rush quickly ended. In court this month, lawyers for land owners alleged that lease agreements were voided after Chesapeake learned a well it drilled in the state had come up dry.
Bonuses promised to land owners went unpaid, according to court documents.
Northern Michigan Exploration, the Chesapeake-affiliated shell company, rejected more than 97 percent of the leases its Michigan agents had signed with farmers and other land owners. More than 800 Michigan land owners, many of them elderly farmers, had their leases terminated.
As a consequence, owners missed opportunities to lease their land to other oil firms. At least 115 have sued, alleging that Chesapeake breached their contracts and defrauded them. On average, they each had been expecting $95,000 in bonuses, those lawsuits show.
The near-blanket cancellation of the contracts raises the question of whether Chesapeake ever intended to pay if it failed to find oil or gas immediately, says Mark Gergen, a contract law professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school.
“It suggests they might have had a strategy going in of not honoring their agreements,” he says. “The shells would have facilitated that” because Chesapeake could blame the shells for the cancellations, suffering no damage to its reputation.
If land owners prove that they should have been paid, at issue is who will be held accountable: Chesapeake, a corporation with $37 billion in assets, or Northern, a shell company with no publicly documented assets.
The internet, angered by web hosting titan Go Daddy’s initial support for a disastrous online piracy bill voiced their grievances with their “domains”, moving tens of thousands of website names to other Internet domain registrars in a coordinated day of online protest.
Go Daddy said it felt the shift, but did not provide specific numbers, and has announced that it is opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act.
“We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to Go Daddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed,” newly appointed Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman said in a statement.
“Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.”
On “Move Your Domain” day (#moveyourdomain) Go Daddy clients on Twitter reported if they’d made a move or if they’d been contacted by the firm to stay with them.
“Just Left @GoDaddy due to their promoting #SOPA and their new CEO’s half-hearted reversal. We don’t live in China or Iran yet … #ByeDaddy,” @DaveScott9
“Bye @Godaddy — just transferred 58 domains away because of your SOPA and PIPA support. #sopa #sopasucks Stay in servers, not politics,” @1HChandler
Through multiple statements Go Daddy said it no longer supported the House version of the legislation, known as SOPA, nor had it ever backed the Senate version , or (Protect IP Act, or PIPA) and noted that it has been removed from the U.S. Congressional list of SOPA supporters.
SOPA would make the streaming of unauthorized content a felony and websites that violate it could be blocked by Internet Service providers and payment processors as well as de-indexed by search engines.
“Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities,” Adelman said in the statement.
The boycott and transfer day were organized by users of social news site Reddit, which also set up a boycott site.
Go Daddy’s competition seized the opportunity to lure those making transfers. One of which was Namecheap. They decided to donate $2 for each transfer made on the day of protest to Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital rights. By typing “SOPAsucks” in at check-out those who transferred would pay $6.99 rather than the normal fee of a little more than $10.
Though Namecheap doesn’t know where the transfers originated , they ended the day with 27,200 transfers, giving them more than 77,000 inbound transfers since they announced their anti-SOPA stance on Dec. 22, a company spokeswoman Tamar Weinberg said in an email.
“We’ve seen more than 20 times our normal transfer activity and are delighted that we were able to take a stand against SOPA and help EFF in their fight,” she said.
Domain.com reported a majority of their transfers in the last week came from Go Daddy users. They also experienced a nearly 450 percent increase in the number of transfers.
Gandi.net also noted a peak in domain transfers, all from Go Daddy. They don’t have exact numbers, but expect it could reach between 5,000 and 10,000, the firm’s Stephan Ramoin wrote in an email.
“All of the sudden there really is a lot of mainstream attention … we’re seeing a lot of people waking up to these issues and taking a firm stance,” said Parker Higgins, an EFF activist. “It is an important issue and it’s one that really affects the future of the Internet.”
The House Judiciary Committee has said it would debate the bill early next year.
According to a new study, published in the journal Pediatrics, by the age of 23, up to 41 percent of American adolescents and young adults have been arrested at least once for something other than minor traffic violations.
The study’s authors say such a high percentage of arrests may point to potential health and behavioral problems that put young people at risk for criminal activity, but the study does not indicate how many of those arrested were for committing violent crimes or for minor infractions.
“An arrest usually happens in context. There are usually other things going on in a kid’s life,” said study author Robert Brame, professor of criminal justice and criminology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Brame and his colleagues analyzed responses to a national survey of more than 7,000 young people between 1997 and 2008. They found that between 25 and 41 percent of the respondents reported one arrest by the age of 23; 16 to 27 percent of the respondents reported being arrested by age 18.
“Those are alarmingly high numbers,” said Dr. Eugene Beresin, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School. “There are social, economic, educational and family risks associated with arrests. And we all have to be worried about that.”
Beresin said a high number of arrests could also indicate untreated psychiatric disorders, another factor that has been linked to criminal activity. According to the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, a nonprofit group, between 50 to 75 percent of incarcerated young people have diagnosable mental health problems.
Whatever the cause of the arrests, the study’s authors suggest that pediatricians are primely placed to observe and confront potential problems with their young patients, with an ability to counsel children and their parents and direct them to services that can help.
“Pediatricians should be aware that these arrests are a high prevalence occurrence,” Brame said. “A report of an arrest could be a gateway to a broader conversation about what’s going on.”
Even if a pediatrician tries to help a patient with a criminal record, Beresin notes that the services that are meant to help troubled youth are limited, and budget belt-tightening in many states is making them even scarcer.
“It’s like Ghostbusters, who are you going to call? There are very few people to call.” Beresin said. “We’re really asleep at the wheel right now when it comes to these problems with our young people.”
David Dean Smith, of Comstock Park, Michigan, has been charged with felony sex offenses after telling police he was HIV-positive and has been trying to intentionally infect as many people as possible. Health officials have issued an alert warning that “possibly hundreds of people have been exposed to HIV.”
Smith was initially charged with one count after he went to Grand Rapids police last week and said he had intentionally had unprotected sex with as many people as he could over the last three years, according to police. At his arraignment Wednesday he was charged with a second count of “AIDS-sexual penetration with an uninformed partner” after police identified a second possible victim.
According to the Grand Rapids 61st District Court, Smith claimed to have had sex with “thousands” of partners, intending to kill them by infecting them with HIV. Some of those people are from outside the Grand Rapids area, including people he met over the Internet.
Smith said at his arraignment Wednesday that he has been undergoing counseling. Court documents show that Smith was admitted to Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services recently because he was “suicidal” and had tried to kill himself at least once. The records say the hospital determined that Smith is “sexually aroused by causing pain to females.”
Four years after the banking industries reckless lending practices and criminal schemes led to a near collapse of of the economy, taxpayer funded bailouts and secret Federal Reserve loans totaling trillions of dollars; federal prosecutors are still turning a blind eye even as judges around the country are pointing fingers at possible wrongdoing.
The Justice Department claims that hard evidence is hard to come by but according to a new Reuters report that is not the case.
Foreclosure-related case files in just one New York federal bankruptcy court hold at least a dozen mortgage documents known as promissory notes bearing evidence of recently forged signatures and illegal alterations, according to a judge’s rulings. Altered notes have appeared in courts all around the country.
In the past two years banks have refused to halt forecloses on thousands of active-duty U.S. soldiers homes who are legally eligible to have foreclosures stopped. Refusing to grant foreclosure stays is a misdemeanor under federal law. The U.S. Treasury stated in November that it is conducting a civil investigation of 4,500 such foreclosures. Attorneys representing service members estimate banks have foreclosed on up to 30,000 military personnel in potential violation of the law.
Last month in Alabama, a federal bankruptcy judge ruled that Wells Fargo & Co. filed at least 630 sworn affidavits containing false “facts,” including claims that homeowners were in arrears for amounts not yet due.
Wells Fargo “took the law into its own hands” and disregarded laws banning perjury, Judge Margaret A. Mahoney declared.
In thousands of cases, documents required to transfer ownership of mortgages have been falsified. Mortgage servicers who needed the originals to foreclose simply drew up new ones, falsely signed by their own staff as employees of the original lenders, many of which no longer exist.
Most of the major banks have been able to somehow avoid federal prosecution thus far but Reuters has identified one pending federal criminal investigation into Florida-based Lender Processing Services, the nation’s largest subcontractor of mortgage servicing duties for banks. People close to the investigation said indictments may come as early as the end of this month.
Officials in state attorneys’ general offices and lawyers in foreclosure cases say they have seen no signs of any other federal criminal investigation.
“I think it’s difficult to find a fraud of this size on the U.S. court system in U.S. history,” said Raymond Brescia, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written articles analyzing the role of courts in the financial crisis. “I can’t think of one where you have literally tens of thousands of fraudulent documents filed in tens of thousands of cases.”
Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials say they have brought mortgage-fraud criminal cases through their “Operation Stolen Dreams.” None, however, were against big banks. All targeted small-scale operators charged with defrauding banks with forged mortgage applications or for taking advantage of homeowners by falsely promising arrangements to get them out of default and then keeping their money.
Justice Department spokeswoman Adora Andy declined to comment on the absence of prosecutions for foreclosure practices by big banks.
She said in a statement: “The Department of Justice has been and will continue to aggressively investigate financial fraud wherever it occurs, including at all levels of the mortgage industry and, when we find evidence of a crime, we will not hesitate to pursue it.”
Some judges have accused banks of falsely stating in court that they are working on loan modifications for homeowners in default.
“Bank of America issues constant press releases about how it is responsive to their borrowers on these issues. They are not, period,” said Judge Robert Drain, in a case involving homeowner Richard Tomasulo, a pharmacist from Crompond, New York. Judge Drain said Bank of America had not been working to modify Tomasulo’s mortgage despite telling the court that they had been since January.
“Whoever is in charge of this program and their supervisor, who should be following it, should be fired” because “they are frankly incompetent.”
Bank of America spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens said the bank has completed “nearly one million” modifications since 2008. The U.S. Treasury suspended loan modification incentive payments to the bank this year because it was “seriously deficient” in responding to requests for modifications.
Mounting evidence of foreclosure fraud has convinced judges and state regulators that servicers have harmed homeowners and the investors who bought mortgage-backed securities.
In September of 2010, evidence surfaced that employees of Ally Financial Corp. were guilty of “robo-signing,” which is the act of low-level workers signing and swearing to the facts in thousands of affidavits they hadn’t read or checked. The affidavits were then notarized outside the signers’ presence, a violation of state and federal criminal laws.
A unit of the Justice Department that oversees bankruptcy court cases, the U.S. Trustees Program, said in its 2010 annual report that there were “pervasive and longstanding problems regarding mortgage loan servicing,” which “are not merely ‘technical’ but cause real harm to homeowners in bankruptcy. According to the Trustees Program, banks falsified affidavits by claiming homeowners owed fees for services never rendered and by overstating how much owners were behind on payments.
In October 2010, members of Congress pressed the Justice Department to investigate. Attorney General Eric Holder said investigations were best left to the states, with help from the Justice Department.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the top bank regulator, quickly negotiated settlements with the 14 largest servicers, requiring changes in practices and “remediation” for homeowners. That settlement allows the banks to choose their own contractors to determine who was harmed and by how much. Lawmakers and homeowner advocates have criticized the arrangement, contending that it will let the banks avoid making all wronged homeowners whole, because the contractors are paid by and answer to the banks.
Last year the FBI’s Las Vegas office shut down its mortgage fraud task force, even though Vegas has been one of the hardest hit areas of the crisis. Tim Gallagher, chief of the FBI’s financial crimes section, said that the Las Vegas office had asked to transfer agents to other duties.
The most serious potential foreclosure violations involve falsified mortgage promissory notes, the documents homeowners sign vowing to repay mortgage loans. Courts have ruled that unless a creditor legally owns the promissory note, it has no legal right to foreclose. For each mortgage there is only one promissory note.
Bankruptcy court records reviewed by Reuters show that at least a dozen different documents purporting to be the authentic promissory note have turned up in foreclosure cases involving six different properties in the federal bankruptcy court for the Southern District of New York.
In one, Wells Fargo is attempting to foreclose on the Bronx home of Tindala Mims, a single mother who works as an ambulance driver. In September 2010, Wells Fargo filed a promissory note bearing a signed stamp showing that the note belonged to defunct Washington Mutual Bank, not Wells Fargo. The judge threw out the case.
In a second attempt, the court was given a different version of the note. But inspection showed physical alterations. A variety of marks on the original were missing and altered on the second. The second version had a stamped endorsement, missing on the first, that appeared to give Wells Fargo the right to foreclose.
The judge threw out the second attempt too. Wells Fargo is trying a third time and declined to comment on the case.
Linda Tirelli, Mims’ lawyer, in October sued Wells Fargo, for “fabrication of documents.”
“It seems to me that Washington is deathly afraid of the banking industry,” Tirelli said. “If you’re talking about filing false documents and filing false notarizations, do you really think that the U.S. Attorney would find it too difficult to prosecute?”
The office of Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan has routinely brought charges involving forgery and filing false documents against smaller targets.
In April, the FBI arrested seven employees of the USA Beauty School in Manhattan. Bharara’s office alleged that the seven suspects had forged documents such as high school diplomas, attendance records and applications for financial aid for students taking cosmetology classes.
In August, Bharara’s office filed felony charges against a sports-memorabilia company’s CEO, accusing him of auctioning jerseys falsely advertised as “game used” by Major League Baseball players.
In a press conference, a U.S. Postal Inspection Service official said prosecution was important because “victims felt that they had a piece of history only to be defrauded and left with a feeling of heartbreak.”
Given the record of Bharara’s office, and those of his fellow U.S. Attorneys around the country, to aggressively pursue violations both big and small, the absence of cases involving the foreclosure fiasco seems to stand out.
“Why there hasn’t been more robust prosecution is a mystery,” said Brescia, the visiting professor at Yale.
What is Obama’s stance on all of this? In classic political double speak, President Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth in a 60 Minutes interview about the issue.
Hey Mister President Reuters has a new report out that makes for an interesting read, you should check it out.
The pre-trial hearing for Pfc. Bradley Manning who has been accused of releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, concluded with the government charging that Bradley’s actions aided Al Qaeda.
Calling what Manning did a “six month-long enterprise of indiscriminately harvesting information,” Cpt. Ashden Fein stated in the prosecution’s closing argument that Manning had actual knowledge that what he gave to WikiLeaks would end up in the hands of Al Qaeda and similar enemies.
An Al Qaeda propaganda video was shown. Subtitled, the video featured a figurehead of the organization discussing the released information. The figurehead said the cables revealed “foreign dependencies.” He said something about relying on Allah for actions against the US and then said before taking actions jihadists should rely on the “wide range of resources on the Internet” now.
According to Fein Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is “urging followers to collect and archive WikiLeaks information.” Manning “knowingly gave intelligence through WikiLeaks to the enemy.” He “wantonly caused the release of this information.” It was “not just good for declared enemies” but also accessible to “all other enemies with Internet access.”
Manning, Fein added, released over 700,000 documents that were on SIPRnet “during a time of war and while deployed.” He was “never authorized to make classification decisions to affect the national security of the United States.” He was given “unfettered access” to the information and “multiple enemies received” this information.
The effect of Manning’s prosecution could have a dramatic affect on national security journalism. Successfully putting Manning in prison for life without parole would set an example to deter other soldiers from revealing evidence of war crimes and make it possible for the government to go after journalists who cover documents from the military or security industrial-complex.
This also cements the fact that anyone who releases information to WikiLeaks can count on being pursued by the government and, when caught, charged with “aiding the enemy” aka terrorists, because they have access to the Internet and could read material that was once-secret.
At least 69 people were killed in 16 bombings in Iraq just days after the last American forces left the country and in the midst of rising sectarian tensions between Shiite and Sunni politicians.
Most of the attacks hit Shiite neighborhoods, although some Sunni areas were also targeted. In all, 11 neighborhoods were hit by either car bombs, roadside blasts or sticky bombs attached to cars. There was at least one suicide bombing and the blasts went off over several hours. At least 14 went off in the morning and there were two more in the evening.
The deadliest attack was in the Karrada neighborhood, where a suicide bomber driving an explosives-laden ambulance blew himself up outside the office of a government agency fighting corruption. Two police officers at the scene said the bomber told guards that he needed to get to a nearby hospital. After the guards let him through, he drove to the building where he blew himself up, the officers said.
“I was sleeping in my bed when the explosion happened” said 12-year-old Hussain Abbas, who was standing nearby in his pajamas. “I jumped from my bed and rushed to my mom’s lap. I told her I did not to go to school today. I’m terrified.” At least 25 people were killed and 62 injured in that attack, officials said.
The events of the past few days are beginning to look like the country’s nightmare scenario. The alliance betweem Sunnis and Shiites in the government is collapsing, large-scale violence with a high casualty toll has returned to the capital, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki appears to be making a move to grab the already limited power of the Sunnis.
Al-Maliki’s Shiite-led government this week accused Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, the country’s top Sunni political leader, of running a hit squad that targeted government officials five years ago, during the height of sectarian warfare. Authorities put out a warrant for his arrest.
Ayad Allawi, who heads a Sunni-backed party called Iraqiya, laid the blame for Thursday’s violence with the government.
“We have warned long ago that terrorism will continue … against the Iraqi people unless the political landscape is corrected and the political process is corrected, and it becomes an inclusive political process and full blown non-sectarian institutions will be built in Iraq,” Allawi told The Associated Press, speaking from neighboring Beirut.
Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, Michel Chossudovsky, told RT in an interview that finding Iran’s officials guilty of helping the 9/11 attackers is nothing but “a ploy.”
Families of victims of the 9/11 attacks won a default judgment against Iran, the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and Lebanon-based Hezbollah. According to the lawsuit, people in Iran, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, provided support to the terrorists who carried out the terror strikes on US soil. Mr. Chossudovsky says it’s nothing but a cover-up, with Iran as a convenient fall guy.
“There is absolutely no evidence that Iran aided the 9/11 attacks. There is ample evidence after collection that there was conspiracy and the complicity of the US government…There is absolutely no evidence that Al Qaeda or the Taliban were involved in the 9/11 attacks. In fact, if there is anyone behind Al Qaeda, it was the Central Intelligence Agency, going back to the Soviet Afghan war”, Chossudovsky said.
This latest court ruling is part of the plan, according to Chossudovsky.
“We are dealing with fabrications whereby a war agenda, which has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board for many years, is now seeking justification to go live – and we’ve seen the drone attacks, we’ve seen the sanctions.”
The reasoning behind such a plot is rather simple in Chossudovsky eyes, oil.
“Because Iran has 10 per cent of the world’s oil reserves – four or five times the amount of the United States; it’s in a crucial region, it doesn’t accept US hegemony and it’s an ally of Russia and China.” said Chossudovsky.
Chossudovsky also said he believes the consequences of a conflict with Iran could be disastrous. “It could unleash a war which extends from the eastern Mediterranean right through to Central Asia to the Chinese border – and then we are in a World War III scenario.”
Jamal Abdi from the National Iranian American Council says there is a campaign going on “to ratchet up pressure for yet another US attack on a Middle Eastern country.”
“What we are seeing now is this strange self-fulfilling prophecy process. This is exactly what we saw with Iraq. This is a campaign to go to war,” he told RT.
Abdi says he does not see any evidence that is particularly compelling that Iran had a direct role in 9/11.
“Immediately afterwards Iran condemned the attacks. There were candlelit vigils on the streets of Tehran in solidarity with the Americans who lost their lives,” he explained.
“You saw Iran cooperating with the United States in helping to topple the Taliban, the enemy of Iran.”
The verdict might be a part of a plan to invade Iran, believes Sabah Al-Mukhtar, the president of the Arab Lawyers Association. However, he doubts that the US has enough resources to do that at the moment.
“I don’t think [the US] has the force to do that or the economy to do that,” Al-Mukhtar said. “I think the USA is trying to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t think it is in a position to go into another country, and Iran is three times as big as Iraq.”
California State University professor Paul Sheldon Foote told RT that the verdict is actually part of a campaign to demonize Iran. “This is what we call a kangaroo court here in America. This is outrageous. Iran has no involvement in this whatsoever ”, Foote said.
Forty members of Congress have sent a letter urging the House and Senate Armed Services Committee leaders to protest provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act that would allow for the indefinite detention of American citizens. The NDAA first passed in the House of Representatives weeks ago but endured strong opposition from a handful of lawmakers in the U.S. Senate last Thursday, where the bill was passed but with the addition of an amendment that forced the measure to be revised for a final vote. The final version of the NDAA was completed and a vote on it is set to take place this week.
“I strongly oppose mandating military custody and allowing for indefinite detention without due process or trial. These provisions are deeply concerning and would risk putting American citizens in military detention, indefinitely. In short, this authority is at complete odds with the United States Constitution.” stated Rep. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.)
On December 5, Senator Rand Paul (R-KT.) wrote of the dangerous provisions found in the NDAA in the National Review: “If you allow the government the unlimited power to detain citizens without a jury trial, you are exposing yourself to the whim of those in power. That is a dangerous game.”
The final version of the bill does not address any of the concerns of members of congress.
Any issues that the Obama administration supposedly had with the Senate-passed version of the bill, apparently had nothing to do with the indefinite detention of Americans. Recent revelations by Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) indicate that the White House actually insisted that any language exempting American citizens from the indefinite detention provision be removed.
“The language which precluded the application of Section 1031 to American citizens was in the bill that we originally approved … and the administration asked us to remove the language which says that U.S. citizens and lawful residents would not be subject to this section.” said Levin.
The provisions found in Section 1031 of the bill provide the President full power to arrest and detain citizens of the United States without due process. Under that provision, the President is also given the authority to use the military to apprehend and detain those suspected individuals, dubbed “covered persons.” Section 1031, defines a “covered person” as one who either engages in terrorist acts, or is associated with an organization guilty of “belligerent acts.”
According to Senator Rand Paul the FBI publishes characteristics of people you should report as possible terrorists. The list includes the possession of “Meals Ready to Eat,” weatherproofed ammunition and high-capacity magazines, missing fingers, brightly colored stains on clothing, paying for products in cash, and changes in hair color.
Still, supporters for the bill say that it should not make exceptions for anyone, regardless of their citizenship.
“It is not unfair to make an American citizen account for the fact that they decided to help al Qaeda to kill us all and hold them as long as it takes to find intelligence about what may be coming next,” remarked Senator Graham (Rep.-S.C.) “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them, ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’”
According to the Huffington Post, “the last time something of this magnitude was even talked about was during World War Two when Japanese-Americans were put into internment camps following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”
While the indefinite detention provision managed to remain in the bill, some other significant items found their way out of it, including a 2014 audit requirement for the Pentagon, reports Congressional Quarterly.
For those of us who are concerned for the future of the internet here are three lists of companies and where they stand on the Stop Online Piracy Act. GoDaddy has recently dropped it’s support for the bill due to protests. Maybe if more people let their voices be heard through their wallets we can get congress to listen to the people for once.
