The US House of Representatives passed the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act Thursday night, voting 232-191 mostly along party lines. The bill, approved by the House Judiciary Committee last week, specifies when and how the president can order the use of warrantless surveillance . Under the legislation, warrantless surveillance would be justified following an "armed attack" [...]
Brian J. Foley : "This week's legislation limiting the rights of 'detainees' to challenge the Executive's exercise (and abuse) of power over them also strips Americans of our ability to oversee the Executive. When it's easy for the Executive to 'win' its cases against these prisoners, and to prevent prisoners from challenging their detention in [...]
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. et al. v. Intel Corporation et al., United States District Court for the District of Delaware, Judge Joseph Farnan, September 26, 2006 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
The US Senate approved its version of the military commissions bill in a 65-34 vote late Thursday after narrowly rejecting several amendments, including one sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) which would have eliminated a highly-controversial provision stripping detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. The [...]
Members of the US House Energy and Commerce Committee lambasted executives of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation Thursday for their role in a corporate espionage scandal and demanded to know why company executives and attorneys did not put a stop to the program. In a special hearing committee members grilled the executives seeking answers to how controversial [...]
Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli made a formal apology Thursday to Maher Arar , the Canadian citizen who on suspicion of being linked to Al Qaeda was deported from the US to Syria in 2002 and tortured there. Zaccardelli publicly accepted all of the recently-released findings of the Arar Commission , which concluded [...]
Lawyers for Saddam Hussein called for an end to Saddam's genocide trial in a statement issued Thursday, rejecting the proceeding as nothing more than a "farce" used to "offend the dignity of president Saddam and his comrades." As quoted by AFP, the statement claimed that the "trial has nothing to do with law or with [...]
US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor on Thursday rejected the Bush Administration’s proposal to continue its domestic surveillance program while her August 17 decision finding the program unconstitutional and ordering its shutdown is being appealed, but did allow the program to continue for one more week to allow the government to contest her refusal before [...]
The Belgian Data Privacy Commission released an advisory report Thursday concluding that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) , the Belgium-based international banking cooperative, has been supplying the US Department of Treasury with "massive amounts of personal data for surveillance without effective and clear legal basis and independent controls in line with Belgian [...]
Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has denied a BBC report that human organs were being routinely taken from executed prisoners and sold to foreigners, saying that the donors must first give written consent to the sale of their organs before any such transaction takes place. Gang said the use of prisoners' organs is "very cautious" [...]
