Magpie

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Pop quiz!

Quick! What's missing from The Economist's list of the 15 most democratic countries in the world?

Economist rankings of most democratic countries

Something's missing here.

You get half credit if you couldn't find the UK, but what I'm really wanting you to notice is that the US isn't there either. To find the US, you have to look at the complete listing of the world's full democracies. There are 28 of them, and the US is #17, right between Spain and the Czech Republic. (And, if you are wondering, the UK is #23.)

Here's some of how The Economist explains that positioning:

One advantage of our index compared with others is that it provides for considerable differentiation of scores, including among developed countries. The “near-perfect” democracy is Sweden, the country with the highest score. The other Nordic countries also have high ranks. By contrast, the United States and Britain are near the bottom of the full democracy category, but for somewhat different reasons. America falls down on some aspects of governance and civil liberties. Despite low election turnouts, political participation in the United States is comparatively high. In Britain low political participation (the lowest in the developed world) is a major problem, and to a lesser extent, for now, so are eroding civil liberties. [Emphasis added]

Just how far has the US fallen down on civil liberties? Well, the US of A has the lowest civil liberties score of any of the 29 'full democracies' on the list, and scores worse than more than 20 of the 50 'flawed democracies' rated by The Economist.

Remember when the US would have been near the top of this or any similar list? Hopefully the results of next year's presidential elections will reverse the sad trend set in motion by Dubya's two terms in office.

By the way, the worst country of the 167 that The Economist rated is North Korea. Iraq came in at #112, just one position away from dropping onto the 'Authoritarian Regimes' roster. No such luck for the US' steadfast Mideast ally, Saudi Arabia, which is #156.

You can read a summary of the Economist's findings if you go here, and you can download the full Democracy Index (along with a description of the methodology used to generate the list) if you click here [PDF file].

Labels: Civil liberties, Democracy

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:19 AM | Get permalink

Friday, August 17, 2007

Can I see your papers, please?

Guess what? It looks like Dubya's administration is parlaying the Real ID Act and its new passport requirements into a de facto internal passport that will have to be used by many US citizens.

Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain....

The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

I guess those wild-eyed privacy fanatics who opposed the Real ID Act weren't so paranoid about the feds' real intent, were they?

Via CNN.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Civil liberties, Fascism, Privacy, Real ID, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 5:10 PM | Get permalink

Monday, August 6, 2007

Give Dubya an inch.

And he'll come back for the rest of what's left of the Constitution.

Here's some of what our Dear Leader had to say as he signed the so-called Protect America Act, in which spineless Democrats in both houses of Congress helped the GOP ram through an ill-considered expansion of the feds' spying powers under the FISA law:

While I appreciate the leadership it took to pass this bill, we must remember that our work is not done. This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law.

When Congress returns in September the Intelligence committees and leaders in both parties will need to complete work on the comprehensive reforms requested by Director McConnell, including the important issue of providing meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our Nation following the attacks of September 11, 2001. [Emphasis added]

Obviously, having the right to intercept any phone call, text message, or email that passes through a US network without a warrant isn't enough for the prez. Nor is having six months to turn the internet and domestic phone networks into permanent spying architecture. Dubya has put us on notice that he wants to make his illicit spying program retroactively legal, getting his corporate accomplices out of any responsibility for assisting the ~~regime~~ government poke into the private affairs of its ~~suspects~~ citizens.

Aren't you ever so glad that we put the Democrats in control of the Congress? After all, god knows what would have happened if the elections had left the GOP in charge of protecting the Constitution and our civil rights ...

Labels: 'Protect America' Act, Civil liberties, Dubya, FISA, Police state, Spying

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:13 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

15,000 new pairs of eyes.

All of them spying on you and me on behalf of Alberto Gonzales and Dubya.

The FBI is taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities.

According to a recent unclassified report to Congress, the FBI expects its informants to provide secrets about possible terrorists and foreign spies, although some may also be expected to aid with criminal investigations.... The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The FBI said the push was driven by a 2004 directive from President Bush ordering the bureau to improve its counterterrorism efforts by boosting its human intelligence capabilities.

The aggressive push for more secret informants appears to be part of a new effort to grow its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts. Other recent proposals include expanding its collection and analysis of data on U.S. persons, retaining years' worth of Americans' phone records and even increasing so-called "black bag" secret entry operations.

To handle the increase in so-called human sources, the FBI also plans to overhaul its database system, so it can manage records and verify the accuracy of information from "more than 15,000" informants ...

Via The Blotter.

Labels: 'War on Terrorism', Civil liberties, Spying, Surveillance

| | Posted by Magpie at 1:29 PM | Get permalink