The Lower Merion School District will pay $610,000 to settle lawsuits over its tracking of student laptop computers, ending an eight-month saga that thrust the elite district into a global spotlight and stirred questions about technology and privacy in schools.
School board members voted unanimously Monday night to pay $185,000 to the two students who claimed the district spied on them by secretly activating the webcams on their laptops.
The bulk of the money, $175,000, will be put in trust for Blake Robbins, the Harriton High School junior whose family brought the issue to light in February. Jalil Hasan, who filed his lawsuit this summer after graduating from Lower Merion High School, will receive $10,000.
The district will also pay $425,000 in legal fees to their attorney, Mark S. Haltzman.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Pennsylvania School Webcam Spying Case Settled
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Videotaping On-Duty Police Officers in America
This summer the issue of recording on-duty police officers has received a great deal of media attention. Camera-wielding citizens were arrested in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts under interpretations of state wiretapping laws, while others were arrested in New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Florida, and elsewhere based on vaguer charges related to obstructing or interfering with a police officer.So far Massachusetts is the only state to explicitly uphold a conviction for recording on-duty cops, and Illinois and Massachusetts are the only states where it is clearly illegal. The Illinois law has yet to be considered by the state's Supreme Court, while the Massachusetts law has yet to be upheld by a federal appeals court. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler recently issued an opinion concluding that arrests for recording cops are based on a misreading of the state's wiretapping statute, but that opinion isn't binding on local prosecutors.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
California Same-Sex Marriage Stay To Be Lifted August 18
ABA Journal:
The federal judge who ruled California's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional has declined to permanently stay his ruling. But he did allow a temporary hold on his order, giving Prop 8 supporters time to appeal the ruling.Supporters have until Aug. 18 to appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But only those who have standing, those impacted by U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's order, will be able to appeal, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Read the 11-page final stay order (PDF).
The campaign for Proposition 8 plans to file an immediate appeal.Via Law.com:
Chief Judge Vaughn Walker today denied a motion to stay his decision overturning California's ban on same-sex marriage. But Walker stayed entry of judgment until Aug. 18 at 5 p.m., giving proponents a window in which to appeal his ruling on the stay to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision on the stay came out after a morning of online reports describing a growing line of hopeful couples congregating at San Francisco City Hall.From Point of Law:
Judge Walker refused to grant a stay of his ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. At the moment, the California governor and attorney general are refusing to defend Prop 8, and Judge Walker held that the intervenors, the organizations that supported Prop 8, might not have standing to appeal his ruling.
This seems to me the news in Judge Walker's decision to extend a stay on his ruling in favor of marriage rights for gay couples until August 18. I'm not a legal expert but this is from the NCLR's release:
Even though Judge Walker did not immediately let same-sex couples in California marry, the ruling provides important insight into the merits of the issues that the Ninth Circuit will consider on appeal. For example, in his ruling today, Judge Walker casts serious doubt on whether the proponents of Prop 8 even have "standing" to pursue an appeal because they do not speak for the state of California, and the official representatives of the state agree that Prop 8 is unconstitutional. Standing refers to whether a particular person has a legal right to bring an appeal. In his ruling today, Judge Walker said: “As it appears at least doubtful that proponents will be able to proceed with their appeal without a state defendant, it remains unclear whether the court of appeals will be able to reach the merits of proponents’ appeal. In light of those concerns, proponents may have little choice but to attempt to convince either the governor or the attorney general to file an appeal to ensure jurisdiction."
But the governor and attorney general favor marriage equality. So it will be up to Anthony Kennedy, if the appeal court denies standing to the Prop 8 proponents. But maybe not. A reader notes:
- Garry J. Wise, TorontoAppellate courts generally try to resolve cases on the narrowest grounds possible. Since the question of whether the intervenors have standing to pursue the appeal is a procedural/jurisdictional issue, and not the merits of the case, an appellate court should look to that question first to see if the case can be resolved without addressing the merits. If the court decides that the intervenors don't have standing to appeal, the court could resolve the case in favor of the plaintiffs without granting much room for the Supreme Court to take the case and reverse it.
Ruling Today on Stay Pending Appeal of California Prop 8 Decision
SAN FRANCISCO -- The federal judge who overturned California's same-sex marriage ban is set to rule Thursday on whether gay marriages should resume immediately in the state or await an appeals court's input.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker announced late Wednesday that he would issue his decision by noon on requests to impose a stay that would keep Proposition 8 in effect while its sponsors appeal his decision.
The announcement came after lawyers for gay couples, California Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown filed legal motions Friday asking that same-sex marriages be allowed to resume immediately.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Explosive Allegations in Penn. School Spycam Suit
Raw Story provides the latest on a motion in a Pennsylvania lawsuit arising from alleged, improper remote-access by Lower Meridian school district officials to web cameras installed on the standard-issue laptops it provided to its high school students:
A Philadelphia-area school district secretly took "thousands" of webcam photos of students in their homes and tracked their Web site visits and parts of online chats through spy software installed on the students' school-issued laptops, a Pennsylvania court heard yesterday.
...In a motion filed in court on Thursday, Robbins' lawyers asserted that the school district had taken at least 400 snapshots of 15-year-old Robbins, including some of him sleeping. The motion also stated that "thousands of webcam pictures and screen shots have been taken of numerous other students in their homes," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
And in a strange twist to the story, the lawyers also suggested that Carol Cafiero, one of two school administrators with access to the spying technology, "may be a voyeur" who spied on students for her personal gratification, as some of the images taken by the laptops may have ended up on her personal computer.
The motion asks the judge to force Cafiero to turn over her home computer, which she has refused to do so far. Earlier this week, during a deposition, Cafiero pleaded the Fifth Amendment to all questions regarding her involvement in the alleged school spying.
Watching the students at home was like "a little [Lower Merion School District] soap opera," said a staffer in an email obtained by Robbins' lawyers.
"I know, I love it," Cafiero responded in a reply email, as quoted at the Inquirer.
If true, the allegations against Cafiero would realize privacy advocates' worst fears about the school district's monitoring of students at home: That the technology is all too open to abuse by those who would seek to exploit children.
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Supreme Court Justices in the 21st Century
Today's New York Times features an excellent op-ed by University of Chicago law professor, Geoffrey R. Stone, on the modern role of U.S. Supreme Court Justices and the politically driven mythologies that continue to drive the conservative-liberal debate on this issue:
AS the Senate awaits the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice, a frank discussion is needed on the proper role of judges in our constitutional system. For 30 years, conservative commentators have persuaded the public that conservative judges apply the law, whereas liberal judges make up the law. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, his job is just to “call balls and strikes.” According to Justice Antonin Scalia, conservative jurists merely carry out the “original meaning” of the framers. These are appealing but wholly disingenuous descriptions of what judges — liberal or conservative — actually do.
...it should be apparent that conservative judges do not disinterestedly call balls and strikes. Rather, fueled by their own political and ideological convictions, they make value judgments, often in an aggressively activist manner that goes well beyond anything the framers themselves envisioned. There is nothing simple, neutral, objective or restrained about such decisions. For too long, conservatives have set the terms of the debate about judges, and they have done so in a highly misleading way. Americans should see conservative constitutional jurisprudence for what it really is. And liberals must stand up for their vision of the judiciary.
...Faithfully applying our Constitution’s 18th- and 19th-century text to 21st-century problems requires not only careful attention to the text, fidelity to the framers’ goals and respect for precedent, but also an awareness of the practical realities of the present. Only with such awareness can judges, in a constantly changing society, hope to keep faith with our highest law.
This does not mean judges are free to make up the law as they go along. But it does mean that constitutional law is not a mechanical exercise of just “applying the law.” Before there can be a serious national dialogue about our Constitution, our laws and the proper role of our judges, that myth must be exposed.
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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Wednesday, March 04, 2009
American Dictatorship?
As usual, Glenn Greenwald delivers with his seminal crtitique on the constitutional implications of nine, newly-released and highly-controversial legal opinions prepared by the U.S. Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush presidency.
The memoranda were relied upon by the Bush administration in prosecution of its so-called "War on Terror."
Mr. Greenwald:
Let's just look at one of those documents (.pdf) -- entitled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S." It was sent to (and requested by) Defense Department General Counsel William J. Haynes and authored by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo and DOJ Special Counsel Robert Delahunty. But it's not a "Yoo memo." Rather, it was the official and formal position of the U.S. Government -- at least of the omnipotent Executive Branch -- from the time it was issued until just several months George Bush before left office (October, 2008), when OLC Chief Stephen Bradbury abruptly issued a memo withdrawing, denouncing and repudiating both its reasoning and conclusions.
The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments. It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens. And it wasn't only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls "domestic military operations" was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying -- in secret and with no oversight -- on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
...More amazingly still, there is almost certainly a whole slew of other activities that remain concealed, and very well may remain undisclosed for years, as a result of the creepy Orwellian slogans embraced in unison by our political class -- look towards the future, not the past!; only "liberal score-settlers" want an investigation of any of this. That mentality is being aided by a new administration that seems bizarrely desperate to keep concealed the secrets of the old one. As but one example, we know that the Bush administration was engaged in certain surveillance activities aimed at U.S. citizens that were so patently illegal and wrong that even the right-wing fanatics in Bush's own Justice Department (such as John Aschroft) threatened to resign immediately if they didn't cease, yet we still, to this day, don't know what those domestic surveillance activities were.
The most vital point is that all of the documents released yesterday by the Obama DOJ comprise nothing less than a regime of secret laws under which we were governed. Nothing was redacted when those documents yesterday were released because they don't contain any national security secrets. They're nothing more than legal decrees, written by lawyers. They're just laws that were implemented with no acts of Congress, unilaterally by the Executive branch. Yet even the very laws that governed us were kept secret for eight years.
This is factually true, with no hyperbole: Over the last eight years, we had a system in place where we pretended that our "laws" were the things enacted out in the open by our Congress and that were set forth by the Constitution. The reality, though, was that our Government secretly vested itself with the power to ignore those public laws, to declare them invalid, and instead, create a whole regimen of secret laws that vested tyrannical, monarchical power in the President. Nobody knew what those secret laws were because even Congress, despite a few lame and meek requests, was denied access to them. What kind of country lives under secret laws?
See Mr. Greenwald's article, The newly released secret laws of the Bush administration
More reading:
- Justice Department to Reveal More Bush Administration Legal Memos - Washington Post
- Criminals In The Bush White House, Ctd. - Andrew Sullivan
- What John Yoo's OLC Memos on the Terrorist Surveillance Program Probably Said - Volokh Conspiracy
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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Monday, November 10, 2008
On Closing Guantanamo
Obama legal advisor Laurence Tribe, on the development of immediate plans to close Guantanamo and try its prisoners on American soil:
"We can't put people in a dungeon forever without processing whether they deserve to be there."
..."In reality and symbolically, the idea that we have people in legal black holes is an extremely serious black mark... It has to be dealt with."
That sounds about right.
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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Sunday, October 26, 2008
ACLU's Hundred Day Plan: Stop U.S. Torture, Abuse
From the ACLU's Actions for Restoring America, here is Day 1:
DAY ONE: STOP TORTURE, CLOSE GUANTANAMO, END EXTRAORDINARY RENDITIONS
The next president will have a historic opportunity -- on day one -- to take very important steps to restore the rule of law in the interrogation and detention of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, and in secret prisons around the globe. Every action taken pursuant to an executive order of President Bush can be reversed by executive order of the next president.
Therefore, on the first day in office, the next president should issue an executive order directing all agencies to modify their policies and practices immediately to:
Cease and prohibit the use of torture and abuse, without exception, and direct the Attorney General immediately after his or her confirmation to appoint an outside special counsel to investigate and, if warranted, prosecute any violations of federal criminal laws prohibiting torture and abuse;Close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and either charge and try detainees under criminal law in federal criminal courts or before military courts-martial or transfer them to countries where they will not be tortured or detained without charge;
Cease and prohibit the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the transfer of persons, outside of the judicial process, to other countries, including countries that torture or abuse prisoners.
I agree with the focus of this plan of action.
The Bush administration's legacy of torture and human rights abuses will be the most difficult and ugly blemish on America's credibility to address in the long and short-term.
The next President must take immediate, remedial action.
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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Friday, June 27, 2008
US Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Gun Control Law
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the hotly-anticipated case over the D.C. gun ban, a 5-4 majority affirmed the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violated the Second Amendment. The majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia. Justices Breyer and Stevens wrote dissents. (Here’s the opinion.)
E.J. Dionne comments in A Court of Radicals:
In knocking down the District of Columbia’s 32-year ban on handgun possession, the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have shown again their willingness to abandon precedent in order to do whatever is necessary to further the agenda of the contemporary political right.
The court’s five most conservative members have demonstrated that for all of Justice Antonin Scalia’s talk about “originalism” as a coherent constitutional doctrine, the judicial right regularly succumbs to the temptation to legislate from the bench. They fall in line behind whatever fashions political conservatism is promoting.
Conservative justices claim that they defer to local authority. Not in this case. They insist that political questions should be decided by elected officials. Not in this case. They argue that they pay careful attention to the precise words of the Constitution. Not in this case.
...In his intemperate dissent in the court’s recent Guantanamo decision, Scalia said the defense of constitutional rights embodied in that ruling meant it “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” That consideration apparently does not apply to a law whose precise purpose was to reduce the number of murders in the District of Columbia.
Also see: Justices Rule for Individual Gun Rights - N.Y. Times
- Garry J. Wise, Toronto
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