American Civil Liberties Union

Last week, The Washington Post reported that for the last two years, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) intelligence gathering and analysis unit devoted to rightwing groups and militias has been "effectively eviscerated," while reports on so-called Islamic extremism "got through without any major problems."

Last summer, the ACLU and its affiliates in Oregon, Southern California, Northern California and New Mexico filed a lawsuit on behalf of 17 U.S. citizens and legal residents to challenge their placement on the U.S. government's No-Fly List and the failure of the government to give them a chance to defend themselves. Some of these people were in the United States when they found themselves suddenly and without explanation unable to board a plane. Others — including military veterans, students and people visiting family — were overseas and were effectively exiled from their own country because they couldn't board a plane to fly home.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

An unavoidable consequence of creating a new and ad hoc justice system on the fly is that issues that would be simple and routine in an ordinary criminal trial end up raising questions that are novel and highly contested. This has been a regular feature of the Guantánamo military commissions. We travel here to observe "pre-trial proceedings" with the expectation that the cases will be moving towards trial — only to find out that, because of some arcane dispute about what the new rules mean, trial has become even more remote.

On August 15, 2008, Richard Wade, a 12-year-old honor student at Southaven Middle School, made the simple mistake of taking his cell phone with him to school. He had no idea that on that day, school officials would seize his phone, search its contents and conclude without substantiation that the private photos he had saved on the cell phone — most of which simply showed him dancing at home — were "gang-related messages." Nor did Richard foresee that the DeSoto County Board of Education would expel him from school for carrying these photos on his cell phone.