The Multiracial Activist - www.multiracial.com

 

January 22, 2008

The Honorable Senator Harry Reid
Senate Majority Leader
Washington, DC 20515

Re: Consumer rights and government accountability organizations unite to
condemn immunity for the telecommunications industry

Dear Majority Leader Reid,

On behalf of consumer-rights groups and government accountability organizations, we urge you not to let telecommunications companies off the hook; the telecommunications companies were complicit in spying on innocent Americans in the years after September 11, and perhaps even earlier. We understand that you will be revisiting wiretapping legislation in January and respectfully request that the bill you bring to the floor not include a statutory grant of retroactive immunity for these acts that violate customers’ privacy.

We now know that communication service providers turned over our private calls, emails and records to the government in the absence of a court order or other lawful requirement to do so. This violates both criminal and civil laws. Currently, citizens and consumers are trying to advance their rights in court, some seeking damages, and some seeking a simple declaration that the activity was illegal and a court order stopping it from happening in the future.

Killing all the pending cases will have two effects. First, it deprives consumers the opportunity to assert their own privacy rights before a neutral arbiter, which had been statutorily guaranteed since 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provides a civil cause of actions so that Americans can enforce their rights when the communications companies and the government infringe on them. Robbing them of this opportunity through legislation not only frustrates the pending cases, but undercuts the accountability structure in the statute, which will only encourage law breaking in the future.

Second, it serves to bury government misconduct. Granting retroactive immunity shields not only the telecommunications industry, but the government actors that induced them to break the law in the first place. Despite numerous subpoenas, Congress has been completely frustrated in its attempts to discover what the Administration has done with our private information. These cases may be the last chance for citizens to actually determine who ordered the interception of their phone calls and how those intercepted communications have been used against them.

The only way to restore the trust of American customers – and American citizens – is to hold the telecommunication companies accountable when they collude with the government to spy on ordinary Americans. If we do not hold the phone companies and the government accountable now, there will never be an incentive for them to act within the law, and the concerns of customers and citizens will go unanswered.

Sincerely,

Consumers Union
Common Cause
Citizens Outreach Project
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
Doctors for Open Government
Government Accountability Project
Public Interest Research Groups
American Civil Liberties Union
The Multiracial Activist

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Muncie, Indiana Man Indicted for Burning a Cross

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Rena J. Comisac and Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana Timothy Morrison announced today that Kyle Milbourn of Muncie, Ind., was indicted by a federal grand jury for a hate crime stemming from a cross-burning last year that was directed at a woman and her three biracial children.

Milbourn was charged with one count of interfering with the housing rights of another person; one count of conspiring to interfere with civil rights; one count of using fire during the commission of a felony; and one count of witness tampering. If convicted, Milbourn faces a maximum punishment of 40 years of imprisonment and a $1,000,000 fine.

According to the indictment, on or about March 6, 2006, Milbourn and another individual built an eight-foot wooden cross, erected it in front of the victims' home, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. Milbourn did this with the intent to interfere with the victims' rights under the Fair Housing Act.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent Charlie Rownd investigated this case. The case will be prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Christina McKee from the U.S. Attorney's Office and Trial Attorney Betsy Biffl from the Civil Rights Division.

The charges set forth in an indictment are merely accusations and the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

First Call Analyst:

FCMN Contact:

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

CONTACT: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs,

+1-202-514-2007, or TDD +1-202-514-1888

Web Site: http://www.usdoj.gov/

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Amy Harmon, writing for The New York Times, on  In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice :

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.

“We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. “We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused.”

It's amazing that this article quotes Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  He is one of the foremost "one drop" advocates, proclaiming to the world that Anatole Broyard (among thousands of others) was a biological "black" who was merely "passing as white."  He has done more than anyone to promote a hypodescent ideology based on the idea that "black" genes are super-inferior and dominant.  Of course, Gates claims that he doesn't believe that, but would you find a Jew stupid enough to demand that the Aryan/non-Aryan racial classification system of the Nazis be retained and enforced?

Of course, the liberal advocacy of supposed white racial purity and "tainted black blood" has been going on a long time.  No doubt the white student who believes that her nine percent of "black" DNA makes her genetically destined to celebrate the phony Kwanzaa holiday (created by a criminal and spread by white corporate America, not African Americans) has watched racist films like "Pinky," "Imitation of Life" and "The Human Stain."

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