Linkmeister

Assignment: SacBee

The Sacramento Bee is running a four-part series this week asking whether the Patriot Act and its hoped-for successor legislation goes too far towards limiting civil liberties. The paper gives some examples:

• Two middle-aged peace activists from San Francisco find themselves singled out by authorities as they try to board a flight to Boston for a family visit. Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon are held and questioned for hours before being released at San Francisco International Airport because their names apparently popped up on a secret government "no fly" list.

• A 40-year-old public defender surfing the Web on a library computer in Santa Fe, N.M., finds himself surrounded by four local police officers, then handcuffed and detained by Secret Service agents after someone apparently overhears a political debate in which he suggests that "Bush is out of control."

• Barry Reingold, a 62-year-old retired phone company worker, gets into an intense debate at his San Francisco gym over the bombing of Afghanistan and his criticism of President Bush, and is awakened at his Oakland apartment a week later by two FBI agents who want to talk to him about his political beliefs.

Oh, and then there's this, which you might vaguely recall from May of 2002:

Acting on a tip from a detainee at the government's prison facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, agents had learned that some terrorists might have been trained in underwater attacks.

[snip]

...PADI [Professional Association of Diving Instructors] turned over CD-ROMs listing 10 million Americans and their addresses -- a database the FBI apparently is still using.

This is a series I'll be going back to for the remainder of the week; if the topic concerns you, you probably should as well. (via TalkLeft)