Eight members of the RNC Welcoming Committee, a group formed to protest the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN, have been charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.” Because in 21st-century America, terrorism and civil disobedience are one and the same.

“These charges are an effort to equate publicly stated plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC as being the same as acts of terrorism. This both trivializes real violence and attempts to place the stated political views of the Defendants on trial,” said Bruce Nestor, President of the Minnesota Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. […]

The criminal complaints filed by the Ramsey County Attorney do not allege that any of the defendants personally have engaged in any act of violence or damage to property. The complaints list all of alleged violations of law during the last few days of the RNC — other than violations of human rights carried out by law enforcement — and seeks to hold the 8 defendants responsible for acts committed by other individuals. None of the defendants have any prior criminal history involving acts of violence.

Several members of the RNC Welcoming Committee held a press conference to tell their side of the story. If you feel like hearing what they have to say, clips are available from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, Democracy Now! (here and here), and The Uptake. (”It’s interesting that … the questions are about violence on the protesters’ side…. Did any of the protesters shoot rubber bullets at the police? Did any of the protesters fire concussion grenades?”)

The charges are only a small part of a pattern of intimidation, abuse, and civil rights violations by the authorities:

Several police agencies, ramrodded by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department, staged massive pre-emptive raids against houses where activists were staying and against the RNC Welcoming Committee’s convergence space. Many of the imprisoned protesters continue to be held without charges. Many have been abused by their jailers, including a woman being knocked to the ground and dragged by her hair, several protesters being denied prescription or over-the-counter medications for serious medical conditions, and a 19-year-old activist named Elliot Hughes, who was beaten and tortured for over an hour because, according to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department, he was being verbally disruptive.

And that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of other, non-RNCWC activists intimidated, assaulted, arrested, and held without charge during the protests; the dozens of journalists treated the same way, including Amy Goodman and two other folks from Democracy Now!; or the relentless series of lies issued by the cops and swallowed whole by the mainstream press, when they bothered to cover the protests at all.

The same thing happened at the RNC in New York in 2004. The same thing happened during the APEC protests in 1997 (pepper spray, snipers on the rooftops, activists’ rights routinely violated by the RCMP, an ineffectual government inquiry that held almost no one to account). No doubt the same thing will happen in Vancouver during the 2010 Olympics. As far as I can tell, that’s just how the big protests work these days.

Several hours of surveillance footage recorded at Vancouver airport the night Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski was Tasered and died were inadvertently erased by the Canada Border Services Agency a week after his death, The Vancouver Sun has learned.

The CBSA is claiming the deletion was unintentional — a result of “confusion over how long the footage would be stored before being erased.” If this is true, then the CBSA is criminally incompetent. I sure hope it’s true, because the alternative is that the CBSA deliberately deleted footage of their own misdeeds. But the authorities would never mislead us about something like that, right?

Either way, the results are the same: Robert Dziekanski was murdered by bureaucratic incompetence and police brutality.

Fortunately, the cops aren’t worried about it:

The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, which is investigating Dziekanski’s death, said Thursday it wasn’t aware the CBSA’s original footage had been erased.

However, IHIT spokesman Cpl. Dale Carr said the team is not worried because one of its investigators reviewed the complete footage before it was erased and was confident all clips of Dziekanski are on the DVD.

“What? They destroyed evidence that might have been crucial to our investigation? This is the first we’ve heard of it. Hey, Jim, you watched all that footage, right? Do you think we might be missing anything important?”

“Gee, Lieutenant, I don’t know. I only watched it that one time, and that was just a few days after the guy died.”

“Before he had that unfortunate reaction to a 50,000-volt shock, you mean.”

“Uh, right. And it was a lot of footage, too — six hours of it! And boy, was it boring.”

“That’s why you made this videotape of all the important parts, right?”

“Well, yeah, but if I’d known they were gonna delete the tapes on us, I would have been a lot more careful about — ”

“You’re not saying you might have … missed something, are you?”

“I sure hope not, Lieutenant.”

“Right. See, folks? Nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control.”

I don’t usually blog about the hideous farce that is American politics, but this is too good to pass up:

When Cheney was told during the ABC News interview that public opinion polls show an overwhelming opposition to the war in Iraq, Cheney’s response was: “So?”

And when the interviewer pressed him asking, “So — you don’t care what the American people think?” he responded, “No,” and explained, “I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.”

Americans also roundly reject the position put forward by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino in an effort to explain Cheney’s comments. Asked whether the public should have “input,” she replied, “You had your input. The American people have input every four years, and that’s the way our system is set up.”

I guess those right-wingers really mean it when they say, “The US is a republic, not a democracy.”

It would be cheaper to provide actual housing and support for BC’s homeless than it is to provide existing non-housing services to the same people:

A new study says providing shelter for the homeless with severe addictions and mental illness throughout British Columbia could save taxpayers millions of dollars.

“Addiction is the most prevalent mental health problem in both the street homeless and at-risk populations, followed by concurrent disorders and, less frequently, mental illness alone,” the Simon Fraser University report says.

The paper — titled Housing and Support for Adults with Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illnesses in British Columbia [warning: 15-page PDF] — says providing non-housing services for such people currently costs the public system more than $55,000 per year per person. It says providing adequate housing and supports could reduce this cost to $37,000 per year….

“The costs of providing supported housing and other health services to this population … is lower than the cost incurred through the use of emergency departments, the corrections system and emergency shelters when they are homeless,” the report says.

(Hat tip: David Eby. If you are at all interested in poverty, homelessness, or the social impact of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver — and if you live here, you ought to be — I strongly recommend reading Eby’s blog. He works with the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit that provides legal assistance to people in the Downtown Eastside.)

From the Vancouver Sun:

The B.C. Court of Appeal has backed B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Don Brenner’s decision to kill the Canadian Bar Association’s landmark attempt to force governments to provide adequate civil legal aid to poor people.

In a majority ruling Monday, the court agreed with the province’s senior trial court judge and said he was also quite right to assess costs against the CBA. […]

“Although the action is intended to assist low-income members of the pubic and its spirit is commendable, I do not consider that the altruistic nature of the action should be afforded much weight until at least the [bar association] has established it can meet the minimal test of disclosing a reasonable claim,” [Court of Appeal] Justice Mary Saunders wrote. […] “Access to legal services is fundamentally important in any free and democratic society. In some cases, it has been found essential to due process and a fair trial. But a review of the constitutional text, the jurisprudence and the history of the concept does not support the respondent’s contention that there is a broad general right to legal counsel as an aspect of, or precondition to, the rule of law.” […]

For almost two decades, legal aid across Canada has been a growing concern because of government cutbacks.

Provinces have curtailed legal aid services, narrowing the types of cases they cover, raising the eligibility criteria, making it harder to qualify.

Foreign Policy in Focus has posted a great article called Globalization: What Is To Be Done? It’s an overview and critique of American free trade policy since World War II, emphasizing how corporations have benefited while workers’ rights have suffered. It neglects the issue of democratic control, but there’s only so much you can cover in 6000 words. And despite the far-left pedigree of the title, there’s no overwrought anti-imperialist rhetoric to distract from the plain facts. If, like me, you don’t know as much about globalization as you should, I’d strongly recommend checking it out.

(Updated. See below.)

The Canadian government has begun another consultation process on lawful access. This one focuses specifically on access to basic telco customer information — names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and IP addresses.

What’s interesting is that they’re doing it quietly, and trying to keep civil society groups out of the loop. From the same CBC article:

Michael Geist, chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said the process is not being conducted publicly as two previous consultations have been, in 2002 and in 2005.

The consultation has not been published in the Canada Gazette, where such documents are normally publicized, or on the agencies’ websites.

Interested parties have been given until Sept. 27 to submit their comments, which is a short consultation time, Geist said. Several organizations and individuals contacted by CBCNews.ca only received their documents this week.

On his blog, Geist adds that he “was asked not to post [the consultation documents] online.”

Back to the CBC article:

More pointedly, a number of parties that took part in the previous consultations, including privacy and civil liberty advocates — and even some telecommunication service providers — have not been made aware of the discussion, he said.

“It’s really disturbing particularly in light of the fact that they’ve had two prior consultations on lawful access in the past, so it’s not as if they don’t know the parties that are engaged on this issue,” Geist said.

Officials with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association were not aware of the consultation.

To those of us who have been following the lawful access issue, this is not surprising. The first round of lawful access consultations in 2002 faced heavy objections from privacy and civil liberties advocates (not to mention telcos who felt lawful access was an excessive burden on their operations). A second round of consultations took place in 2005, but as I have mentioned before, “civil society groups got one meeting in which the proposals were outlined for them, and then a laughably short two-week window in which to submit their comments.”

Also, keep in mind that the basic customer information being discussed in the current consultation is just the first phase of lawful access. The original consultation also looked at far more frightening possibilities like data retention and access to information related to the actual content of your activities online (e.g., what sites you visit and what’s in the emails you send). In 2005, when the Liberal government introduced its so-called Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act, it only included less serious first-phase proposals like the ones under discussion in the current consultation. (They tried the same thing with a private member’s bill last March.)

So, to recap:

• Canada’s cops and spies want more power to spy on you online.
• The Conservative government is helping them by sidelining civil society’s objections, while working closely with the telco industry (and the cops and spies).
• The Liberals did the same thing when they were in power.
• If our cops and spies get access to basic subscriber information — and they probably will, since both the Liberals and the Conservatives support the idea — they will be coming back to ask for expanded and more intrusive powers.

UPDATE, September 13: CTV has posted the consultation document (PDF) on their website.

UPDATE, September 19: That peculiar noise you heard late last week was the sound of the Conservative government backpedaling furiously:

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the government would not introduce legislation forcing internet service providers to give customer information without a warrant.

“We have not and we will not be proposing legislation to grant police the power to get information from internet companies without a warrant. That’s never been a proposal,” Day told the Ottawa Citizen late Thursday.

“It may make some investigations more difficult, but our expectation is rights to our privacy are such that we do not plan, nor will we have in place, something that would allow the police to get that information.”

I’m glad to hear it. Let’s make sure they stick to this promise.

As for that leaked consultation document:

Day told the Citizen that the original document sent to a select group of stakeholders “never would have gone out if I had seen it” and that it “somehow went out without my approval.”

In other words, either our Public Safety Minister is incompetent, or significant erosions of due process don’t merit his attention.

The new deadline for public comment is October 12.

Declan at Crawl Across the Ocean sums it up:

As for the no-fly list, I guess it’s like they always say, innocent until proven guilty, or until placed on a secret government list for unknown reasons with little hope of appeal.

In case you missed the news, Canada’s no-fly list went into effect on Monday. There are up to 2,000 people on the list — 2,000 people who are an “immediate threat to aviation security” but haven’t, you know, actually done anything we can arrest them for.

Joy Smith, a Conservative MP, has introduced a private member’s bill called the Clean Internet Act (Bill C-427). It’s a private member’s bill and therefore unlikely to pass, but still, it’s a scary piece of work. Here are the highlights:

• All ISPs would have to be licensed. Since the bill defines an ISP as “a person who provides a service that facilitates access to the Internet, whether or not the service is provided free or for a charge,” that would apparently include libraries that offer free public Internet access, not to mention Internet cafes, your workplace, and possibly you yourself if you let other people use your Internet connection. More generally, as Russell McOrmond notes, “ISPs should not need to be licensed any more than owners of photocopiers or computers should be licensed” — they’re access providers, not content providers.
• ISPs would be required to block access to hate speech, material that incites violence against women, or child porn. It would also be an offense, not only to post such material, but to possess any of this material if you got it off the Internet — even though we already have laws governing hate speech and child porn.
• ISPs would be required to deny service to anyone who “has used the Internet within the previous seven years for a purpose that would be an offence under this Act.”
• The executives of any ISP that violates this law would be subject to a fine or jail time. In addition, as Ars Technica points out, the bill would allow the government to revoke an ISP’s license — thus presumably cutting off Internet access for all of that ISP’s customers — if one of the ISP’s executive officers is convicted of committing violence against women, inciting hatred, or possessing child pornography. No, seriously — it’s section 4(3) of the bill.

An expert quoted in CBC’s article on the bill put it best: “The sentiment’s right, but the practicality is out to lunch.”

Incidentally, when she introduced this bill in Parliament, Joy Smith said, “We must all keep in mind that we need to stop the human trafficking that is happening in our country now and this bill makes a strong statement about that part of the Internet.” Needless to say, the bill doesn’t have anything to do with anything you or I would understand as human trafficking.

The Conservatives have commissioned a poll and a series of focus groups to examine the issue of electoral reform. Trouble is, the pollster they’ve hired is a raving right-wing lunatic, and the think tank that’s managing the focus groups thinks proportional representation is a bad idea. So far, the results are about what you’d expect. Idealistic Pragmatist has the details here and here.

That the Conservatives aren’t too keen on proportional representation isn’t surprising. Under proportional representation, the Conservatives — who can only claim about a third of the vote — would never be able to get the majority government they so desperately want. They’d have to form a coalition with other parties instead — something they seem to regard as unthinkable, even though it works quite well in other democratic countries. That’s why the Tories’ idea of electoral reform stops with elections and term limits for senators: real democratic reform, in the form of proportional representation, would sabotage their ambitions for a Parliamentary majority.

(Incidentally, the aforementioned Idealistic Pragmatist is a great source for information on electoral reform. IP’s Proportional representation FAQ and Six reasons to support proportional representation are excellent starting points if you want to learn more about the subject.)