Another shocking story comes out about the federal government’s ineffective, error-ridden terrorist watch lists.

The Transportation Security Administration, under scrutiny after last month’s bombing attempt, has on its Web site a “mythbuster” that tries to reassure the public.

Myth: The No-Fly list includes an 8-year-old boy.

Buster: No 8-year-old is on a T.S.A. watch list.

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Invasive and possibly ineffective body scanners will be implemented soon in Columbus and several other airports around the country.

If you plan to fly from Port Columbus when the weather warms up, there’s a good chance you’ll have to step into a full-body scanner first.

The airport expects to receive at least two full-body scanners by late spring or early summer to enhance its security screenings.

Airport officials are awaiting final confirmation and further details from the Transportation Security Administration, which will pay for and operate the scanners. Columbus had been put on a list by the TSA last year to receive the full-body scanners, said Rod Borden, chief operating officer of the Columbus Regional Airport Authority.

TSA spokesman Jon Allen said the 150 body scanners the TSA has already secured are manufactured by Rapiscan and cost $160,000 apiece. They will be distributed across the country in coming months.

A student columnist at OSU’s Lantern makes strong points about how the U.S. should be handing terroist threats and improving security.

The war on terrorism is changing the world we live in at an astonishing pace. After the recent developments with the so-called “underwear bomber” and a double agent that took the lives of eight high-level CIA operatives in Afghanistan, authorities in the United States are scrambling to beef up security at home and abroad.

In the end, strengthening the Patriot Act and concocting all sorts of new measures will not ensure peace of mind for the American people. We are playing a high stakes game where civil liberties are beginning to play second fiddle to national security.

At first glance, this would seem like a marvelous idea. Let’s put armed guards in every terminal sporting camouflaged fatigues and grenade-launching M-16 machine guns, just like in the good old days. While we are at it, let’s put up 15-foot walls around our homes, complete with barbed wire and an observation deck with a guy dressed in medieval garb brandishing a bow with flaming arrows.

Some would argue that we have no other choice but to become more like a “police state,” akin to some horrible nightmare from George Orwell’s novel “1984.” This is a dangerous slippery slope and before you know it we might be living in a world where Big Brother constantly watches us, tells us what to think and how to act. If anything, we are well on our way.

The Blade discusses recent revelations about the Transportations Security Administration’s practices in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and War on Terror.

AFTER 19 hijackers commandeered four airliners with box cutters and crashed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, improving security at U.S. airports became a top government priority. The problem: It sometimes seems as if a modern-day version of the Keystone Kops was put in charge of the operation.

Further questions about the competence at the federal Transportation Security Administration have been raised by reports that the agency posted closely guarded secrets about passenger screening practices online for the entire world to peruse.

An old version of a 93-page TSA operating manual put on the Internet, inadvertently, officials say, spells out procedures and technical details for screening operations, metal detectors, and explosive detection systems at U.S. airports.

Critics and supporters debate a new initiative by Columbus city officials to install security cameras in several neighborhoods.

As Columbus moves forward with plans to monitor neighborhoods with security cameras, civil libertarians warn that the costs — both to privacy and pocketbooks — might outweigh the benefits.

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But with few exceptions, studies of camera surveillance in the United States and England haven’t found a statistically significant impact on crime rates. Criminals simply move to nearby areas without cameras, experts caution.

“All it really does is give people the illusion of safety,” said Gary Daniels, who heads the American Civil Liberties Union’s regional office in Columbus.

A new chart outlines several of the proposed changes to the USA Patriot Act set to be renewed by the end of 2009.

Confused by all the proposed changes to the Patriot Act ricocheting through the Capitol? The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has put together a handy chart comparing the current law with the various amendments in the House and Senate.

The chart compares proposed amendments (.pdf) to National Security Letters (NSLs) and the so-called “lone wolf” provisions of the Patriot Act. The proposals have only been passed by the judiciary committees, and face further amendments before they hit the full House and Senate for votes.

According to Gregory Nojeim, CDT’s director of project on freedom, security and technology, although neither of the current proposals goes far enough in fixing all of the problems that civil libertarians find in the Patriot Act, they do show improvements.

More stories of U.S. anti-terror laws unfairly affecting those who have no connection to terrorists.

For months, Somalis living in Columbus have complained that it has become increasingly difficult to send money home to family members because of banking-industry fears that the funds could end up with terrorists.

Huntington, JPMorgan Chase and Charter One are among the banks that have closed accounts set up by remittance companies, said Omar Tarazi, a local lawyer who has worked with the Somali American Chamber of Commerce and several remittance companies.

Somali leaders said remittances that refugees send home are a lifeline to families and friends struggling in the war-torn African nation. It has few banks, so remittance companies are crucial to sending money home.

The leaders say banks fear being held liable if authorities discover that the money is funding extremists. The Patriot Act requires due diligence of banks in making sure that funds are tracked.

The Lima News discusses the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror.

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One of those examples lies 90 miles off the shore of Florida. The military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, continues to be a black eye for our country around the world. President Barack Obama promised during last year’s campaign to close the military prison, but now he has found it not so easy to do.

It should be unimaginable that a country that prides itself on the rule of law has held people suspected of being terrorists — and in some cases, known not to be — based only on belief. Yes, our country was attacked. Yes, dangerous people still mean to do us harm. But forgetting our principles, giving up our way of life, lets the terrorists win, as Bush would have put it.

And another is going on here in this country. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Congress rushed through the Patriot Act. It’s a law most commonly used for drug offenses, but Bush got members of Congress to pass without reading an act Republicans rightly refused to pass for President Bill Clinton.

But the nation is at war, right? So what rights to privacy should Americans expect to have? The same ones the U.S. Constitution says we have, actually.

A federal court judge in Toledo ruled that a local charity’s assets were wrongfully frozen when the U.S. government placed them on a terrorist list without any due process or means to challenge the labeling.

The U.S. government violated the constitutional rights of a local Muslim charity when it froze its financial assets in 2006 and prevented it from adequately defending itself against allegations of ties to terrorism, a federal judge in Toledo has ruled.

Judge James Carr released a 100-page order Tuesday that favored arguments by KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development Inc., which sued the government in October.

The ruling, which attorneys have called unprecedented, agreed with the organization’s assertions that KindHearts was denied due process and subjected to the unlawful seizure of its property.

The Dispatch gets it right, until the very end. While RFID chips are a terrifying prospect, a national ID card poses severe challenges to Americans’ privacy rights.

The federal government ought to re-evaluate the identifying technology that is embedded into passports and passport cards and that states are beginning to include in driver’s licenses. As some technology experts have pointed out, radio-frequency identification tags, or RFID, could lead to surreptitious tracking and present the danger of identity theft.

After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, the federal government started issuing passports and passport cards with these tags, which contain a person’s name, nationality, sex, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photograph.

The tags make travel documents more difficult to forge, and they also add convenience: Remote readers at the borders can scan them from several feet away and keep lines moving smoothly. When an RFID reader emits a radio signal, nearby tags automatically transmit their data to the reader.

Finally, the ABJ says that the findings by five federal investigator generals must be explored further immediately.

When Dick Cheney recently defended the Bush White House program of wiretapping without warrants, the former vice president returned to a familiar theme in the fight against terrorism. In early 2006, George W. Bush insisted that the program ”helped prevent attacks and save American lives.” Now the inspectors general of five federal agencies, including the CIA and the Justice Department, have offered their assessment. They found that the program’s effectiveness hasn’t been so clear.

Recall that the Bush team secretly launched the program shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. The New York Times disclosed the operation four years later, in 2005, to much understandable outrage, the administration circumventing laws requiring court approval. The National Security Agency operated the program, allowing eavesdropping on the international communications of Americans.

The inspectors general reported that intelligence officials ”had difficulty citing specific instances” when the wiretapping program contributed to thwarting terrorist plots. If the eavesdropping could be useful, it played a limited role in counterterrorism. The report concluded that other intelligence efforts produced more timely and detailed information.

The Plain-Dealer’s editorial on the government’s warrantless wiretapping program calls for further investigation by the Obama administration.

The five inspectors general of America’s most important justice and national security agencies have issued damning findings on the extent to which ideologically driven insiders in the George W. Bush White House distorted the usual legal checks and balances that govern warrantless surveillance and other domestic spying.

It’s a troubling account of political deception and constitutional subversion.

Yet their “Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance Program” released July 10 has been met with obfuscation from many Republicans and with silence from some Democratic lawmakers more interested in covering up their own inaction and their leadership’s effective acquiescence in some of these practices.

Such a reaction must not stand.

The Blade was one of three Ohio newspapers to editorialize on recent revelations about the Bush administration’s tactics in the War on Terror.

THE revelation by CIA Director Leon Panetta that the agency had a program to assassinate senior al-Qaeda leaders is not terribly surprising. The claim that former Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the CIA to not brief members of the congressional intelligence committees about it demands further inquiry.

In the past, we have argued that President Obama and Congress would be better off devoting their energy to solving current national problems rather than being distracted by questionable activities of the previous administration.
Nonetheless, the CIA program merits a full investigation.

The operation, whatever it was, violated a congressional briefing procedure put in place in the 1970s after previous CIA abuses. That safeguard was put in place to deter renegades like Mr. Cheney, who used self-selected intelligence that turned out to be false to push the United States into an unnecessary war in Iraq.

A new report by the ACLU uncovers threats to Muslim-Americans’ ability to donate to the charity of their choice. The ACLU currently has litigation underway in Toledo challenging the government’s shut down of KindHearts, a local non-profit, without any trial or evidence of wrong-doing.

The fight against terrorism has dealt a harsh blow to Muslim charities and interfered with their donors’ religious freedom, a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union concludes.

The report says statutes that it describes as overly broad and enforced in a discriminatory manner, coupled with a lack of due process, have starved Islamic charities of money and impeded Muslims’ ability to fulfill zakat, their religious requirement to make charitable donations.

The report is based on interviews with more than 100 Muslim community leaders as well as experts on antiterrorism laws and regulations. Though it gives no estimate of the decline in donations to Muslim groups, it says a total of nine Islamic charities have closed as a result of government action against them since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Federal lawmakers are taking a second look at Real ID and may reform or eliminate it soon.

Yielding to a rebellion by states that refused to pay for it, the Obama administration is moving to scale back a federal law passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that was designed to tighten security requirements for driver’s licenses, Homeland Security Department and congressional officials said.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano wants to repeal and replace the controversial $4 billion domestic security initiative known as Real ID, which calls for placing more-secure licenses in the hands of 245 million Americans by 2017. The new proposal, called Pass ID, would be cheaper, less rigorous and partly financed by federal grants, according to draft legislation that Napolitano’s Senate allies plan to introduce as early as Monday.

It appears as though Columbus is abandoning its misguided plans to install more surveillance cameras around the city.

Those surveillance cameras that were coming to a Columbus neighborhood near you won’t arrive any time soon.

The city doesn’t have the money to buy them, said Joel Taylor, its finance and management director.

Mayor Michael B. Coleman pitched neighborhood cameras in 2007 and the city’s capital plan had included $1.55 million for them, said Ken Paul, aide to City Councilman Andrew J. Ginther, who leads the council’s safety committee.

Last year, the council approved $243,827 to buy two surveillance camera platforms for crowd control at large festivals and other events.

ACLU Staff Counsel Carrie Davis discusses the growing trend of police departments and schools using social networking sites to profile young people for certain crimes.

Dayton area teens who use the Web to communicate with their friends could be in for a surprise if their postings include activities that break school rules.

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Police need to exercise restraint in developing suspicions on the basis of what is said on social networking sites, said Carrie Davis, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

“Really, what they’re doing is using people’s speech and associations as a basis for suspicion,” Davis said.

It is a challenge for law enforcement because technology has developed at a rate that outpaced the laws, she said.

“They’re dealing with technologies that didn’t exist when the laws were written,” Davis said. “Most of our privacy laws were written in the 1970s.”

Check out this great editorial from the Youngstown Vindicator on the need to balance liberty and security.

The release of nine memos drafted by Bush administration lawyers in the aftermath of 9/11 provide a cautionary tale of how fear can motivate bureaucrats to advocate the deconstruction of a constitutional republic.

The snapshot provided by the memos is that of a band of Justice Department lawyers who were willing, if not eager, to create an imperial presidency that was not answerable to the Congress, the judiciary or the Constitution, at least not as most people understand the Constitution.