Cryptome is pulling together information on Yahoo executives following a report by Reporters without Borders on how Yahoo helped the Chinese government track down and convict Shi Tao, a journalist for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News), for leaking a government memo.

Privacy International is calling for a boycott of Yahoo as a response.

As if to place a punctuation mark on all of the other recent deaths, it has just been announced that Chief Justice Rehnquist has just passed away. For all the things he has done that I have cursed him for, he at least has been a rational thinker and a fine mind, and will certainly be better than his replacement.

I hope that our civil rights will survive that replacement. I am now thoroughly depressed.

Hat tip for the news to Think Progress.

The first bus full of refugees from New Orleans to arrive at the Reliant Astrodome in Houston was not the result of FEMA work... but the work of an 18- or 20-year-old man (the stories are somewhat conflicting) named Jabbar Gibson. It was covered both in the Houston Chronicle and by Houston's Newschannel 5, (Update: that page has been removed, possibly out of standard expiration policies, so I have set up a mirror) but there is quite a remarkable difference in tone between the two. Although described as "renegade refugees" by the Houston Chronicle, the survivors are otherwise treated sympathetically by the article... but their escape was described as "an extreme act of looting" by Newschannel 5, which then went on to point out:

In the most spectacularly unnoticed shifts of the United States towards becoming a police state, the House voted today not only to renew the Patriot Act provisions for another four years, but to make most of them permanent, with a few to be checked again in ten years.

Billmon has a summary of exactly what this allows the government to do, for those that haven't been paying attention.

It's time to write to your senators (at least those of you not living in a place where even the Democratic senators are hopeless, such as I am), since that's the only place where the damage can even be mitigated at this point. That and make sure your passport is up to date, and you've got a clean exit plan from the country.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, an organization of lawyers "dedicated to protecting and advancing the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights", has made the news recently by coordinating the legal representation for the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, some of whom were picked up far from any battlefield and who have languished there years without any evidence against them being disclosed. Their actions have, along with the recent change in public opinion about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been handled, have been causing increasing numbers of lawyers to go through the arduous process of gaining access to Guantánamo. The additional scrutiny alone seems to have already had a positive effect:

In a pleasant counterpoint to my previous writing about attempts by various officials to block public photography, the New York Transit Authority has decided not to ban photography in subways. This doesn't mean that they won't still hassle photographers, however. The article states:

We'll start with the bad news, so we can end on a lighter hearted note. The Oregon Supreme Court has invalidated the same-sex marriage licenses granted in Multnomah County last year. The reasoning appears to be that the county did not have the authority to remedy (or even decide upon) a matter involving the state constitution, existing statute defined marriages as between a man and a woman, and that the constitutional issue was only with whether or not the "benefits of marriage" could be withheld, not marriage itself. As a result, the 3,000 or so marriages licenses were deemed invalid to begin with.

Heather Mac Donald at the New York Post is writing in defense of the Patriot Act. Her arguments boil down to the claim that of course the United States Government will only use the awesome, deadly power of the Patriot Act for good, because the FBI is fully reformed from Hoover's time, and the government had access to a less powerful variant of one provision (that she claims is the most controversial) before the Patriot Act without degenerating into widespread tyranny.

I had to stop, go back, and reread the article trying to make sure I wasn't missing anything, because it was so absurd on the face of it.

I regularly see or hear about people with the notion that the right to freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment, includes the right to demand that the government endorse you and pay for your advertising, distribution costs, and even your soapbox.

The Associated Press is reporting that a law school student group at a southern Illinois university is suing the university — for failing to provide funding and the official university sanction to their group, which requires members to pledge to adhere to Christian beliefs, including a prohibition against homosexuality. The group can still use campus facilities to meet, they haven't been banned from speaking on campus, but somehow, the fact that this government institution, a taxpayer-funded university, refuses to lend its name and its funding to a religious group means that freedom of speech is being restricted.

I found out through Rox Populi that Austin, Texas is putting up for a vote a measure to ban smoking in most public places. Smokers, such as the ones at Pandagon [Edit: that link doesn't seem to have survived Pandagon's reorganization, but there is an Internet Archive copy available] and Norbizness are already ranting about it, making the usual claims that it is going to destroy the economy, kill off live music, and is a violation of smokers' rights, along with the somewhat less usual claims that the worker health issues are unimportant because they're just the cover for the evil liberal commie non-smoker agenda to burn smokers at the stake and tear down the rock music scene, after taking away all their pot and setting fire to their SUVs.