Friday, August 23, 2002

Black Farmers Seek Settlements From Bias Suit "Black farmers protested on Thursday outside the Department of Agriculture, asking for immediate settlement of their cases from a five-year-old lawsuit." By Elizabeth Becker. [New York Times: National] 4:22:22 PM

Georgia School Board Requires Balance of Evolution and Bible Although the evolution vs. "intelligent design" issue is in constant battle in public schools, in this case the proponents are only seeking to add disclaimers that students should approach evolution "critically." The Georgia chapter of the ACLU seeks to remove the disclaimers. In a survey conducted by Lawrence Lerner of California State University in 2000, both Georgia and Maine were found to have seriously problematic education standards for evolution. [New York Times: National] 4:19:43 PM

FBI Misled Intelligence Court to Avoid Fourth Amendment The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court which approves FBI electronic surveillance requests, said that it was misled "an alarming number of times" in 2001 and 2002 on the intentions of FBI surveillance requests. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FBI has a much lower evidence standard to request a surveillance warrant to be used for counter intelligence purposes, but the information they gather cannot be used for any domestic criminal investigation. The court said that it was frequently misled by the FBI that this "wall of separation" between counterintelligence and criminal investigations was being maintained. Surprisingly, the court actually praised the Ashcroft Justice department for cleaning up these abuses, but the court had also rejected the Justice department's request earlier this year to circumvent the FISA protections, saying that the request was not reasonably designed to protect Americans' privacy. The full opinion is also available. [PDF, link from The Washington Post and Slashdot.] [New York Times: National] 3:34:41 PM

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech ... Every citizen may freely speak, write and publish sentiments on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of this liberty;...

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