By The Associated Press

NEW YORK — The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn against the Department of Homeland Security as well as U.S. customs and immigration authorities.

The lawsuit says more than 6,500 people have had their electronic devices searched as they crossed U.S. borders since October 2008. Nearly half of those searched were U.S. citizens.

In May, a graduate student in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal was detained for several hours as his electronic devices were searched, the suit says. The encounter badly frightened the student, according to the suit.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers filed the lawsuit on behalf of the National Press Photographers Association, criminal defense lawyers and the student: Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old French-American citizen whose laptop computer was confiscated at the Canadian border.

The civil rights groups said photographers regularly travel abroad with cameras, laptops and media storage devices to cover global news stories and rely on their ability to communicate confidentially with sources. They said many of the defense lawyers have similar confidentiality concerns as they travel abroad with laptops, blackberries and cell phones.

The lawsuit says policies adopted by U.S. government agencies permit the search of all electronic devices that “contain information,” including laptops, cameras, mobile phones, ‘smart’ phones and data storage devices.

The policies are particularly invasive since electronic devices carry “vast amounts of personal and sensitive information that reveals a vivid picture of travelers’ personal and professional lives, including their intimate thoughts, private communications, expressive choices and privileged or confidential work product,” the lawsuit says.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler said he could not comment on the lawsuit. He said the department uses secondary inspections of electronic media “in limited circumstances to ensure that dangerous people and unlawful goods do not enter our country.”

He said the department “has been transparent about these searches” with the policies and a privacy impact assessment of them available on the department’s website.

ACLU staff attorney Melissa Goodman said the searches do not make people safer.

“Americans do not surrender their privacy and free-speech rights when they travel abroad,” she said.

The lawsuit highlights what Abidor went through at the U.S.-Canadian border as he traveled May 1 on an Amtrak train between Montreal and New York City to visit family after completing his academic year.

The lawsuit says a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer asked him a series of questions before he was asked to go with his belongings to the cafe car, where five or six other officers joined the questioning as he was ordered to provide access to his laptop.

The officer questioned him about some personal pictures and images of Hamas and Hezbollah rallies that he had downloaded as part of his research for his doctorate in the modern history of Shiites in Lebanon before he was searched, handcuffed and taken to a detention cell, the lawsuit says.

He was released after about three hours, leaving him “frightened, disturbed and severely upset” as he continued to New York on a bus, the lawsuit says.

The civil rights groups said that when Abidor’s laptop was returned 11 days later, there was evidence that many of his personal files, including research, photos and chats with his girlfriend, had been searched.

In a release, Abidor said: “This has had an extreme chilling effect on my work, studies and private life — now I will have to go to untenable lengths to assure that my academic sources remain confidential and my personal dignity is maintained when I travel.”

The lawsuit asks a judge to declare the policies unconstitutional and to stop them from being carried out when there is no reasonable suspicion.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press

FAC Content Use Policy

The New York Times Magazine
September 5, 2010
By Don Van Nattat Jr., Jo Becker, and Graham Bowley

IN NOVEMBER 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World.

The stories were banal enough (Prince William pulled a tendon in his knee, one revealed). But the royal aides were puzzled as to how News of the World had gotten the information, which was known among only a small, discreet circle. They began to suspect that someone was eavesdropping on their private conversations.

By early January 2006, Scotland Yard had confirmed their suspicions. An unambiguous trail led to Clive Goodman, the News of the World reporter who covered the royal family, and to a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who also worked for the paper. The two men had somehow obtained the PIN codes needed to access the voice mail of the royal aides.

Scotland Yard told the aides to continue operating as usual while it pursued the investigation, which included surveillance of the suspects’ phones. A few months later, the inquiry took a remarkable turn as the reporter and the private investigator chased a story about Prince William’s younger brother, Harry, visiting a strip club. Another tabloid, The Sun, had trumpeted its scoop on the episode with the immortal: “Harry Buried Face in Margo’s Mega-Boobs. Stripper Jiggled . . . Prince Giggled.”

As Scotland Yard tracked Goodman and Mulcaire, the two men hacked into Prince Harry’s mobile-phone messages. On April 9, 2006, Goodman produced a follow-up article in News of the World about the apparent distress of Prince Harry’s girlfriend over the matter. Headlined “Chelsy Tears Strip Off Harry!” the piece quoted, verbatim, a voice mail Prince Harry had received from his brother teasing him about his predicament.

The palace was in an uproar, especially when it suspected that the two men were also listening to the voice mail of Prince William, the second in line to the throne. The eavesdropping could not have gone higher inside the royal family, since Prince Charles and the queen were hardly regular mobile-phone users. But it seemingly went everywhere else in British society. Scotland Yard collected evidence indicating that reporters at News of the World might have hacked the phone messages of hundreds of celebrities, government officials, soccer stars — anyone whose personal secrets could be tabloid fodder. Only now, more than four years later, are most of them beginning to find out.

Click here for the rest of the story.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company    FAC Content Use Policy

American Civil Liberties Union
Press Release
September 7, 2010

NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Layers (NACDL) today filed a lawsuit challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy permitting border agents to search, copy and detain travelers’ electronic devices at the border without reasonable suspicion. DHS asserts the right to look though the contents of a traveler’s electronic devices – including laptops, cameras and cell phones – and to keep the devices or copy the contents in order to continue searching them once the traveler has been allowed to enter the U.S., regardless of whether the traveler is suspected of any wrongdoing.

“These days, almost everybody carries a cell phone or laptop when traveling, and almost everyone stores information they wouldn’t want to share with government officials – from financial records to love letters to family photos,” said Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “Innocent Americans should not be made to feel like the personal information they store on their laptops and cell phones is vulnerable to searches by government officials any time they travel out of the country.”

Today’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), whose members include television and still photographers, editors, students and representatives of the photojournalism industry; NACDL, which is a plaintiff as well as counsel on the case; and Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old dual French-American citizen who had his laptop searched and confiscated at the Canadian border.

Abidor was travelling from Montreal to New York on an Amtrak train in May when he had his laptop searched and confiscated by Custom and Border Patrol officers. Abidor, an Islamic Studies Ph.D. student, was questioned, handcuffed, taken off the train and kept in a holding cell for several hours before being released without charge. When his laptop was returned 11 days later, there was evidence that many of his personal files, including research, photos and chats with his girlfriend, had been searched.

“As an American, I’ve always been taught that the Constitution protects me against unreasonable searches and seizures. But having my laptop searched and then confiscated for no reason at all made me question how much privacy we actually have,” said Abidor. “This has had an extreme chilling effect on my work, studies and private life – now I will have to go to untenable lengths to assure that my academic sources remain confidential and my personal dignity is maintained when I travel.”

Members of both NACDL and NPPA have also been subjected to the DHS search policy, which interferes with their ability to do their work. NPPA members regularly travel abroad with cameras, laptops and media storage devices to cover global news stories, including wars, protests and foreign elections, and rely on the ability to communicate confidentially with sources. Many NACDL members travel abroad with laptops, blackberries and cell phones as part of their vigorous representation of their clients, and have an ethical duty to safeguard the confidentiality of their clients’ information.

“Unchecked government fishing expeditions into the constitutionally protected materials on an innocent traveler’s laptop or cell phone interfere with the ability of many Americans to do their jobs and do nothing to make us safer,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Americans do not surrender their privacy and free speech rights when they travel abroad.”

Documents obtained by the ACLU in response to a separate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records related to the DHS policy reveal that more than 6,600 travelers, nearly half of whom are American citizens, were subjected to electronic device searches at the border between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010.

The ACLU, NYCLU and NACDL filed today’s complaint against Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Alan Bersin and Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement John T. Morton in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Attorneys on the case are Crump and Goodman of the ACLU, Christopher Dunn and Arthur Eisenberg of the NYCLU and Michael Price of NACDL.

Materials related to the lawsuit, including the complaint and a video featuring ACLU lawyer Catherine Crump and client Pascal Abidor talking about the case, is online at: www.aclu.org/bordersearches

The documents released in the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit are available online at: www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-v-dhs

FAC Content Use Policy

Los Angeles Times
August 28, 2010
By Molly Hennessy-Fiske

In a fight that could have wide-ranging implications, Los Angeles County supervisors are pushing to see confidential medical records used by county doctors to evaluate their peers to determine whether they have met accepted standards of care, saying they need the information to ensure patient safety and justify settling malpractice claims against the county.

Access to such information emerged as an issue earlier this year after concerns were raised about peer review at Olive View- UCLA Medical Center. An anonymous letter to state regulators alleged that among other problems at the county hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, doctors and staff were not meeting to discuss medical mistakes and that peer review was “missing.”

In May, Supervisors Michael D. Antonovich and Gloria Molina sent a letter to John Schunhoff, interim chief of the county’s Department of Health Services, requesting access to relevant peer review records at Olive View. They cited county counsel’s advice that they had authority to review the documents “for the purposes of monitoring and oversight.”

Soon after, hospital officials made peer review documents for the last year for the neonatal unit available to supervisors’ deputies. Antonovich’s health deputy, Fred Leaf, said they were satisfied that peer review was being conducted and gave officials more time to comply with a request to see a list of all peer-reviewed cases at the hospital over the last two years.

Olive View officials have since refused to release records, a position supported by leaders at the county’s three other hospitals. They are negotiating with the county’s chief executive, William T Fujioka, who declined to comment.

Schunhoff said part of the purpose of peer review is for doctors to root out mistakes and create corrective plans to prevent them countywide. Opening up peer review to outside scrutiny could make doctors and staff reluctant to report such mistakes, he said.

“We have to maintain that confidentiality but ensure that information becomes a part of corrective action and is shared across facilities,” Schunhoff said.

Olive View administrators sent an e-mail to doctors Tuesday reminding them of their responsibility to prepare for and attend peer review committee meetings.

Administrators had sent an e-mail to members of the professional staff association that represents doctors to announce a special meeting with its lawyer Sept. 3 to discuss supervisors’ request for what the association called “unprecedented access” to peer review. The association at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center also called a special meeting Thursday to discuss the issue.

A Harbor-UCLA doctor who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation said he and his peers are outraged, afraid that opening peer review to supervisors could lead doctors to stop reporting problems and prompt more malpractice lawsuits.

“The concept of peer review is that I can confidentially review my colleagues and if I see a problem with my colleague, I can report it,” the doctor said. “If they force us to do this, then I’m going to be very reluctant to [report peers] because of the consequences. Who knows where these reports go, the medical and legal aspects.”

Patient safety experts and hospital industry officials said opening peer review to outside scrutiny would be unprecedented and could have a chilling effect on doctors’ willingness to honestly assess their peers.

Dr. Robert Wachter, a patient safety expert at UC San Francisco, said it would be “extraordinarily unusual for members of a board of supervisors to be looking at individual peer review reports.”

“It’s a hornet’s nest that’s being opened here,” said Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California.

But Molina says she needs to see such records to identify patient safety problems and justify settling multimillion-dollar medical malpractice claims. A study released Aug. 13 showed that the county has faced fewer malpractice claims in recent years yet paid out more, about $12 million last year compared with about $8 million in 2007.

“The biggest issue for me is the risk management aspect of it — that is, let’s not do it again,” Molina said. “Because if you don’t know, you can’t correct it.”

Molina said she learned from the board’s experience closing troubled Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center not to trust medical staff to police themselves. She questioned whether there was enough state and county oversight of peer review.

“The state has all sorts of processes for transparency, accountability of doctors and all medical personnel,” she said. “But again, it’s only as effective as the reports of the information they get.”

During the last four years, the county has settled more than a dozen Olive View malpractice cases, county records show, with the costliest involving botched deliveries. State regulators have fined Olive View in connection with four medical errors and three failures to report medical errors since 2007.

The regulators fined Olive View $25,000 in 2008, after a patient whose gallbladder was removed at the hospital developed a massive infection and died. The hospital’s corrective action plan promised “additional peer review” of the physician responsible for supervising a resident who cared for the woman. In January 2010, supervisors approved a settlement with the patient’s relatives for $382,500.

The same day, supervisors agreed to pay a $5.9-million settlement to a mother after an obstetrician delayed her cesarean delivery at Olive View in April 2008 and one of her twins sustained a brain injury, according to county records. State regulators faulted the hospital’s nurses for failing to advocate for the patient.

A year before, supervisors agreed to pay a $4.5-million settlement to the mother of a baby who sustained severe brain damage after a prolonged cesarean delivery at Olive View in September 2007, according to county records. The hospital was later fined $1,600 for its 15-day delay in reporting the botched delivery to state regulators.

According to records reviewed by The Times, the same obstetrician delivered both babies and has no record of discipline or malpractice claims with the state medical board. She has since left Olive View and is now working at Kaiser Permanente’s Woodland Hills Medical Center, staff said.

Supervisors Don Knabe and Mark Ridley-Thomas said they were willing to compromise with doctors on a policy that allows the board to see portions of peer review documents. Supervisors have also floated the options of removing doctors’ names, inviting medical staff to supervise the review or having a medical expert review the records for the board.

“My hope is that this can be resolved without a needless legal battle,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times    FAC Content Use Policy

August 25, 2010

The Wall Street Journal

By Geoffrey A. Fowler

Places is a feature that lets users share their physical locations with Facebook friends, but it also allows users to identify friends at those locations. By default, each Facebook member can be tagged at a location by friends until the member changes his or her account’s privacy settings.

The result is that a Facebook member can use a smartphone to “check in” at a nearby location and record that another friend is at that place as well, whether that person is actually at the location or not. That prompted some privacy advocates to advise Facebook users to disable the feature soon after its debut.

Cameron Hiebert, a 36-year-old in Lima, Ohio, said he likes the idea of being able to share his location on Facebook, but not the fact that friends can tag each other, even if they’re not physically at that place with them. As an experiment, he created a fictional place called “Cameron’s Naughty Little House of Perversion and Love,” and tagged five of his friends (as well as himself) as being at that place.

“It is a huge privacy concern,” he said, noting he had already turned off the setting that would allow others to tag him.

Facebook, which changed its privacy controls following a torrent of criticism in May, defended the new feature and said it had consulted a dozen privacy and safety groups before it went live on Wednesday with Places.

(This story and related background material will be available on The Wall Street Journal Web site, WSJ.com.)

Tagging friends in status updates, Facebook said, was a norm on the website even before Places. With location, the company said, it added notification for the person being tagged and the ability to remove individual tags or turn off tagging completely. It also requires that the person doing the tagging place themselves at the location.

“If you have a friend that is tagging you in illicit places, you can tell them to stop, or you can de-friend that person, or block them entirely,” said Ana Yang, a Facebook Places product marketing manager.

Many privacy groups said they were pleased that Facebook had limited Places to voluntary check-ins–rather than constant real-time tracking of users’ locations–and also that the service set defaults for much of the shared information to be limited to a user’s circle of friends.

Still, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, one of the groups briefed by Facebook about the product before its launch, said Facebook didn’t give users adequate controls.

“After all of the privacy uproar earlier this year, Facebook is clearly thinking more about privacy–that is why we were surprised and disappointed that they did not resolve these issues that were technically possible,” said Nicole Ozer, the group’s technology and civil-liberties policy director.

She said Facebook should make it easier for users to control the feature that allows their friends to tag them at a location by providing a clear “don’t allow” option when a friend first tags them at a location. Currently, a user can accept the tag or defer the decision. But if no action is taken, the default is for the information to be shared with friends.

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the company has had ongoing discussions with privacy and safety groups. For the Places launch, it briefed a wider group that included some past critics. “We always recognized that location information is one of the most sensitive topics,” he said. “We feel good about the result.”

On Friday, Facebook brought two of the privacy advocates it consulted, from ConnectSafely.org and the Future of Privacy Forum, onto a stage with them for an online video broadcast from the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters to highlight the company’s privacy efforts.

During the broadcast, Larry Magid, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, a group that addresses cyber-bullying and other youth online issues, said he had recommended that Facebook add additional precautions for minors using Places.

He suggested that it automatically limit use by minors under the age of 18 of a “here now” feature, which broadcasts one’s location to a wide set of Facebook users also in that pace. Facebook complied, and Places automatically limits sharing such information just to those minors’ confirmed friends.

“We appreciate the fact that you actually took our advice,” Magid told Facebook’s Yang at the event. “We weren’t just window dressing.”

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital freedoms group in San Francisco that was prebriefed about Places, described the product launch as a “good step forward” from the way that Facebook has launched new products in the past.

“We had a constructive dialogue with Facebook,” he said, though the company didn’t integrate all of his suggestions. On Thursday, Opsahl posted a blog post that warned users to think about the implications of sharing location with everyone from ex-lovers to business competitors.

Ray Lin, a 24-year-old in New York City, said he liked the idea that Places would let him tell friends where he is without calling or sending a text message. “It is an easy way to say, ‘Hey, I am here,’” he said, adding he was OK with the idea that friends could tag him, so long as he could remove the tags later if he wanted.

Todd Rosenthal, a 38-year-old Facebook user in Sacramento, said he wasn’t going to use Places. “I don’t really have any desire for people to know where I am all the time,” he said, adding he felt Facebook’s default privacy settings were too loose.

(Robert A. Guth contributed to this article.)

FAC Content Use Policy

San Bernardino Sun
August 23, 2010
By Mike Cruz

A Superior Court judge ruled that the wife of former Sheriff Gary Penrod was just a private citizen – and not a public figure – when a High Desert newspaper publisher ran articles about her counseling business during trial proceedings Monday in her multimillion- dollar libel lawsuit.

The ruling Monday from Judge Frank Gafkowski appears to favor Nancy Bohl, who filed a lawsuit in June 2000 against Valley Wide Newspapers publisher Raymond Pryke based on a series of articles he ran about Bohl’s business, The Counseling Team, and her relationship with Penrod.

The ruling and others from the judge stating that parts of two articles were “libel per se” and discussing a public concern came during lawyers’ arguments about pretrial motions in San Bernardino Superior Court.

“Just the fact that she is going out with him or married to him does not make her a public figure,” Bohl’s lawyer John Rowell argued in court.

The judge agreed. Even Bohl’s contract with San Bernardino County to provide counseling services to sheriff’s deputies was not enough to tilt the scale, according to the court.

Rowell said his client started her business, The Counseling Team, in 1985. The articles ran between June 1999 and April 2000 in Pryke’s community newspapers, such as the Hesperia Reporter and Adelanto Bulletin.

With headlines like “Sleeping with Penrod Pays Off” and “Sheriff Penrod Spies on Deputies,” the articles accused Bohl of leaking confidential details from counseling sessions to management at the sheriff’s department and using her relationship with Penrod to get a county contract.

Bohl has denied the allegations.

Gafkowski said the allegations about Bohl, her relationships and county contract erupted during a very short period of time and were not raised before publicly.

“She’s drawn into this involuntarily,” the judge said.

Pryke attended the hearing Monday, sitting at the table before the judge and next to his lawyer, Frank Lizarraga. Bohl and Penrod were not present.

Lizarraga argued that Bohl voluntarily put herself in the public vortex when she entered a relationship with Penrod, a public official, in 1999. News of a possible conflict were also covered in other Inland Empire newspapers, he said.

As a result of the relationship between Bohl and Penrod, the county had to change the contracting process for her business. The judge said issues may rise to level of a public concern but do not make her a public figure.

Lizarraga argued that Bohl became at least a limited public figure prior to the publication of the articles because of the vortex.

“No one forced her to have the relationship,” said Pryke’s lawyer. Bohl also thrust herself into the public vortex when she and Penrod purchased property together.

But the judge explained that Bohl did not inject herself purposely into the issues, nor did she seek to influence the situation, as a limited public figure would.

“I don’t have a situation where Ms. Bohl did anything to bring attention to herself,” Gafkowski said.

Jury selection could begin later this week, and testimony may start next week.

A judge ruled in 2005 that the articles impugned the integrity of Bohl and The Counseling Team and ordered Pryke to pay $3 million. An appeal in 2007 overturned the decision.

Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Newspaper Group   FAC Content Use Policy

The Courier Mail

August 20, 2010

By Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson

In a warning experts have labelled hypocritical, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company knew “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, and the implications of sharing that information could be severe.

Internet analysts warn information sharing will skyrocket in the next 10 years and personal information, opinions, photos and videos are likely to haunt more than just teens.

The results could affect employment prospects and personal relationships, and open internet users to property or identity theft.

Deakin University communications lecturer Ross Monaghan said online service providers like Google and Facebook were “not doing enough to protect privacy because it is in their best interests to collect information about us” for marketing purposes.

Mr Monaghan warned while users might be somewhat protected now, new technology would make it harder to hide information shared on the web.

“Face recognition for photos is not widely available on the web, but in 10 years’ time any photos or videos of you online will be available for searching,” he said.

“Facebook is adding face recognition to their photo galleries quite soon, and if it doesn’t handle that well there could be serious implications for people’s privacy.”

The social networking leader, with more than 500 million active users, also launched a location-based service in the United States this week.

Curtin University information technology lecturer Dr Peter Dell said users publicly sharing their location online “does raise the stakes”.

Sharing details of regular stops could give stalkers a reasonable chance of intercepting a target and could also lead to property crime as users announced they were not at home, he said.

Even so, encouraging people to change their names to escape online histories was riddled with legal and social problems, RMIT information technology lecturer John Lenarcic said.

“I think governments would get a bit irritated with that, because if people regularly changed their names there could be security hassles,” he said. “It’s bordering on irresponsibility to say a large group of people should change their identities.”

Mr Lenarcic instead recommended that internet users should exercise care when sharing information, and monitor children’s use of technology.

By The Associated Press

BOSTON — U.S. Immigration Judge Leonard Shapiro blasted the leak by the unidentified official in his 29-page ruling granting asylum to Zeituni Onyango in May. His written decision was released this week through the Freedom of Information Act and first was reported by The Boston Globe.

Shapiro found that a federal government official disclosed Onyango’s immigration status and her relationship to Obama to the Associated Press three days before the November 2008 election in which Obama was elected as the first black president.

The AP’s story stated that Onyango, the half sister of Obama’s late father, had been living illegally in the United States after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years earlier. Information about Onyango’s case was disclosed and confirmed by two sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official. Onyango, 58, has been living in public housing in Boston.

Shapiro called the disclosure “a reckless and illegal violation of her right to privacy which has exposed her to great risk,” and he criticized the official for using the information for political reasons.

“The disclosure intentionally linked the Respondent’s status as an asylum applicant with President Obama’s presidential campaign, and the effect was to politicize confidential information about the Respondent which the United States government had no authority to release,” Shapiro wrote. “The illegality and political ramifications of this breach were made apparent when, following the breach, President (George W.) Bush swiftly issued a directive requiring federal agents to obtain high-level approval before arresting fugitive immigrants.”

Shapiro found that because Onyango’s identity and status were disclosed, she would be a target in Kenya not only for those who oppose the United States and Obama but for members of the Kenyan government “who oppose President Obama’s politics and/or his ethnicity, which the Respondent shares.”

In 2008 the Department of Homeland Security began an internal investigation into the leak. The investigation is expected to be completed soon.

In his ruling, Shapiro said the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged Onyango was identified in the news media as an asylum applicant but did not concede the disclosure was made by a U.S. government official.

DHS argued the disclosure “did not create a new risk of harm” to Onyango because the AP article did not reveal any facts about her asylum claim and because she and her attorney later gave some details about the claim to the news media.

The agency said the disclosure did not put her at risk, citing other family members in Kenya who have not been harmed. It also noted the Kenyan government celebrated Obama’s election as president and sponsored a delegation of several family members to travel to the 2009 presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C.

Shapiro, however, said Onyango’s relationship to Obama is distinct from her Kenyan family members’ relationships to him because she has lived in the United States since 2000 and applied for U.S. asylum.

One of Onyango’s Cleveland-based lawyers, Scott Bratton, said the asylum process is confidential, in part to protect people who may be sent back to their home countries. Leaking the information just before the election put Onyango at greater risk, he said.

“She is known to everybody now,” he said. “She is known to have applied for asylum. She’s been thrust into the spotlight, and because of that she has a fear of returning.”

In Obama’s memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” he affectionately referred to Onyango as Auntie Zeituni and described meeting her during his 1988 trip to Kenya.

Onyango’s case inflamed the national debate over immigration, with some questioning whether Onyango had been given special treatment because of her relationship with the president. The White House has said Obama had no involvement in the case.

Onyango initially came to the U.S. in 2000. Her first request for political asylum in 2002 was rejected, and she was ordered deported in 2004. But she didn’t leave the country and continued to live in Boston.

A judge later agreed to suspend her deportation order and reopen her asylum case.

Kansas City Star
Aug. 16, 2010
By Mark Morris

Missouri’s laws restricting protests near funerals are unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled Monday.

The ruling from Chief U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan found that two 2006 laws that sought to regulate such protests violated First Amendment free-speech rights.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, daughter of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps, filed the federal lawsuit. Church members often have picketed service members’ funerals, alleging that God is punishing America for tolerating homosexuality, abortion, divorce and other issues.

The laws never have been strictly enforced in Missouri.

Copyright 2010 Kansas City Star and wire services

Los Angeles Times
August 15, 2010
By Lisa Girion

Los Angeles County officials are investigating information released regarding a string of child death and neglect cases involving the Department of Children and Family Services. The information appeared in a series of Los Angeles Times stories.

On Tuesday, county Chief Executive William T Fujioka will ask the Board of Supervisors to direct all departments to aid an “inquiry related to the inappropriate disclosure of confidential child welfare information, and, in consultation with the County Counsel, report back on the findings.”

The meeting’s agenda also states that comments will be taken on the proposal.

Two sources familiar with the probe said the inquiry was authorized more than a week ago and was all but complete. The investigation was launched during a closed meeting of the Board of Supervisors without public notice, the sources said. The results of the meeting were never formally publicized.

Fujioka did issue a statement saying “the sole basis for our review at this point in time is to determine if any single or group of county employees released information in violation of the relevant sections of the Welfare and Institutions Act. That act speaks to the confidentiality and potential liability placed upon the county should that information be released by its employees.”

Jim Ewert, legal counsel for the California Newspaper Publishers Assn., said the vote authorizing the investigation appeared to have violated the Brown Act, the state’s open-meetings law, in at least two ways. If the county discussed or took action on a proposal without notifying the public at least of the general nature of the action, then it violated the Brown Act.

Also, the topic itself doesn’t qualify for a special, non-public meeting, Ewert said. The law sharply limits the nature of government deliberation and action that can occur outside the public purview. The basic rule is that all government actions and discussions are open to the public with a few exceptions, such as individual performance reviews, hiring and firing decisions.

A proposal to launch an investigation into the source of information used in newspaper stories would not qualify for closed-door treatment, Ewert said.

“It’s a clear violation,” he said. “I’m not aware of any exemption in the Brown Act that would permit them to discuss that in closed session. So, even if they had properly agenda-ized the vote, it would still be in violation of the Brown Act.”

The inquiry into The Times’ sources comes amid tightening secrecy surrounding information about children who die of abuse or neglect after coming to the attention of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services.

Department Director Trish Ploehn has grown reluctant to share documentation about the deaths even with the Board of Supervisors, preferring to brief them orally or not at all.

Additionally, a senior deputy county counsel declared the topic of child fatalities off-limits at a meeting earlier this month of the county’s Commission for Children and Families when commissioners asked for basic statistics regarding the deaths. County Counsel Andrea Ordin said later that her deputy erred in squelching the discussion and promised that the data would be released, but the department had yet to do so.

Ewert, the newspaper association lawyer, questioned the supervisors’ priorities in allocating county resources on an investigation into the release of information amid far more troubling reports about the operations and failures of the department. He said the investigation made it look as if the county was “circling the wagons,” rather than focusing on how it could better protect children.

Ewert also said that the investigation could have a chilling effect on the willingness of county employees to relay legitimate and public information to The Times.

Copyright 2010 Los Angeles Times