Verizon Top Secret FISC Order (pdf)

Verizon Top Secret FISC Order

Pleadings in the above-captioned docket Declassify on: 12 April 2038 This Court having found that the Application of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an Order requiring the production of tangible things from Verizon Business Network Services, Inc. on behalf of MCI Communication Services Inc., d/b/a Verizon Business Services (individually and collectively "Verizon") satisfies the requirements of 50 U.S.C. § 1861, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.

North Carolina Repeals Its Racial Justice Act

ColorLines

Showing proof of systemic racial bias will no longer be an option to spare North Carolina death-row inmates from execution. On Wednesday the North Carolina legislature repealed its Racial Justice Act, the only law of its kind of the nation, which allowed death-row inmates to appeal their cases if they could show that racial bias played a role in their sentencing.

Racial justice advocates have said that the law, which has undergone revisions, is a necessary and important tool which acknowledged the reality of well-documented systemic racial discrimination and racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system. But critics argued that the law is more troublesome than it's worth, and has been exploited by people who are using it as an indirect way to halt executions around the state. Since its passage, critics pointed out, the Racial Justice Act has been invoked by all but two death-row inmates, including those who are white. 

Kentucky, too, has a Racial Justice Act, but it is not retroactive. Defendants may only invoke the law prior to trial. In that way, North Carolina's law was singularly unique. Since it was enacted in 2009, the law has been plagued by controversy and repeal efforts. This week, those voices won.

"It's incredibly sad," Rep. Rick Glazier, a supporter of the law, told the New York Times. "If you can't face up to your history and make sure it's not repeated, it lends itself to being repeated."

NSA Whistleblowers: "All U.S. Citizens" Targeted by Surveillance Program, Not Just Verizon Customers

Democracy Now! 

A leaked court order has revealed the Obama administration is conducting a massive domestic surveillance program by collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon customers. The Guardian newspaper published a classified order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court directing Verizon’s Business Network Services to give the National Security Agency electronic data, including all calling records on an "ongoing, daily basis." The order covers each phone number dialed by all customers, along with location and routing data, and with the duration and frequency of the calls, but not the contents of the communications.

We discuss the news with three guests: Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, and two former National Security Agency employees turned whistleblowers: Thomas Drake and William Binney. In 2010, the Obama administration charged Drake with violating the Espionage Act after he was accused of leaking classified information to the press about waste and mismanagement at the agency. The charges were later dropped. "Where has the mainstream media been? These are routine orders, nothing new," Drake says. "What’s new is we’re seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The PATRIOT Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records from any company."

Binney, who worked at nearly 40 years at the NSA and resigned shortly after the 9/11 attacks, says: "NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at that and said: If Verizon got one, so did everybody else. Which means that they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information of all U.S. citizens."

Chokwe Lumumba Elected Mayor of Jackson, Miss.

DemocracyNow

Just days before the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the city’s voters have elected longtime black nationalist organizer and attorney Chokwe Lumumba to become mayor. Describing himself as a "Fannie Lou Hamer Democrat," Lumumba surprised many political observers by winning the Democratic primary, despite being outspent five to one. He went on to easily win this week’s general election.

Over the past four decades, Lumumba has been deeply involved in numerous political and legal campaigns. As an attorney, his clients have included former Black Panther Assata Shakur and the late hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. As a political organizer, Lumumba served for years as vice president of the Republic of New Afrika, an organization which advocated for "an independent predominantly black government" in the southeastern United States and reparations for slavery. He also helped found the National Black Human Rights Coalition and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. "People should take a note of Jackson, because we have suffered some of the worst kinds of abuses in history," Lumumba says. "But we’re about to make some advances and some strides in the development of human rights and the protection of human rights that I think have not been seen in other parts of the country."

Nasser al-Awlaki to Obama: Why Did You Kill My U.S.-Born Son, Grandson in Drone Strikes?

DemocracyNow

In a broadcast exclusive, Nasser al-Awkali speaks out for the first time since the Obama administration confirmed drones had killed four U.S. citizens, including his son, Anwar, and teenage grandson, Abdulrahman. The cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011. Anwar’s 16-year-old son was killed in another drone strike two weeks later. "If the United States government gave me concrete evidence against Anwar, I would have done my best to convince Anwar to come to Sana’a or to go even to the United States to face a trial. But it was only allegations," al-Awlaki says, noting he believes the United States could have easily captured him alive. We also speak with Anwar’s uncle, Saleh bin Fareed, a Yemeni sheikh and tribal leader. "I am sure I could have handed him over — me and my family — but they never, ever asked us to do that," Fareed says. The story of the al-Awlakis is featured prominently in the new documentary film opening today, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield," directed by Richard Rowley and written by Jeremy Scahill and David Riker.

Laura Ingraham Vows To Campaign Against Any House Republican Supporting Comprehensive (non-white) Immigration Reform

MediaMatters

Fox Host Welcomes 'Coin Operated Negro' Allen West To Network After He Calls Holder "Worse Threat" Than Al Qaeda

MediaMatters

A Fox News host warmly welcomed former Republican Congressman Allen West to "the team" after he said that Attorney General Eric Holder is a bigger threat to Americans than the leader of Al Qaeda.

In a June 5 fundraising email, West claimed that Attorney General Holder was a "bigger threat to our Republic" than terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former deputy of Osama bin Laden, who took control of al Qaeda after bin Laden's death. West also used a quote from the ancient philosopher Cicero to imply that Holder was guilty of treason.

The June 7 edition of Fox & Friends gave West a platform to expand on his smear. West answered co-host Brian Kilmeade's question about why he claimed Holder was as dangerous as al-Zawahiri by pointing to Cicero's claim that a nation "cannot survive treason from within" and "[a] murderer is less to fear, the traitor is the plague." West charged Holder with having "the arrogance of officialdom," and claimed that "When the rule makers are not adhering to the rule of law, then the very foundations of this great nation will start to crumble."

Co-host Brian Kilmeade took a moment at the end of the segment to thank West for his input and welcome him to the Fox News team:

KILMEADE: Lt. Col. Allen West, always swimming against the tide, telling us how he feels. It's great to have you on board and a member of the team. 

Fox News has previously hyped calls for Holder's resignation.

DHS defends suspicionless searches of (non-white people's) laptops and cell phones

Rt

The United States government doesn’t need a reason to seize and search the cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices of Americans entering the country, according to a Department of Homeland Security document provided to the press this week.

The DHS has long insisted that border agents and immigration officers are allowed to collect the electronics of US citizens crossing into the country without reason or cause, but a December 2011 document made public this week once and for all shines a light on a sparsely discussed security-measure that has attracted the attention of privacy advocates and others who’ve equated the practice as a constitutional violation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Associated Press jointly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the document earlier this year after the DHS published a two-page executive summary briefly explaining the results of an audit conducted by the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In that statement, the DHS auditor concluded that Customs and Border Protection agents and officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement were not violating either the First or Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution by seizing the electronics of Americans without clear suspicion of a crime.

“We conclude that CBP’s and ICE’s current border search policies comply with the Fourth Amendment,” Tamara Kessler wrote for the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the summary. “We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits.”

Now with the full 23-page paper in their possession — albeit a version that’s seen a fair share of redactions — the AP and ACLU have published the document in order to expose a post-9/11 policy that has remained intact under President Barack Obama, but to little discussion.

“This is striking,” ACLU fellow Brian Hauss wrote Wednesday, “because it is the first time, as far as we know, that the government has explained why purely suspicionless searches supposedly enhance security.”

The government’s reasoning, according to the document, is that the blanketing ability to collect and assess the devices of anyone thought to be entering the country is crucial to thwart high crimes. That being said, the government attests that requiring actual probable cause before seizing a device would, in the eyes of the DHS, hinder their ability to counter terrorism.

“[A]dding a heightened [suspicion-based] threshold requirement could be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefit,” the document found. “First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches.”

“Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic,” it continued. “Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual's device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.”

Speaking to AP, ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump said the government’s reasoning is “just not good enough” and demonstrates purely inadequate reasoning.

“A purely suspicionless search opens the door to ethnic profiling,” Crump said.

Hauss, the legal fellow for the group’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said the government’s line of thought in defending the policy is faulty for a few different reasons. “DHS claims that giving Americans the opportunity to challenge laptop searches in court would lead to the divulgence of national security secrets, but this is obviously wrong,” he wrote. “The government has numerous resources at its disposal to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information. The ‘state secrets privilege,’ to take just one example that is used in court cases, has been criticized on many grounds, but no one has ever seriously suggested that its protections are too anemic. Although DHS might fear the prospect of being called into open court to explain its actions, executive accountability before the law is the bedrock on which our system of constitutional self-government is built.”

Last year, the US Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling that legally permitted the use of suspicionless roadblocks anywhere within 100 miles of an international border, subjecting nearly 200 million Americans around the country to spontaneous and sporadic inspections of vehicles and their possessions.

On Tuesday, ACLU spokesperson Peter Boogaard told Bloomberg News that a 2009 policy change restricted how long the DHS can hold on to seized electronics. Earlier this week, though, it was suggested that the department did not necessarily see any problems with duplicating that information to be held on to indefinitely.

David House, a founding member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, sued the DHS in 2011 after his computer and cell phone were seized after an international flight he was on landed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. On behalf of the ACLU, House sued DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on the accusation that his belongings were searched solely on the basis of his association with the Support Network, an organization that has paid in full the legal bills for the 25-year-old Army private accused of committing espionage and aiding terrorists by sharing sensitive files with the website WikiLeaks. House’s devices were held for 49 days by ICE — longer than the 30 days allowed legally — and the contents of those electronics were copied by investigations. House dropped his lawsuit last after the DHS agreed to delete its copy of the data.

“They’re giving us exactly what we wanted,” House told Wired.

U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

WashPost

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

London’s Guardian newspaper reported Friday that GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, also has been secretly gathering intelligence from the same internet companies through an operation set up by the NSA.

According to documents obtained by The Guardian, PRISM would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required in Britain to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside of the country.

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas location to another. Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a fundamentally new form. Until then the government had to show probable cause that a particular “target” and “facility” were both connected to terrorism or espionage.

In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data sets as “facilities” and agreed to certify periodically that the government had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of “U.S. persons” data without a warrant.

In a statement issue late Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

Verizon has been giving all of the company's US phone records to NSA

Guardian

For more than a month, Verizon Wireless has regularly provided the National Security Agency with logs of every phone call that Verizon Wireless customers make in the United States, according to a new report by British publication The Guardian.

Several weeks ago a secret federal court apparently created a three-month window that’s still ongoing, and which compels Verizon to hand over to the NSA daily logs for all calls involving its customers in which one or both parties are physically located in the United States.

“The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19,” The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald reported. “Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.”

The Guardian published on its website a copy of the April court order signed by federal judge Roger Vinson. National security reporter Ellen Nakashima of The Washington Post subsequently showed that document to several experts and former government officials, who all agreed The Guardian’s copy of the alleged court order has every appearance of authenticity.

Nakashima wrote for The Washington Post: “The (Guardian) website reproduced a copy of the order, which two former U.S. officials told The Washington Post appears to be authentic. … An expert in this aspect of the law said Wednesday night that the order appears to be a routine renewal of a similar order first issued by the same court in 2006. The expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive issues, said that the order is reissued routinely every 90 days and that it is not related to any particular investigation by the FBI or any other agency.”

“The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual,” The Guardian’s Greenwald further reported. “FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.”

Tech website Mashable speculated that the release of this one top-secret court order may actually create significantly more questions than it answers: “It's unclear how deep this particular rabbit hole goes. This leaked Verizon document may be the sole FISA order of its breadth and magnitude, or it may be the first publicly seen evidence of a larger government-data-gathering regime potentially involving numerous telecommunications providers.”

“The law on which the order explicitly relies is the ‘business records’ provision of the USA Patriot Act,” The Associated Press reported.

Prior to publishing its article Wednesday evening, The Guardian requested comment from the White House, NSA and Justice Department — but all three organizations declined to speak on the matter.

The Guardian’s source for the leaked court order remains unknown. The document — which was supposed to have remained classified until April 12, 2038 — expressly stipulates, “No person shall disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order.”

Reporting for Forbes, Andy Greenberg wrote, “Though the classified, top-secret order comes from the FBI, it clearly states that the data is to be given to the NSA. That means the leaked document may serve as one of the first concrete pieces of evidence that the NSA’s spying goes beyond foreigners to include Americans, despite its charter specifically disallowing surveillance of those within the United States.”

Vermont decriminalizes marijuana possession

[JURIST]

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin [official website] signed a bill [H.200, PDF] on Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana. Vermont became the seventeenth state in the US [Reuters report] to decriminalize marijuana, adding to a growing trend of more lenient drug laws and regulations. Under the new legislation possession of less than one ounce of marijuana (28.3 grams) would be treated as a civil penalty, replacing jail time with a fine similar to one for a traffic ticket. Additionally anyone under the age of 21 caught with small amounts of marijuana would be treated the same as if they were in possession of alcohol. Upon signing the bill Shumlin emphasized the importance of shifting state resources [press release] from drugs such as marijuana to more addictive and harmful opiates like heroin and meth.

Earlier this week the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported [JURIST report] that black people were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people, concluding that such statistics illustrated a racial bias as well as the failure of narcotics law and public policy. In May the Supreme Court of California [official website] ruled [JURIST report] unanimously that local governments may outlaw medical marijuana dispensaries, upholding a ban enacted by the city of Riverside in 2010. In February the Michigan Supreme Court [official website] ruled that the private sale of medical marijuana is illegal [JURIST report]. In December an Arizona judge ruled that the state's medical marijuana law is constitutional [JURIST report] and instructed the state to permit dispensaries to open. On the far end of the spectrum Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana [JURIST report] via state ballot initiatives during the November 2012 election cycle, while Massachusetts also approved the legalization of medical marijuana [Harvard Crimson report] through a similar referendum.

Arizona judge refuses to reconsider order denying driver's licenses to (non-white) immigrants

[JURIST]

US District Judge David Campbell on Thursday refused to reconsider stopping an order [JURIST report] by Governor Jan Brewer [official website] denying driver's licenses to young immigrants who have been granted work permits. Campbell has yet to schedule a trial [Reuters report] on the merits of the contention that the policy instituted by Arizona's Department of Transportation [official website] is illegal. Until such a ruling is issued, participants of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [official website] program will remain unlicensed. Federal officials estimate that potentially 80,000 Arizonans are eligible.

Last month the Connecticut Senate approved legislation [JURIST report] that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses regardless of documentation status. Similar laws have already passed in Maryland, Illinois and California [JURIST reports]. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [advocacy website] filed a lawsuit challenging Brewer's order [JURIST report] in December

Mississippi Prisons Infested with Rats

Colorlines

A state prison in Mississippi is over-crawling with rats, and civil rights lawyers are suing the state over it -- call it Master Splinter's revenge. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Mississippi Department of Corrections for their East Mississippi Correctional Facility for mentally ill inmates in Meridian, a city that's also crawling with civil rights violations in its schools and police department. 

Ryan Nave at Jackson Free Press reports that the rat infestation is so bad there, "that some of the prisoners have adopted the disease-carrying vermin as pets, sometimes taking them on walks around the prison on leashes fashioned of paper clips and string."

Supreme Court upholds Maryland warrantless DNA collection

[JURIST]

The US Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] 5-4 Monday in Maryland v. King [SCOTUSblog backgrounder] that police may collect DNA samples from individuals arrested and charged with serious crimes. The respondent in the case, Alonzo King, challenged the validity of Maryland's DNA Collection Act [text, PDF] after state officials used his DNA to implicate him in a later crime. In an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the majority found that the warrantless DNA collection does not violate arrestees' Fourth Amendment [text] rights. Kennedy wrote:

In light of the context of a valid arrest supported by probable cause respondent’s expectations of privacy were not offended by the minor intrusion of a brief swab of his cheeks. By contrast, that same context of arrest gives rise to significant state interests in identifying respondent not only so that the proper name can be attached to his charges but also so that the criminal justice system can make informed decisions concerning pretrial custody. Upon these considerations the Court concludes that DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure. When officers make an arrest supported by probable cause to hold for a serious offense and they bring the suspect to the station to be detained in custody, taking and analyzing a cheek swab of the arrestee’s DNA is, like fingerprinting and photographing, a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

The ruling reverses the decision of the Maryland Court of Appeals, which had been temporarily stayed [JURIST reports] by Chief Justice John Roberts last July.

Kennedy's majority opinion was joined by the chief justice and by Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. Justice Antonin Scalia filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Scalia criticized the court's comparison of DNA collection to other techniques, such as fingerprinting: "The Court's assertion that DNA is being taken, not to solve crimes, but to identify those in the State's custody, taxes the credulity of the credulous. And the Court's comparison of Maryland's DNA searches to other techniques, such as fingerprinting, can seem apt only to those who know no more than today’s opinion has chosen to tell them about how those DNA searches actually work."

Mass grave of Non-whites uncovered in Israel's Jaffa

Where are my rights? White Woman Records Police Searching, Barging into her Home in Case of Mistaken Identity

BlackListedNews

White Party (Republican) website tweets, deletes ‘HNIC’ reference

Grio

The conservative website The Daily Caller suffered a social media fail on Thursday, when the site’s Twitter account featured a shorthand for the n-word.

The original tweet, posted at just before 5 p.m. Thursday, was directed at Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus. It linked to a story on the Daily Caller website about a rapper naming himself “Rhymes Priebus” after the RNC leader. “Rhymes,” the Chicago-based aspiring rapper, reportedly drove members of President Obama’s press pool during a recent presidential visit to his hometown.

The tweet jokingly asked “Hey @Reince, why didn’t you tell us you were moonlighting as a rapper? Turns out our GOP Chair is HNIC…” HNIC is a slang term meaning “Head Nigger or Negro in Charge.”

Whoever posted the Tweet must have quickly rethought it, since they deleted it as short time later, tweeted an apology, and posted a replacement:

 

The Daily Caller was founded by former CNN “Crossfire” co-host Tucker Carlson.

FBI Reveals Another Round of Suspicious Letters to Obama, CIA

CitizensforLegitGov

As federal authorities question a person of interest in the mailing of possibly poison-laced letters to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Obama, the FBI revealed late Thursday that they arrested a Washington man for allegedly sending his own group of suspicious letters to five targets including the President, an Air Force base and to the CIA. According to an FBI statement, the bureau arrested Matthew Buquet, 38, of Spokane last week after authorities intercepted a letter to a Spokane federal judge that later tested positive for the ricin toxin. He was charged with a single count for allegedly mailing threatening communications, but the FBI said four other "similar" letters were sent around the same time to a Spokane post office, the White House, a Washington Air Force base and to the CIA.

Wisconsin appeals court (all white judges) rules voter ID law is constitutional

Jurist

The Wisconsin Court of Appeals [official website] for the Fourth District ruled [opinion, PDF] Thursday that Wisconsin Act 23 [text], a law requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls, is constitutional. The ruling reverses Dane County Circuit [official website] Judge Richard Niess's March 2012 decision, which held [JURIST report] that the law's photo ID requirement would disenfranchise voters who lack the resources to obtain such ID. The law requires [AP report] voters to show either a state-issued ID card, valid driver's license, US passport, a student ID that expires within two years or a military ID.

Voter ID laws [JURIST backgrounder] have become increasingly controversial and commonplace throughout the US. There are now more than 30 US States [NCSL backgrounder] that require voters to present some form of ID at the polls, including multiple states that have passed laws requiring photo ID. In April the Arkansas House of Representatives overrode [JURIST report] Governor Mike Beebe's veto [JURIST report] of a bill requiring voters to provide photo ID in a 52-45 vote, making the bill an official Arkansas law. In March Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell signed into law [JURIST report] legislation requiring voters in the state present photo ID prior to voting. Lawyers for Pennsylvania and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania [advocacy website] reached an accord in February extending the temporary injunction [JURIST report] of the Pennsylvania voter ID laws and allowing state residents to vote in the upcoming primary and special elections without submitting ID.

Connecticut senate approves driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants

[JURIST]

The Connecticut Senate [official website] approved legislation [HB 6495] Thursday that would allow undocumented immigrants to obtain driver's licenses regardless of documentation status. If signed by Governor Dannel Malloy [official website], the bill would allow those immigrants without proper documents from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office [official website] the ability to obtain a driver's license for the purpose of highway safety. Applicants would have to prove identity with a passport or other document and show that they had been living in Connecticut for at least 90 days, but would not need to show permission from the US...