American Informant

Part of my childhood was spent in Baghdad, Iraq, during the rule of Saddam Hussein. At that time, the regime offered free and universal education and healthcare. Literacy rates in the country surpassed much of the Arabic-speaking world and, indeed, the Global South. As the celebrated Egyptian intellectual, Taha Hussein, famously put it: “Cairo writes; Beirut prints; and Baghdad reads.” Booksellers were everywhere in Baghdad. Its people read voraciously and passionately debated literature, poetry, and a range of other subjects. But what struck me, even as a child, was the absence of sustained talk about politics in bookshops, markets, and other public spaces. I knew that adults could not stay away from the topic of politics in more intimate, private settings, where a deeper level of trust usually reigned. Once you entered the public sphere, however, discretion about politics—and especially local politics—clearly became the better part of valor. Iraqi society had been so thoroughly infiltrated by elements of Hussein’s intelligence services that ordinary people knew to tread with extreme caution. After all, the person standing within earshot at a bustling Baghdad market, overhearing your conversation—or maybe even your direct interlocutor— could be an informant. And the stakes were high: incarceration, torture, or death. That was an early introduction to the valency of informants—their capacity to interact with the society that surrounds them and their distorting effect on it. The lesson has colored my subsequent work on surveillance, including this reflection on the contemporary role of informants in the United States

Positive rhetoric, prejudiced policy: the contradiction of Islamophobia in American government after 9-11.

Following the tragic terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, local and national leaders responded to the security crisis by uniting the country under the American ideals of freedom and democracy while condemning the Islamic terrorist group responsible. With beliefs rooted in historical American and European prejudice, Western scholarship promoted a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West wherein the cultures’ supposed irreconcilable differences would inevitably lead to warfare. Simultaneously, many Americans grew suspicious of Muslims after the attacks, including government officials. As hate crimes against Muslim and Middle Eastern Americans soared in the U.S., government leaders used positive rhetoric to discourage violence and further unite the country’s citizens. At the same time, however, these leaders implemented discriminatory policy and law enforcement practices like the U.S. Patriot Act that disproportionately targeted Muslim immigrants and citizens from Muslim-majority countries in the name of counterterrorism. These Islamophobic sentiments and policies have only continued to grow under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, with hate crimes and anti-Muslim sentiment once again skyrocketing in 2016. This powerful disconnect between governmental rhetoric and policy has allowed for decades-long discrimination against Muslim and Middle Eastern citizens to continue to this day

Hacking Qualified Immunity: Camera Power and Civil Rights Settlements

Excessive force cases are intensely fact-specific. Did the suspect resist, necessitating the use offorce? What threat did the suspect pose, if any? Was the use of force excessive in light of the situation? These are judgment calls based on myriad facts that differ from case to case. Establishing what really happened forces courts and juries to wade into a fact-bound morass filled with fiercely conflicting defendant-said, police-said battles. Now an evidentiary transformation is underway. We are in an era where the probability of a police encounter being recorded has never been higher. With the rise of recording—by the public as well as the police trials of complaints against the police are more likely to occur outside the courtroom, in the arena of public perception. This article is about the power and perils of cameras in deciding civil rights claims against the police and exacting settlements. Many hope that cameras will offer more objective evidence to resolve fierce factual conflicts and reveal the truth of what happened This contribution explores the volatile power of video evidence to vie for subjective audience perceptions - and potentially short-circuit the qualified immunity hurdle to induce settlements

Perpetual Impunity: Lessons learned from the global system of rendition and secret detention

It is now well documented that the Blair government was colluding at the highest levels in the global system for the rendition, detention and interrogation of terror suspects, at the same time as repeatedly denying any involvement. This paper seeks to explain why the UK so confidently maintained its position of denial. The main argument is that involvement in the global rendition system was facilitated and protected by an architecture of impunity. That is to say that the global rendition system deliberately consisted of a set of practices that were designed to ensure impunity for those agents involved at various levels, particularly Western governments and their intelligence agencies. Furthermore, if aspects of a state’s involvement were exposed, the architecture of impunity was sufficiently robust that the state could control the level of exposure. For example, the state could allow the light to be shone on certain aspects but could keep others very much in the dark. The state could also take specific actions to mitigate the effects, for example by withholding key information, destroying evidence, or by deflecting attention. Finally, where state involvement was exposed, again because the architecture of impunity was so robust, the authorities were in a strong position to seriously hamstring or avert investigations into wrongdoing. We conclude by offering some reflections on what this tells us about the challenges of holding governments to account for human rights violations of this nature, especially where they arise through a transnational network of state violence/crime

A Proposal for an NYPD Inspector General

This report focuses on oversight of the NYPD's intelligence operations. Although a number of substantive legal rules set the boundaries of these types of programs, history has shown that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure that intelligence agencies adhere to these limits. Intelligence gathering, by its very nature, is clandestine and details of operations often cannot be publicly revealed. And while law enforcement agencies should be proactive in their approach to crime and terrorism, broad powers to collect intelligence in pursuit of these goals can, and have historically, bled into abuse