Judge's Biblical Monument Is Ruled Unconstitutional. A federal judge on Monday ordered the chief justice of Alabama's Supreme Court to remove a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments from his courthouse. By Jeffrey Gettleman. [New York Times: National]

How many different ways can the courts say that posting the Ten Commandments in public places is unconstitutional?  Roy Moore, cheif Justice of the Alabama Supreme court has been trying to maintain a display of the Ten Commandments, first in his courtroom and now in the lobby of the Supreme Court, for the last 10 years.  He has repeatedly lost.  This latest controversy arose when he snuck in a 2+ ton granite monument with the Ten Commandments and other religious inscriptions, and installed it in the court lobby.  He does, of course, plan to appeal this ruling.

"This court holds that the evidence is overwhelming and the law is clear that the chief justice violated the Establishment Clause," wrote Judge Myron H. Thompson of Federal District Court in Montgomery in a crackling opinion, referring to a clause in the First Amendment. The monument is "nothing less than an obtrusive year-round religious display intended to proselytize on behalf of a particular religion, the chief justice's religion."

Regardless of whether or not a religious document was part of the inspiration for our modern laws, there is no reason for a religiously-oriented display to be placed in any court room.  Our courts are quite secular in nature, a demonstration of humankind's ability to be self-ruling.  Through our courts, we investigate events, use logic and reason to determine guilt or innocence and set forth the proscribed penalty for breaking the laws.  We do not rely upon anything religious in nature to make these judgements or issue these punishments.  There is no "spectral evidence" that is admissable, no High Priest or Priestess to devine the will or judgement of the Gods, and there is room for the all-too-human failings that can lead to false convictions or letting the guilty go free.

While the Ten Commandments may have played a role in the initial structuring of our laws, our laws have grown far beyond the precepts they set out.  We, as a society, have determined what is considered appropriate behaviour, and, more importantly, what isn't.  We have determined what penalties are appropriate and what the best ways to get at the truth are. These courts are not courts of God, but courts of Man.  To try and elevate them to somehow having been convened on God's authority is to make both more and less of them than they actually are.   We need no emblems of external authority, because we have given ourselves the authority to stand in judgement of each other.  For good or ill, we should recognize them for what they are.

A coalition of roughly 50 organization published an open letter to Senators Trent Lott and Tom Daschle today, expressing their concerns with the proposted "Total Information Awareness" program and asking that they adopt an amendment to the Homeland Security bill preventing the TIA program from going forward.  As evidence of how widespread concern about this program is, the letter is signed by the leaders of groups that represent a wide range of viewpoints, including both People For the American Way and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum.    Other signatories include the SquareOne Media Network, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Consumer Task Force for Automotive Issues, and Junkbusters, Corp.

According to DARPA's own documents, TIA will collect and mine vast amounts of information on the American public, including telephone records, bank records, medical records, and educational and travel data. TIA also proposes to connect with a massive system of biometric identification.

There are no systems of oversight or accountability contemplated in the TIA project. DARPA itself has resisted lawful requests for information about the program pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

On another note, Microsoft has hired a director for their Federal Homeland Security office.  The purpose of this position is to allow Microsoft to be able to bid on contracts related to the Homeland Security and to lobby the Homeland Security office to use Microsoft products for their projects.

As "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire" observes, this leaves open one very interesting, and rather disquieting, possiblility.  IF the Total Informatiom Awareness office is approved, and IF Microsoft were to get the Homeland Security contracts (neither of which is a certain thing), Microsoft could end up not only writing and publishing the most commonly used operating system in America, but could also be directly involved with the government's goal of gathering as much information on each citizen as possible, so that it could be subjected to the "data mining" analysis that is supposed to help investigators indentify if someone should be viewed as a potential threat based on the pattern of actiities their electronic trail leads.  How much easier would it be for the government to spy on people if their operating system was designed to interoperate an communicate with the government's data management system?  LIke I said - there are an awful lot of ifs involved, so there's no cause for panic yet, but the situation does bear watching.