Google goes to COURT in bid to reveal how government collects data as company claims it has First Amendment right to tell the public

Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests the court makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it is forced to give the government.

The legal filing, which invokes the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about broad National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic.ed in the NSA leak.

Revelations about the program, called PRISM, have opened fissures between U.S. officials and the involved companies, which have scrambled to reassure their users without violating strict rules against disclosing information that the government has classified as top secret.

A high-profile legal showdown might help Google’s efforts to portray itself as aggressively resisting government surveillance, and a victory could bolster the company’s campaign to portray government surveillance requests as targeted narrowly and affecting only a small number of users.

Tuesday’s unusual legal move came after days of intense talks between federal officials and several of the technology companies, including Google, over what details can be released. It also comes as the firms increasingly show signs of wanting to outdo each other in demonstrating their commitment to protecting user privacy.

In its petition, Google sought permission to publish information about how many government data requests the surveillance court approves and how many user accounts are affected. Google long has made regular reports with regard to other data demands from the U.S. government and other governments worldwide, but it has been forced to exclude requests from the surveillance court, which oversees an array of official monitoring efforts that target foreigners.

Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo in recent days have won federal government permission to include requests from the court as part of the overall number of data requests they receive from federal, state and local officials. Google has rejected that approach as too imprecise to help users understand the scope of its cooperation with federal surveillance.

“Google’s users are concerned about the allegations. Google must respond to such claims with more than generalities,” it said.

In a statement also issued Tuesday, the company said, “Lumping national security requests together with criminal requests — as some companies have been permitted to do — would be a backward step for our users.”

The Justice Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday night.

Surveillance court requests typically are known only to small numbers of a company’s employees. Discussing the requests openly, either within or beyond the walls of the company, can violate federal law.

Yet even if Google is permitted to say how many requests the surveillance court has made, the information may not shed much light on PRISM. The program does not require individual warrants from the surveillance court each time a search is made.

The existence of PRISM was first reported by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Even overall numbers of surveillance court requests would offer insight “only at a very high level of abstraction,” said Stephen Vladeck, an American University law professor. “I don’t think we’ll learn anything other than how pervasive this practice has been. . . . It will only be a piece of a much larger puzzle.”

The court, based in downtown Washington and composed of 11 federal judges appointed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., rarely rejects government requests for information. Of 1,789 requests it received in 2012, it approved all but one, which was withdrawn.

In 2008, the court rejected a challenge from a technology company that argued that a government request for information on foreign users was too broad to be constitutional. The court redacted the name of the company and other details when it published the ruling. Few of its decisions are ever made public. Appeals are handled by a secretive review court and can reach the Supreme Court.

The sharply limited public window into the legal infrastructure of surveillance review has made it difficult for outsiders to evaluate its decisions or the value of the secrecy it maintains.

“As with so many areas of national security, it’s hard to know if it makes a difference,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor. “It’s very frustrating, and that’s the essence of it.”

All of the technology companies involved in PRISM, including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, have struggled to respond to the revelations about NSA surveillance. (Washington Post Co. chief executive Donald E. Graham is on Facebook’s board.)

Most of the companies have issued carefully crafted denials, saying that they do not permit wholesale data collection while acknowledging that they comply with legal government information requests. In Tuesday’s legal filing, Google called the Postand Guardian reports about PRISM “misleading.”

Those articles cited an NSA Power­Point presentation that said the agency connected directly to the servers of Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other tech industry giants — an assertion immediately denied by the companies. The program was described differently in another NSA document obtained by The Post.

When news of the PRISM program broke two weeks ago, officials at Facebook, Google and other tech firms informally conferred on a public response, according to two people who were familiar with the discussions and spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks were private.

Much of the conversation was aimed at gathering more information about PRISM, these people said, and the communications staffs and lawyers made calls to learn of one another’s plans for a public response. The initial round of company statements used similar phrases, with Google chief executiveLarry Page and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg vigorously denying that they had given the government “direct access” to their servers.

Four days later, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo issued statements within hours of one another, calling for greater freedom to disclose NSA data requests. Twitter, which the NSA PowerPoint slides did not list as a provider to PRISM, echoed the companies’ sentiments.

But dissent among the companies grew. When Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo later agreed to report surveillance court requests in conjunction with other government orders, Google issued a statement criticizing the disclosures, as it did again Tuesday.

Twitter, which has a reputation of taking a hard line against government data requests, endorsed Google’s position, with its legal counsel, Benjamin Lee, tweeting, “We agree with @Google: It’s important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests — including FISA disclosures — separately.”

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Heartbroken mother complains to school after her disabled child is left sidelined from his friends in class photograph

They're the pictures parents treasure forever: a class photo that captures an entire school year in an instant.

So imagine the confusion and upset mom Anna Belanger felt when she discovered her son had been placed off to the side in his Grade 2 class photo, simply because he was in a wheelchair.

'I couldn’t comprehend how the photographer could look through the lens and think that this was good composition... this just boggled the mind,' she said.

In the photo, the class is sitting in three rows with the teacher standing on the left.

Anna's son Miles Ambridge, who's 7, is seen several feet away leaning from his wheelchair with a huge space separating him from his classmates. 

'Being picked on and being set aside is horrendous and this was what was happening,' said Mrs Belanger, of New Westminster, British Columbia.

She said that being in a wheelchair comes with an additional set of challenges for Miles, who was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy at 13 months, a genetic disease that attacks nerve cells in the spinal cord.

 

Miles’ father Don Ambridge, who saw the photo first, was appalled and demanded that Herbert Spencer Elementary School ask the company to retake the picture.

The school have not yet commented on the class photo.

Belanger told the Toronto Star that discrimination was still a daily issue for people with disabilities and she wanted to shed light on the stigma surrounding it.

'This was not a malicious act, I don’t think it was done on purpose. I just don’t think there was any rational thinking behind it,' Belanger said.

Miles' parents have decided not to show the picture to their son. 

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911 call captures escalation of traffic stop based on cop's mistake. Motorist eventually gets pepper sprayed and repeatedly tased

A frantic 911 call is shedding light on a police mistake that turned a lunch date into a showdown with officers.

A judge recently ruled that the ugly incident in March 2010 in City Heights was sparked by an illegal action by police.

In the 911 call, which is part of court filings, Shannon Robinson is heard talking to a 911 operator. She placed the call from inside a parked Pontiac Sunfire as she sat with her fiancé Dante Harrell and a friend.

"Hi. What's going on there?" asks the 911 operator.

"I have a couple of your officers ... they have stopped me," says Robinson.

Harrell says she called 911 to ask for a supervisor after he was questioned by the officers, followed by 15 minutes of waiting.

In a summary judgment, the court ruled the officers made an illegal stop.

"He stopped me by mistake … pushed his button and my license plate came back as a Honda," said Robinson.

Harrell said the officers admitted to typing in a wrong letter during a routine license plate check, but wanted to check them out anyways. He said after the 911 call was made, the officers tried to grab the phone.        

"I have your supervisor on the phone," exclaims Robinson in the 911 call. "I'm talking to your supervisor on the phone. Get your hands off me."

Harrell said what is not heard in the 911 call is what one officer said next.

"'They're on the phone with our supervisor, isn't that childish? I'm about to OC them,'" Harrell told 10News.

"OC" is another term for pepper spray.

About the same time, the 911 operator is heard saying a supervisor is on the way and attempts to end the call.

"They pepper-sprayed me," said Robinson on the call.

"Ma'am, you need to disconnect,” responded the 911 operator.

"They pepper-sprayed me and my husband!" said Robinson.

Harrell said the two were pepper-sprayed before he was Tasered repeatedly. He said both he and Robinson were taken to the ground.

The phone, in the backseat, was still on recording the chaos.

Julia Yoo represents both Robinson and Harrell.

"These 911 tapes reveal just a desperate plea on part of a citizen who was being wronged," she said. "It was all about desperation and for survival."  

Those pleas will be front and center at a September trial when a jury decides whether excessive force was used.

The judge also ruled police made an illegal arrest of Robinson.

The two officers, Ariel Savage and Daniel McClain, remain on the force. An internal affairs probe was completed. Police declined to talk about any discipline they faced, citing personnel matters.

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98-year-old charged with 'unlawful execution, torture' of Jews during World War II

Prosecutors on Tuesday charged a 98-year-old who features on Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center's wanted list with war crimes, saying he had helped to deport Jews to Auschwitz in World War II.

Laszlo Csatary was found guilty in absentia in 1948 of whipping or torturing Jews and helping to deport them to the death camp while serving as police commander in the Nazi-occupied eastern Slovak city of Kosice in 1944.

The Hungarian was sentenced to death and lived on the run for decades until Hungarian authorities detained him and put him under house arrest in Budapest in July last year. He has denied any guilt.

In March, a Slovak court commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment.

"He is charged with the unlawful execution and torture of people, (thus) committing war crimes partly as a perpetrator, partly as an accomplice," said Bettina Bagoly, a spokeswoman for the Budapest Chief Prosecutor's Office. She said Csatary's case would go to trial within three months.

The Wiesenthal Center named Csatary their most wanted war crimes suspect last year.

In April his detention terms were changed to a ban on leaving Hungary, but prosecutors have now applied to put him back under house arrest, Bagoly said.

In a statement, the prosecutors said Csatary had regularly hit Jewish prisoners with a dog-whip in 1944 when he was a police commander overseeing a detention camp in Kosice, which was then part of Hungary and is now in Slovakia.

Around 12,000 Jews were deported from Kosice to various concentration camps, mostly to Auschwitz.

"With his actions, Laszlo Csatary ... deliberately provided help to the unlawful executions and torture committed against Jews deported to concentration camps ... from Kosice," the prosecutors' statement said.

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How to Cheat On a Test (2 pics)

Here is a modern way to cheat on a test.

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U.S. Supreme Court: Arizona Citizenship Proof Law Illegal

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states cannot on their own require would-be voters to prove they are U.S. citizens before using a federal registration system designed to make signing up easier.

The justices voted 7-2 to throw out Arizona's voter-approved requirement that prospective voters document their U.S. citizenship in order to use a registration form produced under the federal "Motor Voter" voter registration law.

Federal law "precludes Arizona from requiring a federal form applicant to submit information beyond that required by the form itself," Justice Antonia Scalia wrote for the court's majority.

The court was considering the legality of Arizona's requirement that prospective voters document their U.S. citizenship in order to use a registration form produced under the federal "motor voter" registration law. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which doesn't require such documentation, trumps Arizona's Proposition 200 passed in 2004.

Arizona appealed that decision to the Supreme Court.

"Today's decision sends a strong message that states cannot block their citizens from registering to vote by superimposing burdensome paperwork requirements on top of federal law," said Nina Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and lead counsel for the voters who challenged Proposition 200.

"The Supreme Court has affirmed that all U.S. citizens have the right to register to vote using the national postcard, regardless of the state in which they live," she said.

The case focuses on Arizona, which has tangled frequently with the federal government over immigration issues involving the Mexican border. But it has broader implications because four other states - Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Tennessee - have similar requirements, and 12 other states are contemplating such legislation.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the court's ruling.

The Constitution "authorizes states to determine the qualifications of voters in federal elections, which necessarily includes the related power to determine whether those qualifications are satisfied," Thomas said in his dissent.

Opponents of Arizona's law see it as an attack on vulnerable voter groups such as minorities, immigrants and the elderly. They say they've counted more than 31,000 potentially legal voters in Arizona who easily could have registered before Proposition 200 but were blocked initially by the law in the 20 months after it passed in 2004. They say about 20 percent of those thwarted were Latino.

Barbara Arnwine, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called the decision a victory. "The court has reaffirmed the essential American right to register to vote for federal election without the burdens of state voter suppression measures," she said.

But Arizona officials say they should be able to pass laws to stop illegal immigrants and other noncitizens from getting on their voting rolls. The Arizona voting law was part of a package that also denied some government benefits to illegal immigrants and required Arizonans to show identification before voting.

The federal "motor voter" law, enacted in 1993 to expand voter registration, requires states to offer voter registration when a resident applies for a driver's license or certain benefits. Another provision of that law - the one at issue before the court - requires states to allow would-be voters to fill out mail-in registration cards and swear they are citizens under penalty of perjury, but it doesn't require them to show proof. Under Proposition 200, Arizona officials require an Arizona driver's license issued after 1996, a U.S. birth certificate, a passport or other similar document, or the state will reject the federal registration application form.

While the court was clear in stating that states cannot add additional identification requirements to the federal forms on their own, it was also clear that the same actions can be taken by state governments if they get the approval of the federal government and the federal courts.

Arizona can ask the federal government to include the extra documents as a state-specific requirement, Scalia said, and take any decision made by the government on that request back to court. Other states have already done so, Scalia said.

The Election Assistance Commission "recently approved a state-specific instruction for Louisiana requiring applicants who lack a Louisiana driver's license, ID card or Social Security number to attach additional documentation to the completed federal form," Scalia said.

Currently, the Election Assistance Commission doesn't have any active commissioners. The four commissioners are supposed to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The last two commissioners, Donetta L. Davidson and Gineen Bresso, left in 2011, according to the EAC website.

Voting rights advocates immediately called on future EAC commissioners to reject any requests to add identification documents to the federal voter registration form.

"Federal law already provides enough protection, and states should not be unduly burdening eligible citizens who want to register to vote," Advancement Project Co-Director Penda D. Hair said.

The case is 12-71, Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc.

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An 18-year-old girl beheaded her father with a bush knife after he repeatedly raped her at their home in Papua New Guinea

A teenage girl has beheaded her father with a bush knife after he raped her at their home in Papua New Guinea, according to a local media report.

The Post-Courier newspaper reported that community leaders are protecting the girl, saying the man deserved to die.

The paper said the 18-year-old chopped her father's head off after he repeatedly raped her last Tuesday night in their village in the Western Highlands.

The report cited a pastor as saying the father, in his mid-40s, had three other children and raped his daughter when they were alone in the house after the mother and the other siblings visited relatives.

"The father wanted to rape his daughter again in the morning inside the house and that was when the young girl picked up the bush knife and chopped her father's head off," Pastor Lucas Kumi is quoted as saying.

The Post-Courier said community leaders are now refusing to hand the girl over to police, vowing to protect her.

"The people and leaders in our area went and saw the headless body of the father after the girl reported the incident to the leaders and the people and told her story of why she had killed her father," Mr Kumi is quoted as saying.

"The daughter did what she did because of the trauma and the evil actions of her father, so that is why we have all agreed that she remains in the community."

Violent crime, as well as witchcraft, is rife in Papua New Guinea.

The government last month voted to revive the death penalty in a bid to deter offenders after a series of high-profile grisly incidents.

Brutality against women, including domestic violence and rape, is also endemic in the country.

Over the weekend, the Post-Courier reported that child prostitution is on the rise, particularly in the capital Port Moresby, where many new nightclubs have sprung up and young girls are increasingly being forced into the sex trade.

Some are being pushed into selling themselves by their parents to help them cope with rising costs of living, it said, citing non-government organisations.

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Earthquake art

When a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook Olympia, Wash., in 2001, shopowner Jason Ward discovered that a sand-tracing pendulum had recorded the vibrations in the image above.

Seismologists say that the “flower” at the center reflects the higher-frequency waves that arrived first; the outer, larger-amplitude oscillations record the lower-frequency waves that arrived later.

“You never think about an earthquake as being artistic — it’s violent and destructive,” Norman MacLeod, president of Gaelic Wolf Consulting in Port Townsend, told ABC News. “But in the middle of all that chaos, this fine, delicate artwork was created.”

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Google launches BALLOONS in bid to bring internet to the remotest places on Earth

Google has launched 30 balloons into the stratosphere from New Zealand as it experiments with ways to bring affordable internet access to the world.
Nicknamed Project Loon, the internet giant is sending the superpressure balloons 12 miles up into the air, where they will sail around the globe at twice the altitude of aeroplanes.
The helium-filled balloons inflate to 49ft in diameter and carry transmitters that could beam 3G-speed internet to some of the 4.8billion people in the world that are not yet online, supplying an area of about 780 square miles - twice the size of New York City.


Project Loon was developed in the company's X Lab by the same team behind Google Glasses and the driverless car. It is hoped it could save developing countries the high cost of laying fibre cables to get online and lead to a dramatic increase in internet access for the likes of Africa and south-east Asia.
Loon could even provide emergency back-up for areas during natural disasters.
This week the balloons, made from a thin polyethylene film, were released from a frozen field near Lake Tekapo on New Zealand's South Island, where they sailed past the magnificent Southern Alps mountains on their ascent.
'It's pretty hard to get the internet to lots of parts of the world,' Richard DeVaul, chief technical architect at Google[x], told the BBC.
'Just because in principle you could take a satellite phone to sub-Saharan Africa and get a connection there, it doesn't mean the people have a cost-effective way of getting online.

'The idea behind Loon was that it might be easier to tie the world together by using what it has in common - the skies - than the process of laying fibre and trying to put up cellphone infrastructure.'
Fifty volunteer residents signed up to be a tester for a project that was so secret no-one would tell them what it was for.
Technicians came to the volunteers' homes and attached bright red receivers the size of basketballs that look like giant Google map pins - which every building would need to receive the signal.
Charles Nimmo, a farmer and entrepreneur in the small town of Leeston, was the first tester to get online from the airborne balloons.
Mr Nimmo was able to spend about 15 minutes surfing the web before the balloon transmitting the signal sailed past.
His first stop was to check out the weather. He wanted to find out if it was an optimal time for 'crutching' his sheep, the term for trimming away the wool around a sheep's bottom.

Mr Nimmo is among the many people living in rural areas, even in developed countries, who cannot get broadband access.
After ditching his dial-up service four years ago in favour of satellite internet, he found himself stuck with hefty bills.
'It's been weird,' he said of the Google Balloon Internet experience. 'But it's been exciting to be part of something new.'
Project leader Mike Cassidy said: 'It's a huge moonshot. A really big goal to go after. The power of the internet is probably one of the most transformative technologies of our time.'
People have used balloons for communication, transportation and entertainment for centuries. In recent years, the military and aeronautical researchers have used tethered balloons to beam internet signals back to bases on Earth.
Google's balloons fly free and out of sight, scavenging power from card table-sized solar panels that dangle below and gather enough charge in four hours to power them for a day as the balloons sail around the globe on the prevailing winds.
Far below, ground stations with internet capabilities about 60 miles (100km) apart bounce signals up to the balloons.
The signals would hop forward, from one balloon to the next, along a backbone of up to five balloons.
Before heading to New Zealand, Google spent a few months secretly launching between two and five flights a week in California's central valley.
'We were chasing balloons around from trucks on the ground,' said Mr DeVaul.
'People were calling in reports about UFOs.'
While there had been rumours about Project Loon, Google had refused to confirm the project until now.
But there have been hints. In April, Google's executive chairman tweeted: 'For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected.'
In Christchurch this week, the balloons were invisible in the sky except for an occasional glint, but people could see them in the remote countryside where they were launched or through binoculars, if they knew where to look.
At Google's mission control in Christchurch this week, a team of engineers used wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to manoeuvre the balloons over snowy peaks, identifying the wind layer with the desired speed and direction and then adjusting balloons' altitudes so they floated in that layer.

One of the most complex parts of the project was hand-building strong, light, durable balloons that could handle temperature and pressure swings in the stratosphere.
Google engineers studied balloon science from Nasa, the U.S. Defence Department and the Jet Propulsion Lab to design their own airships made of plastic films similar to grocery bags. Hundreds have been built so far.
Mr DeVaul said they would not interfere with aircraft because they fly well below satellites and twice as high as aeroplanes.
Google played down concerns about surveillance, emphasising that they would not carry cameras or any other extraneous equipment.
The balloons would be guided to collection points and replaced periodically. In cases when they failed, a parachute would deploy.
The company worked with the Civil Aviation Authority on the trial, choosing New Zealand in part because of its remoteness.
Mr Cassidy said in the next phase of the trial they hope to get up to 300 balloons forming a ring on the 40th parallel south from New Zealand through Australia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina.
Christchurch was a symbolic launch site because some residents were cut off from online information for weeks following the 2011 earthquake that killed 185 people.
Tania Gilchrist, another tester, said she had been lucky to only lose power for ten hours following the quake.
'After the initial upheaval, the internet really came into play,' she said.
'It was how people co-ordinated relief efforts and let people know how to get in touch with agencies. It was really, really effective and it wasn't necessarily driven by the authorities.'
Terrain should not be a problem for Project Loon. The balloons could stream internet into Afghanistan's steep and winding Khyber Pass or Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, a country where the World Bank estimates only four out of every 100 people are online.
There are plenty of catches, including a requirement that anyone using Google Balloon Internet would need a receiver plugged into their computer in order to receive the signal.
Google is not talking costs at this point, although it says it is striving to make both the balloons and receivers as inexpensive as possible.

 The signals travel in the unlicensed spectrum, which means Google does not have to go through the regulatory processes required for internet providers using wireless communications networks or satellites.
International aid groups have been pushing for more connectivity for more than a decade.
In pilot projects, African farmers solved disease outbreaks after searching the web, while in Bangladesh 'online schools' take teachers from Dhaka to children in remote classrooms through large screens and video conferencing.
Temple University communications professor Patrick Murphy warned of mixed consequences, pointing to China and Brazil where internet service increased democratic principles, prompting social movements and uprisings, but also a surge in consumerism that has resulted in environmental and health problems.
'The nutritional and medical information, farming techniques, democratic principles those are the wonderful parts of it,' he said.
'But you also have everyone wanting to drive a car, eat a steak, drink a Coke.'
As the world's largest advertising network, Google itself stands to expand its own empire by bringing internet to the masses.
More users means more potential Google searchers, which in turn give the company more chances to display their lucrative ads.
Richard Bennett, a fellow with the non-profit Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was sceptical, noting that mobile phones are being used far more in developing countries.
'I'm really glad that Google is doing this kind of speculative research," he said.
'But it remains to be seen how practical any of these things are.'
Imogen Wall, of the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said: 'The potential of a system that can restore connectivity within hours of a crisis hitting is tremendously exciting.
'If the service fails in a crisis, then lives are lost.'

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Woman Being Denied Citizenship Because Her Morality Doesn't Come From Religion

Margaret Doughty, a 64-year old woman from the UK who has spent the past 30+ years in the U.S., is in the process of applying for United States Citizenship and happens to be an atheist. She is currently a permanent resident running non-profit adult literacy organizations, doing her part to enrich the lives of American citizens. In the process of applying for citizenship, all candidates are asked if they’d be willing to take up arms in defense of the United States of America.  Ms. Doughty responded,

“I am sure the law would never require a 64 year-old woman like myself to bear arms, but if I am required to answer this question, I cannot lie. I must be honest. The truth is that I would not be willing to bear arms. Since my youth I have had a firm, fixed and sincere objection to participation in war in any form or in the bearing of arms.  I deeply and sincerely believe that it is not moral or ethical to take another person’s life, and my lifelong spiritual/religious beliefs impose on me a duty of conscience not to contribute to warfare by taking up arms…my beliefs are as strong and deeply held as those who possess traditional religious beliefs and who believe in God…I want to make clear, however, that I am willing to perform work of national importance under civilian direction or to perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States if and when required by the law to do so.”

Despite being an atheist, Ms. Doughty was told that any conscientious objection must be based on religious grounds, not simply moral objections. So as someone who was not religious, and didn’t believe in a god, she had no basis for objecting. Her statement has been denied and she has been informed that to move forward in the process she must submit a letter from the elders of her church to prove her conscientious objections are religiously based.

The USCIS has told her,

“Please submit a letter on official church stationery, attesting to the fact that you are a member in good standing and the church’s official position on the bearing of arms.”

She has been given until June 21st to show that her objection is religiously-based, or her application will be denied.

This is not the first time a non-religious person has raised a conscientious objection to joining the armed forces. In fact, related issues have gone to the Supreme Court and have been ruled in favor of the non-religious objector.  In Welsh v. United States, Elliott Ashton Welsh refused to take up arms on a moral objection rather than a religious one.  However, under the Universal Military Training and Service Act, one could only object to joining the armed forces based on a religious conviction involving a Supreme Being. The Court agreed that Welsh could be considered a conscientious objector based on his personal moral grounds, and that the exemption being purely religious was a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

It appears that Margaret Doughty is facing a very similar First Amendment violation. As a conscientious objector to war, she is basing her position on her personal ethical code rather than a religious one. The response from the INS suggesting her claim must be based on religion is the same sort of First Amendment violation we saw in Welsh v. US.

Please join us in spreading the word about this case so that we can fight discrimination against non-believers. Coincidentally, Ms. Doughty’s stepson is Chris Johnson, a New York based photographer. He’s working on a book called A Better Life, which aims to shine a positive light on atheists by featuring 100 nonbelievers who found joy and meaning in their lives without god.

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