You have the right to remain silent, but only if you tell the police that you're remaining silent.

You have a right to a lawyer - before, during and after questioning, even though the police don't have to tell you exactly when the lawyer can be with you. If you can't afford a lawyer, one will be provided to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you, which, by the way, are only good for the next two weeks?

The Supreme Court made major revisions to the now familiar Miranda warnings this year. The rulings will change the ways police, lawyers and criminal suspects interact amid what experts call an attempt to pull back some of the rights that Americans have become used to over recent decades.

The high court has made clear it's not going to eliminate the requirement that police officers give suspects a Miranda warning, so it is tinkering around the edges, said Jeffrey L. Fisher, co-chair of the amicus committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

"It's death by a thousand cuts," Fisher said. "For the past 20-25 years, as the court has turned more conservative on law and order issues, it has been whittling away at Miranda and doing everything it can to ease the admissibility of confessions that police wriggle out of suspects."

The Associated Press: High court trims Miranda warning rights bit by bit

meanwhile .....

The Center for Constitutional Rights & the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday filed a joint lawsuit to challenge the legality and constitutionality of a licensing scheme that requires lawyers to seek government permission to represent individuals that same government intends to kill. The U.S. government has claimed the power to target and kill U.S. citizens and other individuals anywhere in the world, outside of any battlefield-without charge, trial, or a judicial process of any kind.

The fact that the executive can act as judge, jury, and executioner presents an extremely dangerous expansion of power that undermines our laws, collective liberty, and safety. The executive branch is substituting a secret bureaucratic process for the due process required by the U.S. Constitution and international law. It is carrying out killings that can target innocent people, given the long and well-documented history of the U.S. government wrongly accusing both citizens and foreigners of terrorism and being a threat to national security. The government's claimed authority to target individuals far from any battlefield is also distorting international law and effectively creating a war without boundaries or end.

Not only is the government trying to kill U.S. citizens without due process, it is also trying to stop lawyers from representing them to challenge the government's actions.

In early July, CCR and the ACLU were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government's decision to authorize the killing of his son, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi, whom the government is actively targeting in Yemen, where he is currently in hiding. Shortly after, the Secretary of the Treasury labeled Anwar Al-Aulaqi a "specially designated global terrorist," making it a crime for lawyers to provide representation for his benefit without first seeking a license from the government.

Our two organizations applied for a license, but have not been granted one so far, despite the urgency of the representation we seek to provide. Our suit today charges that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury has exceeded its authority by subjecting pro bono legal services to a licensing requirement, and that OFAC's regulations violate the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, and the principle of separation of powers. We are asking the court to invalidate the regulations and to make clear that lawyers can provide representation for the benefit of designated individuals without first seeking the government's consent.

It is our strong belief that regardless of the government's allegations against Al-Aulaqi or any U.S. citizen suspected of wrongdoing, authorizing the death of individuals on secret allegations alone, outside of any legal process, and then denying such individuals legal representation to challenge that very conduct, not only violates the Constitution and our laws, but seriously undermines our collective safety. If the government suspects Al-Aulaqi of criminal activity, it should charge him, arrest him, and try him in a court of law. The executive branch cannot claim the extraordinary power to unilaterally deem people terrorists and authorize their killing, off the battlefield in countries around the world, without any fair process or oversight.

elsewhere .....

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has taken on everyone from Al Capone to John Dillinger to the Unabomber. Its latest adversary: Wikipedia.

The bureau wrote a letter in July to the Wikimedia Foundation, the parent organisation of Wikipedia, demanding that it take down an image of the FBI seal accompanying an article on the bureau, and threatened litigation: "Failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter."

The problem, those at Wikipedia say, is that the law cited in the FBI's letter is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial websites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal.

Other organisations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau's lawyers had misquoted the law. "While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version" that the FBI had provided.

Michael Godwin, the general counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote, "we are prepared to argue our view in court." He signed off, "with all appropriate respect."

US FBI challenges Wikipedia over use of its seal

on the bright side .....

Mick - as he became known locally - can't exactly recall why he wandered up to the police barracks on Petrie Terrace and lodged an application to join the force all the way back in 1965. A great uncle back in the old country had been a senior police officer, but there was no long family tradition of fighting crime - of which Sicily, with it's mafia clans, had an elegant sufficiency.

In Brisbane, he had a hell of a time of it, naturally, being a wog, and every insult and racist barb that had been heaped upon him as a schoolboy and a teenager returned with three-fold vehemence as he applied himself to his training. On his graduation day he was, he says, "as happy as I would ever be serving in the Queensland police force".

It's not an exaggeration. Because of his Sicilian background, Mick Cacciola was instantly marked by senior members of the Queensland force for use as an undercover operative against illegal gaming and sly grogging within the migrant community. Not only did this set him against his own people - a contradiction he dealt with by thinking of himself as Australian, not Sicilian - but it also brought the unwanted attention of those corrupt cops working as an organised criminal gang inside the Queensland police force to protect the thriving, multimillion-dollar black market in SP bookmaking, prostitution, unlicensed booze and, eventually, drugs.

The Second Father

'onya mick