(Boylove News Articles) - DEAD END: The International Megan's Law's Assault on Everyone's Freedom of Travel

DEAD END: The International Megan's Law Assault on Everyone's Freedom of Travel The free movement of the individual is increasingly seen as a revocable privilege, not an inalienable right, as the U.S., Interpol, and governments worldwide conspire to strip, not just “sex offenders”, but everyone of the fundamental right to travel and to cross borders By David Kennerly Table Of Contents PART I: Introduction The Alarm Which Finally Roused Us From Our Slumber The Next Step Down The Road To Oblivion Understanding “International Megan's Law” “The International Megan's Law”: An Analysis The "Exterminating Angel" In the Driver's Seat PART II: The Actors: The National Security State, Post Snowden and Greenwald (and Manning and Assange and Scahill and Binney and Drake) Extending the Security State To Sex Offenders The “Five Eyes” INTERPOL's Big Makeover The Special Role of the Media In Driving the Sex Panic Non-Governmental Organizations Congress PART III: An Inescapable Conclusion Restless Natives Presumption Of Future Guilt Of Those Said To Be Victimizers (and of Eternal Saintliness of Those Said To Be Victims) Endnotes ©2014 David Kennerly We are, all of us, standing on a civil liberties precipice. The systematic degradation of the rights of all citizens is now well underway. Through the pretext of safeguarding safety and security and, ironically, our “way of life,” governments worldwide are imposing limitations (and, within the U.S., unprecedented limitations) on our freedom of movement; rights stripped from us in the name of safety and security. That the worst of these violations are, for the time being, born disproportionately by those occupying society's margins and whose social value is seen, and treated, as inferior to all others should provide us no comfort nor assurances for our future. Nor does it relieve us of the burden of our complicity or of our conscience. The emergent “zero tolerant” society has taken, as its central conceit, the proposition that all human affairs must now be intensely scrutinized, and mediated, through the obsessive ministrations of government. The utility of fear in facilitating this continuous erosion, especially the obligatory appeal that all such fearful erosions are “for the benefit of children”, has become the time-honored mechanism through which the rights of all people are routinely diminished. We should be especially dubious of that appeal when the victims of these laws are, increasingly, children, themselves. Children who are routinely deprived of their own liberty, and permanently and dramatically diminished - as citizens - for crimes that often consisted of nothing more than mutual exploration; explorations once accommodated within a rational society which had yet to lose all sense of fairness or proportion. The Snowden Alarm Which Finally Woke Us We have learned, in extraordinary detail, of the wanton illegality in which our governments now engage through the remarkable revelations of Edward Snowden as well as those of Bradley Manning, William Binney, Thomas Drake and others. They have all taken a courageous stand to insist that government must be held to account for policies which identify liberty as incompatible with the interests of safety and security, policies which are, in any case (at least, in the United States) unconstitutional and illegal. We have also learned, from the treatment of journalists such as American documentary filmmaker and recent Polk Award recipient (and Academy Award and Emmy Award Nominee), Laura Poitras, of the power of the U.S. government, through its Border & Customs authority, to subject anyone, including journalists, whose message they find inconvenient or embarrassing (such as Poitras' searing reporting on U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan) to repeated harassment upon their return to the United States. Poitras has had to endure hours of detention and threatening interrogation (without benefit of counsel) as well as the repeated search and seizure of her laptop computers and electronic devices along with the digital data found within them. [See the companion piece to this article: “'HOMELAND SECURITY'S' ASSAULT ON FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT: How America's sex laws endanger you, your children's and everyone's freedom to travel.”] We now know that the U.S. Government routinely uses U.S. Customs' warrantless powers of search to record all data contained on the laptops, cellphones and other digital devices of anti-war activists, political dissidents, journalists or of anyone else whom they wish, especially when they possess no probable cause to obtain that information through other means. This is a deliberate program in which law enforcement, and perhaps any government agency, can alert Customs officials to intercept specific individuals in the event that they travel internationally. That most people now store enormous amounts of data - often inadvertently - on their cellphones and laptops represents an opportunity for government to lay claim to the myriad details of their lives when reentering the U.S. In Poitras' case, she has endured this treatment more than forty times and with such regularity that she simply picked-up and moved to Berlin; rarely returning to the U.S. where she finds her treatment, at her own government's hands, deeply frightening and disturbing. And this, even before she met or became aware of Edward Snowden (who she then introduced to her colleague, Glenn Greenwald) in what would become one of the most extraordinary journalistic collaborations and achievements of all time. The Next Step Down The Road To Oblivion It is into this civil liberties and constitutional milieu which International Megan's Law, not yet enacted (but already partially in force), now emerges; as an additional power of the advanced global security state to strip citizens of the fundamental right to travel and of the expanded powers of two agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS): Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and which are the faces of its implementation. The stark implications for freedom imposed by this law have, thus far, escaped the serious attentions of civil libertarians. It is my hope to make them aware of its dangers which go well beyond its stated goals and which pose a grave threat to the free movement of people today and with even broader implications for the future. Understanding “International Megan's Law” “It is imperative that we take the lessons we have learned on how to protect our children from known child sex predators within our borders and expand those protections globally,” declared a triumphant U.S. Representative Chris Smith, Republican of New Jersey after successfully pushing his bill, the “International Megan's Law” through the U.S. House of Representatives. “Child predators thrive on secrecy, a secrecy that allows them to commit heinous crimes against children with impunity and without any real accountability. Megan’s Law must go global to protect American children and children worldwide.” Smith has been introducing one version after the other of this bill, named after a child murder victim for whom any number of federal and state laws have been named, for the past six years, but without much success. That is, until this year. Having finally passed in The House and now being considered by The Senate, “International Megan's Law to Prevent Child Sex Trafficking” is half-way to its goal. Halfway, since it is unimaginable that President Obama would not grace it with his signature were it to reach his desk after a win in both Houses of Congress. Following the wildly successful formula of adorning criminal statutes with the names of murdered child crime victims, this bill is, nevertheless, something new altogether. Since the appalling Supreme Court decision in 2002 in “Smith v. Doe” in which the Justices held, in a six-to-three decision, that sex offender registration laws were perfectly constitutional since they do not represent retroactive ex post facto punishment (in the criminal sense) but civil regulation as a means of ensuring public safety (yet imposing criminal sanctions for non-compliance) there has been a succession of laws blithely unencumbered by constitutional concerns for sex offenders which restrict where they can live, work, visit and even who they can associate with as well as dictate the frequency with which they must report the myriad details of their lives to law enforcement. Most of those constitutionally suspect laws have, until now, concerned themselves with regulating the lives of registered sex offenders within the borders of the United States. “International Megan's Law” represents a breathtaking leap beyond those constraints which burden sex offenders with domestic restrictions on where they can live, work or visit in the U.S., and expands them to the world, as a whole. Its primary purpose is twofold: first, to prevent all child sex offenders from leaving the United States and visiting other countries where they might commit an illegal sexual act (as anyone might do) and secondly, to provide U.S. authorities with similar notice from other countries when a child sex offender plans to visit the U.S. (as if that is a problem unaddressed by law enforcement today). It is important to note that the U.S. already bars all alien convicted sex offenders from entering the U.S. when it is able to identify them as such. This bill, by alerting foreign nations to the intended visit to their country of an American sex offender, makes fully bilateral the reciprocal exchange of the criminal background of travelers. Following is a synopsis of this bill which conveys its essential elements as well as its intent: “The International Megan's Law”, An Analysis To “eliminate the demand” for child sex tourism and child sexual exploitation outside of the U.S. by making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for American child sex offenders to be permitted entry to any foreign country and, further, as a quid pro quo to ensure that similar information be provided to the U.S. from foreign governments whose own “child sex offenders” intend to visit the U.S. (where they will be refused entry). Its effect will certainly be to virtually eliminate child sex offenders leaving the U.S. Endnotes: