I think the previous commenter meant the "War on Terror", which is essentially eternal because there is no opponent that could be defeated, and therefore it cannot be ended, only abandoned.
Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.
1st amendment is also pretty much in tatters, with protesters now labeled as "low level terrorists", and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation (admittedly that was in the UK, but what do you think would happen to Greenwald if he were dumb enough to travel to the US??)
Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone. Of course, only if you do something the government doesn't like, but that's pretty much the point of civil rights...
> Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.
Your comment is utterly ungrounded in reality. The "war on terror" has had pretty much no specific effect on any of the civil rights you mentioned.
1) Habeas corpus: the most recent change to the law of habeas corpus was AEDPA in 1996. Despite having "antiterrorism" in its name, it's largely addressed at preventing convicted criminals from abusing the habeas process through repeated frivolous habeas petitions and treating habeas essentially as a federal appeal from valid state court judgments. The "terrorism" provisions are distinct and don't concern habeas corpus, but rather financing and immigration issues related to terrorism. The post-9/11 Supreme Court cases on habeas have strengthened habeas corpus, not weakened it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush, and the predecessor cases Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
2) Removal of the 4th amendment: the 4th amendment is probably not at the apex of its vitality, but it's on the upswing since 9/11. To the extent that it's been diminished over the years, that largely happened in the 1970's and the 1980's as a byproduct of that era's "tough on crime" movement. Even in the context of NSA spying, the legal basis for those programs are not rooted in anything post-9/11, but in the quite old third-party doctrine and this case from 1979 that created the data versus metadata distinction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland.
3) Gutting of the 1st amendment: the first amendment has simply never been stronger, and the U.S. continue to have among the strongest protections for free speech of any country in the world. Your comment about "protestors now labeled as 'low level terrorists,' and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation" is factually incorrect. What protestors in the U.S. have been charged with a crime based purely on their political speech? Some FBI documents stating that Occupy protestors might be a vector for domestic terrorism isn't a first amendment violation by any imaginable stretch of the imagination; to violate the first amendment, the "label" must have some legal significance, not simply be an expression of the opinion of someone in the government. Also, your question "what do you think would happen to Greenwald" if he traveled to the U.S. totally ignores the fact that the U.K. has historically had much weaker protections for free speech and journalism than the U.S.
> Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone
You seem to be mostly regurgitating the utterly uninformed conventional wisdom that permeates places like HN and Reddit.
You are confusing "reality" with "law". Changing the law is not the biggest problem since 9/11 (though there has been enough of that, see Patriot Act, etc.), it is going around the law and simply ignoring it.
For example, it has always been legal to kill enemies during war (with restrictions). We've just now expanded the definition of what a war is and what an enemy is, or changed the meaning of "torture" etc.
Of course many of these things started before 9/11, but if you can't detect the difference since then, you need to get out of the (law) library more often.
I think the previous commenter meant the "War on Terror", which is essentially eternal because there is no opponent that could be defeated, and therefore it cannot be ended, only abandoned.
Most of the other measures are justified with the "War on Terror", including the removal of habeas corpus, removal of the 4th amendment, gutting of the 1st amendment, removal of judicial review and oversight etc.
1st amendment is also pretty much in tatters, with protesters now labeled as "low level terrorists", and journalists detained under anti-terrorist legislation (admittedly that was in the UK, but what do you think would happen to Greenwald if he were dumb enough to travel to the US??)
Yeah, to me that looks like civil rights pretty much gone. Of course, only if you do something the government doesn't like, but that's pretty much the point of civil rights...