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A new petition issued from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has made it to the Supreme Court and aims to declare the historic male-only military draft to be unconstitutional.

Noting that the U.S. Department of Defense lifted the ban on women serving in combat in 2013, the petition specifies that the obligation for men to register upon turning 18 years old has yet to be applied to women.

Thousands of women have since served with distinction in combat positions across all branches of the military, the formal petition reads. The registration requirement has no legitimate purpose and cannot withstand the exacting scrutiny sex-based laws require.

Rooted in this argument is the 1981 case Rostker v. Goldberg, which argued that because American men are required to register under U.S. law and women are not, the male-only draft is discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The act gives U.S. presidents the power to require mandatory conscription of eligible adult males into the U.S. Army, but excludes women. Ultimately, the court held that the act does not violate equal protection clauses under the Fifth Amendment, and that the government is allowed to develop an army in times of national emergency.

Now, the petition asks the Supreme Court to overrule Rostker v. Goldberg since women are formally allowed to register for military service and in combat roles.

It is time to overrule Rostker. The registration requirement has no legitimate purpose and cannot withstand the exacting scrutiny sex-based laws require, the petition states, citing that military departments acknowledge that requiring both men and women to register would 'promote fairness and equity and further the goal of military readiness.

The Department of Defense has made strides in including women in combat roles, authoring a report in 2015 that called its own previous standards excluding women from military work outdated.

In 2017, a committee was established to review the draft policy within the Military Selective Service Act to evaluate if the draft should be expanded to incorporate women recruits. Despite a commission analysis that recommended the inclusion, Congress has yet to make the requirement for women official.

The Washington Post further notes that last week, a group of veterans who held military leadership roles asked the Supreme Court to take the case and rule the male-only draft requirement a violation of the equal protection clause.

The vast majority of men ... have no advantage in readiness over women, who the current statutory scheme forbid from registering, the brief, filed by former National Security Agency (NSA) director Michael Hayden, reportedly said.

Debate over whether or not the draft requirement for men is constitutional has ensued in multiple lower courts, but these revitalized petitions ask the Supreme Court to overturn their original 1981 ruling.

The petitions authors also note that by excluding women from draft registration requirements, it undermines their own equality as U.S. citizens.

Like many laws that have purported to privilege women over men, the men-only registration requirement burdens women too by perpetuating the notion that women are unworthy of full citizenship stature, the report concludes, citing another Supreme Court case regarding the treatment of women in the military. Excluding women from a duty characterized as a fundamental civic obligation conveys 'not only that they are not vital to the defenseof the country but also that they are not expected to participate in defending it.'

The Supreme Court could reportedly take months before deciding to revisit Rostker v. Goldberg.

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Supreme Court asked to declare the all-male military draft unconstitutional | TheHill - The Hill

Given that until recently the British government refused to acknowledge the existence of its World War IIera code-breaking organization, this informative official history of the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, one of the United Kingdoms leading intelligence agencies, is remarkable. Ferriss narrative takes on the breaking of the Nazis' Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II and the efforts to replicate that achievement during the Cold War. GCHQ now plays a major role in all areas of cybersecurity. Its activities, along with those of the U.S. National Security Agency, were compromised when a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, revealed them in 2013. Ferriss account avoids sensationalism. It provides a careful judgment of Bletchley Parks impact, points to how signals intelligence during the Cold War usefully illuminated the lower levels of the Soviet system, and shows GCHQs operational importance to the conduct of colonial and postcolonial conflicts, including the 1982 Falklands War.

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A Review of "Behind the Enigma" by John Ferris - Foreign Affairs

By Paul Rosenzweig, The George Washington University Law School

Generally, surveillance comes in three basic forms. First, there is physical surveillance, dating from the times of Alexander the Great and earlier, up to the Stasi State in post-World War II East Germany and to today. This is the traditional form of scrutiny that has always been the province of spies and intruders.

This is a transcript from the video series The Surveillance State: Big Data, Freedom, and You. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

When one thinks of physical surveillance, the first image that comes to our mind is that of an eavesdropper.

An eavesdropper could, for example, hear a conversation. Or, if he looks in a window, become a Peeping Tom, and see the subject of his surveillance. One could even contemplate surveillance of smellslike, say, the scent of burning cannabis.

As the nature of our physical environment changed, physical surveillance also evolved. The telegraph became a way to rapidly transmit messages around the globe, and governments began exploring ways to intercept those messages.

American electronic surveillance really came of age during the Cold War. It is said that for years, the CIA ran a joint electronic surveillance operation with the Chinese, in the western deserts of China, to monitor Soviet missile launches.

In the mid-1970s, the National Security Agency (NSA) conducted two programs involving electronic interceptions that have, since, proven quite controversial.

One of them, code-named SHAMROCK, involved U.S. communications companies giving the NSA access to all of the international cable traffic passing through their companies facilities. The second program, known as MINARET, created a watch list of U.S. persons whose communications were to be monitored.

To the above traditional forms of surveillance, we must add a third: the collection, and analysis, of personally identifiable data and information about individuals.

Dataveillance is an inevitable product of our increasing reliance on the Internet and global communications systems. As the available storehouse of data has grown, so have governmental and commercial efforts to use this data for their own purposes.

To further frame the context, lets take a look at two surveillance exercises.

Learn more about surveillance in America.

The key to finding Osama bin Laden came from tracking, one of his couriers: Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who lived in Abbottabad, Pakistan. To track him, the CIA initially used sophisticated geo-location technology that helped pinpoint his cell phone location.

That allowed the CIA to determine the exact type of car that al-Kuwaiti droveit was a white SUV. Using physical and electronic surveillance, the CIA began tracking the vehicle. One day, a satellite captured images of the SUV pulling into a large concrete compound in Abbottabad. Agents used aerial surveillance to keep watch.

The residents of the Abbottabad compound were also extremely cautious. They burned their trashprobably to frustrate a search of that trash that might have yielded DNA samples of the residents.

The United States also learned that the compound lacked a phone or an Internet connection. Again, why? Almost certainly because the residents understood that phone and Internet communications could be tracked, traced, and intercepted.

It was observed that a man, who lived on the third floor, never left. He stayed inside the compound, and underneath a canopy, frustrating overhead surveillance by satellite.

In addition to satellites, the government flew an advanced stealth drone, the RQ-170, over Pakistan to eavesdrop on electronic transmissions from the compound.

The CIA made any number of efforts to identify this man. They tried to collect sewage from the compound to identify fecal matter and run a DNA analysis, but as the sewage contained the effluence of other houses, they couldnt isolate a good sample.

At one point, the CIA got a Pakistani doctor to pretend he was conducting a vaccination program. Nurses tried to get inside the compound and vaccinate the children, which would have allowed them to get a DNA sample, but again without success. To get a closer look, CIA spies also moved into a house on the property next door.

It has been reported that this surveillance operation cost so much money that the CIA had to ask for supplemental funding from Congressfunding that it, of course, received.

In short, during the hunt for bin Laden, the United States employed physical and electronic surveillance and sophisticated data analysis. The result, from an intelligence standpoint, was a success.

By now, most Americans are pretty familiar with the long lines, thorough pat-downs, and X-ray inspections that are part of the process.

But that physical screening comes at the back end of a process that begins much earlier when you first make a reservation to fly. The Transportation Security Administrations (TSAs) security directives require airline passengers to present identification when they make a reservation.

Later, if youre selected for secondary screening, you and your bags will be taken out of line for additional scrutiny. And why is it that we ask for a passengers name along with gender and date of birth?

Learn more about hacking and surveillance.

The reason is because that data is used for a form of dataveillance-screening, known as Secure Flight. Your name and date of birth are checked against a terrorist screening database.

Screenings include flights that overfly but dont land in the continental U.S. This was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, created by the Congress and the president after the September 2001 terror attacks to identify security lapses, and ways to strengthen U.S. defenses.

The Secure Flight program has not, so far as is publicly known, ever actually spotted a terrorist.

There are ways one might legally challenge this kind of surveillance. In 2006, a traveler named John Gilmore challenged the TSAs identification requirement. He asserted that he had a right to travel and that his right to travel included the right to do so anonymously without providing identification.

The federal Ninth Circuit court of appeals agreed, provisionally, that he had a right to travel. But, it said that if he wanted to travel by air, then Gilmore was consenting to the requirement that he provide identification before boarding the plane. If he didnt want to do that, he was free to travel by some other means.

The story doesnt end there, however. For years, ten U.S. citizens were unable to fly to, or from, the United Statesor even over American airspacebecause they were on the governments top-secret No Fly List.

They were never told why theyd made to the list, they didnt have much chance of getting off of it, either. In June 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of a disabled Marine veteran named Ayman Latif, who was living in Egypt, and the nine others.

Latif won the case. The court concluded that he did have a right to challenge his inclusion on the no-fly list, and was entitled to a process by which he could seek to be removed from it.

It didnt help the governments case that Latif had probably been put on the list by mistake, and should have been removed long before his lawsuit came to court.

The above polar cases bring us full circle to a set of concepts that we need to think about: the balance between transparency and effectiveness.

Some of the physical and traditional forms of surveillance include eavesdropping, looking at the object, or prying over someone, and using smell to do surveillance.

The CIA used drones, satellites, and physical surveillance in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Dataveillance is a type of surveillance that includes the collection, and analysis, of personally identifiable data and information about individuals.

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Surveillance: Types, Uses, and Abuses - The Great Courses Daily News

As millions of people across Texas suffered from power and water outages during extreme cold from a winter storm this week, women at the federal prison in Fort Worth where National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner is imprisoned faced alarming conditions. The detained women were forced to literally take matters into their own hands in a disgusting way.

Winner told family and a friend that incarcerated women at her prison took one for the team and used their hands to scoop feces from overflowing toilets that hadnt been flushed due to the prolonged water outage.

Reality told me that the toilets stopped working because there wasnt any water and things got disgusting really fast.

Reality told me that the toilets stopped working because there wasnt any water and things got disgusting really fast, said Brittany Winner, who spoke with her sister Reality by video chat. Some inmates put on rubber gloves to scoop out the shit and throw it away to get rid of it because of the smell.

Many of the women, like Winner, are at Federal Medical Center Carswell because they have chronic medical needs that the prison, a medical detention center, is tasked with treating. But the toilet incident was one of several unsanitary and unhealthy hardships that the women endured, according to advocates and a detailed press report, during a week of extreme weather that has left dozens dead nationwide. While the frigid prison was dealing with internal temperatures so cold that one incarcerated woman told a local reporter that her hands were blue and shaking, it was also still contending with an ongoing Covid-19 outbreak that has already taken the lives of six women incarcerated there.

In a statement, the Bureau of Prisons said interruptions to service were minor. Similar to many of those in the surrounding community and across the state of Texas dealing with heat and water issues during the recent winter storm, the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswellexperienced minor power, heat, and hot water issues that affected the main supply channels, Emery Nelson, a bureau public affairs official, said in an email. However, back-up systems were in place and FMC Carswell maintained power, heat, and hot water until the main supply issues were resolved.Nelson also said incarceratedpeople at Carswell had access to potable water with no disruptions or shortages, to include hot water for showers, and the ability to flush toilets.

A report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this week said that the medical portion of the prison the hospital facilities appeared to maintain heat, but the newspaper also collected accounts from the housing units that matched thosegiven by Winners advocates: shortages of hot water, loss of heat, and issues with waste management.

Sufferingwas widespread across Texas, where local authorities have raised alarm over people so desperate for warmth that they used cars and charcoal grills to heat their homes and suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. To Winners advocates, the crisis inside the prison felt like the latest unjust blow for an incarcerated person who, like many across the United Statess sprawling prison system, could have been released to home confinement long ago when the government made a halfhearted effort to reduce the federal prison population in the early days of the pandemic. Prosecutors involved in Winners case opposed the policy and successfully argued to keep the whistleblower behind bars, where she eventually was infected withCovid-19.

These women theyre trapped, Realitys mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said of the sub-freezing temperatures in Fort Worth this week. They cant escape this. They cant do something to better their situation at all.

Winners family and friends first heard from the whistleblower about winter storm conditions in her prison on Monday, when she told them that water had been intermittently off since Saturday afternoon. This meant the women detained inside not only couldnt flush toilets, but that they also couldnt wash their hands or drink from water fountains, Winner told them.

She was so dehydrated and so thirsty, Winners friend and advocate Wendy Meer Collins said. Collins added that Winner was so desperate to shower that she had given herself what she called a birdbath using ice cubes from a machine.

In addition to the water shortages, the furnace appeared to be off or insufficiently functioning for much of the week, even though the prison appeared to mostly maintain power, according to Winners advocates and the report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which said women put socks on their hands and guards wore winter coats and hats indoors to stay warm. The Bureau of Prisons said there was a maintenance period in the prison and that internal temperatures were monitored but did not specify what needed to be maintained nor when it wasfixed.

During the days of sub-freezing temperatures, women at FMC Carswell needed to walk in ice and snow outdoors to go to the cafeteria to get meals, according to Winner-Davis and Collins. The women dont even have the option to huddle together to stay warm, Collins said, as Winner has been punished in the past for hugging a fellow incarcerated person in violation of the prisons unauthorized contact policy. (Despite saying that the prison had maintained heat, the Bureau of Prisons also told The Intercept that it distributed extra blankets to incarcerated women.)

By the time Winner spoke to her mother on Thursday morning, she told her that heat had been recently restored in their building.

The miserable week inside the cold prison spurred a new round of calls for relief from supporters who back the year-old clemency campaign for Winner, their eyes now on the new administration.

Winner, who blew the whistle on threats to election security, is currently serving the longest prison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for mishandling classified information.

The government itself acknowledges that Winners intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund, another First Look Media company, supportedWinners legal defense.)

Her clemency campaign has drawn a diverse array of political supporters, including the President George W. Bush-era secrecy czar responsible for overseeing classification procedures, who wrote an op-ed calling for Winner to be Bidens first pardon, as well as a prominent congressional Libertarian who said using the Espionage Act to prosecute her was unjust and abusive.

Winner was the first national security whistleblower prosecuted by the last administration, and Collins believes that a Democratic White House, whose voters are motivated by issues of election integrity and security, should signal a clear break with the 45th presidency and allow Winner to go home.

This is Trumps political prisoner, and its time to let her out, Collins said. Shes served more time than she ever should have anyway.

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Freezing Weather Creates Crisis in Reality Winner's Texas Prison - The Intercept

The Biden administration has rhetorically placed strengthening democracy abroad at the center of its foreign policy. As part of this push, the White House has committed to holdingaSummitfor Democracyto galvanize supportforfightingcorruption, combatingauthoritarianism, and advancinghuman rights.Some foreign policy analysts argue that such a meeting is ill-advised and the administration should instead get to work on these issues at home, while others offer smart recommendations for how to craft the gathering. Since no administration will backtrack after making such a bold announcement, those in the latter camp have made the more useful and practical contributions.

What has been largely overlooked in this debate is what comes before and after the summit as well as how the Biden administration articulates and delivers on its vision for strengthening democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. Convening a grouping of established and aspiring democracies to convey Americas commitment to the cause is smart and principled foreign policy, given Chinas rise and Americas unsettling experience with stress on its own institutions. Even as it plans the summit, however, the White House should develop a roadmap for implementing the presidents vision. This means crafting a democracy and human rights strategy and signing an executive action required to cement it as U.S. policy.

The summit is necessary but far from sufficient to address the many global challenges to democracy. Authoritarians are on the march, having used the pandemic as an excuse to expand executive authority and suppress dissent. Kleptocracy is on the rise and often underwrites authoritarians repression. The Chinese Communist Party has mounted an ideological insurgency against democracy by actively promoting an alternative governance model based on centralized control and censorship. Chinese companies linked to Beijing areexploiting and exacerbating governance gaps in vulnerable countries by using corruption and opaque processes to solidify deals that favor elite interests and undermine accountability. Russia uses corruption, attacks on elections, and disinformation to undermine democratic actors and allies with links to the United States and the European Union. Citizens in every major region feel that democracy is not helping make their lives better.

The Biden administration should use the summit to highlight these challenges, galvanize support for addressing them, and work with like-minded allies to develop solutions. But it must go beyond this to develop a roadmap for success and take follow-on bureaucratic actions to cement progress. This means developing a comprehensive U.S. democracy and human rights strategy that encompasses all the relevant agencies and tools for support.

The strategy must include clear short- and long-term goals and theories of success for achieving them, with measurable objectives for chosen areas of focus. The overarching long-term goal of the United States should be a world where democracy is the predominant form of governance because it is the model with the best chance of delivering peace and prosperity for citizens. The strategy will need to articulate country and regional priorities and visions for success in each, given competing strategic priorities and finite resources.

As I have written elsewhere, five areas of focus warrant attention as part of the Biden administrations democracy strategy. First, it should bolster core institutions of democracy in strategically important countries. Second, democracy strengthening and democracy protection should be coupled to enable countries to prevent and counter Russian and Chinese interference. Third, it should support a positive vision for how technology can deliver on democratic principles and pushing back against digital authoritarianism. Fourth, it should recommit to working with allies to shore up democracy abroad. Finally, it must back these initiatives with forceful and principled diplomacy to stand with democratic activists and speak out against dictators and tyrants.

The administrations democracy and human rights strategy should also include steps to revitalize democracy at home. A dual international and domestic democracy strategy would reflect how the administration has prioritized work on this important issue at home and abroad and lend credibility to efforts overseas by explicitly recognizing (and putting resources against) weaknesses in U.S. democratic practice.

A U.S. democracy strategy should be a main deliverable for the summit. The administration can use the summit to announce the new approach and with it a commitment of significant foreign assistance resources to implement the vision. The Biden administration should enshrine the democracy strategy in a National Security Directive, like it did for the White House approach to COVID-19. Such a directive would establish the strategy as the U.S. policy for supporting democracy at home and abroad and carry with it the direction of the president that the federal government execute this vision.

Presidents have regularly used directives to state their policy on a range of issues. The George W. Bush administration, which issued 66 such directives, outlined its Artic Region Policy in National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 66 and U.S. cybersecurity policy in NSPD 54. The Obama administration, which issued 43 directives, outlined a new U.S. policy toward Cuba in Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 43. And the Trump administration, which released 18, outlined U.S. policy on promoting womens global development and prosperity in its National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 53. Every administration dating back to the Truman presidency has done the same.

Beyond codifying the U.S. approach to democracy and thereby increasing the probability the strategy is effective, a presidential directive sends a strong signal to our allies and authoritarians that the United States is serious about strengthening democracy overseas.

Developing such strategies and directives takes time. The National Security Council (NSC) should start the drafting and planning processes now even as it plans a summit. If it does not, the White House risks this high-level meeting sucking the oxygen out of its democracy efforts and being left, post-meeting, with little to show and the actual work left to do. Arguably, the strategy and not the summit should be the NSCs priority focus on this issue set in the coming months.

Summits are sexy. Policy documents are not. Thankfully, they are not mutually exclusive. The Biden administration is right to hold the summit and in so doing demonstrate to the world the U.S. commitment to democracy. It should use the summit to announce its broader democracy strategy, and ensure that all agencies quickly implement the strategy.

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The Democracy Summit must be paired with a democracy strategy - Brookings Institution