provinceorstate:columbia circuit

  • The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has ruled in the case of Verizon et al. v. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (PDF)
    http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/3AF8B4D938CDEEA685257C6000532062/$file/11-1355-1474943.pdf

    This regulation essentially provides an economic preference to a politically powerful constituency, a constituency that, as is true of typical rent seekers, wishes protection against market forces. The Commission does not have authority to grant such a favor.

    #Net_neutrality gets a kick in the teeth | ZDNet
    http://www.zdnet.com/net-neutrality-gets-a-kick-in-the-teeth-7000025154

    Think about it. #Netflix eats up more Internet bandwidth than any other Internet service. Netflix’s traffic keeps growing and it’s about to explode. Netflix has started broadcasting a handful of shows in 4K Ultra HD. These shows will require a speed of approximately of 15.6 megabits per second (Mbps).

    You don’t think #Verizon wants a piece of the action for providing the high-speed pipes 4K video will require? I sure would if I were in their shoes.

    We’ve also seen in just the last few days that the content providers aren’t happy about letting “free” content, such as over-the-air (OTA) TV on the Internet at all. Put these factors together and I see an Internet that’s far less open not just to entertainment, but to all kinds of content.

    None of this is set in stone yet. The next step for net neutrality is for the FCC to come up with a new set of rules. The Supreme Court must rule on the legality of OTA content being shared over the Internet.

    Across the pond, the European Union is dead set in favor of net neutrality, so some companies might decide to host their Websites in Europe to avoid the US’ regulations. I could see Google/YouTube or Netflix doing that.

    Sound crazy? I think it would be crazy like a fox. The EU is already trying to grab a big hunk of American cloud services business because of NSA privacy fears, so why couldn’t EU-based content delivery networks [#CDN] and website-hosting businesses host US regulation-free sites there as well? I’d consider it, if I were a content provider.

    There’s one good thing that might come of it. The US government may finally spell out how the Internet will be governed.

    As George Foote a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney who works on FCC-related matters said, “The court has invited the FCC and Congress to finally come to grips with the digital, ubiquitous, riotous world of communications. The FCC’s attempt to use the common carrier rules to regulate the Internet would never work, despite the very good policy of ensuring fair and competitive communications service. The Internet simply cannot be regulated under rules written when there was a telephone monopoly. Congress is reviewing the whole Communications Act and there is a new FCC Chairman. The Court has asked them to get to work.” Let’s hope they do. 

    This is all speculation now of course. Still, if the Supreme Court rules against sharing OTA TV over the Internet and Verizon get the rules set up the way it wants, the top-level ISPs become the de facto gatekeepers of the Internet. They’ll decide what we can view and how much we’ll pay for it.

    Mais pour les membres du think tank #libertarien TechFreedom, le problème est ailleurs :

    The Feds Lost Net Neutrality, But Won Control of the Web | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
    http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/01/one-talking-comes-net-neutrality

    To some extent, the FCC’s newfound sense of restraint is required by the court’s decision, which hinged on a provision of the Communications Act barring the Commission from imposing “common carriage” obligations on Title I “information services” like broadband. Instead, the FCC has to leave room for “individualized negotiation” between ISPs and so-called edge providers (Netflix, Google, etc.). But the FCC can still require that, for example, premium carriage agreements be “commercially reasonable” and non-discriminatory — as it did when requiring wireless carriers to provide data roaming to their competitors’ customers (which the D.C. Circuit recently upheld). This would prevent the clearest potential problems (like, say, degrading Netflix just to favor an ISP’s own video service) while still allowing pro-consumer deals (like guaranteeing quality of service for video providers).

    In short, the FCC now has vast discretion, and seems unwilling to give that up.

    Cela n’empêche pas les papiers sur le caractère crucial de la #neutralité_du_net de fleurir à nouveau :

    Net Neutrality and the Future of #Journalism | Free Press
    http://www.freepress.net/blog/2014/01/15/net-neutrality-and-future-journalism

    For newsrooms the decision means that a company like AT&T or Verizon could decide where their uses can go for news and what stories get buried or blocked online. Verizon could strike a deal with CNN and hamper their users’ ability to access alternative news sources. Comcast could slow access to Al Jazeera, because it wants to promote its NBC news offerings*.

    That’s why, in 2010, Senator Al Franken argued that “Net Neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time.”

    PS : je suis du coup passé par la page WP de la FCC et j’ai découvert ce bandeau que je n’avais jamais vu :
    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commission

    #prévision https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:%C3%89v%C3%A9nement_%C3%A0_venir

    #actualité #média #wiki https://fr.wikinews.org/wiki/Accueil

  • freedetainees.org – Can Guantanamo detainees challenge confinement conditions ?
    http://www.freedetainees.org/2013/10/19/can-guantanamo-detainees-challenge-confinement-conditions

    Can Guantanamo detainees challenge confinement conditions?
    October 19, 2013 - By: LGHR - Forced Feedings, Hunger Strike - No Comment // 98 Views

    WASHINGTON — Force-feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainees confronted federal judges Friday with complicated questions including how far judicial review can stretch for hunger strikers.

    In a case closely watched by inmate advocates nationwide, a three-judge appellate panel pushed back against an Obama administration claim that courts are powerless to review the complaints of Guantanamo detainees who refuse to eat as a form of protest. But the judges also puzzled over whether they have the legal authority to consider such cases.“This is a unique situation,” Judge Thomas Griffith said, adding that “Guantanamo is a different sort of prison.”

    The 45-minute oral argument Friday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit marked the latest, and potentially most significant, in a series of legal challenges to force-feeding. Prison authorities in California and other states, as well as the federal authorities at Guantanamo, support the tactic when faced with inmates on extended hunger strikes.

    In August, a San Francisco-based federal judge approved plans to force-feed California inmates, if necessary, who were taking part in a long hunger strike to protest solitary confinement conditions. The appellate judges on Friday cited the California developments several times, though the Guantanamo circumstances aren’t strictly comparable.

    Guantanamo “is a facility in which even more deference should be accorded (the government), given the nature of the detainees,” Justice Department attorney Daniel J. Lenerz told the court Friday.

    Guantanamo is also a facility that Congress has tried, in several ways, to put beyond the traditional reach of U.S. courts. During Friday’s oral arguments, held before a standing-room-only audience, judges seemed at least a little uncomfortable with that legal isolation.

    “Does the government always prevail . . . by saying, ‘It’s obvious to us that hunger strikes have a corrosive effect on inmate morale?’” a skeptical-sounding Griffith asked, further questioning whether the government’s assertion is really “the end of the inquiry.”

    In a prior case, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees enjoy the constitutionally protected right to file a habeas corpus petition challenging their detention. On Friday, Judge David Tatel noted that the high court left open the scope of that right. In particular, the question is whether it entails an ability to challenge the conditions of confinement.

    “Isn’t the core question whether the condition that’s being complained of is unconstitutional?” Tatel added.

    The court spent almost no time Friday discussing an auxiliary argument that the force-feeding – blandly called “enteral feeding” by Lenerz – violated the detainees’ religious rights. Judges also avoided the details of the painful feeding process, as they focused on the technical but essential gateway question of whether the case can be heard.

    The Military Commissions Act of 2006 says “no court, justice or judge shall have jurisdiction” to consider legal actions concerning the treatment or “conditions of confinement” of those who “have been properly detained as an enemy combatant.” Two federal judges in July said the law prevented them from issuing preliminary injunctions to stop the Guantanamo force-feeding.

    At the same time, one of the judges – U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler – used her July 8 decision to denounce the practice she said she was powerless to stop.

    “It is perfectly clear . . . that force-feeding is a painful, humiliating and degrading process,” Kessler wrote, adding that the detainees “set out in great details in (their) papers what appears to be a consensus that force-feeding of prisoners violates Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.”

    Guantanamo detainees began a broad-based hunger strike in about March, protesting conditions that included intrusive searches and indefinite detention. At the hunger strike’s peak earlier this year, U.S. military authorities declared that 106 of Guantanamo’s detainees were participating, with 46 designated for force-feeding. There are currently 164 detainees, and the number of those on a hunger strike has sharply fallen.

    During force-feeding, the detainee is restrained while a two-foot long feeding tube is passed via the nasal passage into the stomach. The tube is secured to the nose with tape, and liquid nutrients are pumped in over a period of about 20 to 30 minutes.

    The specific challenge considered Thursday is being pressed by three detainees, each of whom has been cleared for release but nonetheless remain confined.

    “Force-feeding is unethical, it’s inhumane (and) it’s a violation of international law,” Oakland, Calif.-based attorney Jon B. Eisenberg, representing the detainees, told the court. He added that “these are unlawful conditions of confinement, these are unlawful restraints . . . (but) the threshold question is, does this court have jurisdiction?”

    Source

  • Americans born in Jerusalem cannot list ’Israel’ as place of birth -
    Haaretz

    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.537530

    A federal appeals court on Tuesday invalidated a U.S. law that was designed to allow American citizens born in Jerusalem to choose to have Israel listed as their birthplace on passports contrary to long-standing U.S. foreign policy.

    Ari and Naomi Zivotofsky, whose son Menachem was born in Jerusalem and is a U.S. citizen, filed a lawsuit in 2003 demanding that the government enforce the law.

    A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the president - and not lawmakers - had sole authority to say who controls the historic holy city claimed by Israelis and Palestinians.

    In the U.S. government, the president “exclusively holds the power to determine whether to recognize a foreign sovereign,” wrote Judge Karen Henderson for the panel.

    Since the founding of Israel in 1948, U.S. presidents have declined to state a position on the status of Jerusalem, leaving it as one of the thorniest issues to be resolved in possible future peace talks.

    The State Department, which issues passports and reports to the president, has declined to enforce the law passed by Congress in 2002, saying it violated the separation of executive and legislative powers laid out in the U.S. Constitution.

    When President George W. Bush signed the law, he said that if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, it would “impermissibly interfere” with the president’s authority to speak for the country in international affairs.

    The issue of the Zivotofsky case reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year on the preliminary question of whether it was so political that it did not belong in the courts. The high court ruled 8-1 that the case could proceed, setting up Tuesday’s ruling.

    Lawyers for Zivotofsky said they would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, as they did following the 2009 ruling.

    “We hope that before Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky’s bar mitzvah, he will be able to bear a passport that recognizes his birthplace as ‘Israel,’ ” attorneys Nathan and Alyza Lewin said in a statement.

    An estimated 50,000 American citizens were born in Jerusalem and could have used the law, if it were enforced, to list Israel as their birthplace.

    While Israel calls Jerusalem its eternal and indivisible capital, few other countries accept that status. Most, including the United States, maintain their embassies to Israel in Tel Aviv.

    Palestinians want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as capital of the state they aim to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel.