I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
The ACLU of Michigan has filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation seeking documents related to their information gathering techniques regarding racial and ethnic groups in the state.
In a press release, the group says:
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Michigan today sued the FBI and Department of Justice for records related to the FBI’s use of race and ethnicity in conducting assessments and investigations of local communities in Michigan. According to an FBI operations guide, FBI agents have the authority to collect information about, and create maps of, so-called racial and ethnic behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions and “ethnic-oriented” businesses in communities with concentrated ethnic populations.
“Through this lawsuit we hope to get records that will tell us exactly what federal law enforcement officials are doing and whether Americans are protected,” said Mark P. Fancher, ACLU of Michigan Racial Justice Project staff attorney. “Law enforcement profiling based on race and ethnicity has the potential to erode community trust while doing nothing to solve or deter crime. It’s important that Michigan residents know what federal law enforcement officials are doing so that as a community we can hold them accountable for any abuses of power.”
The FBI’s power to collect, use and map racial and ethnic data in order to assist the FBI’s “domain awareness” and “intelligence analysis” activities is described in the 2008 FBI Domestic Intelligence and Operations Guide (DIOG). The FBI released the DIOG in heavily redacted form in September 2009, but a less-censored version was not made public until January 2010. Although the DIOG has been in effect for more than two years, very little information is available to the public about how the FBI has implemented this authority…
“While the collection of some racial and ethnic data about communities might assist in addressing discrimination, the FBI’s claimed authority to target and map certain racial and ethnic communities for increased scrutiny and investigation invites unconstitutional racial profiling,” said Nusrat Choudhury, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “In America, we don’t target neighborhoods for law enforcement purposes based on the ethnic makeup of the people who live there or the types of businesses they run.”
Last year the ACLU filed FOIA requests for this information and the agency has refused to turn over some documents. The lawsuit seeks to force them to turn over those records.
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