A congressional committee hearing is being held today on the Homeland Security Department’s (DHS) monitoring of social media. The meeting, being convened by the House Subcommittee of Counterterrorism and Intelligence, chaired by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), is being held as a result of documents on DHS monitoring that were exposed through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public research center that focuses attention on emerging issues of privacy and other civil liberties issues.

Everything changed on September 11, 2001. It’s become an American truism. And for many, it’s also absolutely true. It certainly was the case for Tom Engelhardt. He was roughly seven miles north of the World Trade Center that morning and that’s about the furthest he’s been from it since.

Not much change to our list of full time encampments this week. We go to 65 encampments as Occupy Bellingham faces an 11:30 am PT eviction today and moves to the “threatened with eviction” list, but since the rash of raids on the 23rd, there hasn’t been much action. (Homeland Security must be giving staff the week off for the holidays.) Details follow.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee, chaired by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), is holding a major hearing on whether the United States is safer ten years after the September 11th attacks. Homeland Security Department Janet Napolitano, FBI Director Robert Mueller and National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew Olsen will be testifying before the committee.

Thursday’s No Justice No BART protest–which shut down Powell Street Station in San Francisco–turned into an ugly attack on free speech and freedom of the press when BART police arrested between 25 and 30 people, a third of whom are reported to be journalists, including seven student journalists from San Francisco State University and the Chronicle’s Vivian Ho.

Fifty years ago today, East German soldiers began overseeing the construction of the Berlin Wall. That wall came down in 1989, but as Der Spiegel reminds us, other walls remain elsewhere in the world.

Even more insidious, though, are the invisible walls we build with money and defend with lawyers, all in an attempt to defend the status quo and nail things down as they are right now.

Sorry, but life is like a river, and you can’t nail it down. Count me among those who yearn for life without such walls.

HALT

Republican Lamar Smith of Texas, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, profoundly wasted the committee’s time today with a junk piece of legislation that would only make matters worse for immigration authorities if passed. The legislation, the “Hinder the Administration’s Legalization Temptation (HALT) Act,” limit the administrative authority the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration Customs & Enforcment (ICE) has to consider waivers and issue cancel deportations, if deemed necessary.

A federal judge on Friday heard a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) against the government’s assertion that it has the authority to search, seize and copy laptops, cell phones, cameras and other devices of people at America’s borders even if there is no suspicion of wrongdoing.

Specifically, the hearing was on whether the government’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit against laptop search policies at the border was legitimate.

Antiwar and international solidarity activists, subjects of a federal grand jury investigation that alleges they may have provided “material support for terrorism,” uncovered documents on FBI guidelines and investigation practices left behind in an activist’s home that was raided in September of last year. The documents illuminate how the FBI has conducted surveillance of the activists being targeted in the investigation and further prove the grand jury is being used as a tool to go after political groups.

Antonia Juhasz’ Black Tide drills into our past, our present, and all too possibly, our future. Black Tide gives us the chance to learn from Antonia’s years of expert work on the oil industry and the industry’s effects upon us all and the planet we all depend on. This book goes far beyond history and policy – the book draws on the months Antonia spent with Gulf Coast residents living with the consequences of the oil catastrophe BP and partners brought upon them and the Gulf one year and thirteen days ago. The result is a powerful, compelling work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. But unlike a novel, Black Tide brings us into the lives of real people, and Antonia brings them to us in their own words.