Considering the weather conditions in the winter in Ohio, almost all construction is done during the summertime, when its warm and sunny so construction workers don’t have to worry about snow, ice, windchills, and freezing temperatures. But the railroad construction being done lately in northern Trumbull county, located in Northeast Ohio, has been posing problems for residents and emergency crews.

Several roads have been shut down where railroad crossings are located, and while residents look at it as a major inconvenience, another worry is if there is an emergency somewhere medics will not be able to arrive in time.

According to Major Harold Firster of the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office, “It’s very frustrating when you can’t get to the citizenry of the county.”

This past Wednesday, Trumbull County deputies had much difficulty arriving at a scene in the area after an emergency call had been made as four of the main routes in the area have been closed of for railroad repairs.

Bill Spithaler, a local resident that lives on Davis Peck Road, has concern for his community during this time:

“The fire departments and the sheriff’s department, nobody knew all these crossings were closed to where they have access. It’s an inconvenience for residents, but for the EMS it could be a major life-threatening ordeal for somebody that needed services.”

Major Firster believes that the announcement of all the closures taking place in the area were not made aware to the proper channels. “With multiple agencies trying to report this problem, it never really filtered down to the 911 center or the Sheriff’s office,” Firster said.

Norfolk Southern, who is doing all the repairs, usually let local residents know when, where, and for how long they will be doing work, but many have been left unaware posing problems such as getting held up in traffic or being late for work. Fortunately for the community, Firster is taking action and has contacted Norfolk Southern and the Department of Homeland Security and has been able to come to an agreement for emergency vehicles before the construction is completed. The agreement entails that all emergency vehicles will now be allowed in what was before restricted areas even for them, and that they are allowed to cross railroad tracks, including passing through the roads that have been closed off to local residents.

“Of the nine crossings that were closed, four of them are either open, or able to be crossed at this time,” Firster said. The other remaining five will be open soon.

Construction should be wrapped up in the next few days and all will resume back to normal in the community, in addition to new and improved streets and railroad crossings.

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On April 26, Propublica reported on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, and the debate it has inspired about the privacy of your Internet data and security. The underlying bill allows Internet providers, software companies and other private firms to share information about “cybersecurity” with the federal government — and protects them from legal liability.

The bill’s sponsors touted a handful of amendments they said addressed privacy and civil liberties concerns, but privacy activists say the amendments still don’t go far enough. The House had been set to vote on the bill today but instead passed it Thursday night, 248-168, with some changes:

How “cyber threat” information can be used: Rep. Ben Quayle, R-Ariz., proposed an amendment that limits the use of shared cyber threat information to five purposes: protecting cybersecurity, investigating cybersecurity crimes, protecting people from death or injury, protecting minors from harm, and protecting U.S. national security.

What kind of information can be shared: An amendment by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., specifies the kind of information that can be shared, saying it must be “directly pertaining to” a threat, vulnerability, attack or unauthorized access. It also makes clear that violating a website’s terms of service — that’s the form on which you check “agree” when registering at a site like Facebook or Gmail — doesn’t constitute a cyber threat.

A second look: An amendment proposed by Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., states that five years after the bill is enacted, Congress would have to re-examine and reauthorize it, providing an opportunity to address changes in technology or unintended consequences.

Addressing civil liberties: An amendment proposed by Mulvaney and Rep. Norman Dicks, D-Wash., says that in sharing information, the federal government should take “reasonable efforts” to limit the impact on privacy and civil liberties, consistent with the need to protect cyber threats.

Personal records: Put forth by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., the amendment says the government can’t make use of educational, medical, firearms or tax return records that it receives from private companies through CISPA.

Why privacy activists are unhappy

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other pro-privacy groups continue to argue that the bill would enable commercial interests and intelligence agencies to misuse personal information under the guise of preventing cybercrimes. The pro-privacy groups say the amendments represent an improvement but don’t offer sufficient safeguards. CISPA allows private companies to hand information directly to military and intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency.

Privacy activists backed amendments by Democrats to give the Department of Homeland Security authority to devise privacy protections. None made it to the floor in the GOP-controlled House.

Under the amended bill, shared information can be used for the protection of national security, not just cybersecurity. Some opponents say this is too broad and fear it would be easy for the government to justify collecting private data even when unrelated to hacking or Internet security.

What’s next 

CISPA faces a hard road in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it must duke it out with cybersecurity bills backed by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. The White House said this week that advisers would recommend that President Obama veto CISPA if it ever reaches his desk.

by Megha Rajagopalan, ProPublica, April 27, 2012, 4:37 p.m.

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Through the centuries immigration has been a major source to the United States’ growth and development. But it has been also, and it is still, a source of controversy and conflict.

One of the biggest problems tied to immigration in US is the large number of illegal immigrants which outnumbered the legals one. A 2011 survey showed that the illegal immigrants living in the United States in 2010 were about 11.2 million – a number essentially unchanged from the previous year -.

In the controversy about this fundamental issue, either Democrats and Republicans agreed over the years on the need to make changes to the federal immigration laws to face this problem. But essentially just in 2010, after the passage of a new immigration bill in Arizona, the need of a reform in this field has came back to light and has become the subject of discussion.

The Arizona immigration bill, the toughest of the nation about illegal immigration, was signed on April 2010.It required state and local police officers to inquire about the immigration status of anyone they stop if they have a “reasonable suspicion” the person is an illegal It also makes it a state crime to not carry immigration papers. One day before to take effect, in July 28th, the bill was blocked by a judge who asserted the primary authority of the federal government over state lawmakers in immigration matters.

The bill was strongly criticized by President Obama who declared that it threatened “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

Analysing the strategy of the Obama administration in matter of illegal immigration, it is clear that he is pursuing the programs started by the former President Bush administration, despite initially he pledged he would had moderated his predecessor ‘s policies.

Starting from the Bush administration’s policies Mr. Obama expanded a program to verify workers immigration status, replacing immigration raids at factories and farms with a different enforcement strategy sending federal agents to check companies’ records searching for illegal immigrant workers.

These kinds of audits don’t lead to the deportation of the illegal immigrants workers as in the past, but these are being usually fired. Since the beginning of this practice in 2009 thousands of suspected illegal immigrants workers have been fired.

The aim of this policy is to prevent future illegal immigration discouraging the employers to hire illegal immigrants and the immigrants to not cross the borders illegally being conscious of the difficulty of finding a job in those conditions. The effects of the enforcement of this strategy are evident mostly on the Mexican illegal immigration which seems to be reducing. Mexicans – that are the largest group of illegal immigrants – are delaying in crossing the United States borders illegally because of the current situation of low possibilities to find jobs, a considerable decline has been shown by the Mexican Government’s census data.

According to the Department of Homeland Security officials, in each of the last two years the number of immigrants who were deported is the highest in the country’s history, about 400,000.

Over the last months many states government all around US started advancing legislation proposals inspired to Arizona’s bill, with the aim to crack down on the illegal immigration penalizing the illegal immigrants. Mostly in the states under Republican control, this fact is due to the lack of consensus recorded by the Congress.

The debate on toughening up on strategies against illegal immigrants is stirring also the states that have usually been tolerant, that are proposing tougher measures in matter of illegal immigration.

The purpose is to make life so difficult for illegal immigrants to push them to go back to their own countries. As never before since 2006 the possibilities of these laws to be passed appear so high. Perhaps is something changing in the Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants or it is just a political manoeuvre? We will see if the 2012 elections would make reach a turning point on this issue.

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Since the late 2008,when the program Secure Communities initiated,there has been confusion about its enforcement and its interpretations.

Documents containing hundreds of messages, mostly copies of emails sent between officials of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and public relations advisers from early 2009 and the present time,show all the uncertainty and the misunderstanding created by this obscure and vague program.

“I’m totally confused now. I’ve got so many versions of the opt-out language I don’t know what’s current and what’s not. It seems like we have different language for different purposes and it’s confusing. Can we put this on today’s agenda to talk about?”

This is one of the emails,written on June 2010 by a member of the ICE staff who expressed his perplexity on the question,and it is just one of the many collected by the National Day Labourers Organizing Network with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Cardozo School of Law.

Secure Communities is a program wanted by the Obama administration to enforce the laws of immigration and crime and,by 2013 it should be spread to all local jurisdictions in any states. It consists of a collaboration between the state and the local police. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases are put at their disposal to check either the criminal records and the immigration history of those immigrants who are arrested.

Since the program started in 2008 has led to the deportation of about 58.300 immigrants with criminal convictions but, groups of immigrants advocacy opposing to the program say that in reality it has led to the unjust deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants with no criminal records or of people arrested just for minor traffic infractions, tearing established families apart.

According to ICE are 39 the states where Secure Communities is at the present time. Still many states are opposing the enforcement of the program. New Jersey, the state with the nation’s sixth largest immigrant population, is one of those refusing to join it and also supporting the protest against the inefficiency of Secure Communities.

The confusion is mostly related to the fact that it’s not clear whether the program is voluntary or mandatory. Can the local law enforcement agencies opt out of it or not?

Over these years the responses of ICE have been different and conflicting, changing every time. There isn’t any legal and official mandate that indicates the program enforcement is mandatory, but DHS decided in October 2010 that local jurisdictions could not opt out of Secure Communities, giving no clear explanations about the legality of this imposition. Thus the doubts about the constitutionality of making the program mandatory are still strong.

Moreover even at the technical level it is totally confusing how exactly should the criminal identification process work. The FBI databases are shared with the DHS databases now,so apparently there is no way, technically, to limit the ICE’s filtering by the local jurisdiction, even if those refuse to participate to the program.

Highlighting all these problems due to the conflict and the obscurity of the program,the immigration advocates oppose strongly Secure Communities, pointing the question that immigration is a federal problem and any state should enforce specific federal laws and, especially should be free to opt out of the program.

So can a state law so vague and confusing be enforced obligatory by every local jurisdiction?

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