The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s seventeenth meeting will be hosted by Georgetown University in Gaston Hall at Healy Hall on December 5, 2006, from 2:00 to 5:00 pm. This will be the first public meeting of the Board, and it is designed as an expert’s forum in which the Board will solicit comments from non-governmental individuals and organizations with an interest and expertise in privacy and civil liberties issues arising in the context of the government’s actions to protect the nation from terrorism. The Board has also invited privacy and civil liberties officers from a number of federal departments and agencies, including the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Terrorist Screening Center, to attend.

All of this is more than mere pedantry about proper word usage. As Orwell and various linguists have pointed out, vocabulary shapes thought. Statist language promotes a statist mindset. We cannot hope to make significant progress in combating the State's power as long as it still has a foothold in our heads. We must uproot the tendrils of State influence from our own minds, and to do this we must also uproot its hidden propaganda from our own speech.

There are thousands, indeed tens of thousands, of people around the globe, victims of horrid oppression who have fought for their own liberation, sometimes alongside U.S. forces, who today are considered to be terrorists or supporters of terrorists, and thus cannot settle in America.Welcome to Washington, D.C., and the Kafkaesque world of the PATRIOT and Real ID Acts, as interpreted by the federal bureaucracy.

“Privacy is the biggest concern,” Serkes said. “I keep hearing that privacy and consent laws are barriers to implementation. Our concern is that this will lead to a push to dumb down privacy and consent laws and this raises red flags for us.”

In what could prove an embarrassing new setback for embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the eve of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a group of influential conservatives and longtime Bush supporters has written a letter to the White House to call for his resignation.