Former CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling was convicted on Monday of charges under the Espionage Act, closing a four-year case in which the government accused him of giving a reporter classified information about covert operations. This information included a plan that gave Iran officials flawed nuclear plans. Sterling allegedly gave author and New York Times reporter James Risen the information for his 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration.”

Sterling was hired in 1993 and fired in 2001 after suing the CIA for racial discrimination, according to a 2002 New York Times article written by Risen. Prosecutors said that being fired gave him a motive to leak the information to Risen as revenge, according to the Washington Post. Having been interviewed by Risen before, the government argued that Sterling was also the only CIA employee who had a relationship with the reporter in addition to a motive.

Sterling pleaded not guilty in 2011 to 10 counts, including unauthorized retention and disclosure of classified information, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice. His defense attorneys argued that there were other CIA employees who could possibly have leaked the information to Risen.

To establish the connection between Sterling and Risen, prosecutors spent a large chunk of the the four-year ordeal trying to subpoena Risen to testify. Risen, however, vigorously fought back all the way up to the Supreme Court, saying that he’d rather go to jail than give up a source. He lost, but the government eventually let up. Attorney General Eric Holder guaranteed that Risen wouldn’t go to jail for refusing to reveal a source.

So, Risen did walk away from having to submit testimony against his will, but did hold up the case. Ultimately, that didn’t help Sterling, whose jury convicted him in an Alexandria, VA, U.S. District Court after deliberating over the course of three days. He is set to meet the jury again for his sentencing hearing in April and is free until then. Defense attorney Barry Pollack told the Washington Post that they plan to appeal the verdict.

Including the James Risen fiasco, the Sterling’s trial itself was “a daily spectacle worthy of fiction,” as the Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky put it. By choosing to prosecute Sterling, a former CIA employee privy to classified information, the government put itself in the pickle of having to use the classified information against Sterling without revealing too much of it in the process, which would partially defeat the purpose. Several witnesses testified while hidden behind a gray screen in the courtroom and only used their first names and last initials. A Russian scientist involved in the faulty nuclear plans was asked to respond in only “yes” or “no” answers so as not to disclose more information than needed.

Despite the government’s risk of leaking information itself while prosecuting leakers, the Obama Administration has pursued many such cases. However, there is a contradiction between pursuing so many leak cases and Obama’s pledge of a “new era of openness” early in his first term.

Former government employees John Kiriakou and Stephen Kim are serving prison time for leak cases that didn’t go their way. Former NSA official Thomas Drake settled for a minor charge after a four-year court battle for giving Fox News classified information about North Korea. Even former CIA director David Petraeus might get the leak treatment for allegedly giving classified files to his biographer.

Whether or not the Obama Administration ever truly does welcome a “new era of openness,” it doesn’t appear to define a clear line between whistle-blowing and illegal leaking. When a government makes mistakes, citizens of a country with freedom of speech and of the press ought to know whether or not they’re going to be tried under the Espionage Act. Better yet, the government could commit to its own pledge to openness.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Former CIA Employee Jeffrey Sterling Found Guilty of Leaking Information appeared first on Law Street.

A judge, a few attorneys, and more than a thousand potential jurors are facing a tricky situation in a Boston court. How do you select jury members to try a crime that caught the whole nation off guard and drew international attention for days on end? Starting Monday, lawyers began to screen 1,200 Bostonians to serve on the jury of the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial.

Tsarnaev is the 21-year-old suspect in the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing that killed three people and injured more than 260. Despite the fact that the death penalty was declared unconstitutional in Massachusetts in 1982, Tsarnaev faces capital punishment if he is convicted, given that the charges against him are federal.

That is what makes the selection process so tricky. Tsarnaev is almost definitely going to be convicted, considering the amount of incriminating evidence authorities have—including footage of him dropping what looks like a bag filled with explosives near the race’s finish line, an inscription he supposedly wrote inside the boat where he was captured, and bomb-making instructions that he allegedly downloaded. His defense is expected to focus on trying to save him from the death penalty by picking the right jury members. For the prosecution, it’s the opposite.

The Associated Press explains that the prosecution will want to look for jurors who see things in black and white (or guilty or not guilty) and are likely to favor the death penalty. Meanwhile, the defense will want to look for people who, despite knowing that Tsarnaev is responsible, want to understand what forces pushed him to kill.

CNN reported that Tsarnaev’s defense attorneys have suggested that his older brother, Tamerlan, who was killed in a police chase that ended in a firefight a few days after the marathon, was the mastermind behind the bombing. Dzhokhar, they’ll argue, was influenced and coerced by Tamerlan.

The defense is even trying to bring in the Tsarnaev family history as evidence, citing the psychological impact that Tsarnaev’s father, a refugee from Chechnya, had on him and his brother. The defense has said that the brothers grew up in an environment of “suspicion and fear.” On the other hand, the prosecutors are expected to use the evidence they have to show that Tsarnaev carried out the attack knowingly and willingly.

Tsarnaev is facing 30 federal charges, 17 of which are punishable by death or life in prison. If convicted of any of those, he’ll have a second trial with the same jury to determine sentencing. In the jury selection process, this presents another criterion for which the jurors need to be screened: they have to be willing to impose capital punishment if that is the way that justice is to be legally served.

This is all happening in a state that did away with the death penalty more than three decades ago. In a 2013 Boston Globe poll, 57 percent of respondents said they favored life without parole for Tsarnaev over capital punishment. In contrast, 33 percent said they favored death, and the rest said they didn’t know. Experts told the Globe the results reinforce the notion that most Massachusetts citizens oppose the death penalty. In Boston, a relatively liberal city, the court will have to choose jurors who don’t harbor any strong feelings about it. Anyone who does cannot be a member of the jury. The defense actually tried to move the trial away from Boston several times because of the obvious emotional toll the attacks had on the city, but U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. refused.

The jury selection process is expected to take about three weeks. The trial is set to start in late January and take three to four months.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Since the top European court made a ruling in May requiring Google to field requests from members of the public to erase links associated with their names, the web search giant has removed about 230,000 URLs, according to its own data.

The European Union’s Court of Justice ruling said that Google would have to delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” links from its searches on its European domains, such as google.co.uk and google.fr. Removing such links doesn’t mean they’ll never appear in a Google search again; just that they’ll be omitted when they’re associated with the name of the person requesting the removal.

The rationale behind the so-called “right to be forgotten” decision is to allow members of the public to reclaim their online profiles if they’re damaged by negative content on the web. It’s up to Google whether the links should be removed. For example, Google cites an example of an Italian woman who asked that an article about her husband’s murder be dissociated with the search for her name. In another example, a German individual asked that an article about the person’s rape be removed. The links were removed in those cases, but an Italian man’s multiple requests to remove links to 20 articles about his arrest for financial crimes were denied.

This is an apparent win for private European citizens who want to be in control of their public profiles, but European Union officials last month began to push for Google to expand the program beyond just European domains. A statement from the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party said that “decisions must be implemented in such a way that they guarantee the effective and complete protection of data subjects’ rights and that EU law cannot be circumvented.” This means that Google would have to field requests for link removals on its .com domain for Europeans to be fully protected.

That has yet to happen, but if it does, it could also affect a lot of people outside Europe, based on how it is carried out. Americans could request that Google take down embarrassing, damaging, and irrelevant links. But establishing the right to be forgotten in the U.S. could be more difficult because some would argue it interferes with American freedom of speech. In a case unrelated to the European issue, a judge ruled last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco that Google is protected in terms of the order in which it presents its search results. The plaintiff, Louis Martin, was alleging that Google was biased in excluding his website, coastnews.com, from search results.

While the San Francisco story is in a way the backward version of the European story–a citizen is trying to get a link to be visible rather than be taken down–it could set the precedent that Google is free to present whatever results its algorithms decide are relevant, regardless of privacy.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The Right to be Forgotten on Google: Will it Come to the U.S.? appeared first on Law Street.

On Monday, two years and one day after a shooter took the lives of 20 elementary school students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, families of nine of the victims filed a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the weapon that killed their loved ones.

The complaint asserts liability for wrongful deaths, arguing that Bushmaster Firearms Inc., the manufacturer, shouldn’t have been selling civilians the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in the massacre. Shooter Adam Lanza’s mother had purchased the rifle legally. Lanza shot and killed his mother with another gun before taking her Bushmaster AR-15 and heading for Sandy Hook.

The suit goes at lengths to argue that the AR-15 has no reason to be sold for civilian use. Although the rifle is useful to the military, it says, it is predictable that selling it to civilians could result in mass shootings:

The AR-15, however, has little utility for legitimate civilian purposes. The rifle’s size and overwhelming firepower, so well adapted to battlefield are in fact liabilities in home defense. … But there is one tragically predictable civilian activity in which the AR-15 reigns supreme: mass shootings.

The families filed the suit in Connecticut Superior Court and listed as additional defendants weapons distributor Camfour and Riverview Sales, the shop that sold the gun used in the attack, as well as its owner, David Laguercia.

The families have a formidable legal hurdle ahead of them called the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which protects gun manufacturers and dealers from liability when their products are used in crimes. The families are seeking to use an exception of the law for cases when the companies should be able to know that their guns could be used in a way that could injure others, the Associated Press reports.

Bushmaster faced a similar suit a decade ago, when families and victims of the Washington, D.C. area sniper shootings that left 10 dead settled with the manufacturer and a gun shop for $2.5 million. Laguercia also had recent legal trouble when he pleaded guilty last year to federal misdemeanor charges regarding his failure to keep proper records and selling weapons without completing background checks. However, those charges were not related to the Sandy Hook attack.

The suit says that the plaintiffs seek “nothing more and nothing less than accountability for the consequences” of the defendant’s choice to “disregard the unreasonable risks the rifle posed outside of specialized, highly regulated institutions like the armed forces and law enforcement.” Officially, they are seeking unspecified monetary damages.

Historically, government discussion on gun control has lived in legislatures, and not courts. The Sandy Hook case is very particular to the specific incident two years ago, so it may be better-suited in a court. However, it doesn’t come without major obstacles.

The families will have to link Bushmaster, Camfour, Riverview, and Laguercia to Lanza. This could prove especially difficult given that the gun was sold to his mother and not him. That is just the beginning of their problem. Whether or not they can make that connection, they have to successfully prove that any of the defendants could have foreseen the attack at Sandy Hook happen as a result of the sale of the rifle. Practically, this would rule out Bushmaster and Camfour, as they are far up the chain. However, it could be possible for the plaintiffs to hit Riverview and owner Laguercia, and paint him as negligent. Considering what is at stake, though, successfully suing a single gun shop and owner doesn’t seem like a really big win for gun control–although this could be a symbolic victory.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Newtown Families Sue Manufacturer of Gun Used in Sandy Hook Shooting appeared first on Law Street.

On Tuesday, two important things happened in regards to internet piracy. First, a Swedish police raid on a computer server room in the Stockholm area shut down the Pirate Bay, one of the most popular websites for filesharing.

Second, in the immediate aftermath, millions of people were scratching their heads, probably looking for some other way to watch their favorite TV shows and movies for free.

Prosecutor Frederik Ingbland confirmed to Swedish media that the raid was targeting the Pirate Bay. After its founding in 2003, the site became infamous as a venue for millions of Internet users to download music, movies, TV shows, and other pirated media using torrents, a peer-to-peer exchange system. While it isn’t clear exactly how many people were using it at its height, by 2013, the Pirate Bay had become the most popular filesharing website.

This is far from the first time the site has run into the law. In 2009, four of its founders were convicted in a Swedish court of contributing to copyright infringement. They were sentenced to a year in prison and fined $3.6 million to be paid to an array of entertainment media companies such as Sony BMG, Universal Music, EMI, and Warner Brothers. A year later, following a failed appeal, those sentences were reduced by a few months and the fines increased to about $7 million.

The reduced sentences apparently weren’t good enough for two of the convicted founders because, shortly after, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Warg suddenly appeared in Southeast Asia, according to the Washington Post. Warg was arrested in Cambodia in September 2012 and this time was given three and a half years by the Swedish courts. Neij was arrested last month crossing the border from Laos to Thailand.

Back then, despite legal trouble and international hide-and-seek, the website was still up and its users were torrenting away. Now, it seems that the Pirate Bay could be down and out, but the ideas it promoted are not. It might sound weird to say that a media pirating website promoted any sort of meaningful ideas, but the Pirate Bay did change the way media consumers view media–in both a literal and conceptual sense. As the Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey explains, “See, the Pirate Bay is as much an idea and an orientation to entertainment media as it is/was a torrent-tracking site. … It’s made digital piracy a casual, inarguable part of the mainstream.”

The Pirate Bay may have been the most popular way to illegally enjoy your favorite movies, music, and TV shows, but it wasn’t the first site to do this and it definitely isn’t the only one now. The point is there are a ton of people who regularly download pirated media with no remorse. Data from TorrentFreak, a blog about filesharing-related issues, shows that in 2013 more people illegally downloaded HBO’s Game of Thrones than the number of people who actually watched it on TV.

There isn’t any indication that this sort of thing is going to stop soon. The Pirate Bay’s shutdown doesn’t seem be changing that. Co-founder Peter Sunde, who actually did spend time in prison and was released in November, wrote that he was actually glad the site was taken down, calling it “ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design.”

In retrospect, it seems that the main goal of the Pirate Bay was to popularize torrenting as a way to get media. Since that is already the case, people like Sunde are now indifferent about the shutdown. “From the immense void that will now fill up the fiber cables all over the world, I’m pretty sure the next thing will pan out,” he wrote.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Shutting Down Pirate Bay Won’t Stop Internet Piracy appeared first on Law Street.

The group of unnamed “hacktivists” Anonymous and the Ku Klux Klan have engaged in an apparent all-out cyber war over the events in Ferguson, Missouri over the last week. Anonymous apparently took control of the Klan Twitter account @KuKluxKlanUSA on Monday and seemingly still had control of it as of Friday. Anonymous also appears to have released a video on Tuesday launching a campaign called #OpKKK, or Operation KKK, threatening to take any content the KKK puts on the Web and to “dox” their members, meaning they would publish members’ personal information, including where they live.

Anonymous’s attacks are supposedly in response to threats from the KKK, well-known for being a hate group, in the St. Louis area against people protesting the death of Michael Brown and calling for the punishment of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. VICE News reports that the group distributed flyers on the streets and online the previous week addressing “terrorists masquerading as ‘peaceful protesters.’”

‘We will not sit by and allow you to harm our families, communities, property nor disrupt our daily lives. Your right to freedom of speech  does not give you the right to terrorize citizens,’ the flyer reads. ‘We will use lethal force as provided under Missouri Law to defend ourselves,’ it adds, citing Missouri’s version of a stand-your-ground law.

In Anonymous’s video response to the threats, a digitally altered voice explains why the hacker group chose to attack the Klan online. “We are not attacking you because of what you believe in as we fight for freedom of speech. We are attacking you because of what you did to our brothers and sisters at the Ferguson protest on the twelfth of November,” it says.

What followed were more suggestions of the cyber war spilling over into real violence. On Wednesday, another supposedly Anonymous-affiliated account posted an alleged message from Klan leader Frank Ancona encouraging members to ‘accidentally’ shoot any protesters wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, associated with the Anonymous movement.

‘It’s deer hunting season here in southern Missouri, it’s really easy to see how a hunter could mistake someone wearing one of those gay anonymous masks for the hind-end of a whitetail deer. Boom!!!! Oops, sorry it was an accident,’ the tweet reads.

While he didn’t explain why anyone would be deer hunting in the streets of the St. Louis metro area, Ancona seems to have confirmed the message in another statement attributed to him, RT reported. “You pathetic n***** lovers are going down, we’re NOT HIDING. WE’RE NOT ASHAMED OF WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE REPRESENT. THE INVISIBLE EMPIRE CANNOT AND WILL NOT BE OVERTHROWN,” the message posted to Pastebin reads.

This isn’t Anonymous’s debut in Ferguson. Toward the beginning of the protests, when the identity of the officer who shot Brown was not known, Anonymous was on a campaign to release the names and information of various Ferguson police officers. In the process, a self-proclaimed member released what he or she claimed was the name of the shooting officer, Bryan Willman. Willman, a police dispatcher, was forced to shutter many of his online accounts, change his passwords, and stay in his house for six days, the New Yorker reported. It was only after this erroneous leak that the police department released the name of Officer Darren Wilson as the real shooter.

Despite the major mistake that may have endangered the life of an innocent police dispatcher, Anonymous has proven to be the real deal when it comes to hacking anything from police departments to hate groups.

Still, the authenticity of anything published in this apparent cyber war is difficult to verify for any news organization–a lot of the details of whose controlling these social media accounts is unknown. That’s because Anonymous actually is anonymous and is a loosely-associated network; almost anyone can claim to be a member. At the same time, the KKK seems to lack the technical know-how to give any sort of  coordinated response.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post KKK vs. Anonymous: Cyberwar Declared Over Ferguson Protests appeared first on Law Street.

A Colorado High School is being sued for denying a student group the ability to gather for prayer. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that describes itself as a non-profit legal organization advocating for the free practice of faith, is suing the school district along with the principal and assistant principal of Pine Creek High School. They allegedly stopped a Christian student group from holding group prayers on the grounds of separation of church and state, Reuters reported. The Alliance says they are violating the students’ First Amendment rights.

The Alliance said in a news release that the informal prayer group would meet to pray, sing, and discuss religion in an unoccupied choir room during a free period, when students are supposedly allowed to meet up with friends and hang out on school grounds. Senior Chase Windebank contacted the Alliance after he unsuccessfully appealed to Principal Kolette Back about the ban, who told him that they could only hold group prayers before or after school, but not during school.

The Alliance then sent a letter in October to Colorado’s Academy School District 20 arguing that Pine Creek is violating the prayer group’s First Amendment rights by restricting their religious freedom. The district responded by saying that no student group is technically allowed to meet during school time. On Friday, the Alliance filed a First Amendment-based suit anyway, saying Windebank’s group should be able to pray freely during the free period.

Public schools themselves are not allowed to hold sanctioned prayers because of the separation of church and state outlined in the First amendment. But Windebank’s group is supposedly informal, thus the group’s prayers aren’t technically school-sanctioned. One could say that since students are free to hang out freely during the free period, they should be allowed to meet to pray. One could also say that for a public school to allow a prayer group to go on violates the separation of church and state. But technically the state (by way of Pine Creek High School) has nothing to do with the prayer group. It’s just Windebank and his friends.

The Pine Creek case may be debatable, but it’s only a small story in a larger issue. The separation of church and state is a principle of secularism that can inadvertently lead to misguided policies that ironically go against secularism. An example of this phenomenon is France’s laws banning conspicuous religious symbols in public schools and banning veils that cover the face in any public place. The laws have been seen as de facto bans specifically on Muslim headwear for women, such as the niqab and the hijab. Proponents have defended the laws as protecting French identity and values, while others say they obstruct religious freedom.

The irony is that secularism and the separation of church and state mean that governments are neutral toward religion. Just like they can’t sponsor religious practices, they also can’t hinder them. It means no religion, not anti-religion. So when it comes to Pine Creek High School’s ban on Windebank’s prayer group, the question is whether or not by asserting the separation of church and state, it means that the school is actually restricting students’ freedom. The separation of church and state, at its core, never requires citizens to give up their freedoms. The prayer group was initially asked by the principals to stop meeting during school hours because what it was doing was religious. By doing that, the school could inadvertently be going against the very principle of separation. Whether or not that’s true, the lawsuit will decide.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Colorado School Prayer Ban: Limiting Religious Freedom? appeared first on Law Street.

Quietly nestled on Alabama’s ballot on Election Day at the top of a list of proposed amendments was Amendment Number One, a measure that would ban the application of “foreign law” in Alabama when it would violate the rights of the state’s citizens. The measure overwhelmingly passed, and at the surface seems like a legitimate amendment. Voters may have glazed over it because the wording seems benign:

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of Alabama of 1901, to prohibit the State of Alabama from giving full faith and credit to public acts, records, or judicial proceedings of another state that violate the public policy of the State of Alabama and to prohibit the application of foreign law in violation of rights guaranteed natural citizens by the United States and Alabama Constitutions, and the statutes, laws, and public policy thereof, but without application to business entities. (Proposed by Act No. 2013-269)

No one wants any laws to violate Alabamans’ rights, right? That is all the amendment appears to ensure, but in context, it may have some unintended consequences. Foreign law often does need to be interpreted in U.S. courts. There are private disputes relating to foreign or religious law that often need to be settled in the U.S. and there are cases that are litigated in Alabama but are governed by the law of another jurisdiction, Vox notes. Marriages and adoptions that occurred outside the country but came to Alabama are a good example.

All this falls under “choice of law,” the notion that courts have to reconcile the differences between the relevant laws between two jurisdictions if a case involves them. Since this is so common, Alabama’s Amendment One could be redundant or problematic, depending on how courts interpret it.

So why was this amendment on the ballot in the first place if it’s so questionable? The amendment appears to a revision of one that didn’t make it onto the ballot in 2012. That amendment, introduced by Alabama State Senator Gerald Allen, was known as the Sharia Law Amendment, specifically targeting Islamic law in an effort to prohibit its use in judicial decisions. A similar measure in Oklahoma was struck down by an appeals court on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

After his first measure failed, Allen reintroduced the measure without any explicit reference to Sharia law, though the media is still talking about it as if it is the Sharia Law amendment. The amendment that Alabama voters actually passed on Tuesday is about all foreign law.

But let’s talk about Sharia law. What is it? Is it foreign? Does it pose a threat to the United States judicial process? Simply put, Sharia law is a set of rules aggregated from the Quran, the Islamic holy book, and the hadith, the teachings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. While it does come from sacred sources, there is no single codification of Sharia law, leaving the interpretation of what is or isn’t Sharia law up in the air, and usually in various courts’ hands. Different Muslim-majority countries apply it in different ways. Generally, it encompasses everything from finance to marriage to prayer. Theoretically, there are instances where Sharia law and U.S. law coincide (for instance, murder is prohibited under both). So you can see why blanket bans on Sharia law are laughable, and why the ACLU denounced the idea that “anything Islamic is un-American.”

In fact, to say that anything Islamic is automatically un-American may be un-American itself. After all, so much of this nation’s history is inextricably linked to religious freedom. You probably didn’t learn this in your eighth grade civics class, but Thomas Jefferson owned a Quran. Yes, Thomas Jefferson, founding father, author of the Declaration of Independence, and third U.S. president. A 2013 book by Denise A. Spellberg details Jefferson’s role as an advocate to allow Muslims and all religious groups the ability to hold citizenship and public office.

Whether or not Amendment One was an attempt to bring back the Sharia Law Amendment, maybe only the Alabama lawmakers who approved it know. But one thing remains clear. The United States is not a legal island. It is influenced by foreign and religious law and it’s often necessary to use those laws for the country to carry on its judicial process.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Alabama’s Amendment One: An Attempt at Banning Sharia Law? appeared first on Law Street.

The Iranian government executed a woman on Saturday for murdering a man who she said attempted to sexually assault her. After several delays of her execution and despite condemnation from human rights organizations, the Iranian government went forward with hanging Reyhaneh Jabbari.

Jabbari, 26, admitted in 2009 to killing 47-year-old Dr. Morteza Abdolali Sarbandi in self-defense, claiming that he tried to rape her. Sarbandi was killed in 2007, when Jabbari met with him on the pretense that she, an interior designer, would evaluate his office for a renovation, the New York Times reported.

Under Iranian law, Jabbari technically should have been in the clear for killing Sarbandi. As a Slate article explains, the Iranian death penalty doesn’t have to apply in a murder case if the murder was in retaliation to another crime punishable by death, such as rape. Jabbari maintained that she killed Sarbandi after he attempted to rape her. However, the judges are given very broad discretion in interpreting the facts of the case – so broad, in this case, that Jabbari was found guilty.

Beyond the fact that Jabbari’s is technically innocent even if she killed Sarbandi, that shouldn’t even matter considering the circumstances of her admission. Jabbari admitted to the murder “under duress possibly amounting to torture,” U.N. human rights investigator Ahmed Shaheed said in a press release, adding that acts of sexual violence should always be fought, no matter what. Shaheed said that if Jabbari was telling the truth, she was attacked by the Iranian justice system in addition to her assault:

If her allegations are true, Ms. Jabbari may have been doubly victimized; first by her attacker, and then by the judicial system, which is supposed to protect victims of intended and actual sexual and physical assault.

An online petition in March bore more than 240,000 signatures urging Iran not to execute Jabbari. The government then delayed the execution from April until this month. As the new date approached, supporters of Jabbari took to Facebook and Twitter to get attention to stop the execution. The day before the execution,  Amnesty International wrote that Jabbari’s side story wasn’t fairly judged. “Her claims do not appear to have ever been properly investigated,” Amnesty wrote in a blog post.

Iran has one of the highest execution rates in the world. According to an August United Nations report, the country executed at least 852 people, including at least eight who were under the age of 18 at the time of their crimes, during the period from June 2013 to June 2014. The report says Iranians can face the death penalty for “adultery, recidivist alcohol use, drug possession and trafficking” plus “enmity against God,” which is viewed by the Iranian government as when “a person brandishes or points a weapon at members of the public to kill, frighten and coerce them.”

All this might leave some wondering how hard it is not to get executed in Iran. In the larger scheme of things – for the Iranian justice system, that is – Jabbari is just another number.

—

Zaid Shoorbajee (@ZBajee)

Featured Image courtesy of [The Pondering Moose via Flickr]

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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A lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania claiming that the popular English rock band Led Zeppelin plagiarized the iconic song “Stairway to Heaven” is moving forward after a federal judge denied the band’s motion to dismiss the case. The case claims that Zeppelin lifted parts of “Stairway” from “Taurus,” a song by the lesser-known American band, Spirit. The suit was filed by the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust, a group that’s made up of family members of Spirit’s founder, better known as Randy California. They stand to gain a chunk of Zeppelin’s earnings from the song, which as of 2008 were valued at about $562 million.

“Stairway” was released in 1971, three years after “Taurus.” It’s possible that Zeppelin was heavily influenced by Spirit, as they played together several times in 1968 and 1969. When listened to, no Zeppelin fan can deny that the two songs are very similar. Namely, the opening to the eight-minute “Stairway” sounds a lot like the entirety of Spirit’s two-and-a-half minute song, which is an instrumental with no vocals.

The plaintiff’s complaint is amended from an original one filed in May. Zeppelin’s lawyers in September filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that there was no sense in the suit taking place in Pennsylvania, as they’re all British citizens who have no connection or property in Pennsylvania. Zeppelin’s motion said that they’d be willing to move the case to Los Angeles, but Philadelphia Federal District Court Judge Juan Sánchez denied the motion to dismiss after the plaintiff amended the case to say that Zeppelin has made money off of Stairway in Pennsylvania, and therefore it is an appropriate venue.

The Daily Beast points out that Zeppelin is no stranger to lawsuits about its content. The band has been sued by for its songs, “Bring It on Home,” “Killing Floor,” and “Dazed and Confused” by artists alleging that Zeppelin’s songs are too similar to their own. All those cases, however, were settled outside of the courtroom.

If this case doesn’t end in a settlement, however, a court would have to rule whether Zeppelin infringed Spirit’s copyright by deciding whether “Stairway” sounds like “Taurus.” Even if the judge or jury believes that Zeppelin copied Spirit subconsciously, precedent tells us it’s enough to say they plagiarised. In an infamous 1976 case, former Beatle George Harrison was found liable of copyright infringement for using similar music in his song “My Sweet Lord” as the song “He’s So Fine” by Ronald Mack. The court ruled that Harrison unconsciously plagiarized Mack’s work

Although this may sound like the beginning of the end for “Stairway’s” reign as one of rock and roll’s greatest songs, the details of the case suggest otherwise. Sánchez denied Zeppelin’s motion to dismiss “without prejudice to reassertion as to Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint.” As an article in Bloomberg Businessweek explains, all that complicated legalese means is that Zeppelin can argue another reason to dismiss the case, and they’ll probably succeed.

That being said, it’s noteworthy that Zeppelin picked the Pennsylvania venue as the reason to ask for a dismissal, and that they are willing to take on the case in California, where Spirit is from and where there could be more relevant witnesses. If Zeppelin has a better reason to dismiss the case, they might have used it already. There is no telling at this point, but I have to say, ooh, it makes me wonder.

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Zaid Shoorbajee (@ZBajee)

Featured image courtesy of [Heinrich Klaffs vi Flickr]

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Twitter is suing the the United States Department of Justice for violating its First Amendment rights, the company announced on Tuesday. The social media service is arguing that it has the right to disclose to the public how often the government requests data from it for national security purposes.

Currently, the government requests information for such investigations from tech companies like Twitter in the form of national security letters and Foreign Intelligence Security Act court orders. The government does let these companies disclose how many times it requests information, but not down to the exact number. Instead they can report ranges of the requests they’ve received in “bands” of 1,000. For example, a firm can report that it has received between 0 and 999 government information requests, without being any more specific.

Twitter’s complaint is that these restrictions inhibit its freedom of speech. It argues that it should be allowed to disclose to its users a more precise number of government information requests. In particular, if it hasn’t received any requests in a certain category, Twitter wants to say publicly that the number is zero.

Ben Lee, a Twitter Vice President, said in a blog post on Tuesday:

It’s our belief that we are entitled under the First Amendment to respond to our users’ concerns and to the statements of U.S. government officials by providing information about the scope of U.S. government surveillance – including what types of legal process have not been received.

Twitter tried to accomplish the same thing earlier this year without going to court, by sending a sample transparency report in April to the DOJ, asking which information it could or couldn’t publish. Unfortunately, that attempt wasn’t fruitful. “After many months of discussions, we were unable to convince them to allow us to publish even a redacted version of the report,” Tuesday’s blog post also disclosed.

The current restrictions stem from a January settlement between the DOJ and Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook, and LinkedIn. At that time, the companies were were looking for permission to publish any number at all related to national security requests. That settlement allowed these companies and “similarly situated companies” (that includes Twitter) to use the bands of 1,000 rule to report the number of government requests. Twitter hints in its formal complaint that the number of requests it receives is relatively small, and argues that it  should be allowed to reflect “limited scope” of government surveillance on its accounts in its transparency reports.

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks that revealed the vast extent of government surveillance online, tech companies have tried to show their users that they care about privacy. Apple and Google made news last month when they announced that their new generation of mobile operating systems would encrypt user data with the user’s passcode, making it impossible for either the company or the government to access private information without the passcode. Even if the government requests it, the company can’t reach it.

Unlike on most social media platforms, anything the average Twitter user tweets is publicly visible. So, intuitively, the government doesn’t need to request from Twitter too much information; it’s there for the picking. That seems to be what Twitter is hinting at when it says that it would like to be allowed to report that it has received zero national security requests. That being said, it would be nice to know what other information the government is asking to have – information that supposedly isn’t public. Twitter comes off in this story as the noble tech company trying to stay accountable to its 271 million active users. The company can stay even truer to the value of transparency by letting its users know what non-public information the government wants, and this suit will decide whether they get to do just that.

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Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post A Tech Company That Has Your Back: Twitter Sues the DOJ appeared first on Law Street.

For the first time in the United States during the current outbreak, a patient was diagnosed with the Ebola virus–the Centers for Disease control confirmed the case on Tuesday. As if Thomas Duncan, the infected Liberian man who came to the United States, doesn’t have enough to worry about, he’s also facing legal trouble. The Liberian government will prosecute Duncan when he returns to Liberia for allegedly lying on an airport questionnaire, the Associated Press reported.

Duncan left Liberia on September 19th to visit his family and wasn’t showing any symptoms at the time. Days before, he helped take a 19-year-old infected pregnant woman to a hospital and helped bring her back home when she was turned away for lack of space, the New York Times reported. The woman, Marthalene Williams, died the next day. Williams’ parents said that Duncan helped carry her back from the taxi to her house. Her brother, who accompanied her, her father, and Duncan on the taxi ride home, also started showing symptoms of Ebola and died less than a week later.

When Duncan was at the airport on his way out of Liberia, he received a questionnaire given to anyone intending to depart Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone – the three West African countries countries most severely facing the Ebola epidemic – asking him about his recent contact history in the country. Duncan answered “no” when when asked whether he had been in contact with anyone who may have been infected.

Duncan passed the screening at the airport without showing any sign of symptoms and boarded his plane. The idea that Liberian officials would threaten to prosecute him might suggest double standards, since people are still able to move between countries in West Africa. But Liberia may have chosen to do this to make an example out of Duncan. It’s likely that Liberia wants to set a precedent that its screenings are serious business and wants countries to where Liberians travel to be reassured about that, Cornell University Law professor Jens Ohlin told the Atlantic.

The sudden decision to prosecute an infected person might also be an attempt not to upset U.S. officials, though Ohlin doesn’t seem to think so. This hasn’t happened in other major countries, so it is tough to say whether Liberia is singling out the United States.

Duncan is arguably very lucky that he happened to be in America when he started to show symptoms of Ebola. The average death rate has been up to 90 percent in previous outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization. But in August, two American aid workers who were working in West Africa were cured of the disease after being treated in Atlanta.

Currently being treated in a Dallas hospital, Duncan started showing symptoms on Sept. 24 and went in for treatment two days later. His family members in Dallas have also been quarantined in their apartment. While the situation is dire in West Africa, CDC Director guaranteed that it wouldn’t be a problem in the United States. “The United States has a strong health care system and public health professionals who will make sure this case does not threaten our communities,” he said in a press release on Tuesday.

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Zaid Shoorbajee (@ZBajee)

Featured image courtesy of [Phil Moyer via Flickr]

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Liberia to Prosecute Ebola-Infected Traveler appeared first on Law Street.

On Tuesday in a dramatic escalation of the many-sided conflict in Syria, the United States, along with a coalition of Middle Eastern states, showered ISIS strongholds with airstrikes and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Lawmakers, public officials, and pundits have traded arguments over whether the United States has any interest in intervening, whether ISIS poses any threat to United States, and whether the United States has any justification in getting involved in Syria’s three and half year long civil war. In support of the strikes that started on Tuesday, President Obama has invoked several international and domestic legal justifications. Like any justifications for war, however, they aren’t completely solid.

On Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power answered the international justification question in a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, saying that the United States has the right to carry out self-defense on behalf of Iraq.

Generally, a country can only use force in the territory of another sovereign country if it is authorized to do so by the U.N. Syria is a sovereign country, and Power’s letter to Secretary General Ban only informs him of the attacks, it doesn’t ask for his permission. However, force can be used against a sovereign country without permission if it’s for the sake of self-defense. The United States is arguing that, although Syria is a sovereign state, it isn’t doing anything to stop or weaken ISIS within its own borders, justifying the United States’ defense-based intervention.

President Obama also has to cover his bases for legal justification domestically. To that end, he told Congress on September 9th that he doesn’t need Congressional permission and that he has the authority to take action. This justification can be found in the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). That resolution gave the President authority to:

Use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.

The law is vague and has a wide enough breadth that it has been successfully used by the United States for continued military actions across the world.

The organizations targeted in the wording of the AUMF have generally been Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. While ISIS has its origins in Al-Qaeda and claimed to still be affiliated, Al-Qaeda officially cut ties with ISIS in February, prompting controversy over whether the president actually has the legal authority to target them without Congressional approval. But this week’s strikes didn’t target ISIS alone. The Pentagon announced that the attacks also targeted the Khorasan, a little-known terrorist group that does have connections with Al-Qaeda via Jabhat al-Nusra, another Al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria.

Additionally, an incredibly interesting facet of this conflict is that, despite the fact that Obama has previously said that he wanted to eventually repeal the AUMF, he is using it to justify strikes against ISIS. The Obama Administration’s choice of justifications has prompted questions over the president’s apparent change of heart about practicing restraint in counterterrorism. Historically, however, the expanded offensive isn’t so strange, as Obama has bombed half a dozen other countries in the Middle East and North Africa during his presidency.

Remember that just over a year ago, the United States was having the same debate about getting involved in Syria, except that Obama was then insisting that it was necessary to bomb Syrian President Assad, after his regime killed upwards of 1,400 people in a sarin gas attack. That plan was ditched at the last second when Russia made a deal with Syria to dispose of the country’s chemical weapons. But historically speaking, what Obama’s administration did on Tuesday really isn’t a departure from his foreign policy strategies.

Some Obama critics say that if Obama had gone through with those threats against Assad last year, the United States may not be in this mess with ISIS today. A common theory about how ISIS grew to be so powerful is that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad strategically watched idly by as it clashed other rebel groups, who were trying to oust him and create a democratic government, and took over large swaths of land. He even bombed the rebels as they gained ground against ISIS. He did this, some say, in order to have a legitimate claim to having a terrorist threat in Syria and lure in Western powers to help him, and not the rebels. As it turns out, Assad didn’t need to convince the West to join his side. They are, however, giving him a courteous “heads-up” about bombing his enemies.

While his administration has done its homework and technically managed to justify these new attacks on ISIS, Obama’s words and actions surrounding them don’t scream consistency, either. His backing out of the plan last year to strike Assad in Syria suggests that he may have only been talking about strikes to save face. It suggests that only when words like “Islamist” and “terrorist” are being thrown around is it necessary to take action. And using the AUMF to take those actions suggests that it’s acceptable for the president to change his position on that justification whenever it’s convenient.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Strikes Against ISIS in Syria: Shaky Ground for Obama Administration appeared first on Law Street.

Snapchat quietly settled a lawsuit last week with Reggie Brown, a supposed original co-founder of the popular social media app. Brown claimed in his suit that he was the one who came up for the idea for the app in the first place, but was kicked out of group before it was released.

Snapchat said in a statement on September 9th that CEO Evan Spiegel and Chief Technology Officer Robert Murphy had resolved their dispute with Brown and confirmed his claims:

Reggie Brown originally came up with the idea of creating an application for sending disappearing picture messages while he was a student at Stanford University. He then collaborated with Spiegel and Murphy on the development of Snapchat during its early and most formative days.

The settlement marks the first public acknowledgement by Snapchat of its faults after a year-and-a-half legal battle with Brown. In February 2013, Brown claimed that he came up with the idea for an app that lets users send disappearing photos and videos to friends. He said he also came up with the idea for the app’s logo and its original name, “Picaboo.” He said he was ousted from the group by his fraternity brothers, Spiegel and Murphy, and that he rightfully owned one-third of the company. Snapchat denounced Brown’s claims several times and said that they were “utterly devoid of merit.” By settling last week, they changed their position. But Snapchat did keep the terms of the settlement confidential, making it impossible to know whether Brown got his one-third or something else.

Under normal circumstances, Sanpchat’s settlement might spark up a debate about intellectual property and ownership rights. But in this case, that didn’t happen for a couple of reasons. That September 9th date on which Snapchat announced the settlement might ring a bell to people who follow technology news. It was the day of Apple announced its new line of iPhones and the Apple Watch. Snapchat chose to publish its press release on that day at 1 p.m., the exact start time of Apple’s big event, which was the story of the day in the technology news sphere. The Snapchat story was almost completely overshadowed.

The other reason this settlement may not have sparked up a debate is that Snapchat, despite claiming to have 700 million photos and videos sent daily and being valued at an estimated $10 billion, currently does not earn any revenue. The company has already turned down offers from high profile tech giants–$3 billion from Facebook and $4 billion from Google. Without earning any revenue, Brown’s piece of the Snapchat pie currently wouldn’t earn him anything besides name recognition and the potential reward should the company decide to sell.

Snapchat’s dispute with Brown might sound familiar in the social media realm. In 2004, Facebook had a similar debacle–three Harvard University seniors sued CEO Mark Zuckerberg for using their idea for a social network. Facebook settled with them in 2008 for 1.2 million shares of Facebook, which were valued at $300 million during Facebook’s initial public offering.

While we don’t know what settling with Snapchat earned Brown, it does seem to be revealing an easy money-making scheme: introduce an idea for a product or service, wait for someone you know to make it successful, then sue.

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Snapchat’s Settled Lawsuit: Another “Social Network” Story? appeared first on Law Street.

The current conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has been met with repeated declarations by American politicians about Israel’s right to defend itself. Now in its fourth week, the Israeli Defense Force’s “Operation Protective Edge” has claimed the lives of more than 50 Israeli soldiers, three Israeli civilians, and upwards of 1,500 Palestinians — 80 percent of whom the United Nations estimates are civilians.

With death tolls that lopsided, it’s worth taking a look at self-defense: what does each side consider it to be and do Israel’s actions legally qualify? Here’s the breakdown, starting with the origins of the current conflict.

First Shots

One common narrative to explain how the fighting started has dominated the media. That storyline claims that on June 12, members of Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers, prompting a massive search of Gaza and the West Bank for the victims. The kidnapping led a group of Israeli settlers to kidnap and burn alive a Palestinian teenager in a revenge attack. Hamas, it is said, then launched rocket fire into Israel in response, leaving Israel with no choice but to retaliate.

What is often buried in this narrative is that before any rockets were launched from Gaza in the current conflict, Israel led an operation in which it arrested more than 500 Palestinians while searching for the three missing teens. Nine palestinians were killed in that campaign, known as “Operation Brother’s Keeper.” More importantly, Israeli officials knew from early on that the teens had been dead — despite their claims that they were searching for the boys alive. There’s evidence that one of the kidnapped boys managed to phone the Israeli police. The boys were killed during that phone call, but the recording and the knowledge of the deaths were under a gag order that wasn’t lifted until July 1. All of this calls into question why Israeli authorities carried out their search under the misinformation that the boys may have been alive.

There’s also some confusion over who took the young men: while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu initially blamed members of Hamas as the kidnappers and murderers of the three Israeli teens, officials later admitted that they believed the culprits were acting as “lone cells.”

The question of who sparked this conflict absolutely depends on how you frame recent events. But to say that it began with Hamas’ rocket fire ignores Israel’s provocative and questionable actions.

Israel’s Right to Defend Itself

Netanyahu, President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the U.S. Senate have publicly maintained that Israel has the right to defend itself from thousands of rockets being launched over the border from Gaza by the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military wing. The problem is that nearly all of those rockets either land in open fields or are intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system.

While anyone can argue that any state has the right to defend itself from outside attacks, Israel is an occupying power in the Gaza strip according to international law. That means Israel needs to uphold the tenants of occupation law, which dictates that it is responsible for the safety and security of all Gazans.

Stemming from the Hague Regulations of 1907, the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and the Additional Protocols of 1977, occupation law identifies an occupation as “when a State exercises an unconsented-to effective control over a territory on which it has no sovereign title.”

Since Israel defeated its Arab neighbors in the 1967 war and took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights, Israel has been a military occupant in Gaza. Therefore the current offensive by Israel in Gaza is not technically self-defense. Israel can defend itself against rocket attacks, but since Hamas’ rocket attacks are coming out of territory that Israel itself controls, it must operate in accordance with occupation law, and use nothing more than police force to restore order.

Israel claims that it is no longer occupying the Gaza Strip since it withdrew 8,000 settlers in 2005. But that argument skips over the fact that Israel still maintains control of the Gazan airspace, territorial waters, and its border crossings, in conjunction with Egypt. Israel’s regulation of what goes in and out of Gaza is so strict that it even counts the calories in the food that is imported. Whatever Israeli officials may claim, evidence of an occupation abounds.

On the ground

If we forget for a moment about international law and assess what is happening on the ground in Gaza, Israel’s actions are hugely disproportionate and cannot be considered self-defense. Israel has ensured that Gaza is no threat to its civilians, through the military occupation of Gaza and through implementation of the Iron Dome. Israel’s U.S.-funded military is a giant compared to Hamas’ guerrilla fighters and collection of rockets that it can’t even aim.

Israel has claimed that it is only targeting Hamas operatives and is taking any and all precautions necessary to avoid civilian deaths. But the 80 percent civilian death toll suggests otherwise. Israel is known to use phone calls, leaflets, and “roof knocking” — hitting a building with a small missile before blowing it up — to warn civilians of an impending strike. But the civilians often have no time nor place to evacuate in the tiny, overcrowded area. Israeli strikes on Gaza are also suspected to have several times hit U.N. facilities that function as schools, shelters, and hospitals, even after being given their exact GPS coordinates. The most recent incident drew public condemnation to both sides from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, who called it “a moral outrage and a criminal act.”

Israel’s attempts to deter criticism by claiming that Hamas stores and fires weapons near these civilian areas and uses civilians as human shields. This argument is hard to defend since, in the 140 square mile strip home to nearly two million people, you’d be hard-pressed to find non-civilian areas. This argument also attempts to absolve Israel of any wrongdoing by blaming Palestinians for their own deaths.

After multiple failed ceasefires, the current conflict seems to be coming to its final moments as Israel withdraws most of its ground troops from Gaza. To say that Palestinians are tired of being on the losing side of things is an understatement. But as public opinion about the decades-long conflict shows signs of shifting, especially in the younger generations, and as the the death toll continues to rise, some Palestinians are calling for a third intifada. Palestinians may feel that they have no choice but to rise up if Israel continually dodges international accountability.

True and swift consequences for Israel’s violations are highly unlikely to happen in the U.N. with the U.S.’ imminent veto in staunch support of its ally. And Israel never ratified the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, and doesn’t have any legal obligations to it. Palestine, however, which is recognized in the U.N. as a non-member observer state, could accede to the Court, granting the prosecutor jurisdiction to investigate war crimes that happened in Gaza.

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Zaid Shoorbajee (@ZBajee)

Featured image courtesy of [Mohammed Al Baba/Oxfam via Flickr].

Zaid Shoorbajee

Zaid Shoorbajee is a an undergraduate student at The George Washington University majoring in journalism and economics. He is from the Washington, D.C. area and likes reading and writing about international affairs, politics, business and technology (especially when they intersect). Contact Zaid at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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