Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In April of 2006, Wired News editor Kevin Poulsen sued the United States Customs and Border Patrol under the Freedom of Information Act. Poulsen won the case, and yesterday the trial court granted Poulsen $66,000 in attorney's fees.

The general climate that Muslims encounter in post-9/11 America is affected by several different types of actors, including the government, the media, and ordinary citizens. For example, government treatment of Muslims after 9/11 arguably legitimizes private violence, such as hate crimes, against Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim. See, Muneer Ahmad "A Rage Shared by Law: Post-September 11 Racial Violence as Crimes of Passion," 92 CAL. L. REV. 1259 (Oct. 2004). In this post, I'd like to briefly discuss the effect that the media may have on how Muslim-Americans are viewed in, and on the extent to which Muslim-Americans are regarded as fully belonging to, contemporary American society.

One of the most challenging problems for national security is predicting and stopping terrorist attacks before they happen. The government proposes that data mining is a useful tool for finding terrorists. By using database technology, statistical analysis and modeling, the government says it can search our email, phone calls, shopping habits, educational records, and find the needle (terrorists) in the haystack (the general population). One has to know a bit about the science and statistics behind data mining to evaluate this claim.