cryptogon.com

The unusual secret gathering is being billed as a “joint caucus” of the majority Democrats and the minority Republicans, two groups that represent the entire 59 members of the Illinois Senate. The caucuses routinely meet separately to plot partisan strategy, and the public is not invited. But a joint meeting is very rare.

The spokeswoman for Senate President John Cullerton, D-Chicago, said the event will be closed because the presentation to be given by the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures will not fall under the state Constitution’s requirements to be open.

But David Morrison, a top official with the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said the move doesn’t make sense.

“Setting aside the legal issues, I can’t imagine what the NCSL is going to say that’s so top secret that the general public will not be allowed to hear it,” Morrison said.

The Constitution says, “Sessions of each house of the General Assembly and meetings of committees, joint committees and legislative commissions shall be open to the public.

Sessions and committee meetings of a house may be closed to the public if two-thirds of the members elected to that house determine that the public interest so requires; and meetings of joint committees and legislative commissions may be so closed if two-thirds of the members elected to each house so determine.”

Cullerton’s spokeswoman, Rikeesha Phelon, said in an email, “Since a caucus is neither a legislative session or committee meeting, the public meeting and notice requirements of the constitution do not apply.”

Patty Schuh, the spokeswoman for Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno, R-Lemont, said the event was an initiative of Cullerton’s majority Democrats and that “they want it closed.” Schuh said she did not anticipate public business will be conducted.

Donald Craven, a longtime attorney for the Illinois Press Association who also has represented the Chicago Tribune on open government issues, disagreed with lawmakers’ interpretation.

“A joint caucus is a meeting of the Senate as a whole, either as the Senate or as a committee of the whole,” Craven said. “This is not a social gathering. This is designed to discuss public business.”

The same conclusion was reached by Charles N. Wheeler III, who has followed Senate activities for four decades as a statehouse reporter and journalism professor at the University of Illinois Springfield.

“What prompts this idea for secrecy?” Wheeler asked, saying it sets a “bad precedent.”

In the teeth of fierce opposition both inside and outside parliament, the National Assembly approved, by 312 votes to 214 against, a first reading of a bill on Internal Security – the quaintly titled “LOPPSI 2”.

LOPPSI – otherwise known as Loi d’Orientation et de Programmation pour la SÈcuritÈ IntÈrieure (pdf)- is a ragbag of measures designed to make France a safer place. Like similar UK legislation – most notably the various Criminal Justice acts brought in over the last decade – LOPPSI brings together a number of apparently unrelated proposals which would severely restrict individual rights in all walks of life.

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However, it is in the online area that some of the most radical proposals are to be found, with the criminalisation of online ID theft, provision for the police to tap online connections in the course of investigations, and most controversially of all, allowing the state to order ISPs to block (filter) specific internet URLs according to ministerial diktat.

One was short and portly with a moustache, the other tall. Dressed in sports gear and carrying tennis rackets, they looked like any other European tourists visiting the Gulf state for some winter sun.

The international investigation into the assassination of Mahmoud al Mabhouh last month is certain to examine the role played by Israel, where four of the victims of identity theft, three Britons and a German, currently live.

Some reports last night suggested that a team of 17 people were involved in the meticulously planned killing, of whom six have yet to be identified.

UK authorities issued the British passports used by the assassins in Dubai last month, official sources said. They confirmed the killers had not altered the names and numbers in the passports, but the photographs had been changed.

At least five of the Britons whose identities were used by the assassins in Dubai live in Israel. All deny any involvement.

“I am obviously angry, upset and scared – any number of things,” Melvyn Mildiner told Reuters. “And I’m looking into what I can do to try to sort things out and clear my name.”

Israeli television named two other British-Israelis whose identities were used, Paul Keeley and Stephen Hodes, and a German passport holder, Michael Bodenheimer.

The revelation fuelled already widespread speculation in the region over Mossad involvement in the killing of Mabhouh and an elaborately orchestrated plot involving 11 assassins mostly posing as tourists in Dubai, with some wearing wigs and false beards.

But within hours they and nine accomplices had carried out the ruthlessly efficient assassination of the Hamas military Commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who had just a few seconds’ warning of his fate as the killers overpowered him in his room.

Police in Dubai believe the murder bears the hallmarks of a meticulously-planned operation by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, though Israel has so far refused to say whether it was involved.

What is beyond doubt, however, is that the alleged hit team, travelling on forged British, Irish, German and French passports, spent no more than 19 hours in the Gulf state, killing Mr Mabhouh just five hours after he had flown in from Syria.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google’s censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.

Google warns this would lead to the removal of many politically controversial, but harmless, YouTube clips.