A citizen's required reading for July 4th: The Declaration of Independence

The United States' Declaration of Independence may well be the most cited yet least read or understood document in American history.

Some have suggested over the years that each responsible U.S. citizen should take the occasion of the Nation's birthday to read that precious document every year, something like pausing at Thanksgiving to give thanks or at New Year's to ponder what's past and ahead.

Obviously, we can't require that. But The Ticket can facilitate that. So here it is, in its historic entirety. For those who are curious to see how the historic document evolved, the wording refined and trimmed, through several writings, including those funny s's that look like f's, they can view side-by-side versions right here .

And for those who'd like a little musical accompaniment, we have a special treat this July 4th. It's a video version of the anthem performed by one of our favorite singers, a woman with an amazingly crystaline voice who writes her own songs . We met her here as a Ticket follower on Twitter. Her name is Amiena (her music website is here).

The final version of the Declaration is right here with paragraphs edited for length for typographical purposes on this modern webpage.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/07/july-4-declaration-of-independence-text.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+topoftheticket+%28Top+of+the+Ticket%29

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Ecuadoreans, DEA seize submarine made for drug smuggling

WASHINGTON — The Drug Enforcement Administration said it has helped seized a submarine capable of transporting tons of cocaine.

DEA officials said the diesel-electric submarine was constructed in a remote jungle and captured near a tributary close to the Ecuador-Colombia border. Ecuadorean authorities seized the sub before it could make its maiden voyage.

The sophisticated camouflaged vessel has a conning tower, periscope and air-conditioning system. It measured about 9 feet high from the deck plates to the ceiling and stretched nearly 100 feet long. The DEA said it was built for trans-oceanic drug trafficking.

One person has been taken into custody. DEA Andean Regional Director Jay Bergman said the sub's nautical and payload capacity is a serious development.

-- Associated Press

Photo:This photo released by the Drug Enforcement Administration shows a diesel-electric submarine that was constructed in a remote jungle and captured near a tributary close to the Ecuador-Colombia border. Credit: Associated Press

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/07/ecuadorians-dea-seize-drugsmuggling-submarine.html

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2 men arrested in Hemet police attacks; 2 suspects remain at large, authorities say

"He made a couple statements that made us believe that he didn't like us very much," said Dana, who announced the arrests at a Saturday news conference with Riverside County Sheriff Stanley Sniff Jr. and agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Dana said 78 officers, deputies and federal agents raided the two suspects' homes Friday. Two other suspects remain at large, he said. Police are still trying to determine whether the two men are connected with any area gangs. Investigators believe a local white supremacist gang may have been behind the attacks.

"The community is relieved," said Hemet Mayor Eric McBride. "They wanted to see closure on this, and now we have some progress."

In March, a suspicious device was attached to a gang enforcement officer's unmarked vehicle; two weeks later, four city code-enforcement trucks were torched in the Hemet City Hall parking lot.

In April, an early morning fire damaged the Hemet police shooting range. And in June, authorities found a vintage military rocket on the roof of a nearby market, pointed in the direction of the police station.

Alderman Danny Solis (25th Ward) called on Friday for an ordinance that would enlist Internet technology to protect the anonymity of witnesses who report crimes to the police.

As Mr. Solis stood in a group of about 30 residents and officials who had gathered in Pilsen — less than a week after one man was killed and another was badly injured in a shooting in the neighborhood — he urged those in the crowd to “break the code of silence,” and pick up the phone when a crime had been committed.

Cecily Arroyo, one of the event's organizers, said, “The silence is deafening, and we must come together as a community.”

The group included a small girl who held a sign that read, “I want to grow up peacefully in Pilsen.”

The event was held after the City Council voted to impose new restrictions on gun owners in response to Monday's Supreme Court ruling that effectively ended the city's ban on handguns.

After his news conference, Mr. Solis said his plan would involve third parties like Google, Bing or Yahoo as filters for information sent by residents, via text or photo messaging, who might not otherwise trust the police to protect their identities.

Chicago has used technology before for anonymous tips. Text-a-Tip, developed by Crime Stoppers and implemented in 2008, is a text message tip line for residents who might otherwise be afraid to come forward.

Compared with Boston, where Text-a-Tip made its debut in 2007, Chicago got off to a slow start. While Boston's crime rate is significantly lower than Chicago's, its texting hot line received 694 messages in its first year alone, while Chicago's received only 36 in its first six months. Experts attribute the disparity to a forceful marketing push by Crime Stoppers in Boston.

“I want to use the technology of the day to provide extra eyes and ears for the community,” Mr. Solis said.

He also proposed that the companies, in exchange for the promotional benefit the service would bring, should contribute to a fund that would reward people who provided information that helped solve a crime.

Robert Rocha, 31, a “violence interrupter” with Ceasefire Chicago , said he was skeptical that the service would get to the root of the problem. Families are often in denial about their children's possible involvement with gangs, Mr. Rocha said.

“It goes way back in history,” he said. “A lot of it is Hispanic culture — the not talking.”

People also fear being deemed a “rata,” or rat, he said.

“To break the code of silence, we must educate the community about laws and gangs,” Mr. Rocha said. “It's through this that we can take the streets back.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/us/04cncpulse.html?_r=1&ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Public Housing Residents Await Urgent Transfers

After her apartment was repeatedly broken into, Georgina Jenkins thought she had found a ticket out of Alemany, the public housing project known to residents as the Black Hole. The San Francisco Housing Authority had placed her on its priority transfer list, reserved for tenants facing immediate danger or urgent medical need, according to Ms. Jenkins and her attorney.

Ms. Jenkins, a 25-year-old aspiring medical technician, said she was offered a unit at North Beach Place, a renovated project on the other side of the city. She was preparing to move when she was informed in March that her security problem, dire as it was, could not be resolved until she paid thousands of dollars in back rent.

Sitting in her darkened apartment, with holes in the wall and a boarded-up bathroom window, Ms. Jenkins said she was tired of waiting — the last break-in was in February.

“Anybody that has an emergency transfer needs to be moved in a nice amount of time,” she said. “I'm trying to get out of here.”

There are 246 people on the Housing Authority's little-known priority transfer list, according to the agency. Ms. Jenkins's still-unresolved case underscores the complicated issues that arise as San Francisco tries to overhaul its crime-plagued public housing buildings, which has about 6,000 units.

According to documents released in late May under a public records request by Bay Area Legal Aid, which represents low-income communities, 233 people — or 95 percent of those on the list — have waited more than three months to be relocated, and 176 have waited more than a year. The list, which is compiled by the Housing Authority in consultation with the police, includes people seeking protection from hate crimes, violence, repeated robberies, domestic abuse and medical conditions that may be worsened by their surroundings.

Tenants rights advocates say the statistics show that the Housing Authority is failing in its most basic function: keeping low-income residents safe.

“If 95 percent of your emergency cases are three months out and still waiting, it doesn't seem much like an emergency,” said Minouche Kandel, a lawyer at Bay Area Legal Aid.

Housing officials acknowledge that the delays are a serious problem. But they say they are the result of a lack of space — 28,000 people are awaiting public housing in San Francisco — and other factors that have little to do with security. As the city renovates public housing units across the city, it is turning over management of some facilities to private companies that, by most accounts, have made them cleaner and safer — but they have also made it much harder to gain admittance.

North Beach Place, a gated, clean community near Fisherman's Wharf, is one of them.

“We don't have the inventory of units where people want to go; that's really the dilemma on the transfer list,” Henry A. Alvarez III, executive director of the Housing Authority, said in an interview.

As a result, some residents whom city officials and the police have deemed to be in immediate need of protection have been unable to gain admittance to the buildings where they would be safest.

In March 2008, for example, Alejandro Aguilar, a 40-year-old day laborer , severely beat a woman in her apartment at Valencia Gardens, a public housing development in the Mission district, according to police records and an account by the victim. After being taken into custody, Mr. Aguilar said twice that “next time” he intended to kill the woman, according to the police.

Mr. Aguilar was charged with assault after the woman accused him of attempted rape.

Terrified by the threats and by the prospect of testifying against Mr. Aguilar, the woman was placed on the priority transfer list. But after she was shown an apartment at North Beach Place, the facility's manager, the John Stewart Company, denied her an apartment because of bad credit, according to e-mail messages between the Housing Authority, the company, and the woman's advocates at the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

Justine Minnis, an official with the John Stewart Company, wrote in an e-mail message in July 2008 that the woman “did not meet the resident selection criteria,” because her “credit history has changed since she was originally screened at Valencia Gardens.”

Loren Sanborn, a senior vice president with the management company, said screening criteria were important to the success of North Beach Place.

“We believe that everyone should be treated the same,” Ms. Sanborn said.

Eventually, the Housing Authority, which is strapped because of budget cuts, agreed to intervene to guarantee any unpaid rent owed to the management company and cover the woman's moving expenses up to $50,000. She finally moved in September 2008.

“Under normal general circumstances, that's not something we want to be doing, but this was one of those extreme cases,” said Mr. Alvarez, the executive director.

But Mr. Alvarez, who was brought in to clean up the troubled agency two years ago, did not fault the John Stewart Company for wanting to maintain higher standards. North Beach Place, he said, has become one of the most sought-after facilities in the city.

“If we're going to create this opportunity where people say, ‘This is what I want,' then I think there are going to be different expectations of what is required to participate,” Mr. Alvarez said. “Whether one argues if that is too harsh or not too harsh, I have to look at the results.”

But advocates for public housing residents said the rules got in the way of keeping people safe.

“What we can't tolerate is when we get to that point when you finally get people out of their violent situation and then they are not be able to access it for arbitrary reasons,” said Sara Shortt, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenants rights organization.

Ms. Shortt said that it was a violation of the public housing code to deny housing to people facing security risks based on factors like bad credit. Ms. Shortt and others have been trying to get the Housing Authority to make private management companies drop the screening requirements for priority transfer cases.

It took Marvella Branner two years to move from Westside Courts, in the Fillmore district, to North Beach. Living on the third floor and struggling with severe asthma, Ms. Branner had trouble climbing the stairs and was worried that paramedics who frequently took her to the hospital would someday be unable to reach her in time. She said she sought placement on the priority transfer list in 2007 and was finally moved last fall.

The Housing Authority said it now had more vacancies in older and more crime-ridden projects like Sunnydale and Alice Griffith, both in southeast San Francisco. In some cases, tenants on the priority transfer list are refusing relocations to older facilities, believing they are no more safe than where they currently live.

Carolyn Pollard, 48, was offered a transfer earlier this month after the third break-in at her apartment in Sunnydale, the city's largest project, situated below McLaren Park. But Ms. Pollard, who lives with her daughter and a 4-year-old grandson, turned down the transfer because the offered home was in Hunters Point, which also has serious crime problems.

“My son is from the Western Addition, and if he comes down to visit me and his son, who knows what's going to happen?” said Ms. Pollard, who pays $231 a month for her apartment.

Ms. Pollard, a cheerful woman whose nickname is Tootie, said she spent weekends with relatives to get away from Sunnydale. She leaves in place a wooden board that a repairman put over a broken window in her living room — even though the glass has been repaired.

“They're just going to break it again, right?” she said. “I told them to leave it there.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/us/04bchousing.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Man Charged With Killings of 2 Officers in Florida

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — A man accused of killing two Tampa police officers during a traffic stop surrendered after detectives spent more than a day negotiating with an associate of his, police officials said Saturday.

The suspect, Dontae R. Morris, 24, turned himself in at a police station around 10:30 p.m. Friday, the police said. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of Officers David Curtis and Jeffrey Kocab early Tuesday.

“Honestly, I can never remember a point in my life where I felt more relieved,” said Chief Jane Castor of the Tampa police.

Mr. Morris was denied bail in a court appearance on Saturday and ordered to remain in jail.

The police said that Mr. Morris was also a suspect in two other killings, and that he was charged early Saturday in one of them, the May 18 shooting of a man outside his family's Tampa apartment. A statement from the Tampa police said ballistic tests indicated that the same gun was used in the officers' killings on Tuesday.

Hundreds of officers in tactical gear had combed apartment buildings, vacant homes and even waterways in an intense search for Mr. Morris after the officers' deaths. Detectives received more than 400 tips.

The police statement said the surrender came nearly 30 hours after detectives began negotiations with an associate of Mr. Morris's. That dialogue eventually led to Mr. Morris turning himself in, and the associate will be entitled to a $100,000 reward that had been offered for information leading to the arrest, the statement said.

A short time after Mr. Morris surrendered, the police said that his 21-year-old brother had been arrested early Saturday at a Tampa motel on charges of domestic violence and possession of cocaine and marijuana .

News of the surrender and charges came just hours after a wake for Officers Curtis and Kocab drew hundreds of mourners to a church. Photographs of Officer Curtis with his wife and four sons were shown on large screens. Officer Kocab was pictured with his wife, who is nine months pregnant.

Funerals for the two officers, both of whom were 31, were held Saturday.

At around 2:15 a.m. Tuesday, Officer Curtis pulled over a man and a woman in a red Toyota Camry. The officer called for backup after seeing that the man was wanted on charges of writing a bad check, the authorities said. Six minutes after Officers Curtis and Kocab approached the car's passenger side, a witness called 911 to report that they had been shot. The officers were pronounced dead at a hospital.

The car's driver, Cortnee Brantley, was charged Friday with a federal count of witnessing a felony and not reporting it.

In the May 18 shooting in which Mr. Morris was also charged, Derek Anderson, 21, was killed outside his apartment after a man tried to take his backpack, detectives say.

Sheriff David Gee of Hillsborough County said Friday night that Mr. Morris was also considered a suspect in the June 8 death of a father of four who was found badly hurt on the side of a road and died while being taken to a hospital.

The authorities were looking into why Mr. Morris was released from prison in April and not transferred to Jacksonville, Fla., where warrants had been issued in the bad-check case. Corrections officers informed Jacksonville authorities of Mr. Morris's impending release last October, prison records showed. Sheriff John Rutherford of Jacksonville said his office was looking into the matter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/us/04police.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010

ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America's original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation's birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago.

With the holiday weekend approaching, Johnson summoned the television networks for the signing ceremony on Thursday evening, July 2. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, first proposed more than a year earlier by John F. Kennedy , banished the Jim Crow laws that denied black Americans access to voting booths, public schools and public accommodations. Johnson told the nation we could “eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country” with the help of a newly formed “Community Relations Service” and its “advisory committee of distinguished Americans.” Talk about an age of innocence!

Still, there were some heartening reports of America's first full day under the new law. A front-page photo in The Times on July 4 showed 13-year-old Gene Young of Kansas City being shorn by a white barber at the Muehlebach Hotel shop “formerly closed to Negroes.” But that Norman Rockwell-like tableau was paired with the image of a white businessman, Lester Maddox, and a teenage accomplice respectively wielding a pistol and an ax handle as they turned away blacks from Maddox's restaurant in Atlanta. The summer of 1964, which had begun with the lynching of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., would soon erupt in a bloody wave of terrorism, marked by dozens of bombings of black churches, homes and businesses.

A presidential campaign was in the wings. The soon-to-be Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, had committed heresy by casting one of the Party of Lincoln's few Senate votes against the Civil Rights Act . But not even Goldwater had been as implacably opposed as a Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd. Of all the filibusters trying to block the bill, largely from Southern and border state racists then welcomed by the Democratic Party, Byrd's was the longest ( some 14 hours ) and perhaps the most appalling. As the historian Taylor Branch recounted, Byrd even let loose with ornate “segregationist interpretations of Luke and Paul.”

This was typical of Byrd. He had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1940s. As he moved toward a political career after World War II, he wrote to a notorious bigot, the Democratic Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, to rage at President Truman's efforts to integrate the military : “I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels.”

That letter was not unearthed until the late 1980s, but by then Byrd had long since renounced and apologized repeatedly for his ugly past, with words as well as deeds, including his avid support for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1983. Byrd referred to his K.K.K. association in interviews as an immutable stain. He always noted with rue, not complaint, that it would haunt his obituaries . He wasn't wrong. But when those obituaries finally appeared last week , after his death at 92, Byrd's résumé in racism was dwarfed not just by his efforts to atone for it but by his legislative achievements on many fronts during his epic Senate career.

Byrd's evolution often parallels that of a country that has now elected its first African-American president. But the story of America and race is hardly resolved, and progress is not inexorable. Even in the new century, we still take steps back and forward in bewildering alternation. New Yorkers could only be embarrassed to learn last week, courtesy of The Times , that in a city where the non-Hispanic white population is 35 percent, 70 percent of the senior officials hired by Mayor Michael Bloomberg are white — a record worse than that of all three American cities of comparable population, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. The title that an independent panel gave to its newly issued report on the altercation between Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a Cambridge, Mass., police officer — “Missed Opportunities, Shared Responsibilities” — might apply here too.

Yet paradoxically the news in New York was preceded by happier tidings from South Carolina, where the flag of the Confederacy still flies at the state Capitol. Republican primary voters there gave victories both to an African-American candidate for Congress, Tim Scott, and an Indian-American gubernatorial hopeful, Nikki Haley. Liberals have argued that these breakthroughs come with a caveat: Scott and Haley are often ideologically to the right of even their conservative competitors. True enough, but that doesn't alter the reality that some very conservative white voters in the land of Strom Thurmond did not let any lingering racial animus override their other convictions. They voted for Haley, the daughter of Sikh immigrants, despite the urging of a local G.O.P. official that they reject a “raghead.”

Scott's victory had an added irony because he defeated Thurmond's son . But we shouldn't read too much into these results from low-turnout primaries — just as we shouldn't draw too much solace from the pleasing morality tale of Byrd's atonement. Even as Washington paid homage to Byrd's triumph over his origins last week, the Capitol played host to what the Supreme Court's only black justice, Clarence Thomas, might call a “high-tech lynching.” The victim was, of all people, Thurgood Marshall — the nation's first black solicitor general and first black Supreme Court Justice, nominated to both jobs by L.B.J.

The pretext was Elena Kagan's confirmation hearings in the Senate. Marshall had been a mentor to Kagan, for whom she clerked in 1988 . He is also a hero of our history, a brave and brilliant lawyer whose advocacy in many civil rights cases, and most especially Brown v. Board of Education, helped open the doors for landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Even before last week's ceremonial hazing of Kagan, the G.O.P.'s only national black political figure, Michael Steele, attacked her for writing approvingly of a speech Marshall had given calling the original text of the Constitution “defective” — a restrained adjective, actually, for a document that countenanced slavery. On the first day of the Kagan hearings, Marshall received many more mentions (35) than even that other Republican archenemy, President Obama, in the accounting of Talking Points Memo . Orrin Hatch of Utah and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said they weren't sure they could have voted to confirm Marshall to the court. Jon Kyl of Arizona, a state that suffered years of economic boycotts because of its opposition to the King holiday, faulted Marshall's jurisprudence for advancing “the agenda of certain classes of litigants” (wonder who?) and for being out of the “mainstream.”

These senators were in the tradition of Thurmond , not Byrd — indeed, they are Thurmond's direct heirs. Like Byrd, Thurmond had been an ardent Democratic foe of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Unlike Byrd, he left his party in disgust that year and endorsed Goldwater, jump-starting the migration of the Democrats' racist cadre and their political toxins to the G.O.P. and setting the stage for the Republican “Southern strategy.” That strategy isn't dead. Witness just recently the Virginia governor Bob McDonnell's declaration of a Confederate History Month that omitted any mention of slavery, and the Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul's revival of Goldwater's “constitutional” objections to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Thurmond, who died at 100 in 2003, never recanted his racist past. He chose instead to pretend it never happened. He told interviewers that his “reputation as a segregationist” was “just misunderstood” and that he helped “the people of both races” throughout his lifetime. This from a man who, when running as a Dixiecrat for president in 1948, exclaimed that “all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation.” Only after Thurmond's death did we learn that his record also included fathering a daughter with a teenage black maid in the 1920s — and then shunting her into the shadows.

The senators trashing Marshall last week almost uncannily recycled Thurmond's behavior from July 1967, when, as a freshly minted Republican senator on the same committee, he pelted Marshall for an hour with windy, truculent and arcane questions during Marshall's own Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Indeed, some of the coded invective — such as Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions's decrying Marshall as “ a well-known activist ” — was coined by Thurmond and his peers then. Thurmond not only voted against Marshall but declared him too deficient in constitutional knowledge to qualify for the court.

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” wrote our current Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, in a smug majority opinion nibbling away at Brown v. Board of Education in 2007. His conservative self-righteousness, a product of his time, is as delusional as L.B.J.'s liberal faith in the efficacy of a federal “Community Relations Service” was in 1964. On this Fourth, as on the 233 that preceded it, America is still very much a work in progress.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04rich.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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Liberty Thoughts

Today we celebrate an event that took place in the 18th century. It is an unusual event to commemorate with a holiday — not the first shot in a battle or the toppling of a government but the broadcasting, as it was in those days, of a proposition about the nature and the rights of human beings. How fruitful, how reasonable, how correct that proposition was, we have seen again and again throughout our history. That proposition was the Declaration of Independence.

We know the words well, but they bear repeating: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The men responsible for the ideas in that document could, of course, know nothing of our world, and even with all the aids of history, we can hardly imagine what it was like to be alive in theirs, in 1776. How capacious an idea the Declaration contains becomes clear when you realize that it still contains us all, however we vote, however we choose to celebrate this day.

We live in our historical moment. And yet we are the product of a very different moment, a time when a group of men, driven onward by the pen of Thomas Jefferson, felt certain they could enunciate truths that were universal, good for all time.

Their claims were stunningly bold, both politically and philosophically. There are intellectual precedents to the Declaration. But there is only one Declaration. We are still enacting its thesis, still, after all these years, learning how to embody its aspirations. It is not just a matter of trying to remain true to Jefferson's words. The strength and the wonder of this country is that the words remain true to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04sun4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Parade Magazine

Convicted criminals in eight states—Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia—have access to citizens' Social Security numbers as part of their inmate work programs, according to a recent report from the Social Security Administration (SSA). The report notes that such programs save states money by tasking inmates with jobs like data processing that would otherwise be done by paid employees. But the SSA and others say the risks to individuals far outweigh the benefits to states.

“We are not aware of any case where personal information has been used to harm anyone,” says Bill Miskell of the Kansas Department of Corrections. But he admits that that “doesn't preclude the possibility of it happening in the future.” After a similar SSA report in 2006, five of the 13 states then allowing such access stopped the practice. Now, Miskell says, Kansas plans to stop giving prisoners jobs involving personal data. South Dakota officials say they now ensure that private data is redacted before prisoners handle paperwork.

“Giving prisoners access to Social Security numbers defies common sense,” says Rep. Samuel Johnson (R., Tex.), co-sponsor of the Social Security Number Privacy and Identity Theft Prevention Act, which would prohibit prisoners having access to such data. “This insane practice must stop.”

http://www.parade.com/news/intelligence-report/archive/100704-prison-work-programs-pose-id-theft-risk.html

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