tagged w/ Police State
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New York prosecutors ask Twitter to reveal Occupy Wall Street man's tweets
Twitter agrees not to comply with subpoena from district attorney's office while protester's lawyer prepares rebuttal
The company has not complied with the subpoena from the New York district attorney's office.
Prosecutors have subpoenaed the Twitter records of an Occupy Wall Street protester who was arrested in October during a mass protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.
The 26 January subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney's office seeks "user information, including email address," along with three months' worth of tweets from @destructuremal, the Twitter handle for Malcolm Harris.
Harris, 23, a freelance writer and editor who lives in Brooklyn, said on Tuesday that Twitter sent a copy of the subpoena to him on Monday. He posted it on Twitter.
"When you get an email from Twitter Legal, you assume it's a phishing scam, trying to get your password," he said. "It turned out that it is a phishing scam, but it's from the prosecutors."
It is not clear what specific evidence prosecutors are after. But the subpoena is an example of posts on social media sites posing potential legal problems for authors.
Harris said his lawyer, Martin Stolar, would file a motion to quash the subpoena. Twitter has agreed not to comply with the subpoena while Stolar prepares the motion, Harris said.
A spokeswoman for the district attorney's office declined to comment.
The subpoena seeks Harris's tweets from 15 September – two days before the Occupy Wall Street movement began – to 15 December.
Harris is not sure what tweets could be fodder for prosecutors; Twitter's interface does not allow him to review all of his old tweets. Stolar was not available for comment.
A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on the case but confirmed that the San Francisco-based company's policy is "to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so", in order to protect users' rights.
Harris is one of hundreds of Occupy-related defendants whose cases are still winding their way through American courts.
A special courtroom has been set up to handle more than 1,800 cases in New York, the vast majority involving misdemeanour charges.
He was charged with disorderly conduct and is due back in court on 29 February.
Like a number of Occupy protesters, he has vowed to take the case to trial rather than accept a deal from prosecutors.
The National Lawyers Guild is representing many of the arrested protesters.New York prosecutors ask Twitter to reveal Occupy Wall Street man's tweets... more
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Published on Thursday, February 9, 2012 by Common Dreams
30,000 Domestic Drones to Fill the Sky, Civil Liberties at Risk
FAA Act would raise 'very serious privacy issues'
- Common Dreams staff
A bill has passed in the House and Senate this week that would increase the presence of drones in U.S. civilian airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act requires the FAA to alleviate many current rules on domestic drone authorization. Drones would now be able to fly in the same airspace as commercial airliners, private planes, and cargo jets. Up to 30,000 drones could be allowed in U.S. airspace by the end of the decade.
The Senate passed the bill on Monday, 75-20 and allots $63.4 billion to the FAA. Obama is expected to sign it into law.
ACLU, among other civil liberties groups, is expressing grave concern for civilian privacy, as the legislation does not restrict drone surveillance activities by police and federal government agencies.
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ACLU states:
As we explained in our recent report, drone technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, and there is a lot of pent-up demand for them within the law enforcement community. But, domestic deployment of unmanned aircraft for surveillance purposes has largely been blocked so far by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is rightly concerned about the safety effects of filling our skies with flying robots (which crash significantly more often than manned aircraft).[...]
Unfortunately, nothing in the bill would address the very serious privacy issues raised by drone aircraft. This bill would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.[...]
We don’t want to wonder, every time we step out our front door, whether some eye in the sky is watching our every move. [...]
Here are details on what the bill would do in terms of drones:
Require the FAA to simplify and speed up the process by which it issues permission to government agencies to operate drones. It must do this within 90 days. The FAA has already been working on a set of proposed regulations to loosen the rules around drones, reportedly set for release in the spring of 2012.
Require the FAA to allow “a government public safety agency” to operate any drone weighing 4.4 pounds or less as long as certain conditions are met (within line of sight, during the day, below 400 feet in altitude, and only in safe categories of airspace).Nano Hummingbird Surveillance Drone
Require the FAA to establish a pilot project within six months to create six test zones for integrating drones “into the national airspace system.”
Require the FAA to create a comprehensive plan “to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.” “Civil” drones means those operated by the private sector; currently it is all but impossible for any non-government entity, except for hobbyists, to get permission to fly drones (for-profit use of drones is banned). Industry groups and their congressional supporters see this as a potential area for growth. Congress specifies that the plan must provide for the integration of drones into the national airspace system “as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015.” The FAA has nine months to create the plan. The FAA is also required to create a “5-year roadmap for the introduction” of civil drones into the national airspace.
Unfortunately, nothing in the bill would address the very serious privacy issues raised by drone aircraft. This bill would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.
Require the FAA to publish a final rule within 18 months after the comprehensive plan is submitted, “that will allow” civil operation of small (under 55 pounds) drones in the national airspace, and a proposed rule for carrying out the comprehensive plan.
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TPM reports:
The federal government is also facing a lawsuit from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group that is asking for the FAA to release records on the almost-300 agencies that have authorization to operate drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the EFF who brought the case, told TPM that this bill makes their suit even more important. “I think the fact that Congress is pressuring the FAA to expand its UAS program through the FAA Reauthorization Act only reinforces the need for these records,” Lynch said. “It’s important that we learn more about how the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies are already using UASs before we expand their use further. The privacy concerns posed by the use of drones for domestic surveillance are too great to excuse the FAA’s lack of transparency on this issue.”
(Published on Thursday, February 9, 2012 by Common Dreams
30,000 Domestic Drones to... more
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For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected. The United States of America has long held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other nation. For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. Presently, the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, a number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in its history. http://nilebowie.blogspot.com/2012/02/economics-of-incarceration.htmlFor anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally... more
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This is not America. None the less, this is what it will look like if we ever let them do it, and they WILL try. With school districts in California conducting door-to-door surprise vaccinations, and with the American Medical Association advocating compulsory participation in vaccine TRIALS, we are not very far off from seeing this sort of thing on our own highways http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/vaccines/were-from-the-governmentand-were-here-to-help.htmlThis is not America. None the less, this is what it will look like if we ever let them... more
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A report the Transportation Security Administration doesn’t want you to see: While Americans the country over are being scrutinized as extremists for seemingly innocent activities like paying cash when shopping or advocating a return to equality under Constitutional law, the Department of Homeland Security continues to employ personnel that wouldn’t pass basic background checks or psychological profiles. http://www.thedailysheeple.com/crimes-of-the-tsa-agents_022012A report the Transportation Security Administration doesn’t want you to see:... more
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Plainly put, the U.S. "counterterrorism official," who is quoted in the New York Times article is a murderer and a liar. He is falsely accusing journalists and human rights activists who investigate U.S. drone killings of helping "Al Qaeda succeed," which he damn well knows is a big lie. It is actually the job of the CIA, which invented Al Qaeda and its mythical face, Osama Bin Laden, to help Al Qaeda succeed. http://disquietreservations.blogspot.com/2012/02/why-conspiracy-theorists-are-being.htmlPlainly put, the U.S. "counterterrorism official," who is quoted in the New... more
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Chicago, Illinois plans to host more than 7,500 international dignitaries and 3,000 journalists at the G8 Summit this spring.
But if history is any indication, those numbers will be dwarfed by tens of thousands of demonstrators descending on the Windy City this year to protest the massive gathering of world leaders.
And as police prepare to clash with protesters who picket the annual meeting of the minds, the crime scenes that are expected to be marred by messy arrests might never be made available outside of Chicago. In the state of Illinois, an obscure eavesdropping law prohibits recordings of unknowing individuals. Even if a cop is caught clobbering a protester on the streets of Chicago, recording the incident can land both amateur photographers and seasoned journalists alike behind bars, where they could face sentencing on par with charges of rape and murder.
The law in question is an antiquated eavesdropping rule that can bring about felony charges for producing an audio recording without ones’ consent. Critics have come after the law and challenged its constitutionality — or lack thereof — but as of now the offense is on the books and is likely to stay that way come springtime. For the Chicago cops that will be tasked with controlling a swarm of protesters at the summit, it could be to their benefit. The same, sadly, can’t be said for the freedom of the press.
To say Chicago will become the scene of a mass protest might be an understatement. By comparison, the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle, Washington spawned 600 arrests and prompted police to use tear gas, pepper spray and physical force on protesters. A decade later, the 2009 G-20 Summit in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania yielded 190 arrests and still more incidents of police violence. The same summit a year later in Toronto, Canada caused police to put more than 1,000 citizens in handcuffs, making it the largest mass arrest in the country’s history. With riots rendering nearly a million dollars worth of damages as well, it was also one of the biggest uprisings that Canada has seen in recent memory.
With the Occupy Wall Street movement only heightening awareness of corrupt politics in America and across the globe, dissatisfaction with the establishment and its decisions that impact the world are more rampant than ever. Protesters are already planning how they will respond to the summit scheduled for this May, but under current law, video cameras that capture sound are just as illegal as assault weapons.
Under the Eavesdropping Act in Illinois, catching a cop crack down on a protester is a Class 1 felony. If budding videographers think they might be the exception come this spring, think again.
Christopher Drew thought he was exercising his First Amendment when he recorded an altercation with cops in 2009, but for the Chicago, Illinois artist, he couldn’t be further from the truth. He was approached by an officer with the Chicago Police Department three years ago and questioned about the artwork he was selling on the city’s State Street. When law enforcement realized that they were being recorded, Drew was dished felony charges under the eavesdropping law and ended up spending a few days in jail. Drew asked an Illinois judge to dismiss the hefty felony charge, but the court rejected his plea. Later this year his case is expected to go to trial, and if found guilty, Drew could serve 15 years in prison.
“In a democracy you are suppose to oversee your public servants. If they’re doing wrong you’re suppose to bring it to the attention of other citizens and to the court,” Drew explained to RT. “They have no privacy right, they are in public and they are on the public dime and doing public duty. That means that we’re their employer. We have a right to record our employees and bring that evidence to the system that they are doing wrong.”
Michael Allison has become a victim of the police state’s bizarre law, too. He was at his mom’s house in Illinois when cops showed up and questions the automobiles he had parked on the property. When Allison began recording his conversation with the cops, he was cuffed and charged with violating the eavesdropping law. Those charges included five counts of eavesdropping, each with a maximum of 15 years in prison.
For videotaping his own conversation with a cop on his family property, Allison could have served the rest of his life behind bars.
Circuit Court Judge David Frankland would later say that the case against Allison was unconstitutional, but that decision was just a small exception. The eavesdropping law still stands today, even if it has opponents sitting on judicial benches.
“A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen’s privacy cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties,” the judge wrote.“Such action impedes the free flow of information concerning public officials and violates the First Amendment right to gather such information,” added Judge Frankland.
Drew, Allison and Judge Frankland are just a small sampling of many opponents of the controversial law, but unless those numbers grow before the G8, the protests that are almost certain to be countered with excessive police force will be illegal to record.
Some state lawmakers are trying to overturn the legislation before this spring, but it is a challenge that stands to be complicated with a goal only a few months into the future. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan has asked the state Supreme Court for a new decision on the constitutionality of the law and others have come to her side. Some have even proposed an exception that will allow citizens to record the police, which is allowed in most jurisdictions in America.
"I don't believe there is an expectation of privacy for public officials on public property doing public duties," Rep. Elaine Nekritz, a local sponsor of the re-write, tells the Associated Press.
The US Court of Appeals in Boston, Massachusetts countered a similar wiretapping law last year, with a judge ruling in August that filming the police is a “basic and well-established liberty safeguarded by the First Amendment.”
Many outside of Boston agree, and if the law isn’t changed in Illinois before spring, Chicago’s G-8 summit is expected to still be caught on film, law notwithstanding. But as thousands plans to flood the streets of the city to demonstrate against the meeting of leaders from the US, France, Russia, Italy and elsewhere, cops will be tasked with countering not just riled protesters, with journalists of all sorts gripping their cameras. Come springtime, the Chicago PD will have to determine which First Amendment guarantee is more important to crush: the freedom of the press or the freedom to assemble.
Luckily America’s most well-known constitutional law professor and former Chicago resident will be in town that week. What do you think Barack Obama has to say about the law?
http://rt.com/usa/news/summit-chicago-law-public-725/Chicago, Illinois plans to host more than 7,500 international dignitaries and 3,000... more
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For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected. The United States of America has long held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other nation. For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. Presently, the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, a number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in its history.
While miserable statistics illustrate some measure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring in the detainment centers inside the land of the free, only a partial picture of the broader situation is painted. While the country faces an unprecedented economic and financial crisis, business is booming in other fields – namely, the private prison industry. Like any other business, these institutions are run for the purpose of turning a profit. State and federal prisons are contracted out to private companies who are paid a fixed amount to house each prisoner per day. Their profits result from spending the minimum amount of state or federal funds on each inmate, only to pocket the remaining capital. For the corrections conglomerates of America, prosperity depends on housing the maximum numbers of inmates for the longest potential time -- as inexpensively as possible.
By allowing a profit-driven capitalist-enterprise model to operate over institutions that should rightfully be focused on rehabilitation, America has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial complex. Under the promise of maintaining correctional facilities at a lower cost due to market competition, state and federal governments contract privately run companies to manage and staff prisons, even allowing the groups to design and construct facilities. The private prison industry is primarily led by two morally deficient entities, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation). These companies amassed a combined revenue of over $2.9 billion in 2010, not without situating themselves in the center of political influence.
The number of people imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal system. Because judicial leniency and sentencing reductions threaten the very business models of these private corporations, millions have been spent lobbying state officials and political candidates in an effort to influence harsher “zero tolerance” legislation and mandatory sentencing for many non-violent offenses. Political action committees assembled by private correctional corporations have lobbied over 3.3 million dollars to the political establishment since 2001. An annual report released by the CCA in 2010 reiterates the importance of influencing legislation:
The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior. Also, sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some offenders on probation with electronic monitoring who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.
Considering that today’s private prison population is over 17 times larger than the figure two decades earlier, the malleability of the judicial system under corporate influence is clear. The Corrections Corporation of America is the first and largest private prison company in the US, co-founded in 1983 by Tom Beasley, former Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. The CCA entered the market and overtly exploited Beasley’s political connections in an attempt to exert control over the entire prison system of Tennessee. Today, the company operates over sixty-five facilities and owns contracts with the US Marshal Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Prisons. The GEO Group operates 118 detention centers throughout the United States, South Africa, UK, Australia and elsewhere. Under its original name, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was synonymous for the sadistic abuse of prisoners in its facilities, resulting in the termination of several contracts in 1999.
The political action committees assembled by private prison enterprises have also wielded incredible influence with respect to administering harsher immigration legislation. The number of illegal immigrants being incarcerated inside the United States is rising exponentially under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency responsible for annually overseeing the imprisonment of 400,000 foreign nationals at the cost of over $1.9 billion on custody-related operations. The agency has come under heavy criticism for seeking to contract a 1,250-bed immigration detention facility in Essex County, New Jersey to a private company that shares intimate ties to New Jersey's Governor, Chris Christie. Given the private prison industry’s dependence on immigration-detention contracts, the huge contributions of the prison lobby towards drafting Arizona’s recrementitious immigration law SB 1070 are all but unexpected. While the administration of Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer is lined with former private prison lobbyists, its Department of Corrections budget has been raised by $10 million, while all other Arizona state agencies are subject to budget cuts in 2012’s fiscal year.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this obstinate moral predicament presents itself in the private contracting of prisoners and their role in assembling vast quantities of military and commercial equipment. While the United States plunges itself into each new manufactured conflict under a wide range of fraudulent pretenses, it is interesting to note that all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags, uniforms, tents, bags and other equipment used by military occupation forces are produced by inmates in federal prisons across the US. Giant multinational conglomerates and weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation employ federal prison labor to cheaply assemble weapons components, only to sell them to the Pentagon at premium prices. At the lowest, Prisoners earn 17 cents an hour to assemble high-tech electronic components for guided missile systems needed to produce Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles and anti-tank projectiles.
(more @ link)
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/economics-of-incarceration.htmlFor anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally... more
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Congress Is Demanding That The FAA Make Room For The US Drone Fleet
We reported yesterday that the past decade has seen unprecedented growth in the number of U.S. drones flying the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan.
With unfettered access to the occupied air space and burgeoning technology, the American UAV fleet has swelled beyond what was imagined before the wars.
Now, with ground operations concluded in Iraq and scheduled to end in Afghanistan by 2014, those new drones will be coming home and their pilots will need a place to fly them and train.
Which could be why Congress is calling for the accelerated use of unmanned drones in U.S. air space.
Steven Aftergood at FAS dug up the authorization bill before the Federal Aviation Administration requiring the agency to put “a comprehensive plan to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system” within nine months.
The bill goes on to say “The plan… shall provide for the safe integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015.”
The bill calls for numerous test ranges to be operated in conjunction with NASA and the Department of Defense, use of drones in the Arctic, guidance system improvements, and an assessment of the “catastrophic failure of the unmanned aircraft that would endanger other aircraft in the national airspace system.”
This bill follows up the Army's January directive to use drone fleets in the U.S. for training missions and "domestic operations."
And both of these initiatives are mandated in the NDAA (section 1097) that calls for six drone test ranges to be operational withing six months of that bills signing December 31.
http://www.businessinsider.com/congress-passes-law-for-drones-us-2015-2012-2Congress Is Demanding That The FAA Make Room For The US Drone Fleet
We reported... more
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This week in OWS Week Program 2 - Chris Ernesto from Occupy Arrests is interviewed about the 6,000 PLUS arrests that have happened here to people that are asserting their First Amendment Right! The Right to Peacefully Assemble and Freedom of Speech! - The Video shows the brutal arrests around the United States and shows the police state for what it is.
http://freedividual.com/2012/02/02/ows-week-program-2-aired-live-2112-on-presstv/This week in OWS Week Program 2 - Chris Ernesto from Occupy Arrests is interviewed... more
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In a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Initial reports from sources suggested that an ABC News camera was also prevented from taping the hearing; ABC has since denied that they sent a crew to the hearing. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/01/house-republicans-order-j_n_1246971.htmlIn a stunning break with First Amendment policy, House Republicans directed Capitol... more
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Our government conducts business in secret. The First Amendment is gone...there are MAYBE nine amendments left in the Bill of Rights.
"WASHINGTON -- In a stunning break with First Amendment policy on Capitol Hill, House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. Republicans also denied the entrance of a credentialed ABC News news team that was attempting to film the event."Our government conducts business in secret. The First Amendment is gone...there are... more
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The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain "in order to protect the intelligence agencies" - the torturers. http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/the-world-war-on-democracyThe police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA,... more
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