PLAYLIST
- Hall Of The Mountain King/Louie Louie – Half Japanese
- For Your Love – Yardbirds
- My Favorite Things (excerpt) – John Coltrane
- Hard Times – Baby Huey & the Baby Sitters
- Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band – Express Yourself
- To Be Free – Luther Davis Group
- A Saucerful Of Secrets – Pink Floyd
- If I Had My Way I’d Tear The Building Down – Blind Willie Johnson
- You Can’t Lose What You Ain’t Never Had – Muddy Waters
- Fascination – David Bowie
- Hafsól – Sigur Rós
- In a Silent Way – Santana
- Driving – Driver OST
- Expectations – Belle & Sebastian
- Beggin’ – Duo Inter
- White Room – Cream
- Spanish Castles in Space – The Orb
THE GANG IN BLUE
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/christian-taylor-arlington-police-cop-fired
http://www.euronews.com/2015/08/12/texas-police-officer-is-fired-after-shooting-dead-black-teenager/
A white policeman who shot dead a black teenager in Texas last week has been dismissed. Officer Brad Miller killed Christian Taylor after reports that the 19-year old had been seen on security camera footage vandalising vehicles at an car dealership. The policeman could now face criminal charges.
“I have serious concerns as to the rationale articulated for the use of deadly force in this incident. These concerns, however, are best addressed through the criminal investigation process,“Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson told reporters.
“The grand jury will decide if the use of force in this incident rises to the level of criminal prosecution.”
http://www.euronews.com/2015/08/09/fbi-to-probe-fatal-police-shooting-of-black-teenager-in-texas/
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/christian-taylor-police-shooting
The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the dead man as Christian Taylor, of Arlington. Taylor was a sophomore at Angelo State University in San Angelo.
Officers were responding to a burglary call about 1 a.m. Friday in Arlington when they discovered someone had driven a vehicle through a front window of the Classic Buick GMC, according to a statement from the Arlington Police Department. The statement said police approached the suspect and a struggle ensued. At some point during the struggle, an officer shot Taylor.
The police statement said Miller had no police experience before joining the Arlington police force.
He will be placed on administrative leave, which is routine in such cases. Independent criminal and administrative investigations will be completed, according to the police statement.
In September of 2013, Jonathan Ferrell was in a state of distress after crashing his car and attempted to get help by knocking on a woman’s door in the middle of the night. The woman became frightened, so she shut her door and called the police.
When officers responded to the scene, they saw the former Florida A&M football player walking down the street, in an alleged “zombie state.”
As Ferrell attempted to run from police, one of the officers, Randall Kerrick opened fire, unleashing a fury of bullets into the back of this unarmed man.
Kerrick fired 12 shots at Ferrell, 10 of which hit him, all of them went into his back.
Kerrick was arrested and charged with voluntary manslaughter and his trial began this week (Kerrick faces up to 11 years if he is convicted). During the trial on Tuesday, the dashcam footage from officer Adam Neal’s patrol vehicle was shown publicly as that officer took the stand.
Neal testified that Ferrell looked like he was “amped up” and was in a “zombie state” just before Kerrick pulled out his gun, according to the NY Daily News.
Prosecutors claim that Kerrick overreacted when he shot Ferrell nearly a dozen times in his back, and the city of Charlotte agreed. Last year, after shelling out $21,000 in taxpayer dollars to defend Kerrick, the city eventually quit paying to defend this killer cop.
Earlier this year, the family of Ferrell was awarded $2.25 million in damages for their son’s death, despite Kerrick claiming that Ferrell “went for his gun.”
No other officer on the scene felt that Ferrell was a threat as none of them pulled out so much as a baton. Officer Neal testified that he didn’t pull out his gun, taser, or baton because he planned to wrestle the young man.
A police officer in Alabama proposed murdering a black resident and creating bogus evidence to suggest the killing was in self-defence, the Guardian has learned.
Officer Troy Middlebrooks kept his job and continues to patrol Alexander City after authorities there paid the man $35,000 to avoid being publicly sued over the incident. Middlebrooks, a veteran of the US marines, said the man “needs a god damn bullet” and allegedly referred to him as “that nigger”, after becoming frustrated that the man was not punished more harshly over a prior run-in.The payment was made to the black resident, Vincent Bias, after a secret recording of Middlebrooks’s remarks was played to police chiefs and the mayor.
Bias, 49, said in an interview. “The police here feel they can do what they want, and often they do.” Alexander City police chief Willie Robinson defended Middlebrooks. “He was just talking. He didn’t really mean that,” he said in an interview.
“He was walking with a purpose.” Officer Vanessa Miller killed Ryan Bollinger, 28, after witnessing him “dancing in the street” during a traffic stop.
Armed with a broom. Officer Eddo Trimino killed Lavall Hall, 25, after Hall emerged from the house with a broomstick. Hall was mentally ill, and his mother called 9-1-1 for assistance to get Hall back to the hospital during an episode. Video shows Trimino approaching Hall after he fell, firing a fifth bullet to finish him off.
“Believing he was utilizing a Taser.” Reserve Deputy Bob Bates killed Eric Harris after cops chased him down and tackled him to the ground. Bates, 73, believed he was using his taser when he actually drew his service pistol.
Naked and Refused to Stop. A DeKalb County police officer killed Anthony Hill, an Afghanistan war veteran, as he was naked and behaving erratically in public.
He was throwing rocks. Kennewick officers killed Antonio Zambrano-Montes, 35, shooting him 17 times when he turned around after running away. The Mexican immigrant was throwing rocks at cars when police gave chase. Cops tried to say that video taken of the murder could not be used as evidence.
Didn’t show hands after being tased. Officer Lisa J. Mearkle killed David Kassick, 59, as he was lying face down on the ground after being tased. Kassick ran away after being pulled over for a routine traffic stop. Mearkle was charged with criminal homicide after video emerged.
Car going 11 mph was a threat. Two Denver officers killed Jessica Hernandez, 17, when they open fired on the car full of teenagers. Police claim Hernandez struck an officer with the car, but this is disputed by a passenger who said the car struck the officer after Hernandez was shot. The car traveled no more than 11 miles per hour over a distance of 16 feet.
Armed with a spoon. Officer Brent Lawing killed Dennis Grigsby, 35, after responding to a burglary call. Grigsby was mentally ill and lived across the street from the home of the alleged burglary. He was holding a spoon in the garage when Lawing shot him once in the chest.
Armed with a prescription bottle. Officer Mark Rine killed Rumain Brisbon, 34, as he was bringing dinner home to his family. He ran away when cops approached him investigating an alleged drug deal. As they wrestled him, one cop thought a prescription bottle in his pocket was a gun, then shot him twice in the chest.
Armed with a toy gun. Beavercreek officers killed John Crawford, 22, in a Wal-Mart store after someone called 9-1-1 and lied about Crawford pointing the BB gun at people.
Not only are American police, from coast to coast, shooting first and asking questions later, they are being trained to do so in seminars by a psychologist who openly promises them that he’ll testify on their behalf if anything ever goes wrong. He’s already done it nearly 200 times.
Dr. William J. Lewinski.
No matter what the circumstances are in a police shooting, he’s the guy departments lean on to say it was completely justified and unavoidable.
His conclusions are consistent: The officer acted appropriately, even when shooting an unarmed person. Even when shooting someone in the back. Even when witness testimony, forensic evidence or video footage contradicts the officer’s story.
He has appeared as an expert witness in criminal trials, civil cases and disciplinary hearings, and before grand juries, where such testimony is given in secret and goes unchallenged. In addition, his company, the Force Science Institute, has trained tens of thousands of police officers on how to think differently about police shootings that might appear excessive.
It’s actually big business. A quick scan of Dr. Lewinski’s website has him teaching large workshops in Chicago, San Antonio, Orlando, and in other big cities across the country. Can’t make it to his conferences, don’t worry, he’ll come to your department, and offer your officers a certificate on how they are basically allowed to shoot first and ask questions later. He charges $1,000 an hour for his testimony and is, unsurprisingly, willing to testify for hours on end.
Hell, his whole company is named Force Science Institute—as in the use of force by police. This business is so lucrative that it’s all he does. Experts are denouncing his work as phony and dangerous, but police departments could not care less.
An editor for The American Journal of Psychology called his work “pseudoscience.” The Justice Department denounced his findings as “lacking in both foundation and reliability.” Civil rights lawyers say he is selling dangerous ideas.
“People die because of this stuff,” said John Burton, a California lawyer who specializes in police misconduct cases. “When they give these cops a pass, it just ripples through the system.”
Dr. Lewinski is basically training police to shoot before making a full assessment of the true threat.
In June, Athens-Clarke County police officer Jonathan Fraser was responding to a call about a drunk college kid.
In his report, Fraser wrote that his victim, 19-year-old Michael Roquet “struck me with his left elbow in my chest,” and later “he hit me again with his elbow…. so I struck him [with a baton] in the leg and upper body” and then handcuffed him.
However, according to the body camera footage of the incident, it is clear that there is no violent struggle, and only a drunken college kid serving as an outlet for this cop’s rage. At no time in the report did Fraser mention that he struck Roquet in the head. Nor did Fraser mention that Roquet fell to the ground after the devastating blow and that he proceeded to pummel his inebriated victim as he curled up in the fetal position to protect himself.
“He [Roquet] is not resisting at that point, he is on the ground,” said Police Chief Scott Freeman as he watched the video of this beating.
Amazingly enough, when the department investigated themselves, they actually found wrongdoing. In the report investigators issued to Fraser after the incident they stated that “You violated… policy…. You used hard control strikes from an impact weapon… on an individual who was actively resistant, but was not assaultive…. a strike to the head from a baton is considered use of deadly force…. You used more force than necessary.”
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is now reviewing the case after the young man died after falling to the ground.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/lowes-viriginia-black-delivery-driver
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/harris-county-texas-vaginal-search
A 21-year-old woman said that sheriff’s deputies in Harris County, Texas, threw her to the ground and searched her vagina earlier this year in the parking lot of a Texaco gas station because they said they smelled marijuana in her car.
Charnesia Corley of Spring, Texas, said she was driving to the store on June 21 to buy something for her sick mother when she was stopped by a deputy, according to television station KTRK.
The deputy pulled her over for allegedly running a stop sign around 10:30 p.m., she told the television station.
Here’s what she and her attorney, Sam Cammack, told the Houston Chronicle happened next:
A male deputy pulled her over for allegedly running a stop sign. He said he smelled marijuana, handcuffed Corley, put her in his vehicle and searched her car for almost an hour. He didn’t find any pot, according to her attorney.
Returning to his car where Corley was held, the deputy again said he smelled marijuana and called in a female deputy to conduct a cavity search. When the female deputy arrived, she told Corley to pull her pants down, but Corley protested because she was cuffed and had no underwear on. The deputy ordered Corley to bend over, pulled down her pants and began to search her.
Then, according to Cammack, Corley stood up and protested, so the deputy threw her to the ground and restrained her while another female was called in to assist. When backup arrived, each deputy held one of Corley’s legs apart to conduct the probe.
KTRK reported that she was charged with resisting arrest and possession of marijuana, although the television station did not say where the marijuana was allegedly found.
“I feel like they sexually assaulted me! I really do. I feel disgusted, downgraded, humiliated,” Corley told the television station.
She told KTRK she plans to file a complaint with the sheriff’s department.
However, during a search of Corley’s vehicle, without her consent, no illegal plants were found.
According to Harris County Sheriff’s spokesperson, Thomas Gilleland, this stop was justified and the department did everything by the book.
“The number one cause of death for black people is abortion,” he said.
A study conducted by Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, and Jeanne Flavin, a sociology professor at Fordham University, documented 413 arrests of women for actions that authorities deemed harmful to their fetuses between 1973 and 2005. Of the 368 women for whom information on race was available, 59 percent were women of color. Since 2005, the researchers have identified 380 additional cases. According to Paltrow, the majority of those women had no intention of ending their pregnancies and went on to have healthy children.
“It’s a national embarrassment,” Geoffrey P. Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminology professor who often consults with the Justice Department on its studies, told the Times. “Right now, all you know is what gets on YouTube.”
Disproportionate only begins to describe the reality of unarmed black men being shot to death by police in the United States.
An update by The Washington Post on its investigation into police shootings across the country this year shows that 40% of the 60 unarmed people who have died were black males.
Black men only make up 6% of the U.S. population.
The Post determined that black men are seven times more likely than white men to die by police gunfire while unarmed. In terms of actual numbers, the total of unarmed black men killed by police stands at 24 in 2015.
Although police killings of African Americans have drawn considerable attention in the past year, members of a different ethnic group—Native Americans—are more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement.
According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, from 1999 to 2011, Native Americans comprise 1.9% of police killings—legal interventions in official terms—but only 0.8% of the U.S. population. The same set of statistics, analyzed by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, showed that African Americans, 26% of the population, accounted for 13% of the people killed by police.
Over the period covered by the study, 4,531 people were killed by law enforcement, 96% of them via firearms and 96% of them men.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/poll-majority-black-americans-report-unfair-treatment-police
A majority of blacks in the United States — more than 3 out of 5 — say they or a family member have personal experience with being treated unfairly by the police, and their race is the reason.
Half of African-Americans respondents, including 6 in 10 black men, said they personally had been treated unfairly by police because of their race, compared with 3 percent of whites. Another 15 percent said they knew of a family member who had been treated unfairly by the police because of their race.
This information, from a survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research
Two polls released last week show that more white Americans believe there is work to be done to ensure African-Americans are treated equally. A Pew study showed that 59% of respondents believe there are changes needed to ensure that black people have the same rights as whites, while only 32% said enough had been done. According to a similar survey in March 2014, only 46% thought more work was needed, compared to 49% who said there had been enough changes. A Washington Postpoll released Wednesday had similar results; 60% thought there was more work needed, compared to 37% who believed enough had been done.
CLIMATE CHANGE
Experts at the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland said many glaciers are melting up to three times the rate of the 20th century. “The observed glaciers currently lose between half a meter and one meter of its ice thickness every year—this is two to three times more than the corresponding average of the 20th century,” Michael Zemp, lead author of the study and director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service, said in a statement about the study.
The researchers characterized the melting as “historically unprecedented,” and said “centennial glacier retreat is a global phenomenon.”
“Exact measurements of this ice loss are reported from a few hundred glaciers only,” Zemp said. “However, these results are qualitatively confirmed from field and satellite-based observations for tens of thousands of glaciers around the world.”
But Zemp wasn’t done with the bad news, adding the melting has a momentum of its own. “These glaciers will suffer further ice loss, even if climate remains stable,” he said.
http://gizmodo.com/we-need-to-seriously-rethink-how-we-prepare-for-future-1722592072
Coastal Cities Are Preparing for Cataclysmic Floods
A pair of studies in Science this week look at the way cities in coastal areas are preparing for the cataclysmic flooding and storms that will threaten them over the next few centuries.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that countries that are acting now to protect themselves from flooding with big geo-engineering projects will be better off down the road. But oneScience study finds that these sweeping engineering projects aren’t long-term insurance.
But do rich countries that are already building flood infrastructure end up being better protected down the road? Tessler and his co-authors mapped 48 delta regions based on their level of flood risk and the amount of investment capital they had to pour into large-scale flood infrastructure. Then, they ran those regions through a scenario where energy costs and labor costs go up in the future.
What they found was contradictory: While every delta got more vulnerable, it was the richer, higher-GDP deltas that were the most at risk. Here’s their risk map for the future:
So just because a region is spending on flood-proof infrastructure doesn’t mean it will be better off when a big one hits.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/epas-colorado-mine-spill-what-you-need-know
Right now Colorado’s Animas River looks more like an ad for Tang than the scenic blue ribbon it usually is. Last Wednesday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accidentally released three million gallons of heavy-metal-laden mining waste, and the toxic surge is making its way downriver. Here’s the latest on what’s going on.
Wait, the EPA did that?
Yes. The agency is typically in the business of cleaning up this kind of mess, but in this case, well, it screwed up — big time. While supervising the drainage of the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado (one of many abandoned mines in the area) workers breached an unstable dam, releasing an unstoppable deluge of the very same toxic wastewater they’d been trying to contain. It took a day before the agency owned up to the accident and when it did, it underestimated its severity. After first putting the spill at a million gallons, the EPA has now tripled that estimate.
To be fair, the agency was only trying to deal with the mess the mining company left behind in the first place.
Gold King hasn’t been an operational gold mine since 1923, but that doesn’t mean it’s just sitting pretty. The Denver Post reports that Colorado has approximately 22,000 abandoned hard rock mines, and their untreated drainage has long been a problem for the state’s waterways. Mining exposes acidic minerals and heavy metals and groundwater can wash them into rivers — the government estimates that 40 percent of Western headwaters have been contaminated this way. Still, attempts to clean up the mines are few and far between due to the mess of red tape they involve.
The wastewater from Wednesdsay’s spill contains a nasty cocktail of heavy metals including aluminum, lead, arsenic, and cadmium, though the EPA has yet to release a more specific profile of the spill’s composition.
As of Sunday the mine was still spewing out at 500 gallons per minute, but on Friday the EPA began diverting any newly released liquid into two settling ponds nearby. The agency will eventually treat the waste before discharging it into the river.
Unfortunately plenty of the stuff is already on the go. By Sunday night, the plume had traveled more than 80 miles downriver to Farmington, New Mexico, which borders the Navajo Nation. This is where the Animas feeds into the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado. Though the towns managed to shut off intake valves before the tainted water arrived, authorities are advising residents who have wells within the floodplains of the Animas and San Juan to get their water tested before drinking or using it.
http://www.euronews.com/2015/08/13/uk-government-fast-tracks-fracking-in-england/
The British government has announced a series of measures which would fast-track fracking applications in England.
Ministers will be allowed to intervene on shale gas planning applications if they believe local councils are not processing them quickly enough, a decision likely to prove fractious.
The government believes that developing shale gas is a national priority to ensure energy security, while campaigners claim they are running roughshod over local people.
http://io9.com/one-chart-showing-why-the-global-drought-is-only-going-1723341206
The Food and Agriculture Organization’s stats department recently took a look at how the world’s water use has changed over the last century—and found that we’re using seven times as much water as we did a century ago.
And with a population that’s continuing to grow, the demand is only going to keep increasing.
http://www.propublica.org/article/amid-drought-california-experiments-with-leasing-water-rights
The money crop that the fallowed land produced was one of the West’s most precious commodities: water. Under an experimental trading scheme set up by the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe and the Metropolitan Water District — which supplies municipal water to the Los Angeles area, Orange and San Diego counties, and much of the Inland Empire — the farmers essentially leased millions of gallons of their Colorado River water to California’s coastal cities.
It’s a prototype of a trade that may soon become much more common, and the kind of win-win scenario that could help solve the West’s water crisis.
http://gizmodo.com/heres-a-time-lapse-view-of-the-drought-collected-from-s-1721429383
EVENTS
Our 40 seat performance space at 2781 21st street is a great community resource for YOU! We have held successful Book Club Meetings, Public Speaker Seminars, Comedy Shows, Bands, Theatrical productions, birthday parties and variety shows. To have this space accessible to all, we offer the following rate plans:
1. 1/2 the door or $100, whichever is less. ($40 min) You can MAKE money off a production. If you make $400 at the door, the most we want is $100. We want to help local producers and bands create opportunities to perform and succeed financially. Wow, right?
2. Want to run a free event? $40.
You run the door. You run the promotions. We run the sound and provide you with a podcast post show.
8-10pm: Wed, Sat, Sun and other times available.
INTERNATIONAL THREAT ASSESSMENT
Chelsea Manning, who is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking government documents to WikiLeaks, has been threatened with possible “indefinite solitary confinement” for a series of seemingly trivial infractions, including owning expired toothpaste and “sweeping food onto the floor,” her lawyer said on Wednesday.
ACLU attorney Chase Strangio says Manning is additionally accused of “disrespect” for requesting her lawyer while speaking to a guard and “prohibited property” for owning books and magazines that include the Caitlyn Jenner cover issue of Vanity Fair.
In response to the charges, Manning’s supporters have started an online petition providing a detailed list of her alleged violations:
According to the website, Manning’s “prohibited property” was as follows:
Vanity Fair issue with Caitlyn Jenner on the cover, Advocate, OUT Magazine, Cosmopolitan issue with an interview of Chelsea, Transgender Studies Quarterly, novel about trans issues “A Safe Girl to Love,” book “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy — The Many Faces of Anonymous,” book “I Am Malala,” 5 books by Robert Dorkin, legal documents including the Senate Torture Report, book: “Hidden Qualities that Make Us Influential.”
Obama’s plans never included an end to what he himself constantly described as the camp’s defining evil: indefinite detention. To the contrary, he explicitly demanded the right to continue to imprison Guantánamo detainees without charges or trial –– exactly what made Guantánamo so evil in the first place — based on the hideous new phrase “cannot be tried but too dangerous to release.” Obama simply wanted to indefinitely imprison them somewhere else.
In other words, Obama never sought to close Guantánamo in any meaningful sense
The ACLU also made this point from the moment Obama first unveiled his “move Guantánamo” plan and Democratic partisans pretended it was a “close Guantánamo” plan.
limits on closing Guantánamo, which Obama himself (not the Republicans) imposed.
hunger strike may end life of one guantanamo inmate
a Palestinian inmate in israel in hunger strike coma as UN criticizes forced feeding
ISIS & chemical weapons? another WMD debacle? an exhausted supply.
NATIONAL INSECURITY
The U.S. Department of Justice has refused to reveal its rules for spying on the media, prompting one group representing journalists to sue the agency in federal court.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco seeking documents under the Freedom of Information Act that document Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) procedures for issuing national security letters to spy on the media. The Justice Department has so far refused to release the information or even respond to the FOIA request the foundation made in March.
Victoria Baranetsky, the foundation’s attorney, told Courthouse News Service obtaining the records and publishing them “is necessary to deter chilling effects on the press and its sources, especially given recent years during which the Obama Administration has increased surveillance of reporters.”
The Associated Press was targeted by the Justice Department in 2013 when the agency secretly obtained months of phone records for at least seven journalists on 20 phone lines. The administration was trying to learn at the time the source of a government leak regarding Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) work to thwart a terrorist plot.
The Justice Department also investigated Fox News reporter James Rosen in connection with a possible leak of classified information by a government contractor, according to Courthouse News Service.
Erika Totten returned to protesting in the DC area after taking a few months off last winter, law enforcement officers were waiting to greet her.
“We’ve been looking for you,” she recalls officers at several protests telling her. “We wondered where you were. We haven’t seen you in a while.”
documents, released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination, indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful. The reports confirm social media surveillance of the protest movement and ostensibly related events in the cities of Ferguson, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New York.
They also show the department watching over gatherings that seem benign and even mundane. For example, DHS circulated information on a nationwide series of silent vigils and a DHS-funded agency planned to monitor a funk music parade and a walk to end breast cancer in the nation’s capital.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/zerofox-report-baltimore-black-lives-matter
Documents from a “crisis management” report produced by the cybersecurity firmZeroFox indicate that the firm monitored Black Lives Matter protesters during theFreddie Gray protests in Baltimore earlier this year. The documents, which surfaced online last Wednesday, also state that the firm “protected” the online accounts of Maryland and Baltimore officials and members of the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland National Guard.
The report identifies DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, two prominent Black Lives Matter organizers who took part in the Baltimore protests, as “threat actors” for whom “immediate response is recommended.” It describes McKesson and Elzie as “high” severity, “physical,” and “#mostwanted” threats and notes both have a “massive following” on social media. It says that ZeroFox was engaged in “continuous monitoring” of their social media accounts and specifies their geographical locations at the time of the report. The report does not suggest that the pair were suspected of criminal activity but were “main coordinators of the protests.”
Responding to a troubling rise in law enforcement’s use of high-tech surveillance devices that are often hidden from the communities where they’re used, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today launched the Street-Level Surveillance Project (SLS), a Web portal loaded with comprehensive, easy-to-access information on police spying tools like license plate readers, biometric collection devices, and “Stingrays.’’
The SLS Project addresses an information gap that has developed as law enforcement agencies deploy sophisticated technology products that are supposed to target criminals but that in fact scoop up private information about millions of ordinary, law-abiding citizens who aren’t suspected of committing crimes. Government agencies are less than forthcoming about how they use these tools, which are becoming more and more sophisticated every year, and often hide the factsabout their use from the public. What’s more, police spying tools are being used first in low-income, immigrant, and minority communities—populations that may lack access to information and resources to challenge improper surveillance.
“Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level are increasingly using sophisticated tools to track our cell phone calls,photograph our vehicles and follow our driving patterns, take our pictures in public places, and collect our fingerprints and DNA. But the public doesn’t know much about those tools and how they are used,’’ said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “The SLS Project provides a simple but in-depth look at how these surveillance technologies work, who makes and uses them, and what kind of data they are collecting. We hope that community groups, advocacy organizations, defense attorneys, and individuals all take advantage of the information we’ve gathered.”
The SLS Project website went live today with extensive information onbiometric technologies which collect fingerprints, DNA, and face prints as well as on automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—cameras mounted on patrol cars and on city streets that scan and record the plates of millions of cars across the country.
Law enforcement agencies must obtain a warrant to get tracking data from mobile phone companies, according to a decision by a federal appeals court.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled (pdf) Wednesday in a 2-1 decision that just because a third party holds information, it does not mean that it can be made freely available to police.
“People cannot be deemed to have volunteered to forfeit expectations of privacy by simply seeking active participation in society through use of their cell phones,” Senate Circuit Judge Andre Davis wrote for the majority.
The case was one of an armed robber whose whereabouts were traced over a seven-month period via data provided to prosecutors by Sprint.
“It’s great for us going forward,” Nate Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told The Intercept. “It’s a robust recognition of how much private information can be revealed through our cell phone records—doctor’s office visits, AA meetings…in the aggregate, it paints a strong picture of our lives.”
Absurdist Noir 