Category Archives: Police State

Morning Links

Obama is worse for press freedom than Nixon says Pentagon Papers lawyer James Goodale.

The next country on the NATO target list is apparently Syria.  Pretty soon it will be easier to count the middle east countries that the west hasn’t attacked than the ones they have.

And if Syria weren’t enough to keep the war industry going, Obama is also going to be discussing the fate of Iran on his visit to Israel, where some officials in the U.S protectorate believe Obama has been dragging his feet on attacking Iran.  While Obama has clearly been pursuing a strategy to justify a war with Iran nearly identical to the Bush administration’s lead-up to the Iraq invasion, it has not yet culminated in an actual war as powerful Israeli political powers have wanted.

Mainstream press outlet, UPI, reports that  : The Iraq War killed 190,000 people, 70 percent civilians and 4,488 U.S. service members and will cost the U.S. taxpayer $2.2 trillion, U.S. researchers say.  But, a respectable 2006 study claimed death toll of 650,000 and there have been many more since then.  And this article says the dollar cost could total $6T.

Maryland Senate votes to decriminalize small amounts of pot and the House is also expected to pass it.  The federal government, corrupt as ever, remains under the control of the beneficiaries of the drug war.

Fifteen benefits of the drug war.  Not for you.  For the government.

Transportation Security Administration inspectors forced a wounded [active duty] Marine who lost both of his legs in an IED blast and who was in a wheelchair to remove his prosthetic legs at one point, and at another point to stand painfully on his legs while his wheelchair was examined, according to a complaint a congressman has registered with the TSA.  Nice work, TSA.

Know your rights at increasingly common U.S. police state checkpoints.

Tell your dog, Rover, to start saving more for his health care.  Obama care is expected to hit veterinarians by forcing them to pay an excise tax on any equipment that can also be used for human care.

Domestic drone surveillance receives enthusiastic welcome

The Federal Aviation Administration is planning to establish six drone test sites within the U.S. and Huntsville, Alabama is actively engaged in competing to attract one of those sites to the “Rocket City” area.  According to local TV station, WAFF:

Redstone Arsenal is already the hub for development and management of unmanned aerial vehicles for the army, so if you add testing into the mix, it puts Redstone and the Huntsville area on the map for everything behind drones.

And the competition is going to be tough.

Because more jobs come with the testing of drones, Huntsville is not the only city vying for the opportunity. There is already interest from cities in more than 30 states to be one of six testing sites that the FAA will designate.

Drones have, of course, been in the news because the U.S. routinely uses them to to carry out targeted attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, killing thousands, many of whom were innocent.  It was recently revealed that the U.S. has built a new drone base in northern Africa presumably to support American operations in Libya, Egypt, and Mali.  In terms of domestic use, the White House has been criticized for assuming the power to use drones to kill Americans on U.S. soil ignoring  due process requirements of the Constitution.    In this context, the comments of Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle regarding the intended purpose of domestic drones seem stunningly naive:

“It looks at the landfill and makes sure it has the right compaction there and uses a sensor to tell you. It may follow a pipeline and makes sure there is no leakage out of that pipeline,” he said. “That’s the kind of technology you are looking at and the commercial applications that you are looking, which means jobs, money to the area. There is really not enough money in watching people.”

Actually, the largest share of the $75B (by 2025) drone market is expected to be in the agriculture industry.  Law enforcement is expected to account for $3.2B and “all other applications” (including the environmental uses mentioned by Battle) account for another $3.2B.   By Battle’s compass, the militarization of law enforcement and the growing surveillance state are inconsequential to the discussion because that’s not where the big money is.

 

ACLU starts campaign against police militarization

From a March 6th entry on the ACLU national website:

American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in 23 states today simultaneously filed more than 255 public records requests to determine the extent to which local police departments are using federally subsidized military technology and tactics that are traditionally used overseas.

ACLU-storiesThe site lists ten horror stories like the one at left to make the point that the aggressive tactics routinely employed by over-zealous police departments for ordinary crime are becoming more like the battlefield methods used in war zones, often visiting preventable tragedy on innocent people.  The scary part is that these tactics are becoming increasingly common even for low risk, non-violent situations.  The supply of battlefield weapons is expanding under continuing armed forces hand-me-down programs.

This blurring of the line between police and military will eventually transform “the land of the free” into an occupation zone as police substitute brute force where they once used reason and intelligence.  It will fuel an “us against them” mentality which will only result in further deterioration in the relationship between police and the community.

Carry a condom, go to jail

The problem with “crimes” like gambling, drug use, and prostitution is that there are no victims to file complaints with the police or testify against the perpetrator in a trial.  So, to catch people engaged in these kinds of consensual activities, police resort to sleazy deceptive sting entrapment tactics to trick people into doing something for which they can be arrested.  In effect, police become complicit in creating the crime for which they ultimately arrest someone.  This, by itself, makes the phrase “the land of the free” utterly ridiculous.  But, going after consensual criminals is a big part of the criminal justice industry, so don’t expect it to end anytime soon.

Cops have long since figured out that real criminals hide and don’t commit their crimes where anyone can see.  That makes them hard to catch.  But, ordinary non-criminal people are everywhere and they don’t hide what they do because they don’t have any criminal intent.  So, if their behavior can be criminalized, arrests would be easier and the assembly-line justice system can more easily be supplied with fresh bodies to prosecute and incarcerate.

Such is the case in New York City where, not only prostitution is illegal, but merely looking like some cops idea of a prostitute is cause for suspicion.  Suspicion then becomes justification for a search.  If condoms are found in the search, the cops can justify an arres based on the twisted logic that the person might commit prostitution in the future.  This is referred to as “precrime” and was popularized in the movie, Minority Report.

Molly Crabapple has a few words about this practice:

Like most laughably cruel tricks of the justice system, you probably wouldn’t know that you could be arrested for carrying condoms until it happened to you.

But, it’s just an arrest.  How bad can that be?

Arrest is always violent. The NYPD may or may not break your ribs, but the process of arrest in America is still a man tying your hands behind your back at gunpoint and locking you in a cage. Holding cells are shit-encrusted boxes, often too crowded to sit down. Police can leave you there for three days; long enough to lose your job. If this seems obvious, I say it because the polite middle classes trivialize arrest. They talk about “keeping people off the streets.” They don’t realize that the constant threat of arrest is traumatic, unless it happens to them or their kids.

This is not a legitimate function of a justice system in any free country.  This is state sponsored persecution, plain and simple.  Of course, historically, persecution is never recognized as such by the people doing it.  As an adult, your sex life is your business and that applies even when sex is your business.  The government should have no more control over you than they have over any other business (which, by most libertarian standards, is way too much).

Encryption: The only cure for warrantless eavesdropping?

Governments around the world are beginning to recognize how the internet shifts the balance of power away from government toward the citizenry and they are taking the threat very seriously.  Not a week goes by without a news story of government attempts to expand their power to monitor and control the internet.  These power grabs usually take the form of legislation disguised as measures to control child porn, copyright infringement, or terrorism, but they have been less than successful because of the public outrage they sometimes inspire.  So, when it comes to monitoring internet communications, the government has taken to cloaking its operations in secrecy, thereby thwarting any opportunity for anyone to know whether they are being spied on.  If you have no way of finding out whether the government is monitoring your communications, you are powerless to challenge them on it.  And it is exactly that tactic that permits the government to sidestep any Fourth Amendment limitations.  Basically, when it comes to the internet, the requirement for a search warrant is dead.

So, while the government will presumably always have the power to pull the plug on the internet, you can fight back against their monitoring by using encryption.  According to reason.com, encryption schemes have not integrated well into email clients and other communications software…

But Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload fame has stepped in to fill the gap. Facing prosecution for his old cloud storage service, Dotcom has not only battled extradition to the United States from New Zealand, he has started Mega, a new encrypted cloud storage service. And what better to go with your encrypted cloud storage than an encrypted means of discussing what you keep in there? Says Dotcom of his new email service, “we’re going to extend this to secure email which is fully encrypted so that you won’t have to worry that a government or internet service provider will be looking at your email.”

Unfortunately, Kim Dotcom has not been very successful in fighting extradition to the U.S. where he faces charges of piracy, racketeering, copyright infringement, and money laundering.

Nevertheless, better encryption software is being pursued and is already available from some vendors.  The real question is whether those vendors will be able to adequately convince the public that they aren’t in cahoots with the government, providing them a way to decrypt the traffic without ever telling the public.  With the powers the government has acquired since 9/11, it seems very likely that a software company could be compelled to provide backdoor mechanisms for the NSA and be forced to keep it a secret under threat of prosecution.

Such is life in “the land of the free”.

Out of control government secrecy is why we need more Bradley Mannings

Glenn Greenwald has a great reaction to Manning’s appearance yesterday:

Heroism is a slippery and ambiguous concept. But whatever it means, it is embodied by Bradley Manning and the acts which he unflinchingly acknowledged today he chose to undertake. The combination of extreme government secrecy, a supine media (see the prior twocolumns), and a disgracefully subservient judiciary means that the only way we really learn about what our government does is when the Daniel Ellsbergs – and Bradley Mannings – of the world risk their own personal interest and liberty to alert us.

Lincoln’s oft quoted words, “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” are nothing more than a meaningless arrangement of letters in a state where the government hides behind an impenetrable iron curtain of secrecy.   The U.S. government has a long history of secrecy, deceit, and intolerance of whistle-blowers, but 9/11 provided the excuse it needed to expand that methodology to the point where the U.S. can no longer be readily distinguished from the totalitarian police states erected under communism and fascism.

Today, U.S. government secrecy has little to do with national security and everything to do with shielding its actions from oversight or Constitutional challenge and avoiding embarrassing exposure of its brutality, corruption, and incompetence.

The U.S. government now routinely terrorizes the innocent people of other countries by killing them, imposing crippling sanctions on their already suffering economies, inciting civil war among them and hatred toward the U.S., interfering in their politics, supporting their corrupt despotic heads of state, over-throwing their government leaders (elected or not), provoking them into war, or sometimes simply by backing other nations that do these same things. And it does most of this in secret and it does all of it in the name of the American people, in your name.

Of course, after the next devastating terrorist attack, Americans will be told that some evil immoral enemy has attacked us through no fault of our own.  The dead will be declared innocent victims as we immediately acquiesce to new wars and further erosion of what freedom we have left.  Then the following November we will run to the polls and happily reelect all the same people who brought this down on us.

The fact is that Bradley Manning did more to hold our government accountable than any politician ever elected to Congress or the White House.  A government that shrouds itself in secrecy is not, and never will be, a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people“.  Manning is not the poison.  He’s part of the antidote because he courageously pushed back against that secrecy and will pay for it for the rest of his life.  The other part of the antidote is us.  All we need to do is go to the polls and throw out the self-serving politicians of both parties in Washington who perpetuate this secrecy and the corruption that it conceals.  It’s easy to do and won’t cost us a thing.  If we don’t, we will simply get what we deserve.

The war on sex workers

The February Reason magazine has a great article by Melissa Gira Grant on the “An unholy alliance of feminists, cops, and conservatives” that targets the commercial sex industry.  Those of you who arrived at this site via Sex Hysteria! are already familiar with my past writings about how conservatives and liberals have joined forces in a fight to wrest from women the right to control their bodies, their sex lives, and their incomes.

Melissa Grant’s article presents an excellent portrayal of the movement to ban sex work, how it evolved into what it has become, and what its strategies are to eliminate the world’s oldest profession.  My few comments don’t begin to do the article justice.

While these crusaders prefer to be called abolitionists, they are much closer to prohibitionists in terms of their end goals.  They have been hard at work to recast their message in a way that makes it much simpler and easier to sell.  By focusing on prostitution as separate from pornography, the  movement has eliminated opposition from that part of the women’s movement that supports First Amendment rights.

To garner further support through the tools of newspeak, they broadened the definition of sexual exploitation to include essentially all commercial sex work. Essentially, all prostitution is now human trafficking, conflating voluntary prostitution with sex slavery, instantly painting themselves as if they were out to rescue women from bondage, hence their adopting the mantra of “abolitionists” and identifying themselves with the Civil War era abolitionist movement.

To shed the stigma associated with advocating the arrest and imprisonment of those they are claiming to be rescuing, they now define prostitutes as victims of their customers and campaign for tougher laws against soliciting prostitution.    When sex workers reject the characterization that they are victims, the prohibitionists ignore them: Anyone who claims to be selling sex by choice are simply deluding themselves.

The power of this strategy hinges on one factor above all others.  By characterizing these victims as adolescents (which can mean anyone under 22 years old), they combine the issue of sex with children, instantly disarming people’s natural skepticism.  The mainstream media totally buys into the theme and quotes these organizations without question.  The logic works like this: All prostitution is human trafficking and almost all prostitutes begin as children, therefore to voice opposition to this movement is the same as condemning children to live as sex slaves.

The extent to which these organizations distort the facts is nothing short of stunning.  They know they are doing it, but they’ve convinced themselves that they’re saving children, so the ends justify the means.  They know that they will get a warm reception by CNN and be seen by a million people, but those who actually question and investigate their claims reach only a few thousand.  They can’t lose.

And what is the ultimate result of all this crusading to deny woman the right to make their own decisions about their own lives?  The bad side is that it drives prostitution deeper into a lawless underground where exploitation, danger, and fear are an inevitability.  There is no good side.

Read the whole article.

Does the President’s power to execute American citizens extend to American soil?

Apparently, the Obama administration isn’t saying even though they have repeatedly been asked.  From Greenwald:

The Justice Department “white paper” purporting to authorize Obama’s power to extrajudicially execute US citizens was leaked three weeks ago. Since then, the administration – including the president himself and his nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan – has been repeatedly asked whether this authority extends to US soil, i.e., whether the president has the right to execute US citizens on US soil without charges. In each instance, they have refused to answer.

It seems pretty obvious that the Obama administration is unlikely to agree to a restriction on his power to use drones as he sees fit without a knock-down-drag-out fight and it is equally unlikely that a majority in Congress will put forth that degree of resistance.  while the democrats would be outraged by such a position from a republican president, they aren’t so bothered when the president is from their own party.  Another case of, “It’s okay when our guy does it.”

Morning Links from The Agitator

Here are a few interesting links picked up from The Agitator.

  • Philadelphia district attorney Seth Williams will no longer accept the testimony of six city police  officers.  So far, 270 cases have been thrown out, which seems to hint that there may be some question of the officers’ ability to tell the truth.  An investigation by the FBI is on-going but, of course, what is being investigated remains a secret.  As is typical of most cases of police misconduct, the cops have not been charged and remain on the force. I guess their job will be reduced to doling out street justice since they’re useless in any criminal prosecution..  From the article: “The Fraternal Order of Police has defended the officers, saying they were doing their job.”
  • Here is some helpful weapons training for cops who suffer from the handicap of trigger-pull hesitation when confronted by a threat from a child or pregnant women.  I’m guessing this might be an extension of whatever program was used to eliminate any hesitation an officer might have when it comes to shooting family pets.

LittleBoy

  • Dayton, Ohio cops break down the door to a man’s home after noting that he failed to signal for a turn.  They apparently followed the man home, knocked at his door,  and when the man refused to answer, they used a battering ram to enter his house.  They then searched his house “for officer safety” and found drugs.  An Ohio appeals court declared the entry lawful based on precedent, but offered the consolation that they only did so because they had to.

Poking a sick (or pipe, hammer, etc) in the eye of Big Brother.

There’s a new game in Germany and it’s called Camover where the object is to destroy as many security cameras as possible.  From RT:

To participate in Camover, players form a team and give it a name – the ‘brigade’ part seems to be a must – and then go around town destroying CCTV cameras. The process has to be taped and posted online. Each team gets point for the number of destroyed cameras, as well as for creativity of execution.

The contest continues until February 19th when the European Police Congress is held in Berlin.  There is an interesting factor at play here.

Germany has strict personal image rights laws – global tech giant Google was forced to censor the faces of anyone whose picture was taken on their street view service, RT’s Peter Oliver reported.

Could this catch on elsewhere?  Maybe.

Once a local trend, Camover has now gone global, with ‘brigades’ reporting successes from all over the world. The newest teams have been formed in US, one of which, the’Barefoot Bandit Brigade,’ claimed to have destroyed 17 CCTV cameras in a move of “concrete sabotage against the system of surveillance and control.”