This Week in Police Violence

wired: A federal hearing today on NSA surveillance programs...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:13:22 -0400

A federal hearing today on NSA surveillance programs leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden produced some interesting numbers about the scope of the data collections and other issues. We’ve produced a roundup below of some of the interesting stats and intelligence gleaned from the discussion.

The hearing, before Congress’s Select Committee on Intelligence, included NSA Director, General Keith Alexander; Deputy Attorney General James Cole; Deputy Director of the FBI Sean Joyce; and General Counsel Robert Litt, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel.

Here’s the breakdown of the NSA hearing - by the numbers.

"The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work..."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:50:55 -0400

“The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair.”

- Elaine Scarry on how the Patriot Act inverts the Constitution (via bostonreview)

theatlantic: In Focus: Protests Spread Across Brazil Starting...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:40:42 -0400

theatlantic:

In Focus: Protests Spread Across Brazil

Starting late last week, with several small protests denouncing a hike in public transport fares, demonstrations flared up yesterday, encompassing larger public anger at poor public services, police violence and government corruption. More than 200,000 took to the streets of Brazil’s biggest cities yesterday, voicing frustration with the billions of dollars set aside for upcoming sports events like the World Cup and the 2014 Olympics, despite crushing levels of poverty in some places, and underfunded public education, health, security and transportation. Though the majority of the protests were peaceful, a few violent demonstrations were broken up by police in Rio de Janeiro.

See more. [Images: AP, Reuters, Getty]

The Atlantic Wire: The Supreme Court Decided Your Silence Can Be Used Against You

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:30:39 -0400

When I hate on Scalia as a piss-poor defender of liberty, please recognize that I have my reasons.

From the Atlantic:

A nation continues to wait for final word on the Supreme Court’s Big Four cases this term — voting rights, affirmative action, DOMA, and Proposition 8 — but the justices’ closest decision arrived first on Monday, in a 5-4 ruling on Salinas v. Texas in which the conservative members of the Court and Anthony Kennedy determined that if you remain silent before police read your Miranda rights, that silence can and will be held against you. Here’s what that means.

Basically, if you’re ever in any trouble with police (no, we don’t condone breaking laws) and want to keep your mouth shut, you will need to announce that you’re invoking your Fifth Amendment right instead of, you know, just keeping your mouth shut. “Petitioner’s Fifth Amendment claim fails because he did not expressly invoke the privilege against self-incrimination in response to the officer’s question,” reads the opinion from Justice Samuel Alito, which Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts backed. Justices Thomas and Scalia had a concurring opinion while the remaining four Supremes dissented.

The Salinas case revolves around Genovevo Salinas, a man who was convicted of a 1992 murder of two brothers. Salinas was brought in for police questioning in January 1993. According to the dissenting opinion of Justice Breyer, he was called in to “to take photographs and to clear him as [a]suspect” and Salinas was questioned without being read his Miranda rights:

Because he was “free to leave at that time,” [App.14], they did not give him Miranda warnings. The police then asked Salinas questions. And Salinas answered until the police asked him whether the shotgun from his home “would match the shells recovered at the scene of the murder [Id., at 17.] At that point Salinas fell silent.

That silence was then used against Salinas in court, and he was eventually convicted. But the bigger question in revisiting this 20-year-old murder case was whether or not prosecutors were allowed to point to that silence, and win a case using Salinas’ own silence against him.

You know what’s a much more recent wrinkle to the potential precedent effect of today’s ruling? A case like that of the younger Boston Marathon suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who reportedly sat through 16 hours of questioning before he was read his Miranda rights. Had Tsarnaev, who was recovering from serious injuries at the time, remained silent during questioning without explicitly invoking his Fifth Amendment, prosecutors could, under the Salinas ruling, now use that silence to their advantage.

It all seems ridiculously terrifying, this idea that in order to claim your Fifth Amendment, you now need to know how to call the on-the-fly legal equivalent of “safesies.” Your right to remain silent just got more complicated, and it will require potential criminals to be more informed about their protections and the linguistic details on how to invoke them. “But does it really mean that the suspect must use the exact words ‘Fifth Amendment’? How can an individual who is not a lawyer know that these particular words are legally magic?” Breyer wrote.

Wonkblog: Throwing children in prison turns out to be a really bad idea

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:20:44 -0400

This week in shit that should surprise absolutely no one.

The post:

The United States still puts more children and teenagers in juvenile detention than any other developed nations in the world, with about 130,000 detained in 2010. And as it turns out, this is very likely a bad idea.

A new paper by economists Anna Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. offers strong evidence that juvenile detention is a really counterproductive strategy for many youths under the age of 19. Not only does throwing a kid in detention often reduce the chance that he or she will graduate high school, but it also raises the chance that the youth will commit more crimes later on in life.

This seems intuitive enough, but the problem is actually measuring the effect. After all, the youths who commit crimes and get tossed in detention in the first place are presumably different from kids who never get detained. So of course they’d have different outcomes. What we’d really want to know is whether detention itself is actually making things worse.

So, to figure this out, Aizer and Doyle took a look at the juvenile court system in Chicago, Illinois. The researchers found that certain judges in the system were more likely to recommend detention than others — even for similar crimes. That is, it’s possible to identify stricter and more lenient judges. And, since youths were assigned to judges at random, this created a randomized trial of sorts.

What the researchers found was striking. The kids who ended up incarcerated were 13 percentage points less likely to graduate high school and 22 percentage points more likely to end up back in prison as adults than the kids who went to court but were placed under, say, home monitoring instead. (This was after controlling for family background and so forth.) Juvenile detention appeared to be creating criminals, not stopping them.

The authors lay out a couple of reasons why this would be. Going to prison can obviously disrupt school and make it harder to get a job later on. But also, as other researchershave found, many people who end up behind bars end up making friends with other offenders and building “criminal capital.” Prison turns out to be excellent training for a life of crime.

The authors end with a few broad policy suggestions. They note that the United States now spends about $6 billion on juvenile corrections each year, despite evidence that other strategies might be more effective. Illinois, for instance, has started usingelectronic monitoring and well-enforced curfews as alternatives to detention for a number of nonviolent crimes (this doesn’t work in all cases — murderers, say, still get sent to prison).

These types of alternative punishments, the authors note, can often do just as much to deter crime, but they don’t do nearly as much long-term damage to the kids involved.

motherjones: Edward Snowden’s leaks have prompted many...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:10:51 -0400

motherjones:

Edward Snowden’s leaks have prompted many questions about government surveillance activity in the US, including this one: How often do tech firms turn over user data to the feds?

Lol at ‘Don’t be evil.’

guardian: Brazil experienced one of its biggest nights...

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:07:04 -0400

guardian:

Brazil experienced one of its biggest nights of protest in decades on Monday as more than 100,000 people took to the streets nationwide to express their frustration at heavyhanded policing, poor public services and high costs for the World Cup. Full story here.

Photograph: Ueslei Marcelino /Reuters

tipsforradicals: “If you don’t break the law, you have nothing...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:30:56 -0400

tipsforradicals:

“If you don’t break the law, you have nothing to hide”, trotted out by UK minister William Hague in the wake of the PRISM story.

But how true is it? Not very.

The rules may change. Once invasive surveillance exists, the rules that govern how it works can be changed. Any surveillance must be regarded in terms of how it can be abused by a worse power than today’s.

Complex conclusions can be drawn from a little bit of data. If you don’t believe me, read this cute example of how the UK crown could have used basic metadata to identify American revolutionary Paul Revere.

It’s not you who determines if you have something to fear. It doesn’t matter how law-abiding you think you are. If you set off a red flag in an automated surveillance machine, your life may be pored over in minute detail. Activities that seem innocent to you may not seem innocent to them. You might be cleared later, but by then you may have already lost your job.

With total surveillance, punishment becomes selective. There are so many laws that, given enough effort, police can probably find evidence of you breaking one of them. Given that, punishment of any individual becomes more about who you want to punish. Does that sound like a way you want the police to work?

Surveillance data isn’t always accurate. There are so many laws that any automated system will find them hard to parse and identify who is breaking them.

Laws must be broken for society to progress. Less than a human lifetime ago, if you were born a homosexual, you were criminal from birth. With today’s surveillance, no queer organisations could have ever formed. Breaking unjust laws is necessary for society to progress and learn from its mistakes. In other words, it matters less whether an individual has done something wrong, and more whether the state has done anything wrong.

Privacy is a valid human need. Needing to have spaces to yourself doesn’t imply that you are doing anything wrong. It’s not weird to want privacy!

Source articles:

Debunking The Dangerous “If You Have Nothing To Hide, You Have Nothing To Fear” (Rick Falkvinge), includes a great example of why surveillance often draws bad conclusions

We Should All Have Something To Hide (Moxie Marlinspike)

Another post, IRL Minority Report: the terrifying world of predictive surveillance

"Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a..."

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:38:45 -0400

“Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.”

- Edward Snowden during his live Q&A with Glenn Greenwald and pretty much all of twitter. (via stopprism)

thepeoplesrecord: Here are more photos of the uprising going on...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:10:46 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

Here are more photos of the uprising going on in Brazil. There have been four days of direct action in opposition to an increase in public transportation fares. Thousands of people have been on the streets each day & the next action on Monday already has more than 135,000 attending.

TW: Gore, police brutality for these two photos:

Folha reporter Guiliana Vallone, who was shot in the face by police.

Another woman who was brutalized during a police action

From Turkey to Brazil & beyond, we resist!

wired: fastcompany: …had it not been for social media, the...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 17:50:36 -0400

wired:

fastcompany:

…had it not been for social media, the government would likely have succeeded in hiding the protests from many Turks. Turkey is a country that jails more journalists than Iran, and it is hardly surprising that the mainstream Turkish media, which has been additionally co-opted by the authorities through financial measures, broadcast pictures of beauty contests and cooking shows for several days while parts of Istanbul and other cities were blanketed with tear gas.

“On Friday [May 31] I saw on Facebook that there were riots, and I came here [to the center of Istanbul],” a 29-year old teacher named Ulas said in a bar near Taksim Square. “There were many people and we fought them [the police] all night. But on Saturday I spoke to some of my friends here in Istanbul, and they had no idea what was going on. One, a leftist, was at the zoo. This is because they were watching penguin documentaries on the mainstream channels.”

How social media forced Turkish news organizations to change course

[Photos by Victor Kotsev for Fast Company]

Wherein social media becomes a way to change the world. Again.

bostonreview: Message in a Jack-o-lantern: Letter from a...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 16:40:37 -0400

bostonreview:

Message in a Jack-o-lantern: Letter from a Chinese labor camp stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart.

susie-c: This sticker on my phone kind of makes me laugh now....

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:30:45 -0400

susie-c:

This sticker on my phone kind of makes me laugh now. In a terrible way.

lol?

tipsforradicals: Tear gas and pepper spray 101, from Occupy...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:20:34 -0400

tipsforradicals:

Tear gas and pepper spray 101, from Occupy Oakland Medic Collective. USA-centric, but still relevant to lots of other countries.

Tear gas and medical info for protesters, by Starhawk. Quite detailed, goes into respirators and stocking a protest first aid kit.

Who should avoid tear gas, by the Black Cross Health Collective. Contains useful health warnings, and also a bit more on remedies.

NYT: Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:10:31 -0400

Secret Courts. God damn! File under: “Shit capitalists/democrats always say was horrible under communism but apparently flies when they’re in charge.”

The article:

SAN FRANCISCO — In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a National Security Letter related to WikiLeaks members.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

A Message from Sao Paulo

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:50:53 -0400

occupygezipics:

LET THE WORLD KNOW
have you heard about protests in Turkey?

how about São Paulo?

same war scenario is going on here these days, police is repressing protests with violence and unjustified arrestments. the difference is: in the news around here, protests and freedom of speech in Turkey are being violently repressed by the state. In the other hand, in São Paulo, vicious vandals prey public heritage while police protects it. Its all the same! We are fighting for urban transformation! its not just a 20 cents increase in the public transportation tickets issue, we are the sons of S26, A20, G8, Pinheirinho, Aracruz, Altamira never heard. LET THE WORLD KNOW: SÃO PAULO IS GOING THROUGH CIVIL WAR. Truculent violence, rubber bullets at close range, innocent people were arrested. Even journalists were wounded. Dictatorship in full democracy!

We won’t let it go, not this time. So please, dont forget about us!

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-06-13/protest-over-10-cent-bus-fare-increase-paralyzes-brazil-s-cities

http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/06/14/actualidad/1371171229_461963.html

via Carol Larcher

"Israel plans to send thousands of African migrants to an unidentified country, according to a court..."

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 16:40:39 -0400

“

Israel plans to send thousands of African migrants to an unidentified country, according to a court document, in an attempt to address one of Israel’s more pressing issues: what to do with an influx of roughly 60,000 African migrants who have sneaked into Israel from Egypt over the past eight years.

Most of the migrants have come from Eritrea or Sudan, some fleeing repressive regimes and others looking for work.

Over the past year Israel has taken a series of steps to halt the influx. It built a fence along the border with Egypt and last year offered some migrants cash to leave voluntarily, warning they would be expelled otherwise.

According to the document, a state lawyer told the Israeli supreme court on Sunday that a deal had been reached with an unidentified country to absorb some migrants and that Israel was in talks with two other countries to secure a similar agreement.

”

- “Israel Planning To Deport African Immigrants To ‘East African Country’,” Guardian (UK) 6/3/13 (via racialicious)

occupygezipics: A protester is holding a teargas canister in...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:30:47 -0400

occupygezipics:

A protester is holding a teargas canister in the photograph. The first warning on the canisters is “Do not throw at people directly”. However, Turkish police did not seem to take that warning seriously as they fired them directly into the crowds that were protesting peacefully.

http://ilkergoksen.com/portfolio/occupygezi.shtml

stopprism: This is how propaganda works. Help us...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 14:20:36 -0400

stopprism:

This is how propaganda works. Help us #stopPRISM

Not enough scare quotes in the world for “journalism.”

””“Journalism”“

””“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”journalism”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“”“

thepeoplesrecord: pinkxedge: resistkxl: thepeoplesrecord: TW:...

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 13:10:30 -0400

thepeoplesrecord:

pinkxedge:

resistkxl:

thepeoplesrecord:

TW: brutal police repression at Gezi Gardens in San Francisco
June 13, 2013

This morning around 2AM we were were woken up from our encampment at Gezi Gardens by about 200 police officers & SWAT personnel. Immediately, they detained several members of the community, arrested several and corralled the rest of us out.

Three brave tree sitters were able to stay in their tree platforms while the police raided camp. Graciela was able to video the following recording of police cutting the rope that sitter was holding, causing him to fall roughly 40 feet to the ground.

He is in the hospital & his condition is unkown. We shared the video with media across the Bay Area, but we don’t know if they will air it. Please view & share this video so that the world can know what about San Francisco police brutality but be aware that this likely caused serious, potentially permanent injury.

Here’s the video that Graciela recorded of the incident!

solidarity

FUCK SFPD • TAKE BACK GEZI GARDENS • FRIDAY 6PM OCTAVIA & FELL

Retake the commons tomorrow! Meeting will be at Patricia’s Green on Octavia Street between Hayes Street and Fell Street at 6PM (in San Francisco). Planning meeting tonight at the same time and space. This isn’t over. Join the Facebook event here and invite everyone you know in the Bay Area to the event tomorrow.

——

Update: Here’s a photo of one of the Gezi Gardens tree-sitters, Mark, who was punched in the face by an SFPD officer while he was in the cherry picker already being brought down from the tree.

The condition of the tree-sitter who dropped 40 ft to the ground is still unknown but he is currently in the hospital.

Please, reblog & spread the word about tomorrow’s rally to reclaim Gezi Gardens.