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Category: Surveillance

  • New Middle East and North Africa Coalition to Combat Digital Surveillance

    New York, June 8, 2021– From Morocco to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region are using digital surveillance tools to identify, surveil, and silence dissidents, journalists, and human rights defenders. Launched on June 7, 2021, the new MENA Coalition to Combat Digital Surveillance has come together to end the sales of digital surveillance tools to repressive governments in the region, fight for a safe and open internet, defend human rights, and protect human rights defenders, journalists, and internet users from governments’ prying eyes.

    The murder of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, on October 2, 2018, demonstrated both the dangerous consequences of targeted surveillance, and the extent of secrecy and impunity in which authoritarian regimes in the region can obtain and deploy sophisticated and oppressive spyware tools. More than two years later, there has been no real accountability for the government involved, while the NSO Group —whose surveillance tools were allegedly used to target Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi associates living in exile — has continued to implicate itself  in egregious human rights violations in the region and around the world (NSO says its spyware is only licensed to government agencies investigating crime and terrorism, and that the company investigates allegations of misuse.).

    The coalition, co-led by the Gulf Centre for Human Rights and Access Now, welcomes all civil society organizations working to defend freedom of expression, privacy, and fundamental rights to become active members. Collective civil society action including strategic litigation, public campaigns, regional and international advocacy, and documentation of surveillance cases and human rights violations, will be key to eliminating digital surveillance tools and ensuring human rights across MENA.

    The coalition was officially launched during the public session at RightsCon, “Protecting Human Rights Defenders and Activists: Coalition to End the Sales of Surveillance Technology to the MENA Region,” on Monday, June 7.

    Coalition members

    • Access Now
    • ARTICLE19
    • Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
    • Front Line Defenders
    • Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)
    • Human Rights Watch (HRW)
    • Iraqi Network for Social Media (INSM)
    • Jordan Open Source Association (JOSA)
    • Masaar – Technology and Law Community 
    • Red Line for Gulf
    • Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
    • SMEX

    Media contact:

    Bebe Santa-Wood

    Communications Associate

    press@cpj.org


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden DOJ Says It Will No Longer Spy on New York Times Journalists

    The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration, and then the Biden administration, to secretly obtain the email logs of four reporters at the newspaper. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper from even knowing about the request until a federal court lifted it. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one at CNN. Jameel Jaffer, founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, says subpoenas for journalists’ records are “really troubling” because of their potential chilling effect on critical journalism. “It’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government,” he says.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman. This is Democracy Now!

    We turn now to look at a fight over press freedom. The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration — and then the Biden administration — to secretly obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper, including its executive editor, from even knowing about the request. The Times reported on the story Friday after a federal court lifted the gag order. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one, Barbara Starr, at CNN.

    On Saturday, the Justice Department reversed course and announced it’s changing its policy and will no longer force media companies to hand over source information as part of its leak investigations.

    On Sunday, New York Times reporter Adam Goldman appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources. His phone records were seized by both the Obama and Trump administrations.

    ADAM GOLDMAN: It’s certainly disappointing, but I wasn’t surprised. Some of the same prosecutors who were involved in seizing my phone records earlier this year, and unsuccessfully trying get my emails, were involved in secretly obtaining my phone records in 2013 when I worked at the Associated Press. This office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C., has a history of trampling on the First Amendment. So that’s why I wasn’t surprised. They treat the media, they treat newspapers like drug gangs.

    AMY GOODMAN: In late May, President Biden spoke out against the seizing of records from journalists at the very time when The New York Times was still under a gag order. He was questioned by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

    KAITLAN COLLINS: [Should the government be] seizing reporters’ phone records and emails? And would you prevent your Justice Department from doing that?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Only yours. But beyond yours, OK, for them, no.

    KAITLAN COLLINS: But honestly.

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: And we should — absolutely positively, it’s wrong. Simply, simply wrong.

    KAITLAN COLLINS: So you won’t let your Justice Department do that?

    PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I will not let that happen.

    AMY GOODMAN: It was only this weekend that the Justice Department announced they would not do this.

    We’re joined now by Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, previously the deputy legal director at the ACLU.

    Jameel, it’s great to have you back. Can you first respond to what we learned this weekend?

    JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, sure. And thanks for inviting me.

    I mean, I guess the first thing to say is that these kinds of subpoenas are really troubling for a number of reasons. It’s not so much about journalists’ rights; it’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government. And if reporters’ sources are available to the government, then reporters won’t be able to get the information they need in order to write the stories we want them to write. So there’s a real concern that these kinds of subpoenas can have a chilling effect on journalism that is, you know, really necessary, journalism that goes to the ability of the public to hold government officials accountable for their decisions. So, that’s why I think these reports are so disturbing, these reports of Trump administration subpoenas directed at news organizations, intended to uncover the identities of reporters’ sources. And, you know, as your intro noted, we’ve seen now a number of these; just over the last few weeks, a number of these have come to light.

    One sort of background fact that’s important to recognize here is that the Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in on this set of issues for 50 years. And the result is that whatever protections journalists have in this context are really a matter of executive grace. They’re a matter of what protections the Justice Department wants to give them, rather than what protections the First Amendment requires. The First Amendment is kind of strangely absent in this context. The relevant set of rules has come, over the last few years, at least, from the attorney general’s guidelines, which were strengthened under President Obama. Attorney General Holder tightened those restrictions — tightened those rules in some ways to make it slightly — not just slightly, more difficult for prosecutors to obtain reporters’ sources, the identities of reporters’ sources.

    But even with that kind of tightening, the Justice Department has found it possible to serve these subpoenas, and not just serve these subpoenas, but this most recent report out of The New York Times involves not just a subpoena intended to obtain reporters’ phone and email records, or subpoenas meant to obtain those records, but a gag order on Times executives that prevented, initially, the Times’s lawyer, David McCraw, from disclosing the fact of the subpoena and court order to other Times officials. And that, I think, is a kind of independent First Amendment problem, not just the subpoena directed — you know, intended to uncover the reporters’ sources, but then a gag order that prevents the Times from sharing that kind of information even within the organization, let alone with the public.

    AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, we don’t know if there are — though the Biden Justice Department says they’re not going to engage in these, whether there are any more of these gag orders out there, because people can’t talk about them. And what do you make of — I mean, Goldman and Matt Apuzzo had been — the Justice Department had gone after them both under the Obama administration — they worked for AP, and now they’re working at The New York Times — and him saying, “They treat us like drug gangs. They’re using the same laws”?

    JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah. Well, I mean, I do think that there’s a real risk here that people will come to see journalists as kind of extensions of law enforcement or extensions of the intelligence agencies, and then, you know, would-be sources won’t go to people like Apuzzo or Goldman with information that is crucial for the public to have. So I do think that the concerns are justified.

    I know that President Biden has now said that his administration won’t tolerate these kinds of subpoenas, and the Justice Department has said that it’s going to implement that direction, which is obviously a good thing. You know, what I would say about that, though, just to temper it a little, number one, is, again, it’s really troubling that all of this is a matter of executive grace rather than constitutional law. There should be some set of rules, that is independent of whoever’s in office right now, that limits what kinds of information the Justice Department can get, and when, in these kinds of investigations.

    But the other thing I’d say is just that there are real questions about implementation. You know, the definitions matter. Like, who counts as a journalist? What counts as a leak investigation? The attorney general’s guidelines have historically had exception for foreign intelligence investigations. And that means that subpoenas and court orders served under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or national security letters that are sometimes served on technology companies or telecoms, those are essentially exempt from the attorney general guidelines that were put in place under the Obama administration. So there’s a real question now — you know, great that the Biden administration seems willing to go in a different direction, but I think we should ask some questions about the precise scope of the commitment that the Justice Department has now made.

    AMY GOODMAN: Would it be up to Congress to pass laws?

    JAMEEL JAFFER: Yeah, well, you know, many states have shield laws that protect journalists when state law enforcement seeks access to their records. There is no federal shield law, so, you know, again, we have no background First Amendment law, or almost no background First Amendment law. There’s a 1972 case, Branzburg v. Hayes, which is the last time the Supreme Court weighed in, in this context. But that case is very, very muddy, sort of notoriously muddy. It doesn’t really give journalists any kind of real confidence that their records can be kept secret. So you’ve got that, and, on the other hand, you have no federal shield law. There’s no congressionally enacted protections for journalists.

    So, again, what that leaves journalists with is really just whatever protections the Justice Department wants to give. And I don’t think that’s really defensible in a society that is committed to press freedom. You know, you can’t call yourself a society that’s committed to press freedom if the only press freedom that exists is the press freedom that the government wants to provide or the executive branch wants to provide.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Tech giants help Israel muzzle Palestinians

    Israel’s caretaker prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, sought to shut down all use of the popular video-sharing app TikTok in Israel last month.

    The attempt to censor TikTok, details of which emerged last weekend, is one of a number of reported attempts by Israel to control social media content during last month’s military assault on the Gaza Strip.

    Netanyahu tried to impose the blackout as Israel faced an international social media outcry over its 11-day attack on Gaza, which killed more than 250 Palestinians, and the violent repression by Israeli police of Palestinian protests in occupied East Jerusalem and inside Israel.

    Government law officers are understood to have resisted the move.

    Benny Gantz, the defense minister, also lobbied senior officials at Facebook and TikTok to crack down on posts critical of Israel, labelling them incitement and support for terror.

    The tech giants responded by agreeing to act “quickly and effectively,” according to a statement from Gantz’s office.

    The revelations follow widespread reports last month that social media corporations regularly removed posts that referred to the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where Israel recently stepped up moves to force out Palestinian families and replace them with Jewish settlers.

    Social media users and digital rights organizations also reported censorship of posts about the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

    Threats of expulsions in Sheikh Jarrah and an invasion by Israeli soldiers of al-Aqsa were the main triggers causing Hamas to fire rockets into Israel last month. Israel responded by destroying swaths of Gaza.

    Shadowy cyber unit

    Israel’s success in manipulating social media last month follows warnings from Israeli human rights groups about the longer-term threat of Israeli censorship faced by Palestinians.

    Adalah, a legal rights group in Israel, said a shadowy Israeli government “cyber unit” – which works hand in hand with tech giants like Facebook and Twitter – had been given “a blank check” to police social media and muzzle online dissent.

    Israel’s supreme court ruled in April that the cyber unit could continue its often secretive operations from inside the justice ministry, arguing that its work contributed to national security.

    Since 2016, the cyber unit has removed many tens – and more likely hundreds – of thousands of Palestinian social media posts in collaboration with global tech corporations.

    The posts are erased without any legal oversight and usually without notifying users, Adalah pointed out. In many cases, users’ accounts are suspended or removed entirely, or access to whole websites blocked.

    The vast bulk of those being silenced are Palestinians – either those under a belligerent Israeli occupation or those who live inside Israel with degraded citizenship.

    The cyber unit was established in late 2015, part of a raft of measures by Israel purportedly intended both to identify “terrorists” before they strike and to curb what Israel describes as “incitement”.

    Given the opaque nature of the process, it is impossible to know what content is being taken down, Rabea Eghbariah, one of the Adalah lawyers who filed a petition against the unit to Israel’s high court, told The Electronic Intifada.

    Examples in the Israeli media, however, suggest that Israel regularly targets posts critical of Israel’s belligerent occupation or express solidarity with Palestinians.

    The court petition to end the cyber unit’s work was filed in November 2019 by Adalah, which represents 1.8 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of Israel’s population.

    According to Adalah, the unit’s methods violate “the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and due process”.

    In approving those methods, Adalah observed, the courts had conferred on the Israeli state the “unchecked” power “to govern online speech” and had allowed private tech companies to usurp control of the judicial process.

    Eghbariah said Palestinians could rarely challenge their silencing on social media. The tech companies do not reveal when Israel is behind the censorship or what “terms of service” have been violated.

    In court, Israeli officials defended their sweeping suppression of online content by arguing that ultimately social media companies like Google and Facebook were free to decide whether to accede to its requests.

    News sites shuttered

    However, Israeli officials have previously boasted that the tech giants almost always agree to remove whatever content Israel demands. In 2016, the justice ministry reported that Facebook and Google were “complying with up to 95 percent of Israeli requests to delete content” – almost all of it Palestinian.

    Eghbariah told The Electronic Intifada that some 80 percent of Israel’s referrals for removing content relate to Facebook and its other major platform, Instagram, both of which are heavily used by Palestinians.

    The next most targeted site was YouTube, where Palestinians often post videos showing attacks by Jewish settlers illegally taking over Palestinian land or Israeli soldiers invading Palestinian communities.

    The accounts of Palestinian news agencies and journalists have also been repeatedly shut down.

    Eghbariah noted that submissions by Israel’s cyber unit to social media platforms had skyrocketed since it was set up. In 2019, the last year for which there are figures, some 19,600 requests to remove content were submitted – an eightfold increase on three years earlier.

    He added that each referral to a tech company could relate to tens or hundreds of posts, and that the removal of a whole website typically counted as a single request.

    “What’s noticeable is the increasing cooperation rate of the social media platforms,” he said. “In 2016, three quarters of Israeli requests were complied with. By 2019 that had risen to 90 per cent.”

    Distinctions blurred

    Human Rights Watch is among those who have criticized Israel for blurring the distinction between legitimate criticism made by Palestinians and incitement.

    By contrast, the Palestinian digital rights group 7amleh has noted, Israel rarely takes action against Israeli Jews, even though they are responsible for posting racist or inciteful material roughly every minute.

    And the politicized nature of Israel’s crackdown on social media is often hard to disguise.

    In December 2017, Nariman Tamimi was detained for incitement.

    She had streamed a video on Facebook of her then 16-year-old daughter, Ahed, confronting and slapping an Israeli soldier who was invading their home in the occupied West Bank moments after his unit shot her cousin.

    Dareen Tatour, a poet from the town of Reine, next to Nazareth, spent years either in jail or under strict house arrest for supposedly glorifying violence in a poem.

    Experts said the lines had been misunderstood by Israel’s security services.

    Indeed, errors in translations from Arabic have been regularly evident. In a case in October 2017, a Palestinian laborer was arrested for supposedly threatening a terrorist attack on Facebook before it was discovered that the Arabic expression he used meant “good morning.”

    In 2019, 7amleh reported that fears over this online crackdown had left two-thirds of Palestinians worried about expressing their political views on social media.

    Normalizing censorship

    Other governments may look to the Israeli court’s decision in April as further encouragement to adopt a more aggressive role in censoring online content.

    Eghbariah said that the UK, France and the European Union already had their own cyber referral units, although unlike Israel’s those units were explicitly authorized by legislation.

    In a sign that Israel’s politicized approach to crushing online dissent could become normalized worldwide, an architect of Israel’s cyber unit was appointed to Facebook’s new oversight board last year. Emi Palmor was the justice ministry’s director-general at the time the unit was established.

    The board is supposed to oversee what content should be allowed on Facebook and Instagram.

    The Israeli cyber unit’s increasing efforts to remove content from Palestinians, labelling it “terrorism,” “disinformation” or “incitement,” are the latest stage in more than a decade of moves by Israel to control and manipulate its image online as social media has become more central in most people’s lives.

    Israel stepped up its digital activities after its large-scale attack on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, which killed large numbers of civilians, including children, and shocked much of the world.

    During the attack, the Israeli army established its own Youtube channel, the first army to do so, offering a model that the US army quickly sought to emulate.

    At the same time tech-savvy youngsters were recruited to pose as ordinary web-surfers as they secretly promoted foreign ministry talking-points.

    Several “cyber warrior” teams established in the following years, including one that recruited former officers from Israel’s military spying unit 8200.

    Erased from maps

    Since then, Israel has expanded its digital operations, not only promoting hasbara (propaganda) online but intensifying its silencing of Palestinians.

    At a conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2018, local representatives for Google and Facebook conceded that the companies’ priority was to avoid upsetting powerful governments like Israel’s that could tighten regulation or constrain their commercial activities.

    The tech giants are also unlikely to be neutral between the claims of the Israeli state and ordinary Palestinians when they are so reliant on Israel’s hi-tech sector. Technologies developed using the West Bank and Gaza as a testing-bed have been eagerly bought up by these global corporations.

    Incensed by Facebook’s censorship, a Palestinian campaign of online protests was launched in 2018 under the hashtag #FBcensorsPalestine.

    In Gaza, demonstrators have accused the company of being “another face of occupation.”

    Google and Apple have also faced a wave of criticism for colluding in Israel’s policy seeking to erase Palestinians’ visible presence in their homeland. The tech companies have failed to identify many Palestinian villages in the West Bank on their online maps and GPS services while highlighting illegal Jewish settlements.

    They have also refused to name the Palestinian territories as “Palestine,” in accordance with Palestine’s recognition by the United Nations, subordinating these areas under the title “Israel.”

    Jerusalem is presented as Israel’s unified and undisputed capital, just as Israel claims – making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible.

    • First published in Electronic Intifada

    The post Tech giants help Israel muzzle Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Left-Wing Psychotherapy Cults: Sullivanians from Hedonism to Group Terror

    Photo Image:  FilmDaily

    Orientation

    My Purpose

    A few months ago, I wrote an article titled “Political and Spiritual Cults“. My purpose was to show the commonalties among all cults, whether they are political, spiritual or psychological. In this article I want to narrow the focus to discuss a left-wing psychological cult, the Sullivanians, a countercultural organization that made its mark on the Upper West Side of New York City between 1970 and the early 1990s. Why bother to do this? Because as a socialist I have to face that any socialist organization I join, whether it be social democratic, Leninist or even anarchist has the potential to become a cult. The more we know about the conditions under which cults emerge, the more we can combat them.

    Overcoming Media Biases Against Cults

    When mass media compares cults members to the general population, cult members are portrayed as:

    • Mentally unstable
    • Less educated
    • Lonelier
    • From the poor and working-class backgrounds
    • Physically intimidated into joining
    • Brainwashed
    • Drawn from criminal elements
    • Less moral as people

    Research has shown none of this to be true.

    Plan of the Article

    For the most part I will be following the architecture I built in my previous article, including what is a totalistic institution; the ten characteristics of cults; the stages cults go through; the mechanisms of control in each stage; why people stay; what kind of qualities the leaders have and what is the impact of leaving on cult members.

    I will be adding a short section on the theoretical assumptions of the Sullivanians at the beginning. For each of these units I will say something about how it applies to the Sullivanians. Besides my article, I will be referring to two books on the Sullivanians: Amy Siskind’s sociological analysis, The Sullivan Institute/Fourth Wall Community: The Relationship of Radical Individualism and Authoritarianism and a book by a participant, Artie Honan How Did A Smart Guy Like me….For my general understanding of cults, I owe the most to Margret Singer, Janja Lalich, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad.

    Theoretical Assumptions

    The Sullivanian Institute was a spin-off organization that broke away in 1957 from the work of Harry Stack Sullivan. Sullivan was sensitive to the social side of psychological dynamics and among other insights blamed the nuclear family for the formation of the ideal capitalist consumer. Both Dr. Jane Pearce and Saul Newton took these criticisms of the nuclear family much further. In 1963, Pearce and Newton coauthored a book called Conditions of Human Growth. In that book they identified the family as socially isolating the individual from developing healthy relationships with friends, especially in adolescence and adulthood.

    Open-ended friendships, both sexual and otherwise, were the way out of the infantilization of the nuclear family and the road to maturity. For them, friendships are the first potential of experience of love between equals. A big part of therapeutic work was to get their patients to expand their friendships as they withdrew from their families. Newton and Pearce considered the desire for the security of exclusive relationships among their patients to be a neurotic symptom. In fact, one of the first things on the agenda of the Sullivanians therapists was to separate the patients from their parents. On the whole the two foundation stones of the Sullivanians community were:

    • To break from their family of origin
    • To have non-monogamous sexual relations among friends

    What is a Totalistic Institution?

    Calling an organization a cult has more to do with how an organization is run than what people believe. Cults are a subcategory of organizations which includes mental health institutions, prisons, army barracks, orphanages, and religious institutions such as monasteries. As opposed to this, in what Erving Goffman calls “pluralistic institutions”, people come and go as they please in and out of various institutions throughout the day as they go from playing one role to another. Within each institution, the group dynamics and power relationships vary. An individual can have great control in one area and little control in another. What produces critical thinking within the individual is the habit, whether conscious or unconscious, of comparing one institution to another, each with their strengths and weaknesses.

    In totalistic social formations, all institutions are rolled into one. Economic exchanges, livelihood, sacred beliefs, political dynamics, living situations and sexual encounters are all concentrated within a single institution. In the more extreme institutions like prisons or in the military, working and play activities are done all at the same time, in the same place with uniform expectations. Boundaries between inside and outside are rigid. The authorities are centralized and there is little room for feedback. There are surveillance systems, spying and little privacy, and this breeds insecurity and paranoia.

    Sullivanians as a Total Institution

    The Sullivanian community was divided into four tiers. The four therapists at the top were Saul Newton, Joan Harvey, Ralph Klein and Helen Moses; a secondary tier of therapists in training; a third tier of psychotherapy patients and lastly, community members who were friends of the people in the first three tiers. When the Sullivanians morphed into the Fourth Wall Theatre community in 1977, the fourth tier were people living in Manhattan who came to see the plays, often from poor areas of the city. The biggest factor that made the Sullivanians a totalistic institution was the collapsed boundaries between the tiers. Members of all tiers were invited to have sex with each other, including therapists with clients, clients and those in therapy training. Sleeping alone was considered an interpersonal failure. Furthermore, the therapists ignored confidentiality and talked openly about the problems of their patients. The most important people – the therapists – knew everyone else’s business and encouraged others to be spies to report on any dissatisfactions anyone had with the leadership. This led to mistrust among people in the second and third tiers as well as paranoia.

    The Sullivanians were not as rigid as a prison or an army barracks. Community members worked at different jobs and they lived in different apartment buildings.  However, all households occupied most of an apartment building and each household apparently consisted only of members of the Sullivanian community. These households made enough money to hire people from the outside to cook, clean and babysit. House members had regular meetings in which they talked about household problems but also about their lives. Members also knew each other’s weaknesses and these weaknesses got back to the leadership in one way or another.

    The dependency of community members on the leadership ran deep. Therapists in training were dependent on leadership economically to provide them with referrals. People were dependent personally for their identity through therapy. Interpersonally they played together, lived together and in the 1980s, did political work together. All this supported the authoritarian control by the leaders and made the Sullivanians a totalistic institution.

    Ten Characteristics of Cults

    From my previous article on cults, I named ten characteristics.

    • It emerged out of a political, economic or ecological crisis.
    • It recruited young adults between 17 and 24 of middle-class and upper middle-class origins who were likely to be undergoing some developmental crisis in their personal lives.
    • It has an authoritarian, charismatic leader.
    • It has a revolutionary, dualistic ideology.
    • It possesses a social-psychological array of tools for luring in new members and sustaining their commitment.
    • It lacks mechanisms for critical feedback from the membership.
    • It requires a small group of lieutenants to isolate and keep atomized the membership through spying so that no coherent opposition can form.
    • It develops rituals, myths and celebrations that allow the group to mark time.
    • It demonizes outside groups that are in competition with the cult.
    • It has rigid, terrorized boundaries that make it extremely difficult to leave.

    Sullivanians’ Characteristics of Cults

    It is not true that the Sullivanians cult emerged as a reaction to a political, economic or ecological crisis. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the economy was not contracting. It was possible for community members to work at low paying jobs in the arts, have leisure time and still make the rent, especially because of group living. However, the decline of the Sullivanians community in the 1980s was definitely connected to contracting economic conditions where rents skyrocketed and jobs in the arts shrank. AIDS and the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island added to the group paranoia.

    The Sullivanians did appeal to upper middle-class adults. They weren’t in any serious psychological crisis. They were relatively healthy adults who were attracted to an alternative lifestyle including art. music, theatre and dance. Sexual exploration was part of the counterculture and not unique to the Sullivanians. In Saul Newton they had an authoritarian working-class leader who was once a member of the Communist Party and claimed to have fought in the Spanish Civil War. Both men and women in the community agreed he was charismatic. Newton was also erratic and explosive and most members were scared of him. There were no institutionalized feedback mechanisms for criticizing the leadership. Complaining behind his back was dangerous because of surveillance and could easily get back to the leaders.

    Although Newton was either a Stalinist or a Maoist, in the first nine years of the community, he was not heavy-handed politically. It was in the descendent phase when the nuclear meltdown occurred, the AIDS epidemic spread and Yankeedom had become more conservative in the 1980s that his Stalinist or Maoist politics became more hard-edged.  Relations between the Sullivanians and other leftists became increasingly hostile, and their political ideology became more dualistic and sectarian. Here is where the characteristic of the demonization of outsiders took place.

    The psychological array of tools for drawing people in and holding them was pretty straightforward. In all cults, sex is used to control people. However, in most cults sex flows one way, from the members to the leaders. Among the Sullivanians sex among members was immediate and expected. Secondly, unlike other cults, women were encouraged to have more than one partner at a time. Besides immediate and sustained sex for both men and women, there was the opportunity to work with therapists on their problems and to do so for a low fee, compared to the much higher going rate. Thirdly, friendships were made quickly and developed through household living arrangements. Fourthly, the Sullivanians were very supportive of the members developing their creativity. Siskind points out that many of them became famous in the arts, filmmaking, and dance. The Sullivanians were also a utopian community, so joining it helped people to feel that they were a special group, superior to others, in addition to being part of a movements which was going to overthrow capitalism.

    Symbolism and ritual were a strong part of the Sullivanians community. They played hard together at parties and vacations, but this was all secular enjoyment. There was no celebration of revolutionary holidays or the singing of the Internationale, as we might expect of an aspiring socialist community. Neither was there a dramatic change of identity based on change of hair or clothes that I found.

    Stages of Cults

    As I said in my article Political and Spiritual Cults:

    In their book, The Guru Papers, Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad identify two stages of cults: the proselytizing stage and the apocalyptic paranoia stage.

    In the proselytizing ascendant stage, the guru sees the possibility of realizing his ambitions. The group is touted as being at the cutting edge of new knowledge. Outsiders are welcomed although they are treated with a kind of benign superiority. In the ascendant phase, the guru rewards the enthusiasm of his followers and grants them positions which have opened up within the hierarchy. The tone of the community is celebratory. The guru is accessible to the public and is charming and playful. In terms of the recruitment, this is the “honeymoon phase”. The focus is to expand the organization and the emphasis is on the present.

    The apocalyptic, paranoiac, decadent phase is when the numbers of recruits have leveled off and explanations need to be found. The public is now seen as too stupid and blind to acknowledge the merits of the cult. In the declining stage, the message becomes pessimistic, with a doomsday “I told you so” tone. Outsiders cease to be welcomed in a spirit of satisfying their curiosity. Rather they are seen as enemies out to destroy the organization. Part of the descendent phase also involves the guru making more grandiose claims while promising to invoke occult power. The membership begins to have doubts.

    Sullivanians’ Stages of Cults

    The Sullivanians definitely went through these stages. Siskind, in her sociological analysis of them, calls the proselytizing phase the “Halcyon Years” from 1969-1978. Siskind calls the apocalyptic phase “the Revolutionary period of 1979-1983. Between 1984 and 1992 there was a steep decline in membership. In the first period the emphasis was on the psychology of the individual and their full development, including taking classes and the practice of the arts. The full enjoyment of life through sex, friendship, creativity and community was all supported. They also had a comedy club run by a very talented member, Luba Elman who was also responsible for early theatrical productions which later turned into the Fourth Wall Theatre Company. Between 1970 and 1974 the Sullivanian community grew at a steady rate of 100 new members a year, culminating at a peak of 400 in 1974. Political relations with other leftists had some tension but that did not stop cooperation in large protests.

    There were four shock waves which were scattered across the landscape of the Sullivanian community between 1977 to 1983 that turned it from growing, hopeful community into a more stagnant, paranoid and isolated community. The first was the driving out of Luba Elman as the organizer of the Fourth Wall Repertory Company and her replacement by therapist turned playwright and actress, Joan Harvey. Both she and her partner Saul were dictatorial in their expectations of the members of the stage crew and everyone else in the Fourth Wall community.

    Another very dramatic event was the Fourth Wall takeover of the Truck and Warehouse Theatre. The previous company refused to leave the building although the lease was up. They were forced out in an orchestrated attack, with waves of Fourth Wall people invading the building. Some took over the stage sets, rebuilt them with the carpentry and electrical skills of the Fourth Wall community. Two hours after the initial takeover, 160 more members came to support the takeover and guard the building. Then they set up an elaborate security system to guard the building. The violent nature of the whole process must have affected the moral of people. Artie Honan, one of the chief organizers of the takeover, said: ”Looking back, I feel that this was a senseless act of violence. Something I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been taking direction from Saul. (What’s a Smart Guy Like Me…) I doubt he was alone in these sentiments. Later he said I was preoccupied about having to organize security coverages …I had no time to reflect on the experience or to think about how it ran against the grain of my values. Lack of time to think is characteristic of all cults.

    A third major event was the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. This spread fear in the community. It led to a panic in which 200 community members en masse fled to Florida to avoid radiation. This event turned the Sullivanians into an explicitly political community as Saul’s Maoist orientation came to the fore. House meetings went from every day discussions about household and personal problems to political book readings and discussion groups. It was in this period that Saul implemented a Maoism anti-intellectual campaign in which community members would renounce their class background in group self-confession circles.

    A fourth major event was the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s. This directly impacted the size of the community and the sex-economy of the organization. The Fourth Wallers were naturally wary of having sex with outsiders and limited the sexual activity to the already existing members. Since, on average, the women outnumbered the men two to one, the shortage affected the women more than the men. There was even a Male Chauvinism campaign within the community to force the men to have sex with women who didn’t have partners! Please see Table A for a contrast between the two stages within the Sullivan community

    Characteristics of Sociopathic Leaders

    In their book Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships, Janja Lalich and Madeleine Tobias identify fifteen characteristics of a sociopath that could apply to a cult leader. Here they are:

    • Glibness and superficial charm
    • Conning and maneuvering
    • Grandiose sense of self
    • Pathological lying
    • Lack of remorse, shame or guilt
    • Shallow emotions
    • Incapacity to love
    • Sensation seeking
    • Impulsivity and lack of behavioral control
    • Early behavior problems with juvenile delinquency
    • Scapegoating
    • Promiscuous sexual behavior and infidelity
    • Erratic work history of fits and starts
    • Materialistic lifestyle
    • Criminal and entrepreneurial versatility

    Saul Newton as a Sociopath

    As repulsive as Saul Newton might be to you and to me, he did not have all fifteen characteristics of a sociopath. I will begin by eliminating the characteristics he did not possess. We know very little of his history, so we don’t know anything about whether his teenage behavior might be categorized as juvenile delinquency or whether he had an erratic work history. From my reading I did not find instances of sensation-seeking. He put members in the Sullivanians community in risky situations, but he seemed to be sure that he and any of his wives were well-protected. It would be unfair to characterize him as having shallow emotions. He had problems controlling his anger, as in beating his wives. There is nothing I’ve read that indicated that Newton showed any deep emotion but anger. It is reasonable to say he was emotionally repressed, rather than being shallow.

    Criminal and entrepreneurial creativity in cults usually means if one cult group fails and goes bankrupt, the leader wheels and deals and repackages himself with a new name and organization as Werner Erhard did. As far as I know, Saul Newton did not do this. He stuck with the Sullivanian community all his life. Lastly, a “materialistic lifestyle” is a very vague term. How many cars, boats, planes and houses does a leader have to possess to qualify as being materialistic? From my reading, I would classify Newton as upper middle-class, akin to a doctor, lawyer or architect living on the Upper West Side of New York City. He and his wives had their own chefs, childcare providers and shoppers. He owned a brownstone building. Newton lived well, but he didn’t have seven Cadillacs, as Rajneesh had. He did not own any boats or planes, nor did he buy other buildings and deal in real estate. He did not have the lifestyle of L. Ron Hubbard, Reverend Moon or Werner Erhard.

    However, Newton had all the remaining characteristics of a sociopath big-time. He had superficial charm, and as I said earlier, both men and women characterized him as charismatic. He clearly was conning and manipulating the community all his life. He got them to take over a theatre building, told them who could and couldn’t date and set up an elaborate surveillance system for tracking people while convincing the members to do all the work. He maneuvered with Joan Harvey to oust Luba Elman from the Fourth Wall community and put themselves in the leadership position. He seemed to be a pathological liar, meaning he lied so much he lost track of the boundaries between truth and falsehood. There is no indication in either of the books I read that he has the slightest regret or remorse for anything he did. Neither were there any examples in which Newton claimed to love anyone. He was not loved by community members, but feared. In a small funeral gathering in 1992 not a single member of the Sullivan community showed up.

    Newton definably had a grandiose sense of himself. What kind of person would have put himself at the head of a psychotherapy organization with no degree in the field or even having been in therapy himself? He was almost compulsively promiscuous. He had no problem asking his female patients for sex as part of the sessions. At the end of his life when he was suffering from dementia, he continued to see clients even when his memory was failing him. Newton was clearly impulsive (at least around getting angry) and could not control himself. However, in other situations he was extremely deliberative as he plotted and schemed to manipulate community members. Lastly, he was always blaming community members when things didn’t go right. He showed no power of self-reflection in seeing how his behavior was partly responsible for anything.

    Reasons People Stayed in the Community

    Why do People Stay?

    Lalich and Tobias lay down the following most common reasons people stay in cults:

    • Attachment to new beliefs
    • Cognitive dissonance
    • Entrapment
    • Peer pressure
    • Exhaustion from overwork allows little time for objectivity or self-reflection
    • Burned bridges separate members from their past
    • Being ridiculed and called names by cult members is very painful
    • Fear for your life
    • Guilt and embarrassment over having participated in the group to begin with

    From the two books I’ve read about the Sullivanians, I would say virtually every one of these psychological conditions were operating. In the early years, the major belief centered around a conviction that their nuclear family was the major part of their problems. Giving up their belief would mean facing they were dupes who then burned their bridges and hurt their families badly. It would definitely cause cognitive dissonance. Community members were clearly entrapped. Most spend anywhere between 5 and 20 years in the community, forging deep friendships. They spent hundreds of hours in therapy and in the last years of the community, that was not cheap. For many, their livelihoods were dependent on the community and their living situations were all tied together. It is completely understandable they would not want to cut their losses.

    There was a great deal of peer pressure to stay in the group. It was difficult to think clearly about whether or not to leave when they could not easily discuss openly their reservations about staying. They could never be sure if what they said would get back to the leadership. In addition, by the early 1980s, the economy was contracting, requiring members to work longer. Also, Newton was becoming increasingly demanding of members to be available for work on the Fourth Wall community. As Artie Honan says many times in his autobiography, there was little time to reflect on the big picture. Most were like frogs in slowly boiling water. They couldn’t see what was happening to them.

    Unlike other leftist cults, there didn’t seem to be a great deal of name calling, but Saul Newton was brutal about getting rid of any community member he felt was too much trouble and, perhaps more painfully, community members executed his wishes. People were kicked out of the community quickly, often told they had 24 hours to leave their group housing situations. In at least one instance a person’s things were thrown in the street. Ex-members were shunned and ignored in public and the Upper West Side of New York is not a place to easily find anonymity.

    Saul Newton was a violent man. He beat his wives and occasionally publicly punched a few of the men in the community. The violence he used in orchestrating the takeover of the theatre was probably never forgotten by anyone. When one of Saul’s psychological proteges decided to leave, upon Newton’s instruction he was followed, grabbed from behind and held over the subway tracks.

    If members decided to leave, they had little in the way of a support system. Their families were heart-broken, angry and some members were disowned. The road back was unknown, lonely and full of doubt. There was no recovery groups from cult in those days. I don’t really know that the Sullivanian community felt a sense of guilt upon leaving the way members of other cults might. If a member got into the cult early, in the good days of the first seven years, those memories must have been breath-taking, intense and not easily forgettable compared to whatever normal life followed. It was the period from the early 1980s on they might have felt regretful about.

    Aftermath for Cult Members

    In their book Cults in Our Midst, Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich identify five major areas of life ex-cult members have to deal with:

    • Practical everyday life
    • Emotional volitivity
    • Cognitive inefficiencies
    • Theoretical instabilities
    • Lack of a social network

    How Ex- Sullivanians Members Managed Their Lives in The Aftermath

    Practical, everyday life

    The two books I read on this subject do not have much information about how group members managed after the community broke up. Most of what follows will be what I would call reasonable speculation. In the area of everyday living, I believe the Sullivanians did better than ex-members of other cults. For example, Sullivanians had to find work to support themselves while in the cult and they succeeded in landing jobs in the arts or doing technical work. While ex-members who became therapists were dependent on referrals, this was not a community that was totally dependent economically. The same was true about managing money and finding an apartment. Members had practice in doing these things even when in the cult. While the Sullivanians were not provided with their own medical and health care, as upper middle-class urbanites they would not go without health and medical care as many members of other cults did. All this doesn’t mean they did not suffer. But compared to other cults, the climb back up might not have been as steep.

    Emotional volatility

    In terms of emotional volatility, I suspect the Sullivanians were more like other cults in that members suffered from PTSD, insomnia and dissociation at times. I don’t think difficulty concentrating or flashbacks were part of the psychological processes they had to constantly fight off because there were not that many bad experiences. I don’t believe a loss of a sense of humor was a psychological condition. Membership in households provided opportunity for play and laughter. It wouldn’t take much to bring them back. Depression over loss of the Sullivanian community and its vision must have been great. Before the community as a whole broke up, Saul‘s treatment of those who left would give them every reason to fear for themselves and their loved ones.

    Cognitive inefficiencies

    Many members of other cults have trouble thinking critically when they leave. Especially in spiritual cults which place a great deal of emphasis on meditation, and other altered states of consciousness, where critical thinking is frowned upon. Some young members of cults never learned to think critically. They simply did not know how to set up spread sheets for weighing the pros and cons of different job offers, school choices or romantic partners. After being in cults which for years explained causes and consequences by good and evil forces, it is difficult to reason about complex causes and intended and unintended consequences. I don’t think members of the Sullivanian community ran into these problems much. While they suspended judgment and criticality when under the spell of the leadership, they had to make analytical and comparative judgment while at work, with their partners and at house meetings when they were away from the leadership.

    However, there is one area of cognition which must have been difficult and that is de-toxifying their vocabulary. All cults control their members thinking by narrowing the complexity of their language. When the leaders train someone’s vocabulary to use virtue and vice words, they are training them in dualistic thinking. Dualistic thinking makes people more controllable. This definitely went on in the Sullivanian community. It would take time to reintroduce previously “banned” vice words and repressed virtue words.

    Theoretical instabilities

    The overwhelming majority of cults are spin-offs from major theoretical schools in the fields of spirituality, politics or psychology. Spiritual cults might be spinoffs from Buddhism, Hinduism or Christianity. Political cults may draw from the work of Marx or Lenin. Psychological cults may have drawn from Freud, Jung or Humanistic psychology of Maslow. Upon leaving the cult, the ex-cult member is in a theoretical no-man’s-land. Does the psychological cult member whose leader drew from Freud therefore reject Freud completely or are they able to separate Freud from the cult interpretation of Freud? In the case of spirituality, can a member of the Hindu cult like the Hari Krishna’s reject the cult but hang on to Hinduism? In the case of the Sullivanians, Saul Newton was probably a Maoist. Can ex- Sullivanians separate Maoism as practiced by the Sullivanians from Maoist groups in general? Will they remain Leninists and switch from Mao to Stalin? Will they remain Leninists and become Trotskyists? Will they become democratic socialists?

    A more extreme strategy is to reject the field entirely. So, a follower of a spiritual cult may become an atheist. A member of a political cult might become anti-political or apolitical. A member of a psychology cult might join a group that is anti-psychological, such as Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who led the movement against his own field. This may be a good choice because you are starting from scratch. This may also be a bad choice because you are starting from scratch with no infrastructure. There are no easy answers.

    Lack of a social network

    As I mentioned earlier, leaving a cult is devastating for a support system. Most cult members have burned bridges with their family and friends, church and clubs they were once a part of. However, relative to other cults, with the Sullivanians the situation may have been different. I can imagine that anybody who left the cult in the early 1980s when the community was still functioning well would have a rough time. However, once the community itself was disbanded, it was a different story. Why? Because the members of this cult had lived together for years unsupervised directly by the leadership. They played together, they made art together and they made love together, hard and often. These types of connections are easy to remember and hard to forget. Artie Honan says he is still Facebook friends with many former members. He also reports that in 2007, they had a reunion in Harlem. One hundred and fifty people came. Considering the Sullivanians peaked in membership in 1974 at 400, this turnout shows there is something of quality in this community that superseded Saul Newton and the rest of the cult leadership.

    How the Sullivanians Compared to the Experience of Other Cults

    I have a number of reasons for suspecting that the Sullivanians had it better than other cults. In the first place, they did not emerge out of an ecological, economic or political crisis. Neither did they come into the cult at an impressionable age of late teens or early twenties. My sense is that most members were in their mid to late 20s when they joined and were probably more grounded. That meant people were less desperate when they joined the group. Secondly, unlike most, if not all cults, the sexual economy was far more horizontal. Members slept with each other, not just with the leadership, as in other cults. Thirdly, women were as sexually free as the men. Though Saul Newton was definitely patriarchal, women still had many sexual relationships with their peers, just as the men did. Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, the social networks that were built had relative autonomy from the leadership, especially in the living situations. This allowed them to form subgroups with their own experiences, independently of the leadership. In most cults, subgroups are not allowed to form. It was these experiences in subgroups that made it possible not to lose complete touch with each other after the Sullivanians broke up as an institution. It made it possible to have a reunion 15 years later.

    The Socialist Political Spectrum: Which Tendencies are Most Likely to Form Cults

    So, what does the fate of the Sullivanians tell us (if anything) about which tendencies on the political spectrum are likely to form cults? Are Leninists, democratic socialists and anarchists all equally likely to form cults or are some more likely to form than others? Remember earlier I said that the key element in determining a cult is not the beliefs but rather how the cult was organized. In addition, charisma, by itself is not enough to institutionalize a cult.

    A good example of a socialist organizer who was charismatic but never turned his group into a cult was Murray Bookchin. I met Murray 50 years ago on the lower East Side of Manhattan and I can testify that he had a great deal of charisma and a significant following among young hippie anarchists. This continued as he moved to Vermont to teach and founded the Institute for Social Ecology.  But the Institute for Social Ecology or any other organization he was involved in did not became a cult because the egalitarian principles of anarchism blocked this from happening.

    It would be unfair to characterize the Sullivanians as a pure political group. It was not a real political group until the 1980s. Yet the leader of the organization, Saul Newton, was a Maoist and during the last years of the group, he did use Maoist tactics like self-confession of the members’ class backgrounds, along with criticism and self-criticism.  In my previous article, a major focus was on a group called the Democratic Workers Party which definitely was a cult with a Leninist focus. What about other Leninists groups?

    In their hostile analysis of Leninist organization, On the Edge: Political Cults Right and Left, Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth identify five other Leninist groups that were either cults or might have at least cultlike characterhoods. Harvey Jackins’ Reevaluation Counseling and Fred Newman’s New Alliance Party and social therapy, Gerry Healy; Ted Grant and Gino Perente also led organizations that had cult-like characteristics which were either Stalinist or Trotskyist in orientation. Each received a chapter’s attention in the book On the Edge.

    Tourish and Wohlforth summarize their book:

    Each and every Marxist Leninist grouping has exhibited the same cultic symptoms: Authoritarianism, conformity, ideological rigidity, fetishistic dwelling on apocalyptic fantasies. Not all Leninist groups are full-blown cults. However, we have yet to discover one that did not have some cultic features (213).

    As Lenin spelled out in 1910 in What is to Be Done, socialist ideas were to be introduced to the working class from the outside by professional revolutionaries drawn largely from the middle class. They view themselves as a chosen people, the possessor of a gnosis beyond the grasp of ordinary folk. Therefore, a separate organization is in order, tight discipline is required and superhuman sacrifice is demanded from members. Democratic centralism is required so that all members publicly defend the agreed positions of the party, whenever opinions they might hold to the contrary in private. (214) The communist front organization is particularly suited to political cult-manipulation (216).

    In contrast to this, the organization of the Democratic Socialists of America has loosely associated chapters and the whole organization is opposed to any kind of authoritarian organization. In fact, they organized themselves intentionally so they would have no resemblance to Leninism.

    Qualification

    I do not mean to imply that Leninism is not successful as a political tendency in the world. Russia, China and Cuba have all offered working class people significant improvements in their lives by way of steady employment, good wages, safe and reasonably priced housing, free healthcare and literacy over the last 100 years. With the exception of Sweden between the 1930s and the 1970s, social democracy has not had a good track record with the poor and working class. As for anarchism, it certainly had a great deal of success in revolutionary movements in Russia, Spain and recently in Rojava. The problem with the anarchists is that it is harder to tell what successes have carried over after the revolutionary period ended.

    The issue in this article, however, is not how successful each of the three socialist tendencies are in the end. Which group is most likely to use cult-like methods to get there? It is clear to me that Leninism has the most cult-like potential according to the criteria in this article.

    • First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post Left-Wing Psychotherapy Cults: Sullivanians from Hedonism to Group Terror first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth

    Life is full of slips.

    Words slip out of our mouths to surprise us.  Thoughts slip into our minds to shock us.  Dreams slip into our nights to sometimes slip into our waking thoughts to startle us.  And, as the wonderful singer/songwriter Paul Simon, sings, we are always “slip sliding away,” a reminder that can be a spur to courage and freedom or an inducement to fear and shut-upness.

    Slips are double-edged.

    It is obvious that since September 11, 2001, and more so since the corona virus lockdowns and the World Economic Forum’s push for a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will lead to the marriage of artificial intelligence, cyborgs, digital technology, and biology, that the USA and other countries have been slipping into a new form of fascist control.  Or at least it should be obvious, especially since this push has been accompanied by massive censorship by technology companies of dissenting voices and government crackdowns on what they term “domestic terrorists.”  Dissent has become unpatriotic and worse – treasonous.

    Unless people wake up and rebel in greater numbers, the gates of this electronic iron cage will quietly be shut.

    In the name of teleological efficiency and reason, as Max Weber noted more than a century ago in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, capitalist elites, operating from within the shadows of bureaucratic castles such as The World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organization WHO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), The World Bank (WBG), The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Google, Facebook, the National Security Agency (NSA), the CIA, etc., – run by people whose faces are always well hidden – have been using digital technology to exert increasing control over the thoughts and actions of people worldwide.  They have been doing this not only by diktats but by manufacturing social habits – customary usages – through which they exert their social power over populations.  This linguistic and ideational propaganda is continually slipped into the daily “news” by their mainstream media partners in crime. They become social habits that occupy people’s minds and lead to certain forms of behavior.  Ideas have consequences but also histories because humans are etymological animals – that is, their ideas, beliefs, and behaviors have histories.  It is not just words that have etymologies.

    When Weber said “a polar night of icy darkness” was coming in the future, he was referring to what is happening today.  Fascism usually comes on slowly as history has shown.  It slips in when people are asleep.

    John Berger, commenting on the ghostly life of our received ideas whose etymology is so often lost on us, aptly said:

    Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

    And the teleology in use today is digital technology controlled by wealthy elites and governments for social control.  For years they have been creating certain dispositions in the general public, as Jacques Ellul has said, “by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination” that makes the public receptive to the digital life.  This is accomplished slowly in increments, as permanent dispositions are established by slipping in regular reminders of how wonderful the new technology is and how its magical possibilities will make life so free and easy. Efficient. Happiness machines.  A close study of the past twenty-five years would no doubt reveal the specifics of this campaign.  In The Technological Society, Ellul writes:

    … the use of certain propaganda techniques is not meant to entail immediate and definite adhesion to a given formula, but rather to bring about a long-range vacuity of the individual.  The individual, his soul massaged, emptied of his natural tendencies, and thoroughly assimilated to the group, is ready for anything.  Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well-grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can easily be set into motion.

    Once this softening up has made people “available,” the stage is set to get them to act impulsively.  Ellul again:

    It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary).  Of course, this dissociation can be effective only after the propaganda technique has been fused with the popular mores and has become indispensable to the population. This stage may be reached quickly, as, for example, in Germany in 1942, after only ten years of psychic manipulation.

    The end result, he argues, is the establishment of an abstract universe, in which reality is completely recreated in people’s minds.  This fake reality is truer than reality as the news is faked and people are formed rather than informed.

    In today’s computer driven world, one thing that people have been told for decades is to be vigilant that their computers do not become infected with viruses.  This meme was slipped regularly into popular consciousness.  To avoid infection, everyone was advised to make sure to have virus protection by downloading protection or using that provided by their operating systems, despite all the back doors built in which most have been unaware of.

    Now that other incredible “machine” – the human body – can get virus “protection” by getting what the vaccine maker Moderna says is its messenger RNA (mRNA) non-vaccine “vaccine” that functions “like an operating system on a computer.”  First people must be softened up and made available and then “set in motion” to accept the solution to the fearful problem built in from the start by the same people creating the problem.  A slippery slope indeed.

    But slipping is also good, especially when repetition and conventional thought rules people’s lives as it does today in a digital screen life world where algorithms often prevent creative breakthroughs, and the checking of hourly weather reports from cells is a commonplace fix to ease the anxiety of being trapped in a seemingly uncontrollable nightmare.  It seems you now do need computer generated weather reports to know which way the wind blows.

    In our culture of the copy, new thoughts are difficult and so the problems that plague society persist and get rehashed ad infinitum.  I think most people realize at some level of feeling if not articulation that they are caught in a repetitive cycle of social stasis that is akin to addiction, one that has been imposed on them by elite forces they sense but don’t fully comprehend since they have bought into this circular trap that they love and hate simultaneously.  The cell phone is its symbol and the world-wide lockdowns its reality.  Even right now as the authorities grant a tactical reprieve from their cruel lockdowns if you obey and get experimentally shot with a non-vaccine vaccine, there is an anxious sense that another shoe will drop when we least expect it.  And it will.  But don’t say this out loud.

    So repetition and constant change, seemingly opposites, suffuse society these days. The sagacious John Steppling captures this brilliantly in a recent article:

    So ubiquitous are the metaphors and myths of AI, post humanism, transhumanism, et al. that they infuse daily discourse and pass barely noticed. And there is a quality of incoherence in a lot of this post humanist discourse, a kind of default setting for obfuscation….The techno and cyber vocabulary now meets the language of World Banking. Bourgeois economics provides the structural underpinning for enormous amounts of political rhetoric, and increasingly of cultural expression….This new incoherence is both intentional, and unintentional. The so called ‘Great Reset’ is operationally effective, and it is happening before our eyes, and yet it is also a testament to just how far basic logic has been eroded….Advanced social atomization and a radical absence of social change. Today, I might argue, at least in the U.S. (and likely much of Europe) there is a profound sense of repetitiveness to daily life. No matter one’s occupation, and quite possibly no matter one’s class. Certainly the repetitiveness of the high-net-worth one percent is of a different quality than that of an Uber driver. And yet, the experience of life is an experience of repetition.

    A kind of flaccid grimness accompanies this sensibility.  Humor is absent, and the only kind of laughter allowed is the mocking kind that hides a nihilistic spirit of resignation – a sense of inevitability that mocks the spirit of rebellion.  Everything is solipsistic and even jokes are taken as revelations of one’s personal life.

    The other day I was going grocery shopping.  My wife had written on the list: “heavy cream or whipping cream.”  Not knowing if there were a difference, I asked her which she preferred.  “I prefer whipping,” she said.

    I replied, “But I don’t have a whip nor do they sell them at the supermarket.”

    We both laughed, although I found it funnier than she.  She slipped, and I found humor in that.  Because it was an innocent slip of the tongue with no significance and she had done the slipping, there was also a slippage between our senses of humor.

    But when I told this to a few people, they hesitated to laugh as if I might be revealing some sado-masochistic personal reality, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

    It’s harder to laugh at yourself because we get uptight and are afraid to say the “wrong” things.  Many people come to the end of their lives hearing the tolling for their tongues that never spoke freely because of the pale cast of thought that has infected them.  Not their own thoughts, but thoughts that have been placed into their minds by their controllers in the mass media.

    Freud famously wrote about slips of the tongue and tried to pin them down.  In this he was a bit similar to a lepidopterist who pins butterflies.  We are left with the eponymous Freudian slips that sometimes do and sometimes don’t signify some revelation that the speaker does not consciously intend to utter.

    It seems to me that in order to understand anything about ourselves and our present historical condition – which no doubt seems very confusing to many people as propagandists and liars spew out disinformation daily – we need to develop a way to cut through the enervating miasma of fear that grips so many.  A fear created by elites to cower regular people into submission, as another doctor named Anthony Fauci has said: “Now is the time to just do what you are told.”

    But obviously words do matter, but what they matter is open to interpretation and sometimes debate.  To be told to shut up and do what you’re told, to censor differences of opinion, to impose authoritarian restrictions on free speech as is happening now, speech that can involve slips of the tongue, is a slippery slope in an allegedly democratic society.  Jim Garrison of JFK fame said that we live in a doll’s house of propaganda where the population is treated as children and fantasies have replaced reality. He was right.

    So how can we break out of this deeply imbedded impasse?

    This is the hard part, for digital addiction has penetrated deep into our lives.

    I believe we need to disrupt our routines, break free from our habits, in order to clearly see what is happening today.

    We need to slip away for a while. Leave our cells.  Let their doors clang shut behind. Abandon television.  Close the computer.  Step out without any mask, not just the paper kind but the ones used to hide from others.  Disburden our minds of its old rubbish. Become another as you go walking away.  Find a park or some natural enclave where the hum and buzz quiets down and you can breathe.  Recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the only place Winston Smith can escape the prying eyes and spies of Big Brother, the only place he can grasp the truth, was not in analyzing Doublethink or Crimestop, but “in a natural clearing, a tiny grass knoll surrounded by tall saplings that shut it in completely” and bluebells bloomed and a thrush sang madly.  Here he meets his lover and they affirm their humanity and feel free and alive for a brief respite.  Here in the green wood, the green chaos, new thoughts have a chance to grow.  It is an old story and old remedy, transitory of course, but as vital as breathing.  In his profound meditation on this phenomenon, The Tree, John Fowles, another Englishman, writes:

    It is not necessarily too little knowledge that causes ignorance; possessing too much, or wanting to gain too much, can produce the same thing.

    I am not proposing that such a retreat is a permanent answer to the propaganda that engulfs us.  But without it we are lost.  Without it, we cannot break free from received opinions and the constant mental noise the digital media have substituted for thought.  Without it, we cannot distinguish our own thoughts from those slyly suggested to us to make us “available.”  Without it, we will always feel ourselves lost, “shipwrecked upon things,” in the words of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset.  If we are to take a stand against the endless lies and a world-wide war waged against regular people by the world’s elites, we must first take “a stand within the self, ensimismamiento,” by slipping away into contemplation.  Only then, once we have clarified what we really believe and don’t believe, can we take meaningful action.

    There’s an old saying about falling or slipping between the cracks.  It’s meant to be a bad thing and to refer to a place where no one is taking care of you. The saying doesn’t make sense. For if you end up between the cracks, you are on the same ground where habits hold you in learned helplessness.  Better to slip into the cracks where, as Leonard Cohen sings, “the light gets in.”

    It may feel like you are slipping away, but you may be exploring your roots.

    The post The Etymological Animal Must Slip Out of the Cage of Habit to Grasp Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Dismantle NYC’s Mass Surveillance Project — Start With Jail Recordings

    Incarcerated people make one of their daily allotment of six phone calls at the York Community Reintegration Center on May 24, 2016, in Niantic, Connecticut. In nearly all jails around the country, phone calls are recorded and surveilled.

    Mass public surveillance is becoming a threat in everyday life, with big tech corporations digitally tracking our every move. For incarcerated people, surveillance is even more intrusive.

    In the last year, the New York City Department of Corrections (DOC) illegally recorded more than 1,500 privileged calls between people incarcerated in its jails and their attorneys. Many of these illegal recordings were turned over to prosecutors.

    This blatant constitutional violation has critical and disproportionate impacts. Three-quarters of people incarcerated in New York City jails are awaiting trial and many are held solely because they cannot afford bail. More than 90 percent are Black and Brown, thanks to discriminatory police and prosecution practices and the fact that the U.S.’s criminal legal system is constructed on a foundation of white supremacy.

    Behind these illegal recordings looms a scandal-plagued surveillance-tech-company-turned-DOC-phone-service-provider: Securus Technologies. The city’s contract with Securus expired on March 31. Yet, despite this scandal and the many others plaguing the vendor nationwide, the DOC quietly extended its relationship with Securus for another year.

    The city’s decision to do so highlights the threat our ballooning surveillance apparatus poses to New Yorkers’ civil liberties and rights. A critical first step to ensure that neither our privacy nor our dignity are for sale would be to end the universal recording of jail calls.

    As a public defender, I am intimately aware of the crushing isolation that comes with being charged with criminal wrongdoing and caged on a remote island. Cut off from support structures, separated from loved ones and subjected to intense situational stress, New Yorkers who are detained in city jails rely on phone calls to stay in contact with their spouses, children and other loved ones. The phone is the singular lifeline for solace, counsel and advice.

    But phone calls — free of charge since 2019 thanks to local advocacy — come at a dehumanizing and devastating cost: the sacrifice of privacy, intimacy and dignity. Every call made to a spouse, parent or child is recorded. There are no exceptions: not for calls to ask your mother for advice on your case; not for calls to talk through your spouse’s medical test results; not for calls to receive news that a younger sibling has passed. Every call is recorded.

    It is easy to imagine that jail calls have always been recorded and that this type of dehumanizing surveillance is essential to public safety. Neither is true.

    For decades, when law enforcement suspected that someone was a jail security threat or planning a crime, they had to apply for an eavesdropping warrant with the requisite evidence. However flawed the eavesdropping warrant regime is, there at least were oversight mechanisms under this system. The warrant requirement for call recording in New York City jails was blanketly eliminated in 2008 — at a time when the city’s crime rates were low and declining — with a simple administrative rule change by the Board of Correction. Their primary justification? “Everyone else is doing it.”

    This rule change opened the door for today’s universal recording practice, which solidifies the biased impact of surveillance: Those who cannot afford bail also cannot afford their right against self-incrimination.

    Years later, in 2014, Securus doubled down on privacy invasion when it began “voice printing” everyone in DOC custody. Simply put, a voice print is a visual representation of an individual’s speech pattern. A biometric (like finger and faceprints), voice prints are used to attempt to identify participants in call recordings. Not only was Securus voice printing incarcerated people, but the company also began tagging and tracking the voice of anyone receiving a call from a New York City jail. Those voice prints along with the call recordings — to the tune of 30,000 per day — are saved to Securus’s databases. With data being today’s most lucrative commodity, Securus is creating a new product line out of the voices of my clients, their loved ones and myself.

    The revelation that Securus has been illegally recording phone calls between people incarcerated on Rikers Island and their attorneys is just the latest in a long line of public scandals involving the company. For illegally recording privileged calls alone, Securus has been sued across the country, from California to Texas, and from Kansas to Maine.

    New York City must terminate its contract with Securus. Sadly though, the problem is not limited to just one spy-tech vendor. Many of the same concerns are raised by the city’s relationship with other corporations like Vigilant Solutions, Dataminr, Palantir and Clearview AI. The recording of jail calls is one example of the city’s misguided investment in covert surveillance programs, which include the monitoring of New Yorkers’ movements, social media activity and other highly personal information.

    These surveillance activities impact not only the specific targets of the surveillance, but also their families, friends and communities. New York must dismantle its biased mass surveillance project. Eliminating universal jail call recording is a good first step.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Explosive evidence shows counter-terror police use health workers to surveil patients

    NHS mental health services already have worrying ties to the police. And now, damning new information has come to light. Counter-terror police have been working with community mental health teams in so-called ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’. Mental health patients who are also considered at risk of potential ‘extremism’ are referred to the police. The police then follow up and monitor said individuals.

    As part of the Investigations Unit’s #ResistBigBrother series, we’ve looked at the growing criminalisation of Muslims under counter-terror strategies. Now, we turn to police exploitation of mental health services for surveillance strategies.

    What are these ‘Vulnerability Support Hubs’?

    Medact, a non-profit, has uncovered information on these hubs through a freedom of information request. Its report found that these hubs have assessed thousands of people. While a pilot version of the hubs ran during 2016-2017, they’re now being rolled out under the name Project Cicero.

    Medact found that:

    Most of the individuals assessed at the hubs are people who have been referred to Prevent whom the police suspect may have mental health conditions.

    These individuals have mental health assessments carried out in the presence of police. The police subsequently remain involved in the patients’ care.

    Medact research manager Hilary Aked summarised:

    It is very clear from explicit statements in the documents that we obtained that police are asking health workers to surveil patients. They use the word monitoring; they talk about the need to establish what they call tripwires, which essentially means that something would trigger the referral if certain behaviours or certain speech is done by the patient. And that’s something which counter-terrorism police advise health workers to be aware of. So there they are performing a surveillance duty for the police.

    In these Vulnerability Support Hubs, mental health workers:

    • Determine if individuals are at risk of being a terrorist in the future.
    • Monitor patients’ speech and behaviours for signs of radicalisation.
    • Engage in apparent programmes of ‘deradicalisation’.

    These policies are all in line with the Home Office’s Prevent programme, which itself works on the idea of ‘pre-crime.’

    Lack of transparency

    The problem of consent rears its head here. Aked explains:

    People are referred to Prevent, you know, often without their knowledge and without their consent. And from there, we think they may be referred to a Vulnerability Support Hub, without their knowledge or consent.

    Indeed, the report states that:

    the data shows that Muslims are disproportionately referred to the hubs, again in line with the wider Prevent programme.

    It’s plain that the Vulnerability Support Hubs target Muslims. They also further complicate the problem of the standard of care Muslim mental health patients receive. Care that should be free from racist assumptions and prioritise patient confidentiality and safety.

    National security

    The Canary reached out to the Department for Health and Social Care for its view on this new information. The department responded:

    Healthcare practitioners recognise Prevent as part of their safeguarding duties and with over 300,000 patient contacts every day, the NHS has an important role to play in preventing vulnerable people from being drawn into terrorism.

    A key part of Prevent is to enable frontline staff to recognise and safeguard individuals at risk from all types of radicalisation, referring them to pathways for appropriate support.

    When we discuss ‘safeguarding’ in relation to counter-terrorism, however, it isn’t about safeguarding at all. It becomes an issue of national security. And another concern is the lack of transparency around national security strategies.

    Aked explained to us:

    Often national security is used as a reason for blanket lack of transparency on issues that need to be in the public eye and need to be publicly debated. That secrecy can provide a cover for problematic practices and a lack of accountability. And I think that’s what’s going on with these hubs.

    Medact struggled to get information on what the hubs are and how they work:

    Their activities have largely remained shrouded in secrecy, with very limited information publicly available. Therefore, the hubs’ work has been subject to almost no scrutiny from the media, scholars or the public. This lack of transparency is itself a major ethical concern since it severely limits possibilities for proper accountability

    What does this ask of mental health workers?

    Another severe implication of Prevent involvement in mental health support is the boundaries it asks mental health workers to cross. Under this model, NHS professionals would have to determine what may trigger a referral to Prevent. Again, the problem is that Prevent operates on a pre-crime basis. That means it targets, and potentially criminalises, people who may commit a crime but haven’t yet done so.

    Aked told us about their hope that mental health workers would push back against this added pressure:

    I think we would hope that health workers would be… pushing back against the further integration of security professionals, because the police’s fundamental mission is very different to that of healthcare. We don’t think any good comes from muddying the waters there between those two very different kinds of missions.

    Aked also made it clear that this added burden for mental health workers is rather beyond their capacity and remit:

    …we think they’ve been put in a really unacceptable position by government, which is essentially trying to corrupt health workers and make them an arm of the surveillance state…obviously, health workers, do share information if there’s a legitimate public interest, or some immediate threat of harm. But when we’re talking about pre-crime the thresholds for sharing information are not there.

    Breeding suspicion based on racism

    Moreover, there’s one fundamental issue with the Vulnerability Support Hubs. It’s that they rely on understandings of terrorism, extremism, and counter-terror that have a history of inaccuracy and racism:

    Often the concerns of counter-terrorism police are quite spurious, very racialised, and that’s another reason these Vulnerability Support Hubs seem to have been created is that they actually just help police access health information.

    In other words, Prevent’s pre-crime remit alone did not allow police to access information on individuals suspected of terrorism. But with the existence of these hubs, police now have access to patients’ private information.

    The hubs are a way for Prevent to continue to spy on Muslims who are assessed as being pre-crime. Aked and Medact’s aim is to call attention to the problems of Prevent’s entanglement with mental health. This involves changing government policy, asking mental health workers to resist, and calling on professional bodies to review the measures.

    Our recent investigation into Serenity Integrated Mentoring (SIM) bears many similarities here. SIM also provides an avenue for police involvement in mental health care. Evidently, such pressure is much needed.

    Aked explains:

    We think these hubs should be shut down. There’s wider problems of racism and coercion in mental healthcare already. Shutting these hubs is not going to solve those problems overnight, but these hubs really encapsulate some of the worst dynamics of both racism in mental healthcare and the racism and securitisation of Prevent policy.

    Community response

    A number of Muslim organisations have expressed their concern at the existence of these hubs.

    Deputy chair of MEND Shazad Amin said:

    ‘Monitoring’ of patients referred for ‘Islamic ideology’ risks pathologising normative Muslim practices.

    The disproportionate rates of Muslim children being referred is also concerning – we need clarity on the reasons for this to ensure that judgements based on Islamophobia are not being made.

    CAGE spokesperson Anas Mustapha told The Canary:

    Medact’s report continues to evidence what has been a worrying trajectory of securitising public health through the instrumentalising of PREVENT. We support Medact’s recommendation on the immediate scrapping of the Vulnerability Support Hubs and go further to demand the complete severing of the toxic PREVENT agenda from public health.

    We’ve documented how PREVENT will irreparably damage doctor-patient confidentiality, and undermine the trust under which all public sector interactions rely upon.

    Making public sector workers the handmaidens of the state, not only erodes that trust but has made no tangible improvement to national security.

    Blurring the boundaries of mental health care to allow police to monitor patients is an egregious abuse of police powers. It severely hampers the standard of treatment available to patients, places Muslims under suspicion, and puts more pressure on an already inadequate mental health service.

    Featured image via Unsplash/Lianhao Qu

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The court ruling against GCHQ is just the latest battle in the fight for privacy | Megan Goulding

    Some methods have been ruled unlawful, but the government is still seeking to expand its powers

    No matter our background or beliefs, we all want control over our personal information, our private views and our sensitive data. That control is key to our autonomy and our liberty. But in 2013 Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on how governments had used the excuse of the “war on terror” to erode that liberty.

    Related: Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen | Lauren Bridges

    Megan Goulding is a lawyer at Liberty, who works on technology and human rights

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Art Against Drones

    At the High Line, a popular tourist attraction in New York City, visitors to the West side of Lower Manhattan ascend above street level to what was once an elevated freight train line and is now a tranquil and architecturally intriguing promenade. Here walkers enjoy a park-like openness; with fellow strollers they experience urban beauty, art and the wonder of comradeship.

    The post Art Against Drones appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Second Stage Terror Wars

    We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    – William Casey, CIA Director, February. 1981

    It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.   The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.  So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

    It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

    It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

    Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

    Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.  This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002.  This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

    So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people.  Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary.  The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

    Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies.  This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.

    Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission.  The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.  Zelikow, a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel, will lead the group that will work in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Stand together indeed: Charles Koch, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the Rockefellers, et al. funders of disinterested truth.

    So once again the fox is in the hen house.

    If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective.  Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.

    Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day?  Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back?  Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.

    And today?  Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?

    Who remembers the Nuremberg Codes?

    And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler.  Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late.  The dial is turned to high heat now.

    But that was so long ago and far away, right?  Don’t exaggerate, you say.  Hitler and all that crap.

    Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.

    Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year.  That’s one vaccine manufacturer.  Chump change?  Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.

    Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years.  Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase.  The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.

    The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why.  Why repress dissent?  The answer should be obvious but is not.

    The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.

    Name calling and censorship are sufficient.  Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others.  So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!

    Your body is no longer inviolable.  You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not.  Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah.  The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.

    Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code.  Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)

    “Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.

    I am not making a prediction.  The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention.  Don’t be fooled.  It’s a game they have devised.  Keep people guessing.  On edge.  Relieved.  Tense.  Relaxed.  Shocked.  Confused.  That’s the game.  One day this, the next that.  You’re on, you’re off.  You’re in, you’re out.  We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it.  If you misbehave, you will get a time out.  Time to contemplate your sins.

    If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again.  On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay.  This was again reported on May 10.  Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity.  You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.

    On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.”  Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”

    But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.  We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”

    He said this with a straight face even though the experimental “vaccines,” by their makers own admissions, do not prevent the vaccinated from getting the virus or passing it on.  They allege it only mitigates the severity of the virus if you contract it.

    Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated.  Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.”  Interesting phrase: as we can.  It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms.  Life will be reset, a great reset.  Great for the few and terrible for the many.

    Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming.  It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment.  The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved.  We will have to be eternally vigilant.

    But wait.  Don’t despair.  It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened.  If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet.  Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu.  Are you laughing yet?

    Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed.  Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free.  False consciousness is pandemic.  Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns.  And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.

    We are now in a long war with two faces.  As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.

    The question is: Do we have to wait twenty years to grasp the obvious and fight for our freedoms?

    We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth.  Their agenda is quite different.

    But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.

    The post Second Stage Terror Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Needs to Stop Treating Ramadan Like a National Security Issue

    People attend the first Friday prayers of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan outside the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 16, 2021. Makram El-Amin called for justice for those that were lost to police violence in the Friday sermon.

    Like many Muslims, I remember feeling excited as a child each year when Ramadan came around. Though I didn’t entirely understand the purpose of fasting, I was proud of being Muslim and was eager to emulate my parents. Since I began fasting in second grade, Ramadan has been a core part of my practice of Islam.

    While there is great diversity among Muslims around the globe, the holy month of Ramadan has the power of uniting the entire Ummah (the Arabic word for Muslim community) in a collective observance of fasting and prayer each year. It is this solidarity in worship of Allah that is so evocative of the hadith — the traditions and sayings by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), in which he said: “The believers in their mutual kindness, compassion, and sympathy are just like one body. When any part of the body suffers, the rest of the body comes to its defense.”

    In the current climate of globe-spanning Islamophobia and Muslim suffering, however, acting as one body has become difficult if not impossible. The omnipresent lens of national security subjects our entire faith community to state surveillance, harassment and dehumanizing discourse in media, making it even more difficult for Muslims to reach across existing barriers of race, ethnicity, cultural and linguistic differences.

    A recent Vox article titled “9 questions about the Muslim holy month you were too embarrassed to ask” offered answers to questions about the meaning of Ramadan, how Muslims fast and how to be supportive of a friend who is fasting. The final question, however, was, “So if you’re not supposed to get angry or complain or gossip during Ramadan, how come terrorist attacks by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda always seem to spike during Ramadan?” The Vox author’s tongue-in-cheek response was “because terrorists are assholes.”

    The structure of that Vox article seemed aimed at implying that the final question about terrorism followed logically from the others, but in reality, it had no legitimate place in that article. Whereas the preceding questions convey legitimate information about Ramadan, the last question served only to reproduce the constant cultural fixation on the supposed connection between Islam and terrorism.

    The Vox article was by no means alone in suggesting a connection between Ramadan and an increase in terrorist attacks — a Google search with the question “does terrorism increase during Ramadan” yields many results. Although empirical claims about this increase in terrorist activity abound, the possibility that something other than Ramadan might account for it is conspicuously absent from any of the responses. The question is consistently posed without any context or alternative hypotheses — leaving Ramadan as the sole explanation for any violence.

    An article in The Atlantic titled “Is ISIS More Violent During Ramadan?” is paradigmatic. In seeking answers, this article refers to a 2015 University of Maryland National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) report which examined data on over a decade of attacks by ISIS and other prior existing terrorist groups. This report concluded that “while major attacks have taken place during Ramadan, we have also observed major attacks outside the month of Ramadan, and periods during which Ramadan was relatively calm. Thus, it remains an open question whether Ramadan is a period of heightened risk.” But one unanswered question remains: What was the impetus was for assuming a connection between Ramadan and violence in the first place, other than Islamophobic tropes about Muslims as inherently violent?

    An academic article titled “Days of Action or Restraint? How the Islamic Calendar Impacts Violence” explores this question from a wider perspective. According to the authors, “The Islamic calendar provides an opportunity to illuminate the impact of religious practices on violence because the calendar regulates the timing of society-wide observance and because the religious meaning of specific days changes predictably and annually, creating sufficient variation to assess its effect.” While the authors make what sounds like a rational argument, the argument assumes that the Islamic calendar, in the final analysis, will have the most determining impact on any instances of violence that take place during Ramadan.

    This study ultimately concludes that rather than fostering violence, the Islamic calendar is a force for restraining it. This is because, the authors reason, potential perpetrators rely on societal support and judgements about the appropriateness of committing acts of violence during or on significant Muslim holidays. In this case, the authors reach a seemingly positive conclusion, using empirical data to support findings that provide a strong rebuttal to the assumed link between Ramadan and terrorism. However, the research question assumes in the first place that there is an impulse or will to violence within Muslim communities that the Islamic calendar is somehow regulating.

    The persistence of the debate around whether the holy month of Ramadan is a motivator for violence highlights a phenomenon that has been omnipresent in the “war on terror” — the framing of Islam as a national security threat, which then serves as justification for extreme interventions by the state.

    With Islam securitized, its followers, and its practices are seen first and foremost as potential security threats. This imposition of the lens of national security over the actions of Muslims and Muslim communities includes what amounts to an invasion of the private space that is formed by community religious observance. Empirical validity or not aside, the pervasive scrutiny that these spaces are subject to puts practitioners of Islam in the impossible position of having to defend and justify their religion rather than simply practice it. The unifying power of Ramadan should lie in solidarity of belief that transcends difference, not in a common posture of defensiveness that has been imposed on the religion and its adherents from outside.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Aerial Surveillance In Twin Cities Frustrates, Alarms Residents

    When protests broke out several weeks ago in a Minneapolis, Minnesota suburb over the police killing of Daunte Wright, tensions were already high thanks to the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer found guilty of murdering George Floyd. State and local authorities were ready for the unrest — and so were their federal partners. Armored vehicles and soldiers from the Minnesota National Guard became a symbol of the militarized crackdown.

    Other less visible federal forces were also at work. Thousands of feet overhead, Department of Homeland Security surveillance planes and helicopters circled Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis and surrounding areas, according to Air Traffic Control records and flight data.

    The post Aerial Surveillance In Twin Cities Frustrates, Alarms Residents appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms

    Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.

    The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.

    To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.

    One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”

    The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.

    Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”

    Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.

    With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.

    This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.

    One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”

    Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.

    The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.

    Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.

    The post Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms

    A Cursory Examination of Modern-Day Policing and the Consequences it Poses for the Marginalized

    Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.

    The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.

    To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.

    One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”

    The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.

    Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”

    Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.

    With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.

    This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.

    One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”

    Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.

    The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.

    Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.

    Levi Gonzalez is a researcher of various topics and issues regarding politics and history including: criminal justice, American foreign policy, surveillance, and public policy. He recently received a Master’s degree in Public Policy, with an emphasis on poverty and inequality, from the University of California, Riverside. Levi is a fierce opponent of systemic oppression, state sanctioned violence, imperialism, and exploitation. Learning from those who embrace the challenge of confronting their oppressor serves as a source of inspiration. Read other articles by Levi.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 at 7:23pm and is filed under Artificial Intelligence (AI), Police, Privacy, Racism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 1:45am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Espionage/”Intelligence”, India, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Militarism, North Korea, Singapore, Surveillance, Syria, Trade, United Kingdom, United States, US Military Bases, Viet Nam, War Crimes, World War One, World War Two.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    The post Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sentient Vision Systems announces first ViDAR VMS pod flight

    Australian search and surveillance specialist Sentient Vision Systems has announced the first flight of its ViDAR pod system, the VMS-5 (ViDAR Maritime Surveillance) Day/Night Optical Radar pod. The VMS-5 Day/Night pod is the first of a range of ViDAR surveillance pods configured for different missions and aircraft types. VMS pods will be available for customer […]

    The post Sentient Vision Systems announces first ViDAR VMS pod flight appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Content Control

    Historically, the state and religion have been the institutions that control what people can and cannot say, punishing people for their thoughts, for their actions, and for their words. Silicon Valley companies have emerged as a third institution. They have put forth a new set of parameters. On their platforms, the people who make the decisions about our speech are not people that we elected, or that we trust for their faith, but people like Mark Zuckerberg. They surround themselves with “yes” people.

    In the early days when Facebook was taking up this role, the rooms where decisions were made about what could and couldn’t be said were more diverse than I thought they would be, at least in terms of gender. But there was a lot less diversity in other ways. Most policymakers come from middle-to-upper-class backgrounds and many are Ivy League graduates.

    The post Content Control appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    The post Will Drones Really Protect Us? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    The post Will Drones Really Protect Us? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Drones Really Protect Us?

    I’m seated in the police Zoom briefing with other council representatives for my small seaside town in England. Our Chief Inspector is telling us about the crisis we have with soaring heroin addiction in the town. The recent surge is contributing to a general increase in crime. The next section of the briefing is about the future use of police surveillance drones, and how they could become useful in combating crime.

    A few months ago, Nigel Farage, a far-right politician, arrived in my town to film himself on our tourist beaches; aiming to drum up hate and hostility toward migrants and refugees arriving in the UK on precarious inflatables, having just traversed the channel of water between England and France. Farage complains that the new arrivals are taking up hotel spaces, he triggers the public by saying it’s all coming out of the public purse, we can’t afford to look after our own citizens let alone refugees, and that these people will one day take their homes and jobs. The Home Office considers proposals to use water cannons on the migrant sea crossers, while Home Secretary, Priti Patel suggests the transportation of migrants and refugees to Ascension Island in the South Pacific, harking back to the 18th century, when Britain deported convicts to the penal colony of Australia.

    The British Army Watchkeeper drone has been commissioned to help with surveillance of people crossing the Channel. The Watchkeeper was initially developed when the British military requested £1 billion to develop a military drone. An Israeli arms company, Elbit Systems, was awarded the contract to design and develop the drone. When completed in 2014, it was transported to Afghanistan for ‘field testing’.

    Was a ‘field testing’ in Afghanistan part of the tragic mistake made when a U.S. weaponized drone killed my friend Raz Mohammed’s brother-in-law and five of his friends? The young men were enjoying an early evening gathering in their orchard in Wardak province Afghanistan. All the men were unarmed, none of them were involved with the Taliban. Their instant deaths were the result of a ‘signature strike’ – a targeted killing based on racial profiling, the men ‘fitted’ the demographic of the Taliban – they were wearing Pashtoon clothing, in a Pashtoon village, men of fighting age – that was enough to get them killed.

    Our local Chief Inspector finishes talking about police surveillance drones. At present, in my area of  Sussex, they are mainly using surveillance drones for traffic and ‘operations’, though elsewhere in the UK they have so far been used to survey a Black Lives Matter protest and another at an immigration centre.

    Knowing how I would come across to others in the Zoom room, I decided to take the risk of sounding like a ‘conspiracy loon’ and plunged in – I highlighted the military method of ‘racial profiling’ during surveillance and targeted assassinations, how the US police have started using drones armed with non-lethal weapons (tasers, pepper spray, rubber bullets) against their own civilians, often anti-war, environmental and anti-racist protestors. The chief inspector was a little taken aback but quickly started to respond that British police were not like the military or the US police, that drones are really useful for helping lost people on mountain tops, and that having a drone operator walking around town, while flying a surveillance drone, would be great for community engagement.

    I suddenly recollect a fight which broke out in our town centre and wonder how a drone would have helped. Some sort of argument had arisen amongst the ‘street community’, a mixture of people who gravitate on the street to drink, to buy or take heroin and crack, or wait for their methadone subscription from the local rehab centre based above an arcade of shops which shadows the street community and the raucous outbreak. Shoppers walked past, some looking at the commotion, others head down, not wanting to inadvertently get dragged into a drug fueled hullabaloo. A young woman, weathered skin, tattered clothing, decaying teeth, aged beyond her years screams obscenities at another member of the community. Her gaunt face reminded me of people I’ve seen in Kabul who have become addicted to heroin, the people who live under a bridge, huddled in small groups, heads under a scarf as they cook up opium on a spoon. Their eyes are distant – friends and family say they are gone.

    Heroin addiction in impoverished British towns has soared in the last 10 years. At the crime briefings I attend as a Councillor, no one ever talks about where this cheap high-quality opium has flooded in from, the root cause probably considered ‘too political’. But in reality, heroin supply to Britain has careened in the last decade, namely due to the ‘solar revolution’ in Afghanistan. This has enabled farmers to use electricity generated from solar panels to pump untapped water from 100 meters under the desert. Now, where there was once an arid dust belt, there are now fields of thriving poppy, punches of colour lighting up the desert, too much of a lucrative cash crop for Afghan farmers to pass up.

    Many of the newly blooming fields are in Helmand, the Afghan province where Britain was assigned to fight the Taliban. Britain was also delegated, at the 2001 International Bonn Conference on Afghanistan, the responsibility of counter narcotics in Afghanistan. Considering Afghanistan was the first country in the world where weaponized drones were used – the 2001 unsuccessful assassination of Osama Bin Laden – and thereafter used as a “playground for foreign nations to kill Afghans like a video game” — as one of my young Afghan friends once described to me; it’s highly unlikely British Intelligence Agencies were unaware of the newly blossoming industry, much of which is growing in Helmand, a ‘hotspot’ for drone strikes and aerial surveillance. Today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s heroin, 3% of the Afghan population are addicts, and production of the crop has more than doubled, from 3,700 tonnes in 2012, to 9,000 tonnes in 2017.

    And so, in my home town, deprivation, crime, conflict and all the ills associated deepen. Drones are sent in to ‘solve’ the problem. To date, at least 40 UK police forces  have either purchased a drone or have access to using one. In the area of Sussex and Surrey, there are 23 drones and, according to a recent Freedom of Information, they were used 108 times between January- June 2020.

    Afghans are amongst the refugees washed up upon our beaches in flimsy dinghies, their channel crossing overseen by the very same Watchkeeper drone used to exacerbate war which drove them from their homeland. The most vulnerable in our society, from Britain to Afghanistan, are seized by the scourge of heroin and the conflagration of violence caused by war. The vaunted “eyes in the skies,” the surveillance drones, won’t help us understand these realities. The proliferation of weaponized drones will unleash more misery.

    Momentum for campaigns to ban land mines, cluster bombs and nuclear weapons began with grassroots efforts to tell the truth about militarism and war. I hope a surveillance drone will get the message painted on large banners we’ve held, standing along our seacoast, proclaiming a welcome for refugees and a longing for peace.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 5:44pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Drones, Exploitation, Heroin Addiction, Surveillance, United Kingdom, War on Terror.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • More Surveillance Won’t Stop White Supremacy. It Will Target Activists of Color.

    A man is arrested by way more police than necessary for an arrest

    For mainstream lawmakers, the January 6 attack was a wake-up call to a simmering threat. No longer able to pretend white nationalist violence is a fringe remnant of a bygone era, some elected officials have drawn attention to law enforcement’s negligence to prevent the violence at the capitol and are calling for new approaches.

    However, some of their calls to action point toward old approaches that have only entrenched the forces of white supremacy: domestic terrorism laws. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack, President Joe Biden expressed support for a domestic terrorism law. Brian O’Hare, the president of the FBI Agents Association, called on Congress to make domestic terrorism a federal crime. In a February USA Today op-ed, O’Hare said such a new law would criminalize acts of political violence that run counter to the constitution. But opponents of creating new laws point to existing criminal statutes often overlooked by law enforcement.

    Calls for new domestic terrorism laws raise numerous concerns for Black communities and other communities of color. While treated as a distant dark history, the surveillance and scrutiny of our communities leads to more than a healthy skepticism of local and federal law enforcement.

    “White nationalist violence has been at the root of this country since its inception,” Maha Hilal, co-director of the Justice for Muslims Collective, told Truthout. The collective organizes to dismantle institutionalized Islamophobia and the long-term impacts of the war on terror.

    “It is abhorrent that after all this time the only intervention that the government has been willing to consider — domestic terrorism charges — is one that will end up hurting Black and Brown communities,” Hilal continued. “This fact demonstrates a lack of willingness on the part of the government to actually confront white nationalist violence on its own and stands in stark contrast to how violence from marginalized groups is dealt with immediately and with the harshest of consequences.”

    While reports have shown the rising threat of white nationalist violence for years, the focus of law enforcement’s attention to popular movements has often centered on Black activists and other activists of color.

    During a press conference held by MediaJustice and partner organizations, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) said the priority should not be on expanding national security powers at the expense of human and civil rights, as this step would undermine an already fragile democracy.

    “The intelligence failure that allowed the capitol siege to occur was not the result of insufficient national security or surveillance powers,” said Tlaib. “If our government and the previous administration had focused more on the threat of white nationalist terrorism, and less on harassing Black Lives Matter, civil rights and left-wing protesters, they would have seen this coming a mile away and taken action to prevent it.”

    During a panel discussion, Adjoa Aiyetoro of the Black and Brown Activism Defense Collective said that any useful response to the January 6 attack will require a historical grounding. Aiyetoro said the attack was devastating, but people needed to stop treating it as a special incident.

    “The difference in treatment of white nationalists and Black and Brown people is historic,” said Aiyetoro. “Black and Brown people have always been the targets. They were the others. And we continue to be other[ed] even though we’ve had civil rights laws and [other laws passed].”

    The impacts of surveillance on targeted communities are often lost in mainstream debates on the issue. Although current and former FBI officials and legal experts recount the FBI’s history of COINTELPRO under J. Edgar Hoover as an example of how surveillance can go “wrong,” they often gloss over the continuation of various forms of domestic surveillance.

    A few years ago, leaked documents showed the FBI engaging in a familiar pattern of targeting Black activism as “extremism,” justifying surveillance and investigation into Black organizing around police killings. In 2017, an FBI intelligence assessment claimed that “Black Identity Extremists” were a growing threat and motivated to kill law enforcement. Various civil rights organizations, including Media Justice and the ACLU, demanded the FBI explain not only the use of the term but reveal which individuals and groups were being targeted. The groups sued in 2019 to compel compliance with previously submitted freedom of information act (FOIA) requests. After national backlash, the FBI claimed to stop using the term in mid-2019. Instead, the agency began using the umbrella term “racially motivated violent extremist,” lumping in Black and other organizers of color with white nationalists.

    In June 2020, in the middle of racial justice uprisings across the country, Media Justice and partner organizations discovered that the FBI continued using the “Black Identity Extremist” label internally. Black self-determination has been treated as a national security threat since the country’s inception. Similar concerns have been raised by Muslim communities, particularly after 9/11. Indigenous advocates and communities have also challenged targeted surveillance and other tactics such as efforts during the Standing Rock protests.

    No one should be shocked at the presence of white supremacists within law enforcement and the military, activists say. They are not lone-wolf “terrorists;” rather, white supremacy is part of the institutions of policing and the military themselves.

    Meanwhile, the language of terrorism has become a rhetorical device that justifies brutal acts — from using facial recognition software to drone strikes on civilians — under the guise of “protecting America.”

    “There’s a real fear in the word ‘terrorism’ as instrumentalized by our political leaders,” shared Sijal Nasralla of MPower Change during the panel. “It’s a term that has been used to harm us. And then I think that it has been used to profile, to harm us, [and] to wage wars on majority Muslim countries … to vindicate that kind of violence.”

    The uprisings that took place across the country after the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor added a new layer of concern about local and federal law enforcement surveillance and targeting of Black activists and others committed to racial justice.

    The Trump administration labeled racial justice and opposition to white supremacy as threats. As white supremacists are classified as “racially motivated violent extremists,” activists question whether the same classification will be used to target those working for racial justice. The terms may have changed but concerns continue as to how Black and other communities of color are being characterized, tracked and targeted in pursuit of so-called safety and security.

    Dissent by people of color is often labeled anti-American and prioritized for targeting by police and carceral systems while white nationalism is often ignored (or even endorsed) by the authorities even when it is publicly recognized as a threat. Having a system built on white supremacy allows for government agencies to conflate the righteous rage of oppressed people with white entitlement and anger.

    This is also seen in the renewed focus on anti-protest bills in multiple state houses across the country. “There have been over 50 anti-protest bills introduced since the insurrection in what seems to be an effort by legislators to capitalize on the chaos and advance proposals that increase penalties and create new criminal sanctions for protesters,” Nora Benavidez told Truthout. As the director of U.S. Free Expression Programs for Pen America, Benavidez has studied the increasing criminalization of dissent studying response to racial justice over the past several years.

    Benavidez says state legislatures fail to address the growing threat of white supremacy and white nationalist violence, instead opting for false equivalencies between the Capitol attack and racial justice protests. The same misleading narrative is seen in the continued use of racially motivated extremism as a single category to regulate without any discernment in the difference between groups. “This narrative is misleading,” continued Benavidez, saying it “conflates an extremist power grab with a BIPOC-led protest movement for social change.

    Some say sunlight is the best disinfectant, yet when government abuses carried out under the guise of surveillance and security are exposed, they’re often characterized as isolated occurrences. However, across jurisdictions, mass surveillance continues to disproportionately impact marginalized communities and those advancing justice and equity.

    Efforts to address safety and security must address white supremacy and systemic racism ingrained in law enforcement institutions at all levels of government. The problem of combatting white supremacist violence cannot be solved through the existing law enforcement apparatus, and require exploring partnerships with grassroots movement-based organizations like the BREATHE Act. Simply acting to implement “anti-terrorism” laws without considering the prevalence of harm caused to Black and other people of color by surveillance programs will only continue to exacerbate the problem.

    “If the government is truly interested in addressing white nationalist violence, then they must develop measures of accountability that don’t result in the targeting and scapegoating of BIPOC communities,” said Hilal.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • NGOs, MPs warn ‘draconian’ draft bill will turn Fiji into police state

    By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A proposed draft Police Bill in Fiji has come under intense scrutiny from civil society groups and opposition parties.

    The draft legislation will give police greater surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.

    The proposal is now open to public submissions and the government says it will replace the Police Act 1965.

    The draft Bill gives police the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices.

    Police can secretly monitor and record communications of people they suspect are about to commit a crime or have committed one, the Bill states.

    The draft law also allows police to recruit an informer or anyone else who can provide information in relation to a police matter.

    The government has not stated why it is necessary for police to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant as stated in the Bill.

    Police powers need ‘updating’
    But the Minister for Police, Inia Seruiratu, said the Police Act 1965 needed to be updated because officers were now tasked with enforcing laws aligned to new and emerging challenges such as the global govid-19 pandemic, terrorism, transnational organised crime and other crimes evident around the globe.

    Seruiratu said the Bill was a preliminary draft of submissions received by police during three days of consultations with the force’s key stakeholders in May 2019.

    “Policing has developed beyond the traditional roles it is known for and the Fiji Police Force needs an enabling foundation that not only assists them in the work they are constitutionally mandated to do but will greatly enhance our national efforts to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving criminal landscape.”

    However, the opposition parties have condemned the draft legislation and warned it encroaches on the civil liberties, democratic values and fundamental rights of Fijians.

    The leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party, Viliame Gavoka, said they would do everything in their power to ensure the draft legislation did not reach the floor of Parliament.

    Gavoka said the “draconian” draft Bill would turn Fiji into a “police state”.

    “There’s lots of uproar in the community about police brutality as it has been ongoing for some time,” he said.

    “And then to introduce a Bill like this is truly frightening.

    People ‘fearful of the police’
    “The mentality of the country right now is fearful of the police. And here we have a Bill that gives them more powers to virtually do whatever they want to do with you.”

    The president of the National Federation Party, Pio Tikoduadua, said the government’s plan to introduce a law that could allow authorities to enter and search anyone’s property through force at any time was “frightening”.

    Tikoduadua said it was “inconceivable, ridiculous and insane”, adding a provision in the proposed Bill would make police force subject to military law in emergencies.

    “So, when police are subjected to military law, does it make them soldiers? This is unthinkable in a democracy. It is martial law and can be invoked at any time.”

    Former opposition leader Mick Beddoes said the proposed legislation would empower the police to suppress instead of protecting the people who had paid $US1.8 billion in wages to the security forces since 2017.

    Beddoes said the Bill would dilute people’s constitutional rights and impose on them some of the harshest penalties and fines.

    He said the proposed new law was ‘unwarranted and unjustified’.

    NGOs claim draft Bill violates rights
    The draft bill also forbade officers from joining a union and it would be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any other type of industrial action.

    Human rights activist Shamima Ali said this violated the fundamental rights of police officers who risked their lives on the front-line to ensure Fijians were safe.

    Speaking at the International Women’s Day in Suva this week, Ali said i was time to push the barriers.

    “The Police Bill has the potential to further shrink us,” she said. “We might think, ‘oh it doesn’t concern us. We’re only concerned with bread and butter’. This concerns everyone.

    “We already have high rates of police brutality, pending cases and other criminal allegations. There are some hardworking, honest officers in the force but there are also the bad cops.”

    The Coalition on Human Rights said this was not the time to be giving police more powers when Fiji was facing a pandemic of police brutality cases where individuals had lost their lives at the hands of police.

    Its director, Nalini Singh, said this was unacceptable and a disgraceful reflection on the force which should be the bastion of lawfulness in this country.

    Raised human rights concerns
    “As the Coalition on Human Rights, we have repeatedly raised our concerns about the excessive force used by the Police during arrests on individuals, and the lack of transparency and urgency from the Police in investigation processes.

    “And yet our call for urgent action have been left unanswered. This proposed Police Bill 2020 is a sad reflection of Fiji’s priorities in its commitments towards upholding and respecting human rights of Fijians.

    According to data from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, between May 2015 and April 2020, 400 police officers were charged with serious violent-related offences.

    The ODPP data showed the offences included 16 charges of rape, two charges of murder and nine charges of manslaughter.

    The largest women’s group in Fiji, Soqosoqo Vakamarama iTaukei, said police officers had the right to be part of a union.

    The group’s spokesperson, Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, said the Bill was supposed to help facilitate the work of the force.

    Meanwhile, the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission said it would, in its substantive submission, call for alignment of the Bill with the state’s human rights obligation under the domestic procedures and international conventions and treaties that Fiji had ratified.

    Submission after tabling
    Commissioner Ashwin Raj said his office would make its submission when the Bill was tabled in Parliament.

    Raj said any commentary on the draft bill, before it was tabled in Parliament, was “premature”.

    Meanwhile, police and the roads authority received an application for a protest permit march next week against the draft bill.

    Lautoka-based businessman Ben Padarath also lodged applications with the Suva City Council.

    The move has been supported by Opposition Whip Lynda Tabuya who said she would gather signatures for a petition to be presented to Parliament when it sits next month.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • NGOs, MPs warn ‘draconian’ draft bill will turn Fiji into police state

    By Christine Rovoi, RNZ Pacific journalist

    A proposed draft Police Bill in Fiji has come under intense scrutiny from civil society groups and opposition parties.

    The draft legislation will give police greater surveillance powers if passed in Parliament.

    The proposal is now open to public submissions and the government says it will replace the Police Act 1965.

    The draft Bill gives police the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices.

    Police can secretly monitor and record communications of people they suspect are about to commit a crime or have committed one, the Bill states.

    The draft law also allows police to recruit an informer or anyone else who can provide information in relation to a police matter.

    The government has not stated why it is necessary for police to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant as stated in the Bill.

    Police powers need ‘updating’
    But the Minister for Police, Inia Seruiratu, said the Police Act 1965 needed to be updated because officers were now tasked with enforcing laws aligned to new and emerging challenges such as the global govid-19 pandemic, terrorism, transnational organised crime and other crimes evident around the globe.

    Seruiratu said the Bill was a preliminary draft of submissions received by police during three days of consultations with the force’s key stakeholders in May 2019.

    “Policing has developed beyond the traditional roles it is known for and the Fiji Police Force needs an enabling foundation that not only assists them in the work they are constitutionally mandated to do but will greatly enhance our national efforts to effectively respond to the rapidly evolving criminal landscape.”

    However, the opposition parties have condemned the draft legislation and warned it encroaches on the civil liberties, democratic values and fundamental rights of Fijians.

    The leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party, Viliame Gavoka, said they would do everything in their power to ensure the draft legislation did not reach the floor of Parliament.

    Gavoka said the “draconian” draft Bill would turn Fiji into a “police state”.

    “There’s lots of uproar in the community about police brutality as it has been ongoing for some time,” he said.

    “And then to introduce a Bill like this is truly frightening.

    People ‘fearful of the police’
    “The mentality of the country right now is fearful of the police. And here we have a Bill that gives them more powers to virtually do whatever they want to do with you.”

    The president of the National Federation Party, Pio Tikoduadua, said the government’s plan to introduce a law that could allow authorities to enter and search anyone’s property through force at any time was “frightening”.

    Tikoduadua said it was “inconceivable, ridiculous and insane”, adding a provision in the proposed Bill would make police force subject to military law in emergencies.

    “So, when police are subjected to military law, does it make them soldiers? This is unthinkable in a democracy. It is martial law and can be invoked at any time.”

    Former opposition leader Mick Beddoes said the proposed legislation would empower the police to suppress instead of protecting the people who had paid $US1.8 billion in wages to the security forces since 2017.

    Beddoes said the Bill would dilute people’s constitutional rights and impose on them some of the harshest penalties and fines.

    He said the proposed new law was ‘unwarranted and unjustified’.

    NGOs claim draft Bill violates rights
    The draft bill also forbade officers from joining a union and it would be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any other type of industrial action.

    Human rights activist Shamima Ali said this violated the fundamental rights of police officers who risked their lives on the front-line to ensure Fijians were safe.

    Speaking at the International Women’s Day in Suva this week, Ali said i was time to push the barriers.

    “The Police Bill has the potential to further shrink us,” she said. “We might think, ‘oh it doesn’t concern us. We’re only concerned with bread and butter’. This concerns everyone.

    “We already have high rates of police brutality, pending cases and other criminal allegations. There are some hardworking, honest officers in the force but there are also the bad cops.”

    The Coalition on Human Rights said this was not the time to be giving police more powers when Fiji was facing a pandemic of police brutality cases where individuals had lost their lives at the hands of police.

    Its director, Nalini Singh, said this was unacceptable and a disgraceful reflection on the force which should be the bastion of lawfulness in this country.

    Raised human rights concerns
    “As the Coalition on Human Rights, we have repeatedly raised our concerns about the excessive force used by the Police during arrests on individuals, and the lack of transparency and urgency from the Police in investigation processes.

    “And yet our call for urgent action have been left unanswered. This proposed Police Bill 2020 is a sad reflection of Fiji’s priorities in its commitments towards upholding and respecting human rights of Fijians.

    According to data from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, between May 2015 and April 2020, 400 police officers were charged with serious violent-related offences.

    The ODPP data showed the offences included 16 charges of rape, two charges of murder and nine charges of manslaughter.

    The largest women’s group in Fiji, Soqosoqo Vakamarama iTaukei, said police officers had the right to be part of a union.

    The group’s spokesperson, Adi Finau Tabakaucoro, said the Bill was supposed to help facilitate the work of the force.

    Meanwhile, the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Commission said it would, in its substantive submission, call for alignment of the Bill with the state’s human rights obligation under the domestic procedures and international conventions and treaties that Fiji had ratified.

    Submission after tabling
    Commissioner Ashwin Raj said his office would make its submission when the Bill was tabled in Parliament.

    Raj said any commentary on the draft bill, before it was tabled in Parliament, was “premature”.

    Meanwhile, police and the roads authority received an application for a protest permit march next week against the draft bill.

    Lautoka-based businessman Ben Padarath also lodged applications with the Suva City Council.

    The move has been supported by Opposition Whip Lynda Tabuya who said she would gather signatures for a petition to be presented to Parliament when it sits next month.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The New Normal (Phase 2)

    So, we’re almost a year into the “New Normal” (a/k/a “pathologized totalitarianism”) and things are still looking … well, pretty totalitarian.

    Most of Western Europe is still in “lockdown,” or “under curfew,” or in some other state of “health emergency.” Police are fining and arresting people for “being outdoors without a valid reason.” Protest is still banned. Dissent is still censored. The official propaganda is relentless. Governments are ruling by edict, subjecting people to an ever-changing series of increasingly absurd restrictions of the most fundamental aspects of everyday life.

    And now, the campaign to “vaccinate” the entirety of humanity against a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms or, more commonly, no symptoms at all, in over 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of the infected survive (and that has no real effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile) is being waged with literally religious fervor.

    “Vaccine passports” (which are definitely creepy, but which bear no resemblance to Aryan Ancestry Certificates, or any other fascistic apartheid-type documents, so don’t even think about making such a comparison!) are in the pipeline in a number of countries. They have already been rolled out in Israel.

    In other words, as predicted by us “conspiracy theorists,” the “temporary emergency public health measures” implemented by GloboCap in March of 2020 are still very much in effect, and then some. That said, as you have probably noticed, the tenor of things is shifting a bit, which is unsurprising, as GloboCap is now making the transition from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal” roll-out.

    Phase 1 was pretty much classic “shock and awe.” An “apocalyptic virus” was “discovered.” A global “state of emergency” was declared. Constitutional rights were cancelled. Soldiers, police, surveillance cameras, military drones, and robot dogs were deployed to implement the worldwide police state. The masses were bombarded with official propaganda, photos of people dropping dead in the street, unconscious patients dying in agony, bodies being stuffed into makeshift morgue trucks, hospital ships, ICU horror stories, projections of hundreds of millions of deaths, terror-inducing Orwellian slogans, sentimental “war effort” billboards, and so on. The full force of the most formidable Goebbelsian propaganda machine in history was unleashed on the public all at once. (See, e.g., CNN, NPR, CNBC, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Forbes, and other “authoritative” sources like the IMF and the World Bank Group, the WEF, UN, WHO, CDC.)

    But the “shock and awe” phase can’t go on forever, nor is it ever intended to. Its purpose is (a) to terrorize the targeted masses into a state of submission, (b) to irreversibly destabilize their society, so that it can be radically “restructured,” and (c) to convincingly demonstrate an overwhelming superiority of force, so that resistance is rendered inconceivable. This shock and awe (or “rapid dominance”) tactic has been deployed by empires, and aspiring empires, throughout the course of military history. It has just been deployed by GloboCap against … well, against the entire world. And now, that phase is coming to an end.

    The shape of Phase 2 is not entirely clear yet, but one can make a few logical assumptions. Typically, this is the phase in which the conquering force (in this case, GloboCap) restores “normality” (i.e., a “new normality”) to the society it has just destabilized and terrorized. It installs a new occupation-friendly government, restarts the economy, and otherwise begins the gradual transition from martial law to something resembling “normal” everyday life. It hands out candy bars to kids, financial aid to businesses, power to generals and police, and “freedom” to the shell-shocked public.

    This appears to be where we are at the moment. As you’ve probably noticed, the corporate media, government leaders, and medical experts have been making noise about “the end of the pandemic,” or at least “the end of the emergency phase” of it. Suddenly, “some level of Covid is tolerable,” “Zero Covid is unlikely,” et cetera. This is happening pretty much right on cue.

    Now that the vaccination push is underway, they are trying to temper the mass paranoia and hatred that they have fomented for over a year with some hope and a vision of a post-crisis future. Governments are carefully relaxing restrictions, making sure we understand that if we don’t obey orders, wear our masks, get our vaccinations, and so, they will crack down on us again without mercy. They want to ease us into the pathologized-totalitarian future gently, so that it feels like we are being liberated, returning to some semblance of normal life, albeit in a new, more terrifying, perpetually-virus-and-extremist-threatened world.

    For example, here in Germany, the government has decided to “return some freedom and trust to the people,” but they are prepared to lock us down “hard” again if they suspect we haven’t “used their trust wisely.” According to the 5-Step Plan, bookshops and florists can reopen this week with a one-person-per-ten-square-meter limit, up to ten people can play non-contact sports, and five people from no more than two households can meet up (and, thus, also play non-contact sports), unless the “incidence rate” of positive PCR tests rises above 100 per thousand, in which case, back to “hard lockdown” we go. Two weeks after that, on March 22, if the “positive-test rate” stays below 50, outdoor restaurant dining can resume, and theaters, cinemas, and opera houses can open. However, if the “positive-test rate” is more than 50 but less than 100, outdoor dining will only be permitted on a strictly pre-booking basis. (One assumes there will be roving goon squads examining restaurants’ booking records and ordering patrons to show their papers.) There are further Kafkaesque conditions in the plan, but I think you get the general idea.

    Meanwhile, in the USA, although DC remains under occupation, the Capitol surrounded by razor-wire fences to protect democracy from an imaginary enemy straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, Texas, Mississippi, and a few other states are joining Florida in open rebellion, and allowing people to go out to eat, get together with their families and friends, walk around in public without medical-looking masks, and otherwise go about living their lives in a totally non-anus-clenched-paranoid fashion.

    Notwithstanding the outrage of the Covidian Cultists, this development is not of great concern to GloboCap, as the coastal power centers are full-blown “New Normal,” and the liberals who predominantly occupy them have been transformed into paranoid, hysterical zealots who now dedicate a considerable amount of time to hunting down alleged “Covid deniers,” “anti-maskers,” “vaccine refusers,” “white-supremacist extremists,” “conspiracy theorists,” “libertarians,” dead “racist cartoonists,” and anyone else who won’t conform to their pathologized-totalitarian ideology, and obsessively trolling them on social media, or reporting their thoughtcrimes to the Reality Police.

    This transformation of the relatively affluent, predominantly liberal, middle/upper classes, and the millions futilely aspiring thereto, into mindlessly-order-following “Good Germans” (or, rather, mindlessly-order-following “New Normals”) has also occurred here in Western Europe, and elsewhere throughout the global capitalist empire, and was one of GloboCap’s main objectives throughout Phase 1 of the “New Normal” roll out. This transformation has been in progress for quite some time, less dramatically and without a virus. It will continue once this virus is gone.

    The “New Normal” isn’t just about a virus. The “New Normal” was never just about a virus. You don’t need a new “normal” because of a virus. You need a new “normal” when your current “normal” has outlived its usefulness to those in power, which, in our case, are the global capitalist ruling classes.

    I’ve been writing about this for … well, most of my life, and publishing these columns for the last five years, so I’m not going to summarize all that here, but, basically, we’re living through one of those historic transformations of the structure of political power that we usually don’t recognize until after it has occurred … not just a “changing of the guard,” a transformation of the nature of power, how it is exercised, the beliefs it is based on, and the “reality” conjured into being by those beliefs.

    This transformation began with the end of the Cold War, when global capitalism became the first globally-hegemonic ideological system in history. The roll-out of the “New Normal” is part of that transformation, not the whole of it, but an essential stage. We are transitioning from an ideological “reality” to a post-ideological, pathologized “reality” … a “reality” in which any and all deviation from official ideology (i.e., “normality”) is no longer a political challenge or threat, but an “illness” or “psychiatric disorder.”

    I’m going to be obnoxious and quote myself, so that I don’t have to try to explain this again. Here’s a passage from a recent column:

    A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory ‘outside’ the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists.’ These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called ‘normality’ (or, in our case, currently, ‘New Normality’) … [t]he new breed of ‘terrorists’ do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate ‘reality.’ They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be ‘treated,’ ‘reeducated,’ and ‘deprogrammed,’ until they accept ‘Reality.’

    As we shift from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the “New Normal,” the pathologization of political dissent will continue, and intensify, both overtly and subtlely. GloboCap and the corporate media will continue to warn of imminent “attacks on democracy” by imaginary “domestic terrorists,” as well as the old “non-domestic terrorists.” They will also continue to warn of imminent threats posed by exotic viruses, and “variants” of exotic viruses, and permanent “conditions” caused by viruses, and other threats to our bodily fluids. Above all, they will continue to warn of the danger of ingesting “misinformation,” “conspiracy theories,” or any other type of unverified, unauthorized, un-fact-checked content. They will thoroughly diagnose the sources of such content, and exhaustively explain the pathological conditions these sources will clearly be suffering from. They will explore a variety of treatments and cures, and recommend prophylactic measures against potential exposure to these sources.

    These multiplicitous “threats to democracy” (i.e., “terrorists,” “viruses,” “misinformation,” “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” “electoral-system scepticism,” “white-supremacist pancake syrup,” “premeditated pronoun abuse,” “oppositional-defiant-infant masklessness,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “religion,” et cetera) will fuse into a single Goldstein-like enemy which “New Normal” children will be conditioned to reflexively hate and fear, and want to silence, and quarantine off from “normal” society, or “cure” of their “illness” with government-mandated, “safe and effective” pharmaceutical therapies.

    But whatever … I wouldn’t worry about that. I’m probably just getting all worked up over nothing. After all, as a lot of my ex-friends will tell you (through their multiple masks and prophylactic face shields), I’m just a paranoid “conspiracy theorist” spreading “unverified misinformation.”

    • Photos: (1) Abir Sultan/EPE/EFE; (2) Ahnenpaß CC BY-SA 3.0;

    The post The New Normal (Phase 2) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Home Invasions: All the Ways the Government Can Lay Siege to Your Property

    “How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and … foricibly enter?”

    — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lone dissenter in Kentucky v. King

    Americans are not safe in their homes.

    Not anymore, at least.

    This present menace comes from the government and its army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized mercenaries who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

    The weapons of this particular war on our personal security and our freedoms include an abundance of laws that criminalize almost everything we do, a government that views our private property as its own, militarized police who have been brainwashed into believing that they operate above the law, courts that insulate police from charges of wrongdoing, legislatures that legitimize the government’s usurpations of our rights, and a populace that is so ignorant of their rights and distracted by partisan politics as to be utterly incapable of standing up to the government’s overreaches, incursions and power grabs.

    This is how far the mighty have fallen.

    Government agents—with or without a warrant, with or without probable cause that criminal activity is afoot, and with or without the consent of the homeowner—are now justified in mounting home invasions in order to pursue traffic violators, seize lawfully-owned weapons, carry out knock-and-talk “chats” with homeowners in the dead of night, “prevent” individuals from harming themselves, provide emergency aid, intervene in the face of imminent danger, serve as community caretakers, chase down individuals suspected of committing misdemeanor crimes, and anything else they can get away with.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime may be using surveillance technology—with or without the blessing of the courts—to invade one’s home: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.

    However, while the courts and legislatures have yet to fully address the implications of such virtual intrusions on our Fourth Amendment, there is no mistaking the physical intrusions by police into the privacy of one’s home: the toehold entry, the battering ram, the SWAT raid, the knock-and-talk conversation, etc.

    Whether such intrusions, warranted or otherwise, are unconstitutional continues to be litigated, legislated and debated.

    The spirit of the Constitution, drafted by men who chafed against the heavy-handed tyranny of an imperial ruler, would suggest that one’s home is a fortress, safe from almost every kind of intrusion. Unfortunately, a collective assault by the government’s cabal of legislators, litigators, judges and militarized police has all but succeeded in reducing that fortress—and the Fourth Amendment alongside it—to a crumbling pile of rubble.

    Two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, Caniglia v. Strom and Lange v. California, are particularly noteworthy.

    In Caniglia v. Strom, police want to be able to carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called “community caretaking” duties. Under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment, police can conduct warrantless searches of vehicles relating to accident investigations and provide aid to “citizens who are ill or in distress.”

    At a time when red flag gun laws are gaining traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, it wouldn’t take much to expand the Fourth Amendment’s “community caretaking” exception to allow police to enter a home without a warrant and seize lawfully-possessed firearms based on concerns that the guns might pose a danger.

    What we do not need is yet another pretext by which government officials can violate the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety.

    In Lange v. California, police want to be able to enter homes without warrants as long as they can claim to be in pursuit of someone they suspect may have committed a crime. Yet as Justice Neil Gorsuch points out, in an age in which everything has been criminalized, that leaves the door wide open for police to enter one’s home in pursuit of any and all misdemeanor crimes.

    At issue in Lange is whether police can justify entering homes without a warrant under the “hot pursuit” exception to the Fourth Amendment.

    The case arose after a California cop followed a driver, Arthur Lange, who was honking his horn while listening to music. The officer followed Lange, supposedly to cite him for violating a local noise ordinance, but didn’t actually activate the police cruiser’s emergency lights until Lange had already arrived home and entered his garage. Sticking his foot under the garage door just as it was about to close, the cop confronted Lange, smelled alcohol on his breath, ordered him to take a sobriety test, and then charged him with a DUI and a noise infraction.

    Lange is just chock full of troubling indicators of a greater tyranny at work.

    Over-criminalization: That you can now get pulled over and cited for honking your horn while driving and listening to music illustrates just how uptight and over-regulated life in the American police state has become.

    Make-work policing: At a time when crime remains at an all-time low, it’s telling that a police officer has nothing better to do than follow a driver seemingly guilty of nothing more than enjoying loud music.

    Warrantless entry: That foot in the door is a tactic that, while technically illegal, is used frequently by police attempting to finagle their way into a home and sidestep the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

    The definition of reasonable: Although the Fourth Amendment prohibits warrantless and unreasonable searches and seizures of “persons, houses, papers, and effects,” where we run into real trouble is when the government starts dancing around what constitutes a “reasonable” search. Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what is reasonable. There’s even a balancing test that weighs the intrusion on a person’s right to privacy against the government’s interests, which include public safety.

    Too often, the scales weigh in the government’s favor.

    End runs around the law: The courts, seemingly more concerned with marching in lockstep with the police state than upholding the rights of the people, have provided police with a long list of exceptions that have gutted the Fourth Amendment’s once-robust privacy protections.

    Exceptions to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement allow the police to carry out warrantless searches: if someone agrees to the search; in order to ferret out weapons or evidence during the course of an arrest; if police think someone is acting suspiciously and may be armed; during a brief investigatory stop; if a cop sees something connected to a crime in plain view; if police are in hot pursuit of a suspect who flees into a building; if they believe a vehicle has contraband; in an emergency where there may not be time to procure a warrant; and at national borders and in airports.

    In other words, almost anything goes when it comes to all the ways in which the government can now invade your home and lay siege to your property.

    Thus we tumble down that slippery slope which might have started out with a genuine concern for public safety and the well-being of the citizenry only to end up as a self-serving expansion of the government’s powers that makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment while utterly disregarding the rights of “we the people.”

    Frankly, it’s a wonder we have any property interests, let alone property rights, left to protect.

    Think about it.

    That house you live in, the car you drive, the small (or not so small) acreage of land that has been passed down through your family or that you scrimped and saved to acquire, whatever money you manage to keep in your bank account after the government and its cronies have taken their first and second and third cut…none of it is safe from the government’s greedy grasp.

    At no point do you ever have any real ownership in anything other than the clothes on your back.

    Everything else can be seized by the government under one pretext or another (civil asset forfeiture, unpaid taxes, eminent domain, public interest, etc.).

    The American Dream has been reduced to a lease arrangement in which we are granted the privilege of endlessly paying out the nose for assets that are only ours so long as it suits the government’s purposes.

    And when it doesn’t suit the government’s purposes? Watch out.

    This is not a government that respects the rights of its citizenry or the law. Rather, this is a government that sells its citizens to the highest bidder and speaks to them in a language of force.

    Under such a fascist regime, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which declares that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation,” has become yet another broken shield, incapable of rendering any protection against corporate greed while allowing the government to justify all manner of “takings” in the name of the public good.

    What we are grappling with is a government that has forfeited its purpose for existing.

    Philosophers dating back to John Locke have long asserted that the true purpose of government is to protect our rights, not just our collective rights as a people, but our individual rights, specifically our rights to life, liberty and property. As James Madison concluded in the Federalist Papers, “Government is instituted no less for the protection of the property than of the persons of individuals.”

    What we have been saddled with is a government that has not only lost sight of its primary reason for being—to protect the people’s rights—but has also re-written the script and cast itself as an imperial overlord with all of the neo-feudal authority such a position entails.

    Let me put it another way.

    If the government can tell you what you can and cannot do within the privacy of your home, whether it relates to what you eat, what you smoke or whom you love, you no longer have any rights whatsoever within your home.

    If government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, gathering with friends to worship in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    If school officials can punish your children for what they do or say while at home or in your care, your children are not your own—they are the property of the state.

    If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government.

    If police can forcefully draw your blood, strip search you, probe you intimately, or force you to submit to vaccinations or lose your so-called “privileges” to move about and interact freely with your fellow citizens, your body is no longer your own—it is the government’s to do with as it deems best.

    Likewise, if the government can lockdown whole communities and by extension the nation, quarantine whole segments of the population, outlaw religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, and “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” then you no longer have a property interest as master of your own life, either.

    This is what a world without the Fourth Amendment looks like, where the lines between private and public property have been so blurred that private property is reduced to little more than something the government can use to control, manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.

    If we continue down this road, the analogy shifts from property owners to prisoners in a government-run prison with local and federal police acting as prison guards. In such an environment, you have no rights.

    So what can we do, short of scrapping this whole experiment in self-government and starting over?

    At a minimum, we need to rebuild the foundations of our freedoms.

    What this will mean is adopting an apolitical, nonpartisan, zero tolerance attitude towards the government when it oversteps its bounds and infringes on our rights.

    We need courts that prioritize the rights of the citizenry over the government’s insatiable hunger for power at all costs.

    We need people in the government—representatives, bureaucrats, etc.—who honor the public service oath to uphold and defend the Constitution.

    Most of all, we need to reclaim control over our runaway government and restore our freedoms.

    After all, we are the government. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are supposed to be the ones calling the shots. As John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, rightly observed: “No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.”

    The post Home Invasions: All the Ways the Government Can Lay Siege to Your Property first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • More power for Fiji’s police force – draft bill enables eavesdropping

    By Anish Chand in Suva

    Fiji police will have sweeping powers to monitor communications and forcefully enter premises to place tracking devices under the proposed Police Bill 2020.

    The draft legislation is now open for public submissions and will replace the Police Act 1965 once passed by Parliament.

    Police will have the powers to secretly or forcefully enter any premises to place tracking devices, states the draft law.

    They will need to obtain a warrant from a High Court judge and “specify the vehicle, craft, or conveyance of any kind or goods that may be tracked, specify the premises, vehicle, craft, or conveyance of any kind that may be entered pursuant to the warrant”, states the draft law.

    Police can also secretly monitor and record “communications” of persons about to commit a crime or have committed a crime if the draft law is passed in its current form.

    The law also allows police to recruit an “informer” who is described as “any person who, whether formally recruited by police or otherwise, provides information in relation to anything sought by police for any lawful purpose”.

    Police officers will not be allowed to join a union, states the draft law and it will be unlawful for them to go on strike or to take any industrial action.

    Fiji Village radio website reports that the draft bill proposes that a police officer or special constable would be able to search a crime scene and seize potential evidence without a warrant.

    The proposed law says a police officer or special constable may search any person, animal, vehicle or vessel at the crime scene or in the immediate vicinity of such crime scene.

    Any person who fails to comply with this could be sent to prison for up to five years.

    Anish Chand is a Fiji Times reporter. This report is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Myanmar’s Bloody Sunday – security forces ‘live tracking’ media, protesters

    By Phil Thornton in Bangkok

    The Myanmar army, police and militia’s use of violence against peaceful protestors reached another level on Sunday, February 28.

    By 5pm, local media reported at least 19 confirmed killings and another 10 unconfirmed. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) spoke to journalists covering the nationwide protests.

    Toe Zaw Latt, a video journalist and production director with Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), is not surprised by the brutality or the extreme force used by the security forces.

    “It’s their assignment,” he said. “This is what they’re trained to do. Arrest people for exercising their democratic rights. Shoot them, beat them with iron bars, use powerful slingshots to fire bolts, and metal spikes.

    “Use tear gas and fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed people. They want to silence journalists, but we need to report.”

    Toe Zaw Latt was 17 in 1988 when he first faced the military’s violence. He prays the violence in 2021 does not reach the level experienced in 1988 when security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of peaceful protesters, killing thousands.

    “Thousands of us had to take refuge in neighbouring countries. Protest leaders and other activists were jailed for years, tortured and denied any human rights in prison,” he said

    Military blackouts
    DVB, an independent media company, has managed to keep broadcasting, despite the crisis and enforced country wide military blackouts.

    “They pulled the plug on us, but we now rely on our satellite being outside the country,”  said Toe Zaw Latt. “We’re managing to operate 24/7 and every two hours we have a 30-minute news bulletin plus our live social media platform.”

    In 2021, technology is changing how journalists and protesters record abuses, he says.

    “Everyone now has a smartphone and everyone can record the military’s crimes against humanity. But I fear for my staff’s security.

    “We are easily identified as journalists by our equipment and PRESS signage, but we are still targeted by security forces because they don’t want their brutality and crimes recorded.”

    Protesters and journalists are not the only ones using technology. Security forces are using surveillance tools to “live” track protesters’ locations, listen in on conversations and trawl through computers and phones.

    Justice for Myanmar, undercover advocates who campaign for justice and accountability in the country, released a number of reports implicating Western companies in the supply of surveillance technology now used by the military to track its pro-democracy opponents.

    Israeli surveillance technology
    The Ministry of Home Affairs budget files, obtained by Justice for Myanmar and reported in The New York Times, “indicate that dual-use surveillance technology made by Israeli, American and European companies made its way to Myanmar, despite many of their home governments banning such exports after the military’s brutal expulsion of Rohingya Muslims in 2017.”

    Justice for Myanmar spokesperson Yadanar Maung said:“The military are now using those very tools to brutally crack down on peaceful protesters risking their lives to resist the military junta and restore democracy, and to move against journalists who are exercising their right to report on protests.”

    Despite military surveillance, arrests and violence, Toe Zaw Latt says journalists seem determined to keep reporting.

    “It’s challenging for reporters working in these conditions. They [security forces] just start walking into residential streets and start shooting, they’re like mad dogs. Our professional equipment marks us as a target, but we’ll continue to do our job.”

    Aye Win, (not her real name) works for an international news agency in a major city, said it’s the unseen violence that worries her the most. “We fear most what we can’t see – snipers and the thought of what they will do to you when they take you to the barracks or jail,” she said.

    Gunshots, loud can be heard in the background as Aye Win describes an army truck outside delivering more troops to the area. “It’s now 5.30pm and it’s not safe to go out. My female colleagues are scared…not of the crackdown, but of the unseen brutality. I worry about my freelancers, they have no protection, media laws are weak. Police have no respect for journalists, if you get too close they grab and steal your equipment.”

    Evolving security tactics
    Ng Maung has been on the frontline since the coup started on February 1 and has noticed how the security forces tactics have evolved.

    “They have started to remove their identification badges. Our PRESS logo is now a target. Not knowing where snipers are is a huge fear, we now need protection from bullets.

    “If I can see them I’m not scared. It’s not safe to be on the streets at any time. Ten journalists have been arrested already.”

    Toe Zaw Latt explained even if journalists work for international agencies or for a small local media outlet or as a freelancer there is no guarantees for their safety or protection of their right to work without interference from security forces.

    “No one is safe under this military government. We’re all in immediate danger, but at the same time we have to report, we can’t stay silent.”

    The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners an independent organisation founded and run by former political prisoners reported as of March 1 that 1,213 people have been arrested and 913 remain in detention.

    AAP said security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protestors and journalists and live ammunition was also fired at residential homes. Reports of security forces looting and robbing have been confirmed by video footage shared by credible sources on social media.

    Toe Zaw Latt said people have responded by trying to secure their neighbourhoods. “Residents are blocking the roads to stop the police and army from entering, the community are protecting student protestors.

    “There’s no rule of law in Myanmar, but people are helping activists and journalist with food, refuge and lifts. They treat people battling the effects of tear gas.

    “They have even given us masks to stop the risk of covid spread. People say the military is a bigger risk than covid – they’re far more dangerous to the people of Myanmar.”

    Phil Thornton is an adviser for IFJ in South East Asia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Myanmar’s Bloody Sunday – security forces ‘live tracking’ media, protesters

    The Myanmar army, police and militia’s use of violence against peaceful protestors reached another level on Sunday, February 28.

    By 5pm, local media reported at least 19 confirmed killings and another 10 unconfirmed. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) spoke to journalists covering the nationwide protests.

    Toe Zaw Latt, a video journalist and production director with Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), is not surprised by the brutality or the extreme force used by the security forces.

    “It’s their assignment,” he said. “This is what they’re trained to do. Arrest people for exercising their democratic rights. Shoot them, beat them with iron bars, use powerful slingshots to fire bolts, and metal spikes.

    “Use tear gas and fire live ammunition into crowds of unarmed people. They want to silence journalists, but we need to report.”

    Toe Zaw Latt was 17 in 1988 when he first faced the military’s violence. He prays the violence in 2021 does not reach the level experienced in 1988 when security forces fired live ammunition into crowds of peaceful protesters, killing thousands.

    “Thousands of us had to take refuge in neighbouring countries. Protest leaders and other activists were jailed for years, tortured and denied any human rights in prison,” he said

    Military blackouts
    DVB, an independent media company, has managed to keep broadcasting, despite the crisis and enforced country wide military blackouts.

    “They pulled the plug on us, but we now rely on our satellite being outside the country,”  said Toe Zaw Latt. “We’re managing to operate 24/7 and every two hours we have a 30-minute news bulletin plus our live social media platform.”

    In 2021, technology is changing how journalists and protesters record abuses, he says.

    “Everyone now has a smartphone and everyone can record the military’s crimes against humanity. But I fear for my staff’s security.

    “We are easily identified as journalists by our equipment and PRESS signage, but we are still targeted by security forces because they don’t want their brutality and crimes recorded.”

    Protesters and journalists are not the only ones using technology. Security forces are using surveillance tools to “live” track protesters’ locations, listen in on conversations and trawl through computers and phones.

    Justice for Myanmar, undercover advocates who campaign for justice and accountability in the country, released a number of reports implicating Western companies in the supply of surveillance technology now used by the military to track its pro-democracy opponents.

    Israeli surveillance technology
    The Ministry of Home Affairs budget files, obtained by Justice for Myanmar and reported in The New York Times, “indicate that dual-use surveillance technology made by Israeli, American and European companies made its way to Myanmar, despite many of their home governments banning such exports after the military’s brutal expulsion of Rohingya Muslims in 2017.”

    Justice for Myanmar spokesperson Yadanar Maung said:“The military are now using those very tools to brutally crack down on peaceful protesters risking their lives to resist the military junta and restore democracy, and to move against journalists who are exercising their right to report on protests.”

    Despite military surveillance, arrests and violence, Toe Zaw Latt says journalists seem determined to keep reporting.

    “It’s challenging for reporters working in these conditions. They [security forces] just start walking into residential streets and start shooting, they’re like mad dogs. Our professional equipment marks us as a target, but we’ll continue to do our job.”

    Aye Win, (not her real name) works for an international news agency in a major city, said it’s the unseen violence that worries her the most. “We fear most what we can’t see – snipers and the thought of what they will do to you when they take you to the barracks or jail,” she said.

    Gunshots, loud can be heard in the background as Aye Win describes an army truck outside delivering more troops to the area. “It’s now 5.30pm and it’s not safe to go out. My female colleagues are scared…not of the crackdown, but of the unseen brutality. I worry about my freelancers, they have no protection, media laws are weak. Police have no respect for journalists, if you get too close they grab and steal your equipment.”

    Evolving security tactics
    Ng Maung has been on the frontline since the coup started on February 1 and has noticed how the security forces tactics have evolved.

    “They have started to remove their identification badges. Our PRESS logo is now a target. Not knowing where snipers are is a huge fear, we now need protection from bullets.

    “If I can see them I’m not scared. It’s not safe to be on the streets at any time. Ten journalists have been arrested already.”

    Toe Zaw Latt explained even if journalists work for international agencies or for a small local media outlet or as a freelancer there is no guarantees for their safety or protection of their right to work without interference from security forces.

    “No one is safe under this military government. We’re all in immediate danger, but at the same time we have to report, we can’t stay silent.”

    The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners an independent organisation founded and run by former political prisoners reported as of March 1 that 1,213 people have been arrested and 913 remain in detention.

    AAP said security forces fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protestors and journalists and live ammunition was also fired at residential homes. Reports of security forces looting and robbing have been confirmed by video footage shared by credible sources on social media.

    Toe Zaw Latt said people have responded by trying to secure their neighbourhoods. “Residents are blocking the roads to stop the police and army from entering, the community are protecting student protestors.

    “There’s no rule of law in Myanmar, but people are helping activists and journalist with food, refuge and lifts. They treat people battling the effects of tear gas.

    “They have even given us masks to stop the risk of covid spread. People say the military is a bigger risk than covid – they’re far more dangerous to the people of Myanmar.”

    Phil Thornton is an adviser for IFJ in South East Asia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Corporate Media Parrot FBI Talking Points as More Americans Turn to Encrypted Communication Online

     

    NextGov: FBI: ‘Dozens’ of Terror Suspects Have Used Encryption to Hide from Law Enforcement

    FBI Director James Comey (Nextgov, 10/8/15) told Congress that his agency lost track of “dozens” of terror suspects because of encryption. “We’re really not just mak­ing this up,” he assured senators.

    Before he became a household name as the accused spoiler of the 2016 election, James Comey, FBI director under President Barack Obama, was already well-known in tech circles as a crusader against strong encryption. Still smarting from Edward Snowden’s exposure of the US government’s massive and illegal domestic spying operations, Comey grabbed any microphone he could during the waning years of Obama’s tenure to warn Americans that encryption technology was putting us all at grave risk by causing law enforcement to “go dark.”

    Cryptography is the art of encoding text or other data such that only those who have the secret key can read it. This data can include anything from messages and records to digital currency—but these days encryption most commonly protects account passwords and other sensitive information as it traverses the internet.

    Encryption has been around for millennia and, in modern times, it is used on a daily basis by nearly every person living in a technologized society. But like any technology, it can frighten those in power when wielded by the relatively powerless. In the summer of 2015, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that encryption had suddenly inspired the FBI “to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.”

    Sensitive to the public’s lingering outrage at the Snowden revelations, Comey turned to the usual parade of horribles in his attempts to convince Congress that encryption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “Malicious actors can take advantage of the internet to covertly plot violent robberies, murders and kidnappings,” he warned. “Sex offenders can establish virtual communities to buy, sell and encourage the creation of new depictions of horrific sexual abuse of children.”

    Comey preferred to use “horrific sexual abuse of children” and the specter of terrorism to disparage encryption technology—recall the showdown between the FBI and Apple after the perpetrators of a late-2015 massacre in San Bernardino left behind an encrypted iPhone. But the ACLU (4/1/16) quickly exposed his fraud: Researchers uncovered 63 court orders for access to encrypted devices and reported, “To the extent we know about the underlying facts, these cases predominantly arise out of investigations into drug crimes”—rather than terrorists and pedophiles.

    In the wake of the January 6 mob attack on the US Capitol Building, this pattern is repeating itself again…only now corporate media are taking up the FBI’s mantle on their own behalf.

    NBC: Extremists move to secret online channels to plan for Inauguration Day in D.C.

    NBC (1/12/21) warned that “right-wing extremists are using channels on the encrypted communication app Telegram to call for violence against government officials on January 20.”

    Following the violence in DC, headlines across corporate media declared: “Far Right Turns to Encrypted Platforms to Stoke Further Unrest” (Financial Times, 1/14/21). This mass “relocation” online led corporate outlets to speculate that political extremists were planning something huge. NBC News (1/12/21) cherry-picked posts on the encrypted messaging app Telegram to foment fears of “a big turnout in Washington at Biden’s inauguration on January 20.” Politico (1/12/21) and the Washington Post (1/14/21) similarly linked the use of encryption to imminent violence. Despite weeks of breathless anticipation, that violence never materialized.

    Like Comey, corporate media have resorted to guilt by association to turn their readers against digital security. According to Vice (4/17/19), encrypted messaging apps and e-mail systems are chock-full of the worst people in the world, like “ISIS members,” “neo-Nazi extremist groups” and at least one “paramilitary organization.” Now we can add angry white men in furs to the list.

    More recently, Forbes (1/13/21) introduced its readers to the creators of Signal and Telegram (among the most popular encrypted messaging platforms) who belong to another infamous class: billionaires. Never mind that Forbes normally counts billionaires among the world’s most important people. To cement reader acrimony, they made sure to mention that Telegram’s founder is Russian.

    What preoccupied corporate media more than the possibility of violence in the near term, however, were the long-term implications for law enforcement. The Washington Post lamented, in multiple articles (1/17/21, 1/18/21), that the feds have “lost a valuable resource to monitor the growing threat.” Fortune (1/13/21) similarly complained that “encryption makes it difficult for law enforcement to monitor users.” The message is clear: Far-right extremists are coming to a town near you and, thanks to evil billionaire-funded technology, the police are helpless to do anything about it.

    Corporate media’s argument that encryption creates crime and that cops need exceptional access to stop it is as outmoded as it is simplistic. Their premise and conclusion are just as false now as they were when Comey staged his anti-encryption tour five years ago.

    In fact, news media’s resurgent obsession with encryption is just the latest episode in a decades-long effort to undermine user security in favor of domestic surveillance, with each iteration colored by the threat du jour. But instead of educating readers on the history of this conflict and the lessons learned, most corporate media seem to have forgotten all about it.

    Time: In the Fight Against Extremism, Don't Demonize Surveillance-Busting Tools like Signal and Bitcoin

    Alex Gladstein (Time, 1/26/21): “The main superspreaders of extremist content remain centralized corporate platforms like Facebook and YouTube, not open-source privacy platforms.”

    As Alex Gladstein recalled for Time (1/26/21), this debate originated in the 1990s with the dawn of internet communication and the US government’s original complaints about “going dark.” To solve that pseudo-problem, the National Security Agency developed the Clipper Chip, a piece of hardware that, when installed in consumer products, would give law enforcement exceptional access to otherwise unreadable data.

    The Clipper Chip met fierce resistance from consumer advocates and was panned by scholars, who concluded that this kind of technology would “require significant sacrifices in security and convenience, and substantially increased costs to all users of encryption,” that “the breathtaking scale and complexity” of such a system was “beyond the experience and current competency of the field,” and for these reasons “may well introduce ultimately unacceptable risks and costs.” After securing only one major adopter—its own Department of Justice—the US government abandoned the project.

    As Comey ramped up his crusade against encryption in 2015, the same scholars got together again to reassess these so-called “crypto wars.” They found that “today, the fundamental technical importance of strong cryptography and the difficulties inherent in limiting its use to meet law enforcement purposes remain the same.” And although Comey sought to convey the sense that a “going dark” phenomenon was just emerging, “the arguments are the same as two decades ago,” they concluded.

    Here we arrive at the present day, with corporate media peddling a new bogeyman in service of the same bogus arguments. Forbes (2/1/21) declared that “tech companies are going to have to decide whether they hate right-wing extremists more than they love privacy and freedom from government snooping.” “The problem is these apps are hamstrung by their absolutist posture,” Mark MacCarthy wrote, suggesting a middle-ground approach that wasn’t feasible in 1993 and is even less feasible today.

    While there are myriad problems with giving cops exceptional access to encrypted systems, the overarching issue is that technical vulnerabilities are morally agnostic—it doesn’t make any difference if the person taking advantage of the exploit is an FBI agent or a malevolent hacker.

    As the experts cited above wrote, “This is a trade-off space in which law enforcement cannot be guaranteed access without creating serious risk that criminal intruders will gain the same access.”  Not just messaging apps, but all internet-based activity is put at risk by creating backdoors to encryption.

    At the end of the day, Snowden demonstrated that there is no “going dark” phenomenon—we live in a golden age of surveillance, in which the US government and tech corporations have ready access to more data about their targets than at any point in history.

    Moreover, all of corporate media’s bellyaching about political extremists and encryption occurred after the riot was announced online, endorsed on nationwide radio, permitted by the National Park Service, and organized in plain sight on Facebook. Why, then, are corporate media again suggesting that we cripple the most important technology on the internet when law enforcement can’t even prevent violence planned out in the open?

    NYT: The Coup We Are Not Talking About

    Shoshana Zuboff (New York Times, 1/29/21): “The United States and many other liberal democracies chose surveillance over democracy as the guiding principle of social order.”

    The answer is that there is a facile tendency to blame technology (encryption) for social-political problems, while at the same time heralding technology (surveillance) as a silver bullet against those problems. And while the problematic technology is typically accessible to everyday people, the exceptional technology is only available to those with power.

    After the Snowden revelations, several NYU graduate students recognized this fixation on technology as part of a troubling depoliticization process. “The idea that solutions for societal problems can come from technical progress and sophistication in the private sector,” they wrote, “is the bread and butter of Silicon Valley corporations.” In other words, by focusing reader attention on encryption instead of the social and political conditions that give rise to right-wing extremism, corporate media are doing yeoman’s work for their benefactors.

    In an extraordinary op-ed for the New York Times (1/29/21), Shoshana Zuboff offered a different take on the January 6 riot—that such reactionary violence is an inevitable outcome of social surveillance, not digital privacy:

    Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.

    Time‘s Gladstein (1/26/21) thinks “the culture war over encrypted messaging might finally be ending,” but, so long as corporate media parrot FBI talking points and keep readers in the dark about their invalidity, the battle will continue with everyone’s online security as collateral damage.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.