radiofree.asia

Category: Surveillance

  • The Fear Not to Be

    This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be.  Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten.  In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life.  His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.

    His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him.  This included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said, “His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”

    I mention The Courage to Be not to engage in a recondite theological and philosophical analysis, which is the last thing we now need, but to contrast his call for spiritual courage with what we have been experiencing pouring forth from the mass corporate media for years  There is a drumbeat of fear-mongering so intense and constant that it is almost comical if it weren’t so effective in reducing people to quaking, frightened children.

    Primarily about Covid and the need to obey the authorities and submit to being jabbed with mRNA Covid “Vaccines” – the idolatrous religion of bio-security – this  religion of fear goes much further and much deeper.  Scenarios of fear have been rehearsed and produced for decades by the intelligence/IT/media giants on a multitude of issues, large and small.  They are rooted in a spiritually nihilistic political propaganda campaign that is exponentially increasing fear, anxiety, and despondency on a vast scale, which is its intent.  Fearful people are easily cowered and controlled.  The elites know that regular people throughout the world are fed up with being subjected to violence and abuse in multiple forms, and if courage triumphs over their fears, they might join in worldwide solidarity and revolt, as they have been doing in various places recently. To prevent this, the authorities must use terror tactics to divide and conquer them. If people dare to rise up and even question the propaganda, they have been and will be called terrorists for doing so.  Dissent is now equated with terrorism and thus it must be censored.

    All this fear-mongering draws on people’s normal fears of “not to be,” meaning dead. It is, of course, understandable not wanting to be dead, but living in constant fear is a living death.  Tillich, who suffered deep trauma as a chaplain in the trenches of WW I and was later dismissed from his teaching position in Germany when Hitler came to power, wrote that courage is rooted in the spiritual acceptance that underlying our individual lives is the power of Being, by which he meant God, and that fear and anxiety about our fates can be confronted only through the courage to accept in faith this foundational reality.

    I think it is self-evident to anyone who glances at the mainstream media that fear is their staple.  In just the last week or so, I have seen The New York Times, an official organ of propaganda if there ever were one but known historically as the Grey Lady for understatement, tell its readers in a hyperventilating style that anxiety about climate change has spawned a growing field of therapeutic treatment for sufferers, how deer in your back yard are infected with Omicron, how the Russians are coming, etc.  This is the typical fear promoting propaganda that headlines all the media sites every day and has been doing so for years.  Any casual observer can list them on a daily basis, from major to minor matters to fear.

    Yet despite this constant, blatant propaganda, governments flip the truth and warn that anyone who questions this are conspiracy theorists intent on causing trouble and therefore must be watched and refuted. Just the other day the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” saying:

    The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.

    After twenty years of such obvious propaganda, you would think these people would be embarrassed, but they obviously are not and intend to propagate this bullshit for years to come.  They and their media accomplices have taken their lingo lessons straight from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

    On the bio-security religious front alone, Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian has recently reported that the authorities have warned us that there is a vast underdiagnosis of heart disease that may stealthily be coming to get us (not from “vaccines,” of course) and that HIV testing and vaccines look to be the next big push, for there is now the claim that a new variant of HIV is spreading in Europe.  President Biden declared in December 2021 that his administration was aiming to “end the HIV/Aids epidemic by 2030.”  While Covid restrictions may be easing, the mRNA “vaccine push” is not, and their promoters will only find different germs to defeat with “vaccines” and tests to ease the fears of the propagandized public, so many of whom have been turned into hypochondriacs.

    The promulgation of the fear of germs and disease and foreign and domestic “threat actors” is permanent.  For anyone naively thinking that there will be an easing of this elite war of lies, I would suggest they rethink that assumption.  The state of siege that is the Covid crisis will be followed by many more, and this germ warfare includes a vast array of foreign variants, led by Russia and China.  We are in a permanent crisis and emergency engineered by the ruling classes to maintain their control.

    This elite war against regular people has no end in sight.  The elites know that people get worn down over time and lose hope; thus, they plan for the long haul and keep hammering away.  Paul Tillich’s book is important because of its stress on the need for courage in the face of the fear-mongering.  Without a spiritual foundation to sustain one for the long haul, depression will lead to despair or surrender.  History should teach us this. The evil ones often win, at least in the short run, and each of us doesn’t have a long run.  Our time is brief.

    The great dissenters and rebels of the past, even when not overtly religious, kept faith with their comrades and causes because they felt a deep, unbreakable, invincible connection.  It is called different names or none at all.  Maybe faith is the best word.  Faith in what?  Some call it God, as I do. Words can’t explain it; I feel it. Others say nothing and just carry on, sustained by the invisible. Some call it faith in human solidarity.  The names don’t matter.  It is not about naming but experiencing. The poet D.H. Lawrence said wisely that we are transmitters of life, “and when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.”  And he added in his inimitable style: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.  But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.”  It is not easy, but fear helps us fall out.

    There were those who called Tillich an atheist because his philosophical explanation sounded too abstruse, which is true.  But he made a fundamental point about how as human beings we participate in Being, which is the ground of our existence.  We are part of something that is far larger than our puny selves –  beings in the sea of Being.  Who can deny that?  His call to courage hit a resonant cord with believers, agnostics, and atheists alike.  Not a poet but a German trained immigrant scholar who emigrated to the U.S.A., his language was steeped in heavy philosophical verbiage, yet it found a wide audience in its analysis of fear, anxiety, and especially courage because it was about fundamental truths.  Courage is fundamental, as is faith.

    The Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it less philosophically and more elegantly:

    I talk always to the man who walks along with me;
    – men who talk to themselves hope to talk to God
    Someday –
    My soliloquies amount to discussions with this friend,
    Who taught me the secret of loving human beings.
    ….
    And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
    And the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
    You’ll find me on board, light, with few belongings,
    Almost naked like the children of the sea.

    We are children of the sea and courage keeps us afloat.

    Humor also helps, for we are funny creatures.

    It is not often that one escapes an unintended assassination attempt.  I am glad to say that I have.

    This is an example of the power of fear. Where I live, the winter has been quite cold and there was a recent ice storm with thick ice everywhere on top of snow.  My wife was fearful of falling and so had bought hiking poles for herself and me as Christmas gifts.  I said I didn’t want them and wouldn’t use them; that I wasn’t afraid, that I had faith in my ability to sustain myself.  So I didn’t use them, which angered her.  One day when the ice in the driveway and on the car was inches thick, she cajoled me into using the sticks to reach the car.  She set them for me with their clips at the proper height, since they are adjustable.  We toddled down the pathway to the car, setting one pole out ahead of the other in turn.  I exaggerated my need for them, bending far over as if I were in great need of the crutches.  Approaching the driveway, I extended my right hand pole out in front and it collapsed because the clips weren’t set tight and I went flying face forward onto the ice.  She looked at me in fear, not sure if I was dead or hurt or if her fear had made her into an accidental assassin.  She needn’t worry.  It was funny.

    We all fall eventually, but in the meantime, worrying about it is self-defeating.  It is a reaction to fear.  Worrying is a form of preying on oneself (etymology: to seize by the throat with one’s teeth and kill), and it can be induced – and is – by the campaigns of fear that we are being subjected to.

    The courage to be was Tillich’s way of saying that we are upheld by far more than we know.  Call it Being, Tao, the Great Spirit, or God.  Courage is contagious and will carry us on.  It is what we need to resist the fear-mongers who are at our throats.

    The post The Fear Not to Be first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dystopia Disguised as Democracy: All the Ways in Which Freedom Is an Illusion

    The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

    — Frank Zappa, Interview with Jim Ladd, “Zappa On Air,” April 1977.

    We are no longer free.

    We are living in a world carefully crafted to resemble a representative democracy, but it’s an illusion.

    We think we have the freedom to elect our leaders, but we’re only allowed to participate in the reassurance ritual of voting. There can be no true electoral choice or real representation when we’re limited in our options to one of two candidates culled from two parties that both march in lockstep with the Deep State and answer to an oligarchic elite.

    We think we have freedom of speech, but we’re only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners allow.

    We think we have the right to freely exercise our religious beliefs, but those rights are quickly overruled if and when they conflict with the government’s priorities, whether it’s COVID-19 mandates or societal values about gender equality, sex and marriage.

    We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. Punitive programs strip citizens of their passports and right to travel over unpaid taxes.

    We think we have property interests in our homes and our bodies, but there can be no such freedom when the government can seize your property, raid your home, and dictate what you do with your bodies.

    We think we have the freedom to defend ourselves against outside threats, but there is no right to self-defense against militarized police who are authorized to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, and granted immunity from accountability with the general blessing of the courts. Certainly, there can be no right to gun ownership in the face of red flag gun laws which allow the police to remove guns from people merely suspected of being threats.

    We think we have the right to an assumption of innocence until we are proven guilty, but that burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and over-criminalization which renders us all lawbreakers. Police-run facial recognition software that mistakenly labels law-abiding citizens as criminals. A social credit system (similar to China’s) that rewards behavior deemed “acceptable” and punishes behavior the government and its corporate allies find offensive, illegal or inappropriate.

    We think we have the right to due process, but that assurance of justice has been stripped of its power by a judicial system hardwired to act as judge, jury and jailer, leaving us with little recourse for appeal. A perfect example of this rush to judgment can be found in the proliferation of profit-driven speed and red light cameras that do little for safety while padding the pockets of government agencies.

    We have been saddled with a government that pays lip service to the nation’s freedom principles while working overtime to shred the Constitution.

    By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect the constitutional rights of the citizenry while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    Aided and abetted by the legislatures, the courts and Corporate America, the government has been busily rewriting the contract (a.k.a. the Constitution) that establishes the citizenry as the masters and agents of the government as the servants.

    We are now only as good as we are useful, and our usefulness is calculated on an economic scale by how much we are worth—in terms of profit and resale value—to our “owners.”

    Under the new terms of this revised, one-sided agreement, the government and its many operatives have all the privileges and rights and “we the people” have none.

    Only in our case, sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, we’ve allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

    The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

    We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.” In exchange for the promise of safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, lower taxes, lower crime rates, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, over-criminalization and government corruption.

    In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

    We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

    We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

    We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

    We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red-light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in hefty fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

    We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

    This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

    With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, “we the people” are being reminded that we possess no rights except for that which the government grants on an as-needed basis.

    Indeed, there are chilling parallels between the authoritarian prison that is life in the American police state and The Prisoner, a dystopian television series that first broadcast in Great Britain more than 50 years ago.

    The series centers around a British secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan) who finds himself imprisoned, monitored by militarized drones, and interrogated in a mysterious, self-contained, cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic retirement community known only as The Village. While luxurious and resort-like, the Village is a virtual prison disguised as a seaside paradise: its inhabitants have no true freedom, they cannot leave the Village, they are under constant surveillance, their movements are tracked by surveillance drones, and they are stripped of their individuality and identified only by numbers.

    Much like the American Police State, The Prisoner’s Village gives the illusion of freedom while functioning all the while like a prison: controlled, watchful, inflexible, punitive, deadly and inescapable.

    Described as “an allegory of the individual, aiming to find peace and freedom in a dystopia masquerading as a utopia,” The Prisoner is a chilling lesson about how difficult it is to gain one’s freedom in a society in which prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy.

    Perhaps the best visual debate ever on individuality and freedom, The Prisoner confronted societal themes that are still relevant today: the rise of a police state, the freedom of the individual, round-the-clock surveillance, the corruption of government, totalitarianism, weaponization, group think, mass marketing, and the tendency of mankind to meekly accept his lot in life as a prisoner in a prison of his own making.

    The Prisoner is an operations manual for how you condition a populace to life as prisoners in a police state: by brainwashing them into believing they are free so that they will march in lockstep with the state and be incapable of recognizing the prison walls that surround them.

    We can no longer maintain the illusion of freedom.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become “we the prisoners.”

     

    The post Dystopia Disguised as Democracy: All the Ways in Which Freedom Is an Illusion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • CPJ calls on authorities in Botswana to reject bill on warrantless surveillance

    New York, January 31, 2022–Botswana authorities should retract or reform a bill that could help police and other investigators intercept journalists’ communications without oversight, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.

    The Criminal Procedure and Evidence (Controlled Investigation) Bill was published in the government gazette on January 12, according to a press release by local media groups condemning the bill and media reports. Spencer Mogapi, a newspaper editor and chair of the Botswana Editors Forum, which collaborated on the press release, told CPJ by phone on Friday, January 28, that the bill could be expedited through parliament and signed into law by President Mokgweetsi Masisi this week. CPJ reviewed a copy of the bill shared by Tefo Phatshwane, the director of the Botswana chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA).

    The bill would grant investigators the power to intercept communications without a warrant for up to 14 days if authorized by the head of an investigatory authority to probe offenses or prevent them from being committed, according to CPJ’s review of the bill. CPJ has documented the arrest and prosecution of journalists in Botswana, and local police’s use of digital forensics tools in 2019 and 2020 to extract thousands of files from journalists’ devices, including communications and contacts, in efforts to identify sources of their reporting.

    Companies that facilitate communication could see their directors imprisoned for up to 10 years if they fail to install hardware or software to enable interception; anyone that does not provide decryption keys so authorities can access encrypted information could be jailed for up to six years.

    “Botswana’s parliament should scrap the controlled investigation bill, which threatens journalists’ ability to communicate privately with sources,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator. “Authorities should implement laws that protect journalists’ privacy and safety, not expose them to surveillance without oversight.”

    Jovial Rantao, chairperson of regional press association The African Editors Forum, described the bill in a statement as the “worst piece of legislation to have emerged in Botswana, the Southern African region and the rest of the continent in recent history.” The Southern Africa Editors’ Forum expressed similar alarm over the bill.

    Reached by phone and messaging app on Friday, Batlhalefi Leagajang, Masisi’s press secretary, told CPJ the bill was “not under the ambit of the presidency” and the president would allow the parliamentary process to proceed before acting.

    Botswana government spokesperson John-Thomas Dipowe acknowledged CPJ’s emailed questions about the bill on Friday, January 28, but did not respond before publication.

    According to social media posts related to the bill on January 27, Botswana’s minister of defence, justice and security, Kagiso Thomas Mmusi, said there was a need to have a law that could plug legal and security gaps relating to issues of money laundering and financing of terrorism.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Surveillance And Policing Of Looted Land

    The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community group rooted in the Skid Row community on Tongva/Gabrielino land, stolen territory known as Los Angeles. Over the past decade, we have been working to build power to abolish LAPD surveillance. This report grew out of that organizing and examines the relationships of policing and surveillance to displacement, gentrification, and real estate development. We study those relationships with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization.

    We often hear that police are an occupying army in our communities. Throughout the history of imperialism and colonization, occupying forces have used surveillance to monitor and contain populations they deem threatening, all for the purpose of maintaining their violent rule.

    The post The Surveillance And Policing Of Looted Land appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Prison Profiteer Is Using Sandra Bland’s Death to Sell Surveillance Technology

    A prison guard takes a picture of a prisoner with a Guardian RFID hand-held Spartan 3

    Guardian RFID is a virtually unknown, but rapidly growing, company that sells digital technology to jails. It makes ID cards and bracelets that can be scanned by guards when doing head counts, meal distribution and suicide checks.

    Guardian RFID is yet another prison profiteer among the ever-expanding number of companies that operate as what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “parasites,” feeding off of the prison-industrial complex. What is most disturbing about Guardian RFID are its plans for super-surveillance in the carceral environment. Guardian RFID was named by Inc. magazine as the 396th fastest-growing private company in 2021, increasing its revenue by 126 percent in three years. Guardian RFID has been around for 20 years selling its products to jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers. The company claims to provide technology for 75,000 correctional officers, who they call “Warriors” protecting “America’s Thin Gray Line.”

    As mass incarceration is adapting to respond to crises of legitimacy, companies like Guardian RFID are always ready to sell new solutions to the problem of how to contain and control people. Emerging technologies present previously unimagined levels of surveillance. This system views humans like numbers, or like bar codes to be scanned and counted, not as individuals with families, histories and a future.

    Weapons of Mass Data Collection

    Guardian RFID sells high-tech tools that enable tight surveillance in jails. Carceral personnel deploy the hand-held Spartan 3 which is basically an Android phone with apps created for basic jail functions. The Spartan scans ID cards and wristbands worn by those incarcerated. The data is then stored on a remote cloud that, according to a Guardian RFID spokesperson, is “F*#@ing Magic.” The company says it builds artificial intelligence systems with “predictive and prescriptive insights” that will give guards “constant surveillance capabilities.”

    Guardian RFID uses slick imagery and hyper-militarized language to sell its products, mostly to sheriffs in rural counties throughout the South, Midwest, and other remote areas of the U.S. where the sheriffs are powerful political figures. As it says on the Guardian RFID website, the Spartan 3 is to work with the speed and precision of a “surgical strike” — like “ISIS strongholds turned to glass.” It is a “weapon of mass data collection.” The goal is achieving “operational dominance,” what is described in further hyperbole, as “a powerful synonym for waterboarding” — a form of torture.

    Guardian RFID is headquartered in Maple Grove, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. It was founded in 2001 by Ken Dalley, the company’s self-described “Chief Warrior,” a recent finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Heartland Award. Guardian RFID takes pride in being “Warrior led” but it’s not clear whether Dalley was ever a corrections officer. He did not respond to Truthout’s request for an interview. The company aims to track “every inmate” and estimates its technology tracks more than 10 percent of people incarcerated in the United States. Guardian RFID wants to “digitally transform” jails, prisons and juvenile detention centers.

    Guardian RFID won its first contract in 2005 at the Hardin County Jail in Eldora, Iowa, a 107-bed facility. Located 75 miles north of Des Moines, the jail was until recently best known as the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Iowa for two decades. There, the Jail Administrator Nick Whitmore touted the Guardian RFID system for protecting his office from a lawsuit. “If there is an investigation on an assault or suicide occurrence,” said Whitmore, “we’re able to document and prove in court that there was one-on-one contact between the individual detainee and jail guard.”

    After the death of Sandra Bland on July 13, 2015, Guardian RFID actively promoted its technology to jails in Texas, attempting to take advantage of reforms made in the wake of national protests. The Sandra Bland Act was passed by legislators in Texas two years after her apparent suicide. Among its requirements was that jails have “automated electronic sensors to ensure accurate and timely cell checks.” Guardian RFID lobbied sheriffs in the counties near where Bland died, winning contracts in Fort Bend County, Bezos County and Wharton County, all suburbs of Houston within an hour of the Waller County Jail where she was found hanging in her cell. Guardian RFID’s system was recently installed at the Bexar County Adult Detention Center in San Antonio, Texas, as part of a $20 million technology modernization effort, in part, to “demonstrate continuous compliance” with the Sandra Bland Act. Dallas, Texas, likely signed a million-dollar deal with Guardian RFID to be in accordance with the new state law. On Guardian RFID’s blog, there’s an entire post about the Sandra Bland Act, instructing jails how to maximize “compliance.”

    Moreover, Guardian RFID will surely get more contracts after high-profile news stories like the Jeffrey Epstein scandal where guards fell asleep on the job. A wealthy financier held on federal charges of sex trafficking, Epstein hung himself with a bedsheet at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, which has since been temporarily shuttered due to security and infrastructure issues. Guards were supposed to check on Epstein every 30 minutes the night of his death. As was captured on camera, officers Michael Thomas and Tova Noel left Epstein alone for eight hours while they were napping and shopping online. Authorities charged the pair with falsifying the paper log books — but charges were dropped after the guards performed community service. Guardian RFID argues that its digital system is superior to the old paper method and thus prevents “liabilities.”

    One of Guardian RFID’s largest contracts is with Sheriff Marian Brown who runs the Dallas County Jail in Texas, the seventh-largest jail in the U.S. with an average daily population of 6,000 people. The three-year contract, approved on December 15, 2020, was for a total of $1.1 million. The dollar amount for the first year was $477,770, with $391,475 coming from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES), a $2 trillion stimulus bill passed in March 2020. What carceral surveillance has to do with COVID relief was not articulated in the proposal before the Dallas County Commissioner’s Court. The remainder of the bill — $86,295 — was to be paid from commissions the sheriff makes off the commissary fund, the money that comes from the inflated prices people at the jail pay for personal items like toothpaste, deodorant and socks. The cost was $314,979 for the subsequent two years of the contract. There is big money to be made in selling total surveillance technology.

    Automating Repression

    At the Polk County Jail System in central Florida, Guardian RFID provides the ID tags that are required for everyone in custody who enters through the jail gates. There are nearly 4,000 people incarcerated in three separate jails — Central County Jail, South County Jail and Central Booking. Guardian RFID makes the audacious claim that people “take pride in their ID cards and even feel important having to wear them.” Guardian RFID founder Dalley took a tour of Polk’s modern processing center, what he says is by far the “most impressive and groundbreaking” of its kind. With the help of Guardian RFID technology, Polk’s guards collect 42 million log entries in a year to “automate” compliance with Florida Model Jail Standards, guidelines established by the Florida Sheriff’s Association. But to Guardian RFID, it seems, the thousands of people they tag are not real people. They are just data points.

    The massive data collection project at the Polk County Jail did not prevent the death of Shaun Seaman, who on May 13, 2020, was beaten to death while on suicide watch. The guards were supposed to check the cell every 15 minutes, as was protocol, but failed to physically check on Seaman for four and a half hours after the attack. The family filed a civil lawsuit and is being represented by high-profile civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump.

    The website for the DeSoto County Adult Detention Facility in Mississippi, says Guardian RFID’s technology is approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), radio frequency levels are similar to those in consumer electronics, and the devices are hypoallergenic. Those who refuse to wear the “non-implantable devices” will be “subject to fines and disciplinary action, including prosecution.”

    Guardian RFID has a contract for the Sherburne County Jail, a 732-bed jail, one of the largest jails in the Twin Cities area of St. Paul-Minneapolis, not far from Guardian RFID’s headquarters. Sheriff Joel Brott runs a “forward-thinking” office said Guardian RFID President Dalley. The jail also generates extra revenue by housing 500 people detained by ICE and U.S. Marshals, as well as individuals from local and regional jails. Sheriff Brott used these extra income flows to pay for upgrading the facility — in this case, installing Guardian RFID’s system. Like many sheriffs, Brott further monetizes incarceration to pay for his jail. Some are more imaginative than others, like one sheriff in Kentucky.

    A “Self-Sufficient” Jail

    Jailer Jamie Mosley has developed what he says is the first “self-sufficient” jail. In January 2020, Mosley opened the Laurel County Correctional Center, based in London, Kentucky. The new $24 million jail holds twice the capacity of the previous facility. The new jail came in under budget — due to the unpaid labor of individuals in custody. “The flooring in the hallways, and all of the stone work in the showers was done by the inmates,” Mosley told the local press.

    Due to a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, the county is reimbursed $54 per day for each person at the Laurel County jail, plus any medical costs. The federal detainees come from the Eastern District of Kentucky, as well as the larger cities of Knoxville, Chattanooga, Greenville and Nashville. Mosley said the jail is self-sufficient and operates on zero tax dollars. With the extra revenue, Mosley contracted with Guardian RFID, which he says, “gives us so much more accountability than we had before.”

    The jail also generated even more revenue for Mosley, who founded his own company called Crossbar to sell bendable e-cigarettes to those in his custody, as well as in other jails. According to a report by Vice, Crossbar sold its e-cigs to 33 jails and in 2018 was expected to make $35 million. Mosley has been unashamed about his exploitation of those he holds under lock and key. “I remind our staff,” he told a local newspaper, “that most of the time our job is to take better care of people than they were taking of themselves.”

    Guardian RFID disguises some of its profiteering through what it promotes as humanitarian work. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Guardian RFID formed Warrior Foundation, a nonprofit organization to raise money to purchase masks for guards whose “sacrificial and heroic efforts are unseen.” The Warrior Foundation launched “Operation: Swift Mask” with two other major prison profiteers, Securus Technologies and GTL, that provide phone calls for over-priced rates. They raised money to send 250,000 masks inside to jails and prisons.

    On one level, the overall mission of Guardian RFID is nothing new — making money off of locking people up. But by combining more traditional elements of overcharging for services with a cutting-edge surveillance system inside jails, Guardian RFID is opening a new frontier of tightening the screws on a population that already faces systematic repression and dehumanization.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Australia and New Zealand compete with China for Tongan influence

    ANALYSIS: By Michael Field in Auckland

    Within a day of the massive volcanic eruption that rocked Tonga and severed the archipelago’s communications with the rest of the world, a handful of countries vying for influence in the region pledged financial aid.

    Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, 60 km north of the capital Nuku’alofa, blew up on January 15, sending tsunami waves across the Pacific and shock waves around the world.

    The eruption cut the tiny kingdom’s only fibre-optic cable, to Fiji, 800 km to the west, leaving its 110,000 residents without internet or voice connections to the world.

    A Royal New Zealand Air Force surveillance flight showed that several small islands suffered catastrophic damage, and it has become clear there is extensive damage in Nuku’alofa.

    New Zealand has sent two naval ships equipped with desalination equipment and aid materials to Tonga, which is covid-free and has effectively closed its borders. Only fully vaccinated personnel are allowed to enter the country.

    Within hours of the eruption, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced an immediate grant of NZ$100,000 (US$68,000) and mobilised naval and air forces to rush help to Tonga.

    Australia followed, and a day later China pledged $100,000. The US followed shortly thereafter, with all donors making it clear it was the first round of aid.

    Heavy debt to Beijing
    Siaosi Sovaleni, Tonga’s newly elected prime minister, knows his islands have little money and a heavy debt to Beijing. After political riots in 2006 that resulted in the destruction of Nuku’alofa’s central business districts, China was the only country willing to help rebuild, but only through a loan, not aid.

    Tonga still owes $108 million to the Export-Import Bank of China, equivalent to about 25 percent of its gross domestic product and about $1000 per Tongan.

    The debt at times has threatened to bankrupt Tonga, one of the Pacific’s poorest countries, but China repeatedly declines to write it off.

    Suspicion around Beijing’s agenda has grown with the construction of a lavish and large embassy in Nuku’alofa. Surveillance pictures suggest it was undamaged by the tsunami.

    The Chinese Embassy in Tonga
    The Chinese Embassy in Tonga … photographed before the volcano eruption and tsunami. Image: Wikimedia/GNU Free Documentation Licence

    Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tweeted that Australia must be first to give Tonga assistance.

    “Failing that,” he said, “China will be there in spades.” He added that large Australian warships should be sent immediately: “It’s why we built them.”

    China’s Global Times, the English language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, published an editorial saying, “Tonga is in need of emergency aid, and China said it is willing to help.”

    Huawei interests in Pacific
    It noted that the volcano had taken out Tonga’s submarine cable and refers to attempts by Huawei to operate in the South Pacific.

    “It is important to note that in addition to providing necessary supplies, China is capable of helping Pacific island nations with their reconstruction work,” the Global Times said.

    “In fact, in recent years, Chinese companies such as technology giant Huawei have been actively pursuing infrastructure projects in Pacific island nations, of which the construction of submarine fibre optic cables is an important part.”

    Huawei had attempted to be involved in cables in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, but Australia succeeded in blocking the bids.

    The Global Times said some Western countries, led by the US, are trying to block such cooperation as they see Pacific island nations “as a place for competing for geopolitical influence and publicly claim to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific”.

    The tabloid added Pacific island nations did not want to be forced to pick sides between China and the US.

    The Nuku’alofa riot occurred on 16 November 2006 when the country was under a royal and noble-dominated regime that essentially ruled out democracy. Following the ascension to the throne of the late King Tupou V, pro-democracy and criminal groups set fire to the capital.

    A P-3K2 Orion surveillance aircraft flies over Nomuka island in the Ha’apai group of the kingdom of Tonga, showing extensive ash damage from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano. Image: NZ Defence Force

    Consequences of ‘soft loan’
    Then Prime Minister Fred Sevele asked China for $100 million in aid but instead received a soft loan of $112 million to fund the rebuilding of Nuku’alofa, repayable over 20 years.

    The consequences of the loan were profound for Tonga, and a subsequent prime minister, the late ‘Akilisi Pohiva, used the matter to win elections.

    In 2013 Pohiva said the kingdom had debts it could never repay: “Our hands and feet have already been tied,” he said.

    “We need a government by the people that can work this out with the Chinese government in a way Tongans now and in the future will not suffer catastrophic consequences.”

    He said he feared the Chinese would take over the running of Tonga.

    “If we fail to meet the requirements and conditions set out in the agreement,” he said, “we have to pay the cost for our failure to meet the conditions.”

    Help less flat-footed
    Jonathan Pryke, director of the Pacific Islands Programme at Australia’s Lowy Institute, said help to Tonga from Australia and New Zealand had been less flat-footed than it was during the recent anti-China riots in the Solomon Islands. Pryke wondered if Tonga was different because of the nature of the crisis.

    “While valuable in its own right, the support Australia and New Zealand provide is not entirely altruistic,” Pryke said. “This support generates a lot of goodwill and ‘soft power’ in the region, and gives Australian and New Zealand defence assets the chance to ‘get into the field.’”

    Pryke said Australia and New Zealand were both eager, now more than ever, in light of the geostrategic competition with China, to show the region that they were its best and most reliable foreign partners.

    “With that said, Tongan officials are much wiser now in what support they will accept from China than in 2006, as repayments on that debt continue to be pushed off but will be monumentally costly for the government when they finally do come due.”

    New Zealand-based security consultant Dr Paul Buchanan of 36th-Parallel.com said he wondered why China was being slow in its reaction. It previously sent a navy hospital ship to Tonga, but not this time.

    He noted the cable had only recently gone into Tonga and that two years ago it was damaged by a ship’s anchor. While coincidental, the latest severing offers an opportunity for China.

    Opportunity for China’s signals fleet
    “Getting involved in the process of repair/replacement of the branch cables linking Suva to Nuku’alofa… allows [China’s] signals fleet to get involved in a way that it has not been able to do before,” Dr Buchanan said.

    Noting Beijing’s unexpectedly large embassy in Tonga, Dr Buchanan said China might act in its own self-interest rather than out of a sense of humanitarianism.

    “Perhaps the kingdom knows this and will try to leverage the PRC’s slow response in favour of more favorable reconstruction terms,” Dr Buchanan said. “But I am not sure that the king and his court play that way.

    “New Zealand and Australia seem to have responded as could be expected, but if my read is correct, [China] seems willing to cede [the] diplomatic initiative to the ‘traditional’ patrons on the issue of immediate humanitarian relief.”

    Michael Field is an independent New Zealand journalist and co-editor of The Pacific Newsroom. This article was first published by Nikkei Asia and is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Tonga eruption: Airport runway cleared of ash, says WHO official

    RNZ Pacific

    A World Health Organisation representative in Tonga says the international airport has been cleared of volcanic ash which will allow humanitarian aid flights to arrive.

    Hundreds of volunteers, workers and Tongan Defence Force personnel have been clearing the debris from the runway by hand.

    WHO liaison officer in Tonga Dr Yutaro Setoya, who is in the capital Nuku’alofa on the main island Tongatapu, said there had been a thick layer of ash on the runway preventing planes from landing.

    “The runway, I understand, was cleared to be able to be used from outside [the country]. I understand humanitarian flights are coming in,” Dr Setoya told RNZ by satellite phone.

    A New Zealand Defence Force C-130 Hercules is on standby and will be able to to take off once the all clear has been given, bringing supplies of water, hygiene kits and other goods.

    Two Australian Air Force Hercules are also ready to depart.

    One of Tonga’s main communications providers, Digicel, said it had restored international calls to Tonga via satellite.

    Undersea communications cable delay
    But until the undersea communications cable is restored its network services will not be fully operational, it said.

    It is expected to take at least a month to complete repairs on the cable that carries the bulk of internet and phone communications to Tonga.

    Digicel Tonga is giving out free sim cards from Thursday morning, with the company saying it knows how desperate family and friends overseas are to connect with relatives.

    Three people are confirmed to have died after Saturday’s massive volcanic eruption and tsunami.

    Houses on the island of Mango in the Ha’apai group were destroyed, and the majority of structures on Atatā on Tongatapu, about 6km north Nuku’alofa, were all but wiped out by the tsunami.

    There has been extensive damage to Fonoifua and Nomuka Islands. Evacuations of residents are underway.

    Western parts of the main island of Tongatapu are also badly hit, with dozens of houses destroyed.

    New Zealand Defence Force ships HMNZS Wellington and HMNZS Aotearoa are due to arrive in Tonga on Friday, carrying water and other immediate supplies, as well as engineers and helicopters.

    ‘Contactless’ aid
    Their first task is to offload desperately needed water, but distributing supplies will be complicated by the need to maintain covid-19 protocols.

    Tonga is free of the virus, and Tongan and New Zealand officials are still working out how foreign assistance can be done in a contactless way.

    A second New Zealand Defence Force P3 Orion surveillance flight was carried out on Wednesday and also included Fiji’s southern Lau Islands, at the request of the government of Fiji.

    The Tongan government has begun a huge cleanup operation in the capital.

    Dr Setoya said Tonga needed access to emergency funding and immediate humanitarian supplies from overseas, but he believed most of the response to the devastating volcanic eruption could be handled domestically.

    He said people affected by the volcanic eruption were resilient and strong and were helping others clean up.

    “Tongan people are strong and very quick to react,” he said.

    “People are cleaning ashes from the ground and the roof … hand in hand, cleaning the houses together. So I think there’s a good energy in Tonga.”

    He said Tonga needed rain to wash away the ash.

    “Because ash is everywhere and has to be washed away before we get clean water [from roofs] … many people depend on rain water in Tonga.”

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Tonga eruption: Images appear to show most of Atatā island wiped out

    RNZ News

    New images appear to show the majority of structures on the Tongan island of Atatā have been wiped out after a volcanic eruption and tsunami last weekend.

    The Tongan government has so far confirmed three deaths from Saturday’s eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, and all houses on the island of Mango were also wiped out.

    The New Zealand Defence Force has described the damage to the island of Atatā as “catastrophic” in its surveillance photo, which was posted online by a resort based there.

    The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) also released an image of Atatā island on January 18, with an assessment that 72 structures had been damaged and the entire island covered in ash.

    Atatā island, Tonga (UNITAR)
    The UN Institute for Training and Research image of Atatā island on January 18, with an assessment that 72 structures had been damaged and the entire island covered in ash. Image: RNZ/UNITAR

    However, it noted it was a preliminary analysis and had not yet been validated on the ground.

    The Royal Sunset Island resort posted on Facebook that all residents had now been evacuated to the mainland.

    The resort was fully submerged by the tsunami and it was not expected there would be much left.

    Other satellite imagery circulating online also appeared to show major damage on the island.

    Meanwhile, the New Zealand government today announced two naval ships with supplies had been approved for arrival in Tonga.

    The ships were sent before an official request for help from the Tongan government, but the statement from Minister of Foreign Affairs Nanaia Mahuta’s office this afternoon confirmed the vessels — expected to arrive by Friday, depending on weather — had been approved.

    The eruption was likely the world’s largest in the past three decades, and support and aid efforts have been stymied by communications outages after the blast.

    US company SubCom expected repairs to the undersea cable, which carries most of Tonga’s communications, would take at least four weeks.

    A mobile network was expected to be established using the University of South Pacific’s satellite dish today, though the connection would likely be limited and patchy.

    Volcanic activity and tsunami risk continues to be monitored.

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

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Tongan government confirms all homes on Mango destroyed, fears death toll of 3 may rise

    RNZ News

    The Tongan government has confirmed that all houses on the island of Mango were wiped out in the tsunami that followed Saturday’s volcanic eruption.

    It confirmed that three people are now known to have died: a 65-year-old woman in Mango and a 49-year-old man in Nomuka, both in the outlying Ha’apai island group; as well as British national Angela Glover in Tongatapu.

    The Tongan navy had deployed with health teams and water, food and tents to the Ha’apai islands.

    One aerial image taken by the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) showed Mango and described the damage there as “catastrophic”.

    No houses, but just a few temporary tarpaulin shelters could be seen.

    A view over an area of Tonga that shows the heavy ash fall from the recent volcanic eruption within the Tongan Islands.
    A view over Nomuka in Tonga from a New Zealand Defence Force P-3K2 Orion surveillance flight after the islands were hit by a tsunami triggered by an undersea volcanic eruption. Image: RNZ/NZ Defence Force

    The Tongan government said Mango, Atata, and Fonoifua islands were being evacuated, and that water supplies in Tonga were seriously affected. It said all houses were destroyed on Mango Island, only two houses remained on Fonoifua and extensive damage occurred on Nomuka Island.

    The government also said there were multiple injuries.

    First official Tongan statement
    It is the first official statement the kingdom has made about the disaster to international media.

    The government said parts of the western side of Tongatapu, including Kanokupolu, were being evacuated after dozens of houses were damaged, and that in the central district many houses were damaged in Kolomotu’a and on the island of ‘Eua.

    A diplomat, Tonga’s deputy head of mission in Australia, Curtis Tu’ihalangingie, earlier described the images taken by the NZDF reconnaissance flight as “alarming”, saying they showed numerous buildings missing on Atata island as well.

    “People panic, people run and get injuries,” Tu’ihalangingie told Reuters. “Possibly there will be more deaths and we just pray that is not the case.”

    With communications in the South Pacific island nation cut, the true extent of casualties is still not clear.

    Glover, 50, was the first known death in the tsunami, swept away as she tried to rescue the dogs she cared for at a shelter.

    Australia’s Minister for the Pacific Zed Seselja said conditions on other outer islands were “very tough, we understand, with many houses being destroyed in the tsunami”.

    UN report of distress signal
    The United Nations had earlier reported a distress signal was detected in Ha’apai, where Mango is located.

    The Tongan navy reported the area was hit by waves estimated to be 5m-10m high, said the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

    Fonoifua Island in Ha'apai, Tonga, as seen from an NZDF P-3 Orion reconnaisance flight after the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai. The image caption says all but the largest buildings were destroyed or severely damaged.
    Fonoifua Island in Ha’apai, Tonga, as seen from an NZDF P-3 Orion reconnaissance flight after the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. The image caption says all but the largest buildings were destroyed or severely damaged. Image: RNZ/NZDF

    Atata and Mango are between 50km and 70km from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, which sent tsunami waves across the Pacific Ocean and was heard some 2300km away in New Zealand when it erupted on Saturday.

    Atata has a population of about 100 people and Mango about 50 people.

    “It is very alarming to see the wave possibly went through Atata from one end to the other,” Tu’ihalangingie said.

    Workers on airport runway
    The NZDF images were posted unofficially on a Facebook site and confirmed by Tu’ihalangingie.

    Fua'amotu International Airport in Tonga as seen from a New Zealand Defence Force P-3 Orion reconnaisance flight, after the eruption of Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai. The image caption says workers are using shovels and wheelbarrows to clear volcanic ash from the runway.
    Fua’amotu International Airport in Tonga as seen from a New Zealand Defence Force P-3 Orion reconnaisance flight, after the eruption of Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha’apai. The image caption says workers are using shovels and wheelbarrows to clear volcanic ash from the runway. Image: Crown copyright 2022/NZDF/RNZ

    Taken from a P-3K2 Orion plane, they also showed workers on the runway clearing volcanic ash at Fua’amotu International Airport, the country’s main airfield.

    One caption described the runway as “unserviceable” because of the layer of ash on it, meaning aircraft cannot land there.

    It said the clearance operation was being done with shovels and wheelbarrows, and that “no heavy excavation machinery was observed”.

    The Tongan government said wharves were also damaged in the eruption.

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

    Nomuka Island in Ha'apai, Tonga, as seen from an NZDF P-3 Orion reconnaisance flight after the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai. The image caption says extensive damage was observed through the village with most coastal buildings destroyed.
    Nomuka Island in Ha’apai, Tonga, as seen from an NZDF P-3 Orion reconnaisance flight after the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai. The image caption says extensive damage was observed through the village with most coastal buildings destroyed. Image: RNZ/NZDF

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Gallery: What the NZ air crew saw at Tonga’s Nomuka – a choking carpet of volcanic ash

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    An RNZAF P-3K2 Orion aircraft flies over the small Tongan island of Nomuka showing the heavy ash fall from last Saturday’s volcanic eruption on Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai.

    Five Squadron crew worked on board while flying overhead to gather vital information to send back to New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) and other government agencies.

    Images: Taken on board the Royal New Zealand Air Force Orion on Monday 17 January 2022/Licensed under Creative Commons BY-4.0

    RNZDF Orion surveillance flight images
    1 of 10
    A P-3K2 Orion aircraft flies over Nomuka island
    TONGA 1: A P-3K2 Orion aircraft flies over Nomuka island in the Ha’apai group of the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 2: A P-3K2 Orion aircraft flies over Nomuka island in the Ha’apai group of the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 3: A P-3K2 Orion aircraft flies over Nomuka island in the Ha’apai group of the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 4: In the cockpit of a P-3K2 Orion aircraft flying over the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 5: In the cockpit of a P-3K2 Orion aircraft flying over the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 6: Taking photographs in the cockpit of a P-3K2 Orion aircraft flying over the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 7: Gathering vital data and information about the extent of the volcano and tsunami damage in the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 8: Gathering vital data and information about the extent of the volcano and tsunami damage in the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 9: Gathering vital data and information about the extent of the volcano and tsunam damage in the kingdom of Tonga. Image: RNZDF
    TONGA 10: Captain SQNLDR Marcus Hogan briefs the aircrew on board the P-3K2 Orion aircraft prior to departing for Tonga. Image: RNZDF

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Tonga volcano tsunami death toll rises to three, reports UN

    RNZ News

    The acting United Nations coordinator in the Pacific understands three people have died following the eruption in Tonga on Saturday.

    The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano, which erupted on Saturday, was about 65km north of Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa.

    There is now a huge clean-up operation in the town, which has been blanketed in thick volcanic dust.

    Serious damage has been reported from the west coast of Tongatapu and a state of emergency has been declared.

    New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed two deaths so far, but Fiji-based United Nations Coordinator Jonathan Veitch said there were still areas that had not been contacted.

    Acting High Commissioner for New Zealand in Tonga Peter Lund told Tagata Pasifika he could see rubble, large rocks and damaged buildings, with serious damage along the west coast of Tongatapu.

    “There is a huge clean-up operation underway, the town has been blanketed in a thick blanket of volcanic dust, but look they’re making progress… roads are being cleared,” he said.

    A Briton among fatalities
    Veitch said one of those fatalities was British national Angela Glover, who was reported by her family to have been killed by the tsunami.

    Glover is thought to have died trying to rescue her dogs at the animal charity she ran.

    Veitch told RNZ full information from some islands — such as the Ha’apai group — was not available.

    “We know that the Tonga Navy has gone there and we expect to hear back soon.”

    The communication situation was “absolutely terrible”.

    “I have worked in a lot of emergencies but this is one of the hardest in terms of communicating and trying to get information from there. With the severing of the cable that comes from Fiji they’re just cut off completely,” he said.

    “We’re relying 100 percent on satellite phones.

    ‘Bit of a struggle’
    “We’ve been discussing with New Zealand and Australia and UN colleagues … and we hope to have this [cable] back up and running relatively soon, but it’s been a bit of a struggle.”

    It had been “a lot more difficult” than regular operations, Veitch said.

    One of the biggest concerns in the crisis was clean water, he said.

    “I think one of the first things that can be done is if those aircraft or those ships that both New Zealand and Australia have offered can provide bottled drinking water. That’s a very small, short-term solution.

    “We need to ensure that the desalination plants are functioning well and properly … and we need to send a lot of testing kits and other material over there so people can treat their own water, because as you know, the vast majority of the population in Tonga is reliant on rainwater.

    “And with the ash as it currently is, it has been a bit acidic, so we’re not sure of the quality of the water right now.”

    Access in ‘covid-free nation’
    Another issue was access.

    “Tonga is one of the few lucky countries in the world that hasn’t had covid … so we’ll have to operate rather remotely. So we’ll be supporting the government to do the implementation and then working very much through local organisations.”

    For those in Tonga who were cut off, Veitch said the main message was “everybody is working day and night on this. We are putting our supplies together. We are ready to move.

    “We have teams on the ground. We are coming up with cash and other supply solutions … so help is on its way”.

    On Tuesday afternoon, ministers confirmed two New Zealand naval ships were being sent to Tonga to provide support, carrying fresh water, emergency provisions, and diving teams. The journey is expected to take three days.

    Tonga’s deputy head of mission in Australia, Curtis Tu’ihalangingie, said Tonga was concerned that aid deliveries could spread covid-19 to the covid-free nation.

    “We don’t want to bring in another wave — a tsunami of covid-19,” Tu’ihalangingie told a news agency by telephone, urging the public to wait for a disaster relief fund to donate.

    Aid needs to be quarantined
    Any aid sent to Tonga would need to be quarantined, and it was likely no foreign personnel would be allowed to disembark aircraft, he said.

    Meanwhile, the United Nations reported a distress signal had been detected in an isolated group of islands in the Tonga archipelago following Saturday’s volcanic eruption and tsunami, prompting particular concern for its inhabitants.

    The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said there had been no contact from the Ha’apai group of islands and there was “particular concern” about two small low-lying islands — Fonoi and Mango, where an active distress beacon had been detected.

    According to the Tonga government, 36 people live on Mango and 69 on Fonoi.

    Australia’s Minister for the Pacific Zed Seselja said Tongan officials were planning to evacuate people from outer islands where “they’re doing it very tough, we understand, with many houses being destroyed in the tsunami”.

    Royal New Zealand Air Force aircrew monitoring the Tongan volcanic tsunami damage during the 170122 flight
    Royal New Zealand Air Force aircrew in the P-3K2 Orion aircraft monitoring the Tongan tsunami damage on yesterday’s surveillance flight. Image: RNZDF/Licensed under Creative Commons BY 4.0

    The NZ Defence Force reports that following the successful surveillance and reconnaissance flight of and RNZAF Orion yesterday, “imagery and details have been sent to relevant authorities in Tonga by the NZ government” to help decisions about aid needed.

    “Images showed ashfall on Nuku’alofa airport runway that must be cleared before our Hercules aircraft can land,” the Defence Force media release said.

    Royal New Zealand Navy ships HMNZS Wellington and HMNZS Aotearoa are departing New Zealand today so they can respond quickly if called upon by the Tongan government.

    HMNZS Wellington will be carrying hydrographic survey and diving teams and a Seasprite helicopter. HMNZS Aotearoa will carry bulk water supplies and humanitarian and disaster relief stores.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. It may include some agency content.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Even After Release, Guantánamo Survivors Live Under Surveillance and in Anguish

    A protester holds a placard reading "Close Guantanamo" and portrait of detainee during an outdoor demonstration.

    It is a sad fact that it requires a major anniversary, two decades on from the arrival of the first prisoners in hoods and orange jumpsuits at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray prison, for the media and the U.S. public to pay attention to Guantánamo and the 39 men who remain imprisoned there.

    The 741 men who have been released have been almost entirely forgotten by the public. The truth is that the U.S. has largely washed its hands of those it tortured and imprisoned without charge or trial for years on end, outsourcing its responsibility to support the reentry of these men to other countries, usually in the Global South, in some cases with fatal consequences.

    I work for the only project in the world that is solely dedicated to assisting people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo to rebuild their lives — a project run by the human rights charity Reprieve. Many of the men we’ve assisted have been dropped by the U.S. into a country they’ve never been to before, where they have no contacts or networks and possibly don’t even speak the language.

    Our research shows that almost one in three detainees who have been resettled in third countries have not been granted legal status documents. And even those who are granted residency find that rather than receive the support they need, they are stigmatized and kept under surveillance.

    Often, host countries don’t allow the family of the former detainee to join him or even visit, after families have already been kept apart for so long. In one of the most heart-breaking cases I’ve worked on, the host country refused visit requests from the former detainee’s mother for five years, and by the time they finally acquiesced, she had died, having not seen her son for more than 20 years.

    Deprived of citizenship or residency rights, people who were previously imprisoned in Guantánamo cannot get a job, access health care (including psychological support), education and other vital services. They may not be able to open a bank account, get a driver’s license, and if living in a country with checkpoints, can’t pass through them. Without this most basic passport to participation in society, they are effectively confined to the shadows.

    The program that I work for, called “Life After Guantánamo,” tries to help survivors of Guantánamo living in these dire circumstances. Founded by Reprieve in 2009, the program has helped 130 men living in 29 countries.

    Reprieve has legally represented more than 80 Guantánamo detainees and helped more people secure release from the prison than any other organization. Through the Life After Guantánamo program, we request that governments give people who were formerly held in the prison the tools needed to rebuild their lives, or, failing that, we seek to do so ourselves. With support, many detainees, whether repatriated to their home countries or resettled in host countries, have been able to start that process.

    Yet even detainees with those comparative “success stories” continue to be haunted by the time they spent in U.S. custody. “It feels like I am still there, I just changed for the big Guantánamo,” one former prisoner told me. “When I close my eyes I am back in Guantánamo, so I can’t sleep,” confided another.

    I visited one detainee after he’d been resettled who wouldn’t leave his new apartment. Although physically he was a free man, mentally he was still imprisoned. Detained in Guantánamo for 15 years since he was only 18 years old, he had become so institutionalized that he couldn’t cope with freedom. With support, he’s now learned the language of his new home country, formed friendships and is undergoing vocational training.

    Many aren’t given that chance. In some cases, men are released from Guantánamo only to be immediately imprisoned again. Twenty-three men were transferred to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), expecting to live as free men, but were detained upon their arrival in horrific conditions when the UAE reneged on assurances given to the U.S. Most of them have been forcibly repatriated to Yemen, despite concerns about their safety. One man, Ravil Mingazov, could be repatriated to Russia where he faces persecution and, as confirmed by the United Nations, a “substantial risk of torture.”

    When Senegal deported two former detainees to Libya, they immediately disappeared into militia-run prisons. Although they have since been found and released, they are at risk of being detained again. Former detainees resettled in Kazakhstan and Mauritania died of medical problems because they could not access health care as they had not been afforded basic rights.

    Most resettlements were negotiated during Barack Obama’s presidency, and once Donald Trump took over, the U.S. appeared to completely disengage from what was happening to them once resettled, giving host countries license to mistreat and abuse them.

    President Joe Biden can end the lottery that determines whether people formerly imprisoned in Guantánamo are given any chance at life. He can ensure that resettlements and repatriations are done safely, without former detainees being put at risk of imprisonment or persecution, that they are afforded citizenship or rights as residents and that their loved ones are able to join them. These demands should be central to the campaign to close Guantánamo, because Guantánamo can continue to imprison, and even kill, after men escape its four walls.

    Disgracefully, the U.S. offers no compensation to these men for the unspeakable horrors they suffered in U.S. custody. The very least the Biden administration can do is ensure that once released from Guantánamo, former prisoners are actually given the opportunity to know freedom.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden and the media: CPJ’s press freedom recommendations

    CPJ is concerned that U.S. President Joe Biden has not addressed many of the Obama and Trump-era limitations on press freedom. In ‘Night and Day’, a CPJ special report on the Biden administration’s relationship with the press during its first year in office, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. found that while some progress has been made, key problems outlined in his reports on the previous two administrations remained. These range from freedom of information requests that remain backlogged, stymieing reporters’ ability to cover matters of public interest; limited access to the southern border; and the use of the Espionage Act against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. 

    Based on the report by Downie, who also wrote CPJ reports on The Obama Administration and the Press and The Trump Administration and the Media, CPJ makes the following recommendations to the Biden administration:

    • Embrace good practice and transparency in dealing with the press by speaking to reporters on the record and avoiding overuse of on background briefings and quote approval. Make the president more accessible to reporters.
    • Instruct all government departments to comply with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in a timely manner without regard to the media organizations or reporters filing those requests. Enforce prompt and less restrictive responses to FOIA requests to facilitate greater transparency. 
    • Implement restrictions that would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to obtain warrants before searching electronic devices. Require both agencies to release transparency reports about such searches. 
    • Prohibit DHS and CBP agents from intimidating and singling out journalists for questioning and/ or asking journalists about their work . 
    • Codify the new DOJ policy restricting federal prosecutors’ ability to obtain journalists’ phone and email records in government leak investigations. 
    • Prioritize and support passage of legislation – such as Senator Ron Wyden’s PRESS Act – that would protect journalists’ First Amendment rights against government prosecution for using and receiving confidential and classified information. The legislation should expansively define journalists, and shield reporters’ communication records, ensuring that the government cannot compel journalists to disclose sources or unpublished reporting information. 
    • Stop the misuse of the Espionage Act to hinder press freedom: Drop the espionage charges against Julian Assange and cease efforts to extradite him to the U.S. Put into place legislation that would prevent the use of the Espionage Act as a means to halt news gathering activity. 
    • Ensure that U.S. companies or individuals are not contributing to the secret surveillance of journalists abroad, and that foreign companies face targeted sanctions for enabling authoritarian governments to spy on journalists.   
    • Take action against impunity in the murder of journalists: Impose sanctions on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman, holding the leader to account for his role in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.  
    • Process P-2 visa applications for Afghan journalists as rapidly as possible and be communicative about which cases are being processed; allow P-2 processing for individuals who have reached the U.S.; and provide support and protection to journalists still in Afghanistan or who have escaped to third countries.
    • Support the creation of an emergency visa for journalists at-risk around the world (such as in section 6 of the International Press Freedom Act of 2021) to ensure solutions are in place for future crises like the one in Afghanistan. 


    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.

  • Ditching the Smartphone

    After talking and writing about it, I finally ditched my smartphone and switched to a flip phone, with the aim of being rid of a cell phone altogether.

    It’s only been a few days, but the psychological and spiritual effect has been uplifting. I had come to view the stupid smartphone as one of the principal portals into our individual and collective imprisonment. Vaccine passports, digital ID’s, constant surveillance and control, all rely on us remaining chained to a gadget less than two decades old.

    So chucking it felt not only necessary but cleansing, a Detox from addiction and dependency, a small step away from the increasingly repressive biosecurity state, which is confident that the masses will never get rid of this particular digital technology because, don’t you know, we simply can’t live without it.

    I totally get the difficulties, though. For millions of people, the smartphone is a vital component to one’s job or education. I’m one of the fortunate ones where this doesn’t apply, and only for the grace have I been able to opt out relatively easy. I only got a cell phone five years ago; and a smartphone two years ago, mainly because of family members who virtually lived on text. I was also traveling a lot, and apps like Google Maps were a God-send.

    But mainly I hated the thing, hated the feeling that I was growing used to it, embracing it even, eyes and ears magnetized to the screen. When the COVID nightmare came along, with its dystopian plans for an AI and QR future, my smartphone mutated into what it perhaps always was: a shackle. An instrument from which the powers-that-be were sneering at me, another fly trapped in their web.

    I knew there existed plenty of warriors working on wresting control of digital technology from the ruling elite, and I fully support those efforts. Personally, however, I hungered for another route. I wanted off the express train, or to at least move towards that goal. Last year, I wrote an article about why I’m often a Luddite wannabe, and one of the questions I posed then was: Is it time to ditch the smartphone? At the time, I had purchased an unlocked Acatel flip phone on Ebay for less than $100, but never got around to doing the switch.

    A week ago, I made the leap. It was surprisingly straight-forward. Here’s how it went down:

    Since I’m a Verizon customer, I went to the dealership where I first set up a cell account a few years ago. Luckily, the workers there weren’t mask crazy, so I kept mine under my nose. It turned out I couldn’t just transfer my phone number because I was changing devices. Fine, I said. My current account still had a few days left, so I would just text the few people I used the phone for and let them know.

    The young clerk at the counter was very nice and supportive. At one point, he told me that a lot of people were changing to flip phones because they were “easier to use.” Privately, I wondered if some of these people were as wary of the COVID bullshit and surveillance as I was.

    I smiled and said, “Slow and simple is a better life style.” He nodded and agreed. I paid the activation fee, tested my new toy, and all was well.

    “Have a happy holiday,” he said as we shook hands.

    “You too,” I said.

    Outside I pumped my fist in the air, as if I had scored a game-winning touchdown. I realized, of course, that this wasn’t some earth-shattering event. Yet it felt good to have moved in the right direction, a small step back to the slow and simple, which, paradoxically, could very well speed up resistance to the COVID agenda.

    The post Ditching the Smartphone first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • CPJ Safety Advisory: Covering the Beijing Olympic Winter Games 2022

    The Olympic Winter Games take place in Beijing, China from February 4-20, 2022. Journalists covering the event are likely to face a range of challenges from coronavirus restrictions to digital surveillance.

    The Committee to Protect Journalists has expressed concern about the ability of the press to work freely during the event. China has been the world’s worst jailer of journalists for three years running. Domestic journalists in mainland China face increasing censorship and control while the international media are operating in a hostile environment; the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) noted that the international media have been unable to attend press conferences and cover Games preparation, such as the arrival of the Olympic torch, for reasons including a requirement to submit COVID-19 test results within an impossible time frame. In March 2021, the FCCC said 20 international journalists had been expelled in the preceding year, while reporters are frequently followed and interviewees scared to engage. In the past, CPJ documented foreign journalists facing harassment and threats in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics.  

    Zero COVID-19 policy

    China is enforcing strict anti-COVID-19 measures across the country. As of January 11, Chinese officials had reported outbreaks of the omicron variant of the virus and locked down some cities to try and contain it, though the closed loop was unaffected. The situation is fluid, so monitor news reports before departure.

    The Winter Games will take place within a “closed loop” or bubble that has already been put into place. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has published a playbook for broadcasters and the press with the following guidance:

    • Travel to Beijing will only be possible if you have valid Games accreditation or a visa supported by a Beijing 2022 invitation letter. You must have all the necessary pre-departure testing conducted by a Chinese Embassy-approved provider.  If you have previously contracted COVID-19, you need to complete an additional vetting process at least eight days before departure.
    • You are advised to download the My 2022 smartphone app at least 14 days before traveling to China. (See digital security information below). 
    • Anyone entering the bubble must be fully vaccinated or face a 21-day quarantine. You are not allowed to leave the closed loop. Everyone will be tested daily and must wear face masks at all times.
    • Visitors can only use dedicated Games transportation to enter or move within the closed loop, as well as to exit, which is permitted only to leave the country.
    • As part of your organization’s registration, you will be assigned a COVID-19 Liaison Officer. They are your point of contact for information or if you contract COVID-19 at any stage of travel or within the bubble.
    • If you are confirmed to have a positive test for COVID-19, you will not be able to participate further. If symptomatic, you will be isolated at a designated hospital. If asymptomatic, you will be placed in an isolation facility.

    Digital security

    China and the IOC have promised a free and open internet inside the closed loop, but restrictions are possible in practice. The internet in China is strictly controlled by the government, meaning that services and websites are frequently blocked. People use virtual private networks to bypass censorship though China has technically banned unlicensed VPNs.

    If you are travelling to Beijing, assume your devices and online activity will be monitored. The more you can do in advance of travel to prepare your accounts and devices, the safer your data will be.

    Top digital security tips for journalists at the Beijing Olympics
    • Leave your devices home. Wipe an old phone and laptop or purchase new ones for the trip.
    • In case of restrictions, ask journalists in China which apps and VPNs work for them.
    • Create a new work email specifically for the trip.
    • Assume your hotel room is under surveillance.
    • Keep your devices with you and avoid leaving them unattended.
    • Wipe all devices on your return.

    Risk assessment

    • Conduct a risk assessment before travel; use CPJ’s template if you need one.
    • Staff journalists should ask newsroom IT support or security teams for organizational digital safety guidance.

    Prepare your devices

    Phones and laptops could be contaminated with malware while in China, and you should leave both personal and work devices at home. Use an old phone and laptop or buy new devices for the assignment.

    • Prepare your devices for airport security and border crossings following guidance in CPJ’s Digital Safety Kit.
    • Wipe old devices before you travel. (Back up anything you might need first.)
    • Delete all inessential apps and services.
    • Install or update essential apps and services immediately before travel to make sure you have the latest software.
    • Check your phone and mobile internet service will work in China.

    Data and accounts

    Your online accounts hold a lot of information about you – including your work, your sources, and your family – so plan to use as few as possible on your trip.

    • Understand that all data stored in online services – public and private – could be vulnerable should you log into an account while in China.
    • Limit which social media and messaging platforms you will use to those that are essential for contacting work or family. Consider having a backup way to reach people in case one does not work in practice.
    • Ask journalists already in China to recommend a functioning VPN and try to find a few options in case you encounter internet restrictions. Note that accessing an unlicensed VPN could be used against you if officials are looking for an excuse to penalize you.
    • Avoid installing the Chinese app WeChat on your devices, since it is likely to collect a lot of data, including messages and calls. 
    • Review accounts on the services you have chosen and remove any content that you would not want others to see, such as contact details for sensitive sources, or personal photos and messages.
    • Create a new work email account specifically for China and use it for the duration of your trip. Avoid logging into your regular work services like email completely in case the content is exposed, and prepare colleagues and away messages accordingly.  
    • Secure your accounts following guidance in CPJ’s Digital Safety Kit.
    • Review what information is available about you via your online profiles and remove anything that you are uncomfortable having in the public domain. (See CPJ’s guide to removing personal data from the internet.)
    • Chinese officials may monitor social media and take offense at comments or activities that could be construed as being critical of China.

    COVID-19 App and QR codes

    All journalists accredited to cover the Beijing Winter Olympics are required to download the My 2022 app to monitor health, and to register online for two QR codes. The IOC playbook notes that you will need to log into the Beijing 2022 Health Monitoring System and start inputting the required information 14 days prior to travel. The playbook details how to install and set up the app (page 62); data collected by the app (page 66); and how to log into and use the QR codes (pages 64-65).  

    • Only install the app on the device you have selected specifically for your China trip; keep it off your personal or work phone.  
    • Once the app is installed, avoid using the device or carrying it with you until you are ready to leave.

    While in China

    • Keep your devices on your person and avoid leaving them unattended.
    • Assume that everything you do online will be monitored.
    • Any call made using a hotel landline or cell phone is not encrypted and can be intercepted.
    • Be aware that you may not have Wi-Fi in your hotel room.
    • Any conversation you have in your hotel room may be subject to eavesdropping.
    • Internet access will be provided if you have to isolate because of COVID-19, according to the IOC playbook.

    On your return

    • Staff journalists should debrief with IT or security colleagues and follow their guidance.
    • Remove SIM cards from phones.
    • Wipe or factory reset all phones and computers. This is not guaranteed to erase all malware, so stop using them altogether if you can.
    • Change passwords on all accounts you accessed from China.
    • Monitor accounts and devices for any activity that is out of the ordinary and consult an IT professional if you have concerns.


    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.

  • Madness, Mayhem, and Tyranny

    Tyranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.

    — An academic study into pathocracy

    Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.

    Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.

    In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:

    Riots, martial law, and the Deep State’s coup. A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over on January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. The subsequent military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next was little more than martial law disguised as national security. The January 6 attempt to storm the Capitol by so-called insurrectionists created the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.

    The imperial president. All of the imperial powers amassed by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Joe Biden, the nation’s 46th president.

    The Surveillance State. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. Consider that it took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots. Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.

    Digital tyranny. In response to the events of Jan. 6, the tech giants meted out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship. Suddenly, individuals, including those who had no ties to the Capitol riots, began to experience lock outs, suspensions and even deletions of their social media accounts. It signaled a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech, one that leaves “we the people” on the losing end of the bargain.

    A new war on terror. “Domestic terrorism,” used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous,” became the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties. As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to wage war on so-called political extremism, ushering in what investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald described as “a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

    Government violence. The death penalty may have been abolished in Virginia in 2021, but government-sanctioned murder and mayhem continued unabated, with the U.S. government acting as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that had already been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Police particularly posed a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent.

    Culture wars. Political correctness gave way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule which, coupled with government and corporate censors and a cancel culture determined not to offend “certain” viewpoints, was all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. Critical race theory also moved to the forefront of the culture wars.

    Home invasions. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices. However, in a rare move, the Supreme Court put its foot down in two cases—Caniglia v. Strom and Lange v. California—to prevent police from carrying out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called “community caretaking” duties and from entering homes without warrants under the guise of being in “hot pursuit” of someone they suspect may have committed a crime.

    Bodily integrity. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these were just a few ways in which Americans continued to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

    COVID-19. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) expanded their powers, abused their authority, and further oppressed their constituents. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it remains to be seen how the rights of the individual will hold up in the face of long-term COVID-19 authoritarianism.

    Financial tyranny. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) exceeded $29 trillion and is growing. That translates to almost $230,000 per taxpayer. The amount this country owes is now greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051. Meanwhile, the government continued to spend taxpayer money it didn’t have on programs it couldn’t afford; businesses shuttered for lack of customers, resources and employees; and consumers continued to encounter global supply chain shortages (and skyrocketing prices) on everything from computer chips and cars to construction materials.

    Global Deep State. Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it became increasingly obvious that we had entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. Fascism became a global menace.

    20 years of crises. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years from 9/11 to COVID-19 has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before.

    The state of our nation. There may have been a new guy in charge this year, but for the most part, nothing changed. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.

    In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

    The post Madness, Mayhem, and Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Apple Employee Blows Whistle on Illegal Spying and Toxic Working Conditions

    Apple logo is seen on the store in Milan, Italy, on October 6, 2021.

    Silicon Valley has become infamous for its role in the surveillance ecosystem, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bosses are increasingly using an array of tech industry tools to keep constant tabs on their employees working from home, despite statistics showing that those who work remotely are more productive than their counterparts toiling away in office buildings.

    But one woman who worked for the tech industry’s biggest company is fighting back. Ashley Gjovik, a former Apple project manager who was fired in September after speaking out about workplace safety concerns, has asked labor regulators to rule that the company employs illegal surveillance tactics. In October, Gjovik filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Apple of a number of unfair labor practices, including keeping tabs on employees in a manner that prevents them from exercising their right to discuss working conditions.

    Gjovik also alleged that the company violated the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by retaliating against her for voicing concerns about workplace safety stemming from the fact that Apple’s office building in Sunnyvale, California, is situated on top of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-designated Superfund site, an area contaminated by hazardous industrial waste that is supposed to have been cleaned up and contained if humans are in the vicinity. If Gjovik prevails, the NLRB could issue a ruling curtailing employers’ abilities to surveil workers and chill their speech.

    Gjovik has filed numerous other complaints with several environmental and workplace safety regulators, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and has been meticulous in documenting her experience, as demonstrated by her personal website.

    This week, the Department of Labor ruled that Gjovik’s complaints had merit, and that the agency’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would be investigating her whistleblower retaliation complaints. Whistleblowing law expert Stephen Kohn told the Financial Times that it was unusual for OSHA to investigate such allegations because companies often “silence and intimidate” employees and because those filing charges must establish that their case is likely to succeed.

    “Most of us know that there’s some level of pollution in our day-to-day lives, but there’s still a lot of trust in the government and companies to do the right thing when it comes to poisoning people,” she told Truthout.

    In her NLRB complaint alleging illegal surveillance by Apple, Gjovik cited the company’s handbook, which reserves the right to search employees’ work equipment and their personal devices “to protect Apple confidential and sensitive information.” The company defines its proprietary information to include “compensation, training, recruiting, and other human resource information.”

    Under federal labor law, all employees have the right to discuss their working conditions “for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” The NLRB has ruled that management cannot spy on employees exercising their rights.

    The Apple handbook includes a footnote stating that the company is not attempting to restrict its employees’ “rights to speak freely about wages, hours, or working conditions as legally permitted.” But Apple policy also generally forbids employees from making any public disclosures without prior approval, including statements to the press, and it orders employees to refrain from discussing “compensation, training, recruiting, and other human resource information” after leaving the company, which it attempts to enforce through non-disclosure agreements. The handbook also bars employees from sharing information about their coworkers’ “compensation, health information, or performance and disciplinary matters” without any footnotes about “rights to speak freely about wages, hours, or working conditions,” according to Gjovik’s complaint.

    Charges that Gjovik filed with the NLRB also cite a memo circulated by Apple CEO Tim Cook after details of a meeting featuring discussion of pay equity was leaked to the press. Cook responded to the disclosure by vowing “to identify those who leaked” and by saying “people who leak confidential information do not belong here,” contradicting any stated policy granting employees the right to discuss their working conditions.

    Gjovik also told Truthout that when she informed someone on Apple’s employee resources team that she had the legal right to speak publicly about working conditions, he replied, “Most people don’t figure that out.”

    In response to questions about Gjovik and Apple workplace activists, Apple has typically declined to make specific comments. For example, the company told Slate: “We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace. We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”

    Apple has not responded to Truthout’s request for comment on Gjovik’s claim that a member of its employee resources team told her that the majority of Apple employees aren’t aware of their rights in the workplace.

    Gjovik’s conflict with Apple management started in March, when an administrative assistant emailed her team about the company’s Environmental Health and Safety division wanting to conduct a “vapor intrusion survey” in the Sunnyvale office. The phrase set off “alarm bells” for Gjovik, who had spent the last six months battling her apartment’s property managers after becoming ill and learning that the residence was built on top of another EPA Superfund site.

    “My body was just going crazy. It was such a nightmare. I was buying books on terminal illness,” Gjovik said.

    When she applied what she learned from her struggle at home, things started going south. Gjovik responded to the administrative assistant’s email by asking her management team if Apple had conducted comprehensive air quality tests, citing an Atlantic article from 2013 which documented how their Sunnyvale building was next to three separate triple fund sites. Apple started leasing the property in 2015, hadn’t conducted any tests since moving in, and did not inform employees of the hazardous waste underneath them, Gjovik alleged, noting that she herself discovered the lack of testing in public records after learning how to do research through her apartment ordeal. She said that management claimed that they didn’t have to inform employees of the situation because there was no evidence of air quality issues. Gjovik replied that they lacked the evidence because they didn’t perform proper tests.

    Meanwhile, evidence of retaliation against Gjovik by management started to mount. HR opened a sexual harassment investigation into one of Gjovik’s superiors that she did not want initiated out of fear that hostility from above would worsen. She started getting bombarded with an unrealistic number of work assignments. One boss cited Gjovik’s “mental health issues” in urging her to drop her concerns about the Superfund site. Additionally, she says, superiors told her not to raise questions about workplace safety — always over the phone or in person. Gjovik attempted to document those statements by replying in emails with notes about the conversations, asking if she missed anything.

    By the middle of summer, things began to escalate. On July 23, Gjovik made The New York Times quote of the day for questioning why Apple management wanted its employees to return to office work as the Delta variant of COVID-19 started to spread throughout the country. Around the same time, she took to the company’s messaging platform, Slack, to ask her coworkers if they have had negative experiences dealing with HR, receiving numerous responses in the affirmative. In early August, after informing employee resources, Gjovik asked colleagues working in the office to document cracks in the floor — a sign that vapor intrusion may be occurring. They took photographs and sent them to Gjovik, and she planned to go into the office the next day to gather evidence herself. On the day of her planned trip to the office, however, she was informed that she was being put on paid administrative leave. On September 9, after Gjovik received a request from Apple management to cooperate with an investigation about “a sensitive Intellectual Property matter,” she agreed to cooperate but never found out what it is they were trying to discover. Gjovik asked that the inquiry be conducted in writing over email. Subsequently, she was fired.

    The night before Gjovik was fired, she received a direct message on Twitter from a random helpful follower urging her to take steps to protect her privacy, in a general warning that invoked his own experience with private sector surveillance. Hours later, she asked her Twitter followers if it would be “over-paranoid” to worry about the security of her messages on Apple’s iCloud. Soon after, she began taking her personal information off of servers controlled by Apple and, as she told the tech publication Protocol, Gjovik began to unplug smart devices in her home. She told Truthout that she has no proof of the company using non-public information against her, but noted that internet trolls defending Apple have used information that she has not shared about her health and compensation to insult her, calling the matter a “nightmare sandwich.” Gjovik has also documented how supervisors at Apple were warning her to be wary of private-sector surveillance when she told them how she was locking horns with her property management company.

    Still, there is an end to the nightmare in sight and a silver lining. Gjovik is hoping that complaints she has filed with workplace regulators will prevent Apple and other massive companies from bullying and mistreating employees, especially workers who aren’t as well-compensated as she was. Already, it appears that the complaints she filed after being put on administrative leave have the potential to bear fruit. In addition to the Department of Labor advancing her case, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission told Gjovik in September that she has the right to sue Apple in state court for creating a hostile work environment. Experts familiar with the NLRA, including former NLRB officials, have said that Gjovik has a strong case against Apple — especially her complaint about CEO Cook threatening the employees who leaked details about the meeting concerning pay equity.

    “What he’s saying here goes too far,” NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman told Bloomberg about the Cook memo. “It’s restrictive of people’s ability to talk about employment policies.” Mark Gaston Pearce, another former NLRB chair who, like Liebman, led the Board during the Obama administration, tweeted that Gjovik’s case could be “a vehicle” to reverse pro-management rulings by the Board under the Trump administration. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has the power to direct Board agents to advance cases that could set precedent, has asked regional offices to pursue cases designed to expand the definition of “concerted activity,” which was narrowed under Trump, including those involving handbook policies like the ones flagged by Gjovik. Abruzzo also noted on November 4 the Board has ruled that concerted activity includes “protesting unsafe working conditions and asserting statutory rights, like filing a claim with [OSHA].”

    As far as her complaint to the SEC is concerned, Gjovik said she wants to stop the company from misrepresenting how it treats its employees. The complaint centers around a shareholder, Nia Impact Capital, who alleged that Apple is exposing itself to employment litigation risk by enforcing a culture of secrecy beyond that which is necessary to protect its trade secrets. The company responded by claiming that “Apple does not limit employees’ and contractors’ ability to speak freely about harassment, discrimination, and other unlawful acts in the workplace.” Gjovik’s SEC complaint alleges that these are “false & misleading statements of material importance” by Apple, citing an agency commissioner who warned in September 2020 against companies engaged in “woke-washing where companies attempt to portray themselves in a light they believe will be advantageous for them on issues like diversity.”

    Not that any of this has brought Gjovik much pleasure. She told Gizmodo that working for Apple was a “dream” job, and although she held a high-pressure position, she was paid well and proud of her work. But since she was put in a situation where she feared for her health and safety, and got significant push back from the company for raising concerns about it, she wants to take the opportunity to stand up for herself and others.

    “I was a very senior employee who gave them my blood, sweat and tears. If they’re doing it to me, what the fuck are they doing to retail?” she asked rhetorically. “I’m going to file as much shit as I can.”

    Correction: An earlier version of this story said that in early August, Gjovik went into the Sunnyvale office herself to take photos of cracks in the floor.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Canada’s NSA

    This year marks the 75th anniversary of a little known but influential arm of Canada’s foreign policy apparatus. An entity called the Communications Security Establishment was established to spy internationally in 1946, operating secretly in its first four decades.

    With an annual budget of $780 million and 3000 employees, the CSE has a variety of high-tech gadgets, including surveillance planes. In 2011 CSE moved into a new $1.2 billion home. The seven-building, 110,000 square metre complex is connected to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s (CSIS) headquarters in Ottawa.

    Unlike CSIS, CSE is largely foreign focused. It seeks to “protect the computer networks and information of greatest importance to Canada” from international attack. CSE also gathers international signals intelligence (SIGINT), which it defines as “intelligence acquired through the collection of electromagnetic signals.” Historically, CSE largely intercepted electronic communications between embassies in Ottawa and other nations’ capitals. Today, CSE monitors phone calls, radio, microwave and satellite, as well as emails, chat rooms and other Internet exchanges. It engages in various forms of data hacking, sifting through millions of videos and online documents daily. Or, as Vice reporter Patrick McGuire put it, CSE “listens in on phone calls and emails to secretly learn about things the Canadian government wants to secretly learn about.”

    After WWII the government established the Communications Branch of the National Research Council, which was renamed Communications Security Establishment three decades later. In Cautious Beginnings: Canadian Foreign Intelligence, 1939-51 Kurt Jensen explains: “the Gouzenko story [a Soviet diplomat who defected in September 1945, alleging widespread Russian spying in Canada] is almost entirely absent from the debate on Canadian postwar foreign intelligence. While the Soviet Union figured prominently in Canadian foreign intelligence interests, it was not an exclusive focus. The available evidence suggests that Canada had broad foreign intelligence interests that reflected current Canadian foreign policy interests.”

    Since its creation CSE has been part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing framework though Ottawa didn’t admit its Five Eyes relationship until 1995. The main contributors to the Washington-led Five Eyes are the US’s NSA, Australian Signals Directorate, New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau, British Government Communications Headquarters and CSE. A series of post-WWII accords, beginning with the 1946 UKUSA intelligence agreement, created the “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” arrangement.

    CSE established SIGINT posts on the east and west coasts as well as in the north. According to a table produced by blogger Jerry Proc, there have been more than 50 Canadian SIGINT stations opened during the past century.

    Canadian diplomatic posts have long housed SIGINT equipment. According to a NSA document released by whistleblower Edward Snowden, CSE operated clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries.” In his 1994 book former CSE agent Mike Frost describes CSE listening posts at a number of embassies or consular posts while two papers in the early 2000s cite Beijing, Abidjan, New Delhi, Bucharest, Rabat, Kingston (Jamaica), Mexico City, Rome, San Jose (Costa Rica), Warsaw and Tokyo as diplomatic posts where CSE (probably) collected information.

    Since the start of the 1960s CSE has listened to Cuban leaders’ conversations from an interception post inside the embassy in Havana. (Ottawa maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba after its 1959 revolution, reports Three Nights in Havana, partly because “the United States secretly urged [Prime Minister] Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well positioned to gather intelligence on the island.”) Canada also spied on Cuba from a diplomatic post outside that country. In the early 1980s CSE wanted to establish a communications post in Jamaica, notes Frost, to intercept “communications from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which would please NSA to no end.”

    CSE also gathered intelligence on Palestinians for Israel. Frost notes, “[former Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman] Yasser Arafat’s name, for instance, was on every [CSE] key word list. NSA was happy about that.” According to files released by Snowden, CSE spied on Israel’s enemies and shared the intelligence with that country’s SIGINT National Unit. “Palestinians” was a “specific intelligence topic” of an NSA-GCHQ-CSE project shared with their Israeli counterpart.

    In the late 1980s the Soviets jammed US and British listening operations in Moscow. In response, they asked CSE to take up the slack. “From summer 1987 to summer 1989”, notes Frost, “it was Canada that was providing the most powerful Western nations with the intelligence that had been so crucial to them and, in fact, to the whole Western Alliance.”

    Economic espionage is a significant and growing component of CSE’s focus. In 1995 the agency began hiring more individuals with economics, commerce and international business qualifications “to build up its own analytical capacity in economic intelligence.” As part of the Snowden revelations, it came to light that CSE spied on Brazil’s Department of Mines and Energy.

    In 1985 the government asked CSE to gather intelligence that could help a Canadian firm bidding for a major pipeline contract in India. A few years earlier the CSE overheard the US ambassador in Ottawa detailing his country’s negotiating position on a US$5 billion wheat sale to China, which helped Canada win the contract. CSE is also thought to have secured information useful to negotiating the mid-1990s North American Free Trade Agreement and World Trade Organization.

    CSE has contributed intelligence to Canada and its allies’ wars. The agency’s sophisticated equipment and analytical and linguistic resources contributed significantly to the 2001-14 occupation of Afghanistan. The agency’s website says it played a “vital role” in the central Asian country and CSE head John Adams boasted that they were responsible for more than half the “actionable intelligence” Canadian soldiers used in Afghanistan. That included monitoring Taliban forces and leaders as well as allied Afghan government officials. Information CSE provided protected Canadian troops from attack and helped special forces assassinate Afghans.

    As the Internet came onto the scene CSE was instructed to conduct Computer Network Exploitation. It went from intercepting communications (“data in motion”) to seeking information on foreign computer systems (“data at rest”). According to CSE expert Bill Robinson, “it became a hunter as well as a gatherer.” CSE could hack into computer systems, implant malware and copy information.

    In 2017 CSE was further empowered to carry out offensive operations against foreign actors. The Communications Security Establishment Act authorized CSE “to degrade, disrupt, influence, respond to or interfere with the capabilities, intentions or activities” of international targets. In effect the intelligence agency could seek to take a government offline, shutter a power plant, knock a drone out of the sky or interfere in court proceedings and elections in countries Ottawa doesn’t deem “democratic”. There is no requirement that the target threaten Canadian security.

    The legislation forbids offensive cyber activities that could cause injury or death or “obstruct, pervert or defeat the course of justice or democracy.” But, these limitations don’t apply if CSE conducts cyber-attacks on behalf of a Canadian military operation or receives approval of the foreign minister. Additionally, there is no independent oversight of CSE’s new offensive capabilities and CSE is allowed to do “anything that is reasonably necessary to maintain the covert nature of the activity.”

    To mark the 75th anniversary of the Communications Security Establishment, it’s time to place this clandestine organization under far greater scrutiny.

    • On December 15 the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute will be hosting a webinar on “Canada and the Five Eyes”.

    The post Canada’s NSA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Secretive Border Patrol Unit Worked With the FBI to Investigate Journalists

    U.S. Customs and Border Protextion / U.S. Department of Homeland Security logo

    A shocking exposé reveals how a secretive Customs and Border Protection division investigated as many as 20 journalists and their contacts by using government databases intended to track terrorists. Those investigated include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, along with others at The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. We speak to Jana Winter, the investigative correspondent who broke the story at Yahoo News, who says it’s unclear if the surveillance program was discontinued. “These were career officials who are still running this secretive unit with no rules and no procedures for how they access these databases,” says Winter. “They target Americans who are located in the United States who are not suspected of any crime whatsoever.”

    TRANSCRIPT

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

    AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a shocking Yahoo News exposé about a secretive Customs and Border Protection unit that investigated as many as 20 journalists and their contacts by using government databases intended to track terrorists. Those investigated by CBP’s so-called Counter Network Division include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter Martha Mendoza, along with others at The Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. Members of Congress and their staff may have also been targeted.

    The explosive revelations are detailed in a 500-page report by the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog unit, the Office of Inspector General. It opened the probe after news reports that a Border Patrol agent named Jeffrey Rambo conducted a leak investigation in 2017 by accessing government travel records of the reporter Ali Watkins, who was with Politico at the time and now works for The New York Times. Rambo also shared the information he gathered with the FBI.

    In response to the report, the Justice Department declined to pursue criminal charges for misuse of government databases and lying to investigators, citing, quote, “the lack of CBP policies and procedures concerning Rambo’s duties.”

    On Monday, the AP demanded an explanation. In a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, AP Executive Editor Julie Pace wrote, quote, “This is a flagrant example of a federal agency using its power to examine the contacts of journalists. While the actions detailed in the inspector general’s report occurred under a previous administration, the practices were described as routine,” unquote.

    An AP spokesperson told Democracy Now!, quote, “We are deeply concerned about this apparent abuse of power. This appears to be an example of journalists being targeted for simply doing their jobs, which is a violation of the First Amendment,” they said.

    For more, we’re joined by Jana Winter, the investigative correspondent for Yahoo News whose major new exposé is headlined “Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans.”

    Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jana. Take us through what took place and why this was called Operation Whistle Pig.

    JANA WINTER: First, thanks for having me on. Second, there’s a lot of tentacles here, so just bear with me.

    Operation Whistle Pig was a leak investigation started by a Border Patrol agent named Jeffrey Rambo, who was detailed to CBP’s Counter Network Division. And initially, his leak investigation targeted Ali Watkins and Senate staffer James Wolfe, but it spread to as many as 20 other journalists.

    And I’d also like to mention that we have no information that this is not occurring today. The same people are in charge. The same people are regularly — air quotes — kind of “vetting” journalists who they think might have information they would like to have or who they want to reach out to.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jana, if you could, could you talk about why they began targeting Ali Watkins and the Senate Intelligence Committee staffer and how they originally — how this Rambo initially contacted her?

    JANA WINTER: Well, it began, as one definitely would not suspect, with an order from the White House to look at forced labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically about what companies were using cobalt mined by child labor to produce consumer goods, like phones in China. So, Rambo gets a tasking to come up with a plan to find these data points to give to the White House, who would then, in theory, hit them, hit the companies, with sanctions under a Tariff Act of 1930.

    So Rambo puts together a list of reporters and NGO workers and government officials from other agencies and people from academia who might provide information on these data points about what companies are using forced labor. On that initial list are reporters who specialize in this kind of reporting, like Martha Mendoza from the AP.

    Rambo also created another list. He was looking for a national security reporter with buzz who could, unbeknownst to the reporter herself, publish articles that were not necessarily accurate, that would overstate the capabilities of U.S. law enforcement, to essentially trick these companies into altering their shipping patterns, which would be enough evidence to hit them with sanctions under the Tariff Act of 1930. So that’s where Ali Watkins comes in. He saw — Rambo saw her article trending on Twitter and thought, “OK, I’ll use Ali Watkins.” And that’s how it happened.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in terms of Rambo himself, any sense of how high up in the chain of command the knowledge of this surveillance of reporters’ activities went?

    JANA WINTER: Yeah, I want to be really clear. I mean, Rambo is obviously the fall guy here. There was a Washington Post story a long time ago that talked about him being this rogue agent — and if only. I mean, now we know, based on all of these documents, that everything he did, on every single step of the way, from his plan targeting journalists to reaching out to journalists, to the vetting of journalists, to looking into their sources, to contacting the FBI, to running a leak investigation in-house, to then contacting the FBI again — all of this was done with the knowledge and under the orders of his boss, Dan White, who was referred for criminal prosecution for multiple things, including making false statements to investigators. And he is now back at his job running his division, and DHS will not talk about this or say anything publicly about what is going on.

    But this goes all the way up. This is not — these aren’t political appointees who were tasked with something at CBP; these were career officials who are still running this secretive unit with no rules and no procedures for how they access these databases, and they target — you know, targeting Americans who are located in the United States who are not suspected of any crime whatsoever.

    AMY GOODMAN: But let’s be clear, Jana, talking about it not being a rogue operation, as you point out in your piece, one of the keepsakes that Rambo has from his time in the Washington area is a large glass globe with cobalt blue oceans and clear land, an award from CBP for his work that came with a cash bonus. The globe is a reminder that before the press coverage, before the press coverage, he was lauded for his work at the National Targeting Center, including on the Watkins/Wolfe case.

    JANA WINTER: Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: The plaque on the globe reads: “Jeffrey Rambo — In Honor and Recognition of Your Dedication to the National Targeting Center Counter Network Division [in] 2017.” And at his going-away party, his boss even cited his work on the leak investigation. Jana?

    JANA WINTER: Yeah, he was a hero inside CBP, until this became public. So, he definitely has been thrown under the bus here, whether — not saying what he did was great at all, but this was something that — I mean, they also made him the Five Eyes representative for all of DHS. There’s one person that does that for their annual or biannual, or something, meeting. He was a hero internally and was completely blindsided by them throwing him under the bus and saying, you know, “Oh, we’re going to investigate this guy. We have no idea what this is. This is a completely rogue agent who did all of these things.” And his life has been severely impacted by this.

    But I think it’s important to — I mean, no offense, but not to focus on Rambo here. I mean, this is much bigger than him. It’s going on today. The administration is silent, burying their heads in the sand like we won’t notice. And the same people, despite criminal referrals, are back at work doing these same things.

    AMY GOODMAN: So, Jana, let’s go back. In response to your Yahoo News report, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has called on DHS’s inspector general to turn over its investigation to Congress immediately. Wyden said in a statement Sunday, “If multiple government agencies were aware of this conduct and took no action to stop it, there needs to be serious consequences for every official involved, and DHS and the Justice Department must explain what actions they are taking to prevent this unacceptable conduct in the future.” Of course, Senator Wyden is chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Can you talk about even the report, this 500-page report that you got a hold of, that the senators are saying they can’t get?

    JANA WINTER: I mean, first of all, that’s ridiculous. I just think — I mean, personally, just as a regular person, I’m super disappointed with many aspects of this, including the oversight aspect. I think CBP launched an investigation into one of their own. DHS inspector general did what they do, which is launch an investigation to follow up. And they recommended things for prosecution. I don’t know — they did not answer my questions about if they had provided this report to Congress.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, I was going to ask.

    JANA WINTER: Yeah, they didn’t answer that. I don’t want to be too negative on them, because they were literally the only agency that got back to me, out of everyone, under deadline, and actually said something that was responsive to something I asked — not this particular question. But so, I don’t really know if they were supposed to hand it over to Congress. I imagine they should have done that.

    But there are so many — I think we’re looking at this from the wrong end. I think that this is by design. I think this is not some, “Oh, of course, all the agencies knew about this, and that was a mistake.” It’s, no, this was a division created to avoid, you know, the pesky bureaucracy involved with sharing sensitive information and databases. The person running the team, Rambo’s boss, who, again, was referred for criminal prosecution and is back at work running the same team, told investigators during all this that their division pushes the limits, they are the guidelines, there are no other ones, they’re the ones making the decisions, they’re the ones making the rules. And DOJ was certainly involved, because this material was passed on to the FBI, and it was — there’s no way to say that it wasn’t used during the prosecution of James Wolfe, the Senate aide. It’s just not possible. You can see the travel records. He lied about the travel records. He went to jail for lying about these things. There’s a direct connection. DHS oversees this. The White House right now — this is not just a Trump political moment. This is an ongoing division that exists to skirt these rules. And the people who run it said as much to OIG investigators.

    So this is not — you know, I just think — I don’t know. I’m interested to see if Wyden can get any traction, obviously, since we have been ignored in every capacity. And frankly, his office has been ignored in this exact capacity for quite a while.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jana?

    JANA WINTER: And the [inaudible] — no, you go ahead. Sorry.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You mentioned the FBI. Could you talk about their involvement in this? And also you mentioned the case against Wolfe. I don’t know if many listeners of our program are aware of that. Could you talk about that case specifically?

    JANA WINTER: Sure. So, James Wolfe used to be the director of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee. And he went to jail for — went to prison for two months for — after pleading guilty to charges — I guess, in the beginning, here’s what happened. So, Rambo is looking into contacting these reporters. He’s looking at Ali Watkins, who’s then a Politico rising star national security reporter. He vets her, meaning he runs all of her travel — you know, looks at her travel, sees that she’s traveling with this older gentleman, older by more than 30 years, who he later identifies as this Senate aide. This is James Wolfe. So, Rambo starts this leak investigation.

    Before he even arranges to meet Ali Watkins, under an alias and all sorts of other weird things, he reaches out to an FBI contact of his who’s now at headquarters, and says, “I’ve got something I think is in your swim lane. Please call me immediately.” So, Rambo is working with the FBI very early on this, on what he sees is a reporter who is getting classified information from this man that he thinks she is dating. Ali Watkins continues to say that she did not receive information from that person, and James Wolfe was never convicted or even charged with leaking classified information, just to be clear. But the FBI, Jeff Rambo passed along all of Ali’s travel records, Facebook posts, all sorts of other data that they had run from her, her connections to the terror watchlist, which dragged up Arianna Huffington — who is objectively not a terrorist, I think we all know — and continued to pull all of these records. And he wanted to hand over — Rambo wanted to hand over all of this information to the FBI the day after he met with Ali Watkins. He said, you know, “I believe that she is leaking information” — I mean, “she’s receiving leaked information from him. Let’s pass this to the FBI as a leak investigation.”

    His boss, Dan White, again, the same one who’s still there now, he said, “No, no, no, why don’t we just take him in it and continue to investigate her in-house? Let’s see if she has any sources within the Department of Homeland Security.” So they ran a whole other investigation, which is Operation Whistle Pig, named after the whiskey that Rambo drank when he was meeting with Ali Watkins at the bar. There are so many parts of this where, yeah.

    So, over time, Rambo has amped up his investigation, but he finds out that the FBI is actually not pursuing his probe, until he gets back to San Diego at the end of his detail to the Targeting Center, and he gets a call that says, “Hey, it’s the FBI. We have just opened up a new leak investigation unit in-house, and we would love all this information again.” So, they make him sign —

    AMY GOODMAN: Jana, we have 30 seconds.

    JANA WINTER: OK. So, basically, we have no idea how many other reporters have been investigated by the FBI, thanks to this unit that has no rules and no procedures and continues to operate today.

    AMY GOODMAN: Jana Winter, investigative correspondent for Yahoo News. We will link to your major new exposé, “Operation Whistle Pig: Inside the secret CBP unit with no rules that investigates Americans.”

    When we come back, we speak with one of the workers at a Buffalo Starbucks that just won a historic victory after they voted to unionize last week, making them the first to do so among Starbucks’ 9,000 stores in the United States, then to Memphis to speak with one of 1,400 Kellogg’s workers who have now been on strike for two months. Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • NHS trusts criticised over system that films mental health patients in their bedrooms

    Oxevision system, used by 23 NHS trusts, could breach privacy rights, charities say

    NHS trusts are facing calls to suspend the use of a monitoring system that continuously records video of mental health patients in their bedrooms amid concerns that it breaches their human rights.

    Mental health charities said the Oxevision system, used by 23 NHS trusts in some psychiatric wards to monitor patients’ vital signs, could breach their right to privacy and exacerbate their distress.

    Continue reading…

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

  • James ‘Jimmy’ O’Dea: How he upheld Te Tino Rangatiratanga and many other key causes

    OBITUARY: By Tony Fala

    James “Jimmy” O’Dea (18 October 1935-27 November 2021) was a mighty activist, community organiser, family man, and working-class defender. He died in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland after a long, brave battle against prostate cancer. He was 86.

    Friends, neighbours, and activists representing many historical struggles joined the O’Dea whanau at All Saints Chapel in Purewa Cemetery on December 4 for a celebration of Jimmy’s life.

    Chapel orators narrated O’Dea’s life as a much-loved husband, father, grandfather, and uncle. Moreover, speakers gave rich, oral historical accounts of his service in the whakapapa of many struggles in Aotearoa and the world.

    The speakers:
    Kereama Pene:
    Minister Kereama Pene of Ngati Whatua opened the service with a poignant reflection on O’Dea’s 62 years of service for Māori communities in Aotearoa. Pene spoke of Jimmy O’Dea’s close friendships with Whina Cooper and a generation of kuia and kaumatua who have all passed over. He said O’Dea attended many marae throughout the country over his long life.

    Pat O’Dea:
    His eldest son, Pat O’Dea, expanded upon Kereama Pene’s fine introductory comments. He spoke about his father arriving in Aotearoa in 1957. Patrick wove oral histories of his father’s long commitment to many struggles in Aotearoa.

    Pat elaborated upon Jimmy O’Dea’s many years of work for Māori communities.

    Pat O’Dea explained that his father first got involved in anti-racist activism for Māori in 1959 when Jimmy supported Dr Henry Bennett. This eminent doctor was refused a drink at the Papakura Hotel in South Auckland because he was Māori.

    Pat O’Dea told stories concerning Jimmy O’Dea’s involvement in the Māori Land March of 1975.

    The audience was told that Jimmy O’Dea drove the bus for the land march in 1975 — a bus Jimmy received from Ponsonby People’s Union leader Roger Fowler.

    Pat O’Dea wove wonderful narratives concerning Jimmy’s role in the 1977 struggle at Takaparawhau (Bastion Point). He articulated rich oral histories regarding Jimmy’s close friendship with Takaparawhau leader Joe Hawke. Pat also spoke of the genesis of that struggle in his oration.

    Pat O’Dea also spoke of his father’s long commitment to Moana (Pasifika) communities in Aotearoa. He told a wonderful story of how Jimmy O’Dea, and his Māori friend, Ann McDonald, both helped prevent a group of Tongan “overstayers” from being deported by NZ Police by boat during the Dawn Raids in the mid-1970s in Tāmaki Makaurau.

    Narrating stories of his father’s long commitment to the CPNZ, the trade union movement, and the working class in Aotearoa, Pat O’Dea spoke of how Jimmy was hated by employers and union leaders alike because he always told the working-class people the truth!

    Pat O’Dea narrated stories concerning Jimmy’s involvement in the anti-nuclear struggle in Aotearoa from 1962. Pat recounted the story of his father voyaging out into the ocean on a tin dinghy with outboard motor — protesting against the arrival of a US submarine making its way up Waitemata Harbour in 1979.

    Pat also briefly addressed Jimmy’s long years of work with the Aotearoa front of the international struggle against Apartheid in South Africa.

    Pat also highlighted Jimmy’s anti-racist labours as one landmark in his many contributions to activism.

    Kevin O’Dea:
    Jimmy’s son Kevin O’Dea joined the celebration by video link from Australia. He introduced the audience to his father as a wonderful family man who loved music and poetry. Kevin elaborated upon the aroha that conjoined Jimmy’s large, extended family. He read a poem for his father about the place of music in times of grief and healing.

    Nanda Kumar:
    Nanda Kumar spoke on behalf of Jimmy’s Indo-Fijian wife Sonya and the extended family. A niece of Sonya, Nanda talked of her Uncle Jimmy’s rich contributions to family life at Kupe Street in Takaparawhau.

    Jimmy’s grandsons:
    One of Pat O’Dea’s sons gave a profound mihi in te reo for his grandfather. He also read an Irish poem to honour Jimmy. This grandson said that the greatest lesson he learnt from his grandfather was that one should always defend those who cannot defend themselves.

    Another of Jimmy’s grandsons gave a strong mihi. He told the story of travelling with his grandfather and learning how much Jimmy cared for people. This grandson performed a musical tribute for his grandfather on the flute.

    Taiaha Hawke:
    Taiaha Hawke of Ngati Whatua gave a noble oration concerning Takaparawhau. He informed guests of the close working relationship between his father Joe Hawke and Jimmy O’Dea as all three men fought for Takaparawhau in the middle 1970s. Taiaha told rich stories of the spirituality that underpinned that struggle — in words too precious to be recorded here. He affirmed his whanau’s commitment to working together with the O’Dea family on a project to honour Jimmy.

    Alastair Crombie:
    Alastair Crombie was Jimmy’s neighbour on Kupe Street, Takaparawhau, for 20 years. He told the audience of how he exchanged plates of food with the O’Dea’s — and how his empty plates were always returned heaped with wonderful Indian cooking from Sonya’s kitchen! Alistair shared stories of how his friendship with Jimmy transcended political differences.

    Andy Gilhooly:
    Jimmy’s friend Andy Gilhooly introduced the audience to James O’Dea’s early life in Ireland. He told the story of Jimmy’s early life of poverty as an orphan boy. Andy spoke of Jimmy’s natural brilliance in the Gaelic language at school: But Jimmy was unable to complete his schooling because of poverty. He talked of Jimmy’s love of the sea — and how O’Dea joined the Merchant Marine and sailed from Ireland to Australia and Aotearoa. Finally, Andy located Jimmy’s love for the oppressed in O’Dea’s Irish Catholic upbringing.

    Stories about Jimmy after the funeral:
    After the funeral, Roger Fowler told me that Jimmy was heavily involved in anti-Vietnam War activism in the 1960s and 1970s. He talked of Jimmy’s long years of work in the anti-apartheid struggle to free South Africa. Moreover, Roger spoke of Jimmy’s long commitment to the Palestinian cause. He also elaborated upon Jimmy’s dedication to his Irish homeland through work in support of the James Connolly Society.

    Jimmy’s place in the whakapapa of struggles in Aotearoa:
    I only knew Jimmy O’Dea as a friend and fellow activist (in SWO and beyond) for 26 years. The experts on Jimmy’s place in the wider whakapapa of struggles in Aotearoa between 1959-2021 are those who fought alongside him on many campaigns.

    Representatives of the Te Tino Rangatiratanga and anti-apartheid struggles in Aotearoa have already paid tribute to Jimmy after he died. John Minto’s obituary for Jimmy is superlative.

    The stories of Jimmy O’Dea in struggle in Aotearoa are borne living in the oral histories held by many good people — including Kevin O’Dea; Patrick O’Dea; the wider O’Dea whanau; Grant Brookes; Joe Carolan; Lynn Doherty & Roger Fowler; Roger Gummer; Hone Harawira; Joe Hawke; Taiaha Hawke; Bernie Hornfeck; Will ‘IIolahia; Barry & Anna Lee; John Minto; Tigilau Ness; Pania Newton; Len Parker; Kereama Pene; Delwyn Roberts; Oliver Sutherland; Annette Sykes; Alec Toleafoa; Joe Trinder, and many others.

    Memories of Jimmy O’Dea are held in the hearts of many other ordinary folk — who, like Jimmy, and people mentioned above, helped build collective struggles and collective narratives of emancipation in Aotearoa and abroad.

    Jimmy and Te Tiriti:
    In conclusion, I feel Jimmy embodied the culture, history, language, and values of his Irish people. His life also pays testimony to the hope that Māori and Pakeha can come together as peoples under Te Tiriti.

    Distinguished Ngati Kahu, Te Rarawa, and Ngati Whatua leader Margaret Mutu provides an insightful introduction to Māori understandings of Te Tiriti in her 2019 article, “‘To honour the treaty, we must first settle colonisation’ (Moana Jackson): the long road from colonial devastation to balance, peace and harmony”

    I believe Jimmy upheld a vision of partnership outlined by Professor Mutu in the above article. As a Pakeha, Jimmy honoured his Māori Te Tiriti partner throughout his life in Aotearoa.

    James “Jimmy” O’Dea upheld Māori Te Tino Rangatiratanga under Te Tiriti in his actions and words.

    Perhaps Pakeha can find a model for partnership under Te Tiriti in Jimmy’s rich life — a model of partnership characterised by genuine power-sharing, mutual respect, and a commitment to working through legitimate differences with aroha and patience. When this occurs, there will be a place for Kiwis of all cultures in Aotearoa.

    For me, Jimmy O’Dea’s lifelong contributions to a genuine, full partnership between Pakeha and Tangata Whenua under Te Tiriti constitute one of his greatest legacies for all living in Aotearoa.

    The author, Tony Fala, thanks the O’Dea whanau for the warm invitation to attend Jimmy’s funeral. The author thanks Roger Fowler for his generous korero regarding Jimmy’s activism. This article only tells a small part of Jimmy’s story. Finally, Fala wishes to acknowledge the life and work of two of Jimmy O’Dea’s mighty comrades and contemporaries — Pakeha activists Len Parker and Bernie Hornfeck. Len served working-class, Māori, and Pacific communities for more than 60 years in Tamaki Makaurau. Bernie Hornfeck spent more than 60 years working as an activist, community organiser, and forestry worker.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Spyware Created by Israeli Firm Used to Hack U.S. Officials’ iPhones

    An Israeli citizen uses their iPhone in front of the building housing the Israeli NSO group, on August 28, 2016, in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.

    Multiple news outlets revealed Friday that Apple notified at least 11 U.S. State Department officials that their iPhones were recently hacked by an unknown party or parties with spyware developed by the private Israeli firm NSO Group.

    The “bombshell,” first reported by Reuters, comes after Apple sued NSO Group last month in an effort to protect iPhone users from its Pegasus spyware, which the Israeli company claims to only sell to government law enforcement and intelligence agencies and was the focus of a major reporting project earlier this year.

    Citing multiple unnamed sources, The Washington Post and Reuters explained that State Department employees based in Uganda or elsewhere in East Africa were targeted over several months, and the intrusions “represent the widest known hacks of U.S. officials through NSO technology.”

    According to the Reuters:

    A senior Biden administration official, speaking on condition he not be identified, said the threat to U.S. personnel abroad was one of the reasons the administration was cracking down on companies such as NSO and pursuing new global discussion about spying limits.

    The official added that they have seen “systemic abuse” in multiple countries involving NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

    The National Security Council said in a statement reported by the Post that “we have been acutely concerned that commercial spyware like NSO Group’s software poses a serious counterintelligence and security risk to U.S. personnel, which is one of the reasons why the Biden-Harris administration has placed several companies involved in the development and proliferation of these tools on the Department of Commerce’s Entity List.”

    Spokespeople for Apple and the State Department declined to comment to Reuters, though the latter also noted that the Commerce Department recently added NSO Group to the Entity List “based on a determination that they developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”

    While officials at the Ugandan Embassy in Washington, D.C. also did not comment, the Israeli Embassy in the U.S. capital gave a statement to Reuters addressing the fact that Israel’s Ministry of Defense approves export licenses for the spyware company.

    “Cyber products like the one mentioned are supervised and licensed to be exported to governments only for purposes related to counter-terrorism and severe crimes,” an Israeli spokesperson said. “The licensing provisions are very clear and if these claims are true, it is a severe violation of these provisions.”

    An NSO Group spokesperson told the news agency that the relevant accounts were canceled and if an internal investigation finds that “these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools,” the involved customers “will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place.” The representative added that the company will “cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have.”

    Facebook sued NSO in 2019, claiming the Israeli firm’s spyware was used on its messaging service WhatsApp.

    “We’ve been calling NSO a national security threat for years,” Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, tweeted Friday. “This reporting shows — again — why we need to hold NSO accountable for their actions, and why governments need to support increased security online.”

    John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, also responded to the revelations on Twitter, saying that NSO Group has been an “in-plain-sight national security threat for years” and it is “embarrassing that it took a private company to warn them.”

    “Are there victims not notified by Apple?” he asked. “How about the overseas-posted personnel using Androids? Does [the State Department] know now? A multi-agency investigation is immediately needed.”

    Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) similarly told the Post that “companies that enable their customers to hack U.S. government employees are a threat to America’s national security and should be treated as such by the government.”

    “I want to be sure the State Department and the rest of the federal government has the tools to detect hacks and respond to them quickly,” added Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Federal agencies shouldn’t have to rely on the generosity of private companies to know when their phones and devices are hacked.”

    Last month, Apple filed a lawsuit in a California-based U.S. district court accusing NSO Group of violating its terms and conditions as well as state and federal laws. Apple is seeking a permanent injunction to ban the firm from using its devices, services, or software.

    That suit came after the Pegasus Project — an investigation into NSO’s spyware published in July by more than 80 journalists from 17 media organizations in 10 countries. Coordinated by Forbidden Stories with the technical support of Amnesty International, the project focused on the leak of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets, including activists, heads of state, and journalists around the world.

    The Pegasus Project spurred worldwide calls for an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, and use of such spyware. Exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden — whose leaked documents revealed that in 2007, Israel was flagged as a top espionage threat against the U.S. government — went further, saying in July that NSO Group’s industry “should not exist.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Abolitionists Are Fighting Against the Surveillance State in Their Neighborhoods

    In this photo from 2017, police monitor ShotSpotter and other crime detection programs at the Chicago Police Department 7th District's Strategic Decision Support Center.

    Why would police want a multi-million dollar gunshot detection system that doesn’t work? “ShotSpotter manufactures the urgency of an active threat, offering situations where there is likely no risk, but where police can operate within a narrative of extreme risk,” says Kelly Hayes. In this episode of Movement Memos, Kelly talks with Chicago organizers who are attempting to rid their city of an acoustic surveillance system that is both ineffective and dangerous.

    Music by Son Monarcas and Viriya

    TRANSCRIPT

    Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

    Kelly Hayes: Welcome to Movement Memos, a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, writer and organizer, Kelly Hayes. We talk a lot on this show about building the relationships and analysis we need to create movements that can win. Today, we are talking about the surveillance state, and how a coalition of activists in Chicago is seeking to interrupt its work. The surveillance technology known as ShotSpotter sounds like something out of a modern dystopian novel: a sea of microphones, scattered across oppressed communities, supposedly to detect gunshots, for the purpose of community safety. But in reality, the technology rarely turns up actual gun-related crime, and instead leads to harassment, brutalization, false imprisonment, and death for targeted community members. Despite these harmful outcomes, police tout the need for the technology, which costs about $95,000 per square mile per year, and claim that it is integral to their work. The company itself argues that the use of its tech should be expanded, and that schools should also be blanketed with microphones, as a form of early detection for school shootings. So today, we are going to talk about Chicago’s Stop ShotSpotter campaign, and why some police departments are determined to keep a multi-million dollar surveillance system that is both ineffective and dangerous.

    In 2018, the Chicago Police Department (CPD) signed a three year, $33 million contract with Shotspotter, with the option for renewal in August 2021. The ShotSpotter system now covers 117 square miles across 12 police districts, mostly on the city’s South and West sides, making Chicago one of the company’s best customers. The company has contracts in over 100 U.S. cities.

    In Chicago, the technology’s deployment was largely paid for with funds acquired through the war on drugs via civil asset forfeiture — a controversial process that allows police and prosecutors to seize cash, vehicles, or other goods if they believe those resources are tied to a crime. Chicago police have previously faced criticism for using civil forfeiture to maintain a secret budget that critics say functions “outside the bounds of normal accountability.” A 2016 investigation in The Chicago Reader found that CPD used civil forfeiture funds to pay for some of its day to day narcotics unit operations and “to secretly purchase controversial surveillance equipment without public scrutiny or City Council oversight.”

    In the spring of 2021, 13 year-old Adam Toledo was gunned down by a police officer in Chicago’s Little Village Neighborhood. Body cam footage subsequently revealed that Adam had his hands in the air when he was shot. There were, predictably, no charges filed against the officer who shot Adam, but some community members zeroed in on the question of how that police officer wound up chasing Adam that night. CPD’s ShotSpotter surveillance system had issued an alert indicating that a gun had been fired in the area, which led to officers being deployed. In the wake of Adam’s murder, some Chicago organizers began to converge around the goal of eliminating ShotSpotter’s contract with the city.

    One of those organizers was my friend, Freddy Martinez, who is a cofounder of Lucy Parsons Labs in Chicago and a co-author of that investigative report about civil asset forfeiture. Lucy Parsons Labs is a collaboration between data scientists, transparency activists, artists, and others who take an abolitionist approach to research, technology and digital rights. LPL is also a major resource to organizers and journalists in the city of Chicago when it comes to understanding the scope of the surveillance Chicagoans face. Most people have never heard of ShotSpotter, or the context in which these systems are being deployed, so I asked Freddy if he could offer us some background.

    Freddy Martinez: So what is ShotSpotter? So it’s an array of essentially microphones and using acoustic sensing and different physics techniques, they’re supposed to say that, “We detected this gunshot.” And then what happens is when the microphones pick up an alert, they send it to an analyst, some person who’s sitting in some customer support office who then would listen to the sound, and then pushes a notification out to people on the ground, police officers, who then respond thinking that there is a armed person, a quite potentially dangerous situation. And so, that’s kind of how the system looks overall.

    The problem with ShotSpotter is that there has never been any kind of evidence, any research that it actually functions in large cities. So, how do you differentiate between gunshots and car backfiring or fireworks? In fact, they don’t. They just turn it off on the 4th of July. So that’s the first part.

    The second part is that we really have no idea where there are errors in some of these processes right there. There’s obviously human error, there’s error in the detection algorithms that the company has written. And then, there’s this idea of, what happens after the alert goes out, right? And so, you have cops that are responding to these alerts dozens of times a day, and we basically have no evidence of what happens after these alerts go out.

    The reason for that is that ShotSpotter claims that it’s something like 97% accurate. And the way that they get to that number is quite clever. What they do is that they classify basically every sound that they pick up as either one, a gunshot, a single gunshot, multiple gunshots, or what they designate as a probable gunshot. And that’s included in their accuracy number. I studied science, accuracy means a very specific thing, it doesn’t mean, it’s probably a gunshot, so put it down as it is a gunshot and send cops out to the field.

    The company claims, well, don’t you want people — you know, someone dials into 911 and they think that they heard a gunshot but they’re not sure, shouldn’t police respond anyway? It’s like, well yes, that’s true but then what actually happens on a deployment is nothing. The cops show up and they find absolutely nothing. And this happens dozens of times a day, but it also brings really dangerous interactions with the public.

    Chicago is often one of the incubators of surveillance technology. It’s often one of the first adopters. They love to go to police tech conferences and say, “Here’s what we’re trying out, and here are all the things that we’re doing.”

    The CPD has experimented with all sorts of algorithms that claim that they can predict who, what, where, when crime will happen. They were early adopters into what then called the CAPS Program, but eventually they started calling community policing all over the country, where the premise is just basically have cops talking to people, more interactions with the people everywhere.

    And I think this misses a lot of the — when talk about police tactics nationally. I think a lot of people don’t see Chicago as a major player. People always talk about LAPD, people always talk about NYPD, but really Chicago is one of these incubators for experimenting on the public.

    KH: So, as Freddy explained, ShotSpotter claims that its product is 97% accurate, and supporters of the technology, including police departments that want to keep the tech, are quite prone to uplifting that number. But when I looked at any report that wasn’t compiled by the ShotSpotter marketing department, I came across very different numbers. According to a report from The MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, for example, 89% of ShotSpotter deployments in Chicago turned up no gun-related crime. 86% led to no report of any crime at all. The report indicated that over the 21.5 months researchers studied, there were more than 40,000 dead-end ShotSpotter deployments in Chicago. On an average day in Chicago, the report found, “there are more than 61 ShotSpotter-initiated police deployments that turn up no evidence of any crime, let alone gun crime.” That study was conducted between July 1, 2019 and April 14, 2021.

    In August, Chicago’s Office of Inspector General’s Public Safety section reported that the police department data it examined “does not support a conclusion that ShotSpotter is an effective tool in developing evidence of gun-related crime.” The report indicated that between January 1, 2020, and May 31, 2021, about 50,000 “probably gunshot” alerts were issued by ShotSpotter in Chicago, each of which resulted in Chicago Police being deployed. The report found that, out of all those deployments, a total of 4,556 incidents in which “evidence of a gun-related criminal offense was found.” That represents 9.1% of CPD responses to ShotSpotter alerts.

    But when we talk about what we know about ShotSpotter in Chicago, and how organizers have been able to seize upon this issue, we should highlight the fact that activist researchers have been sizing up the surveillance state in Chicago for years, including ShotSpotter, using the Freedom of Information Act, in addition to other methods. Lucy Parsons Labs has gained quite a reputation in Chicago for its in-depth research and dogged cataloging of details that politicians would rather keep buried.

    When Adam Toledo was killed, organizers like Freddy were able to offer immediate assistance to people who wanted to understand the surveillance system that set Adam’s fatal police encounter in motion.

    FM: So we, for a long time have just been documenting and cataloging police use of surveillance technologies. We’ve done a lot of deep research, we did a lot of lawsuits, to uncover that information. And so, what that allowed us to do is be one of the people that could just plug in immediately. And when people were having questions about, what is this technology? How does it work? What are the pitfalls? What are the police saying, but what’s the actual truth on the ground, and how does it fit into these larger narratives of like anti-Blackness or histories of repression?

    We became one of the groups that could answer those questions immediately. I remember at one point there was a journalist on Twitter who had said that weekend that Adam Toledo got murdered was like, “I think I’m going to spend this weekend looking into everything I can about ShotSpotter.” And I said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. Go to our website, chicagopolicesurveillance.com. It’s all on there.” And having those resources ready to go is really critical for just organizing work. And that’s kind of been what we’ve sort of focused on for the last couple of years.

    KH: I also spoke with Alyx Goodwin, an organizer with Chicago’s local Defund CPD campaign and the deputy campaign director for the Action Center on Race and the Economy. When we spoke, Alyx told me she’s committed to eliminating the ShotSpotter contract, not simply because the product is ineffective, but also because it’s part of a racialized and deadly system of surveillance that brings violence upon Black and brown people.

    Alyx Goodwin: Surveillance is actually the way I started to really get a grasp on racial capitalism. Growing up, I understood Black people to be surveilled in a specific way, right? I knew about COINTELPRO, I knew about the dismantling of the Black Panther Party and other organizations. I know Black communities are over-policed, that was my entry point to understanding policing and surveillance as a Black person. And then I met with folks who are undocumented, and experiencing surveillance through ICE and immigration, and the way federal agencies are surveilling folks. And then I met with folks who are Muslim, Arab, South Asian, who are surveilled in a specific way, with a different set of programs and at the end of the day, it is all surveillance. It is all for the purpose of maintaining the status quo, and that was just a huge light bulb for me. Even this ShotSpotter campaign — we’re trying to understand the way ShotSpotter is informing surveillance, other forms of surveillance, other surveillance tools.

    So we know that ShotSpotter, per the OIG report, we know that ShotSpotter has also changed police behavior, basically increasing stop and frisk. And we also know on the other side with the gang database campaign, that cops are performing these, what they call “investigatory stops” on people who they believe are gang members. So, there is very likely a strong correlation between ShotSpotter alerts in specific neighborhoods informing the number of stop and frisk, and the way stop and frisk is happening to folks who are now being stopped and labeled as gang members.

    I think it’s also important to name that in the OIG report, it’s described as the narrative that ShotSpotter creates about a neighborhood, is what is encouraging officers to stop and frisk folks. So, they’re already going into this with the frame of mind that this is a dangerous neighborhood, or there’s gang members here, whatever excuse they are using to justify. And so, I think I want us to really hammer down folks who are listening, and coming into the ShotSpotter campaign, to understand that this is a piece of a larger puzzle. Not to overwhelm folks, but if we tear down this particular piece of surveillance, what other wins is that going to open us up to? I think it opens us up a lot to winning a lot of other things, and to breaking down other parts of the police state.

    One of the things that the campaign talks about is that ShotSpotter is not actually a public safety solution, for a number of reasons, one of them being it’s sending police in and making situations worse and more violent. ACRE, my day job, did a report called “21st Century Policing: The Rise and Reach of Surveillance and Police Technology.” And in that report, we had a chance to highlight ShotSpotter, and that came out earlier this year. And then I want to say around the same time in Chicago, was the very untimely death of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old, who lived in Little Village who was killed by the Chicago Police Department because a ShotSpotter alert took them to his location.

    And we talk a lot about justice for families, and justice for people who are in communities who have been impacted by police violence. And it just kind of felt like, in that moment, we had no choice except to work to cancel the contract. Because as a mom of two myself, I cannot fathom, it’s really hard, just the sheer amount of anger that I feel for Adam’s mom. I can only imagine how she feels, and how other families feel, how other communities feel when they’ve lost somebody to police violence, when these are things that could have been avoided if we were not investing money in policing, and if we were not investing money in surveillance, but instead investing that money into things that communities are asking for and demanding. For some reason it is so difficult for them to find money for housing and mental health, but it is not hard for them to find money for police. And that is also, I think, one of the issues that we want to raise with this campaign.

    KH: According to The Associated Press, ShotSpotter evidence has now been admitted in over 200 court cases around the country. Reports prepared by ShotSpotter staff have also been used in court to make dubious assertions about whether defendants fired at police, or how many shots were fired during a particular incident. The AP’s investigation also found that “the system can miss live gunfire right under its microphones, or misclassify the sounds of fireworks or cars backfiring as gunshots.”

    65-year-old Michael Williams spent nearly a year in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, facing a murder charge on the basis of evidence mined from ShotSpotter. A silent clip of security footage showing a car driving through an intersection, and a noise picked up by ShotSpotter’s sea of microphones were the only evidence against Williams, who eventually considered taking his own life to escape the torment of incarceration. Prosecutors, who initially claimed ShotSpotter’s secret algorithm had cracked the case, eventually asked a judge to dismiss the charges against Williams, citing insufficient evidence.

    So we know that ShotSpotter rarely connects police with actual gun crimes, and we also know that, when it does, we can all too easily wind up with a 65 year-old Black man wrongly incarcerated or with a young person shot dead by police. But facts alone don’t generate movements. Well organized facts can create narrative potential, and impactful stories can move people to act, but that kind of activation requires the labor of storytellers. I recently spoke with Caullen Hudson. Caullen is the Executive Producer of SoapBox Productions and Organizing, which is a film production, social activism entity in Chicago. He’s also a member of the Stop ShotSpotter campaign. During our talk, Caullen shared some thoughts on uplifting a radical analysis of the ShotSpotter problem that I think are especially important.

    Caullen Hudson: A lot of what we try to do at SoapBox is, work in and be a movement with organizers and activists, and look at the bigger picture, and the root causes of social issues, and attack them in a way that amplifies and uplifts the work that’s already being done, and the history behind things. And because we work in media and films at the forefront, we try to look at narrative. We’ve been involved in the abolitionist community in Chicago for several years now, and we were aware of work around police technology for a while. I think, for me, personally, I looked into a lot more after Adam Toledo.

    I think what is so tragic about that incident is that it’s a 13-year-old, who was killed by CPD, but it’s also an example of when this technology worked 100 percent, and this is what happened when it does work, because it’s expanding the police state. It’s also, so, interestingly untimely and timely, because it’s happening a year and some change after global uprisings against white supremacy, and anti-Blackness, and policing, which is police violence all the time.

    Not only is it happening at a moment where the mainstream and the commons has had a zeitgeist shift in understanding the insidiousness of all these systems and how they are meant to harm us, but we’re seeing it happen when it’s slowly being shifted back. I think that’s important to look at these certain incidents, and look at these moments, and understand how we can show up for that family. I think, also, it’s important to look at the history of all this, right? I think we look at surveillance, in general. It’s never anything new. It just kind of reified every generation. It just looks different and it feels different, and we just see the state and the powerful have new ways to do it, new technologies to do it through any new other institutions they can build up.

    Next month is the anniversary of CPD killing Fred Hampton, right, and that’s something that people talk about a little more so because there’s a Hollywood movie made about it. Whether we like that or not, it’s because of narrative and because of media, that it’s more in the ether now. They can have these more robust, and more real, and more radical conversations about this because we’re putting together a critique that’s looking at systems at the forefront that we’re creating, which wasn’t happening before.

    KH: Caullen also pointed out that, from a distance, facts about surveillance can often be eclipsed by narratives around reform — narratives that can lead to harmful expansions of the police state.

    CH: What I saw last summer was Mayor Lightfoot going on TV at Black Women Mayors forum, talking to all the good racial justice things that she’s doing. If you’re from Chicago or from from Chicago and an organizer, especially, it’s laughable — the public gaslighting, right, that I think about before her, with Rahm, and we tend to forget that like folks on the other side see Rahm as a reformer, Rahm and Lightfoot, as reformers, or don’t like police. And I think it’s important to know that with the Cop Academy in Chicago, Rahm pitted that as an answer to what happened to Laquan, saying that was tragic. Here’s how we’re going to train police better, get them more resources to do that. So it’ll be better. This is for you. ShotSpotter ‘s tech is the same way with particularly those two mayors, but other mayors in the city, as well, is that we want to expand the police state in order to make them better, and that never is the case because it’s inherently violent, you’re just spreading out violence, making it look different, and make it more palatable for folks who aren’t on the ground or being oppressed by those same systems. I think that that narrative component does a lot, and it moves people, and it makes folks, especially outside of those areas, be okay with it.

    KH: The ShotSpotter contract was discussed at a recent meeting of the Chicago City Council, and activists I spoke with had strong feelings about the arguments police and ShotSpotter representatives made in defense of keeping the contract.

    AG: One of the police officers, I don’t remember his title, his last name is Snelling. And he was saying like, “Yeah, we talk about the 90% number, ShotSpotter not being effective 90% of the time, but we need to focus on the 10% of the time when it is effective.” And that it just sounds like, 10% is an F, that is technically an F, that is basically a zero. And I could not imagine ever trying to come home with 10% and being like, “Look, just focus on the fact that I wrote my name on the paper.” Right? I think that they were trying really, really hard in the hearing to make a case for needing ShotSpotter without having any data to actually back up why they would need ShotSpotter. Which was really, it was exciting to watch because it felt like we had caught them up in the marketing that is ShotSpotter. Like, the numbers, this is all marketing for a product. It’s not like an actual public safety investment, despite what they want us to believe.

    And so, yeah, I think that part of why CPD is so invested in keeping ShotSpotter is just because that further legitimizes their role as an institution for violence and harassment, to be the public safety solution.

    FM: ShotSpotter people actually said at the hearing, they’re like, “We are relying on data. Data is neutral. Data is objective. We’re only going off of data.” And literally all of us just starting pulling our hair because anyone that studies crime and sociology, knows that data is not neutral. But that’s who our opponents are. They’ll say anything as a way of obfuscating what they’re really doing. They’ll say these things that everyone who’s acting in good faith would never claim. I would never claim that data on crime is neutral in any way.

    One of the things that they kept saying over and over at the hearing was, what about the one time that someone was responding to a ShotSpotter alert and they find someone that’s injured? That’s why this technology works. That’s not a good way of making public policy.

    I have to make the joke that at one time I was able to buy Christmas presents because I picked up $400 that someone had dropped outside of the Target, but that’s not how bills get paid, right? And so, when we were talking about the difference here about what true public safety looks like and investing money into mental health and violence interruption programs instead of ShotSpotter precisely because we see that there’s this marketing talk of 97% accuracy.

    And then what happens, when CPD responds 96% or 91% of the time, they don’t even write a report. They don’t even open any kind of investigation. There’s no shell casings. There’s nothing for them to do. And then what does happen though, is that we know for a fact that they will write reports about, we found someone with weed on scene or someone with an open container.

    We have to figure out how to shape this narrative in a way that’s both talking about what the actual facts on the ground are but also rooting out actual factual answers from an abolitionist perspective, because we know that just dumping more money into the police will not keep us safe. Forget ShotSpotter itself not working properly, even if it did, we still wouldn’t want that money that should go to violence prevention programs going into technologies just because they’re good at marketing.

    KH: Organizers with the Stop ShotSpotter campaign say that the city needs to address the root causes of harm and violence in Chicago’s communities, but they understand why that argument is a hard sell with neoliberal city officials.

    AG: Abolition is not profitable, and Chicago is a business relationship for ShotSpotter, Chicago is the second biggest contract. And were the city to invest in things that the community identifies as true public safety, ShotSpotter wouldn’t make money. It would probably lead us to finally reckoning with the fact that we need to lay off police officers. Once we start recognizing that a lot of this is profit-driven, and moving on the fact that a lot of policing is profit-driven, the institution would fall apart.

    I also think that it’s important to name too, that as calls for abolition and defund have gotten louder, the reform industry is booming. Because again, were we to move towards abolition, there’s a number of industries that would fall because of that. So I also think that this is also about business relationships.

    CH: It’s about business, and profit, and capital, and it’s about reaction. This is all reactionary. ShotSpotter is a great real life example of policing in general, right? It literally is supposed to, at its best, spot shots after they happen. Why are we so concerned about things that harm after it happens? Again, presumably if that’s actually the case, versus trying to stop in the first place?

    If we’re so concerned about data, as they keep telling us, we have the data, we have the stats on how poverty alleviation alleviates crime and harm, how jobs, how food, how good education alleviates harm, and crime, and all that. We know that we’ve had so much data on that for the past several decades, arguably forever, but that’s not what we actually invest in.

    Right now, it’s into 2021, and this whole new crime wave narrative has been happening kind of all year. Few folks are talking about how that maybe could be tied to people not having what they need after, or during a global pandemic, and more so about how we stop the crime. We’re talking about the same quote/unquote “solutions” we’ve been talking about for decades, and decades, and decades, so why would we have all this crime to keep doing the same thing over and over again?

    Do you want to get that same bag, give that bag more money versus actually thinking about, and listen to the data, and the people in communities that are one suffering the most from it? I just get frustrated, sometimes I feel like it’s so clear. It’s like, “Why are you doing the same thing over and over again?” And relying on the same narratives, and especially we had an explosion of work, and a mass conscious shift, but I think it’s still there showing how these things are not working. If we all truly want to solve gun violence, why are we reacting to gun violence after it happens?

    Yeah, it’s like look, we can all agree, we want to end gun violence. No one here is for gun violence, and so let us look at the root causes of how that happens, and how institutions, and how entities have actually been at the forefront of dismantled communities, both locally, and domestically, and globally, and how the criminal violence they always want to talk about actually comes from inequality, that actually come from anti-Black, that actually comes from capitalism, actually comes from slavery, actually comes from taking this land. It comes from all the things that this state or powerful entities have always done. And so we know that those things can’t exist. We need to start dismantling them, in order for us to see true liberation, or to see a decrease in the harms that are so prevalent, that we can all agree we don’t want to see anymore.

    Another point, I think that’s important is that, police surveillance expands and visualizes policing under like this myth of tech-based neutrality, and objectivity, and as we’ve talked about, we can’t solve our social and political problems through technology. Tech is not objective, tech is not neutral. We are making this tech, and oftentimes, relying on the same data and information that is sustaining the same systems that we keep talking about, keep fighting against.

    I think that’s what they try to sell us when they have the new toy. It’s like, “Oh, this is based on technology. It’s based on data, so therefore it’s neutral. It can’t be racist. It’s colorblind.” And that myth is deadly.

    KH: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot often portrays abolitionists and other critics of police as out of touch and insensitive to the plight of neighborhoods that are besieged by crime and violence. It is, in fact, a common criticism of prison and police abolitionists, and of the movement to defund the police, that demanding disinvestment from the police is a privileged, white perspective. But most abolitionists are not white, and the ideas that propel this work were incubated by Black and brown people who were subject to the very violence they were critiquing. This remains true of most abolitionist organizing today, including the Stop ShotSpotter campaign.

    FM: When I think about the campaign and the people that are involved in it, I think one thing that I really appreciate and like about it is just how representative we are of the actual people who are facing these issues and have to tackle them and offer actual solutions that we know will keep us safe, that will lead to collective safety. The mayor likes to say that us abolitionists don’t care about victims of crime and things like that.

    And when I saw the murder of Adam Toledo, he was killed outside of the high school that my cousins went to. I know that neighborhood. I’m from that neighborhood. I grew up in that neighborhood. And in a lot of ways, I think that coming to this campaign is a way of both trying to do something for me personally going back 20 years or 25 years and wishing I had lived in a neighborhood that was safer, but also realizing that the solutions are going to come from people like me and from people like Alyx and Caullen and all of us because I mean, we have to be involved because ultimately, we keep us safe, as they say. That’s one thing that’s been sticking with me a lot, thinking about the campaign and some of the work we’ve been doing across the city.

    KH: Amid public debate about the contract’s renewal in August, activists and members of the Chicago City Council learned that the city’s ShotSpotter contract had been quietly renewed back in December. Some members of the City Council objected to the administration’s lack of transparency, with one alderman calling the renewal “an abuse of authority.” While City Council members talk about how to prevent similar incidents in the future, organizers with the Stop ShotSpotter campaign are reminding the public that the contract is still vulnerable.

    AG: So, the contract can be canceled at any time. There’s no legal penalty, there’s no fines. If City Council does not appropriate the money, the contract is canceled. And so for folks in Chicago, we need folks telling their city council member, by calling them, or emailing them, or tweeting at them, Alderwoman Pat Dowell does not like to be tweeted at, so I would highly suggest you tweet at her. But we’re letting them know that folks, we don’t want ShotSpotter in our wards. We don’t want the city paying nine million dollars for this technology, we want nine million dollars invested in structural solutions, in community-led violence interruption and prevention, like the Peace Book, for example. That’s one thing.

    We’re also collecting petition signatures, tonight we hit over 2,500 signatures, which is really exciting. Because [the] City Council is saying, “We need to see the data,” so we showed them the data that ShotSpotter doesn’t work. And they said, “Oh, well, we need to hear from our constituents,” so we are showing them that their constituents that don’t want ShotSpotter exist, and are here and are loud.

    And so, really the most important thing that folks can do that are in Chicago, is tell their Alderperson that they don’t want ShotSpotter used in their ward, or anywhere in the city. For folks who are not in Chicago, if ShotSpotter has a pilot in your city, hit us up, hit folks up in Chicago, because we are looking to support other local campaigns that want to cancel ShotSpotter contracts, or make sure that ShotSpotter doesn’t happen in their city. Also, I would also highly suggest tweeting at Ralph Clark, who is the CEO of ShotSpotter. This man makes a million dollars a year, he lives in the Hills of Oakland very comfortably, and is profiting off of the harassment and surveillance, and gun violence of Black people and Latinx people in Chicago and around the country. And that is just not right, on so many levels.

    KH: Given that police casually inflict violence upon marginalized people, robbing people of life, liberty and dignity, there’s something especially draconian about technology that summons such forces to a targeted community anytime there’s a loud noise. In Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision, Brendan McQuade wrote that the basic mandate of police power is to “regulate poverty and fabricate capitalist forms of order.” According to McQuade, mass surveillance projects and the work of “security” are not a response to disorder, but rather, “the political work of managing poverty and pacifying class struggle.”

    Police do not function as community members, operating in the pursuit of communal safety. They operate in opposition to communities targeted for criminalization and pacification. ShotSpotter offers opportunities for instigation wherein community members are assumed combatants. The social impunity that police enjoy often rests on the idea that police have to make split second decisions in life threatening situations. ShotSpotter manufactures the urgency of an active threat, offering situations where there is likely no risk, but where police can operate within a narrative of extreme risk. In this way, ShotSpotter serves up an ideal narrative context for police deployments — one that cloaks the everyday violence of policing in ShotSpotter’s algorithmic fog of war.

    A few years ago, a couple of friends of mine were sitting outside on a summer day, outside one of their homes, when the police rolled up. The officers who approached them claimed there had been gunfire in the area and demanded to know what my two friends had seen and heard. My friends, a Latinx woman and a trans white woman, told the police they had not seen or heard anything and did not believe there had been a gunshot. The police insisted that they were certain there had been a gunshot because the ShotSpotter system told them so, and they accused my friends of covering for gang members. The police demanded to know why my friends would protect violent criminals who, as far as we know, did not exist. Two marginalized people were at risk of experiencing violence, or arrest, that day, in an accusatory confrontation with police, generated by a faulty algorithm. My friends managed to back away from the situation safely, but the more often incidents like this occur, the more often they will result in abuse, dehumanization, the indignity of arrest, or even the death of a marginalized person.

    Adam Toledo’s case gained attention because body camera footage revealed he had his hands up at the moment he was killed. Such moments of exposure are rare for police, who generally enjoy the white-washed image that cop shows and doting politicians have upheld for generations. In Adam’s case, we saw a convergence of surveillance devices that we are told exist to protect the public: police body cameras and ShotSpotter. A ShotSpotter alert summoned the police. A police officer’s body camera documented that Adam’s hands were in the air when a police officer killed him. And in the end, that footage meant nothing, because the surveillance technology that captured it does not exist to protect people like Adam, and neither do the police.

    We live in a time when biometric surveillance systems, facial recognition software, e-carceration and ubiquitous cameras have created new avenues for policing and social control. We know that these technologies are often faulty, and that even when they work, they are empowering an inherently violent, racist system — one where police freely harass, brutalize, cage and kill with impunity. In Chicago, we are witnessing a vicious cycle, where funds captured in the war on drugs fund narcotics unit operations and controversial surveillance devices, including miles of microphones. And those listening devices, working in concert, provide cover for more aggressive police deployments.

    But cycles can be broken and organizers are fighting to end ShotSpotter contracts, to ban facial recognition software, and to shut down surveillance technologies that are being deployed against migrants and other criminalized people. San Antonio, Charlotte, and Fall River have all ended their ShotSpotter contracts, deeming the technology costly and ineffective. Seven states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of facial recognition technology. Groups like Mijente are organizing for a surveillance free future and targeting tech companies that provide ICE with its predatory infrastructure. The Illinois Coalition to End Money Bond is pushing “to reduce the harm done by pretrial electronic monitoring and to eliminate its use in the long run.” We have so much to dismantle, and so much yet to build, but we can always begin by learning, and by sharing what we know, and then shaping narratives that can help others understand that a dystopian sea of microphones is not what public safety looks like. Safety comes from people working together to change the material conditions that generate harm and despair, and I hope we are ready to do that work together.

    I want to thank Freddy, Caullen and Alyx for talking with me about Stop ShotSpotter, security and abolition. I learned a lot and I really appreciate the work they’re doing. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

    Show Notes

    Take Action:

    • You can sign the petition to cancel ShotSpotter and support community-led solutions to address gun violence in Chicago here.
    • From the StopShotSpotter organizers: “This toolkit contains background information, resources, and calls to action for you to learn more about this campaign and support the Coalition’s goal to not only get rid of this tech, but to also reinvest those funds into the things that would actually create safety in our communities, like the Peace Book and Community Restoration Ordinance.”


    Further Reading:

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pathologized Totalitarianism 101

    Triumph of the Will (1935)

    So, GloboCap has crossed the Rubicon. The final phase of its transformation of society into a pathologized-totalitarian dystopia, where mandatory genetic-therapy injections and digital compliance papers are commonplace, is now officially underway.

    On November 19, 2021, the government of New Normal Austria decreed that, as of February, experimental mRNA injections will be mandatory for the entire population. This decree comes in the midst of Austria’s official persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” i.e., political dissidents and other persons of conscience who refuse to convert to the new official ideology and submit to a series of mRNA injections, purportedly to combat a virus that causes mild-to-moderate flu-like symptoms (or no symptoms of any kind at all) in about 95% of the infected and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%.

    Austria is just the tip of the New Normal spear. Prominent New-Normal fascists in Germany, like Der Führer of Bavaria, Markus Söder, and Minister of Propaganda Karl Lauterbach, are already calling for an allgemeine Impfpflicht (i.e., “compulsory vaccination requirement”), which should not come as a surprise to anyone. The Germans are not going to sit idly by and let the Austrians publicly out-fascist them, are they? They have a reputation to uphold, after all! Italy will probably be next to join in, unless Lithuania or Australia beats them to the punch.

    But, seriously, this is just the beginning of the Winter Siege I wrote about recently. The plan seems to be to New-Normalize Europe first — generally speaking, Europeans are more docile, respectful of all authority, and not very well armed — and then use it as leverage to force the new pathologized totalitarianism on the USA, and the UK, and the rest of the world.

    I do not believe this plan will succeed. In spite of the longest and most intensive propaganda campaign in the history of propaganda, there remain enough of us who steadfastly refuse to accept the “New Normal” as our new reality.

    And a lot of us are angry, extremely angry … militantly, explosively angry.

    We are not “vaccine hesitant” or “anti-vax” or “Covid-denying conspiracy theorists.” We are millions of regular working-class people, people with principles, who value freedom, who are not prepared to go gently into the globalized, pathologized-totalitarian night. We no longer give the slightest shit whether our former friends and family members who have gone New Normal understand what this is. We do. We understand exactly what this is. It is a nascent form of totalitarianism, and we intend to kill it — or at least critically wound it — before it matures into a full-grown behemoth.

    Now, I want to be absolutely clear. I am not advocating or condoning violence. But it is going to happen. It is happening already. Totalitarianism (even this “pathologized” version of it) is imposed on society and maintained with violence. Fighting totalitarianism inevitably entails violence. It is not my preferred tactic in the current circumstances, but it is unavoidable now that we have reached this stage, and it is important that those fighting this fight recognize that violence is a natural response to the violence (and the implicit threat of violence) that is being deployed against us by the New Normal authorities, and the masses they have whipped up into a fanatical frenzy.

    It is also important (essential, I would argue) to make the violence of the New Normal visible; i.e., to frame this fight in political terms, and not in the pseudo-medical terms propagated by the official Covid narrative). This isn’t an academic argument over the existence, severity, or the response to a virus. This is a fight to determine the future of our societies.

    This fact, above all, is what the global-capitalist ruling classes are determined to conceal. The roll-out of the New Normal will fail if it is perceived as political (i.e., a form of totalitarianism). It relies on our inability to see it as what it is. So it hides itself and the violence it perpetrates within a pseudo-medical official narrative, rendering itself immune to political opposition.

    We need to deny it this perceptual redoubt, this hermeneutic hiding place. We need to make it show itself as what it is, a “pathologized” form of totalitarianism. In order to do that, we need to understand it … its internal logic, and its strengths, and weaknesses.

    Pathologized Totalitarianism

    I have been describing the New Normal as “pathologized totalitarianism” and predicting that compulsory “vaccination” was coming since at least as early as May 2020. (See, e.g., The New Pathologized Totalitarianism). I use the term “totalitarianism” intentionally, not for effect, but for the sake of accuracy. The New Normal is still a nascent totalitarianism, but its essence is unmistakably evident. I described that essence in a recent column:

    The essence of totalitarianism — regardless of which costumes and ideology it wears — is a desire to completely control society, every aspect of society, every individual behavior and thought. Every totalitarian system, whether an entire nation, a tiny cult, or any other form of social body, evolves toward this unachievable goal … the total ideological transformation and control of every single element of society … This fanatical pursuit of total control, absolute ideological uniformity, and the elimination of all dissent, is what makes totalitarianism totalitarianism.

    In October 2020, I published The Covidian Cult, which has since grown into a series of essays examining New-Normal (i.e., pathologized) totalitarianism as “a cult writ large, on a societal scale.” This analogy holds true for all forms of totalitarianism, but especially for New Normal totalitarianism, as it is the first global form of totalitarianism in history, and thus:

    The cult/culture paradigm has been inverted. Instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it.

    In The Covidian Cult (Part III), I noted:

    In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious — i.e., the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on — but the differences are not as obvious.

    And I described how New Normal totalitarianism fundamentally differs from 20th-Century totalitarianism in terms of its ideology, or seeming lack thereof.

    Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It’s global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is ‘reality’.

    But the most significant difference between 20th-Century totalitarianism and this nascent, global totalitarianism is how New Normal totalitarianism “pathologizes” its political nature, effectively rendering itself invisible, and thus immune to political opposition. Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism wore its politics on its sleeve, New Normal totalitarianism presents itself as a non-ideological (i.e., supra-political) reaction to a global public health emergency.

    And, thus, its classic totalitarian features — e.g., the revocation of basic rights and freedoms, centralization of power, rule by decree, oppressive policing of the population, demonization and persecution of a “scapegoat” underclass, censorship, propaganda, etc. — are not hidden, because they are impossible to hide, but are recontextualized in a pathologized official narrative.

    The Untermenschen become “the Unvaccinated.” Swastika lapel pins become medical-looking masks. Aryan ID papers become “vaccination passes.” Irrefutably senseless social restrictions and mandatory public-obedience rituals become “lockdowns,” “social distancing,” and so on. The world is united in a Goebbelsian total war, not against an external enemy (i.e., a racial or political enemy), but against an internal, pathological enemy.

    This pathologized official narrative is more powerful (and insidious) than any ideology, as it functions, not as a belief system or ethos, but rather, as objective “reality.” You cannot argue with or oppose “reality.” “Reality” has no political opponents. Those who challenge “reality” are “insane;” i.e., “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “Covid deniers,” “extremists,” etc. And, thus, the pathologized New Normal narrative also pathologizes its political opponents, simultaneously stripping us of political legitimacy and projecting its own violence onto us.

    20th-Century totalitarianism also blamed its violence on its scapegoats (i.e., Jews, socialists, counter-revolutionaries, etc.) but it did not attempt to erase its violence. On the contrary, it displayed it openly, in order to terrorize the masses. New Normal totalitarianism cannot do this. It can’t go openly totalitarian, because capitalism and totalitarianism are ideologically contradictory.

    Global-capitalist ideology will not function as an official ideology in an openly totalitarian society. It requires the simulation of “democracy,” or at least a simulation of market-based “freedom.” A society can be intensely authoritarian, but, to function in the global-capitalist system, it must allow its people the basic “freedom” that capitalism offers to all consumers, the right/obligation to participate in the market, to own and exchange commodities, etc.

    This “freedom” can be conditional or extremely restricted, but it must exist to some degree. Saudi Arabia and China are two examples of openly authoritarian GloboCap societies that are nevertheless not entirely totalitarian, because they can’t be and remain a part of the system. Their advertised official ideologies (i.e., Islamic fundamentalism and communism) basically function as superficial overlays on the fundamental global-capitalist ideology which dictates the “reality” in which everyone lives. These “overlay” ideologies are not fake, but when they come into conflict with global-capitalist ideology, guess which ideology wins.

    The point is, New Normal totalitarianism — and any global-capitalist form of totalitarianism — cannot display itself as totalitarianism, or even authoritarianism. It cannot acknowledge its political nature. In order to exist, it must not exist. Above all, it must erase its violence (the violence that all politics ultimately comes down to) and appear to us as an essentially beneficent response to a legitimate “global health crisis” (and a “climate change crisis,” and a “racism crisis,” and whatever other “global crises” GloboCap thinks will terrorize the masses into a mindless, order-following hysteria).

    This pathologization of totalitarianism — and the political/ideological conflict we have been engaged in for the past 20 months — is the most significant difference between New Normal totalitarianism and 20th-Century totalitarianism. The entire global-capitalist apparatus (i.e., corporations, governments, supranational entities, the corporate and state media, academia, etc.) has been put into service to achieve this objective.

    We need to come to terms with this fact. We do. Not the New Normals. Us.

    GloboCap is on the verge of remaking society into a smiley-happy pathologized-totalitarian dystopia where they can mandate experimental genetic “therapies,” and any other type of “therapies” they want, and force us to show our “compliance papers” to go about the most basic aspects of life. This remaking of society is violent. It is being carried out by force, with violence and the ever-present threat of violence. We need to face that, and act accordingly.

    Here in New Normal Germany, if you try to go grocery shopping without a medical-looking mask, armed police will remove you from the premises (and I am saying this from personal experience). In New Normal Australia, if you go to synagogue, the media will be alerted and the police will surround you. In Germany, Australia, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium, and many other countries, if you exercise your right to assemble and protest, the police will hose you down with water cannons, shoot you with rubber bullets (and sometimes real bullets), spray toxic agents into your eyes, and just generally beat the crap out of you.

    And so on. Those of us fighting for our rights and opposing this pathologized totalitarianism are all-too familiar with the reality of its violence, and the hatred it has fomented in the New Normal masses. We experience it on a daily basis. We feel it every time we’re forced to wear a mask, when some official (or waiter) demands to see our “papers.” We feel it when when we are threatened by our government, when we are gaslighted and demonized by the media, by doctors, celebrities, random strangers, and by our colleagues, friends, and family members.

    We recognize the look in their eyes. We remember where it comes from, and what it leads to.

    It isn’t just ignorance, mass hysteria, confusion, or an overreaction, or fear … or, OK, yes, it is all those things, but it’s also textbook totalitarianism (notwithstanding the new pathologized twist). Totalitarianism 101.

    Look it in the eye, and act accordingly.

    Keith Olbermann/Twitter
    The post Pathologized Totalitarianism 101 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chinese, Palestinian journalists and Pegasus Project win free press awards

    RSF president Pierre Haski announces the 29th RSF Press Freedom Awards in Paris. Video: RSF

    Reporters Without Borders

    The 2021 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Press Freedom Awards have been given to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan in the courage category, Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona in the independence category, and the Pegasus Project in the impact category.

    RSF’s press freedom prizes are awarded every year to journalists or media that have made a notable contribution to the defence or promotion of freedom of the press in the world.

    This is the 29th year they have been awarded.

    The 2021 awards have been given in three categories — journalistic courage, impact and independence. Six journalists and six media outlets or journalists’ organisations from a total of 11 countries were nominated.

    Courage Prize
    The 2021 Prize for Courage, which aims to support and salute journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have displayed courage in the practice, defence or promotion of journalism, has been awarded to Chinese journalist Zhang Zhan.

    Zhang Zhan

    Despite constant threats, this lawyer-turned-journalist covered the covid-19 outbreak in the city of Wuhan in February 2020, live-streaming video reports on social media that showed the city’s streets and hospitals, and the families of the sick.

    Her reporting from the heart of the pandemic’s initial epicentre was one of the main sources of independent information about the health situation in Wuhan at the time.

    After being arrested in May 2020 and held incommunicado for several months without any official reason being provided, Zhang Zhan was sentenced on 28 December 2020 to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.

    In protest against this injustice and the mistreatment to which she was subjected, she went on a hunger strike that resulted in her being shackled and force-fed. Her friends and family now fear for her life, and her health has worsened dramatically in recent weeks.

    Independence Prize
    The 2021 Prize for Independence, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOs that have resisted financial, political, economic or religious pressure in a noteworthy manner, has been awarded to Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassona.

    Majdoleen Hassona
    Majdoleen Hassona

    Before joining the Turkish TV channel TRT and relocating to Istanbul, this Palestinian journalist was often harassed and prosecuted by both Israeli and Palestinian authorities for her critical reporting.

    While on a return visit to the West Bank in August 2019 with her fiancé (also a TRT journalist based in Turkey), she was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and was told that she was subject to a ban on leaving the territory that had been issued by Israeli intelligence “for security reasons”.

    She has been stranded in the West Bank ever since but decided to resume reporting there and covered the anti-government protests in June 2021 following the death of the activist Nizar Banat.

    Impact Prize
    The 2021 Prize for Impact, which rewards journalists, media outlets or NGOS that have contributed to clear improvements in journalistic freedom, independence and pluralism, or increased awareness of these issues, has been awarded to the Pegasus Project.

    The Pegasus Project
    The Pegasus Project

    The Pegasus Project is an investigation by an international consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 media outlets* in 11 different countries that was coordinated by the NGO Forbidden Stories with technical support from experts at Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

    Based on a leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers targeted by Pegasus, spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group, the Pegasus Project revealed that nearly 200 journalists were targeted for spying by 11 governments — both autocratic and democratic — which had acquired licences to use Pegasus.

    This investigation has made people aware of the extent of the surveillance to which journalists are exposed and has led many media outlets and RSF to file complaints and demand a moratorium on surveillance technology sales.

    “For defying censorship and alerting the world to the reality of the nascent pandemic, the laureate in the ‘courage’ category is now in prison and her state of health is extremely worrying,” said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

    “For displaying a critical attitude and perseverance, the laureate in the ‘independence category has been unable to leave Israeli-controlled territory for the past two years.

    “For having revealed the scale of the surveillance to which journalists can be subjected, some of the journalists who are laureates in the ‘impact’ category are now being prosecuted by governments.

    “This, unfortunately, sums up the situation of journalism today. The RSF Award laureates embody the noblest journalistic qualities and also pay the highest price because of this. They deserve not only our admiration but also our support.”

    Chaired by RSF president Pierre Haski, the jury of the 29th RSF Press Freedom Awards consisted of prominent journalists and free speech defenders from across the world: Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist and Washington Post opinion columnist;  Raphaëlle Bacqué, a leading French reporter for Le Monde; Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer and president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression; Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist and communication consultant; Erick Kabendera, a Tanzanian investigative reporter; Hamid Mir, a Pakistani news editor, columnist and writer; Frederik Obermaier, a German investigative journalist with Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper; and Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and founding editor-in-chief of Dozhd, Russia’s only independent TV news channel.

    Previous winners of this prize, which was created in 1992, have included Russian journalist Elena Milashina (2020 Prize for Courage), Saudi blogger Raif Badawi (Netizen category prize in 2014) and the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo (Press Freedom Defender prize in 2004).

    Pacific Media Watch works in association with Reporters Without Borders.

    *(Aristegui Noticias, Daraj, Die Zeit, Direkt 36, Knack, Forbidden Stories, Haaretz, Le Monde, Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Proceso, PBS Frontline, Radio France, Le Soir, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, The Washington Post and The Wire)


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Artists, Activists Demand Concert Venues Drop Amazon’s Palm-Scanning Tech

    Concert operators may like Amazon’s palm recognition system, but some performers and activists are less than thrilled. A group of 200 artists and 30 rights groups has penned an open letter demanding the Red Rocks amphitheater, its ticketing provider AXS and AEG (AXS’ parent company) “immediately cancel” contracts to use Amazon One scanning at any venue. They also want the firms to ban all biometric surveillance at those events.

    The post Artists, Activists Demand Concert Venues Drop Amazon’s Palm-Scanning Tech appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • From Pegasus to Blue Wolf: How Israel’s “Security” Experiment in Palestine Became Global

    The revelation, a few years ago, that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been conducting mass surveillance on millions of Americans has reignited the conversation on governments’ misconduct and their violation of human rights and privacy laws.

    Until recently, however, Israel has been spared due criticism, not only for its unlawful spying methods on the Palestinians but also for being the originator of many of the technologies which are now being heavily criticized by human rights groups worldwide.

    Even at the height of various controversies involving government surveillance in 2013, Israel remained on the margins, despite the fact that Tel Aviv, more than any other government in the world, uses racial profiling, mass surveillance and numerous spying techniques to sustain its military occupation of Palestine.

    In Gaza, two million Palestinians are living under an Israeli blockade. They are surrounded by walls, electric fences, underground barriers, navy ships and multitudes of snipers. From above, the tannaana, the Arabic slang word Palestinians have for unmanned drone, watches and records everything. At times, these armed drones are used to blow up anything deemed suspicious from an Israeli ‘security’ perspective. Moreover, every Palestinian wishing to leave or return to Gaza—with only a few who are allowed such privilege—is subjected to the most stringent ‘security’ measures, involving various government intelligences and endless military checks. This applies as much to a Palestinian toddler as it does to a terminally-ill woman.

    In the West Bank, Israel’s security ‘experiment’ takes on many other manifestations. While the Israeli objective is to entrap people in Gaza, its aim is to control the everyday life of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Aside from the  1,660 kilometer-long Apartheid Wall in the West Bank, there are many other walls, fences, trenches and various types of barriers that are aimed at fragmenting Palestinian communities in the West Bank. These isolated communities are only connected through an elaborate system of Israeli military checkpoints, many of which are permanent and many more are erected or dismantled depending on the ‘security’ objectives on any given day.

    Much of the surveillance occurs daily at these Israeli checkpoints. While Israel uses the convenient term ‘security’ to justify its practices against Palestinians, actual security has very little to do with what takes place at these checkpoints. Many Palestinians have died, many mothers have given birth or lost their newborns while waiting for Israeli security clearance. It is a daily torment, and Palestinians are subjected to it because they are the unwitting participants of a very profitable Israeli experiment.

    Luckily, the news of Israel’s undemocratic practices is becoming increasingly known. On November 8, The Washington Post revealed an Israeli mass surveillance operation, which uses ‘Blue Wolf’ technology to create a massive database of all Palestinians.

    This additional measure gives soldiers the chance to, using their own cameras, take pictures of as many Palestinians as possible and match “them to a database of images so extensive that one former soldier described it as the army’s secret ‘Facebook for Palestinians.’”

    We know very little about this new ‘Facebook for Palestinians’, aside from what has been revealed in the news. However, we know that Israeli soldiers compete to take as many photos of Palestinian faces as possible, as those with the highest number of photos could potentially receive certain rewards, the nature of which remains unclear.

    While the ‘Blue Wolf’ story is receiving some attention in international media, it offers nothing new for Palestinians. To be a Palestinian living under occupation is to carry multiple permits and magnetic cards, to pass various clearances, to have your photo taken regularly, to have your movement monitored, to be ready to answer any question about your friends, your family, co-workers and acquaintances. When that is impractical, because, say, you live under siege in Gaza, then the work is entrusted to unmanned drones scanning sky, earth and sea.

    The reason that ‘Blue Wolf’ is receiving some traction in the media is that Israel has been recently implicated in one of the world’s greatest espionage operations.

    Pegasus is a type of malware that spies on iPhones and Android devices, to extract photos, messages, emails and record calls. Tens of thousands of people around the world, many of whom are prominent activists, journalists, officials, business leaders and alike, have fallen victim to this operation. Unsurprisingly, Pegasus is produced by the Israeli technology firm, the NSO Group, whose products are heavily involved in the monitoring of and spying on Palestinians, as confirmed by the Dublin-based Front Line Defenders, and as reported in the New York Times on November 8.

    Sadly, the Israeli unlawful and undemocratic practices became a subject of international condemnation when the victims were high-ranking personalities, the likes of French President Emmanuel Macron and others. When Palestinians were on the other end of Israeli spying, surveillance and racial profiling, the story seemed unworthy of reporting.

    Worse, for many years, Israel has promoted its sinister ‘security technology’ to the rest of the world as ‘field-proven’, meaning that they have been used against occupied Palestinians. Not only did such a declaration raise a few eyebrows, the tried and tested brand allowed Israel to become the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter. Israeli security exports are now utilized in many parts of the world. They can be found at North American and European airports, at the Mexico-US border, in the hands of various world’s intelligences, at European Union territorial waters—largely to intercept war refugees and asylum eekers.

    Covering up Israel’s unlawful and inhuman practices against the Palestinians has proven a liability on the very people who justified Israeli actions in the name of security, including Washington. On November 3, the Joe Biden Administration decided to blacklist the Israeli NSO Group for acting “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” This is a proper measure, of course, but it fails to address the ongoing Israeli violations against the Palestinian people.

    The truth is, for as long as Israel maintains its military occupation of Palestine, and as long as the Israeli military continues to see Palestinians as subjects in a mass ‘security experiment’, the Middle East—in fact, the entire world—will continue to pay the price.

    The post From Pegasus to Blue Wolf: How Israel’s “Security” Experiment in Palestine Became Global first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘It’s About Giving People Tools So We Can Reach Transparency Critical Mass’

     

     

    Janine Jackson interviewed Media Alliance’s Tracy Rosenberg about Aaron Swartz Day for the November 12, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

          CounterSpin211112Rosenberg.mp3

     

    Aaron Swartz (cc photo: Doc Searls)

    Aaron Swartz (cc photo: Doc Searls)

    Janine Jackson: While an ethics fellow at Harvard, young programmer and activist Aaron Swartz downloaded articles en masse from the academic database JSTOR, triggering the aggressive pursuit of MIT’s IT department, and eventually what’s been described as a grand jury runaway train gone off the rails. Threatened with decades in prison and a seven-figure fine because, in the words of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, “stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar,” Swartz took his own life in 2013. After his death, it was revealed that he, in fact, had authorized access to JSTOR from MIT.

    The persecution of Aaron Swartz was a sign of the animus with which some system-representing actors will go after relatively powerless individuals they choose to make examples of. It’s also been taken up as a call to advance the demand to liberate data, for regular citizens to be able to get the information they need to confront power, and to have a say in decisions affecting them.

    Joining us now to talk about that work is Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance and co-coordinator of the group Oakland Privacy. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tracy Rosenberg.

    Tracy Rosenberg: Thank you for having me.

    JJ: Aaron Swartz wasn’t alone in his concerns or values, and his projects and ideas persist, including in work that you’re involved in on public surveillance by police, and the technology that facilitates and indeed drives that. You talked about it when we spoke a few years ago back in 2018. Can you just catch us up on that project?

    TR: Sure. Aaron Swartz Day, which people might or might not be familiar with, is an annual hackathon dedicated to continuing Swartz’s work, to basically free the information, in whatever interesting and exciting ways people can come up with to do that work.

    Some years ago, they reached out to us regarding how the hackathon could support policing and surveillance transparency work. And so the Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project was born, and among other things, it’s filed hundreds of public records requests, looking for information on surveillance equipment. And it has sued police and sheriff departments, including in Sacramento, Fresno and Long Beach.

    Our latest project is called the Bad Apple Database, and the reason for that name is the common idea that problems in policing are related to “bad apples,” or just a small number of specific people. So the idea of the Bad Apple Database was that we should identify who some of those bad apples are, and how we can get them out of policing.

    So Bad Apple has four basic parts. The first is we have a database of police oversight commissions throughout the country, which is now up to 178 entries. We have public records templates for requesting information on police misconduct and surveillance activities. We have a fully anonymous, super secure tip line. And we have a growing database of actual police misconduct and investigatory reports.

    JJ: And I bet that private tip submission form has more privacy protection than the sort of “crimestopper” hotlines that we see police and media collaborating on, in which they encourage people to sort of vigilante on their neighbors. Privacy is obviously a serious concern for people who are wanting to talk about wrongdoing on the part of law enforcement.

    TR: Yes, it’s important for people to understand that our anonymous tip line is so anonymous that, in fact, we don’t even have people’s IP information if they choose to use it.

    So I do have an announcement that’s going to be formally made at Aaron Swartz Day this year, which will be at the Internet Archives on November 13, which is we have produced an API for the Bad Apple Database, which basically lets people take the information that we are collecting on that site and do interesting things. So for those who are tech-oriented, we think the API is a pretty exciting development.

    So basically you can contact us and get an API key. And you can do that by writing to info@badapple.tools, or sending a direct message to @AaronSwartzDay on Twitter.

    JJ: And what’s that going to do, exactly? What does that mean?

    TR: An API basically allows people to get into the back end of some of the data that we’ve collected, and be able to manipulate it, move it around, express it in different ways. So you might, for example, create a heat map of where oversight commissions are located in the US. Or you may be able to use the public records template to issue a large amount of public records requests. Basically, it’s a tool.

    And it’s very much in the spirit of Aaron Swartz’s work, which is to basically say, this is public information that we should be able to use to advance policy goals. Let’s get it out there in the public domain.

    Lens: Neighborhoods Watched

    Lens (10/21/21)

    JJ: The backdrop of this work, and the need for this work, is the rise of urban mass surveillance, or “neighborhoods watched,” as a piece last month from the New Orleans Gulf Coast newsroom The Lens phrased it. Just to clarify, for people who don’t know, we’re talking about surveillance technology being deployed widely in communities, that sometimes even the elected officials don’t know that law enforcement are using this technology. So this is really a matter about getting access to information that everyone in the community should know.

    TR: Yes, that is absolutely correct. When it comes to surveillance technology, as we’ve said for years, it’s a black box. The decisions are made by law enforcement. The implementation is done by police departments that, by their own accounts, are full of what we call bad apples. And it’s simply a fact that police misconduct records have been largely sealed. In California, we just passed laws in 2018 and again in 2020, SB1421 followed by SB16. In New York, I believe it’s called Article 50. Is that correct, Janine?

    JJ: I’m not sure.

    TR: OK.

    JJ: But I think it’s news we should learn, right?

    TR: Absolutely. But it’s a similar sort of legislation that for a long time made it extremely hard to access police misconduct records. And we’re talking about sustained findings that cops are doing things wrong. And the reality is, we could talk about bad apples all day and all night. But there needs to be action in identifying problematic cops doing problematic things and getting them off the force. Because these are public servants. And we can’t have these positions filled with bad apples that are dangerous to people. Can’t do it.

    JJ: Well, I perhaps conflated two things, because in addition with the Bad Apple, which is about tracking police misconduct and records, which are often not shared, part of the work is also about tracking the equipment and the tools that police and law enforcement are allowed to use, that they maybe have got from the federal government, things like facial recognition, license plate readers, that listeners may have heard of, that are being deployed by law enforcement in their communities in ways that, as I say, sometimes not even the elected officials know about. That’s kind of a different arm of this work, but it’s also relevant.

    TR: What links it together is the issue of transparency. And transparency is a tool by which we capture both the scope and the extent of surveillance activity, the scope and extent of police misconduct, and the ways in which, when things go wrong, it is hidden from the public. As we know, internal affairs is a black box, right? Nobody knows what happens. And surveillance technology, again, what’s being bought, what’s being deployed, where is it being used, and how is it being used, is also a black box.

    So what we’re basically trying to do is provide tools for people to do the kind of digging and uncovering that Open Privacy and Aaron Swartz Day have been doing for years and years. Because the reality is, these are small groups, and they can’t be everywhere, like the problem is. The problem is everywhere. So it’s really about giving people tools, so they can do this kind of work in their own communities, and so we can basically reach transparency critical mass, which is not going to happen just from one handful of folks doing it in one place. It’s going to happen from organized, coordinated activities all over the country.

    JJ: Thank you, and let me just say, finally, that these accountability tools are first and foremost and most importantly tools for citizen engagement, for citizens to learn and then take action. But they are also journalistic resources. There’s got to be a committed relationship, if you will, between openness advocates and journalists. And so what would you like to see reporters taking up with regard to this set of issues?

    Tracy Rosenberg

    Tracy Rosenberg: “The press has an enormous role in partnering with transparency advocates to basically say, give me what you’ve got, so…we can make sure that everybody knows what has been uncovered here.”

    TR: I definitely think that has been growing over the years, and it’s a wonderful development to see. I think certainly in past years, there was some tension there, between citizens who took it upon themselves to do transparency work and the media themselves.

    But that is starting to change. And there are two different parts of this. One is that journalists themselves can use these kinds of tools and can do this kind of work. And there’s a great deal of journalists who have stepped into that space.

    And, secondly, the press is a way to amplify what’s found. Because, yes, you can have a treasure trove of documents that you’ve uncovered. But if that information doesn’t get out to the community at large, then its value in terms of changing policy, and actions being taken, is limited.

    So the press has an enormous role in partnering with transparency advocates to basically say, give me what you’ve got, so we can put it on the television, so we can put it in the newspaper, so we can send it out in our subscription email, so we can make sure that everybody knows what has been uncovered here, what it means, the context for it, and what actions should happen as a result.

    JJ: Well, thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Tracy Rosenberg. She’s from Media Alliance and Oakland Privacy, as well as a number of other groups. Tracy Rosenberg, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

    TR: Thank you, Janine.

     

    The post ‘It’s About Giving People Tools So We Can Reach Transparency Critical Mass’ appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • 20 Years After Patriot Act, Surveillance of Arabs and Muslims Is Relentless

    Former President George W. Bush gestures as he speaks on Homeland Security and the Patriot Act at the Port of Baltimore, in Maryland, on July 20, 2005.

    The U.S. is now more than 20 years beyond the Patriot Act of October 2001. The immediate aftermath of 9/11 brought a heavy U.S. state focus on Arabs and Muslims in the U.S., rationalizing an expansion of policing and surveillance activities against them. It also inspired the convergence of shared struggles for liberation out of a growing consensus that we cannot abolish policing without abolishing U.S. militarism and empire building.

    The “anything goes” context of 9/11 opened up possibilities for expanded forms of policing and surveillance that are unconstitutional. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), also known as “special registration,” put in place by the Department of Justice in 2002, targeted Arabs and Muslims as well as those from the Middle East and South Asia. Overly broad interpretations of “material support” laws denied people — generally Arabs and Muslims — their freedom and even threatened some forms of humanitarian aid.

    But none of this was entirely new. All this was preceded by President Richard Nixon’s “Operation Boulder,” which law professor Susan M. Akram has described as “perhaps the first concerted US government effort to target Arabs in the US for special investigation with the specific purpose of intimidation, harassment, and to discourage their activism on issues relating to the Middle East.”

    Ironically, Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 Oklahoma City attack opened the door to the Clinton administration pushing forward a legislative effort allowing the government “to use evidence from secret sources in deportation proceedings for aliens suspected of terrorist involvement. Under the measure, the government would not have to disclose the source of the damaging information to the person whom it is seeking to deport,” The New York Times reported. A white extremist, then, had carried out a deadly bombing, but it was Arabs and Muslims (including Black Arabs and Black Muslims) who faced the prospect of deportation without ever being able to confront their accuser — or even know the identity of those accusing them.

    According to the ACLU:

    The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act established a new court charged only with hearing cases in which the government seeks to deport aliens accused of engaging in terrorist activity based on secret evidence submitted in the form of classified information. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded the secret evidence court so that secret evidence could be more easily used to deport even lawful permanent residents as terrorists.

    As Arab and Muslim communities were subjected to institutionalized racial profiling, this too frequently encouraged individual anti-Arab and Islamophobic actors who further intimidated and committed acts of violence against Arab and Muslim individuals in everyday life. Between 2000-2009, these violent incidents increased by over 500 percent; since 2016, 484 incidents of hate-motivated violence have been reported and many continue to remain unreported. In the Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian regions, of course, the U.S. military killed people en masse while engaging in torture. The U.S. government also supported authoritarian dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak who would further the U.S. imperialist agenda and simultaneously collaborate in the ongoing colonization of Palestine and siege of Gaza.

    According to the Project on Government Oversight’s Jake Laperruque, the U.S., in its rush to crack down on these domestic communities, swept up international communications on an enormous and unprecedented scale. Laperruque also notes that internal U.S. communications were surveilled, as were internet metadata.

    When eventually disclosed, this surveillance troubled and infuriated people across the political spectrum, some who cared about ending racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and some who generally had spent years inflaming such hatred. Many strands of society were incensed that their communications were being monitored by the government. Yet those with history in U.S.-based Global South liberation movements who were targeted by programs like Nixon’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) or those whose ancestors were killed via collaborations between the KKK and the FBI knew all too well that the Constitution was meant to protect white supremacy rather than protecting us all. At the same time, the Patriot Act truly alarmed liberals and radicals alike in its potential to perpetrate a massive expansion in policing, surveillance and repression.

    The George W. Bush administration had effectively circumvented the Fourth Amendment with its protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

    Attempts to override the entirely bankrupt legislative action of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, was a consequence less out of concern over targeting Muslims and Arabs than anger over the widespread sweeping up of so much information about U.S. citizens — read: white people.

    I lived through these past 20 years between communities in California, Illinois and Michigan. The fear was real. While working-class Arab Muslim immigrant men over the age of 16 were forced to register at their local Immigration and Naturalization Service office as part of the NSEERS program, their loved ones stood outside wondering if they would ever see them again.

    The reports of violence against Arabs and Muslims — and those perceived to belong to those categories — were terrifyingly routine. Some stories reached the mainstream media; most circulated simply through word of mouth.

    Now, in 2021, following the defeat of former President Donald Trump and his open promotion of anti-Muslim policies, we are witnessing the culmination of efforts led by Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. to build community-based power beyond the psychological and emotional incarceration endured between the Bush and Trump years.

    The Arab Resource & Organizing Center in California’s Bay Area along with the Arab American Action Network in Chicago have for years fought back in coalition to support anti-imperialist and abolitionist principles. Left-leaning Arab and Muslim movements are affirming that just because Trump is out doesn’t mean these efforts will relent under President Joe Biden, especially not with his interventionist history and long years of support for Israeli’s colonial policies that have been killing, containing and displacing Palestinians with U.S. weaponry.

    These organizations recognize that U.S. empire-building connects movements fighting anti-Black police violence, those pressing back against anti-Arab U.S. militarism and the “war on terror,” as well as groups resisting the militarization of the border and the ongoing colonization of Native land.

    The recent news out of Virginia Beach of an ongoing racist attack on a Black family’s home with “music blaring racial slurs and monkey sounds as strobe lights flashed” at the house while authorities dithered sounded all-too-familiar to me. It reminded me of my own research in 2021 with the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy in the Chicago area on the status of racial justice for Arab Americans.

    I had been connected to a Muslim woman who was harassed by her neighbors for three years, notwithstanding a restraining order. She told me she felt like a hostage in her own home and police were unwilling to stop the ugly attacks from neighbors coming up to the window and shouting, “F–k Arabs, f–k Muslims.” This would be followed by calls for the family to get out of the U.S.

    The animosity both families have faced is painful and traumatic and stems from the same root cause — U.S. racial capitalism and empire building. But younger generations of Black people, Arabs and/or Muslims have also in the last decade recognized more than ever the necessity of conjoining our struggles against racist police violence.

    This was seen most visibly in Ferguson, Missouri, but is also witnessed, for instance, in Palestinian-Black solidarity efforts across the country as young Palestinian Arab activists organize against police violence disproportionately targeting Black people, while Black activists align with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

    As the Palestinian Youth Movement said in its 2014 statement of solidarity with Ferguson: “Whether the PATRIOT ACT or COINTELPRO, the targeting and criminalization of our communities must end now.” These efforts have extended through defund the police and abolition efforts uniting both communities.

    Shortly after 9/11, I remember the national coalitions like Racial Justice 9/11 that grew overnight when tens of social movements affirmed their unity in the face of the expanding powers of the U.S. nation-state. Today, similar coalitions are inspired by the shared concern over the ways U.S. counterinsurgency tactics that repress movements have expanded, violently justifying the repression of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC)-led groups like the Movement for Black Lives.

    When the Bush administration consolidated its internal war on Arabs and Muslims with the Patriot Act, it helped show Trump the power to move a portion of the U.S. public toward increasingly outward-facing white supremacy. Yet it also set in motion new coalitions. These coalitions have urgently grown out of the imperialist and racist policies implemented first by President George W. Bush, and then even more openly by Trump.

    I wouldn’t wish those first traumatic months in 2001-2002 on anyone. Yet the solidarity resulting at least in part from the overreach and unconstitutional nature of the Patriot Act, followed by the racism of the Trump administration, gives me a measure of hope.

    For all Trump’s efforts to roll back previous social movement wins, many breakthroughs came out of his 2016 presidential victory. More and more grassroots mutual aid movements have materialized, affirming the necessity of growing practices of collective love and reciprocity as alternatives to state violence. Two Muslim women, one Palestinian and one North African, entered the U.S. Congress in 2019 in Palestinian American Rashida Tlaib and Somali American Ilhan Omar. They were joined earlier this year by Rep. Cori Bush, who was active in the Ferguson demonstrations and has openly spoken of solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians.

    In the midst of the Israeli onslaught against Gaza this past May, Representative Bush tweeted: “The fight for Black lives and the fight for Palestinian liberation are interconnected.” She added: “We oppose our money going to fund militarized policing, occupation, and systems of violent oppression and trauma.” Tellingly, she spoke of being anti-apartheid.

    Their voices in the halls of Congress are unprecedented. The effort to undermine them is intense. Yet we must remember that the long U.S.-led war on terror is an extension of the U.S.’s colonial, expansionist and racial capitalist project, rather than an exception. We cannot get stuck in celebratory hope after the defeat of Trump. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were not only complicit in the war on terror but also helped expand it.

    As Kali Akuno, Brian Drolet and Doug Norberg posted on Facebook on October 27, in their critique of efforts to “save democracy,” this stance is not “an argument to avoid or ignore fighting the further advance of fascistic authoritarianism. It is a critique of a view that restricts people to fighting against certain variants of capitalist governance to the exclusion of fighting against the capitalist system itself.”

    If anyone recognizes that President Biden does little to help the U.S. achieve democracy, equality or diversity, it’s my Arab immigrant community. Further, there is no sign of social transformation with Trump continuing to loom on the 2024 horizon and racist provocateurs continuing to organize and contest the 2020 election of a centrist candidate. This is why we need to be willing to imagine a radically alternative future.

    Twenty years ago, I remember Arab activists like Rana Elmir demanding an end to the Patriot Act. Forced to reckon with it, they understood its potentially dangerous future. They shouted at protests that it not only expands the containment, repression, and profiling of Arabs and Muslims, but could also massively expand the U.S.’s power to repress all progressive and BIPOC communities.

    So here we are. Nicole Nguyen, expert on surveillance and the war on terror, reminds us that by expanding the concept of the “violent extremist” the United States has repressed resistance against the war on terror and resistance against the police.

    In the face of this repression, we have no choice but to expand our practices of solidarity, creating hope through the convergence of shared struggles for liberation rooted in collective BIPOC traditions of care, nurturing relations with the land and each other, and in commitments to horizontal, non-hierarchical self-determination.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Peter Maybarduk on Moderna Patent, Tracy Rosenberg on Aaron Swartz Day

     

    New York Times depiction of Moderna vaccination

    New York Times (11/9/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: We’ve talked on this show about how drugs and medicines are researched and developed by the government (on the public dime, if you will), and then pharmaceutical companies get patents on them and sell them back to the public at literally life-altering, or life-ending, prices. If you think, “But surely everything is different in a pandemic that’s killed 800,000 people in this country, one of every 400 people, and more than 5 million worldwide”—sadly, that means you don’t understand the nature of the game.  Willie Sutton reportedly robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.” Moderna is seeking a sole patent for the Covid-19 vaccine they created in partnership with the National Institutes of Health because, as a source told the New York Times, “that could help the company justify its prices and rebuff pressure to make its vaccine available to poorer countries.” We’ll hear about that, and better ways forward, from Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program.

          CounterSpin211112Maybarduk.mp3

     

    Aaron Swartz

    Aaron Swartz (cc photo: Nick Gray)

    Also on the show: Aaron Swartz helped create the RSS protocol when he was 14; he was a founding figure behind SecureDrop, the Creative Commons licensing system, Open Library, Reddit and the civil liberties group Demand Progress, and he helped lead the fight against the censorious Stop Online Piracy Act. In the wake of his death in 2013, many groups vowed to push forward on his vision of citizens, regular people, unleashing data—with entailed access and communicability—in service of the public interest and the right to know.

    Tracy Rosenberg uses data to build bridges between those affected by policy and those that make it, particularly on questions of privacy, surveillance and private or state encroachment on civil liberties—in other words, things you might not even know you need to know about. She’s executive director at Media Alliance and co-coordinator at Oakland Privacy. We’ll catch up with her today on CounterSpin.

          CounterSpin211112Rosenberg.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the latest elections.

          CounterSpin211112Banter.mp3

     

    The post Peter Maybarduk on Moderna Patent, Tracy Rosenberg on Aaron Swartz Day appeared first on FAIR.


    This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.