According to a recent investigation by the Swedish news show Uppdrag Granskning, Sweden’s telecommunications giant Teliasonera is the latest Western company revealed to be colluding with authoritarian regimes by selling them high-tech surveillance gear to spy on its citizens. Teliasonera has allegedly enabled the governments of Belarus, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Kazakhstan to spy on journalists, union leaders, and members of the political opposition. One Teliasonera whistle-blower told the reporters, “The Arab Spring prompted the regimes to tighten their surveillance. … There’s no limit to how much wiretapping is done, none at all.”

A New York judge’s broad opinion, ordering Twitter to comply with a subpoena (PDF) and turn over account information about one of its users arrested for disorderly conduct in connection with an Occupy Wall Street protest, is worse the deeper you dig into it. 

The judge ruled (PDF) that the user, Malcolm Harris, lost ownership of his tweets once he posted them online, and therefore had no legal standing to challenge the subpoena. This decision prompted several worried responses, including our own, because our Fourth Amendment privacy rights should not be surrendered simply because we use online service providers that store information remotely. Even Twitter stepped in to defend Harris, filing a motion to quash (PDF) the subpoena.

But two other troubling legal rulings in the opinion have received less scrutiny, even though they also put basic privacy rights in jeopardy. The court threw away one of the most important procedural protections enshrined in our constitution — the Fourth Amendment’s search warrant requirement — by lowering the standard for government access to both the contents of communication, and information about a person’s location.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (more commonly known as the drug czar’s office) released its 2012 National Drug Control Strategy today. The strategy is nearly identical to previous national drug strategies. While the rhetoric is new — reflecting the fact that three-quarters of Americans consider the drug war a failure — the substance of the actual policies is the same. 

More here.

EDIT:  This is the academic study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association which is the source of the numbers in the graph.  Other sources may be found here.

(Source: hipsterlibertarian, via michaelangerlo)

Breivik gave an apparent far-right salute as he entered the court on Monday morning [Reuters]

The Norwegian militant who massacred 77 people last summer gave a clenched-fist salute, smirked at the court and said he acted to defend his country against Muslims on the first day of a trial that threatens to turn into a “circus” showcasing his far-right views.

Anders Behring Breivik, 33, has admitted setting off a car bomb that killed eight people at government headquarters in Oslo last July, then killing 69 in a shooting spree at a summer youth camp on an island organized by the ruling Labour Party.

The real question of the trial will be whether Breivik will be declared insane or criminal. While he risks staying behind bars for the rest of his life, the high school dropout has said being labeled insane would be a “fate worse than death”.

Wearing a suit and loose tie, Breivik entered the court in handcuffs, which were taken off just before he was seated. He smirked several times as the cuffs were removed, put his right fist on his heart then extended his hand in salute.

“I do not recognize the Norwegian courts. You have received your mandate from political parties which support multiculturalism,” Breivik told the court after refusing to stand when judges entered the courtroom.

“I acknowledge the acts but not criminal guilt as I claim self defense,” he added, seated in front of a bullet-proof glass wall.

Occasionally suppressing a yawn and sipping water, he stared down at the indictment papers, following without visible emotion a laundry list of his killings as the prosecutor read out each one. Some details were so graphic that Norwegian television bleeped out descriptions of the massacres.

The trial is scheduled to last 10 weeks and has raised fears that it could reopen wounds in Norway, a country that prides itself on its tolerant and peaceful society.

The “lone wolf” killer intends to say he was defending Norway against multiculturalism and Islam. He says the attacks were intended as punishment of “traitors” whose pro-immigration policies were adulterating Norwegian blood.

(Source: lifeisliterallylimited, via sociopoliticaldribble)

Shantela and Barry Moreland claim they were hosting the barbecue at their Zion home April 10, 2011, when a Zion police officer “unreasonably” deployed pepper spray while making an arrest, according to the suit filed Monday in U.S. District Court, Chicago.

One invited guest, Charles Booker, was arrested for misdemeanor simple assault, but the case was dismissed 18 days later in Lake County Circuit Court “in a manner consistent with (his) innocence,” according to the suit.

The Morelands allege they and their young sons, Barry Jr. and D’Amarion, then ages 11 and 6, were all hit by the pepper spray and suffered “severe physical and emotional injury,” the suit claims.  Guests Iyesha Booker, Larry Williams, Odessa Mickens and Donesha Booker — who claims she was “visibly pregnant” when she was pepper sprayed — all claim they were left injured from the pepper spray and are listed as co-plaintiffs.

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn’t get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.  

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn’t stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. “My left eye was closed when the tape was applied,” she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. “But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony.” The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar’s case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar’s husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed expansive new guidelines for terrorism analysts, allowing the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC) to mirror entire federal databases containing personal information and hold onto the information for an extended period of time—even if the person is not suspected of any involvement in terrorism. (Read the guidelines here).

Despite the “terrorism” justification, the new rules affect every single American. The agency now has free rein to, as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage put it, “retrieve, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats ” and expands the amount of time the government can keep private information on innocent individuals by a factor of ten.

From the New York Times:

 The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data mining them” using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat. (emphasis ours)

Journalist Marcy Wheeler summed the new guidelines up nicely saying, “So…the data the government keeps to track our travel, our taxes, our benefits, our identity? It just got transformed from bureaucratic data into national security intelligence.” 

beatyourselfup:

ST. LOUIS • The mother of a man fatally shot by an undercover St. Louis police detective in 2010 has sued in federal court here, alleging the officer continued to fire as her son lay on the ground dying, then planted a gun on him to claim the use of deadly force was justified.

Normane Bennett, 23, was shot June 25, 2010, in an alley behind the 3900 block of Sherman Place after he fled from police who tried to arrest him and others for alleged drug activity.

[…]

Wasem’s actions were unanimously cleared by the police board. The department on Thursday declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

A Post-Dispatch review earlier this year found the department cleared all but four of 117 officer-involved shootings over the last five years. The reviews are done with little outside scrutiny, the newspaper found.

[…]

The federal lawsuit claims the police board “turns a blind eye to use of excessive force by its police officers.” It seeks an unspecified amount of damages.

(via agoristmike)

Governments want to know more about you as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a report entitled Patterns of Misconduct, which outlined the FBI’s ongoing violation of our Fourth Amendment rights.

No matter how much you may love animals, can we just all agree that PETA has become the worst? They’re obnoxious turds who actually kill thousands of animals, not to mention they have some of the stupidest, most cloying advertising not dreamed up by Crispin Porter. Now they’ve put up a billboard mocking a man who was attacked by a shark.

Twenty-one-year-old C.J. Wickersham was spear fishing this past weekend in the Gulf of Mexico off Anna Maria Island near the Tampa Bay area. A nine-foot bull shark came up and bit Wickersham in his thigh. The attack left a 15-inch gash that exposed his thigh bone. The attack itself wasn’t life threatening, but he most likely would have drowned if his friends didn’t rescue him.

Wickersham is still recovering in the hospital.

The attack happened Saturday. Today is Wednesday, and PETA has already come around with plans for a graphic billboard mocking Wickersham (see above).

“It may be an unusual way to get the message across, but I think it will cause people to be more sensitive towards fish,” PETA’s Ashely Byrne tells WWSB. “We are certainly glad the man is going to be alright, but we hope he and other fishermen will use this as an opportunity to rethink fishing.” 

—-

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, FUCK PETA.  Preaching hate will never further your cause, no matter how morally/ethically superior it may be.

Police brutality: Cop reinstated before city has completed Alex Landau inquiry

​The decision of the Civil Service Commission to reinstate cops Ricky Nixon and Kevin Devine, who’d been sacked over an alleged 2009 brutality incident at the Denver Diner, is controversial in and of itself.

But this twist becomes even more incendiary considering that Nixon was also involved in the 2009 beating of Alex Landau — and a promised investigation into that incident, which prompted a $795,000 settlement, still hasn’t been completed.

According to a lawsuit filed last year, Denver Police officers Nixon and Devine collectively roughed up and maced four women at the Denver Diner in July 2009. Last September, their attorney, Siddhartha Rathod, stressed that none of the women had done anything wrong, and one had actually been the victim of an assault prior to police involvement. He also accused Nixon and Devine of falsifying reports and fabricating charges. As a result, three of the women entered guilty pleas in an effort to make the accusations go away — actions they subsequently tried to withdraw.

​In April 2011, then-Manager of Safety Charles Garcia fired Nixon and Devine for the alleged falsehoods. However, as the Denver Post reports in a piece linked above, the commission determined that the inaccuracies in their reports were not submitted with “an intent to deceive or hide the truth.” As such, the officers have been reinstated and will receive back pay and benefits.

Activist Chris Siennick had the video since last month. It was only after seeing a report on CBS 21 News Wednesday night, about an officer under investigation for alleged police brutality, that Siennick came forward with his clip.

He took the video with his cell phone last month, outside of Neato Burrito on Second Street in Harrisburg, where he works.

“The police officer was driving by here and she yelled out of the car like, sir, I told you to move on and the guy looks over and shrugs,” Siennick explained.

Siennick says the officer was yelling at an elderly homeless man, who was simply just having a conversation with him and his co-workers. He immediately started taking video with his cell phone, when the Harrisburg cop tackled, then maced the man.

A Los Angeles police deputy was caught on camera punching a special needs woman on a bus.

NBC News reported that the two police deputies came on the bus in response to reports that she had almost attacked an elderly man.

Jermaine Green, an Iraq war veteran who recorded the incident with his cell phone, said when police approached the unidentified woman, she began cursing at them and shortly after, one deputy held down her arm as the other swung a punch.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said the woman got into trouble with the law before, including the assault of a police officer. The spokesperson also said that she had “mental challenges.”