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NEWS FLASH

Rochester, NY Is Using ‘Unconstitutional’ City Ordinances To Shut Down Occupy Rochester Protests | Rochester, New York is using an “unconstitutional” city ordinance to prevent Occupy Rochester demonstrations in Washington Square Park, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). The ordinance gives the Commissioner of Recreation and Youth Services “unbridled discretion to decide whether the public park should remain open or closed after normal operating hours.” The NYCLU also reports that the Rochester Police Department told protesters to “keep the signs to a minimal” in possible reference to another city ordinance that requires a permit to display a sign in a public park. Through these ordinances, Rochester is now “the first and only city in the state of New York to shut down an ‘Occupy’ demonstration in a public park.” “The city’s crackdown on ‘Occupy Rochester’ demonstrations shows a disturbing disregard for the constitutionally protected right to protest,” said NYCLU. “We hope that city officials will embrace free speech and stop enforcing these unconstitutional ordinances. If they choose not to, we are confident the courts will protect protesters’ First Amendment rights.”

By Tanya Somanader on Nov 8, 2011 at 9:45 am

Special Topic

Nashville Reporter Tapes His Own Arrest, Records Apparent Police Misconduct As Peaceful Protesters Detained

By Lee Fang on Oct 31, 2011 at 2:30 pm

State troopers, on orders from Gov. Bill Haslam (R-TN), have repeatedly conducted nighttime raids on the Occupy Nashville encampment outside of the state capitol. During the raid at 2:30 a.m. Friday night, Nashville Scene reporter Jonathan Meador was detained along with 25 peaceful protesters. Meador, who had his camera on to interview attendees at the occupation, inadvertently recorded the state troopers as they appeared to conspire to slap fictitious charges against him.

The Nashville Scene’s Jim Ridley reports:

Thanks to him, Meador was able to produce this unedited video of his own arrest — or to be more accurate, the audio, since with troopers slamming Meador to the ground from behind and rendering him helpless, the image isn’t so hot.

No matter. The sound speaks volumes. What you will hear, very clearly, is a trooper telling another officer to book Meador for resisting arrest. You will also hear, very clearly, audio evidence of Meador’s contention: that he was simply doing his job as a reporter and tried to get off the plaza to comply with the law — but the troopers wouldn’t let him off that easy.

What you will not hear, in any form or fashion, is the slightest mention of public intoxication — the specious charge against Meador the THP has broadcast to the world. If that charge was made up later to discredit Meador — or even more appallingly, to divert attention from what a Metro Night Court judge last night told officers was a blatantly unconstitutional overstepping of government and police authority — nobody who cares about their First Amendment freedoms should sleep in Tennessee tonight.

Watch the video:

Chris Ferrell, the publisher of the company that owns the Nashville Scene, wrote a letter to Gov. Haslam asking him for an apology for arresting a member of the media. Ferrell and Meador are disputing the charge of public intoxication. Ferrell said Meador was not intoxicated but had one drink at dinner.

Despite the fact that the Haslam administration has continually ordered night time raids of the peaceful protesters, the local magistrate Thomas Nelson ordered their release each time.

This morning, attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit to stop the nightly arrests of Occupy Nashville demonstrators, arguing that the state is violating their First Amendment rights, reports the Tennesseean.

Security

Military Tech Developers Look To Sell Spy Products Domestically

By Ali Gharib on Oct 18, 2011 at 4:15 pm

Spy drones: Coming to a city near you?

The Daily Beast reports that, with cuts to the over-inflated defense budget imminent, firms that develop military technologies are looking to alternative markets. Because the products they develop are sensitive, they’ll likely be prohibited from making sales overseas. So they’re turning to domestic markets, looking to sell surveillance products like unmanned aerial “drone” vehicles — and presumably other goods, including some weapons — to everyone from local and state cops to the Department of Homeland Security:

Gulu Gambhir, the chief technology officer for the [Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR)] group of [Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)], said he has seen this day coming. [...]

“A number of our influential products have dual-use capability to locations and missions adjacent to our primary overseas ISR mission. One such example is local law enforcement, emergency first responders and border protection.”

“All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” said ACLU senior fellow Jay Stanley.

Indeed, local law enforcement agencies — and even national ones — have, at times, been less-than-responsible with their surveillance, particularly of American Muslims, raising the potential for further abuse with a greater technological reach.

At Wired’s Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman’s investigative reporting has revealed a deep-seeded anti-Muslim bias among training materials used by the Federal Bureau of Investigations. That bias has also sometimes manifested itself in local law enforcement. A recent groundbreaking investigation by the AP revealed that the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) surveillance was highly focused on Muslim Americans in the city, including one local cleric who was a counter-terror partner to local and national law enforcement.

Technologies are likely to aid these type of biased surveillance. Stanley, who authored a forthcoming report on the use of drones in American cities, told the Daily Beast that police need to exercise restraint “because the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to use a thermal imaging technology to peer into someone’s home without a warrant.” But this didn’t stop the NYPD in 2004 from using infrared technology from recording a “couple on the terrace of a Second Avenue penthouse” as they had an “intimate moment.” The only reason the case came to light was because it surfaced in separate court proceedings.

Likewise, technologies developed for the military have come into much closer contact with Americans on U.S. soil. In 2004, during the Republican National Convention in New York, authorities deployed Long Range Acoustic Devices — or sound cannons — against demonstrators, but never fired them. That changed during the 2009 demonstrations against the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, when sound cannons were fired on protesters.

And these are just a few of the ways that military technologies can, as the ACLU’s Stanley put it, be “turned inward upon the American people.” It seems like a good space for some oversight: Lawmakers should be cautious about the implications of transferring war-making technologies over to domestic forces for use against Americans. Keeping the profit margins high for these organs of the military industrial complex — at a time when everyone is suffering from belt-tightening — is no excuse to risk encroaching on the rights of ordinary Americans.

Alyssa

‘Homeland’ Open Thread: Three Questions

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Oct 3, 2011 at 11:07 am

This post contains spoilers through the Oct. 2 episode of Homeland.

My deep and abiding love for the Homeland pilot, which I think is the best pilot of the new season by several orders of magnitude, is already a matter of public record. But I wanted to lay out a couple of questions for discussion:

1. Do we think Carrie is insane? She’s clearly not entirely mentally healthy. From her totally inappropriate advances towards Saul in a moment of desperation, to her disregard for the law, to her somewhat uncomfortable if perhaps justifiable decision to watch the Brodys have sex. But did she really hear what she thought she heard in that Iraqi prison? And is she mistaking nervous habits for signaling? Clearly, figuring out whether Carrie’s seeing clearly or seeing things that aren’t there will be one of the key conflicts of the story. And getting the balance between making her fragile but also more than the sum of her illness will be critical in making her a compelling character rather than just a stereotype.

2. Is the balance the U.S. has on civil liberties and wiretapping right? It seems that Carrie’s right that something’s going on with Nicholas Brody. But she discovered his hand signals by watching publicly available footage of him — not by sending a team she’s paying herself swarming all over his house. The show seems, so far, to be walking another important but tricky line, arguing that you can take threats seriously and pursue leads aggressively without compromising civil liberties and going outside the legal procedures you need to obtain a wiretap. That means you need more people with actual Iraq experience and more respect for their expertise, not more exceptions to the law.

3. Can we sympathize with a traumatized soldier who is also a traitor? We don’t know for sure that Brody is a sleeper agent (though it’s going to be an interesting season if he turns out not to be). Maybe the deepest secret he has is that he was forced to kill his fellow captive, and we’re going to have to see him work through that. But by presenting him as someone who, in addition to maybe betraying his country because he was tortured and brainwashed, cares about that fellow captive’s widow, is relearning how to have sex with his wife, and is building a relationship for the first time with his son, Homeland is giving us a mental workout in exploring the reactions we’re supposed to have for veterans.

Economy

New York City Police Use 150-Year-Old Law Against Wearing Masks To Arrest Wall Street Demonstrators

By Zaid Jilani on Sep 21, 2011 at 3:20 pm

Is walking around with this mask in New York illegal?

As ThinkProgress previously reported, hundreds of demonstrators have encamped themselves in the financial district in New York City, hoping to call attention to Wall Street’s misdeeds.

Yesterday, seven protesters were arrested by the New York Police Department, despite being peaceful and not noticeably disrupting the normal activities of the city. The Wall Street Journal notes that the charges being brought against these demonstrators include “loitering and wearing [a] mask.” The Village Voice points out that the anti-mask law being used against demonstrators dates back to 1845, when farmers wore masks to conduct attacks against the police. The law was updated in 1965 to “prevent masked gathering of two or more people,” unless they are throwing masquerade parties:

The anti-mask law goes back to 1845, when tenant farmers used disguises (dressing up like Indians) to attack law enforcement officials, apparently. In 1965 the law was updated to prevent masked gatherings of two or more people, except in the case of masquerade parties. Whew.

Demonstrators took video of the arrests of some of the protesters. One of the protesters is simply wearing a plastic mask on the back of her head:

The occupation and protests on Wall Street are now entering their fifth day. Protesters are requesting on their website that people donate money for food for the demonstrators, and note that more than $9,000 has been donated so far.

Alyssa

Will Clint Eastwood Live Up To His Libertarian Politics With ‘J. Edgar?’

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 21, 2011 at 8:37 am

I’ve always found Leonardo DiCaprio a somewhat rigid actor, but that’s a quality that should serve him well playing J. Edgar Hoover, in what looks to be a handsome biopic directed by Clint Eastwood.

It looks like Eastwood is going with the interpretation that Clyde Tolson was Hoover’s lover, or at least the emotional center of his life, and planning to explore the impact of Hoover’s closetedness on his spying on people like Eleanor Roosevelt in hopes he’d be able to exploit fears similar to his own and blackmail them. But one hopes, especially given that Eastwood is going around talking about what a libertarian he is, that the movie mounts a broad-based critique of Hoover’s violations of civil liberties and chilling influence on American life. It’s really not enough to say that J. Edgar Hoover spied on us because his mother was mean to him. And it’s important to remind viewers that there is this authoritarian strain in American life, that domestic surveillance is a recurring tendency we need to consistently resist.

NEWS FLASH

Ex-CIA Lawyer: Obama Has Changed ‘Virtually Nothing’ From Bush’s Counter-Terror Policies | The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report yesterday on the erosion of civil liberties in the post-9/11 era, which concluded that the Obama administration has continued many of the controversial policies of the Bush administration. Covering the ACLU report, the progressive radio show Democracy Now! interviewed former top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lawyer John Rizzo. The Obama administration had changed “virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations,” Rizzo said. “Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.” (HT: Joanne Michele)

By Ali Gharib on Sep 8, 2011 at 1:45 pm

LGBT

Civil Unions To Face Final Test In New Jersey Lawsuit

By Zack Ford on Jun 29, 2011 at 12:30 pm

Lambda Legal and Garden State Equality filed a lawsuit today that could be the final nail in the coffin of civil unions as a “separate but equal” mechanism for recognizing same-sex relationships. Filed on behalf of seven same-sex families whose civil unions “relegate them to second-class status,” the suit argues that civil unions violate both the New Jersey Constitution and the 14th Amendment of the federal Constitution.

In October 2006, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Lewis v. Harris that “the unequal dispensation of rights and benefits to committed same-sex partners can no longer be tolerated under our state constitution.” The court did not mandate marriage as the solution, but gave the the legislature 180 days to rectify the inequality. That December, the state passed a law establishing civil unions and also created the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission, which was charged with evaluating the implementation of civil unions to see how they measured up to marriage for same-sex couples.

The Commission released its final report in December 2008 with a weighty condemnation of civil unions as unequal and a call for full marriage equality (PDF):

After eighteen public meetings, 26 hours of oral testimony and hundreds of pages of written submission from more than 150 witnesses, this Commission finds that the separate categorization established by the Civil Union Act invites and encourages unequal treatment of same-sex couples and their children. In a number of cases, the negative effect of the Civil Union Act on the physical and mental health of same-sex couples and their children is striking, largely because a number of employers and hospitals do not recognize the rights and benefits of marriage for civil union couples.

Despite the Commission’s report, civil unions persist in New Jersey. The legislature attempted to pass marriage equality in January of 2010, but the measure failed. Gov. Chris Christie (R) made it clear this weekend that he would not sign a marriage equality bill into law.

In an interview yesterday, New York state Sen. Steven Saland (R) — who was one of the swing votes to help pass marriage equality last week — shared that the New Jersey commission’s report greatly influenced his understanding that civil unions did not measure up to marriage.

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