Jamie McClelland - POLICE CLAMP DOWN ON INDEPENDENT ONLINE MEDIA: FBI Seizes Server from Progressive Internet Service Provider

In an attack on our infrastructure, our movement and the democratic Internet, the FBI seized a server yesterday from one of our cabinets in a colocation facility.

The server is owned by our sister organization, Riseup, and is managed by ECN, a progressive technology provider in Italy.

While the seizure of any equipment is pernicious and damaging, the pointlessness of this seizure suggests an inclination toward extrajudicial punishment and an attempted crackdown on the very possibility of anonymous speech online.

The FBI has told us they are investigating bomb threats targeting the facilities and people at the University of Pittsburgh. They appear to believe that one of the servers used to transmit these threats was an anonymous e-mail server operated by ECN. Anonymous remailers have no logs or traces of who used them, so the FBI will not get any useful information from the stolen machine.

Seizing this machine serves no useful purpose in tracking down or stopping the bomb threats, but it has many serious negative implications. Anonymous e-mail is an important part of the Internet. One of the benefits of Internet technology is the ability to communicate world-wide, and this communication is fundamental to the struggles of the world's people to address many of the world's ills. In a period in which our society has seen massive losses of privacy in which just about everything we do on-line can be tracked, logged, studied and used for all kinds of purposes, anonymous Internet-based communication tools provide shade from the intrusive searchlights of ubiquitous surveillance.

Read More:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30420

Brandon Turbeville - POLICE STATE USA: New Obama Executive Order Seizes U.S. Infrastructure and Citizens for Military Preparedness

In a stunning move, on March 16, 2012, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order stating that the President and his specifically designated Secretaries now have the authority to commandeer all domestic U.S. resources including food and water. The EO also states that the President and his Secretaries have the authority to seize all transportation, energy, and infrastructure inside the United States as well as forcibly induct/draft American citizens into the military. The EO also contains a vague reference in regards to harnessing American citizens to fulfill “labor requirements” for the purposes of national defense.

Not only that, but the authority claimed inside the EO does not only apply to National Emergencies and times of war. It also applies in peacetime.

The National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order exploits the “authority” granted to the President in the Defense Production Act of 1950 in order to assert that virtually every means of human survival is now available for confiscation and control by the President via his and his Secretaries’ whim.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29835

FBI seeks system to monitor social networking sites

The FBI, seeking to monitor conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, recently placed a request for information from technology companies to develop a system capable of automatically sifting through the torrents of “publicly available” data for keywords relating to terrorism, crime, and other matters of national security

The FBI is the latest in a long line of federal agencies seeking to monitor conversations on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

The bureau recently placed a request for information from technology companies to develop a system capable of automatically sifting through the torrents of “publicly available” data for keywords relating to terrorism, crime, and other matters of national security.

The agency’s goal is to create an early-warning system that can provide real-time open source intelligence that will improve “the FBI’s overall situational awareness.” According to the bureau’s request for information, the proposed system must  “have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identify, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats.”

Read More:

http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20120210-fbi-seeks-system-to-monitor-social-networking-sites

Peaceful Anti-Fracking Activists Pursued by FBI as 'Eco-Terrorists'

In recent years, the broad definition of 'eco-terrorism' has come to include environmentalist activities ranging from arson to setting mink free at fur farms to protests in front of the homes of corporate executives. Environmental activists have seen increased imprisonment (including maximum security sentences) for non-violent crimes.

Now, as the FBI suggests that 'eco-terrorism' is in decline, the Washington Post reports that the FBI has increased heavy surveillance of environmentalists including anti-fracking protesters.

Will Potter, who's work exposes the growing expansion of governmental prosecution of environmental activists, comments, among others.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/11-2

Stephan Salisbury - How to Fund an American Police State

At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California.  American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. 

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization -- a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.

The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public.  It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

Read More:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175511/

Tom Leonard - That's one way to cut crime! Californian city pipes BIRDSONG on to the streets to calm citizens

A desert city in California claims it has dramatically cut crime by piping birdsong from the English hedgerows onto its streets.

Mayor R Rex Parris, who commissioned the recordings from a Surrey-based sound consultant, claims the birdsong is calming the citizens of Lancaster by altering the chemicals in the brain.

Residents of Lancaster have been treated to the restful twittering of robins, wrens, tits and blackbirds for the past 10 months after Mr Parris installed more than 70 speakers in the town.

The warbles and twitters, mixed with soft synthesiser tones and water sounds, is broadcast five hours a day along a once crime-infested half-mile stretch of Lancaster Boulevard.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2088129/Californian-city-Lancaster-pipes-BIRDSONG-England-streets.html#ixzz1kbyp9eWM

Natasha Lennard - Robocops vs Occupy Wall St -- The Rise of Paramilitary Police Tactics

By Natasha Lennard, Salon

Posted on November 23, 2011

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/23/robocops_vs_the_occupiers/ 

Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began in mid-September, protesters and reporters have been learning the hard way how diverse police departments handle large-scale street demonstrations — sometimes with rubber bullets, sometimes, as in Davis, Calif., with pepper spray in the face.

While police departments have deployed tear gas in cities including Denver, Seattle and on more than three separate occasions in Oakland, Calif., in response to Occupy street demonstrations, protesters in New York have been met with the sheer force of numbers, pepper spray, kettling nets to hold in crowds, and batons. Dozens have been hospitalized by a variety of crowd control tactics.

The tactics vary from city to city, but the most aggressive policing originates in methods developed by law enforcement agencies in Miami in response to large protests against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement in November 2003. Miami’s approach, in the words of Miami-Dade State Attorney Kathy Fernandez Rundle, created,  “a model … for the rest of the world to emulate in the future when these sort of events take place.”

In Miami more than 10,000 demonstrators converged on the downtown area, where a conference of trade ministers from 34 countries met to discuss the FTAA, which many South American nations opposed. Police in riot gear used rubber bullets, projectiles and batons to aggressively clear the streets of protesters. An estimated $8.5 million was spent on security for the FTAA conference and police forces from around the state were pulled in.  The ministers didn’t reach any agreement and at least 140 protesters were arrested. Many more were forcibly blocked from assembling.

“Downtown Miami is built on a grid structure, so in terms of city planning it’s almost a gift to law enforcement. They kettled protesters, unembedded press, everyone together into giant squares and would push into them and beat people severely with batons. During all this there were helicopters overhead nonstop,” explains Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, who helped produce an Indymedia film about the FTAA protests and their suppression, titled “The Miami Model.”

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