In a blow to Illinois’ sweeping eavesdropping law, a federal appeals court on Tuesday blocked its enforcement in cases where someone is recording a police officer at work.

It was a victory for activists who had feared that using smartphones or video cameras to record police responding to demonstrations during this month’s NATO summit in Chicago could land protesters and bloggers behind bars for years. It’s also the most serious legal challenge to the measure — one of the strictest in the nation — and adds momentum to efforts by some state lawmakers to overhaul the legislation, whose constitutionality has been questioned.

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One of my major concerns about going to Chicago to stream the protests was ending up in prison for filming police. This is last minute but I’m glad regardless.

Minnesota Police Reportedly Give Drugs To Occupy Protesters For ‘Impairment Study’ And Become Snitches

Occupy protestors in Minnesota are alleging that police gave drugs to young people as part of an ‘impairment study’ that helps officers identify the symptoms of drug use.

In a video (watch above), activists claim that for three weeks, law enforcement officers have been picking up volunteers to participate in a program called “Drug Recognition Expert.”

The footage shows alleged participants in the scheme, including one who claims, “They [the police] come into downtown… and basically pick up random people, and ask them to do drug evaluations.”

The man adds, “They let you smoke and then they send you back to Occupy [demonstration in Peavy Plaza]. You smoke right in front of them.”

People in the video are seen discussing police officers giving them marijuana to smoke for evaluation purposes. However, one subject also said officers were interested in obtaining subjects already under the influence of harder drugs.

One young man who identified himself as Panda said he got “high as fuck” in front of a couple police officers. He said he was walking down the street downtown when an officer told him he smelled like marijuana.

“I started walking faster… [but then] he asked me if I wanted to smoke more. I stopped in my tracks, said ‘yes,’ and then I smoked with a cop,” Panda said, adding that the weed given to him by officers was “some of the best shit I’ve had in a while.” He said officers bought him a double cheeseburger at McDonald’s on his way back downtown. 

Interviewed hours later after he sobered up, Panda said police offered him a quarter-ounce bag of marijuana if he’d become a police informant and snitch on the activities of fellow Occupy protestors.

Source/Credit

The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations, industry security consultants said.

Among 99 protest targets in midtown Manhattan on May 1 are Chase and Bank of America offices, said Marisa Holmes, a member of Occupy’s May Day planning committee. Events are scheduled for more than 115 cities, including an effort to shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, where Wells Fargo investors relied on police to get past protests at their annual meeting this week.

“Our goal is to kick off the spring offensive and go directly to where the financial elite play and plan,” she said.

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Whistleblowing Wednesday: FAA Reveals List of Colleges and Police Departments That Can Fly Drones In America

A new bill passed by Congress gave private, military and commercial drones more access to U.S. airspace. Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the FAA has released a list of institutions that have asked for Certificates of Authorizations (COA) to fly drones in the United States.

That fact that the U.S. Air Force, DARPA and Department of Homeland Security are flying drones is no surprise. But what about the other institutions on the list?

It includes a number of universities from all over the country, including Cornell University, Georgia Tech, Mississippi State University and Eastern Gateway Community College. It makes sense for universities to have access to U.S. airspace to fly drones — after all, they are the ones doing a lot of the research on new drone technologies, so they might as well be able to test their own creations near campus.

Perhaps more troubling to privacy advocates, however, is the growing list of police departments gaining permission to fly drones, which includes departments in Arlington, Houston, North Little Rock, Miami-Dade County, Seattle, Polk County, FL and Gadsden, AL.

Miami, being a relatively large city and a major port of entry into the United States, seems like a reasonable candidate for UAVs. But why Gadsden, a small city of 36,719 in Alabama? Can any city, no matter what its size and needs, get authorization to fly drones over its citizens?

The FAA likely has a lot more questions to answer before privacy advocates will be satisfied. Hopefully there won’t be an incident — a crashed drone or privacy scandal — before the public gets those answers.

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Your Tweets Can Be Held Against You In The Court Of Law

Prosecutors don’t have to get a warrant to subpoena your tweets, even if you delete them, because they’re public information owned by a third party, a New York judge ruled on Monday. But the lawyer for the Occupy Wall Street protester trying to block a subpoena says the judge mixed up his metaphors in the ruling. Malcolm Harris, who’s been fighting a subpoena of his Twitter account, faces as many as 15 days in jail for disorderly conduct after his arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge last November.

In his decision Monday, Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. wrote that there was no precedent in New York for an order to quash a subpoena to a “third-party online social networking service seeking to obtain the defendant’s user information and postings.” But he wrote that “an analogy may be drawn to the bank record cases where courts have consistently held that an individual has no right to challenge a subpoena issued against the third-party bank.” Sciarrino ruled that Harris couldn’t quash the subpoena, but he didn’t necessarily rule that the tweets or other information would be admissible as evidence.

But Martin Stolar, the attorney representing Harris, told The Atlantic Wire on Monday that he would move to re-argue the decision, saying Sciarrino had mixed up his metaphors.

“There’s a whole other recent series of decisions from Supreme Court and New York State, about whether or not using a GPS device to track someone uses a warrant. People’s locations while on the street are generally public, like tweets are, but it’s the accumulation of all that information, like someone’s whereabouts, that the courts have said a subpoena is necessary … I think that’s more analogous to tweets than the bank records are.”

What would be funny is if Twitter decided to fax over the info, just as the New York District Attorney’s office faxed its original subpoena.

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Facebook Will Give Complete, Detailed Printout of Your Activity to Police

If police officers were to file a subpoena for your Facebook information, they would receive a printout of the data from the social network. This printout would be so detailed, complete and creepy that you should strive to be a good law-abiding citizen, just to prevent it from ever existing. 

We have just learned about the true nature of Facebook’s responses to subpoenas thanks to documents uncovered by the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly. 

While researching a story about a man dubbed the “Craigslist Killer,” reporters at the Phoenix had access to “a huge trove of case files released by the Boston Police Department.” And in the process of sifting through all of those documents, they discovered the Boston Police’s subpoena of the suspect’s Facebook information - as well as the data provided by the social network. 

The data - which really did come in the form of an old-fashioned paper printout rather than as a digital file of some sort - included all of the suspect’s wall posts, photos he’d uploaded, photos he’d been tagged in, a list of his Facebook friends, and “a long table of login and IP data.” Based on a look at the actual documents, it appears the login and IP data actually lists which parts of Facebook the individual accessed - down to the photos, groups and profiles he viewed.

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Police Are Using Phone Tracking and Monitoring As A Routine Tool (Must Read)

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.

Theinternal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.

In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.

In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.

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In another astonishing development in the Megaupload saga, a judge in New Zealand’s High Court has declared the order used to seize Kim Dotcom’s assets as “null and void”. The blunder, which occurred because the police applied for the wrong type of court order, means that the Megaupload founder could have his property returned.

Just when it seemed that the handling of the Megaupload case couldn’t get any more controversial, a development from New Zealand has taken things to the next level.

Following the raids on Kim Dotcom’s mansion in January, police seized millions of dollars worth of property belonging to the Megaupload founder. But thanks to a police blunder, he could now see all of those assets returned.

On Friday, Justice Judith Potter in the High Court declared the order used to seize Dotcom’s property “null and void” after it was discovered that the police had acted under a court order that should have never been granted.

The error dates back to January when the police applied for the order granting them permission to seize Dotcom’s property. Rather than applying for an interim restraining order, the Police Commissioner applied for a foreign restraining order instead, one which did not give Dotcom a chance to mount a defense.

According to New Zealand Herald, on January 30th prosecution lawyer Anne Toohey wrote to the court explaining that the wrong order had been applied for and detailed five errors with the application.

Justice Potter said that police commissioner Peter Marshall tried to correct the error by applying for the correct order after the raids were completed and retrospectively adding the items already seized.

Although the correct order was eventually granted albeit on a temporary basis, Potter said she will soon rule on whether the “procedural error” will result in Dotcom having his property returned.

The Crown is arguing that since the new order was granted the earlier error no longer matters, but Dotcom’s legal team framed it rather differently by describing the seizure of assets as “unlawful”.

Whether the assets are returned will rest on Dotcom’s legal team showing a lack of “good faith” in connection with the blunder. A hearing to decide if the assets will be returned will take place next week.

Source

psychedelicmandala:

February 16th, 2012 in Paris, France: Firefighters wave flares and spray down police as they protest during a national strike day in defence of their labour agreements.

Photographs: Ian Langsdon/EPA

Firemen v Police

When the Belgian government decided to pour cold water on the country’s firefighters and increase their retirement age, the men struck back with the same method…literally.

Several hundred firemen broke through police cordons and hosed down the prime minister’s office. The men, dressed in full gear, were smiling as they directed the water at the building…and the small bunch of police officers huddled in front of it. 

The law enforcement men tried to hide behind their Plexiglas shields, but to little avail; they were all soaked within minutes. Showing a rather wicked sense of humor, the firemen then turned to fire extinguishers – and the soaked representatives of Belgium’s police force were swallowed by a cloud of white foam, emerging unharmed but completely blanketed in the substance.  

Firefighters want to keep their early retirement age at 58, arguing their arduous job does not allow them to work into their 60s. Such demands run counter to government plans to have the overwhelming majority of people work two years beyond 65, so the government can afford an ever-increasing pension bill as Belgium’s population ages.

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Sgt. Mike Rood, Richmond PD, Badge #116

mrood@richmondpd.net

510-965-4985. Richmond, CA

510-620-6655 and 510-620-6880 (FAX) « Call  to make a complaint

RELEASE THE KRAKEN

A cop goes ballistic after a driver tells him no warrant, no search and it’s all caught on camera.

This happened more than a year ago (but just recently made it’s way into the media), and to this day, no one has gone to jail or even been reprimanded. 

Nick Christie, a 62-year-old Ohio man visiting Florida, was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct.

While in custody, Christie was gagged, stripped naked and tied to a chair. A lawsuit against the Lee County Sheriff’s Office alleged Christie was pepper sprayed 10-12 times over 48 hours, leading to his death. 

Call the sheriff’s office and demand the police be fired and arrested.

Lee County Sheriff’s Office

14750 Six Mile Cypress Pkwy.

Fort Myers, FL 33912-4406

(239) 477-1000