The Raw Story

Wednesday, 10 December 2014

3 questions to ask before putting cameras on cops

Two weeks ago, many of us were sure that if only Darren Wilson had had a body camera, justice would have been more easily served in Ferguson, Missouri - that a video record would have cleared the confusion over Officer Wilson's fatal shooting of Michael Brown.

Then, a week ago - only two days after President Obama proposed putting 50,000 more police body cameras into service - things didn't look so clear. Video taken by a passerby of Eric Garner's fatal chokehold arrest did not stop a grand jury from declining to bring an indictment.

It's not the first time a promised technological solution has looked less shiny upon closer inspection, but the stakes for this technology are extraordinarily high.

Before we follow our habit of attaching a camera to anything that moves - if we can put them on our dashboards and on our drones, why not our cops? - we need to ask a few questions, and get some good answers.

"Any police department that wants to use body cameras, it's a good decision," said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Hanni Fakhoury. "But you can't just throw the cameras out there and let the details sort themselves out."

Here are the key questions the policed public needs answers to:

1. When are the cameras on?

A report last October by American Civil Liberties Union policy analyst Jay Stanley laid out the contradictions involved in police body cameras. On the one hand, maximum accountability would suggest that the camera stay on for the officer's entire shift; on the other, cops have privacy rights, too, as do the people the police interact with.

Stanley's paper came down to recommending that police body cameras record all citizen interactions - which is basically the rule Washington's Metropolitan Police Department adopted for its trial of body cameras.

That 18-page document details the occasions that require turning the camera on or off, as well as what officers must not do with cameras or their output.

For instance, officers may not "post recordings to any social media site." They also can't stop a recording when a citizen asks, unless there's an anonymous tip involved.

Delroy Burton, chairman of the D.C. police union, said those rules - written with the union's input - were working out so far, as were the cameras. "The report that I'm getting from my members on the street that are actually operating the cameras is they are not having a lot of problems with them."

They have had problems elsewhere. Albuquerque Officer Jeremy Dear did not have his camera on when he fatally shot Mary Hawkes in April; after a review, the department fired him for insubordination.

2. What are the recordings used for?

So you put these cameras into the field and now have all this video piling up. What will you do with it?

Jeramie Scott, national-security counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, allowed for one use: "only for police accountability." In other words, only to confirm what the officer witnessed to make an arrest - - not for retroactive searching for offenses he or she missed at the time.

The temptation will be to find other uses for this data. Scott warned against combining facial-recognition technology with body-camera footage - something Chicago has been doing with footage from its surveillance cameras.

The EFF's Fakhoury had other questions to ask. Can you match the footage with other databases? Share it with other police departments? What about outside agencies?

The single stickiest aspect involves not other cops looking at body-cam video, but you or me. Public-records laws in states are not clear on this front, the ACLU's Stanley warned.

"In some states" - he cited Washington and Minnesota - "it seems pretty clear that it would cover all video."

And while police departments know how to redact private data from papers released under public-records laws, Burton said (correctly) that doing the same with video is not as quick or easy.

3. How long are they kept?

Privacy experts I consulted agreed that police departments should not act like the National Security Agency or, say, tech startups too young to hire chief privacy officers: They should throw away data at their earliest convenience.

The MPD's guidelines call for deleting body-cam videos after 90 days unless they've been flagged as relevant to an investigation, which roughly matches the ACLU's recommendations that retention periods "be measured in weeks, not years."

The budgets and technical capacities of many police departments would suggest a short shelf life for these recordings. But as a Washington Post story noted, the vendors of these systems also offer cloud services - for instance, Taser's Evidence.com - to automate the work of storing all this footage.

The sight of police departments being compelled to buy this hardware, and then signing up for long-term service contracts, evokes an unpleasant precedent. After the 2000 election, old-fashioned voting machines were deemed out of style, and municipalities rushed to deploy electronic voting machines.

Many of these came with dubious security systems and from companies that have since gone out of business - but, years later, we're stuck with them.

It's complicated

As the ACLU's Stanley said, "This is a genuinely complicated issue. It implicates conflicting values that we hold dearly."

It's sufficiently complicated that the EFF and EPIC have yet to post their own policy prescriptions. They're still figuring this out. So am I.

Maybe before we mandate the massive deployment of what amounts to a surveillance technology, we should at least know how many people die as a result of police action. Today, we don't .

Meanwhile, if you spot what looks like an abuse of police power, take out your phone and record it. It's your right as a citizen, and it just might be your obligation, too. As the law-enforcement community is fond of saying: If you see something, say something.

Want something else to read? How about 'Grievous Censorship' By The Guardian: Israel, Gaza And The Termination Of Nafeez Ahmed's Blog

A moose on the rampage attacked two women walking with their dogs, injuring both severely.

The animals can weigh a half ton or more.

"We were just moseying along, hiking, enjoying our hike, and then all of a sudden, I looked up and he was looking right at me,"said Jacquie Boron, 50, who was hiking with her neighbor Ellen Marie Divis, 57, near their homes in Black Hawk, Colo., about 35 miles northwest of Denver.

Boron said the moose grunted and immediately charged toward her, hitting her squarely in the chest and knocking her off her feet.

"I knew that they were aggressive, and I knew that I should be very careful with them," she said. "But I didn't expect them just to charge me."

[embedded content]

The moose repeatedly returned to stomp on her, leaving her with four broken ribs, 15 stitches in her leg and 10 staples in her head.

"He kept coming back for me," Boron said. "I had to get away from him."

Boron said she tried to get away by hiding behind a tree and then moved from tree to tree until the moose wandered away.

Her neighbor, who was also injured, managed to escape and call for help. Their two dogs ran off as well but are home now.

State wildlife experts said it's possible the dogs triggered the moose's aggressive behavior.

"They do not like having dogs anywhere near them, so very often they will try and stomp the dog or will actually follow the dog," said Jennifer Churchill, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokeswoman.

Boron said she won't be hiking around her home any time soon.

"I think I'll stay away from there as long as I know that moose is back there because they're quiet and they're stealthy and they come up on you," she said. "And you can come up on them so quickly and then they react immediately."

Boron expects to be released from the hospital Tuesday. Divis is in fair condition in St. Anthony hospital in this Denver suburb.

State wildlife officials say the moose population is growing fast in Colorado. A hiker who comes across one should walk away and put something large between the two of you.

3 Questions to Ask Before Putting Cameras on Cops

It's not the first time a promised technological solution has looked less shiny upon closer inspection, but the stakes for this technology are extraordinarily high.

Here are the key questions the policed public needs answers to:

1. When are the cameras on?

A report last October by American Civil Liberties Union policy analyst Jay Stanley laid out the contradictions involved in police body cameras. On the one hand, maximum accountability would suggest that the camera stay on for the officer's entire shift; on the other, cops have privacy rights, too, as do the people the police interact with.

That 18-page document details the occasions that require turning the camera on or off, as well as what officers must not do with cameras or their output.

For instance, officers may not "post recordings to any social media site." They also can't stop a recording when a citizen asks, unless there's an anonymous tip involved.

They have had problems elsewhere. Albuquerque Officer Jeremy Dear did not have his camera on when he fatally shot Mary Hawkes in April; after a review, the department fired him for insubordination.

2. What are the recordings used for?

So you put these cameras into the field and now have all this video piling up. What will you do with it?

The EFF's Fakhoury had other questions to ask. Can you match the footage with other databases? Share it with other police departments? What about outside agencies?

The single stickiest aspect involves not other cops looking at body-cam video, but you or me. Public-records laws in states are not clear on this front, the ACLU's Stanley warned.

"In some states" - he cited Washington and Minnesota - "it seems pretty clear that it would cover all video."

And while police departments know how to redact private data from papers released under public-records laws, Burton said (correctly) that doing the same with video is not as quick or easy.

3. How long are they kept?

Many of these came with dubious security systems and from companies that have since gone out of business - but, years later, we're stuck with them.

It's complicated

As the ACLU's Stanley said, "This is a genuinely complicated issue. It implicates conflicting values that we hold dearly."

It's sufficiently complicated that the EFF and EPIC have yet to post their own policy prescriptions. They're still figuring this out. So am I.

Maybe before we mandate the massive deployment of what amounts to a surveillance technology, we should at least know how many people die as a result of police action. Today, we don't .

According to the coroner's report, it was determined that Millan's death was attributable to a stab wound to the chest with an "edged weapon." Police ruled the death a homicide, a rarity for this town where residents feel safe enough to routinely jog by themselves on the same path used by Millan.

Information has now emerged that Millan had access to highly sensitive data on bank profits resulting from the collection of life insurance proceeds from her insurance company employer on the death of bank workers - data that a Federal regulator of banks has characterized as "trade secrets."

Millan was a Senior Vice President with Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) headquartered in Springfield, Massachusetts and a member of its 39-member Senior Management team according to the company's 2013 annual report. Millan had been with the company since 2001.

According to Millan's LinkedIn profile, her work involved the "General management of BOLI" and Executive Group Life, as well as disability insurance businesses and "expansion into worksite and voluntary benefits market."

BOLI is shorthand for Bank-Owned Life Insurance, a controversial practice where banks purchase bulk life insurance on the lives of their workers. The death benefit pays to the bank instead of to the family of the deceased. According to industry publications, MassMutual is considered one of the top ten sellers of BOLI in the United States. Its annual reports in recent years have indicated that growth in this area was a significant contributor to its revenue growth.

Banks as well as other types of corporations enjoy major tax benefits through the use of this type of insurance. The cash buildup in the policies contribute to annual earnings on a tax-free basis while the death benefit is received free of Federal income tax when the employee eventually dies. Even if the worker is no longer employed at the bank, it can still collect the death benefit. Banks owning BOLI routinely conduct "death sweeps" of public records using former employees' Social Security numbers to determine if a former employee has died. It then submits a claim request for payment of the death benefit to the insurance company.

Four of Wall Street's largest banks are the largest owners of BOLI according to December 31, 2013 data from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), holding a combined total of $68.1 billion. The four banks' individual BOLI assets are as follows as of the end of last year:

Bank of America $22.7 billion

Wells Fargo 18.7 billion

JPMorgan Chase 17.9 billion

Citigroup 8.8 billion

The BOLI , however, support a far greater amount of life insurance in force on the workers' lives - potentially as much as a ten to one ratio - meaning that just these four banks could be holding $681 billion on the lives of their current and past employees.

Read the rest of the article here...

"The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens." - Leo Tolstoy

My 7-year-old granddaughter has suddenly developed a keen interest in card games: Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Blackjack, and War. We've fallen into a set pattern now: every time we play, she deals the cards, and I pretend not to see her stacking the deck in her favor. And of course, I always lose.

I don't mind losing to my granddaughter at Old Maid, knowing full well the game is rigged. For now, it's fun and games, and she's winning. Where the rub comes in is in knowing that someday she'll be old enough to realize that being a citizen in the American police state is much like playing against a stacked deck: you're always going to lose.

The game is rigged, and "we the people" keep getting dealt the same losing hand. Even so, we stay in the game, against all odds, trusting that our luck will change.

The problem, of course, is that luck will not save us. The people dealing the cards - the politicians, the corporations, the judges, the prosecutors, the police, the bureaucrats, the military, the media, etc. - have only one prevailing concern, and that is to maintain their power and control over the country and us.

It really doesn't matter what you call them - the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex - so long as you understand that while they are dealing the cards, the deck will always be stacked in their favor.

Incredibly, no matter how many times we see this played out, Americans continue to naively buy into the idea that it's our politics that divide us as a nation. As if there were really a difference between the Democrats and Republicans. As if the policies of George W. Bush were any different from those of Barack Obama. As if we weren't a nation of sheep being fattened for the kill by a ravenous government of wolves.

We're in trouble, folks, and changing the dealer won't save us: it's time to get out of the game

We have relinquished control of our government to overlords who care nothing for our rights, our dignity or our humanity, and now we're saddled with an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.

Even revelations of wrongdoing amount to little in the way of changes for the better.

For instance, after six years of investigation, 6,000 written pages and $40 million to write a report that will not be released to the public in its entirety, the U.S. Senate has finally concluded that the CIA lied about its torture tactics, failed to acquire any life-saving intelligence, and was more brutal and extensive than previously admitted. This is no revelation. It's a costly sleight of hand intended to distract us from the fact that nothing has changed. We're still a military empire waging endless wars against shadowy enemies, all the while fattening the wallets of the defense contractors for whom war is money.

Same goes for the government's surveillance programs. More than a year after Edward Snowden's revelations dominated news headlines, the government's domestic surveillance programs are just as invasive as ever. In fact, while the nation was distracted by the hubbub over the long-awaited release of the Senate's CIA torture, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly reauthorized the National Security Agency's surveillance of phone records. This was in response to the Obama administration's request to keep the program alive.

Police misconduct and brutality have been dominating the news headlines for months now, but don't expect any change for the better. In fact, with Obama's blessing, police departments continue to make themselves battle ready with weapons and gear created for the military. Police shootings of unarmed citizens continue with alarming regularity. And grand juries, little more than puppets controlled by state prosecutors, continue to legitimize the police state by absolving police of any wrongdoing.

These grand juries embody everything that's wrong with America today. In an age of secret meetings, secret surveillance, secret laws, secret tribunals and secret courts, the grand jury - which meets secretly, hears secret testimony, and is exposed to only what a prosecutor deems appropriate - has become yet another bureaucratic appendage to a government utterly lacking in transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law.

It's a sorry lesson in how a well-intentioned law or program can be perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes. The war on terror, the war on drugs, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school zero tolerance policies, eminent domain, private prisons: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns. However, once you add money and power into the mix, even the most benevolent plans can be put to malevolent purposes.

In this way, the war on terror has become a convenient ruse to justify surveillance of all Americans, to create a suspect society, to expand the military empire, and to allow the president to expand the powers of the Executive Branch to imperial heights.

Under cover of the war on drugs, the nation's police forces have been transformed into extensions of the military, with SWAT team raids carried out on unsuspecting homeowners for the slightest charge, and police officers given carte blanche authority to shoot first and ask questions later.

Asset forfeiture schemes, engineered as a way to strip organized crime syndicates of their ill-gotten wealth, have, in the hands of law enforcement agencies, become corrupt systems aimed at fleecing the citizenry while padding the pockets of the police.

Eminent domain, intended by the founders as a means to build roads and hospitals for the benefit of the general public, has become a handy loophole by which local governments can evict homeowners to make way for costly developments and shopping centers.

Private prisons, touted as an economically savvy solution to cash-strapped states with overcrowded prisons have turned into profit- and quota-driven detention centers that jail Americans guilty of little more than living off the grid, growing vegetable gardens in the front yards, or holding studies in their back yards.

Traffic safety schemes such as automated red light and speed cameras, ostensibly aimed at making the nation's roads safer, have been shown to be thinly disguised road taxes, levying hefty fines on drivers, most of whom would never have been pulled over, let alone ticketed, by an actual police officer.

School zero tolerance policies, a response to a handful of school shootings, have become exercises in folly, turning the schools into quasi-prisons, complete with armed police, metal detectors and lockdowns. The horror stories abound of 4- and 6-year-olds being handcuffed, shackled and dragged, kicking and screaming, to police headquarters for daring to act like children while at school.

As for grand juries, which were intended to serve as a check on the powers of the police and prosecutors, they have gone from being the citizen's shield against injustice to a weapon in the hands of government agents. A far cry from a people's court, today's grand jury system is so blatantly rigged in favor of the government as to be laughable. Unless, that is, you happen to be one of the growing numbers of Americans betrayed and/or victimized by their own government, in which case, you'll find nothing amusing about the way in which grand juries are used to terrorize the populace all the while covering up police misconduct.

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book , we're long past the point of simple fixes. The system has grown too large, too corrupt, and too unaccountable. If there's to be any hope for tomorrow, it has to start at the local level, where Americans still have a chance to make their voices heard. Stop buying into the schemes of the elite, stop being distracted by their sleight-of-hands, stop being manipulated into believing that an election will change anything, and stop playing a rigged game where you'll always be the loser.

It's time to change the rules of the game. For that matter, it's time to change the game.

Fox News host and authoritarian follower Andrea Tantaros

Fox News analysts, hosts and reporters on Tuesday wasted no time in blasting Democrats after Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) released a report condemning the CIA's use of torture and other enhanced interrogation techniques.

Just moments after Feinstein announced on the floor of the Senate that the Intelligence Committee had made the long-delayed torture report public, Fox News National Security Analyst K.T. McFarland insisted that Democrats were going to "do harm" to the country by angering terrorists.

McFarland, who said that torture techniques were both legal and justified by the horrific terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, argued that Democrats were only releasing the report for political reasons.

"Why go after it now unless the motivation is completely political?" she remarked. "Congress is changing hands, the Senate is going from Democrat to Republican hands. And are the Democrats in the Senate just - they've been evicted from the house, are they just trashing the place before they leave?"

Fox News correspondent Jesse Watters told the hosts of Out Numbered that the American people did not need to know about torture at the CIA because "people do nasty things in the dark especially after a terrorist attack."

Watters suggested that Democrats had released the report to coincide with the testimony of economist Jonathan Gruber, who outrage conservatives when he said that health care reform was passed using the "stupidity" of the American people.

"They Senate Democrats, they're just trying to get one last shot in at Bush before they go into the minority!" the correspondent opined. "And they didn't even interview any of the CIA interrogators to do the report."

"It's kind of like how does their reporting, they only get one side," he added, referring to a controversial report about an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. "You know, the Democrats didn't care about transparency when they were destroying hard drives at the IRS."

host Andrea Tantaros agreed that she didn't need transparency at the CIA either.

"The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," she said. "But we've had this discussion. We've closed the book on it, and we've stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we're not awesome."

"They apologized for this country, they don't like this country, they want us to look bad. And all this does is have our enemies laughing at us, that we are having this debate again," Tantaros added. "Because they believe if we can just shame ourselves and convince the world how horrible we are, and put us on a moral equivalency with all these other countries then maybe they will stop beheading Americans and putting our heads on sticks. They're fools."

"Or it's what you said," co-host Harris Faulkner interrupted. "Jonathan Gruber is on the Hill today."

Watch the video below from Fox News, broadcast Dec. 9, 2014.

[embedded content]

The SPLC and the “White Privilege” industry is totally silent about their murdered friend.

Recently we wrote about another white male slaughtered in a random racial hate crime by black males in Oakland. We reported that he was an author. What we didn’t know was that he was a militant left-winger who has written article about “white privilege” since 1997. He has even written articles for the notorious SPLC.

The SPLC publishes two free magazines. One is called Teaching Tolerance and is sent to school teachers for free. It offers advice of how to teach cultural Marxist in public schools. David Ruenzel is listed on the SPLC as an writer for Teaching Tolerance magazine.

David Ruenzel was slaughtered nine days ago and the SPLC has yet to even mention his death. The SPLC claims it is dedicated to fighting racial hatred. One of their own was just murdered in a racial hate crime and they are silent. They just published more agitation pieces about Mike Brown and the “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” Nothing about their friend Ruenzel.

Since his death is counter to their political agenda, they don’t even want their supporters to know that he died.

From American Thinker (Colin Flaherty)…

David Ruenzel knew, better than most, about the white privilege that killed him.

As a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of this favorite topics was rooting out racism. And how white racism is permanent. White racism is everywhere. And white racism explains everything.

This mantra of the Critical Race Theory and the Southern Poverty Law Center applied to all white people because, even if they were not personally cracking the whips, or breaking the skulls, white people benefitted from a racist system that did all that — and a lot more.

Ruenzel was writing about white privilege for the Southern Poverty Law Center as far back as 1997 — long before it became the rage at college campuses, newsrooms, churches, high schools and even grade schools.

By the time of his death, Ruenzel had accumulated many of the trappings of the white privilege he exposed: The job. The home. The intact family. And most importantly in his case, white privilege endowed Ruenzel with an expectation of safety in the Oakland neighborhood where last week two black people are suspected of killing him.

The Raw Story

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Wednesday, 10 December 2014

3 questions to ask before putting cameras on cops

Rampaging moose stomps on 2 women walkers in Colorado

Tuesday, 9 December 2014

3 Questions to Ask Before Putting Cameras on Cops

Bank related death? Slain MassMutual executive had access to sensitive data on Bank-Owned Life Insurance policies

The game is rigged: Why Americans keep losing to the police state

Pass the sick bag: Fox News analyst discussing torture report: 'The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome!'

SPLC writer slaughtered in racial hate crime murder

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