Category: Police State

You’re on Candid Camera

~ susie

March 24, 2014 at 12:20PM

They are never, ever, EVER going to get rid of the data. Ever.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they’re harvesting in the city’s streets without a warrant or judicial oversight. As part of the process, they’ve asked the LAPD for a week’s worth of the data they’re collecting, and in their reply brief, the LAPD argues that it can’t turn over any license-plate data because all the license-plates they collect are part of an “ongoing investigation,” because every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, because some day, someone driving that car may commit a crime.

As EFF’s Jennifer Lynch says, “This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity.”

This reminds me of the NSA’s argument that they’re collecting “pieces of a puzzle” and Will Potter’s rebuttal: “The reality is that the NSA isn’t working with a mosaic or a puzzle. What the NSA is really advocating is the collection of millions of pieces from different, undefined puzzles in the hopes that sometime, someday, the government will be working on a puzzle and one of those pieces will fit.” The same thing could be said of the LAPD.

You didn’t really want to know about U.S. torture, anyway!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Thank God our betters are protecting us!

It emerges from the USA that 9,000 documents proving direct involvement of the White House in cases of brutal torture are being withheld from the Senate Committee by the Obama administration. This should surprise nobody, as Obama has done everything in his power to protect George W Bush and the many in the administration, diplomatic service and CIA involved in the whole secret web of torture and murder. The entire programme was on a scale and of an order of brutality much greater than anything that has been yet understood by the public. All of those foreign nationals rendered to Uzbekistan, for example, were killed during or following torture and buried in the desert.

It seems that Obama and the Republicans are combining to make sure that the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the subject – which by all accounts will be damning enough – is never going to be made public in any way that reveals anything not already known. The Republicans – and Fox News – have already united behind the extraordinary assertion that the CIA were entitled to spy on the Committee’s activity on its computers, because the physical computers had been provided by the CIA.

Thanks to Price Benowitz LLP, DC Car Accident Attorneys.

Back to the old days

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Sooner or later, this kind of oppression will cause people to rise up. Not yet, apparently:

After a fairly tame first 10 days of the Olympic Games — at least by Russian protest standards — members of Pussy Riot were briefly detained Tuesday in connection with a theft in their hotel. The highest-profile members of the punk rock collective, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina, were freed along with seven others after questioning by police.

Within 24 hours, however, the anti-Putin protesters staged staged an impromptu performance. Six band members, including one man, donned their signature ski masks and took to the streets of Sochi. But before the show even began, several Cossack militia members stifled the music, with one appearing to pepper spray Tolokonnikova and another beating several women with a horse whip, according to the Associated Press.

The Cossacks continued their violent attack, throwing Tolokonnikova to the ground, tearing the balaclavas from several women, beating them with whips and ripping the guitarist’s instrument from his hands to toss it in the trash. Cossacks have a long history in Russia, helping lead the country’s imperial expansion by serving in the cavalry under czarist rule, according to The Washington Post. They have reemerged in southern Russia after nearly disappearing in the communist era.