Law Enforcement – Page 117 – Public Intelligence Blog

Huh?

Barrett Brown, political prisoner of the information revolution

If the US government succeeds in criminalising Brown's posting of a hyperlink, the freedom of all internet users is in jeopardy

Kevin M. Gallaher

Guardian, 13 July 2013

When I first noticed Barrett Brown in early 2011, I never thought that two years later I'd be directing Free Barrett Brown. Intrigued by his irreverence, I became familiar with his work, admiring him for his skill as a writer. I spoke to him briefly on IRC (internet relay chat) and occasionally dropped into the same channels he frequented; later I met him in person at a conference in New York City. But it's the US government's behavior in this and other cases – see also, Manning, Hammond, Swartz, Assange, etc – that have made running his legal defense fund a labor of love for me.

The distributed research project Brown founded, Project PM, is important and necessary. Since 9/11, the intelligence and cyber-security contracting industries have exploded in size. I believe, as Barrett does, that the public/private partnership on surveillance constitutes a threat to civil transparency and the health of democratic institutions. Large and very profitable companies like Booz Allen Hamilton obtain most of their revenues from the federal government; yet, the majority of their work is performed in secrecy.

Barrett had the insight to realize early on that the troves of emails that were hacked by Anonymous out of HBGary Federal and Stratfor and subsequently made public had the potential to provide a rare window into the activities of the cyber-intelligence industry. I believe it was this journalistic work of digging into areas that powerful people would rather keep in the dark that made him a target.

Contrary to claims, Brown is not a hacker (he is unabashedly lacking in technical skills). Nor was he a spokesperson for Anonymous (the very idea is ridiculous). He is an iconoclastic writer with a penchant for satire and hyperbole. He became an activist by observing the media's failure to cover the issues or stories that he deemed important. Some of his proudest work was the assistance rendered by Anonymous to citizens in North Africa during the first months of the Arab Spring.

Complete article below the line.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Posting a Hyper-Link is a Criminal Act SO Heineous As to Be Worthy of 105 Years in Prison?”

2013/07/11

Mini-Me: Fracking Causes Earthquakes. Any Questions?

03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement

Huh?

U.S. earthquake increase tied to disposal well boom

Wastewater, increasingly injected into deep disposal wells amid the energy boom, appears to be the culprit in an increase in U.S. quakes.

EXTRACT:

In a study out today that provides the strongest link to date between wastewater wells and quakes, seismologists and geologists say U.S. earthquakes have become roughly five times more common in the past three years. They warn about inadequate monitoring of deep wastewater disposal wells that are setting off these small quakes nationwide.

There are more than 30,000 such deep disposal wells nationwide. They're increasingly used as mile-deep dumping grounds for fluids left over from the more shallow hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” wells responsible for surging U.S. natural gas production. The earthquakes have been linked to the wastewater wells but not the fracking drilling wells themselves.

Read article with large graphic.

2013/07/072013/07/07

Owl: The Gestapoization of Local Police — Brutal & Stupid by Design — Entrapment & Repression Instead of Trust & Security

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Uncategorized

As Balko demonstrates in a long excerpt from his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, published in Salon, the incident described below, plus innumerable incidents of police extreme, overwhelming and excessive violence, are not rising due to a few bad apples and rogue cops, but rather to a much deeper “institutional” problem. That's one and polite way to put it. But it begs the question of why there is an “institutional” problem. Maybe this is a symptom of something deeper still: that the 1% who control the “institutions” want excessiveness from a highly militarized police who are officially directed to shoot first and ask questions later in order to condition the 99% to be intimidated and thus controllable as economic conditions the 1% created seriously deteriorate. A military and militarized police force's sole duty during economic collapse will be to protect the 1% from the 99%. But to do that job well requires training and conditioning, hence such incidents can be expected to occur for that purpose much more frequently.

“Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

Continue reading “Owl: The Gestapoization of Local Police — Brutal & Stupid by Design — Entrapment & Repression Instead of Trust & Security”

2013/07/072013/07/07

Marcus Aurelius: NSA Rejecting All US Citizen FOIA Requests — While FISA Court, Which Has No Jurisdiction Domestically, Goes Stasi

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military

Daily Kos: NSA Rejecting Every FOIA Request Made by U.S. Citizens

NYT: In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers Of N.S.A.

Rickard Falkvinge: Sweden Works for NSA Which Works for Israel, Against Russia and Also Europe?

Snowden Interview: NSA ‘In Bed Together with the Germans'

2013/07/072013/07/07

Berto Jongman: US Jumps Off the Cliff: False Lessons from Foreign Wars Now Applied Against US Public — the Public is the Obstacle, the Enemy, and the Target

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military

Domestic lessons learned from foreign wars

A new book reveals that intelligence tactics devised for use abroad are employed against America's own citizens

Henry Porter

The Observer, Saturday 6 July 2013

Out of the blue, and right from the heart of the American military establishment – the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, no less – comes a coup of analysis that has a really important message for the British and American public. It is that the counterinsurgency wars of the past decade have not only been a bloody failure, but that the tactics, methods and hardware of these wars have inevitably ended up being used against the public at home. Think of mass surveillance, of drones, secret courts, the militarisation of the police, detention without trial.

Hannah Arendt identified “the boomerang effect of imperialism on the homeland” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but the academic Douglas Porch has used the history of Britain, France and America to demonstrate that all the rhetoric about bringing, respectively, Britishness, liberté and freedom and democracy to the “little brown people who have no lights” is so much nonsense and that these brutal adventures almost never work and degrade the democracies that spawned them in the first place.

We always vaguely knew that there must be link between what our forces were doing abroad and what was going on at home – did we not? But what Porch does so crisply in Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War is to underwrite Arendt's insight with scholarship that goes back two-and-a-half centuries, taking in numerous forgotten conflicts. For example, he shows how intelligence techniques, devised by the US army in the Philippines war, were used on US unions and even suspected “reds” in Hollywood.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: US Jumps Off the Cliff: False Lessons from Foreign Wars Now Applied Against US Public — the Public is the Obstacle, the Enemy, and the Target”

2013/07/04

4th Media: Has the USA Foresaken the Rule of Law?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

The Breakdown of The Rule of Law: America’s Descent Into Authoritarianism

From early in one’s life, an American is taught the law and American institutions of justice are great equalizers within our society, ensuring that everyone is treated the same, no matter one’s class, race, or ethnicity. Yet, what has been happening quite recently, especially within the past decade or so, is that we have been seeing an increasing breakdown in the rule of law and the use of the justice system to enforce injustices.

President Obama rode in on a high horse in the 2008 presidential elections, specifically on his slogan of hope and change. He rightly criticized the Bush administration on a number of issues, from the economy to the wars abroad, as well as the use of drones.[1]

Yet, Obama subsequently went and not only increased the use of drones, but used them to kill Anwar Al-Awlaki, a member of Al Qaeda who was still legally an American citizen at the time of his death.[2]

However, the story gets even more shocking as not only does such as act create a legal precedent where the President can kill any US citizen that he deems a terrorist[3], but the Obama administration’s attorney general argued that such assassinations of American citizens on US soil “would be legal and justified in an extraordinary circumstance.’”[4]

Full article and all notes with links below the line.

Continue reading “4th Media: Has the USA Foresaken the Rule of Law?”

2013/07/03

SchwartzReport: US Agriculture — Industrialized Food Combined with Gestapo Tactics Against Small Farms & Interstate Transport — Threatens Public Health

01 Agriculture, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

The food trend becomes ever more alarming. For people like Ronlyn and myself, who eat out of our garden, it has little impact, but for millions who don't have that option, the story is becoming ever bleaker. The Obama Administration's active complicity in this trend should be a national scandal.

Industrialized Food for Profit Threatens Our Health
DAVID GUMPERT – truthout

Full story and book cover with Amazon link below the line.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: US Agriculture — Industrialized Food Combined with Gestapo Tactics Against Small Farms & Interstate Transport — Threatens Public Health”