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Freedom of Speech and Assembly

The Myth Of The Free Press

October 28, 2014 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com , , , , ,
The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy—even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism. They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia.

Political Prisoners In The Sacrifice Zone Of Empire

October 28, 2014 Nozomi Hayase, www.counterpunch.org , , , ,
Abu-Jamal and Hammond, two men with very different backgrounds share much in common. Both were placed in prolonged solitary confinement, which the UN Special Rapporteur on torture called “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and may amount to torture.” Since his arrest in March 2010, Hammond was regularly cut off from contact with his friends and family and was more than once in solitary. Abu-Jamal has spent the last 30 years in prison, almost all of it in solitary confinement on Pennsylvania’s death row before prosecutors agreed in 2011 to reduce the sentence. They both have always held strong commitment to social justice. Hammond revealed secret collusion of corporations and the state to engage in unconstitutional spying on human rights activists.

Montreal Protest Law Is Being Defeated By Ongoing Protest

October 27, 2014 Macho Philipovic, www.montreal.mediacoop.ca , , , ,
After longstanding speculation about whether Montreal’s anti-protest by-law P-6 can more effectively be challenged at theballot box or in the courts, a court decision released on Thursday suggests that the answer is neither: sustained mass action and solidarity in the streets itself may be straining the court system to the point that P-6 will become unenforceable. On Thursday 23 October 2014, Judge Gilles R. Pelletier of the Municipal Court of the City of Montreal dismissed the cases of twenty-seven self-represented people who had been detained and given P-6 tickets at a demonstration on 21 April 2012. The cases were not dismissed because the judge recognized a violation of the protesters’ rights to assembly, expression, or protest, but because there were simply too many cases for the system to effectively process. Pelletier ended his decision by suggesting that P-6 cases are at risk of bringing the rest of the trials heard by the court to a crawl.

Occupy Democracy Brings London A Blast From Its Past

October 27, 2014 Kate Aronoff, www.wagingnonviolence.org , , ,
Inspired partially by Occupy Central in Hong Kong, London’s newly formed Occupy Democracy is being called a revival of Occupy London, which for a brief time in 2011 served as a major center of the global Occupy movement. The new occupation began shortly after an 80,000-person march organized by the country’s Trade Union Congress, though it has not been involved with Occupy Democracy in any official capacity. According to organizer Phil England, the idea for the occupation came in March, when a general assembly of Occupy London decided to embark on “a campaign for real democracy [in the United Kingdom].” Demonstrators have been camping out since October 17, and intend to stay until Sunday. As in Hong Kong, organizers are looking to build a movement for truly representative democracy.

Missouri Police Prepare For Backlash

October 26, 2014 Staff, www.AP.org , , , , ,
“I know there’s a lot of anxiety, there’s a lot of fear, anticipation” about that announcement, said Missouri State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson, who was put in charge of security in Ferguson in the days after Brown was killed and is now part of a coordinated command with local police. But “I have a lot of hope.” Law enforcement officers expect to receive at least a day’s notice before a grand jury announcement. That should provide time for them to execute security plans but may also allow demonstrators to prepare. “The moment I learn that there is, in fact, a non-indictment, then there’s going to be an organized protest,” said Eric Vickers, a black St. Louis attorney and civil rights activist. Wilson’s description of events was leaked recently, as was an autopsy report that showed Brown had marijuana in his system and was shot in the hand at close range. Wilson has alleged Brown was trying to grab his gun in the SUV. “It appears that it may be calculated to soften the blow if there is no indictment,” said Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who directs the school’s Criminal Justice Clinic. Amnesty International on Thursday released a report documenting what it described as human rights abuses by police during the protests following Brown’s death. The report accuses police of violating citizens’ rights by intimidating protesters using riot gear, aiming high-powered weapons at people, using tear gas, firing rubber bullets and flash-bangs, and setting curfews. St. Louis city police recently spent $325,000 upgrading helmets, sticks and other “civil disobedience equipment,” said Police Chief Sam Dotson.

UC Berkeley Shuts Down Beehive Collective Art

October 24, 2014 Sue Udry, www.defendingdissent.org , , , ,
Students at the University of California at Berkeley were forced to bring an art project on drought and California water policy to the main campus on October 21 after a dean prevented them displaying it at Gill Tract Community Farm, an “urban farm” in nearby Albany run by the university and community volunteers. The students say that Steven Lindow, executive associate dean of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, kicked the exhibit—a collaboration with the Beehive Collective, a political art group based in Maine—off the farm for clearly political reasons. They say that Lindow is tied to the genetically modified organism industry, and their event criticized Proposition 1, a state ballot initiative supported by the GMO industry.

News Websites Knocked Offline By Internet Attackers

October 22, 2014 Ali Abunimah, www.electronicintifada..net , ,
The Electronic Intifada was forced offline for more than six hours on Monday by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This came days after IMEMC (International Middle East Media Center), another Palestine-focused online publication, was subjected to a similar attack. A DDoS attack “is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources,” according to Digital Attack Map, a website sponsored by Google that tracks such attacks. “They target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a major challenge to making sure people can publish and access important information.” DDoS attacks do not require a breach of a target’s own security but rather assault it from the outside – though they do rely on breaches of security on other people’s computers.

Activist Jailed, Investigated Soldiers’ Disappearances

October 21, 2014 Associated Press, www.ryot.org , , ,
MOSCOW (AP) — A veteran activist who investigated the deaths and disappearances of Russian soldiers in Ukraine has been jailed, an advocacy group said Saturday. Ten Russian troops were captured in August in eastern Ukraine amid fighting between pro-Moscow separatists and Ukrainian troops after weeks of Moscow denying involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. Authorities insisted the captured soldiers got lost while patrolling the border, and the deaths were accidental and happened in Russia. The Soldiers’ Mothers of St. Petersburg, a highly respected non-governmental organization with a long history of working to defend the rights of soldiers, said Saturday that its colleague in southern Russia who was investigating the deaths and disappearances was detained on Friday.

Poitras And Engelhardt On Snowden

October 21, 2014 Laura Poitras and Tom Engelhardt, www.tomdispatch.com , , , , , ,
Tom Engelhardt: Could you start by laying out briefly what you think we've learned from Edward Snowden about how our world really works? Laura Poitras: The most striking thing Snowden has revealed is the depth of what the NSA and the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, and the U.S.] are doing, their hunger for all data, for total bulk dragnet surveillance where they try to collect all communications and do it all sorts of different ways. Their ethos is "collect it all." I worked on a story with Jim Risen of the New York Times about a document -- a four-year plan for signals intelligence -- in which they describe the era as being "the golden age of signals intelligence." For them, that’s what the Internet is: the basis for a golden age to spy on everyone. This focus on bulk, dragnet, suspicionless surveillance of the planet is certainly what’s most staggering.

Journalist Killed While Documenting Illegal Logging

October 20, 2014 Southeast Asian Press Alliance, www.ifex.org , , , , ,
Journalist Taing Tri, 48, of the local Vealntri newspaper in Kratie province, Cambodia, was shot dead around 1 a.m. on 12 October 2014 as he attempted to document the transportation of illegal luxury wood near Pum Ksem Kang Krow village. The Cambodian Center for Independent Media (CCIM) and the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) condemn this murder in the strongest terms possible and call on local authorities to take immediate action to investigate the case and bring the murderers to justice in order to end the cycle of impunity for those who perpetuate violence against journalists in Cambodia. “Mr. Tri's murder is tragic and cannot go unpunished,” said CCIM Executive Director Pa Nguon Teang. “We must bring an end to impunity for those who commit violence against journalists, and we must do it now, starting with Mr. Tri.”

It’s Legal To Film Cops

October 20, 2014 Christopher Mathias, www.huffingtonpost.com , , , , , ,
NEW YORK -- It's becoming clearer and clearer that smartphones have ushered in a new era of police accountability. Since mid-July, when a bystander on Staten Island filmed the death of Eric Garner in a prohibited police chokehold, at least eight other unsettling videos, most of them captured by smartphone, have emerged showing instances of apparent excessive force by NYPD officers. Four such videos have appeared this month alone. Although police might intimidate bystanders into thinking otherwise, it's perfectly legal to film the cops -- not only in New York, but everywhere in the U.S. -- as long as you don't get in their way. Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, encourages people to keep using their phones to film troubling police incidents. The more people who post these videos online, she said, the more likely it is that other people will reach for their own phones when they see cops doing something questionable.

Santa Ana Mayor Cancels Meeting After Battle With Activists

October 11, 2014 Adam Elmahrek, www.voiceofoc.org , , , ,
Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido called off Tuesday night’s City Council meeting after a chaotic confrontation over free speech and decorum that began when the mayor ordered the council chambers cleared because a man would not abide by his order to remove a hat with an obscene statement directed at police. The man, a 22-year-old member of an activist group called CopWatch Santa Ana and who goes by the name Bijan, was sitting in the nearly packed chambers wearing a hat with the words “Fuck the Police.” Before the public portion of the meeting began, Pulido ordered Bijan to remove the hat or leave, declaring the hat a threat to decorum. When Bijan ignored the order, Pulido directed everyone in the council chambers to leave. But a group of approximately 20 residents also refused to go and said the mayor was trying to shut down free speech.

Vets Win Expansion Of Freedom Of Speech

October 10, 2014 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org , ,
The mood at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial this year was bittersweet. There was palpable relief that we were free to express ourselves without police intimidation and that we could choose when to leave under our own terms. But there was also greater sadness than years before because a week after the President began bombing Iraq again and then Syria, Jacob George took his life. Some suspect the trauma of watching another US war begin, knowing that more soldiers and innocent civilians would die or be forever traumatized and seeing the Masters of War succeed in manipulating the public to support war was too much to bear.

We Need An Open Discussion Of The Internet’s Future

October 9, 2014 Todd Wolfson, www.philly.com , , ,
LAST week, one of the most powerful figures in American communications policy, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, paid a visit to Philadelphia. He made this visit in what he called a "hinge" moment, at a time when many critical communication policy issues are being decided. We at Media Mobilizing Project - a community group focused on building a media and communications infrastructure for poor and working people across the region - hosted him. We were excited to do so, as the issues in front of Wheeler are legion - from the ability of municipalities to create publicly owned broadband infrastructure to the future of net neutrality and the continuing consolidation of our media system with the Comcast-Time Warner merger.

The Roots Of PopularResistance.org Began At Occupation

October 6, 2014 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org , , , ,
Today is the anniversary of the Occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. The roots of the Popular Resistance project come from that occupation and was developed with the advice of many people involved in that effort, as well as allied campaigns around the country. We began the occupation on this date in order to link the Afghanistan War with the austerity budget that was announced that week. The reality of a two-party plutocracy that linked the Wall Street and Empire economy. While we began organizing long before the Occupation of Wall Street began by the time we began there were hundreds of occupy encampments around the country. OWS began on September 17th and sparked a national revolt that continues to have a political and cultural impact today.
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