Tag: police state

Israel explains remote-controlled checkpoint gun

The Israeli army has installed a remote-controlled gun turret in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank, saying it’s to be used for crowd dispersal.

The sci-fi-looking style is positioned at a checkpoint on Shuhada Street, a protest hotspot in the city, Haaretz reported at the weekend.

The system, which is currently being tested, can fire stun grenades, tear gas and sponge-tipped bullets, while being controlled by a remote operator.

“As part of the army’s improved preparations for confronting people disrupting order in the area, it is examining the possibility of using remotely controlled systems for the employment of approved measures of crowd dispersal,” a military spokesman told the Israeli paper.

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America’s Open Wound. The CIA Is Not Your Friend

“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.” ― Baruch Spinoza

It hasn’t been a month since President Biden mounted the steps of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, declaring it his duty to ensure each of us understands the central faction of his political opposition are extremists that “threaten the very foundations of our Republic.” Flanked by the uniformed icons of his military and standing atop a Leni Riefenstahl stage, the leader clenched his fists to illustrate seizing the future from the forces of “fear, division, and darkness.” The words falling from the teleprompter ran rich with the language of violence, a “dagger at the throat” emerging from the “shadow of lies.”

“What’s happening in our country,” the President said, “is not normal.”

Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise—the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry—is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden’s propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.

Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.

Are we right to think that?

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We Can’t Hear You? Public Buses Across Country Quietly Adding Microphones To Record Passenger Conversations

Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.

The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

The use of the equipment raises serious questions about eavesdropping without a warrant, particularly since recordings of passengers could be obtained and used by law enforcement agencies.

It also raises questions about security, since the IP audio-video systems can be accessed remotely via a built-in web server (.pdf), and can be combined with GPS data to track the movement of buses and passengers throughout the city.

According to the product pamphlet for the RoadRecorder 7000 system made by SafetyVision (.pdf), “Remote connectivity to the RoadRecorder 7000 NVR can be established via the Gigabit Ethernet port or the built-in 3G modem. A robust software ecosystem including LiveTrax vehicle tracking and video streaming service combined with SafetyNet central management system allows authorized users to check health status, create custom alerts, track vehicles, automate event downloads and much more.”

The systems use cables or WiFi to pair audio conversations with camera images in order to produce synchronous recordings. Audio and video can be monitored in real-time, but are also stored onboard in blackbox-like devices, generally for 30 days, for later retrieval. Four to six cameras with mics are generally installed throughout a bus, including one near the driver and one on the exterior of the bus.

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Germany has charged or punished over 1,000 people for “online speech-related crimes” since 2018

An in-depth report from The New York Times has revealed the scale of Germany’s prosecution of “online speech-related crimes” and provided a behind-the-scenes look at the units who are tasked with surveilling social media to build cases against German citizens for what they post online.

The Times said that after reviewing German state records, it found that there were more than 8,500 cases related to alleged online speech-related crimes and more than 1,000 people have been charged or punished since 2018. However, no national figures exist on the total number of people charged with online speech-related crimes, and experts that spoke with The New York Times said the true figure is probably much higher.

The Times’ report also provides details on the copious amounts of social media surveillance that are being conducted by a task force in the German city, Göttingen. This task force was created in 2020 and reportedly has hallways, bookshelves, and desks filled with red evidence files. These files contain printouts of German citizens’ Facebook comments, tweets, and Telegram posts. Investigators that work on the task force search through social media feeds, public records, and government data to gather evidence of purported online speech-related crimes.

This task force is in charge of cases across Lower Saxony, a state in northern Germany. Authorities in Lower Saxony reportedly raid homes multiple times per month and in some cases, a local television crew records and broadcasts the raids.

Citizens who are raided but refuse to give up their phones have them seized and sent to a lab. This lab uses software made by the digital intelligence company Cellebrite to unlock the seized phones.

This task force alone investigated 566 “internet speech-related crimes” last year and expects to investigate double that number in 2022. The unit also fines or punishes around 28% of those who are investigated.

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FBI Accused of Misleading Judge in Warrant Request, Unlawfully Seizing $86 Million in Private Assets

Recently unsealed court documents appear to show that the FBI misled a U.S. magistrate judge in its request for a warrant to seize assets from a privately owned safe deposit box store in Beverly Hills, California.

The FBI began investigating U.S. Private Vaults—a store housing more than 1,000 private safe-deposit boxes—after its agents and local law enforcement observed suspected drug dealers and buyers in the vicinity. On March 22, 2021, FBI raided the vault, armed with a warrant by U.S. Magistrate Judge Steve Kim, which granted them the right to seize properties belonging to the firm as part of the investigation, according to a Los Angeles Times report.

The agency seized $86 million worth of cash, gold, silver, expensive jewelry, and other assets.

Pages 84 and 85 of the government’s affidavit requesting multiple warrants contained an assurance that the federal agency would respect the rights of safety deposit box customers.

Written by Andrew Brown, an assistant U.S. attorney and driving force of the investigation, that section of the affidavit makes it clear that warrants only authorize “seizure of the nests of the boxes themselves, not their contents,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

However, by the time Kim got the warrant request, the FBI had allegedly made preparations to seize the contents inside the deposit boxes.

In the summer of 2020, Matthew Moon, a high-ranking FBI agent from Los Angeles, asked Jessie Murray, chief of the FBI’s asset forfeiture unit in Los Angeles, whether Murray’s team was “capable of handling a possible large-scale seizure” of safety deposit boxes of U.S. Private Vault, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Murray said yes. In late 2020 and early 2021, Murray joined a conference call to plan the seizure operation. A memo was issued by FBI agent Lynne Zellhart to fellow agents describing the procedures for carrying out the raid.

The memo, which was approved by Moon, asked agents to assign ID numbers to “all cash” found inside the deposit boxes to be catalogued in the Consolidated Asset Tracking System, which the agency uses to organize forfeitures.

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Greenwald: ‘Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition’

Journalist Glenn Greenwald is criticized the Democratic Party, calling members authoritarians trying to criminalize their opposition. 

After The Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper complained about Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz not being indicted with in a sex-trafficking probe, Greenwald, co-founder of The Intercept,  responded with his criticism. 

“Chickens*** club,” Cooper tweeted.

Greenwald replied in a retweet: “This is a perfect illustration of how authoritarian so many Democrats are. 

“This Democrat doesn’t know or care why career DOJ prosecutors decided the evidence was insufficient to prosecute Matt Gaetz. What he knows is that Gaetz supports Trump and thus wants him imprisoned:

“I can’t stress this enough: at its core, Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology. Dissenting ideas are ‘disinformation’ and must be censored by Big Tech. Trump voters are inherently criminal (‘insurrectionists’) and should be imprisoned.”

He also wrote that October 2021 he and others produced a video to assemble the “mountain of polling data and other quantifiable evidence demonstrating how Democratic Party loyalists and liberal activists are now classic authoritarians.”

Greenwald is now an independent journalist following his departure from The Intercept.

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New Zealand expands surveillance network that was used to hunt down three Covid-positive women

The surveillance networks that New Zealand police used to hunt down three Covid-infected women are being rolled out in other parts of the country.

Police have taken advantage of tapping into a surveillance system run by two private companies, allowing them to access thousands of cameras that are constantly scanning and documenting car number plates, even when they don’t own the cameras.

Police issued new rules about the use of automated number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras last week.

We obtained a copy of the rules for you here.

New Zealand police have spent years pushing for the development of a second privately-owned network of almost 5000 CCTV cameras owned by businesses, local governments, and more – all that is accessible by police officers through the use of a simple app.

The approach, similar to new proposals in San Francisco, joins the public law enforcement tools with private surveillance and raises extensive privacy concerns.

Further, the new law that allows this also shields police from liability for data breaches.

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Why Orwell Matters

Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.

And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.

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