Tag: police state

New Zealand: Social Media Companies Agree to Censor “misinformation” and “harmful” Content

Giant social networks operating in New Zealand will from now on “voluntarily” self-regulate to further suppress content considered misinformation and hate speech.

Those signing up to what’s known as Aotearoa (New Zealand) Code of Practice for Online Safety and Harms include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Amazon’s Twitch, Twitter, and TikTok.

The initiative comes from Netsafe – a New Zealand non-profit that describes itself as having “unrelenting focus on online safety.” Under the terms of the code they just agreed to, these social media heavy-hitters are expected to “actively” work on reducing “harmful” content.

We obtained a copy of the details for you here.

It is not stated what type of action the platforms will now be taking in order to achieve that goal, but the companies behind them will be publishing reports each year to demonstrate compliance, and will detail what tools, policies, processes and systems are being used to this end.

The full list of areas where censorship will be tightened includes child sexual exploitation and abuse, bullying or harassment, hate speech, incitement of violence, violent or graphic content, misinformation, and disinformation.

The code itself is said to be modeled after the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, the EU Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech Online and the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. Netsafe considers the code as a way to fill “regulatory gaps” around misinformation and hate speech.

Members of the public will be able to report a social media company if they “believe” the code has been broken on its platform, and file complaints. One of the punitive measures is apparently asking these tech giants to “leave the agreement.”

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Police Are Using Newborn Genetic Screening to Search for Suspects, Threatening Privacy and Public Health

Nearly every baby born in the U.S. has blood drawn in the immediate hours after their birth, allowing the baby to be tested for a panel of potentially life-threatening inherited disorders. This is a vital public health program, enabling early treatment of newborns with genetic disorders; for them, it can be the difference between a healthy life and an early death. But recent news suggests that police are seeking access to these newborn blood samples in criminal investigations. Such use of this trove of genetic material — to hunt for evidence that could implicate a child’s relative in a crime — endangers public trust in this vital health program and threatens all Americans’ right to genetic privacy.

A public records lawsuit filed in New Jersey this month details how police subpoenaed a newborn blood sample to investigate a 1996 cold case. While law enforcement’s desire to use these blood samples in criminal investigations was always a possibility — and one the ACLU has opposed — the increasing use of Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) has only increased the government’s interest in easy access to people’s DNA. While few have heard of IGG, many have heard of its application to cold cases: One high-profile example is the 2018 identification of the Golden State Killer as former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. In IGG, DNA is isolated from a sample left at a crime scene and a rich genetic profile is created and uploaded to a genealogy website in order to map out family trees. In just four years since IGG first became public, its documented use by police has rapidly grown to nearly 200 investigations.

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Do the Police Have an Obligation to Protect You?

The motto, “To Protect and Serve,” first coined by the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1950s, has been widely copied by police departments everywhere. But what, exactly, is a police officer’s legal obligation to protect people? Must they risk their lives in dangerous situations like the one in Uvalde?

The answer is no.

In the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Court of Appeals held that police have a general “public duty,” but that “no specific legal duty exists” unless there is a special relationship between an officer and an individual, such as a person in custody.

The U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect. In its 1989 decision in DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services, the justices ruled that a social services department had no duty to protect a young boy from his abusive father. In 2005’sCastle Rock v. Gonzales, a woman sued the police for failing to protect her from her husband after he violated a restraining order and abducted and killed their three children. Justices said the police had no such duty.

Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that police could not be held liable for failing to protect students in the 2018 shooting that claimed 17 lives at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

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Cop Arrested for Showing up to 911 Call & Masturbating in Front of Family as Well as Multiple Sexual Assaults

Over the years, the Free Thought Project has reported on some utterly disturbing behavior by members of American law enforcement — up to and including public masturbation. Most of these incidents, however, involved cops who were off duty. However, a family in San Jose found out in April that cops responding to 911 calls can and will show up to a call and think they are on a porn set.

That officer was Matthew Dominguez — who began masturbating in front of the family — and has since been charged and arrested. After his case garnered national headlines, more victims came forward and detailed multiple allegations of sexual assaults.

One of the women says Dominguez turned off his body camera during a traffic stop before sexually assaulting her. Another woman detailed a sexual assault that took place at a barbeque. Notably, both of these women filed their complaints before Dominguez was caught masturbating in front of a family, and both of these women had their complaints dismissed.

Only after Dominguez was arrested and the women came forward again, did the department launch another investigation which led to additional sexual battery charges against the officer. On July 7, prosecutors added another misdemeanor sexual battery charge based on the woman’s account.

As TFTP reported at the time, on April 21, a family in San Jose called 911 to report that a mentally ill family member was being violent. Officer Dominguez, a 32-year-old who has been with the department for four years, showed up on the scene with two other officers.

Being the senior officer, Dominguez sent the two officers away to locate the allegedly violent family member. After he made himself alone with the women in the home, he decided it was time to act. As the two officers left, Dominguez started to masturbate in front of two daughters before the mother walked into the room.

When the mother walked in, seeing the two girls in shock, Dominguez took to exposing himself to her as well. Authorities said the victims were “shocked and scared” and ran away after realizing what was going on. Two male relatives were notified about Dominguez’s sick behavior as another witnessed him in the dining room masturbating as well.

Exactly what possesses a police officer to begin masturbating at a crime scene or even to think that it would be acceptable, is mind blowing. Yet here we are.

It would take nearly three weeks for Dominguez to be arrested and eventually he was booked and charged with indecent exposure. He has since been placed on administrative leave.

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Americans Likely to Be Tracked for CO2 Emissions Under SEC’s New Climate Rule: Consumers’ Research

Will your CO2 emissions data be collected and reported to the government in the near future? A consumer rights group said that a new rule proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would lay the groundwork for doing so.

On March 21, the SEC proposed a rule titled “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors” (pdf). The nearly 500-page rule would require SEC registrants—mostly public companies, investment advisers, and broker-dealers—to report certain climate-related information including their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The GHG emissions are categorized into three scopes. Scope 1 is the registrant’s direct GHG emissions. Scope 2 is its indirect GHG emissions from purchased electricity and other forms of energy. Scope 3 is indirect emissions from upstream and downstream activities in a registrant’s value chain.

“Scope 3 requires these companies to estimate the carbon output of the use of their product by the consumer, which means they’re going to have to go out into the field and talk to consumers,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, America’s oldest consumer protection organization, said in an interview with NTD’s “Fresh Look America” program on July 12.

“Let’s say you bought an internal combustion engine lawnmower. The lawn mower company will need to know how many times you mow your lawn. They’re going to have to go out and ask people that and research that. And so you could see how this starts to lay the groundwork for scoring actual individual people’s activities,” said Hild.

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Tulsi Gabbard slams Biden admin for hypocrisy of Bannon conviction, while Clapper, Brennan weren’t charged

Former Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D) posted a fiery statement to Twitter Saturday morning, showing her contempt for the Biden administration and the “elite” for “shamelessly weaponizing law enforcement into a political hit squad” following the conviction of Trump-ally Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan allegedly lied to Congress and were never charged, Gabbard wrote.

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist under the Trump administration, was convicted on two charges of contempt of Congress after a federal jury found him guilty for ignoring a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 Committee on Friday. The two misdemeanour counts each carry a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of one year in jail, in addition to a fine of $100 to $100,000, reported Axios.

Bannon is the first close Trump adviser to be convicted resulting from the House committee’s probe into the affront on the U.S. Capitol last January following Trump’s election loss.

Clapper has allegedly lied to Congress on multiple occasions, the most notable of which occurred right before National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden infamously leaked classified documents.

In March 2013, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked Clapper under oath if the federal government was collecting “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper replied, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.”

Three months later, Snowden released documents revealing the NSA was collecting communications records on millions of Americans.

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POLICE DEPARTMENTS ARE SPENDING MILLIONS ON ‘COPAGANDA’

In May of this year, I testified at a hearing in San Francisco where city leaders questioned the police department’s funding and use of public relations professionals. That funding was heavier than you might expect.

According to police department documents provided to the County Board of Supervisors, budget items included a nine-person full-time team managed by a director of strategic communications who alone costs the city $289,423; an undisclosed number of cops paid part-time to do PR work on social media; a Community Engagement Unit tracking public opinion; officers who intervene with the families of victims of police violence and who are dispatched to the scenes of police violence to control initial media reaction; and a full-time videographer making PR videos about cops.

San Francisco is not unique. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has 42 employees doing PR work in what it calls, in Orwellian fashion, its “Information Bureau.” The Los Angeles Police Department has another 25 employees devoted to formal PR work.

Why do police invest so much in manipulating our perceptions of what they do? I call this phenomenon “copaganda”: creating a gap between what police actually do and what people think they do.

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