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CIVIL RIGHTS

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In search of the the elusive invisible line, who draws it & the consequences of that line being crossed.

#ND #CIVILRIGHTS #PROTEST #NORTHDAKOTA #KISSMYASSETS

Eviction notice for DAPL protest camp should be viewed through the lens of military tactics - Boulder Weekly. Joel Dyer On Friday, Nov. 25, Colonel John Henderson, district commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, sent an eviction notice to several thousand people who are currently living in the Oceti Sakowin Camp just north of the Cannonball River in North Dakota. The protesters, who established the camp and call themselves “water protectors,” are living in the camp as part of their efforts to stop the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as well as to strengthen the Greater Sioux Nation’s ownership claims on the lands north of the river as granted under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

Ownership of the 1851 Treaty lands under the Oceti Sakowin Camp — which currently covers approximately 137 acres — is also claimed by the federal government via the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In his day-after-Thanksgiving eviction notice, Henderson offered a multi-pronged reason for ordering the protesters out of the camp they have now been living in for months. Gov. Think about it. FBI Surveillance Hacks Android Devices, Laptops | ROSS. In recent months, Americans were aghast to learn that their phone calls were secretly being recorded and collected by a government agency, the NSA, when the extent of their indiscriminate wiretapping program was leaked to the public.

But if you think that’s an invasion of privacy, you’d better hope the NSA never gets its hands on FBI surveillance techniques and tactics…such as the ability to remotely turn on the microphones in laptops and Android devices without you knowing it. How’s that for Big Brother? Because what’s a little espionage between family? We’ve all watched enough TV to know that wiretapping is no problem for the mishmash of acronymic government agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, NASA, etc.), but those same shows have taught us certain assumptions about wiretapping, like the necessity of a warrant, and the necessity of the phone actually being in a call.

Just like the rest of them. George Orwell is rolling over in his grave right now, and it’s a good thing he’s buried in the UK. Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking, Drones, and FBI Surveillance. By Trevor Timm Electronic Frontier Foundation | Last updated: Apr 22, 2012 - 11:08:24 AM What's your opinion on this article? ACLU Public Records Requests Shed New Light on Use of Cell Phone Tracking Over the weekend, the ACLU released an exhaustive study of state and local law enforcement’s surveillance practices in regards to how often police forces are tracking citizens’ movements through their cell phones. The findings were staggering. As the New York Timesreported, the documents prove warrantless cell phone tracking “has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.”

Thirty-five ACLU affiliates helped file over 380 public records requests, and they received over5,500 pages of documents in response from over 200 local law enforcement agencies. FOIA Lawsuits Seek Answers on Federal Government’s Drone Programs The Post continued: Second Amendment Foundation. Surveillance Self-Defense | Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications.

VETERANS AFFAIRS

Trumpism Poses the Most Dire Threat to Academic Freedom in Recent Memory. Thanks to the principle of academic freedom, professors have unusual space in American society to challenge the powerful without fear of retribution. For this reason the right has always resented professors, and for decades it has targeted them as subversives. The election of Donald Trump and the rise to power of the extremist ideologues surrounding him, like Steve Bannon and Rudolph Giuliani, make this a frightening moment for those academics who see fighting for a more just world as part of their job.1 In 2012, I found myself the target of a hate campaign after saying a few intemperate things about the National Rifle Association and American gun culture in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I was upset not only because of the horrors of the event itself—a shocking one for many Americans—but because in 1998 my high-school Spanish teacher in Springfield, Oregon, had been murdered by her son before shooting up his own high school.

Why you might want to think twice about surrendering online privacy for the sake of convenience. Why you might want to think twice about surrendering online privacy for the sake of convenience It is inconvenient to guard one’s privacy, and the better one protects it, the more inconvenience one must endure. Enjoying privacy, at a minimum, demands installing software to block tracking online, using long and different passwords for online services, remembering to turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth signals on your mobile phone when leaving the house, using cash, and so on.

The more privacy conscious have to go through the trouble of using encryption for all their messages, covering the camera on their laptop with a sticker, suffering the slowness and limitations of using Tor (a software that enables anonymity online), and may even be willing to forgo the many advantages of having a mobile phone altogether. Companies and institutions should not make it this hard for people to enjoy privacy – we shouldn’t have to go through all this trouble to make good on a right.

Weighing up the losses. Action Network. Articles - Author's Page for Fair Org. Articles Listed By Date List By Popularity Saturday, October 29, 2016 At DAPL, Confiscating Cameras as Evidence of Journalism While elite media wait for the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline to go away, independent media continue to fill the void. Saturday, October 8, 2016 (10 comments) NYT Declares Snowden a Thief -- and Journalism a Crime If we're going to call Snowden's documents "stolen," then journalists frequently receive "stolen" records from sources and use them as the basis for stories -- as the Times itself has done with documents released by Snowden.

If Snowden is a thief, then the New York Times is a fence. Civil Rights | USAO | Department of Justice. Civil Rights Division | Department of Justice. Futures Without Violence. Article 19: Defending freedom of expression and information. WITNESS | Human Rights Video. At Least Nine Ontario Police Agencies Helped Deploy Secret Surveillance Gear. At least nine police agencies in Ontario participated in a provincial program to deploy secret surveillance equipment in the province’s largest cities, according to documents released by Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General under a freedom of information request.

Moreover, the documents reveal that local police were trained in “lawful access” techniques—a police euphemism for intercepting digital communications—in order to keep up with “rapidly changing technology.” These documents reveal that, in 2010, a grant was awarded to Criminal Intelligence Service Ontario (CISO), an arm of the provincial government, to pay for special training for police officers involved in the Provincial Electronic Surveillance Equipment Deployment Program (PESEDP). This is a secretive project whose goal is to equip cops with unspecified surveillance gear. “We’re [moving] toward a society where the police are everywhere.

The state’s actions have to be transparent" US State Police Have Spent Millions on Israeli Phone Cracking Tech. This is part of a Motherboard mini-series on the proliferation of phone cracking technology, the people behind it, and who is buying it. Follow along here. When cops have a phone to break into, they just might pull a small, laptop-sized device out of a rugged briefcase.

After plugging the phone in with a cable, and a few taps of a touch-screen, the cops have now bypassed the phone’s passcode. Almost like magic, they now have access to call logs, text messages, and in some cases even deleted data. State police forces and highway patrols in the US have collectively spent millions of dollars on this sort of technology to break into and extract data from mobile phones, according to documents obtained by Motherboard. Cellebrite, an Israel-based firm, sells tools that can pull data from most mobile phones on the market, such as contact lists, emails, and wiped messages. Previous reports have focused on federal agencies' acquisition of Cellebrite tools. UFED Touch2 Platform. Why Cellebrite? Tow Center for Digital Journalism | Columbia Global. The Center established in early 2010, provides journalists with the skills and knowledge to lead the future of digital journalism and serves as a research and development center for the profession as a whole.

Operating as an institute within Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, the Tow Center is poised to take advantage of a unique combination of factors to foster the development of digital journalism. Its New York location affords access to cutting-edge technologists, a strong culture of journalism and multiple journalism and communication schools, with outstanding universities attached to them.

The Tow Center is where technology and journalism meet, and where education and practice meet. Mission The Center explores how the development of technology is changing journalism, its practice and its consumption — particularly as consumers of news seek ways to judge the reliability, standards and credibility of information. Work. North Dakota needs to immediately drop its outrageous charges against journalist Amy Goodman. UPDATE [Oct. 15th]: North Dakota prosecutors have indicated they have dropped the trespassing charges against Amy Goodman, and instead will charge her with participating in a "riot.

" “I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting," Goodman said on Saturday. "I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters. " Award-winning journalist and the host of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, has been facing an outrageous arrest warrant in North Dakota for “criminal trespass” since early September—the result of her merely doing her job as a reporter and covering private police committing violence against oil pipeline protesters in North Dakota.

Today, she announced she would return to the state in order to turn herself in and contest the charges on Monday. It couldn’t be more obvious that Ms. Out-of-control North Dakota prosecutors still pursuing reporter Amy Goodman, even after judge dismisses riot charge. As we reported last week, the prosecutors first issued an arrest warrant for Goodman back in September for “criminal trespassing,” while indicating she was not entitled to any protections as a journalist because they claimed, “Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.

" Then, the prosecutors admitted that there were "legal issues with proving the notice of trespassing requirements in the statute," i.e. they knew they couldn’t prove their case. So they dropped the trespassing allegation and instead charged her with participating in a ‘riot,’ which was dismissed Monday. So even though they’ve been stymied twice by the law, they’re now thinking of returning for round three. It’s clear that the prosecutors have pre-determined Goodman should be in jail, and now just have to figure out how—statutes and First Amendment be damned.

North Dakota’s unconstitutional pursuit of Goodman is beyond an embarrassment at this point. How the Obama administration laid the groundwork for Trump’s coming crackdown on the press. In the summer of 2009, less than a year after President Obama took office, one of the first orders of business for the newly empaneled Senate Judiciary Committee was passing a long-stalled federal ‘media shield’ bill, which would finally provide a uniform level of protection to reporters who get subpoenaed to testify against their sources in court.

The bill, which had previously been scuttled by Republican Congress, now had strong support in a Democratic Congress, and seemingly, a newly-elected Democratic president, who had co-sponsored an almost identical bill when he was a senator. But just as it looked like the bill would sail through Congress and make its way to the president’s desk, it was stopped in its tracks. President Obama suddenly reversed course from his previous position and announced he would oppose the bill if the Senate didn’t carve out a giant national security exception that would make the important protections within it all but meaningless. Sen. Over 150 filmmakers and photojournalists call on major camera manufacturers to build encryption into their cameras.

Camera manufacturers are behind the times compared to other technology companies. All iPhones and many Android phones come with encryption built into their devices. Communications services like Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime, plus Facebook’s WhatsApp, encrypt texts messages and calls by default. And major operating systems on PCs and Macs give users the ability to encrypt the hard drives on their computers.

Yet footage stored on the professional cameras most commonly used today are still left dangerously vulnerable. Finding the right way to do provide encryption in their products will take some research and development from these camera manufacturers, and we welcome having a conversation with Nikon, Sony, Canon and others about how to best move forward on this important initiative. Dear Canon, We, the undersigned documentary filmmakers and photojournalists, are writing to urge your company to build encryption features into your still photo and video camera products.

Signed, Rapid Responses For Compromised Phones. Protect Yourself. Tcij.org | Reporter's Recording Guide. This guide was researched and written by McCormick Legal Fellow Kristen Rasmussen, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Legal Fellow Jack Komperda and legal intern Raymond Baldino. They built on the work of legal fellows and interns who contributed to previous editions.

Funding for this publication provided by the MoCormick Foundation. © 2012 by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 1101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 1100, Arlington, Va. 22209. Important notice This guide is meant as a general introduction for journalists to the state of the law concerning electronic recording and its implications. It does not take the place of legal advice from a lawyer in your state when you are confronted with a legal problem. Journalists who have additional questions or who need to find a lawyer can contact the Reporters Committee at (800) 336-4243. Techdirt. Electronic Frontier Foundation | Defending your rights in the digital world. Security in-a-box [key project] Security in-a-box was first created in 2009 by Tactical Tech and Front Line Defenders, to meet the digital security and privacy needs of human rights defenders. Since then, the website has been updated and expanded to keep up to date with a rapidly-changing digital environment.

Security in-a-box includes: 1. A How-to Booklet covering 11 areas, including 'how to protect your computer from malware and hackers' and 'how to protect the sensitive files on your computer'. 2. Hands-on Guides, each focusing on a specific freeware or open source software tool. Each Guide shows you how you can use that tool to secure your computer, protect your information or maintain the privacy of your communication. 3. The toolkit offers possible explanations (How and why does this happen?)

Who Security in-a-box was made by and for Security in-a-box was created by a diverse team of experts who understand not only the conditions under which advocates work, but also the resource restrictions they face.

COUNTER-SURVEILLANCE

5 Acts of Creative Disruption by Ayla Harbin and Christa Hillstrom. PRIVACY. When It Comes to Police Surveillance, Local Politics Matter. NSA to share data with other agencies without “minimizing” American information. Lawyer sues Chicago police, claims they used stingray on him. TECHNOLOGY + CIVIL RIGHTS.

Civil Rights | NRCS North Dakota. Civil Rights Certification and Compliance System - North Dakota Department of Transportation. Human & Civil Rights Organizations of America - Home. DOT - The Civil Rights Division. Office for Civil Rights Compliance. About ACRI. About | National Action Network. National Black Justice Coalition. Oldest and Boldest. Thirteen Leading Civil Rights Organizations Issue Call for Action and Reforms in Response to Ferguson Tragedy | NAACP LDF.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

ACLU

How Many Law Enforcement Agencies Does It Take to Subdue a Peaceful Protest?