Walmart arrestsHuffington Post – by Kathleen Miles

Surrounded by about 100 police officers in riot gear and a helicopter circling above, more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in downtown Los Angeles Thursday night as they sat in the street protesting what they called the retailer’s “poverty wages.”   Continue reading “Largest Civil Disobedience In Walmart History Leads To More Than 50 Arrests”

Arizona Central – by JJ Hensley

Cameras affixed to traffic signals at intersections are now commonplace.

A decade ago, law-enforcement agencies began mounting special cameras on patrol cars capable of reading hundreds of license plates a minute.

And Phoenix police have been flying a plane capable of conducting surveillance from 9,000 feet since 2010.   Continue reading “Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office push for drones stirs privacy concerns”

MassPrivateI

Since October 2001, the enforcement wing of the Department of Education has issued Glock pistols to its special agents as a matter of course, according to documents obtained by MuckRock. The department has continued building out its arsenal and expanding its agents’ weapons selection using discounted law enforcement rates offered to the U.S. Capitol Police and the ATF.

The purchase orders and documents provided to MuckRock user Scriven King— which date back seven years – indicate that the Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General has purchased more than 200 Glocks for its special agents since 2006, spending more than $80,000 on pistols in that span. The OIG also spent $17,000.79 on Remington shotguns in September 2010, according to another purchase order.    Continue reading “‘Zero Tolerance’ policy be damned the Department of Education is acquiring handguns”

MassPrivateI

DHS is in the midst of a project where video footage taken of people moving throughout the Toyota Center in Kennewick, Wash., will be combined with mock profiles of volunteers (This is 100% B/S  no one refused). Then various commercial off-the-shelf facial recognition products will be tested to see how accurate they are.

The data being collected consists of video taken during home games of the Tri-City Americans of the Western Hockey League. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is handling video collection. Results from the facial recognition assessment will be made available to the government.   Continue reading “DHS spied on almost 300,000 families & fans of ‘Tri-City Americans’ hockey team is using facial recognition to identify everyone”

MassPrivateI

N.C. State University has announced a partnership with the National Security Agency (NSA) to help address big data problems.

It will be the largest sponsored research contract in the university’s history, according to NCSU, and will bring 100 or more jobs to the Triangle.   Continue reading “NSA to open a $60.75 million “data analysis” (spy) center at North Carolina State University”

MassPrivateI

More and more when it comes to monitoring the public, capability is driving policy. The limits of law enforcement surveillance are being determined by what is technologically possible, not what is wise or even lawful. And it’s not uncommon for the police to use a new technology in secret for as long as they can, and then allow the courts to sort out legality once the issue finally comes before them.   Continue reading “Surveillance capabilities are driving police department policies”

MassPrivateI

Oklahoma – When Linda Bearden did not pay $451 of court costs stemming from a 2011 guilty plea, a Tulsa County judge issued a bench warrant for her arrest.

Months later, on Oct. 15, a sheriff’s deputy noticed a blue Mitsubishi with a cracked windshield driving on 36th Street North near the Gilcrease Expressway. The deputy stopped the car and found Bearden driving under a suspended license with an outstanding warrant for failure to pay court costs, so he arrested her.    Continue reading “Debtors prisons in America: Increasing number of people going to jail for not paying fines”

MassPrivateI

Seattle – On Friday, that program — called Redlight Traffic — is launching a first-of-its-kind app for iPhones and Androids that will funnel citizens’ anonymous tips on suspected prostitution activities to law enforcement through a secure website that can only be accessed by police officers. (Because we’re all about creating citizen spies, I bet the old Gestapo, KGB & Stasi police forces are jealous. Feel free to make an anonymous call & report your neighbors wife or your ex-girlfriend)   Continue reading “Don’t like your neighbor or your ex-wife? New app lets you leave anonymous prostitution tips to the police”

MassPrivateI

The Boy Scouts of America on Wednesday chose former U.S. Secretary of Defense and CIA director Robert Gates as its next president, who will face the task of repairing divisions in the organization from a heated debate over accepting gay scouts.

As Defense Secretary, Gates supported President Barack Obama’s withdrawal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prevented gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. Congress repealed the ban in 2010 and it was lifted in 2011.   Continue reading “Militarizing the Boy Scouts former CIA Director & Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to become next president”

The Volokh Conspiracy – by Will Baude

A Tennessee prosecutor in the case of State v. Powell apparently moved to preclude the defense from referring to his side as “the government.” The defense lawyer had an entertaining response. You can get the whole motion here, but I’ve reproduced most of it below:

The government has moved to ban the word “government.” The State of Tennessee offers precisely zero legal authority for its rather nitpicky position, and the defense can find none. The Plaintiff has failed to carry its burden on this motion. Moreover, the Plaintiff’s proposed ban on speech would violate the First Amendment. The motion should be denied.   Continue reading ““The designation ‘That innocent man’ would also be acceptable.””

MassPrivateI

Facebook data scientists can figure out who you’re sleeping with, even if your relationship isn’t “Facebook official,” and in a new paper researchers explain how they figured out the method, the Atlantic reports. Turns out the key is to look at more than just mutual friends. “Embeddedness,” or the number of mutual friends two people have, can show how close those people are (the more mutual friends, the closer they are). But researchers found embeddedness predicted the correct significant others just 24.7% of the time. A more accurate predictor is something called “dispersion.”   Continue reading “Facebook knows who you’re dating & is testing software to track your cursor on screen”

MassPrivateI

As campaigns for state supreme court seats become more expensive and more partisan, the fear of being portrayed as “soft on crime” is leading courts to rule more often for prosecutors and against criminal defendants, contends the Center for American Progress study. 

A new report from the Center for American Progress examines the impact on the criminal justice system of the explosion in judicial campaign cash and the growing use of political attack ads in state supreme court elections, which have increased pressure on elected judges to appear “tough on crime.”   Continue reading “New report shows when campaign cash increased, courts ruled in favor of prosecutors & against criminal defendants”

MassPrivateI

Article first appeared in the economicpolicyjournal:

California – I did have an interesting conversation with a salesman who sold night vision goggles to police SWAT teams. He said most of the training was aimed at battling terrorism. But then he added,“You know, the greater San Francisco area has more SWAT teams than any other part of the country.”   Continue reading “Universities secretive SWAT teams are being trained by Israeli SWAT teams”

MassPrivateI

Look at Facebook, says Amie Stepanovich, director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.

Facebook has the largest biometric database in the world — “and it’s all been formed by people voluntarily submitting pictures to Facebook and identifying who they belong to,” she says.

Theoretically, every time you label faces by tagging a picture, you’re chipping away at those two big challenges for universal facial recognition. First, you’re helping to build a super-database of labeled faces. Second, you’re uploading multiple versions of each person’s face, which can improve a system’s accuracy.   Continue reading “Facebook has the largest biometric database in the world and the potential to recognize anybody’s face”

The Daily Caller – by Alex Pappas

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter.   Continue reading “Feds confiscate investigative reporter’s confidential files during raid”