Get FISA Right

In the wake of the Michael Brown shooting and subsequent non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson, many (including Michael Brown’s family) made the understandable call for police body cameras, since such a device might have provided visual documentation for the claims or counterclaims made in that case.

But are body cameras are really going to be effective, long-term means of making police more accountable to the public?  Or will they just be another device to switch on and off as it suits the cop on the beat — while providing another surveillance stream of unwarranted, suspicionless observations to sift and analyze long after the recording?

Problems with body cams
Writing for Truthout, Bill of Rights Defense Committee director Shahid Buttar gives three reasons to suspect that body cameras are no solution to police violence:

First, there’s no guarantee that the public will ever see footage from police body cameras, especially in…

Michael Carbone (Access) explains the finer points of encryption to workshop participants.

Better late than never: here’s a report back from the “crypto party” hosted by Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Public Citizen on Friday, October 25th in the offices of Public Citizen in connection with the “Stop Watching Us”rally against mass surveillance that weekend.

The evening was a pizza- and beer-fueled workshop on how and why to go about encrypting email and masking one’s Internet usage.  Much of it was (or should have been) familiar to me and MCCRC readers via our own Bill Day’s posts on the subjects (see here for an overview).

But a refresher course with hands-on help never hurts.  The email encryption workshop I joined led off with a clear, useful overview of the issues followed by excellent help from the experts on hand, via organizations like Access, Center for Democracy…

What is net neutrality?  It’s the idea that no bit of data on the Internet highways and byways is more privileged than the next.  The ACLU puts it this way: it’s what makes the Internet “a place where you can always access any lawful content you want, and where the folks delivering that content can’t play favorites because they disagree with the message being delivered or want to charge more money for faster delivery” — the way companies like Comcast or Verizon would like to do.

For his part, John Oliver (“Last Week Tonight”) puts it this way:

The decision is just a month away now, and cable companies are putting big pressure on Congress to intervene and direct the FCC to make the decision they’d like.  So the Internet wing of the civil liberties community — Fight for the Future, EFF, DemandProgress, and other groups — are banding…

On Saturday, December 7, 2013, two carloads of activists drove to the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade to demonstrate against the U.S. surveillance state.

They unfurled banners over US-295 with a simple message:

Save America – Close the NSA.

[videography, sound by N. van der Sluys, T. Nephew; for a sharper image while playing
the videos, click the settings “gear” icon (lower right menu) and select 720p HD]

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The action, organized by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee with activists from Code Pink, Restore the Fourth, and the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition, helps kick off similar protests around the country leading up to the Bill of Rights Day on December 15th.