Upon hearing that the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of a New York Post reporter, a coworker quipped "The NYCLU and New York Post joinning forces? What next? Cats playing with dogs? Yankees hugging Red Sox? Cylons and humans calling the war off?"
But the matter is far too serious, as the above video will attest. Leonardo Blair's account is chilling and his ordeal only came to an abrupt halt when informed police that he was a reporter—an option that most New Yorkers don't have.
The reporter, Leonardo Blair — a Jamaican-born black man — was stopped, arrested and jailed without justification in November while walking from his car to his aunt’s home in the Bronx. The lawsuit maintains that Blair’s constitutional rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments were violated and names the City of New York, NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and NYPD officers William Castillo and Eric Reynolds as defendants.
“Leo Blair was handcuffed and hauled to a precinct house for simply walking down the street,” said Donna Lieberman, NYCLU executive director. “Walking while black is not a crime, and yet every year hundreds of thousands of innocent New Yorkers are stopped, searched and interrogated by the police for doing just that. For justice in our city to be truly just, the NYPD needs to start treating all New Yorkers fairly, regardless of the color of their skin.”
According to data released earlier this week, New York City police officers stopped more people on the streets during the first three months of 2008 than during any quarter in the six years the Department has reported the data.
Posted by Maria Luisa Tucker at 11:24 AM, April 22, 2008
Last week, we reported that the city parks department reluctantly approved an August punk show to commemorate the violent 1988 police riot in Tompkins Square Park. Among those celebrating the news was Clayton Patterson, an East Village artist who filmed over three and half hours of the 1988 riot. Patterson provided the Voice with clips from that footage, which show in graphic detail a number of protesters, bystanders and even reporters being beaten by cops. That video played a large part in backing demonstrators' claims of police brutality. Watch the video here:
Patterson's many years of documenting the turmoil and transformation of the Lower East Side are featured in a new
film, Captured, which premiers this Thursday at NYU's Cantor Film Center.
New York City protests might lose a little of their cattle-drive feel after a legal agreement between the New York City Police Department and the a New York Civil Liberties Union. For years the department has used barricades and mounted officers to control access to political demonstrations, but today agreed to change course on the use of these herding tactics.
Now, the NYPD has agreed to change its crowd control policies at political protests in response to a NYCLU lawsuit. Without admitting any legal liability, the NYPD will issue new regulations for the treatment of political protesters, including guidelines for improving access to areas where the department has barricaded groups of demonstrators and improved communication between police and protest organizers on how the NYPD will restrict access to protests.
“It's going to ensure that when police restrict access, they will have to provide information to people and facilitate access to protests. That’s something the department has never taken on” said Chris Dunn, the lead lawyer for the NYCLU in the case.
Also, the NYPD has issued new advice for the use of mounted police in protests. Now, the manual for mounted officers will say that when using horses to disperse a crowd “it is important to ensure that a crowd or group to be dispersed has sufficient avenues of escape and/or retreat available.”
In the agreement the police department also agrees to pay two participants in the February 15th, 2003 anti-war protests $10,000 and $15,000 each for injuries sustained when mounted police charged into crowds. Each of the individual litigants was prevented from accessing the demonstration after their injuries.
The new rules on access notification require the Police to provide information on restrictions to the press, public and protest organizers. Additionally, police officers at the scene must use sound amplification to inform large groups on how to get to protests after blocking of streets or sidewalks, and individual officers manning checkpoints must be constantly updated on routes to access demonstrations. Dunn points to the changes as a significant shift in how the NYPD deals with accessing protests:
“The department has been very busy restricting access to protests, now they will have to promote access and make sure people are getting to these events”
Posted by Duncan Meisel at 6:58 PM, April 10, 2008
Government wiretapping of U.S. citizens has become “fast, loose, and completely unfettered” according to whistleblower and security specialist Babak Pasdar who discovered a mysterious ‘backdoor’ circuit at a major U.S. mobile phone carrier. He discovered the circuit while overhauling the telecom’s security system, and raised flags when the company refused to install security mechanisms that would restrict access to the data. According to Pasdar, the circuit he discovered, labeled the “Quantico Circuit,” acts as an unfiltered and unlogged tap into any of the wireless carrier’s information streams, including location, text messaging, call destination and more.
Pasdar and his attorney Tom Devine filed an affidavit with all 435 members of the House of Representatives — credited with turning the tide against telecom immunity in a March 12th vote — describing the blanket wiretap, which tracks any and all information traveling over the carrier’s system.
“The House is demanding first to know ‘Immunity for what?’" said Devine of the Government Accountability Project. "Mr. Pasdar’s disclosure describes several gross violations of law, where the legal boundaries were left in the dust. The Quantico Circuit provides unrestricted access to anything — it turns a legal molehill into a lawless mountain.”
No one knows what organization is at the other end of the tap, although the name “Quantico Circuit” seems to be a reference to Quantico, Virginia, the location of the FBI’s intelligence division. “I don’t know what it was doing. The Quantico circuit was a high speed circuit that was a tap, that had access to all systems” Pasdar said.
According to Wired, Pasdar’s description of what he found is similar to a tap at Verizon Wireless that fed into a government wiretapping program. Devine described what he thinks is at stake with this disclosure: “There is no mechanism to segregate responsible exercises of surveillance from the Big Brother scenario” he said. “The system was structured to put the government on an honor system — to put the Bush Administration on the honor system.”
The scope of information gathered suggests a new level of privacy problems. “What really takes this one step further is that the carriers begin to build a behavioral model based around you as an individual” based on the time, location and destination of your calls, Pasdar said.
The harrowing details of Pasdar’s disclosure — warrantless, undocumented, unfettered wiretapping — only adds fuel to the fire of mistrust and disillusionment surrounding the Bush administration's execution of the War on Terrorism.
“It's obvious they were being invasive by virtue of the fact that they’re looking for immunity” for the telecom companies, said Pasdar.
Government wiretapping of U.S. citizens has become “fast, loose, and completely unfettered” according to whistleblower and security specialist Babak Pasdar who 
rss feed
