Ukraine’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ Wants 15-Year Prison Terms for Journalists
Sputnik – 22.03.2015
Ukraine’s Minister of Information Policy announced that he seeks eight to 15 year prison terms for employees of Donetsk and Luhansk television stations.
Ukraine’s Minister of Information Policy, Yuri Stets, said in an interview to Radio Liberty that he wants people who work for local television in Donetsk and Luhansk to serve eight to 15 years in prison.
“I think that it’s effective enough for law enforcement to work there so that people who worked for the channels of the so-called LPR [Luhansk People’s Republic] and DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic] got the following sentences: eight to 15 years.”
In the same interview, Stets says that he has been able to convince Europeans that his ministry will not be a “Ministry of Censorship.” In addition, he announced that a new radio station aimed at Crimea will be launched sometime next week.
The Ministry of Information Policy remains the least-popular ministry in Ukraine according to opinion polls, and is often referred to as the “Ministry of Truth” for its contradictory aims, referencing George Orwell’s novel ‘1984.’ On Thursday, the ministry took control of a financial education television channel, intending to launch a new international broadcaster, Ukraine Tomorrow.
In February, the Ministry of Information Policy launched the “Ukrainian Information Army,” a project which intended to start arguments in comment sections of Russian news websites to shift public opinion. The project failed after warriors failed to convince Russians that Ukraine’s declining standard of living is the fault of Russia and personally Putin, and has since become a mailing list of links to share on social media.
Egyptian detainees complain of torture
Mada Masr | March 22, 2015
The Freedom to the Brave group published on Saturday a leaked letter from detainees in the Abu Zaabal Prison in which they complain they were subjected to torture and beating over the past few days.
“All the political prisoners were tortured and the cells were raided by masked central security forces which created panic,” the letter read. “We were attacked with batons and dogs, which led to several injuries and others passed out due to tear gas.”
Fifteen detainees were reportedly taken from their cells and tortured for three hours in front of the others. They were stripped of their clothes and forced to utter profanities, the detainees claimed.
The letter was written by detainees who were arrested on the fourth anniversary of the January 25 revolution for staging protests.
According to Ali Halabi, an activist who has been following the case of the January 25 detainees, it all began when prison forces attacked Ahmed Gamal Zeyada, a journalist, and other detainees tried to protect him.
“After that the cells were raided by masked forces with dogs and they destroyed the property of detainees as well as torturing them,” he told Mada Masr.
The detainees were then kept in the disciplinary room in their underwear for four days.
Reports of torture weren’t limited to Abu Zaabal Prison, but similar cases in Borg al-Arab Prison were reported as well. According to families of detainees, attacks go well beyond verbal assaults, which even the families are subjected to.
“The detainees and even their families are treated badly during visiting hours,” Mostafa al-Attar, brother of detainee Karim al-Attar told Mada Masr. “As soon as we arrive at the prison, security forces start treating us like sheep, ordering us to move from one place to another using profanities.”
Attar said that the detainees are held in confined spaces and are subjected to searches every few days, when their blankets may be burned and possessions destroyed.
“We know they are subjected to much more than that,” Attar said. “They don’t tell us, but they always look broken and they often cry suddenly.”
Kamal Abbas, member of the National Council for Human Rights, told Mada Masr that the council has received numerous reports from different prisons, especially Abu Zaabal and the appeals prisons. Such information includes forcing detainees to stand for hours.
The National Council for Human Rights issued a report last week saying that the Interior Ministry is hindering their visits to prisons, adding that it is prepared to join the prosecution in Shaimaa al-Sabbagh’s case.
“The Interior Ministry has been deliberately obstructing our visit to the prisons for over four months,” Abbas said, “and it denies any reports of torture.”
The council is required to obtain approval for visits from the general prosecution, and the Interior Ministry is required to arrange the visits.
However, Abbas says these rules are ineffective. “Is it realistic for the Ministry of Interior to facilitate a visit for us to ascertain whether or not it is torturing detainees?” he asked.
Abbas explained that the council has long called on previous and current governments to abide by the constitution, which stipulates that visits are by notification and not authorization.
The council’s last visit, Abbas said, was to the January 25’s fourth anniversary detainees. He confirms they had been subjected to torture and beating when they arrived at the prison.
Mada Masr contacted media and human rights officials at the Interior Ministry for comment to no avail.
French gov preparing to outlaw ‘conspiracy theories’
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | March 20, 2015
In addition to its new law against ‘condoning terrorism,’ the French regime also plans to outlaw ‘conspiracy theories’ and prevent French citizens from accessing websites deemed conspiratorial.
On Jan. 27 France’s President Francois Hollande told a Jewish-Zionist audience at a Holocaust Memorial ceremony:
“We need to act [against the dissemination of conspiracy theories] at the European level, and even internationally, so that a legal framework can be defined, and so that Internet platforms that manage social networks are held to account and that sanctions be imposed for failure to enforce [censorship].”
As a first step in the crackdown on theories not consonant with government propaganda and lies, the French regime banned five websites.
Non-Aligned Media holds that the Ottawa shooting, the Sydney Siege, the Charlie Hebdo attack and the recent assault in Copenhagen were all staged-managed PR events designed to validate a government crackdown on terrorism-skeptics.
The British, Australian and Canadian governments have all forwarded similar pleas to silence skeptics of war on terror mythology and the official interpretations of 9/11, 7/7 and other false flag events which bear Israeli and Western fingerprints.
Britain’s David Cameron in particular equated 9/11 and 7/7 skeptics with ISIS terrorists during a speech at the United Nations.
After the October 22 Ottawa shooting in Canada, Sun News, a neocon Fox News clone outlet, dubbed the phrase ‘terrorist truthers’ to describe anyone not sufficiently sheep-like.
Copyright 2015 Non-Aligned Media
France moves to legalize warrantless data surveillance
RT | March 19, 2015
In effort to boost its intelligence gathering, France is pushing for a law to allow authorities to spy on the digital and mobile communications of anyone linked to a “terrorist” enquiry without any judicial authorization.
The government presented the draft law to parliament on Thursday.
“Facing an increasing jihadist threat, we have to further enhance the effectiveness of the surveillance against terrorists,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said at a news conference two months after 17 people died in a series of terrorist attacks in Paris.
“Today, one of the two people who arrived in Syria has been detected before his departure, so we have to … tighten the net of surveillance of radicalized and dangerous individuals.”
Valls said the text of the draft provided the intelligence services the means enough to fight terrorism, yet respecting individual freedoms – a view, not supported by many human rights organizations and lawyers.
The draft law would give the intelligence services the right to perform “security interceptions” of e-mails and phone conversations, to install radio beacons in a suspect’s cars, as well as microphones and cameras in their home. It could also be able to track what a suspect types on a computer keyboard with the use of special software, and also force internet service providers to hand over data to the security services.
However the prime minister underlined that the draft “is not a French-style Patriot Act,” referring to the anti-terrorism laws introduced in the US after the 9/11 tragedy in 2001 that strengthened security controls. The future law only legitimizes the actions, already common among the intelligence services, so Valls added that “There will be no more grey zone,” as cited by Reuters.
Human rights watchdogs and lawyers have slammed the project as “devastating” for individual freedom. The Paris Bar Association also expressed their disapproval over the “text made without any prior coordination with the judiciary.”
Nils Muiznieks, human rights commissioner of the Council of Europe, said on Thursday, “I am concerned about the strict security approach that characterizes the discussions and the text of the legislation aimed at intensifying the fight against terrorism.”
Amnesty International stated that it “is concerned that several of these measures may pave the way for violations of international and regional human rights standards that are binding on France, in particular those regarding the rights to freedom of expression and to private life.”
In January, following the attacks in Paris where 17 people were killed, Manuel Valls revealed plans to boost anti-terrorism strategies. The prime minister announced that France will employ 2,680 extra anti-terror operatives with a €425 million increase in funding.
French comedian sentenced for ‘defending terrorism’ in Facebook remark
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Media | March 18, 2015
The popular French comedian Dieudonne has been found guilty by a French court of ‘defending terrorism,’ making the comic one of dozens convicted of the Orwellian speech offence since the Charlie Hebdo shooting.
The charges stem from a Facebook comment Dieudonne made in the aftermath of the shooting, saying “I feel like I am Charlie Coulibaly,” a play on the ludicrous catch phrase “I am Charlie.”
Haaretz reports that the Paris court sentenced Dieudonne to a suspended sentence of two months in jail.
The French state has been criticized for its blatant double standards as it relates to free speech. Government ministers voiced support for Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish anti-Muslim cartoons, but concurrently issue orders for the arrest of people critical of Jews and Israel.
France’s President Manuel Valls is said to be under Jewish influence. Valls says he is “eternally linked” with Israel because his wife is Jewish.
Copyright 2015 Non-Aligned Media
US Muslim tortured in UAE for 106 days struggles to prove FBI hand
RT | March 18, 2015
A US citizen, who was put on a no-fly list, declared a threat to national security and tortured in an UAE prison after refusing to become an FBI informant, is having a hard time proving it happened at the behest of the US authorities, his lawyer told RT.
Yonas Fikre is an Eritrean born American citizen who immigrated as a refugee to the US when he was 13 from neighboring Sudan. He became a US citizen and in 2006 settled in Portland, Oregon. His problems began soon after 2010 when he went back to Khartoum, where he still had relatives, to start an electronics import business.
In Sudan he was summoned to the US Embassy on false pretenses and was told by two FBI agents from Oregon that they wanted to ask him a few questions about his mosque in Portland. When Fikre demanded a lawyer and hesitated to answer questions about people he had prayed at the mosque with but barely knew – the agents told him he was placed on a no-fly list. Although there was “absolutely no factual justification” for that, his lawyer, Thomas Nelson, told RT.
Fikre was told he would be taken off the list if he agreed to work for the FBI as an informant. He eventually agreed to answer their questions, but not work for the feds. A couple of weeks later, Fikre says he received a letter from one of the FBI agents, telling him threateningly: “While we hope to get your side of issues we keep hearing about, the choice is yours to make. The time to help yourself is now.”
Taking threats into account, he still managed to fly to his relatives in Sweden. He concluded that he was not in fact deemed a serious threat and the FBI agents had been bluffing, although he wondered whether had he flown to a close US ally such as Britain that this would also have been the case.
He got a chance to find that out after he went to the UAE, one of the US’s closet allies in the Middle East, and was suddenly arrested by the local police.
Fikre was held and tortured in UAE prison for 106 days from June to September 2011. During this time he was continually beaten and repeatedly asked about events in Portland, Oregon – the same questions that the FBI asked him earlier.
“During the torture he was always blindfolded, and so he could not see who was doing the interrogating and who else was in the room, although he was aware that there were others. With the exception that he could occasionally look underneath the blindfold and see pants, trousers, shoes and dress of that sort. Sometimes there was Western dress, sometimes there was Arabic dress,” his lawyer explained to RT.
After eventually being released – without any charges – Fikre managed to return to Sweden and over the next three years managed to prove that he had been tortured while in custody in the UAE, although he and his legal team are convinced they can not prove that this was at the behest of the US authorities.
“During the course of 3 years there, the Swedish authorities investigated what happened to him and they came to a conclusion that Yonas indeed had been tortured. Their problem was that they had a hard time proving that it was the FBI or the American authorities that instigated and performed the torturing. It was not a question of whether the torture occurred, it was a question of whether they can prove that the Americans were behind it,” he explained.
Although there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence, Thomas Nelson says they are having hard time proving the US authorities took part in the torture.
“It’s one of those difficult things because when the most powerful nation on earth wants to hide something, it can do it very easily. We have litigation going on here where, we’re going to try and chase down those avenues and to prove who was involved, what they did and how they did it,” Nelson said.
The lawyer added that legally one of the major problems lawyers face in issues like this is that it’s very difficult to bring a foreign state as a defendant into the United States court system. He also said that another reason that litigation against the US authorities has been unsuccessful is because the US has been “very effective in scaring and creating fear both in the judiciary and in the general public about Muslims.”
NYPD says cops won’t be sanctioned for altering Wikipedia entries
RT | March 17, 2015
Two veteran New York City cops discovered to have altered Wikipedia entries related to high-profile police brutality cases from police headquarters won’t be punished, according to the commissioner.
New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton made the announcement Monday and said the two officers – whose names will not be released – do not currently work in the police headquarters, and are assigned to two different units.
“Two officers, who have been identified, were using department equipment to access Wikipedia and make entries,” NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton told reporters. “I don’t anticipate any punishment, quite frankly.”
The officers might be reprimanded for using their employer’s computers for unrelated work and are expected to be spoken to by Internal Affairs Bureau investigators.
The Wikipedia alterations were made to entries concerning some of the city’s most controversial police brutality cases, including Eric Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo, all of whom were killed by officers.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the same press conference “city computers” are “supposed to be for city business. This was not authorized business.”
Most NYPD computers don’t allow access to the internet, an anonymous source told DNAinfo. Currently, the NYPD doesn’t have a policy specific to Wikipedia, but it is in the process of reviewing its social media rules. Police officials told local news source DNAinfo that they did not direct the changes made to Wikipedia.
Since Wikipedia is publicly accessed and edited by volunteers, it is not appropriate for NYPD officers to edit references they believe are inaccurate. Wikipedia users have removed some of the changes to the entries.
Capital New York reported Friday that as many as 85 IP addresses registered at NYPD headquarters have logged hundreds of edits to Wikipedia entries on victims of police brutality, dating back 10 years.
The NYPD only maintains records that can trace computer use for one year, but they were able to uncover that the two veterans had made alterations on the “Death of Eric Garner” page on Wikipedia shortly after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for his death.
Garner, who was placed in a chokehold, was killed by police last year during an arrest that was captured on video by an onlooker. One of the edits altered “Garner raised both his arms in the air” to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke.”
Why marijuana isn’t at the bottom of the list
By Pete Guither | Drug War Rant | March 17, 2015
“Let’s put it in perspective,” Obama said in response. “Young people, I understand this is important to you, but you should be thinking about climate change, the economy, jobs, war and peace, maybe way at the bottom you should be thinking about marijuana.”
That, of course, completely misses the point regarding what “thinking about marijuana” actually is about.
Tom Angell:
“But he should think again about how important this issue is. On average, there’s a marijuana possession arrest in the U.S. about every minute. Billions of dollars are wasted on enforcing prohibition laws that don’t stop anyone from using marijuana but do ruin people’s lives with damaging criminal records.”
Lee Rosenberg (via Twitter):
No, marijuana legalization is not the most important issue for young people to care about, but government incompetence on the issue has a very negative and very real impact on the perception that government is capable of solving more serious problems.
“Thinking about marijuana” is about more than getting high.
It’s about systemic police corruption. It’s about a failed criminal justice system that fuels situations like Ferguson. It’s about tens of thousands dead in Mexico. It’s about failed foreign policy. It’s about using bad laws to control a population and deny them basic rights. It’s about perversion of our Constitution. It’s about financial self-interest trumping science and reason.
Marijuana most definitely isn’t at the bottom of the list.
Interview With French Dissident Artist Zéon
By Brandon Martinez | Non-Aligned Movement | March 14, 2015
Zéon (pictured above, far left) is a French cartoonist, illustrator and painter. He is 31 years old and lives in Paris. He publishes some comic strip albums, and is running a group of dissident French cartoonists blacklisted by the mainstream press. He together with other artists produce comic books such as “L’Almanach pour tous“.
Brandon Martinez of Non-Aligned Media conducted an exclusive interview with Zéon who was recently arrested and charged with a ‘hate crime’ in France for an anti-Zionist graphic he designed in 2009.
Brandon Martinez: How long have you been doing politically-themed artwork?
Zéon: I began my first Zeon cartoons in 2007.
BM: When did you become aware of the Zionist issue and its relevance to France?
Zéon: In 2003, when the French humorist Dieudonné was banned from official media for a sketch he did about Israel.
BM: You were recently arrested for the crime of “offending Israel” with some of your artwork. What is the status of this case and what exactly are they charging you with?
Zéon: The judge charged me with “provocation leading to racial and religious discrimination by offensive words, in writtings, pictures or electronic communication means”, for a cartoon I did of a stabbed Palestinian child with an Israel map shaped knife. I drew it in 2009 at the time of the Gaza massacre.
BM: Many are enraged by the hypocrisy of the French government who on the one hand champion free expression for Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Muslim cartoonists, but on the other hand mercilessly persecute dissidents who critique Israel or Jews (yourself included). Is this double standard widely recognized by the French public or are people unaware of it?
Zéon: A good part of the people know it, mostly in the youth of today, mainly in the working classes.
BM: After the Charlie Hebdo shooting, we’ve seen the French regime enact stiff laws making it basically illegal to question the government’s neocon foreign policy. Will this have an impact on artists such as yourself?
Zéon: Yes, sure! After the Charlie Hebdo shooting, a lot of people were charged with the ‘defending terrorism’ law, including a young child of 8 years!
BM: What’s the feeling in France with regards to the Charlie Hebdo affair? Many are saying that it was staged or at the very least allowed to happen. What’s your opinion on this?
Zéon: There’s an emotional wave who stay in the public debate for the moment, but it can’t last forever and the rational thinking will shortly come back… “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time!” About the Charlie Hebdo shooting, I’m not a specialist, but my opinion is that these kinds of terrorist acts are most of the time supervised and controlled by the secret services. They’re the only ones who have the means and the logistics to bring these operations to fruition. There are many examples, like the September 11 attacks or the Toulouse and Montauban shootings… They infiltate radical groups, detect and use the most fanatical members to do violence. I think we’re in this kind of situation with the Charlie Hebdo affair.
BM: We saw the great march of the hypocrites shortly after the shooting, featuring some of the world’s worst war criminals, including Netanyahu. Are people in France not disgusted at how the shooting has been used by politicians to curtail freedom as well as push forward more war in the Middle East on behalf of Israel?
Zéon: Yes, everyday more and more people are waking up, fighting against this kind of manipulation. That’s a big problem for the François Hollande regime. They’re trying by all means to bring us back to the unique and automatic way of thinking, “la pensée unique”, they want us to believe everything the official media says, and finally manage us like sheep.
BM: What’s your association, if any, with Alain Soral’s Egalite Reconciliation group?
Zéon: I work regularly with them and their publishing house “Kontre Kulture”. For example, we’ll bring out in a few days a little cartoon book: “Je ne suis pas Charlie… Et j’t’emmerde!” (“I’m not Charlie… And go to hell!”) to respond with humor to this oligarchy who want us to choose between two camps, the “Charlies” or the “terrorists”.
BM: Where can people find your artwork and how can they support you?
Zéon: You can find my artwork on the internet or in my web blog: https://zeondessinateur.wordpress.com To support me, you can take a look at my comic strip “Yacht People” that I’ve done with Dieudonné et Alain Soral, unfortunately it’s only in french for the moment… But we are working on a 3D cartoon film which will be translated into English and Spanish.
CISA Isn’t About Cybersecurity, It’s About Surveillance
By Rachel Nusbaum | ACLU | March 13, 2015
They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. But sometimes that’s the easy part.
When it comes to cybersecurity, it seems everyone in Washington admits we have a problem. It’s in the solutions phase where things really start to fall apart for policymakers.
Instead of focusing on ways to make our data (and the devices we store it on) more secure, Washington keeps offering up “cybersecurity” proposals that would poke huge holes in privacy protections and potentially funnel tons of personal information to the government, including the NSA and the military.
Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee met behind closed doors to mark up the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015. They voted 14–1 to advance the bill, with Senator Wyden offering the lone no vote.
Unfortunately, by all accounts, CISA is one of those privacy-shredding bills in cybersecurity clothing.
If you remember CISPA, the information-sharing bill that fell under the weight of its privacy failings last Congress and even drew a veto threat from President Obama, the problems with CISA might sound a little too familiar. This bill is arguably much worse than CISPA and, despite its name, shouldn’t be seen as anything other than a surveillance bill – think Patriot Act 2.0.
The bill could also pose a particular threat to whistleblowers – who already face, perhaps, the most hostile environment in U.S. history – because it fails to limit what the government can do with the vast amount of data to be shared with it under this proposal. CISA would allow the government to use private information, obtained from companies on a voluntary basis (and so without a warrant) in criminal proceedings – including going after leakers under the Espionage Act.
If you are wondering how giving companies a free pass to share our personal information with the government will make our data more secure, you aren’t alone. We’ve already written about why real cybersecurity doesn’t need to sacrifice our privacy.
The ACLU also recently joined with a broad coalition to remind the committee about some of these problems – problems which have not been adequately addressed in the Senate’s proposal.
The letter reads, in part:
We now know that the National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly collected the personal information of millions of users, and the revelation of the programs has created a strong need to rein in, rather than expand, government surveillance. CISA disregards the fact that information sharing can – and to be truly effective, must – offer both security and robust privacy protections. The legislation fails to achieve these critical objectives by including: automatic NSA access to personal information shared with a governmental entity; inadequate protections prior to sharing; dangerous authorization for countermeasures; and overbroad authorization for law enforcement use.
You can read the full letter, and view the full list of signatories, here.
NYPD accused of editing Wikipedia pages for Eric Garner death, other scandals
RT | March 13, 2015
The New York Police Department is reviewing reports that computers connected to the NYPD’s own network edited the Wikipedia pages for some of the more infamous recent events to involve the force, including the choking death of Eric Garner.
Wikipedia articles pertaining to at least three individuals who died as a result of altercations with the NYPD, including Garner, were edited out of the department’s 1 Police Plaza headquarters, Capital New York reported Friday.
According to publicly available records of the online encyclopedia’s revision history, computers connected to Internet Protocol (IP) addresses traced back by the paper to NYPD headquarters edited — and sometimes attempted to delete — entries on alleged instances of police brutality and articles critical of the force’s conduct.
Along with a page on Garner — the Staten Island man who died last July after being placed in a chokehold by NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo — Wikipedia articles detailing no fewer than two others deaths involving the Big Apple’s boys in blue were altered by computers connected to the agency’s complex in downtown Manhattan, Kelly Weill reported for Capital New York this week.
Wikipedia pages for the NYPD’s so-called “stop-and-frisk” tactic, as well as recent scandals that have tarnished the force — such as the 2013 incident in which an undercover cop was caught up in a group beating on the West Side Highway — were edited from headquarters, Capital New York reported, along with the pages for Garner, Sean Bell and Amadou Diallo. Bell died in 2006 after undercover NYPD officers fired 50 times him and two other men, all unarmed, and Diallo was killed in 1999 when a cop mistook his wallet for a gun and opened fire.
Last December, someone connected through the NYPD’s network made multiple edits to the “Death of Eric Garner” page on Wikipedia, Weill reported, within hours of a grand jury’s decision not to charge NYPD Officer Pantaleo in the man’s death. “Garner raised both his arms in the air” was changed to “Garner flailed his arms about as he spoke,” Weill wrote, and “Use of the chokehold has been prohibited” was changed to “Use of the chokehold is legal, but has been prohibited.”
“Instances of the word ‘chokehold’ were replaced twice, once to ‘chokehold or headlock,’ and once to ‘respiratory distress,’” Weill reported, both times from the NYPD network.
With regards to the Bell shooting article, a user connected to the NYPD network initiated an effort to have the entry nixed altogether by filing a complaint on the website’s internal “Articles for deletion” page.
“He [Bell] was in the news for about two months, and now no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore. The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets. This incident is more news than notable,” the user wrote.
In 2006, according to Weill, a user of the NYPD network deleted 1,502 characters from the “scandals and corruption” section of Wikipedia’s “New York City Police Department” article. Two years later, another computer connected to the network deleted the entire “Allegations of police misconduct and the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB)” and “Other incidents” sections from the main NYPD page.
Weill, an intern with Capital New York, wrote that there are more than 15,000 IP addresses registered to the NYPD, and information about them can easily be found online for free. A simple computer script programed in Python ran those addresses through Wikipedia, she said, and then flagged instances in which edits were made.
“The matter is under internal review,” NYPD spokeswoman Det. Cheryl Crispin told Capital New York in an email.
Read more – Grand jury doesn’t indict NYPD officer accused in chokehold death
Texas Representative Proposes Bill to Make Filming the Police Illegal for Everyone But MSM
By Jay Syrmopoulos | The Free Thought Project | March 12, 2015
Austin, Texas – On Tuesday, a bill was filed by Texas Representative Jason Villalba (R-Dallas), HB 2918, which would turn private citizens who film police into criminals.
The bill attempts to usurp citizens of the ability to hold law enforcement accountable for their actions by negating people’s ability to create an accurate and impartial record of police interactions.
If passed, the bill would amend the current “INTERFERENCE WITH PUBLIC DUTIES” statute (Sec. 38.15), to include language that only allows filming of police (within 25ft) by “news media.”
The term “news media” is then defined as such:
(A) a radio or television station that holds a license issued by the Federal Communications Commission;
(B) a newspaper that is qualified under Section 2051.044, Government Code, to publish legal notices or is a free newspaper of general circulation and that is published at least once a week and available and of interest to the general public in connection with the dissemination of news or public affairs; or
(C) a magazine that appears at a regular interval, that contains stories, articles, and essays by various writers, and that is available and of interest to the general public in connection with the dissemination of news or public affairs.
Notice that private citizens, and internet based sites are not listed as qualifying as “news media,” thus allowing the marginalization of anyone that is not part of the old corporate media structure. This also means that a citizen wouldn’t be able to record their own interaction with an officer.
The law is intentionally structured in this manner as a means of controlling the narrative of police-involved incidents. Traditional news outlets often rely almost solely on police talking points when running a story involving the police. It’s extremely rare for them to allow the victim’s version of events to be part of the narrative, especially when conflicting with that of the police.
If not for the alternative media on the ground in Ferguson, much of what was transpiring there would have never seen the light of day as corporate media would have just buried the story altogether.
The proposed legislation also ignores legal precedent, established in Glik v Cunniffe, where the court held that “a private citizen has the right to record video and audio of public officials in a public place.”
In that case the court went on to say:
“…we have previously recognized that the videotaping of public officials is an exercise of First Amendment liberties,” affirming Glik’s constitutional right to videotape public officials in public places.
The court went on to state that the right to film public officials in public places was clearly established a decade prior to the case, which would mean it was already established as early as 1997.
For some reason, Representative Villalba thinks that his authoritarian “wisdom” should replace that of the Founding Fathers.
What’s clear is that filming law enforcement in the commission of their duties has been established as “free speech” under the 1st Amendment of the Constitution.
The ability of citizens to hold officers accountable for their actions is not only protected “speech,” it’s also a necessary check on an out of control law enforcement apparatus. … Full article
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- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
