UK journalists take legal action against police spying
Press TV – November 21, 2014
Six British journalists have filed a lawsuit against the Scotland Yard after documents showed that the police in London were spying on them for more than a decade.
The lawsuit, which was filed by the National Union of Journalists against London’s Metropolitan Police and the Home Office, was announced late Thursday.
The group of journalists, including three photographers, an investigative journalist, a newspaper reporter and a freelance video journalist, took legal action after they discovered the Metropolitan Police had been recording their professional activities on a secret database.
The database was reportedly designed to monitor so-called domestic extremists.
The records included the movements of the journalists while working, their appearance and how they used a camera to record the events they were covering.
Freelance photographer David Hoffman questioned why he had been labeled as an extremist in the files kept by the police, saying he has “never contemplated any sort of extreme action of a political or criminal nature.”
The journalists said the lawsuit is aimed at exposing the persistent pattern of journalists being assaulted, monitored and stopped and searched by police during their work.
The group is also seeking to force the police to destroy the files containing records of their activities, saying the surveillance violates the liberty of the press and their privacy.
Both the Metropolitan police and the Home Office have declined to comment on the legal action.
The lawsuit comes as recent public disclosures of police records have revealed that Scotland Yard secretly seized journalists’ telephone records.
Several senior police officers have acknowledged keeping an eye on journalists by using powers granted under anti-terrorism measures.
A previous lawsuit by five journalists resulted in the police apologizing or paying damages for wrongdoing, including assault and unjustifiable searches while they were working.
Interview with Serena Shim’s Sister
See also, Press TV Reporter Killed in Car Accident Following Threats by Turkish Intelligence, which includes videos of Shim, including one of her last reports before her death.
Do Wars Really Defend “America’s Freedom”?
By Lawrence Wittner | CounterPunch | November 17, 2014
U.S. politicians and pundits are fond of saying that America’s wars have defended America’s freedom. But the historical record doesn’t bear out this contention. In fact, over the past century, U.S. wars have triggered major encroachments upon civil liberties.
Shortly after the United States entered World War I, seven states passed laws abridging freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In June 1917, they were joined by Congress, which passed the Espionage Act. This law granted the federal government the power to censor publications and ban them from the mail, and made the obstruction of the draft or of enlistment in the armed forces punishable by a hefty fine and up to 20 years’ imprisonment. Thereafter, the U.S. government censored newspapers and magazines while conducting prosecutions of the war’s critics, sending over 1,500 to prison with lengthy sentences. This included the prominent labor leader and Socialist Party presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs. Meanwhile, teachers were fired from the public schools and universities, elected state and federal legislators critical of the war were prevented from taking office, and religious pacifists who refused to carry weapons after they were drafted into the armed forces were forcibly clad in uniform, beaten, stabbed with bayonets, dragged by ropes around their necks, tortured, and killed. It was the worst outbreak of government repression in U.S. history, and sparked the formation of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Although America’s civil liberties record was much better during World War II, the nation’s participation in that conflict did lead to serious infringements upon American freedoms. Probably the best-known was the federal government’s incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese heritage in internment camps. Two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, most of whom had been born (and many of whose parents had been born) in the United States. In 1988, recognizing the blatant unconstitutionality of the wartime internment, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the action and paid reparations to the survivors and their families. But the war led to other violations of rights, as well, including the imprisonment of roughly 6,000 conscientious objectors and the confinement of some 12,000 others in Civilian Public Service camps. Congress also passed the Smith Act, which made the advocacy of the overthrow of the government a crime punishable by 20 years’ imprisonment. As this legislation was used to prosecute and imprison members of groups that merely talked abstractly of revolution, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately narrowed its scope considerably.
The civil liberties situation worsened considerably with the advent of the Cold War. In Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee gathered files on over a million Americans whose loyalty it questioned and held contentious hearings designed to expose alleged subversives. Jumping into the act, Senator Joseph McCarthy began reckless, demagogic accusations of Communism and treason, using his political power and, later, a Senate investigations subcommittee, to defame and intimidate. The president, for his part, established the Attorney General’s List of “subversive” organizations, as well as a federal Loyalty Program, which dismissed thousands of U.S. public servants from their jobs. The compulsory signing of loyalty oaths became standard practice on the federal, state, and local level. By 1952, 30 states required some sort of loyalty oath for teachers. Although this effort to root out “un-Americans” never resulted in the discovery of a single spy or saboteur, it did play havoc with people’s lives and cast a pall of fear over the nation.
When citizen activism bubbled up in the form of protest against the Vietnam War, the federal government responded with a stepped-up program of repression. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, had been expanding his agency’s power ever since World War I, and swung into action with his COINTELPRO program. Designed to expose, disrupt, and neutralize the new wave of activism by any means necessary, COINTELPRO spread false, derogatory information about dissident leaders and organizations, created conflicts among their leaders and members, and resorted to burglary and violence. It targeted nearly all social change movements, including the peace movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. The FBI’s files bulged with information on millions of Americans it viewed as national enemies or potential enemies, and it placed many of them under surveillance, including writers, teachers, activists, and U.S. senators Convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr. was a dangerous subversive, Hoover made numerous efforts to destroy him, including encouraging him to commit suicide.
Although revelations about the unsavory activities of U.S. intelligence agencies led to curbs on them in the 1970s, subsequent wars encouraged a new surge of police state measures. In 1981, the FBI opened an investigation of individuals and groups opposing President Reagan’s military intervention in Central America. It utilized informers at political meetings, break-ins at churches, members’ homes, and organizational offices, and surveillance of hundreds of peace demonstrations. Among the targeted groups were the National Council of Churches, the United Auto Workers, and the Maryknoll Sisters of the Roman Catholic Church. After the beginning of the Global War on Terror, the remaining checks on U.S. intelligence agencies were swept aside. The Patriot Act provided the government with sweeping power to spy on individuals, in some cases without any suspicion of wrongdoing, while the National Security Agency collected all Americans’ phone and internet communications.
The problem here lies not in some unique flaw of the United States but, rather, in the fact that warfare is not conducive to freedom. Amid the heightened fear and inflamed nationalism that accompany war, governments and many of their citizens regard dissent as akin to treason. In these circumstances, “national security” usually trumps liberty. As the journalist Randolph Bourne remarked during World War I: “War is the health of the state.” Americans who cherish freedom should keep this in mind.
Dr. Lawrence Wittner is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark?
Muslim scholars’ union slams UAE ‘terrorist’ label
Yusuf Al-Qaradawi
MEMO | November 17, 2014
The International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) expressed its surprise on Monday over the decision by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to include the bloc on the country’s list of designated terrorist organisations.
In its statement, the union urged the UAE to “reconsider its unjustified position”.
The IUMS, established in 2004 and headed by Islamic scholar Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, was among 83 movements and organisations that were labelled terrorist groups by the UAE on Saturday.
Also included in the list were the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic State (ISIS), Yemen’s Shiite Houthi movement and the Egypt-based Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis militant group.
In its statement, the group said it rejects this labelling, asserting that since its establishment ten years ago, the IUMS “has promoted a moderate approach and discouraged extremism, terror and violence using cultural and educational means”.
“The IUMS has issued dozens of statements against terrorist and extremist groups,” it added.
On its website, the IUMS identifies itself as “an institution concerned with the call (Da’wah) to Islam by tongue, pen, and every contemporary legitimate medium; be it recorded, audio, or visual”.
“IUMS is not a local or a regional union, neither an Arab nor a national one, neither an eastern, nor a western union; rather, it represents all Muslims in the entire Islamic world, as well as all the Muslim [minority populations] and Islamic groups outside of the Islamic world.”
It also asserts that it “does not slant towards exaggerations and excesses, nor does it tilt towards default and negligence, but rather it adopts the centremost approach of the centremost Ummah (Islamic nation), an approach of mediation and moderation.”
The Egyptian-born Al-Qaradawi has been under fire by Egypt’s post-coup authorities for his vocal criticism of the military’s ouster – and subsequent imprisonment – of elected president Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood leader, last year.
Egypt branded the Brotherhood a “terrorist” movement late last year following the bombing of a security headquarters in the Nile Delta.
The label was attached to the movement amid a massive crackdown on its members, supporters and leaders on the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities and provinces.
Saudi Arabia also designated the Muslim Brotherhood a “terrorist” movement in March of this year, following in Egypt’s footsteps.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia were amongst the first countries to welcome Morsi’s ouster. Both countries – along with Bahrain – withdrew their ambassadors from Doha last March, accusing Qatar of interfering in their affairs.
Many observers, however, linked the rift to Doha’s perceived support for Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet, the three countries agreed on Sunday to return their ambassadors to the Qatari capital following a surprise Gulf summit in Saudi Arabia.
Israel Campaigns Against Global Free Speech
The Bilzerian Report | February 20, 2014
Alarmed at the rise of anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiments on the internet, Israeli politicians recently called for nations around the world to enact legislation prohibiting criticism of Jews and Israel. Lobbying to outlaw global free speech is nothing new for Israel, however; it has been in the business of criminalizing speech for decades.
Israel is in the precarious position of receiving tens of billions of dollars in aid every year from nations that purport to support democracy, while simultaneously oppressing the Palestinian people and perpetrating what Nobel Peace Prize winners Bishop Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter deem an apartheid. If the American or European people ever knew that their tax dollars where being used in such a way they would surely cut Israel off. In order to conceal this truth and stifle any criticism, Israel and its lobbyists rely on sympathy from the Holocaust and labels of anti-Semitism to discredit critics. Even US Secretary of State John Kerry was recently called an anti-Semite for supporting a peaceful resolution to the Jewish/Palestinian conflict. Kerry is not alone however, President Obama, and just about anyone who has ever opposed an Israeli policy has been labeled anti-Semitic by his enemies. In order to add teeth to these labels, Israel lobbyists around the world lobby endlessly to criminalize anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
Israel’s threat of forcing world governments to enact new laws against free speech should not be taken lightly. Israel and its lobbyists have already succeeded in enacting stiff anti-racist laws in most Western countries. These laws have been used on numerous occasions to jail academics, pro-Palestinian activists, and also individuals who have spoken provable facts that are deemed anti-Semitic “canards.”
In Australia, Jewish groups lobbied successfully to outlaw holocaust study and “hate speech.” As with most laws regulating speech and academic study, it has been routinely abused, and is now on the list for repeal. In fact, the law is so tied to Jewish lobbying, that the Jewish newspaper Haaretz published an article: Australian Jews brace for a fight against the repeal of hate laws.
In Canada, Jewish groups lobbied for the enactment of hate speech regulation, and defend its use today. In 1983, Israel lobbyists filed a complaint against Ernst Zundal over a book he had written. He was tried several times, his citizenship application in Canada denied (even though he had resided there for decades), he was detained for two years without trial, and eventually deported to Germany where he was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment.
In France, Israel lobbyists publicly complained about comedian Dieudonne’s parodies of Israel and the holocaust. His home was raided, his shows banned, and hefty fines were imposed. England also followed suit and barred Dieudonne’s entrance into the country. In 2003, the French legislator and Israel lobbyist Pierre Lellouche managed to push through a law which extends the definition of discrimination to include nationalities so anti-Israel activists could be jailed. In 2009, the Lellouche law was used to convict 20 anti-Israel activists.
In England, Jewish lobbying efforts successfully enacted strict hate speech laws, and in Austria, acclaimed historian David Irving was incarcerated after Israel lobbyists complained about his academic work. The European Jewish Parliament and the chief Israel lobbyist in Belgium recently called for similar laws to stifle criticism of Israel. According to the Canadian Jewish News article French Vigilance on anti-Israel speech provoking backlash, Israel lobbyists are also attempting to enact similar legislation in the Netherlands.
In America, the Israel lobby has been fighting mightily for years to prohibit hate speech. Those efforts have been unsuccessful thus far, but they have managed to enact hate crime legislation. As Abe Foxman of the ADL noted, the social consequences in America for bigotry against Jews are so severe, (given disproportionate Jewish influence in government, media, finance, higher education, professional sports, etc…) that anti-Israel speakers often see graver consequences than the criminal sanctions they would face in Europe. For example, if one were to be labeled an “anti-Semite,” even if the allegations were wholly unsubstantiated, he would most likely be fired and ostracized from society.
One has to realize that Israel’s efforts having nothing to do with hate speech, anti-Semitism or holocaust denial, but are rather about stifling critical speech that affects Israel and its lobbyists. For example, we know that Israel and its lobbyists are not offended by holocaust denial because Israel and its lobbyists are the leading proponents of Armenian holocaust denial in the world today. Israel should also not be particularly offended by anti-Semitism, because Israel is actually one of the most racist and anti-Semitic nations on the planet.
Today, Israel is furiously enacting anti-free speech laws, hiring internet trolls to spread propaganda and disinformation, and even asking the Jewish owners of social media websites Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, and Youtube to remove material Israel does not like, regardless of its truth or merit. Israel has also campaigned against political parties it does not like in Greece, Hungary, and Ukraine. In Greece, the anti-Israel Golden Dawn Party was disbanded and its leaders arrested for no legal reason. This is a dangerous precedent that threatens world wide freedom and must be combated immediately, before speaking out against such Israeli efforts is also illegal.
Laws protecting free speech are put in place specifically to protect speech that powerful groups find objectionable. Otherwise, there is no free speech and it is just a matter of time before the list of prohibited phrases grows to include everything the powerful oppose. If it’s illegal to speak about certain races, the disabled or elderly, then why not government employees, and then the rich, or poor, and so on? Either speech is totally protected or it is not protected at all. The point of speech protection is to protect the most unpopular forms of speech. Popular forms of speech obviously need no protection.
ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption
By Jacob Hoffman-Andrews | EFF | November 11, 2014
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie. Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. In recent months, researchers have reported ISPs in the US and Thailand intercepting their customers’ data to strip a security flag—called STARTTLS—from email traffic. The STARTTLS flag is an essential security and privacy protection used by an email server to request encryption when talking to another server or client.1
By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted. Some firewalls, including Cisco’s PIX/ASA firewall do this in order to monitor for spam originating from within their network and prevent it from being sent. Unfortunately, this causes collateral damage: the sending server will proceed to transmit plaintext email over the public Internet, where it is subject to eavesdropping and interception.
This type of STARTTLS stripping attack has mostly gone unnoticed because it tends to be applied to residential networks, where it is uncommon to run an email server2. STARTTLS was also relatively uncommon until late 2013, when EFF started rating companies on whether they used it. Since then, many of the biggest email providers implemented STARTTLS to protect their customers. We continue to strongly encourage all providers to implement STARTTLS for both outbound and inbound email. Google’s Safer email transparency report and starttls.info are good resources for checking whether a particular provider does.
Several Standards for Email Encryption
The SMTP protocol, the underpinning of email, was not originally designed with security in mind. But people quickly started using it for everything from shopping lists and love letters to medical advice and investigative reporting, and soon realized their mail needed to be protected from prying eyes. In 1991, Phil Zimmerman implemented PGP, an end-to-end email encryption protocol that is still in use today. Adoption of PGP has been slow because of its highly technical interface and difficult key management. S/MIME, with similar properties as PGP, was developed in 1995. And in 2002, STARTTLS for email was defined by RFC 3207.
While PGP and S/MIME are end-to-end encryption, STARTTLS is server-to-server. That means that the body of an email protected with, e.g. PGP, can only be read by its intended recipient, while email protected with STARTTLS can be read by the owners of the sending server and the recipient server, plus anyone else who hacks or subpoenas access to those servers. However, STARTTLS has three big advantages: First, it protects important metadata (subject lines and To:/From/CC: fields) that PGP and S/MIME do not. Second, mail server operators can implement STARTTLS without requiring users to change their behavior at all. And third, a well-configured email server with STARTTLS can provide Forward Secrecy for emails. The two technologies are entirely compatible and reinforce each other. The most secure and private approach is to use PGP or S/MIME with a mail service that uses STARTTLS for server-to-server communication.
There are several weak points in the STARTTLS protocol, however. The first weakness is that the flag indicating that a server supports STARTTLS is not itself encrypted, and is therefore subject to tampering, which can prevent that server from establishing an encrypted connection. That type of tampering is exactly what we see today. EFF is working on a set of improvements to STARTTLS, called STARTTLS Everywhere, that will make server-to-server encryption more robust by requiring encryption for servers that are already known to support it.
It is important that ISPs immediately stop this unauthorized removal of their customers’ security measures. ISPs act as trusted gateways to the global Internet and it is a violation of that trust to intercept or modify client traffic, regardless of what protocol their customers are using. It is a double violation when such modification disables security measures their customers use to protect themselves.
- 1. If you have netcat (nc) installed, you can test your connection for STARTTLS downgrades using the commands shown here.
- 2. Desktop email clients like Thunderbird generally send outbound email on a TLS-wrapped port, like 587, and do not rely on STARTTLS. But there are some exceptions, like the software used by the Golden Frog engineer who spotted an issue on AIO Wireless.
British Spying Is Our Problem, Too
By Alex Sinha | ACLU | November 10, 2014
The chilling effect of surveillance may be spreading across the Atlantic.
We learned last week that GCHQ – the U.K. equivalent of the NSA – permits its employees to target the communications of journalists and lawyers. That revelation has serious implications for the work of both groups.
American surveillance is already impacting the work of U.S.-based journalists and lawyers. As the ACLU and Human Rights Watch documented in a recent report, the effects are not pretty. National security and intelligence journalists have been struggling to develop and maintain relationships with increasingly skittish sources, and lawyers are losing the freedom to communicate with clients, co-counsel, and witnesses without exposing confidential information to the government.
We depend on the press to keep us informed, helping ensure the government’s accountability to the governed. But when journalists are vulnerable to surveillance, that accountability suffers.
Attorneys are also indispensable, and their right to communicate privately with clients has long been recognized both in domestic and international law. When attorneys can’t communicate freely with clients, they can’t build trust or develop strategy. That weakens important due process rights and diminishes our confidence in the verdicts issued by our justice system.
Like the United States, the U.K. conducts significant surveillance, including tapping fiber-optic cables to gain access to enormous volumes of Internet traffic. The revelations from last week show not only that the communications of journalists and lawyers get caught up in the U.K.’s dragnet, but also that this may happen by design.
The breadth and poor regulation of the U.K.’s surveillance practices are a problem for everyone – including Americans. Here’s why.
The United States has extensive intelligence-sharing arrangements with key allies like the U.K., and through them has access to information that it can’t legally collect on its own. Sharing flows both ways, so the U.K. also has unfettered access to much “raw” or unfiltered U.S. surveillance data.
As far as we know, nothing stops the United States from accessing information from GCHQ that is derived from targeting journalists or lawyers. In fact, we’ve seen this movie before. Last February, we learned that an Australian intelligence agency gave the NSA privileged communications between a U.S.-based law firm and its clients. We’d be foolish to assume anything different happens between the United States and the U.K. – which, like Australia, is one of the NSA’s “Five Eyes” surveillance partners.
What happens in Britain reaches us, too, and U.K. surveillance programs almost certainly collect many Americans’ communications. But we also don’t want our government targeting U.K. journalists and lawyers by proxy.
Considering the extensive intelligence cooperation between our two countries, we should all be concerned about the United States outsourcing practices we would reject at home.
Millions of Cell Phone Users’ Internet Activity Secretly Tracked for Years by Verizon and AT&T
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | November 6, 2014
Verizon and AT&T have been snooping on millions of Americans’ online browsing habits for years, all without users’ knowledge or approval.
The activity involves the use of “supercookies” placed on unencrypted web pages by the telecommunications companies that can’t be turned off by cell phone users, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Even customers who don’t use either provider can have their browsing monitored. If a user connects through a Verizon tower, their web use habits are subject to scrutiny as well. As many as 100 million people have had their internet browsing tracked by the two providers.
EFF contends that the use of the supercookies, or Unique Identifier Headers (X-UIDH), violates the federal Communications Act. X-UIDH allows Verizon and AT&T to “monitor their customers’ browsing history and create permanent identification profiles of their habits, likes, and interests. Once installed, the supercookies cannot be deleted nor evaded, even if customers clear their cookies, use private browsing modes, disable third-party cookies, or select ‘Do Not Track’ in their settings,” according to Nadia Prupis at Common Dreams.
Verizon customers can opt-out of the program, but the company still collects data on their browsing history. Verizon does not include government or corporate clients in the program, so it apparently has a way to let personal use customers avoid being tracked as well.
Mobile users who want to see if they’re being spied upon can go to AmIBeingTracked.com or lessonslearned.org/sniff.
To Learn More:
Verizon and AT&T Using Undeletable ‘Supercookies’ to Track Customers (by Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams )
Verizon Injecting Perma-Cookies to Track Mobile Customers, Bypassing Privacy Controls (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
AT&T Says It’s ‘Testing’ Unique Tracker On Customers’ Smartphones (by Kashmir Hill, Forbes )
Verizon is the Only Telecom that Retains Text Message Content (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov )
Yep, Uncle Sam Still Wants to Log Your Calls
By Rachel Nusbaum | ACLU | November 4, 2014
Today, in a hushed courtroom in Washington, D.C., not far from the now-empty halls of Congress, a federal appeals court heard arguments in Klayman v. Obama, a challenge to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata first revealed by Edward Snowden. If you have ever made a phone call, or received a phone call, this case has implications for your personal privacy and you should pay close attention to what happens next.
The appeal follows a December win for Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer and activist and the plaintiff in the case, where a district court judge ruled the program was likely unconstitutional. Today, government lawyers attempted to argue that this program should be allowed to continue.
The arguments hinged on a central question: Is the warrantless, non-targeted surveillance currently being conducted by the NSA, which is scooping up data on all (or almost all) calls made or received on U.S. telephone networks, a violation of the Fourth Amendment?
The government tried to argue that it is not. They claim that their searches of this massive call record database are reasonable, and that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in the numbers one dials.
But, as EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn argued on behalf of both EFF and the ACLU as friends of the court, the government has no right to scoop up such a massive amount of personal information about Americans in the first place.
The truth is, the NSA’s bulk collection of the phone records of all Americans is fundamentally different than putting a trace on the phone of an individual suspected of wrongdoing. The sheer scale of this program means that we are all suspects, or at least potential suspects, in the eyes of our government.
Think about the impact of knowing that your every phone interaction is being logged by the government. This kind of surveillance has even greater implications for lawyers and journalists, who have to worry about protecting the confidentiality of clients and sources. The phrase “chilling effect” seems insufficient to describe the potential loss to our society, to our whole way of life, as we slowly begin to censor ourselves because we know that the government is always monitoring our communications.
This is contrary to the very nature of a democracy, where people are supposed to hold their government to account. Who will be willing to speak out against an abusive government when that government knows all our deepest, darkest secrets?
Governments are by nature interested in acquiring more power, and today, more than ever, information is power. We should not be surprised that the government wants to know who Americans are speaking with, and for how long, and how often. We rely on the Constitution, and on the other branches of government, to provide a check on that desire.
Today, we asked the court to provide that check and to declare bulk collection of American’s telephone metadata unconstitutional.
(To read the ACLU and EFF’s amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, click here.)
Haiti: Protest Leaders Arrested After Marches
Weekly News Update on the Americas | November 3, 2014
Two Haitian human rights groups, the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) and the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), issued a joint statement on Oct. 27 demanding “the release of the political prisoners and the demonstrators arrested illegally” by the government of President Michel Martelly in recent weeks. Police agents arrested 18 demonstrators in Port-au-Prince on Oct. 17 during a march protesting government policies and marking the 208th anniversary of revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ assassination; the police dispersed the demonstration with tear gas and gunshots. After an Oct. 26 march protesting the government’s failure to hold partial legislative elections on that date, the authorities arrested Rony Timothée and Byron Odigé, two leaders in the Patriotic Force for Respect for the Constitution (FOPARC), which backs the Family Lavalas (FL) party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004). In addition to the 20 arrests in Port-au-Prince, police detained three demonstrators in the city of Les Cayes, South department, on Oct. 12 during a protest demanding electricity.
The two human rights groups indicated that the detainees were arrested for their political positions. The government failed to meet the requirement to question the detainees within 24 hours, the groups said, and they expressed astonishment that “accusations of incitation to violence and destruction could be made against demonstrators and opposition activists when no flagrant crime had taken place.” Timothée and Odigé were also arrested in May, on similar charges, but a judge ordered their release a few weeks later [see Update #1224]. On Oct. 30 demonstrators protested the arrests with a march to the prison in Carrefour, on Port-au-Prince’s southwest outskirts, where Timothée and Odigé were thought to be held. A large police group was on hand, backed up by a truck equipped with a water cannon; stores quickly closed, and mothers reportedly snatched children from schools so that they wouldn’t be exposed to tear gas, but the protest ended without any major confrontations. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 10/29/14, 10/31/14)
Revealed: Ferguson no-fly zone was meant to keep media away
RT | November 3, 2014
The 37-mile no-fly zone around Ferguson, implemented after the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer in August, was designed to keep the press out, phone recordings obtained by AP via the Freedom of Information Act reveal.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) imposed a 12-day no-fly zone in compliance with requests from local police after protests erupted in response to the August 9th police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen. At the time, the official reason given for the restriction was safety precautions. However, in audio recordings, officials are heard admitting that the real reason for the flight restriction was to keep news helicopters from flying over the St. Louis suburb.
The St. Louis Police department maintained that the restricted fly zone was instituted in response to shots fired at a police helicopter, although they were not able to provide an incident report on the shooting, according to AP.
FAA air traffic controllers attempted to reword the flight ban, which had initially banned all air traffic in the 37-mile radius, to let commercial flights operate at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, but prohibit other flights, on August 12th, the day after the restriction was first established.
Effectively putting an end to media presence in the skies, the amended restriction read, “Only relief aircraft operations under direction of St. Louis County Police Department are authorized in the airspace. Aircraft landing and departing St. Louis Lambert Airport are exempt.”
An FAA manger was recorded saying that the police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction) all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”
Police wanted to extend the ban following the release of the shooting officer’s identity, which was lifted on August 22nd, reports AP.
Police response to the civic unrest in Ferguson has been widely criticized. Use of tear gas, accusations of excessive force, and journalist arrests were reported.
The recordings raise further concern about police conduct and the compliance of the federal government in suppressing the constitutional rights of journalists.
One FAA official is heard asking a manager about the purpose of the ban, acknowledging the problematic nature of a media specific restriction.
“So are [the police] protecting aircraft from small-arms fire or something?” he asked. “Or do they think they’re just going to keep the press out of there, which they can’t do.”
Michael Huerta, an FAA administrator, denied the national agency was compliant in banning media from Ferguson airspace.
“FAA cannot and will never exclusively ban media from covering an event of national significance, and media was never banned from covering the ongoing events in Ferguson in this case,” he said in statement on Sunday.
READ MORE Top 10 ways Barack Obama has muzzled American media
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Villains of Judea
Samuel Zemurray
Inside the life of the ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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- If Americans Knew
- Two Supreme Court Justices were secret agents who helped Israel cover up its attack on the USS Liberty
- Bari Weiss ‘Meddles’ With ‘CBS Sunday Morning’ Story on Palestine
- Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech
- The horrors in Gaza continue: Here are the facts
- Israeli General Is Running a Sophisticated, Sociological Engine of Violence
- Israel has stolen $4.8 billion from Palestinians
- The pro-Israel political consensus is collapsing in both parties
- Prominent Christian Zionist Group Is Lobbying U.S. Lawmakers on Israel—Without Revealing It’s Funded by Israel
- “Most Moral Army” caught desecrating another Christian statue, as famine looms in Gaza – Daily Update
- Israel’s subversion of Foreign Agents Registration Act
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
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