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beardedmrbean · 2 years ago

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Prompted by the release of information about thousands of Los Angeles police officers that activists posted to a public online database, City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto is trying to convince California lawmakers to weaken the state’s public records law.

While Feldstein Soto describes her proposal as a minor tweak to the California Public Records Act, civil rights advocates say it would severely diminish the power of the bedrock state law that allows access to information held by local governments and state agencies.

“That proposal would completely gut the Public Records Act,” Melanie Ochoa, an attorney who is the director of police practices for the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said after reviewing a copy obtained by The Times.

“There would be really no transparency element of the PRA anymore if that were to become law.”

The city attorney’s effort amounts to the latest volley in an ongoing tussle between city officials and community activists who have used the public records law to obtain information they see as helpful in holding police accountable for misconduct.

Feldstein Soto’s proposal — contained in a two-page document she has asked several state lawmakers to introduce as a bill — would allow government agencies to decline public records requests that seek “images or data that may personally identify an individual” whose information the agency collects, such as its employees.

California's public records law already exempts from disclosure the home addresses and phone numbers of public employees as well as other information that could "constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy." So the change the city attorney is seeking could block the public from identifying government workers in their professional capacities.

While she framed her proposal as a necessity to protect a range of public-sector workers who could be subject to harassment �� including sanitation employees who dismantle homeless encampments and public health workers who promote vaccinations — Feldstein Soto acknowledged that it was inspired by the public records request that led to the release this year of pictures and data of more than 9,300 L.A. police officers.

“I'm trying to address the wholesale doxxing of people that we need to depend on to do the business of government, without any reason other than the position that they happen to hold,” Feldstein Soto said.

“Having a tool in the toolbox of activists that is not aimed necessarily at the policy of the government, but aimed at intimidating the individuals who are carrying out the policy seems to me to be something where we could all come together to try to protect working people.”

Feldstein Soto traveled to Sacramento last month and said she met with two dozen lawmakers about her proposal. So far none have agreed to put it into a bill, but Feldstein Soto remains hopeful. Even though several lawmakers were skeptical of the idea, she said many more were “affirmatively enthusiastic and supportive.”

Lawmakers in Sacramento are halfway through the 2023 legislative session, which makes passing a newly introduced bill a big political lift. Legislation introduced at this point would go through an abbreviated review process, giving lawmakers less time to scrutinize the proposal and allowing limited public input.

Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) met with Feldstein Soto about her desire to change the public records law and “is sympathetic to the issue,” said Rendon spokesman John Casey. Rendon asked his staff to look for a way to get her proposal into a bill, Casey said, but so far that has not happened in the Assembly. In the state Senate, a spokesperson for Senate leader Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) said her staff met with Feldstein Soto about the proposal but that Atkins is not considering putting it in legislation.

In addition to allowing local governments to withhold photos and identifying information about their employees from the public, the bill Feldstein Soto drafted also would allow local governments to block the release of information that identifies people experiencing homelessness or receiving government benefits, as well as information on services provided to them. She said she’s aiming to shield people who are moved into housing or shelter from being sought out by pimps and drug dealers.

It would be "a discretionary exemption for purposes of basically preserving the safety of the folks,” she said. “We [could] redact the information that would allow somebody to target them.”

But it’s requests for information about L.A. police officers that have sparked the biggest dust-up over the power of the Public Records Act.

In March, a group called the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition launched a searchable online database with the names, photos, ethnicity, rank, date of hire, division/bureau and badge numbers of more than 9,300 officers, including a few hundred who work undercover or in other sensitive positions. The group encourages community members “to observe and document police abuses, especially arrests and other violence,” according to its website, and publishes a guide for activists on how to use public records laws to advance the goal of abolishing police.

Leaders of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition previously told The Times that the information they published was obtained from the Los Angeles Police Department through a public records request. City officials say the undercover officers were inadvertently included in the response and are investigating how it happened.

In an attempt to claw back the photos of the undercover officers, the city sued the Knock LA journalist who filed the public records request and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Last month, a Los Angeles judge rejected the city’s controversial request that he order the journalist to return a flash drive of police officers’ photographs.

Tom Saggau, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said since the database went up several officers have faced threats and have reported them to the department, but he declined to provide details.

When Feldstein Soto approached the officers union about her idea to narrow the Public Records Act, Saggau said, “we conveyed to the city attorney that if a bill was introduced that prevented these types of doxxing disclosures that there was a high likelihood we would support it.”

The president of the union that represents Los Angeles social workers said that although it does not yet have a formal position on Feldstein Soto’s proposal, it sounds appealing as a potential tool to protect employees. Social workers who intervene when families are in crisis have faced threats of death and harm to their families, and had confidential information about themselves posted on social media, said David Green, president of SEIU Local 721.

“It's an accident waiting to happen,” he said. “I'm a firm believer in transparency and accountability, but at the same time, I've had to represent workers ... [whose] health and safety and their life, sometimes, is really threatened by the people we serve, unfortunately.”

But civil rights attorneys refuted the notion that the public records law puts government employees in harm’s way. It does not allow disclosure of personal information, such as home addresses or family information, said Ochoa, the ACLU attorney — only work-related information.

“The courts have recognized that knowledge of who is working in the public and for the public is something the public has a right to know,” she said.

Ochoa pointed to the public records law as a critical tool in efforts to improve police practices and hold law enforcement agencies accountable because it can be used to identify specific officers. Without that power, she said, it would have been impossible to advocate for other transparency laws California passed in recent years to require more disclosure of internal records on police shootings and to create a system for decertifying officers for serious misconduct.

“That would not have been possible if we weren't made aware that the same officer that killed someone had gone to another agency and killed someone else,” Ochoa said.

“We would oppose any attempt to gut the PRA in this way.”

#nunyas news #trying to make it harder to dox cops and such then #hmmmmm

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phagemaleficar · 5 years ago

Conversation

Occupy Wall Street Medic Interview Transcript

Q: Looking back on Occupy, how do you feel that protests have learned and grown since then?

A: Decentralization. We learned you can’t rely on one voice, or one group of voices. When any person can lead, the police cannot stop us through single arrests. I think that’s why they pulled that bullshit mass arrest – they wanted to intimidate everyone because they didn’t know how to stop a leadership that didn’t exist.

Q: How has the police response changed over the years?

A: In the past decade it has become terrifyingly and infuriatingly more militant and under trump they’ve become so absurdly violent that we’ve had to adapt as medics and protestors. They’ve gotten much too trigger happy on impact weapons, projectiles, and chemical weapons and they’re trying new stuff on us all the time.

They’re lasing protestors to mark them for arrest. That was a new one to see. Plus that terrifying DNA-marker UV dye. This stuff can mark you as having been out at a specific date or even time and place and it is devilishly hard to remove. They have also been seen using Adamsite, which is a chemical weapon designed to cause vomiting and sneezing and unlike CS, can last for 12 hours in the system. There’s some nightmare fuel for anyone who believes in democracy.

With few exceptions, I see police as being more violent, and faster on the draw. Criticism of several high-profile police-murder-unarmed-Black-civilian cases has also seemed to make them really shitty.

Q: How has protest culture and organization changed in the years since Occupy?

A: Communication is huge. Encrypted messaging, the ability to blast out info to a whole country, the capacity to put everything, every video, online has meant we have more options but also more risks. Even what, nine years ago? We couldn’t mass organize nearly as well as we can today, though it was pretty good at the time it has only gotten better.

Honestly, the prevalence of social media may have made communication and mass movements harder as the signal-to-noise ratio goes out of whack. How do you expect to find out about an action when the FB algorithm buries it but shows you 50 fuckin buzz feed quizzes? But as the landscape has changed, so have tactics.

Q: Do you think modern protestors would have handled it differently?

A: People are way more pissed now, but I think Occupy helped push that. For all its faults, Occupy made it clear that civilly obedient protest, which we’d fallen back on for… some reason, was just not as impactful. Love or hate it, everyone was talking about it. They delayed the NYSE opening bell which was, I believe, a first. I remember nearly being crushed by a police barricade that day, in fact.

A lot of people radicalized in Occupy movements. I did, personally. Prior to OWS, I thought protesting was pointless and stupid. I thought the police were just keeping the peace. I was, eugh, a libertarian. And then, while trying to help people, I saw just how offensively bad NYPD was and it was a shock. Maybe that perspective skews my thoughts a bit, but I do feel like protestors after a year of increasing violence and anger would be far more confrontational and I think it would have boiled over in that park far sooner.

I also have to say, I think OWS would have been a more diverse movement today. They acknowledge the issue at the time, but there was a bit of an “it is what it is” reaction, and maybe a tendency to overcompensate when Black voices did speak. “Promote Black Voices” doesn’t mean “turn off your brain” and look, lots of people had iffy ideas at Occupy, across melanin shades and hues. The white guilt did us no favors. Having more Black Voices and white allies who actually know how to ally instead of white knight would have been badass.

Q: What kind of impact do you think Occupy had on protesting in the US?

A: It taught cops they couldn’t just target the “people in charge”, that’s for sure. it also was there when live streams off the street were becoming a thing. Having PD there, on a live feed, hiding badge numbers and going berserk was influential in ways I think we’ll bee tracing the effects of for years. A lot like how when war footage went from carefully edited and shown in news reels to on TV, sometimes live, and horrifically live and raw and bloody in Vietnam, the people’s view swung hard.

Seeing Officer Bologna randomly and cruelly hose down a couple of protestors quietly stood in a kettle while even other cops looked on in shock and confusion is one of those images I think we need to make sure is kept around for generations. That being blasted over the internet infuriated people. And the cops know it, now. They know how fast video goes live and how much people are willing to dox every last one of them.

Beyond that, taking protesting to a youth-level, taking it to a fully digital organization and digital word of mouth, this is massive. Occupy reminded us to pressure them in their daily lives, not just at the RNC and DNC but to say “Oh, I’m sorry, were you enjoying your Tuesday? Fuck you Tuesday, people are dying.” Y’know how pearls are made? A tiny grain of sand gets into an oyster and irritates the shit out of it until the oyster makes it into a precious “stone”. OWS taught a lot of us to make ourselves a menace.

Q: What advice would you give to future protestors?

A: You are one, fragile, insignificant person. In a crowd that outnumbers anything they can throw at you. If you refuse to accept “no”, there ain’t shit they can do.

#ows #occupy wall street

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violetwolfraven · 6 years ago

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Flickers, Part 2

“Dreamer, are you even listening?” General Haley asked.

“Yeah,” Nia lied, “I’ve been listening the whole time. Why?”

“She’s right. You look a little spaced out,” Alex admitted.

“Dreamer,” Haley said firmly, “I know you and Agent Dox had a... personal relationship. If you don’t feel you’ll be able to be objective on this mission, perhaps—“

“I can do this,” Nia insisted, “Where is he?”

Haley turned back to the screen, “In the abandoned steel mill. Here.” She pointed to the location on the map.

“What’s he doing there?” Nia wondered aloud, “There’s no real tech for miles.”

“Exactly,” Haley said, “I believe he’s waiting. Setting a trap. The only question is...”

“If it’s for me or you,” Kara finished, “Dreamer, we know he wants us out of play. One of us has to go confront him, and I... I don’t know if I can.”

In the month since Brainy had been turned emotionless, a lot of messed-up crap had happened.

First, he refused to work with the team, only going by the most logical plan to win, casualties be damned.

Then he stopped working with them altogether, preferring to be a solo hero.

Then... he’d decided to stop being a hero, and started serving only himself.

He’d shown no reservations about killing anyone who got in his way before. He’d killed DEO agents, cops, and civilians.

He’d even tried to kill Kara, after using kryptonite-laced weapons to try to torture information out of her. The experience had understandably left the Kryptonian a bit traumatized.

“I’ll go,” Nia said firmly, “I don’t have a kryptonite. I’m the only one who might stand a chance.”

Haley nodded, “I agree about the second part, but whether you have a kryptonite is debatable. Dox seems to know more about your species than you do, and could arguably know about a weakness that you aren’t aware of.”

Nia shook her head, “I was worried about me or my sister getting hurt when we were little after we first saw kryptonite being used on Superman on TV. Mom assured us that for the people of Naltor, there’s nothing like that. Even if there was, it probably wouldn’t affect us as badly, being half human.”

“Alright,” Haley said, “Still, are you sure you’re up for this?”

Although the woman wasn’t exactly kind, Nia could practically sense her worry. Everyone in the room knew how if she had a kryptonite, it was her love for Brainy.

But he had to be stopped. And nobody else could stop him.

...

Just as predicted, Nia’s coms were deactivated the minute she got within fifty feet of the warehouse.

To prevent him from using any kind of electrical pulse or anything to use the coms to hurt her, Nia took them out of her ears, tucking them in a pouch on her belt lined with rubber, just to be safe.

“Brainy?” She called.

“My name is Braniac 5,” He responded, coming out from behind an old machine, “A shame that you can never seem to remember that.”

“I can never remember it because this isn’t really you,” Nia countered, “And I don’t want to hurt you, but people are dead. I have to bring you in. Please don’t make it harder than it has to be.”

“I suspect it won’t be very hard at all.”

Nia tried to manifest a dream-lasso, but nothing happened.

“Power dampener in the warehouse,” Brainy said calmly, “As long as it’s on, you can’t use your powers.”

“That means you can’t, either,” Nia pointed out.

Brainy stared at her, completely emotionless, “Calculus hardly counts as a power by the standards of heroes like you.”

“It counted to me,” Nia insisted, “What you can do is amazing.”

“Flattery isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“So, we’re going to just fight it out, then?”

For the first time, Brainy’s face showed an emotion; a cruel type of amusement, “I never said that.”

A subtle ringing filled Nia’s ears for a second before the sound became deafening and painful.

Nia screamed, falling to the ground and clamping her hands over her ears.

By the time the sound subsided, she was bleeding from her nose and ears, on her knees in front of Brainy. Nia knew that if he wanted to, he could kill her right there.

“Imagine my surprise when I found out how sensitive Naltorians are to sound,” Brainy said, “By my calculations, one more blast like that and you will suffer substantial organ damage. Another after that, and the effects will almost definitely be fatal.”

“Brainy, please,” Nia groaned, “This isn’t you.”

“I’ve already heard that speech from supergirl,” Brainy said calmly, “Save us both some time and try to come up with a valid reason to let you live.”

“Why do you even want to kill me?”

“Because you’re a threat. One of the only beings on this planet in this time that can kill me.”

Nia took a deep breath, “Then do it.”

“What?”

“Do it. I’m tired of going around fighting you for no reason. If I’m a threat, get rid of the threat.”

Brainy seemed to be taken off-guard by that, “Why would you be willing to let me kill you?”

Nia laughed hopelessly, “I don’t want to. But I’m willing because I love you.”

“But I don’t love you. I don’t even know what love feels like.”

“I can show you if you turn the power dampener off.”

Nia knew she had won over his curiousity when she sensed her powers coming back.

She grabbed Brainy’s hand and focused on every memory she had with him, specifically how it made her feel, and used her powers so that he would feel it, too. She used her abilities to tell him that this is what love feels like.

To be honest, Nia was completely shocked when it actually worked.

#supergirl #brainia #dreamerdox #nia nal #brainy #dreamer #brainiac 5

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy

Thousands of protesters are filling the streets of American cities to protest the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, and police brutality writ large. Police officers have shown they’re more than willing to escalate violence with pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, vehicles, and other dangerous crowd suppression measures. In addition, law enforcement are likely heavily surveilling protests with all sorts of tech and spying gear. Already, we've seen a Customs and Border patrol drone flying over Minneapolis protests.

It's not just the cops that protesters need to worry about: when much of a protest is broadcast via tweets, viral video clips, and livestreams, those watching may also want to digitally target protesters, perhaps by identifying them publicly.

So, if you're a peaceful protester, but you don't necessarily want your participation in a demonstration to follow you around or lead to harassment online, what sort of steps can you take around your digital security?

Image: Neil Cooler/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

Bring a clean phone…

"They'll be, obviously, cell-site simulators," Matthew Mitchell, a founder of Crypto Harlem told Motherboard in a Signal call. These devices, otherwise known as IMSI-catchers, Stingrays, or more recently Crossbows, can record phones' geolocation, their phone number, and sometimes the content of texts and phone calls.

"If everyone is texting a couple of organizers, or calling a bunch of friends, that one friend that connected to all people could be identified," Mitchell said.

"What it'll say is this person was definitely at this place, at this time, and maybe you don't want that. Maybe you want to be able to show your support, show your political view, and having the ramifications for that, the cost of your free speech, to be low," he added.

SMS text messages are the easiest for police to intercept, and during a protest you should not assume that these will be private; if possible you should use an encrypted alternative (more info below).

READ MORE: What to Bring to a Peaceful Protest

If you'd rather make it harder for any data that is swept up by these devices to be linked to you personally, you might consider buying a new, dedicated device for the protest. Maybe a $100 Android phone, Mitchell suggested.

"Your privacy is worth more than that," Mitchell said. You could buy this with cash or a gift card too so it's not linked to your credit card records. Don't turn it on when at home with your normal phone, and switch it off when you leave the protest.

You may also want to quickly setup a new Gmail account, on public wifi, and then use that to download encrypted communication apps.

Image: Steve Barker/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

…Or bring no phone at all

Of course, those are several hoops to jump through, it's easy to screw it up somehow, and you might not have $100 to spend on a temporary protest phone. So the simpler, and probably more effective approach for protecting privacy, is to not bring a cell phone at all and rely on more traditional methods of activist coordination.

Agree to meet friends at a certain place, at a certain time. Maybe decide on multiple locations in case the protest is broken up or cordoned off by law enforcement.

Ultimately, there is a trade-off to be had between convenience and privacy while at a protest, and how much you're willing to sway on either side of that is up to you. That also depends on what particular information you want to protect and from whom; something that can be summed up as your own 'threat model' (for more on this, take a look at Motherboard's Guide to Not Getting Hacked).

Image: Paul Stein/Flickr/CC-by-SA 2.0

If you do bring your personal phone, encrypt it

In the end, you may want to just use your own device when going out and protesting. Just keep in mind that it will be relatively easy for law enforcement to identify you and your movements if they do want to access your phone records in some form.

If you're worried about cops, or anyone else, physically seizing and examining your phone, you should encrypt it if you haven't already, and in general keep the device as free of unnecessary information as possible. If you have a passcode on your iPhone, the device is encrypted. Many Androids are also encrypted by default, but you can double check by going to the Settings app, and then tapping on Security, there should be an option for encryption in the menu.

Disable Biometrics

If you use your fingerprint or your face (for example with the iPhone’s FaceID) to unlock your phone, disable them before going to the protest. In case of detention or arrest, the cops can theoretically force you to unlock your phone if it’s protected by biometrics.

This does not mean, however, that you should disable your passcode—it's critical to leave that enabled. Cops cannot legally force you to give up your passcode. On that note, remember to use a strong PIN or passcode, made of at least 9 to 12 digits, ideally combining numbers and letters. If your phone is ultimately seized and a warrant is needed to unlock it, having a longer, stronger passcode or passphrase will make it more difficult to unlock. At least one forensic company also offers law enforcement a tool that will install a piece of software onto a phone so that once the device is handed back to its owner, the software will secretly record their password. The police then seize the device and can unlock it.

Use these messaging apps

Encrypted messaging app Signal has Disappearing Messages, which deletes messages in a conversation after they've been seen. If you don't want someone being able to rummage through your old chats if they do happen to get access to them, you could turn this feature on.

And although it's relatively unlikely an adversary is going to attempt to read your Signal or WhatsApp messages while in transit, it's probably worth verifying each of your protest contacts' cryptographic fingerprints: in Signal these are known as Safety Numbers and in WhatsApp, they are known as Security Codes. While WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted, it's worth keeping in mind that Facebook does own the app, so take that into account when selecting a messaging app to use. iMessage is also encrypted, but if you have iCloud backups on, those are not encrypted. Wire is another good, end-to-end-encrypted app that also offers disappearing messages.

Scrub faces from your pictures

If you take pictures or videos of the protests, and want to post them publicly on social media, make sure there’s no faces in them that can help identify protesters. A new tool called “Image Scrubber” makes that process extremely easy. With it, it takes just a few seconds to anonymize a picture, potentially saving your fellow protesters from getting in trouble with the cops.

Create new social media accounts

"Media will be covering you, but you'll also be on livestreams and Twitter," Mitchell continued. Keep that in mind if you would rather your employer not know you're attending a protest for whatever reason, but also remember that plenty of other people will be monitoring social media looking for protesters to digitally harass.

If you did bring that phone and you're going to be sharing posts or photos yourself, you could make a new social media account for this purpose too. That way, those trying to dox protesters may have a harder time digging up your real identity.

"Understand that people who repost, retweet that the most—the timeline of where the original hashtag was created—all of that's of interest," Mitchell said.

If you do upload images and videos to social media, it's worth considering that street signs, the names of businesses, and other details in photos and video can easily give away your location; think about whether or not that is information you want to be public, and be especially careful if you are protesting very close to your home.

Consider turning off location services on your phone

If you want to share photos or updates on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, without people knowing your exact whereabouts, you should turn off Location Services for those apps (you can do that on Android and iPhone).

Or, you could check you're not inadvertently sharing constant updates on your location via Twitter's metadata if you don't want to.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

How to Protest Without Sacrificing Your Digital Privacy syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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groovydreamervoidroad · 5 years ago

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You didn’t hear it from me. Copy and paste everywhere. ❤️

Protesting Safety Crash Course

1. For the protester

2. If you’re arrested

3. Supporting protesters

For the protester:

1. Be prepared for anything. Protect yourself. Try to go with protest vets.

2. Cover up. Face, body. All of it. Especially tattoos, removing piercings. Wear padding if possible. Pockets and layers are great. Do not wear binders or corsets or cutesy identifying clothing. Closed toed shoes and dark clothes without labels if possible. Profiling is often by body type. Embody an angry sock.

3. Write pertinent numbers and info on your skin in sharpie under your clothes or on notecards. This includes, your pertinent contacts info in case your phone dies and you don’t remember, another with emergency legal council, and a third with your right if you don’t already have them memorized. ACLU has an easy pamphlet you can copy on their website.

4. Should you bring ID? Some people say no but the ACLU suggests it. Cops may detain you longer trying to identify you. Do not lie to the cops even tho they can (and likely will) lie to you. (Section on rights below)

5. Wear a mask and shatterproof googles. Don’t wear contacts, they can trap tear gas. Bring a scarf you can wrap your face in to protect from tear gas. I’ve heard soaking it in water or coke can help, thought the International News Safety Institute says that could interact with the type of gas and make it worse.

6. A helmet (construction maybe) if possible to protect against rubber bullets

7. Pack water and snacks. Milk or water or 3 teaspoons of baking soda in 8,5 oz of water to rinse tear gas (start at the corner, move in) and first aid solutions including tylonel and medications. Wet wipes, tissues and quickclot.

8. Some protests DO NOT ALLOW BACKPACKS THAT AREN’T CLEAR. Men’s cargo pants and purses are a great alternative. Check before you go.

9. Cash, not cards.

10. DO NOT bring anything that could be construed as a weapon. If it wouldn’t make it through TSA, don’t bring it.

11. Put your phone/devices on airplane mode and turn off location. They can and will be used to track you. Have a portable battery and be fully charged. Use encrypted apps to communicate with friends. Turn off facial recognition and thumbprint, use a longer password so it’s harder to hack.

12. Do not use given names if possible. The Nosy will comb videos to dox you with. Comrade. Friend. Pal. Fellow human. Not names.

13. Avoid taking pictures of people and avoid having pictures of you taken. Don’t get doxxed. People have shown up dead over this.

14. Do not show your face on the news or give a statement. The protest is the statement.

15. Don’t post or allude to the fact that you’re attending a protest on social media. Don’t make it easier for Nosy people to dox you. If you make a sign don’t take pictures at home.

16. Be prepared to use your privilege if you have it. Protect marginalized groups.

17. Tear gas can be thrown back or neutralized. Always wear thick gloves as the canister can burn you. To neutralize, have a wide mouth container with water, throw in the tear gas canister and cover with hand, not too tightly you don’t want the container to explode. Alternatively cover with a traffic cone and pour water over it.

18. If you’re witnessing an unlawful arrest, get the officers name, badge number, witness contact info, videos and pictures (which is legal to do on any public property) of injuries to file a complaint.

19. Have a protest buddy. Do not get separated. If you get separated have a plan (if we’ve been apart for an hour meet at 4th and main by the fire hydrant to regroup)

20. Watch out for ‘kettles’ where the law enforcement forms a riot line, forms one behind you and circles people in. They can now do mass arrests or easier targeted arrests.

21. Know the area and know how you’re arriving and leaving. Know a backup.

22. Don’t police each other’s actions. Don’t be a snitch. Also in this vein don’t put other people in danger.

23. Finally, trust your gut and if it is getting shady, bail. Leaving does not lesson your support. Your mental and physical health is important.

If you are arrested:

1. If someone is being arrested get their name and contact info. Keep moving as soon as possible to not end up in a kettle situation.

2. Know your rights. Stay calm, keep your hands visible. Don’t argue, resist or obstruct police. Even if they seem to be violating your rights. Point out you’re not disrupting anyone else’s activity and the the First Amendment protects your actions

3. Ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, calmly walk away.

4. If under arrest, you have the right to ask why. Ask for a lawyer. Do not sign or say anything without a lawyer.

5. You have a right to a local phone call and if it’s your lawyer the police are not allowed to listen

6. You never have to consent to a search of yourself or your belongings. If you do so it can later negatively affect you in court.

7. Police may pat you down if if they suspect you have a weapon and may search you after arrest

8. Police may NOT confiscate or demand to view your videos or photos without a warrant. They may not delete or alter photos under any circumstances.

9. To report an arrest (including your own) call the National Lawyers Guild at 212-679-6018

How to support a protest:

1. If you’re in the area where it’s happening put out water and snacks.

2. Offer rides if possible, bring water snacks and first aid. Uber in Minneapolis was disabled and some had to walk home.

3. Wait outside the jail with water, snacks, phones and batteries to help people get home. Shoelaces are often confiscated so have some on hand if possible. They will not be released at once and may not have their stuff returned immediately. Set up shifts. If you are religious group, now is not the time to to talk but to do.

4. Be loud with your support. Put out signs stating your support. If you witness something, document it but do not dox protesters.

5. Donate!! Donate to support legal and medical fees for the protesters. Donate to organizations that support the cause.

6. Sign petitions for police reform, sensitivity training and better marginalized citizen protection. If you are outside the USA and need a zip code to sign with, 90015 (Las Angeles), 10001 (New York), 75001 (Dallas)

Current petitions and support avenues:

1. Text “FLOYD” to 55156

2. Text “JUSTICE” to 668366

3. https://act.colorofchange.org/sign/justiceforfloyd_george_floyd_minneapolis

4. https://www.change.org/p/change-org-the-minneapolis-police-officers-to-be-charged-for-murder-after-killing-innocent-black-man?utm_content=cl_sharecopy_22409600_en-US%3Av3&recruiter=1094364768&recruited_by_id=79651240-a056-11ea-bc84-37125e1797ed&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=psf_combo_share_abi&utm_term=psf_combo_share_ab

5. https://www.change.org/p/nancy-pelosi-we-want-a-police-reform-bill-now?recruiter=204496456&recruited_by_id=34205cf0-922c-11e4-a696-0f749c20c230&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=petition_dashboard

Sources:

aclu.org

right-to-protest.org

vice, teenvogue, various creators on TikTok, Lex Scott, tumblr

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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The Coddling of the American Pundit

In an absurd reaction to the New York Times nonfiction bestsellers list earlier this week, New York writer Andrew Sullivan tweeted "We. All. Live. On Campus. Now." The problem, Sullivan said, was that the list had numerous "radical critical theory books, written by people deeply opposed to the foundations of liberal democracy” that “were now required reading for employees.”

The following day, a thread of tweets arguing that doxxing racist students helped to “stop them from attending a university that will allow them to become a racist healthcare worker, teacher, lawyer, real estate developer, politicians, etc.” received a similar reaction from Sullivan. “This is beyond chilling,” he tweeted. “It’s the logic of purges and cultural revolution and mob ‘justice’. It has over 400K likes. Liberal democracy is extinct.”

Sullivan and other “contrarian” thinkers with large salaries and gigantic platforms have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last decade obsessing over what teenagers at colleges—Berkeley and Harvard are favorites—are doing on campus, whether that’s getting racists disinvited from cushy speaking gigs or caring about intersectionality and social justice more generally speaking. The broad strokes of their argument are that one day the people pushing for their universities to be more inclusive and to not give platforms to racists will graduate from those universities and will become leaders in America and bring their ideologies with them. Sullivan and others say that this will be bad—bad for free speech, bad for liberal democracy, bad for America, and, most of all, bad for well-paid pundits. America as we know it will be consumed by “campus.” And that moment, where We. All. Live. On. Campus., is now, when hundreds of thousands of people are protesting Black people being killed by the police (or perhaps it was 2018).

Alone, this sort of hysteria is insignificant and also expected of Sullivan, who has spent years promoting and trying to legitimize racial science and declaring war on those who aren’t interested. It's part, though, of a larger wave of right-wing liberal and conservative writers warning that the American public is undergoing an authoritarian turn. State forces violently suppressing protests sparked by state violence isn't the concern here, nor is the president attempting to designate antifascists as terrorists. No, it's the specter of “the campus”—an imagined site of oppression in the reactionary mind where free speech goes to die.

Never mind that it’s students who are bravely in the streets fighting against actual state authoritarianism—marching in the hundreds of thousands nationwide, storming and burning down Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct (which one survey shows the majority of Americans think was justified), and creating an “autonomous zone” in Seattle spanning six city blocks that features an occupied Seattle police precinct along with vehicle barricades and armed protesters standing guard. Never mind, for that matter, that what's happening isn't the result of people avoiding uncomfortable ideas but of engaging with them and taking them seriously enough to take action in the name of a better and more just society—precisely what liberal education and liberal democracy hold as an ideal. What matters is that the "campus" has taken over, and that this is bad.

If this “campus” is now everywhere, it’s worth taking stock of who seems terrified of it, and why. So far, it appears to be no one facing any type of oppression.

Take the staff revolt sparked by Tom Cotton’s New York Times op-ed "Send in the Troops" among staff over whether the fascist screed should’ve been published. Times op-ed editor and columnist Baris Weiss warned of a "civil war" between "the (mostly young) wokes [and] the (mostly 40+) liberals” that resembled the "campus culture wars." Many have mocked her, Sullivan and other conservative thinkers for obsessively writing about campus, but this uprising at the Times, she said, proved her right all along. "This was always why it mattered: The people who graduated from those campuses would rise to power inside key institutions and transform them." Weiss casts radical students—or former ones—as the real authoritarians for engaging in the marketplace of ideas by debating the merits of an article written by a sitting United States senator advocating for the actual deployment of the military against Americans exercising Enlightenment-era rights. (The original position that led to the Times soliciting this op-ed was that the troops should kill them.)

In Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's book The Coddling of the American Mind, the fear that grips the reactionary mind is described as safetyism—"a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns." For some, safetyism is an ever pervasive threat; for others, coronavirus ended this Age of Coddling, for some reason.

Clearly the young people in the streets facing down violent cops are not overly concerned with their safety. Nor are journalists risking their jobs to protest against their employers publishing government propaganda.The people who seem most obsessively concerned with being protected from ideas that challenge their worldview, in fact, seem to be coddled writers and thinkers who are worried about the safety of their social status as protests and calls for systemic upheaval and justice echo across the land.

As Moira Weigel wrote in her review of Haidt and Lukianoff’s book, their arguments are obsessed with balancing acts that do little other than "signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly." They profess to be concerned with an ideological climate that stifles free expression, but in practice express concern over little other than the rules of the discourse. They want an atmosphere in which ideas can be freely debated; if anyone takes an idea seriously, though, it is held as evidence that no such atmosphere exists. The argument is an endlessly recursive argument about what it means to argue, the cri de coeur of a message-board user endlessly crying out for moderators to enforce the First Amendment written across the pages of America's best-paying and most influential publications.

Take Sullivan’s comparison of doxxing to the Cultural Revolution; the same comparison is made by Lukianoff and Haidt, who compared "witch-hunts" on college campuses to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but are more honest about their argument. "As historical events, the two movements are radically different,” they wrote, “most notably in that the Red Guards were responding to the call of a totalitarian dictator, who encouraged them to use violence, while the American college students have been self-organised and almost entirely nonviolent." And yet they shared some similarities, the author maintain, in that "both were movements initiated by idealistic young college students." What does this mean, ultimately? Nothing!

This whiny preening—ironically, it's exactly what “the campus” is accused of—characterizes the overall line of argument. Sullivan is a prominent member of a group of scientific racists who regularly bemoan the natural social consequences of airing racist drivel publicly. Weiss’s warnings were publicly revealed to be fabricated by numerous colleagues who disputed her narrative, calling it "brazenly careerist and self-serving" and a "willful misrepresentation" of largely unified internal opposition to publishing Cotton’s op-ed. There is reportedly a “Bret Stephens” policy at the New York Times, a double standard which allows Stephens to drone about the virtues of free speech (and join Sullivan in advancing race science nonsense) but while constantly whining or complaining to higher-ups about any writer or editor that voices criticism of his ideas.

When Stephens, another campus culture hand-wringer, failed to get a professor at George Washington University fired for insulting him, he wrote an embarassing column trying to paint the joke as anti-Semitic. When the professor invited Stephens to a debate at GWU, Stephens canceled because the debate wouldn't be closed to the public. All of this looks much more like “safetyism” than reading critical theory books or fighting an authoritarian police force.

In a convincing case as to why “safetyism” doesn’t even exist, Inside Higher Ed's John Warner wrote that "if you examine those who wield the charge of safetyism against others, they are always in positions of superior power accusing those without power of disrupting some important principle, a principle that protects the status quo." His critique also lines up with Weigel’s, which points out that these people enjoy “the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination” and “insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads.”

It's hard to take seriously powerful, privileged people who insist that the marketplace of ideas can solve racism and sexism. It's even harder to do so when they insist that participants in the marketplace of ideas who follow the power of ideas they find convincing are behaving illegitimately. It's still harder when those whose entire project is pushing the idea that debate—endless, endless debate—is the way to improve the country rule out protests and uprisings as effective forms of debate. That protests inspired by and enacting ideas and ideals have been successful now and in the past (e.g. the 1960s protests and riots) does not hinder these people from making their arguments. Instead, thought leaders like Jonathan Chait use phrases like “politics is a matter of life and death” to make the case that nobody is entirely right, and that nothing should be done.

These thinkers are correctly labeled by Weigel as "right liberals" who, from "their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and thinkpieces" create cultures and belief systems where the safety of valuing ideas you disagree with becomes a sacred value in theory, and where in practice disagreement is taken as a sort of violence, undermining the entire project of disagreement and debate which is held to be so sacred. Their position is exactly what they accuse their critics of, and as a result, their hysteria is founded in something real: They actually are being left behind by a society and by generations that are taking seriously the ideas they pay lip service to.

“The campus,” as envisioned by the reactionary mind doesn’t exist. But the protests do. The uprisings do. The CHAZ in Seattle does. As right liberals and conservatives are forced to watch more protests and occupations grow and succeed, they’ll slink back into their safe spaces. They’ll insist that their opinions be respected. They’ll demand that we engage in balancing acts to “save liberalism"—acts calibrated to preserve power, privilege, bigotry, and ignorance, and even liberalism itself.

We should see this for what it is: the coddling of the American pundit. And we should reject it.

The Coddling of the American Pundit syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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