5/9, Peter Van Buren, Salon, The government whistleblower who wouldn’t be silenced

5/9, Brian Bennett and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times, Intelligence report identified vulnerability before Boston bombing

5/9, Alicia A. Caldwell and Eileen Sullivan, Salon, Boston police commissioner: We need more cameras

5/9, Hazel Dukes, Amsterdam News (NY), NAACP condemns Quinn’s support of stop-and-frisk

5/9, Barbara Ross, Daily News (NY), Judge backs NYPD’s refusal to detail its surveillance of Muslim community under Freedom of Information Law

5/9, VIDEO, Huffington Post, FBI Planning To Revise Wiretapping Laws

5/8, Laurie Jo Reynolds and Stephen F. Eisenman , Creative Time Reports, TruthOut, Tamms Is Torture: The Campaign to Close an Illinois Supermax Prison

5/8, Scott Thistle, Bangor (ME) Daily News, Bill to allow police to use drones without search warrant heads to Maine Senate

5/7, Erin Durkin, Daily News (NY), On Muslim Surveillance, Bloomberg Questions Mayoral Candidates’ Intelligence

5/7, Charlie Savage, New York Times, U.S. Weighs Wide Overhaul of Wiretap Laws

5/7, Staff, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, After Boston, Little Change in Views of Islam and Violence

5/6, John Knefel, Rolling Stone Magazine, Everything You’ve Been Told About Radicalization Is Wrong

• 4/5, Editor, Dallas (TX) Morning News, Texas Legislature takes up privacy tech with bills on drone surveillance, phone tracking
• 4/5, Brendan Sasso, The Hill, Intelligence lawmakers to amend cybersecurity bill behind closed doors
• 4/4, Kim Zetter, Wired, Google Takes on Rare Fight Against National Security Letters
• 4/4, Neal Conan, NPR, The Least Bad Options For Guantanamo Bay
• 4/4, Cyril Josh Barker, Amsterdam News (NY), Muslims speak out against stop-and-frisk
• 4/4, Marina Portnaya, RT, ‘Drones fly, children die’: US activists launch massive anti-drone campaign
• 4/3, Bruce A. Barrett, CT Post, Moral leadership requires facing our faults

On Saturday, March 23, 150 people filled St. Catherine of Genoa Church in Brooklyn to mourn the death of Kimani Gray.  Outside, police surveyed the scene from the street and from rooftop. On the night of March 9 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, sixteen year-old Kimani Gray was walking home from a birthday party when he was shot and killed by two plainclothes policemen.   Many witnesses say that Gray “pleaded for his life” as the police fired eleven shots, seven of which hit him.

While Gray was simply returning from a birthday party with friends, the police no doubt “saw a gang,” rashly taking stock of the age, gender and race of the boys before them.  Some reports have argued that Gray allegedly pulled a .38 revolver on the officers (without firing), but at least one witness has denied that Gray drew any weapon.  Gray’s possible weapon possession has raised questions about his potential gang affiliation.  Any possession of firearms or gang affiliation on Gray’s part is irrelevant, though, and only detracts from the conversation—The tragedy of Gray’s murder, above all else, speaks to the unnecessary and dangerous militarization and surveillance of American ghettos.

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk programs, communities of color like East Flatbush have been subject to near-constant surveillance.  Rosa Squillacote of the Police Reform Organizing Project in New York City commented in the wake of Gray’s death, saying that as young men of color, they fear that “if [they] go outside, [they're] being watched.”  Her comment was specifically in response to stop-and-frisk programs, which operate on a racial bias (87% of those stopped by the NYPD in 2011 were black or Latino and weapons were found in less than 0.02% of those cases), but it applies to a broader state of living in New York City as well.

There exists a long history of police surveillance and profiling in lower-income, majority non-white neighborhoods in New York City.  This was evidenced in the nights following Gray’s death, when reporters noted scores of police surveilling his East Flatbush home.  Mere days after his death, the neighborhood was overrun: “Walking east along Church Avenue from Nostrand last Thursday afternoon, The Observer counted two police officers on every corner.”  Those police were allegedly there to manage the protests after Gray’s murder, but a similar scene would likely have greeted any passerby before Gray’s death.

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The following update issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights was written by Director of Education and Outreach, Annette Warren Dickerson on April 1, 2013. Updates on the stop-and-frisk trial are available online throughout the proceedings.

The second week of the historic Floyd v. City of New York trial challenging the constitutionality of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program featured a shortened court schedule because the week was bookended by religious holidays. It was only fitting, therefore, that the week ended with faith leaders from a broad cross-section of the city’s many faith communities packing the courtroom and speaking about the negative impacts of stop and frisk on their communities.

In court, the bulk of the week’s testimony was from police officers and supervisors who had been involved in the illegal stops of our plaintiffs and witnesses. Skillful questioning by CCR and co-counsel lawyers laid bare contradictions in their stories, showed that the reasons they now cite for stops weren’t cited at the time, and revealed that supervisors failed to meaningfully review stops throughout the entire NYPD chain to ensure they were lawful.

One officer, Luis Pichardo, said that he was under direct pressure to make numbers — five summonses per tour, and specific numbers of stops and arrests — at the time he stopped CCR’s plaintiff Deon Dennis. Other officers had testified to the existence of quotas in week one, but Pichardo’s admission was particularly significant because he was a hostile witness.

One of the most significant developments of the week centered on a piece of evidence not actually introduced yet. On March 5, the NYPD’s chief of patrol issued a memo, “effective immediately,” requiring all officers to include an elaboration of the circumstances and factors involved in a stop in their paperwork. As it happens, this was the day after CCR filed its remedies brief in the case, which includes exactly this suggested revision of the UF 250 form in its list of injunctive reliefs sought. The city sought to introduce this memo into evidence. The judge indicated that it could not be introduced at this time because there was no officer present in court who could testify to it, but indicated that it would be in evidence once properly admitted.

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On March 11, a series of organizations released a report entitled “Mapping Muslims,” which traces the human impact of the NYPD”s illegal spying program targeting Muslims in and around New York City.  The report, based on interviews with 57 members of Muslim communities in New York City, takes stock of the spying programs’ effects on religious practice, freedom of speech, social and community relations, law enforcement relationships and college campuses.

In 2011, the Associated Press revealed that the NYPD, assisted by the CIA, was mapping and tracking Muslim residents and their businesses and places of worship through a secret squad, known as the “Demographics Unit.”  However, the revelations of the AP failed to curtail the deeply racist and discriminatory pseudo-ethnographic project, which now goes by the euphemism, the “Zone Assessment Unit.”

The interviews conducted for the report make clear that the NYPD’s activities suppressed and chilled the practice of many Muslim’s faith. Individual interviewees observed:

It’s as if the law says: the more Muslim you are, the more trouble you can be, so decrease your Islam.

There are always parked, unmarked cars outside of mosques.

The impact on first amendment protected speech and community openness was found to be similarly chilling. According to Hamza, owner of a business monitored by the NYPD’s Demographics Unit:

I don’t allow Al-Jazeera on in our hookah bar. Particularly when things flare up in the Middle East. We can’t control what people start saying in response to the news, and we never know who else is in the bar listening.

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Police consultants such as William Bratton and Robert Wasserman are warping policing nationwide, and even globally, to a disturbing uniformity. Cash-strapped cities are paying their consulting firms thousands, even millions, of dollars for advice on how to implement “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” style policing. These policies are springing up across the country, as advocates and communities scramble to respond.  The most recent place is Oakland.

On January 15, hundreds of concerned Oakland residents attended a public safety committee meeting of the Oakland City Council to express their concern over Oakland’s plan to extend a $250,000 contract to Bratton, best known for stop-and-frisk and other zero tolerance policies in New York city.  After a rally, hundreds of people squeezed inside the Council chambers; so many people, in fact, that police blocked off doors and started to turn stragglers away, until an overflow room was hastily set up. The tensions in the room were clear, as catcalling and booing started nearly immediately.

For nearly five hours, speaker after speaker stood at the podium to say that Oakland needs funds for services, not consultants, and that the root of the crime problem is the policies that criminalize black and brown people. One African-american elder stated the feelings of many in the crowd poignantly, as he discussed the targeting of young black men by the police:

If you want to kill a tree, kill the roots. If you want to kill a race, kill the children.

Members of the Justice for Alan Blueford Coalition  reminded the council that Oakland’s policies, even without the aid of Bratton’s tough style of policing, have resulted in killings like that of Mr. Blueford, an unarmed young black man who was shot to death by the police. At the end of the meeting, however, the committee voted to move forward with the contract, sending it to a vote before the full Oakland City Council, where one week later, the scene was repeated. After a nearly 8 hour long meeting, with over 250 speakers, the the full city council voted, 7-1 , to approve the contract, regardless of the fact that the majority of speakers were against the contract.

What happened in Oakland is unsurprising, to those who have watched as policing models have shifted towards “zero tolerance” models. Much like the shift towards militarization in protest policing, models like stop-and-frisk have become the norm. Across the country, elected officials seem to have given up on addressing the root causes of crime, instead looking for an easy answer.

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• 1/10, Dana Liebelson, Mother Jones, Why Is Obama Bashing a Whistleblower Law He Already Signed?
• 1/9, Kerry Wills, Robert Gearty and Stephen Rex Brown, New York Daily News, NYPD’s controversial ‘Stop and Frisk’ policy ruled unconstitutional
• 1/9, David Swanson, davidswanson.org, Talk Nation Radio: Shahid Buttar on Spying, Detention, Torture, and Zero Dark Thirty
• 1/9, Pete Yost, Associated Press, US defense contractor pays $5M to Iraqis who alleged torture at Abu Ghraib
• 1/9, Dorothy J. Samuels, New York Times Opinion Pages, Anti-Leak
• 1/9, Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman, Wired, Leaks! Torture! Drones! Obama’s CIA Pick Faces Skeptical Senators
• 1/8, Peter B. Collins, peterbcollins.com, PBC News & Comment: No more appeals in wiretap case, President can break the law

The first installment in this series reviewed President Eisenhower’s prescient warnings about “the military-industrial complex…endanger[ing] our liberties or democratic processes.” It also examined various casualties of the national security state, including transparency, accountability, and democratic legitimacy. Part II, below, continues the analysis and identifies further costs of national security efforts including budgetary waste and constitutional violations. Part III examines specific policy recommendations for the second Obama administration and Congress.

Casualties of the national security state: the federal budget

The national security boondoggle is also a hole in the bottom of our budgetary bucket, bleeding our national treasury and largely prompting the budget crisis that has gripped Washington since 2010. The alphabet soup of duplicative and wasteful intelligence agencies — the NSA, NCTC, FBI, DNI, CIA, over 70 DHS-funded fusion centers, CBP, various military intelligence divisions, and the dozens of state agencies involved in intelligence collection, analysis, retention, and dissemination — collectively burn through hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year.

These agencies have co-opted huge — but publicly unknown — volumes of resources to construct a high-tech Panopticon. The NSA’s $2 billion data center in Utah, the $1.5 billion that DHS has thrown at fusion centers, or the FBI’s billion dollar facial recognition database, are mere tips of an iceberg. The war on terror has ultimately become a bureaucratic arms race among agencies fighting for turf, facilities, and federal funds. The NCTC currently seeks data retention authority that would duplicate that of other agencies, much like the FBI has periodically sought intelligence capabilities already housed in the NSA.

These agencies duplicate each others’ efforts and bleed the federal budget, which has prompted enormous and continuing conflict in Washington over the distribution of inevitable cuts. Especially in light of the looming fiscal cliff, ending the era of blank checks for redundant national security agencies could enable solutions to any number of pressing social crises, from climate change and education to the housing crisis.

Casualties of the national security state: your constitutional rights

The national security state not only drains the federal budget and undermines the legitimacy of our government, but also assaults the rights of we taxpayers who fund it. Stretching beyond counter-terrorism to also include border integrity and immigration enforcement agencies, increasingly militarized local police, and networks of publicly-funded fusion centers around the country, our nation’s internal security agencies pour budgetary salt on constitutional wounds, assaulting constitutional rights and liberties of which we were once justifiably proud.

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• 11/2, Glenn Greenwald, Guardian (UK), Who is the worst civil liberties president in US history?
• 11/2, David Cole, The Nation, Checking Big Brother
• 11/2, Tim Starks, Roll Call, Ron Wyden Blocks Surveillance Bill That Is Barack Obama Priority
• 11/1, Wall Street Journal, Court eyes limits on detention powers in searches
• 11/1, Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald, Defense attorneys ask Panetta to televise 9/11 trial from Guantánamo
• 11/1, Christopher Sherman, ABC News, Texas Asks FBI to Investigate Helicopter Shooting
• 11/1, Tim Gaynor, Chicago Tribune, Arizona lawman Joe Arpaio’s re-election bid divides county
• 11/1, Marni Usheroff, Queens Chronicle, Gay community testifies at stop, frisk hearing