April 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Censorship Silent non-Public [re: prediction of control user program]
by grarpamp 27 Apr '21

27 Apr '21

> I tried to send this to libtech but I don't seem to be able to At least two posts silently censored there this week alone, plus now perhaps or likely yours. Libtech et al are run by such censors, they censor libertarian, freedom, alternate views, refutations, and crypto speech, while permitting piles of lame job conference and paper posts. Libtech, cryptography, tor... all now silently cowardly, censored, and dead... any former ethos gone, now pro GovCorp force of death leftist "democracy", anti actual freedom peace love anarchy, quite possibly sold out. Sad really. Any system capable of predicting behaviour, is a system that will be abused to control fuck and enslave you. The only valid reason to discover and catalog the state of it, is to fight back against it until it is gone.

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[spam] [paranoia] tty stream
by Karl 27 Apr '21

27 Apr '21

does anyone recognise the UI element displaying this on tty1? It happened for maybe half an hour today on raspbian. Systemd was in graphical mode, but I mostly use the ttys. I haven't seen it before or since. https://youtu.be/TPKA_xgI8_8 note: if using youtube, we should move to freer alternatives, I think one might have been called peertube? unsure. Figuring out the unexpected system behaviors I experience seems good. Let me know if there are threads on this list I should be catching up on and replying to. It's hard to cover them all.

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SpyVeillance: Global Resource Systems Packet Forensics Saulino Pentagon AS8003 Neustar Tidewater Laskin
by grarpamp 27 Apr '21

27 Apr '21

https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-government-and-politics-b26a… https://www.wired.com/2010/03/packet-forensics/ Verify and pin your pki certs... Global Resource Systems Packet Forensics Raymond Saulino Pentagon AS8003 Neustar Tidewater Laskin Defense Digital Service "This Is Massive": Shadowy DARPA-Linked Company Took Over 'Chunk' Of Pentagon's Internet In Inauguration Day Mystery A shadowy company set up last September linked to a DARPA / FBI contractor who peddled a 'lawful intercept' internet spy device to government agencies and law enforcement a decade ago, took over a massive portion of the Pentagon's idle internet addresses on the day of President Biden's inauguration, according to an in-depth investigation by the Associated Press. The valuable internet real estate has since quadrupled to 175 million IP addresses which were previously owned by the US Department of Defense - about 1/25th the size of the current internet, and over twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon. "It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network operating company Kenntic. The company, Global Resource Systems, was established by a Beverly Hills attorney, and now resides in a shared workspace above a Florida bank. The company did not return phone calls or emails from The Associated Press. It has no web presence, though it has the domain grscorp.com. Its name doesn’t appear on the directory of its Plantation, Florida, domicile, and a receptionist drew a blank when an AP reporter asked for a company representative at the office earlier this month. She found its name on a tenant list and suggested trying email. Records show the company has not obtained a business license in Plantation. Incorporated in Delaware and registered by a Beverly Hills lawyer, Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast. -Associated Press One name is linked to Global Resource Systems in the Florida business registry - that of Raymond Saulino - who as recently as 2018 was listed in Nevada corporate records as a managing director of a cybersecurity/internet surveillance company called Packet Forensics. According to the report, "The company had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, with the FBI and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers." In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates. The company continues to sell “lawful intercept” equipment, according to its website. One of its current contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is for “harnessing autonomy for countering cyber-adversary systems.” A contract description says it is investigating “technologies for conducting safe, nondisruptive, and effective active defense operations in cyberspace.” Contract language from 2019 says the program would “investigate the feasibility of creating safe and reliable autonomous software agencies that can effectively counter malicious botnet implants and similar large-scale malware.” Saulino is also listed as a principal with a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates. Incorporated in 2018 (and sharing the same Virginia Beach, VA address as Packet Forensics - a UPS store - with different mailbox numbers), Tidewater obtained an FCC license in April 2020 for unknown reasons. Calls to the number listed on the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing are answered by an automated service that offers four different options but doesn’t connect callers with a single one, recycling all calls to the initial voice recording. Saulino did not return phone calls seeking comment, and a longtime colleague at Packet Forensics, Rodney Joffe, said he believed Saulino was retired. Joffe, a cybersecurity luminary, declined further comment. Joffe is chief technical officer at Neustar Inc., which provides internet intelligence and services for major industries, including telecommunications and defense. -AP And now a company linked to Saulino, which didn't exist before September, took control of a massive chunk of the Pentagon's internet space on inauguration day for unknown reasons. According to a terse and opaque explanation from the Pentagon's Brett Goldstein - head of the Defense Digital Service which is running the project, the military hopes to "assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space" and "identify potential vulnerabilities" in order to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries who consistently infiltrate US networks - occasionally from unused internet blocks. What that has to do with Global Resource Systems is anyone's guess. Explanations for what the internet space could be used for are purely speculative, and include "honeypots" - machines set up with vulnerabilities laid as bait to draw hackers, "Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity." "This greatly increases the space they could monitor," said Madory. Why did the Pentagon choose Global Resource Systems - a company linked to a 'spooky' individual - on inauguration day? "As to why the DoD would have done that I’m a little mystified, same as you," internet pioneer Paul Vixie told AP. More via AP: Deepening the mystery is Global Resource Systems’ name. It is identical to that of a firm that independent internet fraud researcher Ron Guilmette says was sending out email spam using the very same internet routing identifier. It shut down more than a decade ago. All that differs is the type of company. This one’s a limited liability corporation. The other was a corporation. Both used the same street address in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. “It’s deeply suspicious,” said Guilmette, who unsuccessfully sued the previous incarnation of Global Resource Systems in 2006 for unfair business practices. Guilmette considers such masquerading, known as slip-streaming, a ham-handed tactic in this situation. “If they wanted to be more serious about hiding this they could have not used Ray Saulino and this suspicious name.” Guilmette and Madory were alerted to the mystery when network operators began inquiring about it on an email list in mid-March. But almost everyone involved didn’t want to talk about it. Mike Leber, who owns Hurricane Electric, the internet backbone company handling the address blocks’ traffic, didn’t return emails or phone messages. Despite an internet address crunch, the Pentagon — which created the internet — has shown no interest in selling any of its address space, and a Defense Department spokesman, Russell Goemaere, told the AP on Saturday that none of the newly announced space has been sold.

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Fwd: Public user prediction software?
by Karl 26 Apr '21

26 Apr '21

Hi tolerant cpunks, I tried to send this to libtech but I don't seem to be able to due to personal concerns. I'm now having a bout of amnesia and unlikely to resend it. Here it is if you guys would like it. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Karl <gmkarl(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 6:52 AM Subject: Public user prediction software? To: liberationtech <liberationtech(a)lists.stanford.edu> Mainstream reporting on targeted advertisement technology claim it can actually predict our behavior accurately enough to make it seem like it is surveilling us when it is not. It also seems to influence our behavior to make us easier to predict; this probably provides revenue to the advertisement algorithms. What is the state of public behavior prediction software? Is there any public tool that can help people understand this technology by playing with it?

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Cryptocurrency: Thodex Exchange CEO Runs Off With $2B
by grarpamp 26 Apr '21

26 Apr '21

https://cryptopotato.com/ceo-of-a-turkish-crypto-exchange-thodex-reportedly… Not your keys, Not your coins. Develop, deploy, and use distributed cross-coin DEX. Dozens Arrested After CEO Of Turkish Crypto Exchange Flees With $2 Billion Turkish authorities have detained 62 people over alleged links to the Istanbul-based cryptocurrency exchange Thodex after its founder fled with a reported $2 billion in investors' assets, Turkish media reported. The suspects were apprehended in raids carried out in eight cities including Istanbul, Anadolu Agency reported on Friday. Police issued arrest warrants for 16 other people. The arrests come after nearly 400,000 users of a Turkish cryptocurrency exchange were left out of their accounts without being able to withdraw their funds. The platform’s website has been down for several days, while reports suggest its CEO has already fled the country with up to $2 billion. Bloomberg reported that Thodex, a Turkey-based crypto exchange, has ceased trading, citing an “unspecified partnership transaction.” The trading platform, founded in 2017, issued a statement explaining that all services will remain shut down for about five working days. However, the message reassured customers that they shouldn’t worry about their funds. In retrospect, they should. Approximately at the same time, though, users started to complain about their inability to access their own assets. As Crypto Potato notes, some took it to Twitter to complain about losing much of their net worth. A local #Crypto exchange where I'd ~20% of my entire trading capital got rug pulled -20 days no withdrawal (fiat & crypto) -Then the website went offline -Then the CEO run abroad I'm not broke, but it hurts... Alot It sucks, Even when u deal with regulated exchanges#Thodex — Feras_Crypto (will Never DM you First) (@FeraSY1) April 21, 2021 He wasn't alone: on Thursday, hundreds of thousands of users were unable to get access to their digital wallets. "We have started the legal procedures and lodged a complaint at the prosecutor's office," a lawyer for some investors said. Prosecutors were investigating the businessman on charges of "aggravated fraud and founding a criminal organisation". ÖNEMLİ DUYURU pic.twitter.com/3aBeJjFSYQ — THODEX (@thodexofficial) April 22, 2021 According to subsequent coverage the exchange’s chief executive officer and founder, Faruk Fatih Ozer had fled the country. Following news of Ozer’s alleged escape from Turkey, users of the local exchange hired a law firm to file a complaint against Thodex. Oguz Evren Kilic, representing an unspecified number of Thodex customers, confirmed the development, saying, “we have filed a legal complaint on Wednesday.” He speculated that the funds on the Turkish exchange could be worth “hundreds of millions of dollars,” as the exchange had 391,000 users. According to another report, Thodex’s CEO and founder has run away in Thailand with an estimated amount of roughly $2 billion. Overnight, Turkish security officials released a photo of Thodex founder Faruk Fatih Ozer going through passport control at Istanbul Airport on his way to Albania. Turkish security officials released a photo of Thodex founder Faruk Fatih Ozer going through passport control at Istanbul airport on April 22, 2021. On Friday, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu made a phone call to his Albanian counterpart to request Ozer be captured and repatriated. At the same time, Turkish police raided the company's headquarters on the Asian side of Istanbul and seized computers and digital materials, press reports revealed. Turkish authorities also started procedures to issue an international warrant to arrest and extradite the missing founder of a cryptocurrency exchange, Anadolu Agency reported. In a message on the company's Twitter account, Ozer said he was abroad for meetings with foreign investors and would return home "in a few days and cooperate with judicial authorities so that the truth can come out". Subsequent updates indicated that this was a lie. In recent months, a growing numbers of Turks turned to cryptocurrency in a bid to shield their savings in the face of a sharp decline in the value of the Turkish lira and high inflation. The Turkish crypto market remains unregulated despite growing scepticism from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government about its safety. Last week, Turkish authorities took a step to regulating the cryptocurrency industry, and as we reported last week, Turkey officially banned users from using cryptos as payment instruments starting April 30th. The government spent a massive $165 billion in foreign-exchange reserves over the past two years, effectively leaving its central bank without reserves Erdogan revealed on Wednesday, part of a futile effort to prop up the national currency. Concern about the country’s dwindling foreign-exchange reserves, which are negative when money borrowed by the government from private banks via swap agreements are factored in, has fueled concern about both lira and dollar deposits -- and pushed savers into alternative investment vehicles. Last Friday, the volume of trade in Turkish crypto markets tripled to over $1.2 billion from a week earlier, according to data published by coingecko.com, which tracks data on price, volume and market value on crypto markets. That compares with an average daily trading volume in the Turkish stock market’s benchmark index of about $3.1 billion. “One can establish a crypto exchange with just 50,000 liras (about $6,000) in capital,” Oguz Evren Kilic, a lawyer representing Thodex users, said by phone. “There’s a huge regulatory gap in this field.” Meanwhile, as Bloomberg reports, last month Thodex initiated a campaign to boost membership by offering millions of free Dogecoins to new registrants. Its website says 4 million of the coins were distributed, though many people have taken to social media to complain they never received them. In the latest development in this bizarre saga, in a statement published from an unknown location, Thodex CEO Faruk Fatih Ozer promised to repay investors and to return to Turkey to face justice after he did. “I was born as one of the three siblings of a civil servant,” Ozer said in his statement, adding that he’s a high-school dropout. As the company ran into financial trouble, he said he thought about either committing suicide or giving himself up to authorities, but both of those options meant clients’ assets would never be retrieved. “So I decided to stay alive and fight, work and repay my debts to you,” he said. “The day I repay all my debt, I will return to my country and give myself in to justice.” Narrator: "he won't return."

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SW That Elected Trump Based On SW That Elected Obama
by Karl 26 Apr '21

26 Apr '21

But when Trump was elected, the man who designed the software and the following excerpt was working for a military contractor to do so, rather than a political party. I'm having trouble continuing to read his book ;p > Insurgencies, by nature, are asymmetric, in that a few people can cause large effects. So catalyzing an insurgency within the belligerent’s organization requires first concentrating resources on a few key target groups. This is optimized by good profiling and identifying the types of people who are both susceptible to new ways of thinking and connected enough to inject our counternarrative into their social network. > > The most effective form of perspecticide is one that first mutates the concept of self. In this light, the manipulator attempts to “steal” the concept of self from his target, replacing it with his own. This usually starts with attempting to smother the opponent’s narratives and then dominating the informational environment around the target. Often this involves gradually breaking down what are called psychological resilience factors over several months. Programs are designed to create unrealistic perceptions in the targets that result in confusion and damage self-efficacy. Targets are encouraged to begin catastrophizing about minor or imagined events, and counternarratives attempt to remove meaning, creating an impression of confusing or senseless events. Counternarratives also attempt to foster distrust in order to mitigate an existing hierarchy or group when you begin to think that you are being used in some unfair way, or when events seem senseless or purposeless. You become less willing to accept setbacks, take risks, or comply with commands. > > But simply degrading morale is often not enough. The ultimate aim is to trigger negative emotions and thought processes associated with impulsive, erratic, or compulsive behavior. This moves a target from mild or passive resistance (e.g., less productivity, taking fewer risks, rumors, etc.) into a realm of more disruptive behaviors (e.g., arguing, insubordination, mutiny, etc.). This approach has been taken in South America, for example, to provoke disunity among members of narcotics operations, increasing the likelihood of information leaks, defections, or internal conflicts that erode a supply chain. The most susceptible targets are typically the ones who exhibit neurotic or narcissistic traits, as they tend to be less psychologically resilient to stressing narratives. This is because neuroticism can make a person more prone to paranoid ideation, as they tend to experience more anxiety and impulsiveness and place more reliance on intuitive rather than deliberative thinking. People high on the narcissism scale are susceptible because they are more prone to

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Cryptocurrency: Total Global Market Cap Blows Past $2T
by grarpamp 26 Apr '21

26 Apr '21

1 Crypto now = $2028 GigaFiats BTC $1100B, ETH $245B privacy (via any popular method, fusion, BCH) $12B privacy (via any native method, mix, XMR) $5B $4T by eoy. Someone is spending tens of millions of dollars to suppress Privacy... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/mkj20r/someone_is_spending… https://cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8369-21 Coinbase ordered to pay $6.5M fine for being caught running bots to manipulate crypto prices on their platform. "Bitcoin wasn’t created to make you rich. It was created to make you free."

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Libertarian: Free Peaceful Independent NAPsters, Coming Under SpyVeillance and Assault?
by grarpamp 26 Apr '21

26 Apr '21

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-feds-are-coming-for-libertari… Jim Bovard: The Feds Are Coming For Libertarians Authored by Jim Bovard via The Libertarian Institute, https://rats-nosnitch.com/rats/ https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1352007118392582148 https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2021/01/feds-in-oregon-filed-most-alleged-… https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/02/fbi-director-christ… http://www.newsweek.com/capitol-police-chief-calls-january-6-riot-terrorist… https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/capitol-attack-domestic-ex… https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/02/fbi-director-christ… https://twitter.com/beinlibertarian/status/1352095243022323718 https://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/07/21/boston-globe-the-terrorist-batting-av… https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/06/12/us-campaign-prod… https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/06/12/us-campaign-prod… https://www.salon.com/2013/07/10/only_1_percent_of_terrorists_caught_by_fbi… https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/fbi-terrorist-informants/ https://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1214/p99s01-woam.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/08/21/law-enforcement-… https://fee.org/articles/federal-surveillance-the-threat-to-americans-secur… https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-report-documents-fbi-abuse-911 https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/policing/2021/02/02/police-killing-s… https://mises.org/wire/one-year-later-police-still-wont-come-clean-duncan-l… https://jimbovard.com/blog/2013/01/02/claire-wolfes-hot-rats/ https://www.amazon.com/101-Things-Til-Revolution-Self-Liberation/dp/1893626… https://www.techradar.com/news/massive-parler-data-leak-exposes-millions-of… Jim Bovard: The Feds Are Coming For Libertarians On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, former CIA chief John Brennan announced on television that federal intelligence agencies "are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about" various suspect groups, specifically mentioning libertarians. Libertarians are in the federal crosshairs. Six or seven years ago, there was a lot of prattle about how "the libertarian moment has arrived." I always knew that was hokum. Since then, there has been a huge increase in hostility to libertarians in Washington DC and elsewhere around the country. Many libertarians assume they have nothing to fear because they are not engaged in seeking to violently overthrow the government. But the feds will be able to find many other pretexts to target peaceful citizens with supposedly subversive ideas. Federal law already defines "domestic terrorism" far more broadly than most people realize. As the Oregonian recently noted, "Cases categorized as domestic terrorism include allegations of…knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted [government] building or grounds…civil disorders and making threatening communications." FBI chief Christopher Wray told a Senate Committee that the FBI has 2,000 ongoing domestic terrorism investigations. Wray recognizes the terrorist peril as the ticket to a bigger budget: "We need more agents; we need more analysts." The Biden administration is itching for a broad new domestic terrorism law to enable even more crackdowns. Libertarians need to recognize how that definition of terrorism has already mushroomed. Capitol Police acting chief Yogananda Pittman, testifying to Congress, described the January 6 clash at the Capitol as "a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists." Apparently, anyone who tromped from Trump’s raging speech to the Capitol that day was a terrorist, or at least an "insurrectionist" (“terrorist” spelled with more letters?). After the clash at the Capitol on January 6, the de facto definition of terrorism seems to be "anything that frightens politicians." Will we find out too late that the new de facto definition of "domestic terrorist" is "individuals who distrust the feds and own two guns and more than 100 bullets"? Another codeword for who the feds will target is "extremists." The Washington Post in January portrayed "domestic extremists" as "a disease that seems to have taken hold in the nation’s nervous system." Last fall, FBI boss Wray told Congress that among the "underlying drivers for domestic violent extremism" are "perceptions of government or law enforcement overreach." Libertarians are practically defined by their perception of government as overreaching. After the January 6 clash, Wray portrayed more busts as proof of FBI triumphs: "The more of the arrests that you see, well, that’s obviously good news for everybody that we’re arresting people who need to be arrested." Here we see the former CIA chief, John Brennan, saying that libertarians are no different than "white supremacists and domestic terrorists," as he calls for the need to bring foreign terror war tactics onto US soil to squash them all. pic.twitter.com/M02Bw7Be9J — Being Libertarian (@beinlibertarian) January 21, 2021 In the coming years, the feds may treat libertarians like Muslims were treated after 9/11. Any new crackdown on terrorism will turn into a numbers game in which justice and fair play don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Between 2001 and 2006, federal prosecutors charged 10 times as many people in terrorism investigations as they convicted on terrorism-related charges. President Bush declared in 2005 that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted." But only 39 people were convicted on crimes tied to terrorism or national security, a Washington Post analysis found. Entrapment opened the floodgates to federal terrorism indictments. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest. In 2006, the FBI fabricated a terror scheme by the Liberty City Seven, where an informant encouraged a bunch of dimwits in Florida to babble about blowing up government buildings. That group was so knuckle-headed that they asked the FBI informant for military uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade. Few Americans recognize how badly the legal playing field is tilted against them. When FBI agents knock on their doors, many Americans won’t hesitate to open up because they assume "those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear." But the FBI is exploiting a sweeping law that criminalizes casual comments. Federal agents have the right to lie to you and to put you in prison if you lie to them. Any citizen who makes even a single-word ("no" or "yes") false utterance to a federal agent faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. It gets worse. You don’t have to actually lie. FBI agents can fabricate the sentences they use to hang you. Unlike most law enforcement agencies, the FBI rarely videotapes interviews, thereby permitting agents to create the narrative or "facts" which then can be used to charge individuals with false statements. Instead of a transcript, an FBI agent writes up a memo a day or two later asserting what you said. FBI agents have been taught that subjects of FBI investigations "have forfeited their right to the truth," which helps explain the vast increase in federal entrapment operations. If the FBI shows up at your door, they might have already accessed every email and text message you sent in recent years. They may have vacuumed all your social media activity—those private Facebook messages you sent—HA! They may have also accessed all your credit card and other financial data. And the FBI may have already interrogated other people to squeeze out accusations against you that they can throw in your face. Then they launch into a game of 20 questions—with a federal indictment awaiting if they claim you answered untruthfully. Politicians in Washington don’t see such abuses as a problem; instead, they are a grand opportunity to smite people who don’t kowtow. It wasn’t that long ago—in the final 15 years of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign—that the FBI became America’s thought police. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy marriages with poison pen letters, and to cripple or destroy leftist, black, white racist, and anti-war organizations. A 1976 Senate report warned, "The American people need to be assured that never again will a federal agency be permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order." But legal and administrative restrictions on the FBI evaporated in the post 9/11 panic, resulting in pervasive abuses of Americans’ rights. The FBI now operates with near-total impunity. The same is true of many state and local police departments who may be hungering for new federal subsidies to crackdown on the extremist peril. How might this play out in the daily lives of people guilty of entertaining libertarian ideas? Consider Duncan Lemp, a 21-year-old Maryland man who was shot to death in a predawn raid in March 2021 after police smashed in his bedroom window and tossed flash bang grenades into his bedroom. Lemp was active on Twitter and liked several tweets by Libertarian presidential candidate John McAfee. Lemp’s last tweet declared, "The Constitution is dead." Two months later, so was Lemp. The Montgomery County, Maryland government later admitted that Lemp was targeted in part because was "anti-government" and "anti-police". Plus, Lemp was outspoken about his support of the Second Amendment and posted photos of himself with guns on Instagram. Police saw one such photo and concluded that Lemp possessed a semi-automatic rifle that was illegal to own in Maryland. After they killed him and searched the Lemp home, they realized they had mis-identified the firearm—it was legal. But police, prosecutors, and local politicians treated that like a harmless paperwork error: nobody cared about the wrongful killing of Duncan Lemp. The police case against Lemp also came from accusations from one or more confidential informants. Lemp trusted people who betrayed him to the police, allegedly with false accusations according to Lemp family lawyer, Rene Sandler. A month after Lemp was killed, activists held a protest at Montgomery County Police headquarters. I attended that event as a journalist (the ol’ press pass flopping around my neck) and was chagrined to see how the event went down. Guys in Hawaii-style "Boogaloo" shirts were using bullhorns to scream profanities at cops and were pointlessly blocking a road. One of the most prominent organizers told attendees to bring firearms to the event, despite Maryland law prohibiting firearms at protests. He told people on Facebook to show up with their guns anyhow and just walk around, pretending not to be part of the demonstration. That guy was full of bluster but never showed up for the protest himself. Almost 10% of the 30 protesters were arrested for firearms or other offenses. I later heard that one of the guys suspected of being a police informant against Lemp was at that rally pretending to demand justice for Lemp. In the coming months and years, many libertarians could be indicted not for violent acts against the government but for unwise or reckless words uttered in proximity to government informants. If you don’t know someone like the back of your hand, then you better be damn careful what you say around them. And even if you know a person well, that doesn’t oblige you to join them in a leap off a legal cliff. Simply because someone spouts anti-government zeal doesn’t make them more trustworthy than a congressman. Claire Wolfe, the author of 101 Things to Do Until the Revolution, wrote an excellent guide to recognizing government informants which she made available for free online. Simple prudence can suffice to avoid many tripwires. If some new acquaintance wants to provide you a pipe bomb to help "make a statement," he probably isn’t a real friend. There was a saying among antiwar activists in the 1960s and 1970s that the person who most fervently advocates violence is likely the undercover government agent. Activists should also recognize the likelihood that they could be surveilled online or in person. Parler was supposed to be a secure alternative to other online venues but millions of its messages were leaked earlier this year. The answer is not to shut up and sure as hell not to cease fighting for your rights and liberties. Friends of freedom need to continue valiantly and peacefully championing their ideas. At some point, more Americans will finally recognize the folly of permitting politicians and government agents to capture vast unchecked power over everyone else. In the meantime, prudent libertarians will avoid writing anything in an email that they don’t want to hear read out loud in federal court.

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Cryptocurrency: Open The Books - Forced, Non Opt Out, Govt Waste
by grarpamp 26 Apr '21

26 Apr '21

https://www.openthebooks.com/ Distributed cryptocurrency disables force fraud and waste, enables free choice. Kraken telling customers on the login page: "Not your keys, not your coins". "Keep the majority of your crypto offline... Only keep the funds you need for trading and other activities on Kraken." Bitcoin-BTC unusable for tx under $5k due to network fees, market share tanks well below 50% in response.

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Paper Offenses: Beget and Sustain Top Gangs?
by grarpamp 25 Apr '21

25 Apr '21

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/a-dc-cop-tells-all/ https://theappeal.org/dc-gru/ A DC COP Tells All by Brandon Soderberg | Apr 22, 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_tWbmfGEhE Nook's Barbershop https://www.scribd.com/document/498469099/Crudup-Et-Al-Complaint https://www.scribd.com/document/499852666/DC-Motion-to-Dismiss https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/2-dc-officers-still-on-patrol-a… https://dcist.com/story/20/09/29/dc-mpd-special-police-units-black-people-a… https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/jury-clears-dc-police-in-fatal-s… https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/2-dc-officers-still-on-patrol-a… https://www.scribd.com/document/498599415/2020-03-02-Price-Complaint https://www.acludc.org/en/cases/cottingham-v-lojacono-challenging-unjustifi… https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/veteran-sergeant-sues-dc-… https://dcist.com/story/20/10/09/dc-mpd-officer-alleges-retaliation-for-rep… https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-dc-police-use-stop-and-frisk-bu… https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/guns-washington-police-s… https://saferstronger.dc.gov/page/near-act-safer-stronger-dc https://www.acludc.org/en/cases/aclu-dc-v-district-columbia-challenging-dc-… https://mpdc.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mpdc/publication/attachmen… https://www.acludc.org/en/news/judge-rules-dc-police-violation-near-act-sto… https://policecomplaints.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/office%20of%20… https://mpdc.dc.gov/release/mpd%E2%80%99s-weekly-firearm-recoveries-january… http://www.courtexcellence.org/uploads/publications/TransformationStartsTod… https://twitter.com/LorenzoWard7DC/status/1010877087488577536/photo/2 https://www.facebook.com/trayon.white/videos/10100842914679795 https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/248654.pdf https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/photo-shows-dc-police-of… https://dcist.com/story/17/07/28/activists-call-for-police-officers/ https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/dc-mpd-illegal-guns-deon-kay/65… https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/dc-council-passes-budget-reduci… https://dcist.com/story/20/10/26/dc-metropolitan-police-department-budget-c… https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-biden-administration-wants-to-addr… https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/dc-crackdown-on-gun-crime… https://www.dailysignal.com/wp-content/uploads/Working-Group-Proposals-Subm… https://www.acludc.org/en/cases/united-states-v-reed-challenging-shifting-c… https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/dc-crackdown-on-gun-crime… https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/dc-gun-cases-federal-cour… https://twitter.com/hodge_jamila/status/1374107396587544583 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374537449 https://wamu.org/story/18/09/19/collateral-damage-caught-gun-violence-aggre… https://mpdc.dc.gov/release/mpd-announces-partnership-howard-university-hos… https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/dc/dc-police-officer-shoots-wounds… https://twitter.com/DCPoliceDept/status/1345401189769355266 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/guns-washington-police-s… https://wtop.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Testimony_contee.pdf https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/dd0059be-3e43-42c6-a3df-ec87ac0ab3b3/DC%20… Around 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 12, 2020, officers with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Gun Recovery Unit (GRU) turned their unmarked Chevy Malibu onto a residential street in Washington, D.C., where they spotted Dalonta Crudup walking with a backpack slung around his shoulder. Crudup, a 23-year-old Black man, noticed the Malibu and shifted his backpack to both shoulders. According to a statement of probable cause, that was enough for the plainclothes GRU officers to jump out of their vehicle and stop Crudup. “You don’t got no weapons on you?” one officer asked Crudup. Crudup lifted his shirt and showed the police his waistband. There was no gun there. He told them he had marijuana—which is legal in D.C.—on him. Multiple times, the police, all wearing tactical gear, asked Crudup if they could search his backpack for weapons. Each time, Crudup told them no. Then one of the cops claimed they heard something in the backpack. They patted it down, said they felt marijuana inside, and took the backpack. The officers said they found a gun and placed Crudup under arrest. After his arrest, Crudup was offered a plea deal by the United States attorney’s office but refused to plead guilty. The police had no justifiable reason to stop him, let alone search him, and he knew that. “What was written on the probable cause affidavit was just egregiously unconstitutional, in my opinion. I mean, he literally was stopped because he was walking while Black with a backpack,” Sweta Patel, one of Crudup’s lawyers, told The Appeal. “They really didn’t give any probable cause, reasonable suspicion, or anything.” Fifteen minutes after Crudup declined to plead guilty, prosecutors dropped his gun charges. Crudup is one of four plaintiffs in an ongoing class action civil rights lawsuit that attorneys Patel and Michael Bruckheim filed in federal court against the D.C. government. The lawsuit alleges that the GRU—which focuses on the interdiction and recovery of illegal weapons and the apprehension of people involved in illegal gun crime—has a policy of stopping, frisking, and searching Black people without reasonable suspicion or probable cause, and that they fabricate information to justify the stops, frisks, and searches. According to the lawsuit, despite D.C. having some of the strictest gun control measures in the country, the GRU has a “practice and custom of treating African American people as though they all carry illegal handguns.” The lawsuit says the GRU officers use a person’s presence in a “high crime” neighborhood as a reason to approach them and often cite a person shielding themselves from officers jumping out of an unmarked car or running as further justification for a stop. When GRU officers ask if they can search someone, they often characterize how that person responds to the question as “suspicious” in order to justify a search, even if the person did not consent. In November, attorneys for the city government wrote in a motion filed with the court that the “plaintiffs’ claims have no merit and should be dismissed” in part because “the officers had reasonable suspicion to support the stops and searches.” They said that none of the plaintiffs disputed that they were in possession of a firearm without a license and also denied that the GRU has a policy of engaging in unconstitutional stops and searches. But activist groups such as Black Lives Matter D.C. and Stop Police Terror Project D.C. say the GRU conducts warrantless searches, uses force almost exclusively against Black residents, and commits fatal police shootings. In 2018, two officers were investigated—and removed from the unit—after a questionable search of the backyard of the uncle of Jeffrey Price, a 22-year-old who died when his dirt bike collided with a police cruiser in Northeast D.C. In March 2020, Price’s mother filed a civil rights lawsuit against the officers involved in the fatal accident; the lawsuit is ongoing. And there have been several lawsuits alleging that the GRU performs “unjustified sexually invasive” searches and regularly engages in “jump-outs” targeting Black residents. Now, a nearly 30-year Metropolitan Police Department veteran is speaking out about the GRU, blasting the unit as statistics-driven and engaged in a pattern and practice of illegal stop-and-frisks. The Appeal obtained a five-page letter written by the former command-level official about the GRU and the roles that this person says former chief Peter Newsham and current chief Robert Contee played in enabling them. “These outdated practices have resulted in the adversarial relationship between the community and the police department,” the veteran wrote. “Sadly, the police leadership’s response to community concerns is to double-down on the practices that are of most concern to the community.” The Appeal also spoke with the veteran, who said they were moved to write the letter out of concern for D.C.’s residents whose trust has been violated by the police, especially young Black men whose lives are being “ruined” by gun charges “inhibiting their future.” They requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Last year, Sgt. Charlotte Djossou alleged in a lawsuit that she was retaliated against for blowing the whistle on department abuses that included narcotics division supervisors instructing officers to target young Black men in low-income neighborhoods for jump-outs and reclassifying felonies as misdemeanors in order to improve crime statistics. “The leadership’s focus on GRU is stat driven,” the veteran wrote. “Leadership focuses on how many guns GRU recovers and if an arrest is made with the recovery. There is very little, if any, review of how the gun was recovered or how the arrest was made.” In early 2019, former chief Newsham defended the department’s use of stop-and-frisk as “constitutional.” In March of this year, Chief Contee said the department has not used jump-outs as a tactic in years, according to the Washington Post. But the veteran says the GRU violates residents’ Fourth Amendment rights and the practice is central to its gun seizures. A “dubious tactic employed by GRU is jumping out on groups of people and fishing for statistics,” the veteran wrote. “Members of GRU would drive up to an area where multiple people were hanging out, jump out of the truck, and force everyone present to submit to stop and frisk without any articulable reason for being stopped and frisked other than their mere presence at the scene.” The Metropolitan Police Department did not respond to The Appeal’s request for comment about GRU’s tactics and allegations of civil rights violations by the unit. But Kristen Metzger, deputy director of the department’s communications office, emailed a statement to The Appeal emphasizing that “under Chief Robert Contee’s leadership, MPD has begun examining the Department’s strategies related to guns and violence. Chief Contee emphasizes a strategic approach aimed at getting the right guns out of the wrong hands in our communities. MPD has already shifted resources to focus on an intelligence-based policing approach to identify, interdict and interrupt violent offenders within the District.” In the letter, the veteran accused the department of misrepresenting data regarding police stops gathered after the 2016 passage of the Neighborhood Engagement Achieves Results (NEAR) Act. The act compels the collection of information about the stop—such as the reason it happened, how long it lasted, whether it resulted in an arrest, and the race of the person stopped—and the release of that data to the public. But the department has a troubled history with compliance. In February, ACLU-DC sued the police department. “MPD has failed to uphold its promise” of complying with the NEAR Act, the organization wrote in a statement, and “as of February 2021, MPD has not published any data since March 2020, and its published data only covers 6 months in 2019. No data on stops conducted in 2020 has been published.” Days after the ACLU-DC filed the lawsuit, the police released stop data from Jan. 1 through June 30, 2020. The department released data for the rest of 2020 the following month and promised a comprehensive 2020 stop data report in April. The 2019 data released in March 2020 was also released after a 2019 ACLU-DC lawsuit. The veteran says in their letter that when a judge ordered the release of stop data after the 2019 lawsuit, department command attempted to “manipulate the results” in order to evade accusations of racial bias. According to the veteran, one commander told officers to perform more stops in parts of D.C. with white residents “to balance the number of pedestrian stops against black individuals in her district.” Another commander instructed police to perform more car stops of white drivers “to neutralize the number of vehicle stops made against black individuals in his district.” The result was more racial profiling rather than a reduction in stops: “Neither commander had a goal of decreasing unnecessary stops against blacks, only to offset the total number by increasing target stops against whites.” Stop data shows that between July 22, 2019, and Dec. 31, 2019, 72 percent of all the department’s stops were of Black residents and 87 percent of “non-ticket stops” were of Black residents. Forty-six percent of D.C.’s population is Black. A 2020 National Police Foundation report revealed that between August 2019 and January 2020, 87 percent of stops, 91 percent of arrests, and 100 percent of use-of-force incidents by the Narcotics and Specialized Investigations Division, which includes GRU, were of Black people. Although the Metropolitan Police Department is hesitant to release stop data as required by the NEAR Act, the veteran wrote, it closely tracks gun seizures, and command officers are held accountable for those statistics: “If there is a drop in the total recoveries as compared to the prior month, the Chief inquires as to why there is a decrease and what the Commanders plan to do to restore the number of recoveries. What is apparently absent in the agency’s review of gun recoveries is how the guns were recovered, specifically the constitutionality of the recovery.” Each week, the department’s gun seizures are released publicly with details about each gun, the name of the person who allegedly possessed the gun, what they were charged with, and often a photograph of the gun. Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of “The End of Policing,” told The Appeal that this focus on data conflates transparency with accountability. “Both government officials and a lot of legal advocates come around to this idea that since we can’t really change anything—or we don’t really want to change anything—let’s collect some data,” Vitale said. “But we don’t need to haggle over the data. We need to quit engaging in this kind of enforcement.” “The impression it leaves me, as a resident of the city,” said Patrice Sulton, executive director of D.C. Justice Lab and a member of the DC Police Reform Commission, “is that people in leadership care most about the number of guns they collected. That’s the metric they are paying attention to.” According to department data, Dalonta Crudup’s Smith & Wesson M&P Bodyguard .380 caliber handgun was one of 46 guns the GRU recovered between Jan. 6 and Jan. 13 last year. April Goggans of Black Lives Matter DC told The Appeal that the tactic of displaying gun seizures for the public is an example of how the police department’s “war on guns” mirrors the numbers game that fuels the war on drugs. “You remember they used to put all of the drugs and the money out on the table?” Goggans said. “Now it’s all about guns right? And people in the city care about guns so they’re like, ‘Get them off the street’ but you try to tell people that there’s this many stops, this many searches, and they’re not finding a weapon most of the time—and the homicides are going up.” A February report by the District Task Force on Jails & Justice analyzed 2019 NEAR Act data and found that out of 1,717 consent searches, police seized just 19 guns. And 1,606 of those stops (94 percent) did not result in contraband seizures. In 2007, the year the GRU was formed, there were 181 homicides in D.C. In 2020, there were 198. In the letter, the veteran expressed concern about a highly publicized June 2018 incident in which the GRU searched a group of Black men hanging out in front of Nook’s Barbershop in the majority-Black Ward 7. Video of the incident posted by Black Lives Matter DC showed plainclothes GRU officers attempting to conduct a search of a man in the group. When the man put his arms up, an officer pulled a gun from his pants. Officers then told the group that they had probable cause to search all of them for weapons. The officers “then turned their attention to the other men present and forced them all to submit to a frisk,” the veteran wrote. “The justification the officers gave, which was supported by the Chief, was if there was justification to frisk one person, there was justification to frisk everyone.” No other guns were seized by the GRU in front of the barbershop that day. Ward 7 commissioner Anthony Lorenzo Green said residents believed that police planted the weapon seized that day—a BB gun, which is illegal to possess in D.C—and that it was taken from an undercover officer, not a civilian, on the scene. “No one was arrested because none of the other men had drugs or firearms in their possession,” Green wrote in a June 24, 2018, letter to then-chief Newsham. “The officers acknowledged they did not get a call for loitering… I am convinced your department is not collecting that [NEAR Act] data because you want to hide the fact that your officers are making up opportunities to harass black and brown people in our city.” The Metropolitan Police Department denied that the man was an undercover officer and that the gun was planted. During a 2018 D.C. City Council hearing held as a result of the incident, then-Councilmember at-Large David Grosso asked Newsham, “Why are we using the same tactics 30 years later?” “It’s not the same tactics,” Newsham insisted. Contee, then assistant chief, defended the incident to the council. He said it was an example of “intelligent policing,” which he differentiated from jump-outs because the cars parked in front of Nook’s had tinted windows and officers observed people going in and out of the vehicle. That was reasonable suspicion to search the group, Contee explained. BLM DC’s Goggans told The Appeal that the tactics displayed in the Nook’s incident are commonplace within the GRU. She said the unit also detains people who don’t have weapons on them until the person can point them in the direction of a gun or someone who has a gun. “With Gun Recovery, they will get guys and they will say, ‘We’ll let you go if you call friends to bring a gun,’” Goggans said. The veteran wrote that a 2018 video recorded by Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White is illustrative of this GRU tactic. The video shows two teens detained for allegedly having an empty magazine. “The GRU members told the teens they would not be released unless they disclosed the location of a gun or a person armed with one,” the veteran wrote. “MPD’s leadership has been made aware of this dubious tactic yet has taken no corrective action.” Goggans described the GRU engaging in targeted harassment such as calling out the names of people while on patrol to “thank” them for talking to them—a clear implication that they are informants, which would threaten their safety in the neighborhood. “The police see Black folks, people in this community, as enemy combatants. So once you’ve determined somebody is an enemy combatant, then the way you engage them is different,” Goggans said. This “warrior” approach to policing is embraced by the GRU, Goggans said. She cited a 2016 photo of GRU members posing in front of a flag with “Gun Recovery Unit” written on it, along with the image of a skull with a bullet hole between its eyes and the words “Vest Up One In The Chamber.” The photo was part of a 2017 complaint by the advocacy group Law for Black Lives. That same year, Goggans notes, Officer Vincent Altiere of a plainclothes unit called Powershift was photographed wearing a shirt featuring a Grim Reaper, a Celtic cross, which is widely used as a white supremacist symbol, and the phrase “let me see that waistband.” D.C.’s war on guns raises constitutional concerns—and it also comes with fatal consequences. On Sept. 3, 2020, Metropolitan Police Department officers chased, shot, and killed Deon Kay after they said they acted on a tip that someone in the area had guns in their vehicle. Officers pursued Kay, who had a gun and ran. Although a GRU officer did not kill Kay, the ACLU-DC connected his death to the police’s focus on gun seizures. “The D.C. police department’s approach to gun recovery has been dangerous and ineffective for years,” ACLU-DC executive director Monica Hopkins said. “The tragic shooting and death of 18-year-old Deon Kay is the logical conclusion of a policy that not only meets violence with violence, but actually escalates and incites it—especially in our Black communities.” Kay’s killing came after a summer of protests in D.C. against police violence following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis—and months after Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed two blocks of 16th Street NW “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” Bowser, however, seemed to justify Kay’s death as a necessary part of the police department’s war on guns. “I know the officer was trying to get guns off the street,” Bowser said. “And I know he encountered somebody with a gun.” Sean Blackmon of Stop Police Terror Project D.C. told The Appeal that Bowser’s stance on Kay is typical of a mayor who opposed the D.C. Council defunding the police by $15 million last year, then requested that $43 million be redirected to the police budget. Blackmon also pointed out that Bowser supported “Mr. Stop and Frisk himself, Mike Bloomberg” in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. “Bowser can wax poetic all she wants about George Floyd, but at the end of the day, Muriel Bowser is guilty of facilitating the very same kind of racist police here that killed George Floyd,” Blackmon said. According to FiveThirtyEight, a Black person in D.C. is 7.3 times more likely to be arrested than a white person and 13.4 times more likely to be killed by a police officer. Yet Bowser continues to support a 2019 citywide initiative called felons-in-possession that makes gun possession a federal charge for people with felony records, even though U.S. prosecutors revealed last year that the policy was enacted only in majority-Black districts. D.C. Attorney General Carl Racine called the initiative, which exposes people to harsher sentencing, “discriminatory.” A group of Black prosecutors also opposed it because of its “negative racial and social impact,” and an April 2020 amicus curiae brief from ACLU-DC argued that the initiative “makes federal cases out of purely local criminal matters.” Bowser and then-chief Newsham both said they did not know felons-in-possession was not being applied citywide. The initiative remains in place today and has the support of Acting Chief Contee. Biden-appointed Acting U.S. Attorney Channing D. Phillips recently announced that felons-in-possession policy would remain in place even though a former assistant U.S. attorney called it “racist, unjust and unlawful” and said that Black people comprise 97 percent of felons-in-possession charges. The racial disparities perpetuated by these kinds of federal initiatives has been known for decades. James Forman Jr.’s 2017 book “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” notes that during the 1990s, then-U.S. attorney for D.C. Eric Holder said of Operation Ceasefire, which encouraged police to “stop cars, search cars, seize guns”: “I’m not going to be naive about it. The people who will be stopped will be young black males, overwhelmingly.” GRU’s strategies resemble Holder’s Operation Ceasefire. He encouraged officers to “wrangle consent,” Forman wrote, and “blur the distinction between commands that a driver must obey (such as providing license and registration, or stepping out of the car) and requests that he may decline (such as giving permission to search).” “But it was more than fear of crime or the credibility of black law enforcement officials that sold Operation Ceasefire,” Forman continued. “Also critical was the fact that the program targeted guns, not drugs.” The veteran criticized former police chief Newsham for not only enabling the GRU but criticizing those who questioned the unit’s tactics, including fellow law enforcement. Newsham “blamed [prosecutors] when cases were thrown out for procedural errors as opposed to using these cases as learning opportunities to better train his officers,” the veteran wrote. The dismissal of handgun charges against a Black man after federal prosecutors said there was no probable cause for the arrest angered Newsham, the veteran wrote. During one staff meeting, Newsham “called the USAO [United States attorney’s office] ‘soft on crime’ and stated judges were no better.” Newsham, who is now the Prince William County police chief, responded to The Appeal’s request for comment in an email from the department’s Public Information Supervisor: “Chief Newsham believes these claims are preposterous, inflammatory and/or noncontextualized, without knowing who you spoke to or what their motive was for suggesting these things, he would be unable to make any further comments on the matter. As for Chief Contee, Chief Newsham has every confidence that he is a very capable and committed police leader who will do what is in the best interest of public safety in the District of Columbia.” A 2018 report by the radio station WAMU that analyzed almost 500 Metropolitan Police Department gun cases filed between 2010 and 2015 showed that nearly 40 percent of those cases were dismissed. “MPD historically, and more so over the past four years, has demonstrated a pattern and practice of unconstitutional conduct,” the veteran wrote. “Even after having these concerns brought to its attention through citizen complaints, video footage of officer conduct, dismissed criminal cases, lawsuits, and court orders, MPD took no action to institute remedial training, implement new policy, or issue any discipline to officers for Fourth amendment violations. There is no accountability for these actions but instead plenty of praise for these results.” The veteran also argued that Contee, who replaced Newsham at the beginning of the year, was complicit in GRU policy and practices. “He was the Assistant Chief overseeing GRU,” the veteran wrote, during a time period that includes the Nook’s Barbershop incident and the recorded incident involving two teens. According to the veteran, Contee did not make any “meaningful” changes to GRU’s roster, its policies, or its training after those high-profile incidents. “This statement is not accurate. The incident at Nook’s Barbershop was investigated by our Internal Affairs Division and the allegations of improper stops and searches were determined to be unfounded,” Metzger of the police department’s communications office wrote to the Appeal. “MPD is committed to listening and learning from the community and recently announced a partnership with Howard University to host community listening sessions.” On Jan. 2, Contee was sworn in as chief, and he also spoke to the media about Antonie Smith, who was shot and wounded by department officers that morning. A resident had reported Smith was armed with a handgun. “I have a swearing-in ceremony shortly in about an hour or so, but you know, this will continue to be a fight for the Metropolitan Police Department to get illegal guns off of our streets,” Contee said. Three hours after the shooting, the police posted a photo of Smith’s gun on the department’s Twitter account. In the weeks leading up to the D.C. Council’s vote to confirm Contee as Chief, he began talking reform. In a March 11 interview with the Washington Post, Contee said the department needed “to think beyond just getting the gun,” and change its approach on gun policing—especially within the GRU. “I want to be more strategic about getting the right guns out of the wrong hands. We have already shifted resources to focus on an intelligence-based policing approach to identify, interdict, and interrupt violent offenders within the District,” Contee told the Judiciary & Public Safety Committee on March 25. “The goal is to build strong criminal cases on offenders and groups to ensure those repeat offenders cannot continue to endanger our communities.” The Post quoted an internal memo from Commander John Haines, head of the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division, which houses the GRU. “No longer are we focused on getting guns,” the memo reads. “The focus will be on those that pull the trigger and directly or indirectly harm others.” On March 31, the Judiciary & Public Safety Committee unanimously confirmed Contee, setting him up for a vote by the council on a date to be announced. The veteran told The Appeal that they are not surprised to see Contee defending the GRU even as he calls for gun policing reforms. In the Post, Contee said officers are not “stopping as many people as they can to get whatever guns they need” and he does not “want that to be the perception of what is happening.” “I think he’s saying what people want to hear. By saying ‘I’m not saying you’ve done anything wrong, we just need to change everything,’ he’s towing the line, he’s telling [the officers] ‘I got your back,’” the veteran said. “Getting guns off the street is worthy, but we don’t have to violate rights. It doesn’t help to make an arrest and violate someone’s rights: The case gets thrown out, and the person goes free.” In an email to The Appeal, Metzger pointed to the Violence Reduction Unit, formed in 2020, as an example of how changes to gun policing have already begun: “The goal of this Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) is to build strong criminal cases on offenders and groups to ensure those repeat offenders cannot continue to endanger our communities. The VRU is already seeing success with its casework and MPD will continue to work with residents to ensure that our strategies support—and don’t undermine—the vibrant and safe communities where our residents—our youth, families and seniors—can thrive and succeed.” For Stop Police Terror Project D.C.’s Blackmon, announcing new policing strategies and new units and denying the existence of jump-outs is another way for the department to avoid responsibility for its harmful and unconstitutional practices. “They love to play those semantic games,” Blackmon said. “But at the end of the day, if you’re violating my basic rights, if you’re abusing me, if you’re beating me, if you end up killing me, you could call it a pizza party—it doesn’t change what it is.” Goggans recognizes that some Black residents of D.C. who endure most of the city’s violent crime are willing to “trade off” freedoms for feeling safer: “I feel like so many people are OK with [GRU] because it’s like ‘good violence’ because it feeds off the fact that people are rightfully fearful of violence.” People accept this kind of policing because it is the only solution offered by the city and substantively funded, Brooklyn College’s Vitale explained. “This is what we call a supply side strategy to managing gun violence, right? Gun control laws, gun interdiction, gun enforcement. But D.C. is not funding the demand side enough, which is, ‘What are we doing to work with young people so that they don’t choose to pick up guns in the first place?’” Vitale said. “Anyone Black in D.C. already knows what’s going on. I think it’s pretty clear that that they just shouldn’t be doing the vast majority of the stops and a huge amount of them are pretextual.” Sulton told The Appeal that “the message being sent to these officers is they are to hunt guns and drugs,” and that D.C. is “trying to solve violence with violence” and “trauma with trauma.” “We can’t afford to keep doing this,” Sulton said. A report released this month by the DC Police Reform Commission, of which Sulton is a member, makes numerous police recommendations policy including the immediate suspension of GRU and similar specialized units “unless and until the Department produces data showing they address violent and otherwise serious crime more effectively than ordinary patrol units.” Crudup attorney Bruckheim said that unlike Crudup and the other class action clients, most arrestees in gun cases plead out, even when their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights have been violated. When they do not enter a guilty plea or their charges are dismissed, the weapons seizure has already been memorialized in police department data as successful. “At the end of the day, if they find a gun, they figure, ‘You know what, we got a gun off the street. So who cares if we violated someone’s rights,’” Bruckheim said. “But the fact is the Constitution of the United States is not limited by geography. I understand how some people will say, ‘What’s the big deal? At the end of the day, they recovered contraband, the city’s a little safer and so on.’ But you can’t go about it by violating the rights of citizens, number one. No matter what.” This article was originally featured at The Appeal and is republished with permission.

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