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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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The Mystery of AS8003 | Kentik
by Robert Hettinga 25 Apr '21

25 Apr '21

> https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-mystery-of-as8003/ <https://www.kentik.com/blog/the-mystery-of-as8003/> "On January 20, 2021, a great mystery appeared in the internet’s global routing table. An entity that hadn’t been heard from in over a decade began announcing large swaths of formerly unused IPv4 address spacebelonging to the U.S. Department of Defense. Registered as GRS-DoD, AS8003 began announcing 11.0.0.0/8 among other large DoD IPv4 ranges.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-addr… https://blog.cloudflare.com/fixing-reachability-to-1-1-1-1-globally/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170122135805/https://dyn.com/blog/vast-world-… https://seclists.org/nanog/2021/Mar/186 https://www.congress.gov/116/crpt/hrpt120/CRPT-116hrpt120-pt2.pdf https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/iran-positions-itself-to… https://web.archive.org/web/20150416174505/http://research.dyn.com/2015/04/… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks#List_… http://www.routeviews.org/routeviews/ https://bgp.he.net/AS8003#_whois https://mewe.com/myworld?scope=contacts

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Police Took And Uploaded 114,155 License Plate Tracking Scans AN HOUR Into A Universal Database To Track And Predict Every Americans' Travel Habits
by jim bell 24 Apr '21

24 Apr '21

Police Took And Uploaded 114,155 License Plate Tracking Scans AN HOUR Into A Universal Database To Track And Predict Every Americans' Travel Habits | | | | | | | | | | | Police Took And Uploaded 114,155 License Plate Tracking Scans AN HOUR In... The Daily Fodder is a news website focused on news, nothing more. | | |

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USA has been learning what happens to other nations at their own hands
by Karl 24 Apr '21

24 Apr '21

The behavioral control software that was turned on the nation over the past decade, was previously used to disrupt dissidents across the globe. One particular software was developed by a team of researchers near Cambridge University and a man named Christopher Wiley, based on current and new work in machine learning. That effort has ended, but many more political control organisations are out there, ready to work for the highest bidder. My life is destroyed forever, with nobody to talk to to make things right. The things I have experienced, hav been happening to, for example, the people of Africa, for many decades.

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Re: The Verge: Elon Musk says Starlink internet service will be ?fully mobile? in 2021
by David I. Emery 24 Apr '21

24 Apr '21

On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 05:04:00PM -0400, Chris Trainor wrote: > Friend of mine has it up in New Hampshire and likes it. Getting about > 100down by 20up. Very low latency. > > If this really goes mobile it's going to kill services like Iridium > Certus, Inmarsat, etc. Not clear. Iridium is handheld, the Starlink Dishy is about 3 feet in diameter and requires solid mounting and stabilization. Starlink could absolutely compete with INMARSAT L band domes on boats and ships... but already a lot of that traffic goes via C/Ku/Ka geosat (which Starlink clearly could very effectively compete with if there is enough available bandwidth on the Starlink system). The lower latency would be an enormous improvement for that market. And folks wandering around in RV's can also clearly use the Starlink platform (would be lots better than other alternatives in many places). I imagine Starlink could compete in the DSNG market too... I'm pretty sure the incentive exists to build a Starlink terminal that can be installed on aircraft, there is already a lot of this sort of stuff in existence... and meeting the RF specs from the top of a commercial or private jet seems doable to me... considering that lots of folks are already uplinking to geosats from aircraft via phased arrays at 14 Ghz.. and transmitting to satellites from aircraft has been around a long time, including situations where the beam aim and sidelobes are critical. Starlink depends on being able to aim a beam from a phased array accurately at a specific spot in the sky (and with low enough sidelobes so not to cause problems for geo birds in the Clarke belt snd other leo birds at other angles). This is not a natural for really small and handheld or hand carried applications... but Musk does have some real talent working for him. -- Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die(a)dieconsulting.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493 "An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten 'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either."

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Autonomy and Code
by Karl 23 Apr '21

23 Apr '21

You can tell that people like me and grarpamp are in serious trouble, because we are complaining about problems instead of doing work together to solve them. That is not how a software developer, or an anarchist, ever behaves. Communication is crucial: but spending time primarily arguing gets very little done. No working community member waits, of their own free will, for others to solve their problems, unless they are not free to do so themselves. Autonomy and code. [[spam] like usual; I'm in a dissociated state posting this, and it's very hard to judge the content.]

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Re: [liberationtech] CFP: Special Track on AI for Tackling Dis/Misinformation during Pandemics @ ACM GoodIT2021
by grarpamp 23 Apr '21

23 Apr '21

You don't need a grand conference for to developing AI, which will only be abused and levered against you and freedom, to tell you've been manipulated, lied to, and Fake News'd since birth, by your very own largely now leftist "democracies", just turn on any TV for 5 minutes for proof... provided you still have any non brainwashed freethought cells left in your brains to spot the program... it's quite obvious what's going on... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE Fake News Then turn it off, shut it all down, and don't replace it. Go explore something different, Libertarian, Voluntary, Peace Love Anarchy... put those videos on your TV for a few months instead, and instead of trying to force others to do your bidding upon threat of death.

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Hal Finney commemoration day, May 4, his 65th birthday
by Stefan Claas 23 Apr '21

23 Apr '21

Hi all, In case here are still some old Cypherpunks among the community, it would be nice if you have something to share, from the old days back then. I like to start. In the mid nineties I mailed Hal about his bignum software he has written in Java. At that time one of his Cypherpunk Remailers ran under the email address @shell.portal.com. Java is nowadays owned by Oracle and if you enter portal.com in your Web Browser it redirects to Oracle. :-) opentimestamps.org runs one server named finney. :-) The Nym Team [1], big fans of Hal named their new testnet Finney and their test tokens HAL. :-) [1] https://nymtech.net Regards Stefan

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