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Feds Want to ID Web Trolls Who ‘Threatened’ Silk Road Judge
http://www.wired.com/author/andygreenberg/06.08.15.
On Dark Web sites like the Silk Road black market and its discussion forums, anonymous visitors could write even the most extreme libertarian and anarchist statements without fear. The rest of the internet, as a few critics of the US judicial system may soon learn, isn’t quite so free of consequences.
Last week the Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena to the libertarian media site Reason.com, demanding that it identify six visitors to the site. The subpoena letter, obtained and published by blogger Ken White, lists trollish comments made by those six Reason readers that—whether seriously or in jest—call for violence against Katherine Forrest, the New York judge who presided over the Silk Road trial and late last month sentenced Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht to life in prison.
“It’s judges like these that should be taken out back and shot,” wrote one user named Agammamon, in a comment thread that has since been deleted from Reason.com’s story on Ulbricht’s sentencing.
“It’s judges like these that will be taken out back and shot,” answered another user named Alan.
“Why do it out back? Shoot them out front, on the steps of the courthouse,” reads a third comment from someone going by the name Cloudbuster.
The subpoena calls for Reason.com to hand over data about the six users, including their IP addresses, account information, phone numbers, email addresses, billing information, and devices associated with them. And it cites a section of the United States criminal code that forbids “mailing threatening communications.” When those communications threaten a federal judge, they constitute a felony punishable by as much as 10 years in prison. (The average internet user has no such protection.)
“We command you that all and singular business and excuses being laid aside, you appear and attend before the grand jury of the people of the United States,” reads the subpoena signed by US Attorney Preet Bharara and assistant US attorney Niketh Velamoor. In an accompanying letter, Velamoor asks that the subpoena not be publicly revealed: “The Government hereby requests that you voluntarily refrain from disclosing the existence of the subpoena to any third party.”
When WIRED called Department of Justice investigator Maxime Vales, who is named in the subpoena as the intended recipient of the users’ data, he declined to comment. Reason.com didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Forrest surprised many Silk Road watchers with her life sentence for Ulbricht, who was convicted on five felony counts that included a “kingpin” statute for running an organized crime operation. Even the prosecution had asked for only a sentence “substantially more than the mandatory minimum” of 20 years—not life. “Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country,” Forrest told Ulbricht at sentencing. “This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”
The Reason.com incident marks the second such subpoena in the past few months to result from law enforcement’s clash with the Dark Web. In March, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed the “darknetmarkets” forum on Reddit, seeking identifying information about several users who may have been associated with Evolution, another Dark Web black market that followed in the Silk Road’s footsteps.
It’s hard to imagine the Reason.com commenters actually intended violent action against Forrest, so much as the typical trollish provocation that fills so many web comment sections. Whether their comments were actually illegal remains a tough constitutional gray area; the Supreme Court has ruled that only “true threats” aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s free speech protection. Determining whether a threat is “true” requires a still-unsettled legal calculation that may factor in both the threat target’s reaction to the statement and the “intent” of the commenter.1
But in fact, Forrest has been threatened before—and more explicitly—on the Dark Web site the Hidden Wiki, and even had her personal information published, including a purported home address. “I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family,” wrote a user named ServingJustice, who also published Forrest’s personal info.
Compared with that “doxing,” Forrest’s more recent critics on Reason’s website made what appear to be only idle threats. But they did so outside of the Dark Web’s anonymity protections. And if Reason coughs up their personal data to Grand Jury investigators, they may come to regret it.
1Correction 6/10/2015: An earlier version of this story stated that regardless of the commenters’ intent, their statements were illegal under federal statutes protecting officials from threatening speech. In fact, only “true threats” would be illegal, and the definition of a true threat may involve the commenters’ intent.
http://www.wired.com/author/andygreenberg/06.08.15.
On Dark Web sites like the Silk Road black market and its discussion forums, anonymous visitors could write even the most extreme libertarian and anarchist statements without fear. The rest of the internet, as a few critics of the US judicial system may soon learn, isn’t quite so free of consequences.
Last week the Department of Justice issued a grand jury subpoena to the libertarian media site Reason.com, demanding that it identify six visitors to the site. The subpoena letter, obtained and published by blogger Ken White, lists trollish comments made by those six Reason readers that—whether seriously or in jest—call for violence against Katherine Forrest, the New York judge who presided over the Silk Road trial and late last month sentenced Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht to life in prison.
“It’s judges like these that should be taken out back and shot,” wrote one user named Agammamon, in a comment thread that has since been deleted from Reason.com’s story on Ulbricht’s sentencing.
“It’s judges like these that will be taken out back and shot,” answered another user named Alan.
“Why do it out back? Shoot them out front, on the steps of the courthouse,” reads a third comment from someone going by the name Cloudbuster.
The subpoena calls for Reason.com to hand over data about the six users, including their IP addresses, account information, phone numbers, email addresses, billing information, and devices associated with them. And it cites a section of the United States criminal code that forbids “mailing threatening communications.” When those communications threaten a federal judge, they constitute a felony punishable by as much as 10 years in prison. (The average internet user has no such protection.)
“We command you that all and singular business and excuses being laid aside, you appear and attend before the grand jury of the people of the United States,” reads the subpoena signed by US Attorney Preet Bharara and assistant US attorney Niketh Velamoor. In an accompanying letter, Velamoor asks that the subpoena not be publicly revealed: “The Government hereby requests that you voluntarily refrain from disclosing the existence of the subpoena to any third party.”
When WIRED called Department of Justice investigator Maxime Vales, who is named in the subpoena as the intended recipient of the users’ data, he declined to comment. Reason.com didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Forrest surprised many Silk Road watchers with her life sentence for Ulbricht, who was convicted on five felony counts that included a “kingpin” statute for running an organized crime operation. Even the prosecution had asked for only a sentence “substantially more than the mandatory minimum” of 20 years—not life. “Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country,” Forrest told Ulbricht at sentencing. “This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”
The Reason.com incident marks the second such subpoena in the past few months to result from law enforcement’s clash with the Dark Web. In March, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed the “darknetmarkets” forum on Reddit, seeking identifying information about several users who may have been associated with Evolution, another Dark Web black market that followed in the Silk Road’s footsteps.
It’s hard to imagine the Reason.com commenters actually intended violent action against Forrest, so much as the typical trollish provocation that fills so many web comment sections. Whether their comments were actually illegal remains a tough constitutional gray area; the Supreme Court has ruled that only “true threats” aren’t protected by the First Amendment’s free speech protection. Determining whether a threat is “true” requires a still-unsettled legal calculation that may factor in both the threat target’s reaction to the statement and the “intent” of the commenter.1
But in fact, Forrest has been threatened before—and more explicitly—on the Dark Web site the Hidden Wiki, and even had her personal information published, including a purported home address. “I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family,” wrote a user named ServingJustice, who also published Forrest’s personal info.
Compared with that “doxing,” Forrest’s more recent critics on Reason’s website made what appear to be only idle threats. But they did so outside of the Dark Web’s anonymity protections. And if Reason coughs up their personal data to Grand Jury investigators, they may come to regret it.
1Correction 6/10/2015: An earlier version of this story stated that regardless of the commenters’ intent, their statements were illegal under federal statutes protecting officials from threatening speech. In fact, only “true threats” would be illegal, and the definition of a true threat may involve the commenters’ intent.
Amnesty International Report Finds That All 50 States Fail to Meet International Standards on the Use of Lethal Force by Police
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/pres...ail-to-meet-international-standards-on-the-us
A new report by Amnesty International USA finds that all 50 states and the District of Columbia fail to comply with international standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, which require that lethal force should only be used as a last resort when strictly necessary to protect themselves or others against imminent threat of death or serious injury.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/pres...ail-to-meet-international-standards-on-the-us
A new report by Amnesty International USA finds that all 50 states and the District of Columbia fail to comply with international standards on the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, which require that lethal force should only be used as a last resort when strictly necessary to protect themselves or others against imminent threat of death or serious injury.
Insecure, Frustrated Bully With Something To Prove Considering Career In Law Enforcement
http://www.theonion.com/article/insecure-frustrated-bully-with-something-to-prove--33427
http://www.theonion.com/article/insecure-frustrated-bully-with-something-to-prove--33427
The increasing militarization of local police forces who are now armed with weapons from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan has transformed how the police respond to dealing with the public. Cops have been transformed into soldiers just as dialogue and community policing have been replaced by military-style practices that are way out of proportion to the crimes the police are trained to address. For instance,The Economist reported that “”SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a license”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organizing cockfights.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/19/orwell-huxley-and-americas-plunge-into-authoritarianism/
Wonder why so many steroid bust the last few years. They don't want us to fight back.
Probably has to do with the rising TRT popularity. Pharma companies pushing to get competition off the streets.
In context, but TBH I'm only posting it because of certain accusations of Lew Rockwell being a right wing racist site.
Ain't That Amerika: Routine State Terrorism in the Imperial Capital
By William Norman Grigg
Pro Libertate Blog
June 23, 2015
The eleven-year-old girl shrieked in horror as the shower curtain was ripped away, leaving her exposed to the view of a large male stranger. Her sense of violation was compounded by the threat of immediate, violent death: The marauder was wearing body armor and aiming an assault rifle at the naked, terrified child.
Downstairs, the offender’s comrades were ransacking the house and barking profane orders at the traumatized child’s family. Sterling Harrison, her 19-year-old brother, was sitting in front of a game console when three of the invaders burst into his upstairs room, bound him, and shoved him down the stairway. Her terrified siblings – one thirteen years of age, the other seven – were corralled and imprisoned at gunpoint in the living room along with the rest of the family.
The invaders were police, of course. Nobody in the home was suspected of committing a criminal offense. No evidence of criminal misconduct was found. The SWAT raid was carried out after 10:00 PM, in violation of municipal ordinances. The rationale for this act of state terrorism was the drug-related arrest, nearly two weeks earlier, of Mordsen Box, the 11-year-old girl’s estranged father, who hadn’t resided at the address for several months.
This after-dark military raid took place at a residence located less than three miles from the White House.
Thirteen days before the raid, Mr. Box was arrested by Metro D.C. Police after five ounces of marijuana were found following a pretext traffic stop. Officer Taylor Volpe, who conducted the stop, claimed – falsely, according to the family’s lawsuit against the MPD – that the rear license plate of Box’s car was partially obstructed by a plastic cover.
Once the stop was underway, Volpe – in keeping with his indoctrination as an opportunistic road pirate – asked if there was “anything illegal” in the vehicle. Like countless others in similar situations, Box made the tragic mistake of answering a question the officer had no right to ask. He stated that he wasn’t “aware” of anything illegal in his car, and that Volpe could carry out the search “if you have to.”
“OK, so I can look?” Volpe reiterated, inducing the intimidated driver to make his consent explicit. Within seconds the officer had found the marijuana, which was confiscated along with $180 in cash that was found in Box’s wallet. His expired driver’s license listed 1054 Quebec Place NW as his home address.
Both Mr. Box and his domestic situation were well-known to the local police. During the weeks leading up to the April 18, 2013 raid, police had paid two visits to the home while searching for Box. On both occasions family members explained that Box didn’t live at the address.
Those facts were carefully omitted by Volpe in the search warrant application filed after the traffic stop. Among the falsehoods included in Volpe’s affidavit was the claim that a “utility listing” was found for Volpe at that address. In fact, all of the utilities were listed in the name of Shandalyn Harrison, Box’s ex-girlfriend.
Invoking his “experience,” “knowledge,” and “training,” Volpe insisted that a search of the residence was justified by the supposed likelihood that a large quantity of narcotics and drug proceeds would be found at the residence. For too many judges, the rote recitation of such claims will obviate the need for actual evidence.“In many dozens of other warrant applications sworn by MPD officers to different Superior Court judges in the one-year period, MPD officers similarly claimed under oath, based on the same `training’ and `experience,’ that a broad category of people referred to as `drug traffickers’ attempt to hide the evidence of their criminal activities in other places that are not their own home,” notes the lawsuit filed on behalf of Harrison and her children. “These statements of `training’ and `experience’ thus purportedly give agents of the District’s government the ability to raid and search multiple homes and other locations for every traffic stop or street arrest in which they find contraband.”
At the time he filled out his warrant application, Taylor Volpe was a rookie officer with the MPD. He was assimilated into the department’s institutional culture very quickly.
In July 2013, just weeks after the home invasion that grew out of Volpe’s affidavit, the officer was given a “Rookie of the Year” award by the 5th District Citizen’s Advisory Council of the MPD. Those to whom that award is given “are acknowledged … by cops who know good police work when they see it (and work alongside it),” observed the Council. Given their standards of behavior, Volpe and his comrades would be suitable for employment in some of the worst Third World despotisms. In fact, they might be a bit over-qualified.
Saddam Hussein famously said that “Law consists of two lines above my signature.” For the DC Metro Police, and the pathologically indifferent judges who enable them, “Probable Cause” consists of whatever speculative, unsubstantiated claims an officer makes, as long as they are prefaced with a reference to his “experience and training.” The result is an enforcement regime in which police in the nation’s Capital behave in a manner indistinguishable from U.S. soldiers carrying out raids against the families of “suspected militants” in occupied Baghdad.
Sexual humiliation of captives during a judicially authorized home invasion appears to be a standard element of the ritual.
About three weeks before Ms. Harrison’s 11-year-old daughter was dragged naked from the shower by an armored, masked assailant, Michael Pitts was thrown to the floor of his home by SWAT operators who tore off his pants and “probed his naked genitals and anal cavity” in front of his disabled mother. The 37-year old Pitts was in the kitchen cooking for his bedridden mother when the Berserkers kicked open the front door.
The rationale for this home invasion was the arrest, three days earlier in a different location, of Pitts’ uncle Tyrone, who had been detained on the streets without probable cause by officers who demanded that the 64-year-old man submit to a body search. The pedestrian, who was not suspected of committing a violent crime, was arrested after the officers found a gun.
In the subsequent search warrant affidavit, Officer Mark Pugh listed not a single “particularized fact suggesting that guns, ammunition, or other contraband would be present in the Pitts’ home,” the family pointed out in its lawsuit against the MPD. It provided only “generic and conclusory claims that, based on their `training’ and `experience,’ [police] are likely to find guns, ammunition, and other firearms accessories in a person’s home after an arrest for gun possession is made away from the home.”
Neither firearms, ammunition, nor evidence of criminal wrongdoing were found during the raid – and as Michael Pitts can testify, the search was nothing if not thorough. Neither Officer Pugh nor his comrades bothered to explain how a body cavity search could produce evidence of a weapons-related offense. Presumably, their “training and experience” authorize them to inflict pointless humiliation of that kind, and their “qualified immunity” protects them against civil and criminal liability for such actions.
Ella Lane, a 71-year-old woman whose home was raided in October 2012, endured a different variety of sadistic abuse. The elderly woman, who had been watching television when her door was broken down by the SWAT team, was dragged to her front lawn and held, at gunpoint, in view of her neighbors for six hours while occupation troops ransacked the home in which she had lived for 37 years. During that time she was not allowed to eat, drink, or use the restroom.
Once again, the invaders failed to find any evidence of criminal activity. As they left the shattered home, one of the Stormtroopers told Lane that if he were ever called back to the house, he would “make sure that she lost her home,” recounts a lawsuit filed against the department.
As in the case of Tyrone Pitts and his family, this SWAT raid grew out of a warrantless search in which a gun was discovered. The subject of the earlier arrest – a 28-year-old man named Terrence Crossland – was the victim’s grandson. Crossland and two friends were smoking on the sidewalk when they were accosted by officers from an MPD Vice unit. Crossland was arrested for violating the District’s open container law after one of the officers found a gun in a jacket belonging to one of his friends.
It was on this basis that Officer John Wright swore out a formulaic and perjurious affidavit claiming that because of his “training and experience” he just knew that “persons involved in illegal activities maintain books, records, documentation and other papers relating to the ordering, sales, and servicing of their firearms.” He didn’t even bother pretending that Crossland’s friend lived in Lane’s house; he simply used the only address he could find.
Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, who filed the civil complaint on Lane’s behalf, correctly observes that “it was not and is not illegal to possess a firearm at one’s home in the District. Nowhere did [Officer] Wright allege … that the residents of the home did not possess valid licenses or that they had been disqualified from lawful firearms ownership.”
Nor did he establish a basis for treating Mrs. Lane as a suspect in a crime: Her only involvement in this matter consisted of living in a home near the scene of the arrest.
As Karakatsanis points out, Wright’s warrant application “sought permission for what amounted to a Colonial Era general warrant, requesting that `a Search Warrant be issued for the entire premises … for any other evidence of a crime that may be found.’”
General warrants of the kind routinely used by Washington’s Metro PD figured very prominently in the angry letter sent to London by Jefferson and his colleagues explaining the moral basis for the use of lethal defensive force against colonial-era law enforcement officers.
That comparison is unfair, given that colonial-era Redcoats tended to be more restrained than contemporary American police officers, and they were also more liable to punishment for any abuses they committed. A more appropriate comparison would be to the behavior and methods employed by the Regime’s occupation forces overseas.
The MPD’s warrant applications adapt the “pattern of life analysis” used in counterinsurgency operations – both Special Forces raids and drone strikes. “Probable cause” isn’t necessary to authorize such measures. All that is required to unleash the strike teams or dispatch the drones is for analysts to establish connections of some kind – kinship, known association, a single cell phone conversation or text message – between a potential target and a “suspected militant.” In the fashion of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, anybody who is killed or injured in the operation is classified as either a “militant” or an associate of one.
Unlike the residents of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area, people living in D.C.’s majority-black neighborhoods aren’t terrorized by the Empire’s robotic heralds of mass destruction. They are merely haunted by the knowledge that police can invade their home without cause, strip-search them in front of their families, or drag their naked, screaming grade school-age daughters out of the shower – and then threaten them with the loss of their home if they pay a return visit.
The three incidents described above, which are typical of the estimated 80-124 SWAT raids that occur every day in the American Soyuz, took place within a ten-mile radius of the White House. Two of those raids, interestingly, were carried out a few months before Miriam Carey was executed in the streets of Washington, D.C. after inadvertently driving through a traffic barricade near the White House.
No other country endures routine state terrorism of this variety. Perhaps we should consider this one facet of “American Exceptionalism.”
The Best of William Norman Grigg
Ain't That Amerika: Routine State Terrorism in the Imperial Capital
By William Norman Grigg
Pro Libertate Blog
June 23, 2015
The eleven-year-old girl shrieked in horror as the shower curtain was ripped away, leaving her exposed to the view of a large male stranger. Her sense of violation was compounded by the threat of immediate, violent death: The marauder was wearing body armor and aiming an assault rifle at the naked, terrified child.
Downstairs, the offender’s comrades were ransacking the house and barking profane orders at the traumatized child’s family. Sterling Harrison, her 19-year-old brother, was sitting in front of a game console when three of the invaders burst into his upstairs room, bound him, and shoved him down the stairway. Her terrified siblings – one thirteen years of age, the other seven – were corralled and imprisoned at gunpoint in the living room along with the rest of the family.
The invaders were police, of course. Nobody in the home was suspected of committing a criminal offense. No evidence of criminal misconduct was found. The SWAT raid was carried out after 10:00 PM, in violation of municipal ordinances. The rationale for this act of state terrorism was the drug-related arrest, nearly two weeks earlier, of Mordsen Box, the 11-year-old girl’s estranged father, who hadn’t resided at the address for several months.
This after-dark military raid took place at a residence located less than three miles from the White House.
Thirteen days before the raid, Mr. Box was arrested by Metro D.C. Police after five ounces of marijuana were found following a pretext traffic stop. Officer Taylor Volpe, who conducted the stop, claimed – falsely, according to the family’s lawsuit against the MPD – that the rear license plate of Box’s car was partially obstructed by a plastic cover.
Once the stop was underway, Volpe – in keeping with his indoctrination as an opportunistic road pirate – asked if there was “anything illegal” in the vehicle. Like countless others in similar situations, Box made the tragic mistake of answering a question the officer had no right to ask. He stated that he wasn’t “aware” of anything illegal in his car, and that Volpe could carry out the search “if you have to.”
“OK, so I can look?” Volpe reiterated, inducing the intimidated driver to make his consent explicit. Within seconds the officer had found the marijuana, which was confiscated along with $180 in cash that was found in Box’s wallet. His expired driver’s license listed 1054 Quebec Place NW as his home address.
Both Mr. Box and his domestic situation were well-known to the local police. During the weeks leading up to the April 18, 2013 raid, police had paid two visits to the home while searching for Box. On both occasions family members explained that Box didn’t live at the address.
Those facts were carefully omitted by Volpe in the search warrant application filed after the traffic stop. Among the falsehoods included in Volpe’s affidavit was the claim that a “utility listing” was found for Volpe at that address. In fact, all of the utilities were listed in the name of Shandalyn Harrison, Box’s ex-girlfriend.
Invoking his “experience,” “knowledge,” and “training,” Volpe insisted that a search of the residence was justified by the supposed likelihood that a large quantity of narcotics and drug proceeds would be found at the residence. For too many judges, the rote recitation of such claims will obviate the need for actual evidence.“In many dozens of other warrant applications sworn by MPD officers to different Superior Court judges in the one-year period, MPD officers similarly claimed under oath, based on the same `training’ and `experience,’ that a broad category of people referred to as `drug traffickers’ attempt to hide the evidence of their criminal activities in other places that are not their own home,” notes the lawsuit filed on behalf of Harrison and her children. “These statements of `training’ and `experience’ thus purportedly give agents of the District’s government the ability to raid and search multiple homes and other locations for every traffic stop or street arrest in which they find contraband.”
At the time he filled out his warrant application, Taylor Volpe was a rookie officer with the MPD. He was assimilated into the department’s institutional culture very quickly.
In July 2013, just weeks after the home invasion that grew out of Volpe’s affidavit, the officer was given a “Rookie of the Year” award by the 5th District Citizen’s Advisory Council of the MPD. Those to whom that award is given “are acknowledged … by cops who know good police work when they see it (and work alongside it),” observed the Council. Given their standards of behavior, Volpe and his comrades would be suitable for employment in some of the worst Third World despotisms. In fact, they might be a bit over-qualified.
Saddam Hussein famously said that “Law consists of two lines above my signature.” For the DC Metro Police, and the pathologically indifferent judges who enable them, “Probable Cause” consists of whatever speculative, unsubstantiated claims an officer makes, as long as they are prefaced with a reference to his “experience and training.” The result is an enforcement regime in which police in the nation’s Capital behave in a manner indistinguishable from U.S. soldiers carrying out raids against the families of “suspected militants” in occupied Baghdad.
Sexual humiliation of captives during a judicially authorized home invasion appears to be a standard element of the ritual.
About three weeks before Ms. Harrison’s 11-year-old daughter was dragged naked from the shower by an armored, masked assailant, Michael Pitts was thrown to the floor of his home by SWAT operators who tore off his pants and “probed his naked genitals and anal cavity” in front of his disabled mother. The 37-year old Pitts was in the kitchen cooking for his bedridden mother when the Berserkers kicked open the front door.
The rationale for this home invasion was the arrest, three days earlier in a different location, of Pitts’ uncle Tyrone, who had been detained on the streets without probable cause by officers who demanded that the 64-year-old man submit to a body search. The pedestrian, who was not suspected of committing a violent crime, was arrested after the officers found a gun.
In the subsequent search warrant affidavit, Officer Mark Pugh listed not a single “particularized fact suggesting that guns, ammunition, or other contraband would be present in the Pitts’ home,” the family pointed out in its lawsuit against the MPD. It provided only “generic and conclusory claims that, based on their `training’ and `experience,’ [police] are likely to find guns, ammunition, and other firearms accessories in a person’s home after an arrest for gun possession is made away from the home.”
Neither firearms, ammunition, nor evidence of criminal wrongdoing were found during the raid – and as Michael Pitts can testify, the search was nothing if not thorough. Neither Officer Pugh nor his comrades bothered to explain how a body cavity search could produce evidence of a weapons-related offense. Presumably, their “training and experience” authorize them to inflict pointless humiliation of that kind, and their “qualified immunity” protects them against civil and criminal liability for such actions.
Ella Lane, a 71-year-old woman whose home was raided in October 2012, endured a different variety of sadistic abuse. The elderly woman, who had been watching television when her door was broken down by the SWAT team, was dragged to her front lawn and held, at gunpoint, in view of her neighbors for six hours while occupation troops ransacked the home in which she had lived for 37 years. During that time she was not allowed to eat, drink, or use the restroom.
Once again, the invaders failed to find any evidence of criminal activity. As they left the shattered home, one of the Stormtroopers told Lane that if he were ever called back to the house, he would “make sure that she lost her home,” recounts a lawsuit filed against the department.
As in the case of Tyrone Pitts and his family, this SWAT raid grew out of a warrantless search in which a gun was discovered. The subject of the earlier arrest – a 28-year-old man named Terrence Crossland – was the victim’s grandson. Crossland and two friends were smoking on the sidewalk when they were accosted by officers from an MPD Vice unit. Crossland was arrested for violating the District’s open container law after one of the officers found a gun in a jacket belonging to one of his friends.
It was on this basis that Officer John Wright swore out a formulaic and perjurious affidavit claiming that because of his “training and experience” he just knew that “persons involved in illegal activities maintain books, records, documentation and other papers relating to the ordering, sales, and servicing of their firearms.” He didn’t even bother pretending that Crossland’s friend lived in Lane’s house; he simply used the only address he could find.
Attorney Alec Karakatsanis, who filed the civil complaint on Lane’s behalf, correctly observes that “it was not and is not illegal to possess a firearm at one’s home in the District. Nowhere did [Officer] Wright allege … that the residents of the home did not possess valid licenses or that they had been disqualified from lawful firearms ownership.”
Nor did he establish a basis for treating Mrs. Lane as a suspect in a crime: Her only involvement in this matter consisted of living in a home near the scene of the arrest.
As Karakatsanis points out, Wright’s warrant application “sought permission for what amounted to a Colonial Era general warrant, requesting that `a Search Warrant be issued for the entire premises … for any other evidence of a crime that may be found.’”
General warrants of the kind routinely used by Washington’s Metro PD figured very prominently in the angry letter sent to London by Jefferson and his colleagues explaining the moral basis for the use of lethal defensive force against colonial-era law enforcement officers.
That comparison is unfair, given that colonial-era Redcoats tended to be more restrained than contemporary American police officers, and they were also more liable to punishment for any abuses they committed. A more appropriate comparison would be to the behavior and methods employed by the Regime’s occupation forces overseas.
The MPD’s warrant applications adapt the “pattern of life analysis” used in counterinsurgency operations – both Special Forces raids and drone strikes. “Probable cause” isn’t necessary to authorize such measures. All that is required to unleash the strike teams or dispatch the drones is for analysts to establish connections of some kind – kinship, known association, a single cell phone conversation or text message – between a potential target and a “suspected militant.” In the fashion of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy, anybody who is killed or injured in the operation is classified as either a “militant” or an associate of one.
Unlike the residents of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area, people living in D.C.’s majority-black neighborhoods aren’t terrorized by the Empire’s robotic heralds of mass destruction. They are merely haunted by the knowledge that police can invade their home without cause, strip-search them in front of their families, or drag their naked, screaming grade school-age daughters out of the shower – and then threaten them with the loss of their home if they pay a return visit.
The three incidents described above, which are typical of the estimated 80-124 SWAT raids that occur every day in the American Soyuz, took place within a ten-mile radius of the White House. Two of those raids, interestingly, were carried out a few months before Miriam Carey was executed in the streets of Washington, D.C. after inadvertently driving through a traffic barricade near the White House.
No other country endures routine state terrorism of this variety. Perhaps we should consider this one facet of “American Exceptionalism.”
The Best of William Norman Grigg
Of course... "The police department consulted with the Baldwin County District Attorney’s Office and Corporal Coleman will not face criminal charges. He does face “sanctions” with the police department and city."
Police dog dies after being left in hot car
ALABAMA (WKRG) — There is tragic news involving the Gulf Shores Police Department in Alabama. A K-9 officer has died after he was left inside a hot patrol car. The dog’s name was “Mason”. WKRG has learned the K-9 officer was left inside the patrol car on Thursday. The dog and his handler, Corporal Josh Coleman, had attended the Hurricane Prep conference in Gulf Shores.
Coleman says he forgot Mason was in the backseat and left the dog inside the patrol car. There is no word on how long the dog stayed inside the vehicle. Corporal Coleman found the dog in distress once he noticed Mason was missing. The dog was rushed to a veterinarian. The dog was then transported to another vet in Pensacola. Gulf Shores Police say the dog was improving Friday morning, but died later in the evening. The Gulf Shores Police Department acquired Mason on November 17, 2014. The department just celebrated the dog’s third birthday on June 9.
The police department consulted with the Baldwin County District Attorney’s Office and Corporal Coleman will not face criminal charges. He does face “sanctions” with the police department and city.
Police dog dies after being left in hot car
ALABAMA (WKRG) — There is tragic news involving the Gulf Shores Police Department in Alabama. A K-9 officer has died after he was left inside a hot patrol car. The dog’s name was “Mason”. WKRG has learned the K-9 officer was left inside the patrol car on Thursday. The dog and his handler, Corporal Josh Coleman, had attended the Hurricane Prep conference in Gulf Shores.
Coleman says he forgot Mason was in the backseat and left the dog inside the patrol car. There is no word on how long the dog stayed inside the vehicle. Corporal Coleman found the dog in distress once he noticed Mason was missing. The dog was rushed to a veterinarian. The dog was then transported to another vet in Pensacola. Gulf Shores Police say the dog was improving Friday morning, but died later in the evening. The Gulf Shores Police Department acquired Mason on November 17, 2014. The department just celebrated the dog’s third birthday on June 9.
The police department consulted with the Baldwin County District Attorney’s Office and Corporal Coleman will not face criminal charges. He does face “sanctions” with the police department and city.
Police Department Reduces Costs By Using Same Evidence For Every Investigation
http://www.theonion.com/article/police-department-reduces-costs-by-using-same-evid-36476
JACKSONVILLE, FL—Noting that the new procedure is far more efficient and has completely streamlined the investigative process, representatives from the Jacksonville Police Department confirmed Wednesday they have been able to sharply reduce costs by reusing the same evidence in every case they handle.
“Our department used to spend considerable time and manpower scouring crime scenes for clues, obtaining search warrants, interrogating suspects, and interviewing witnesses, but since we started using the same gun and DNA swab for every crime, we’ve been able to breeze through investigations in no time,” said police chief Alec McCarthy, who stated that the Jacksonville police have been able to close every case that has come up since the new protocol was enacted as well as make a significant dent in the department’s accumulated backlog of unsolved crimes.
“Homicide investigations would often drag on for weeks, but now we’re in and out in two hours. We knocked out a triple murder, four breaking and enterings, and two aggravated assaults with a deadly weapon just this morning, and we’re on track to wrap up a couple of old child abduction cold cases by the end of the day.”
Citing the success of the new program, the department said it is considering reusing the same signed confession for each case as well.
http://www.theonion.com/article/police-department-reduces-costs-by-using-same-evid-36476
JACKSONVILLE, FL—Noting that the new procedure is far more efficient and has completely streamlined the investigative process, representatives from the Jacksonville Police Department confirmed Wednesday they have been able to sharply reduce costs by reusing the same evidence in every case they handle.
“Our department used to spend considerable time and manpower scouring crime scenes for clues, obtaining search warrants, interrogating suspects, and interviewing witnesses, but since we started using the same gun and DNA swab for every crime, we’ve been able to breeze through investigations in no time,” said police chief Alec McCarthy, who stated that the Jacksonville police have been able to close every case that has come up since the new protocol was enacted as well as make a significant dent in the department’s accumulated backlog of unsolved crimes.
“Homicide investigations would often drag on for weeks, but now we’re in and out in two hours. We knocked out a triple murder, four breaking and enterings, and two aggravated assaults with a deadly weapon just this morning, and we’re on track to wrap up a couple of old child abduction cold cases by the end of the day.”
Citing the success of the new program, the department said it is considering reusing the same signed confession for each case as well.
Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporate_capitalism_is_the_foundation_of_police_20150705
Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporate_capitalism_is_the_foundation_of_police_20150705
Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.
More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages.
alot of cops take steroids, as you can see how some of them are physically looking.
Mostly every industrial state treis to be come a police state to become more control of the people and let their life run more like "living (working like a life) the factory".
That`s the only way to keep the people make working like mahines, drugs should not be taken by workers. What rich people do we all know. But they do not ave to work like a machine so can do that is what they think
Mostly every industrial state treis to be come a police state to become more control of the people and let their life run more like "living (working like a life) the factory".
That`s the only way to keep the people make working like mahines, drugs should not be taken by workers. What rich people do we all know. But they do not ave to work like a machine so can do that is what they think
Southern California is a police state on PEDs roadblocks everywhere, checkpoints everywhere, random checkpoints almost daily. Complete lunacy. Live here and you know it
Korat,
Do you have an articles you can post pertaining to this? This would be good on here. Thanks
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