Civil Liberties

WLBT | Twins living in the Colony Park Apartments say they were unlawfully arrested by Pearl Police Tuesday after watching and recording the shooting investigation at their apartment complex.  The teenagers were transported to Brandon and held for hours before being released.  Now, the family wants to know why.

ABC News | A bill legalizing marijuana for medical purposes has passed the Connecticut Senate. The state joins 16 others and the District of Columbia in enacting such legislation.  State senators voted 21-to-13 in favor of the measure early Saturday, after nearly 10 hours of debate dominated by bill opponent Republican Sen. Toni Boucher.

The Intel Hub | The trend of individuals being arrested for legally filming police in public is an issue which gets me especially frustrated and a favorite topic of mine to bring up here at End the Lie.  Thankfully, recently individuals have been striking back through lawsuits and in some cases charges have been dropped.

The Daily Chronic | A Tennessee bill that would have legalized medical marijuana died following testimony before a key House committee on Wednesday, despite testimony from supporters that the legislation would benefit hundreds of chronically ill people and generate roughly an added $34 million for the state.

AKA Scope | After the successful fight against both the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual IP Act, governments around the world thought it would be a good time to showcase that they’re secretly discussing ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Acting basically as a worldwide version of SOPA, the bill has already been opposed by various countries with the European Parliament due to send ACTA to the European Court of Justice. However, they’ve decided against that and will instead make the decisions themselves in regards whether to pass it or not. Thus, the bill could be passed in the next ten weeks.

Wired | The FBI taught its agents that they could sometimes “bend or suspend the law” in their hunt for terrorists and criminals. Other FBI instructional material, discovered during a months-long review of FBI counterterrorism training, warned agents against shaking hands with “Asians” and said Arabs were prone to “Jekyll & Hyde temper tantrums.”

Slate.com | Bennett Barbour was convicted in 1978 of a rape he didn’t commit. At trial, he had an alibi supported by several witnesses. He didn’t match the victim’s description of her attacker. Barbour suffers from a severe bone disease that would have made it nearly impossible for him to be the assailant. Police found no physical evidence connecting him to the crime, beyond the eyewitness identification by his alleged victim. Barbour was handed an 18-year sentence and paroled after nearly five years.

The New American | Cissna has suffered her own negative experience with the federal agency. Last year at the Seattle-area Sea-Tac International Airport, after a naked-body scan revealed her breast-cancer surgery scars, the TSA insisted on putting her through an intrusive pat-down. She refused.

RAW Story | The British government is in the process of developing a scheme whereby all phone companies and broadband internet providers will be required to store customer transaction data for a year and hand it over to security services upon request.

Rolling Stone | Back when he was running for president in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that medical marijuana was an issue best left to state and local governments. "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue," he vowed, promising an end to the Bush administration's high-profile raids on providers of medical pot, which is legal in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

Raw Story | The activists said they had submitted 12,000 additional signatures, on top of the 163,000 submitted earlier this year. The additional signatures were required after the Secretary of State said that a random sampling of entries found less than 50 percent were valid.

AKASCOPE | During an Arizona legal case, the Department of Justice are making a case that the utilization of a fake name will be considered fraud. Furthermore, the individual in question will not be able to expect privacy if they do so.

Torrent Freak | The world is witnessing the largest offline protest against copyright legislation today. Massive demonstrations against the draconian anti-piracy treaty ACTA are spanning four continents, with protests in more than 200 European cities alone. Hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets to prevent their countries and the European Parliament from putting the free Internet at risk by ratifying ACTA,

IP Tegrity | The  Minister of State for Business, Mark Prisk,  said that an announcement on website blocking for copyright enforcement is "imminent".  He  did not give any detail,  but did hint that the proposals would be ‘welcome’.

Washington Post | Latin American leaders have joined together to condemn the U.S. government for soaring drug violence in their countries, blaming the United States for the transnational cartels that have grown rich and powerful smuggling dope north and guns south.

CNN | You reap what you sow! She obviously sounds like she has a guilty conscience.

NORML | Who are these people, President Obama?  They’re not the people out here who keep making marijuana legalization the number one topic of these online forums.  They’re not the millions whose lives are impacted by a marijuana arrest; the tokers and their families who lose jobs, houses, kids, freedom, assets, respect, security, and peace of mind because of marijuana prohibition.

Bloomberg | The U.S. Supreme Court for the first time limited police power to track people using GPS devices, ruling in a case that will shape the privacy rights Americans should expect from a new generation of wireless electronics.

CBS Detroit | A grass-roots committee working toward ending marijuana prohibition in Michigan is campaigning to amend state law and legalize marijuana use for adults 21 and older. The amendment would not apply to or change workplace or driving issues regarding marijuana.

 Torrent Freak | A few days ago the news broke that the pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was put on hold until consensus was reached.  Although the announcement was rather vague, some news sites and blogs declared SOPA dead, or “shelved,” or erased from history.

Courthouse News Service | Fred Robinson, 69, is accused of stealing more than $250,000 of public money from the Paideia Academy charter school to start a day-care business, and of taking as much as $175,000 from his job in Treasurer Larry Williams' office, where he was allegedly a no-show.

Chicago Tribune | Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed the changes to the city's parade ordinance in his December request to the City Council for expanded powers to deal with the NATO and G-8 summits, set to overlap between May 19-21. The mayor said his request for new spending authority and additional restrictions on public gatherings "is temporary and it's just for the conference and it's appropriate."

Huffington Post | Half a year after the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), the Obama administration is set to release a series of reforms to the current gun law, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Thursday.

ACLU | President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision.  While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations

New York Times | One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

The Independent | The demonstrator, who is part of the group occupying the empty UBS building dubbed the "Bank of Ideas", said he was told he would not be allowed on the Ryanair flight to Malaga because the pilot feared he might distribute leaflets and "upset other passengers".

OpEd News | Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) on Senate floor explaining it was Obama who requested the provision for indefinite military detention of American citizens without charge or trial.   Levin is a primary co-sponsor of the bill along with Sen. John McCain, and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.    Senator Diane Feinstein recently confirmed that she was unable to excise Section 1031 in an email:

New York TImes | Israel’s Defense Ministry apologized on Monday for forcing a pregnant New York Times photographer to remove her clothes and submit to a physical search after she had already passed through an X-ray machine three times at a checkpoint in Gaza last month.

Sydney Morning Herald | BANGKOK: Thailand has warned users of Facebook that they could face prosecution under harsh lese-majeste laws if they press ''share'' or ''like'' on images or articles considered unflattering to the Thai monarchy.

Telegraph | A British company called Gamma International marketed hacking software to governments that exploited the vulnerability via a bogus update to iTunes, Apple's media player, which is installed on more than 250 million machines worldwide.

KURZWEIL | CarrierIQ is seeking to block information on its surveillance software, secretly installed on millions of of Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, but Android developer Trevor Eckhart refuses to remove the company’s training manuals from his website, Wired Threat Level reports.

Torrent Freak | Google has expanded its search blacklist to include many of the top file-sharing sites on the Internet, including The Pirate Bay. The changes were quietly processed and appear to be broader than previous additions. Google’s blacklist prevents the names of sites appearing in their Instant and Autocomplete search services, while the pages themselves remain indexed.

ACLU | The first we heard of this technology was in a March 2002 piece in The Boston Globe with the headline “Parking Enforcement on a Roll.” At that time, the technology was being deployed to scan parking lots for licenses associated with unpaid parking tickets and other fines.

CBC | Police organizations across the country co-operated to spy on community organizations and activists in what the RCMP called one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history, documents reveal.

The Atlantic | Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot--or even switching his rifle off of "safety"--he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena's. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.

The Wash | I hate these fucking full body scanners. Luckily, I have not had to be faced with going through one as of yet and I’d hate to be the TSA officer that would try and make me go through one. Most likely, depending on my day, that encounter will not be pretty.

CNN | "Political expression deserves the highest level of protection and it was unacceptable for the state to suddenly shut down protesters' speech and forcibly oust them from Legislative Plaza that has long been used as a place for peaceful expression," said Hedy Weinberg, executive director at the ACLU of Tennessee.

Gigaom | Many internet users in the United States have watched with horror as countries like France and Britain have proposed or instituted so-called “three strikes” laws, which cut off internet access to those accused of repeated acts of copyright infringement. Now the U.S. has its own version of this kind of law, and it is arguably much worse: the Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced in the House this week, would give governments and private corporations unprecedented powers to remove websites from the internet on the flimsiest of grounds, and would force internet service providers to play the role of copyright police.

PennLive The Patriot News | The 42-year-old Black man also claims authorities didn’t return all the money they took after an arbitration board appointed by Dauphin County Court rebuffed the forfeiture request in March. He contends that nearly $43,000 was seized and that he received only $28,980 back.

Think Progress | The Oakland Police Department’s heavy-handed use of force — which included using flash grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas — shocked the world as the city moved to crack down on Occupy Oakland.  But the harsh crackdown was not without a historical precedent. In April 2003, the department violently cracked down on raucous Iraq war demonstrations, attacking protesters with concussion grenades, “sting balls,” and other similar weapons...

Huffington Post | "We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove," Google wrote in its Transparency Report. "Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

Demand Progress | The rumors were true: The new Blacklist Bill could effectively destroy YouTube, Twitter, and other sites that rely on user-generated content by making the sites' owners legally responsible for content their users post.  It also includes provisions that would make it a felony to stream unlicensed content -- including cover band performances, karaoke videos, video game play-throughs, and more.

New York Times | The Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing for “security, energy management, data harvesting and digital media,” according to the Illuminating Concepts website.

The Independent | Specialist detectives from the Metropolitan Police have discovered the existence of a secret mobile phone within News International's east London headquarters that was used in more than 1,000 incidents of illegal hacking.

The Weed Blog | Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos said this week that legalization of marijuana would allow the war on drugs to move forward by shifting focus to harder drugs and helping to stop the international violence associated with drug trafficking.

ARS Technica | For the last two years, Google has released comprehensive reports twice a year on the frequency of takedown requests and government data requests received in countries around the world. The latest data, released on Tuesday, focuses on the first half of 2011.

The Offices of US Senator Ron Wyden | Surrounded by technology that was considered cutting edge when major digital surveillance laws were written, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) welcomed U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R- Ill.) as a cosponsor of the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act (GPS) which provides sorely needed legal clarity for the use of electronically-obtained location data that can be used to track and log the location and movements of individual Americans. The GPS Act was introduced in June by Wyden and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

Oregon Business Report | Two Congressmen have written a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the FTC to investigate certain websites’ use of “supercookies” to track the activities of website visitors after they have left the website and without their knowledge. The letter, written by Congressmen Joe Barton (R-TX) and Ed Markey (D-MA), is based on an August Wall Street Journal article discussing their use.

Extra Torrent | Last week the UK’s High Court of Justice held the meeting between the country’s Internet service provider BT and pro-copyright outfit Motion Picture Association. The purpose of the meeting was to talk about the countermeasures supposed to be applied against the illegal Newzbin2 site. If you are still not aware, BT was demanded to block access to this online service.

Reason.com | The latest Gallup poll shows a record high of 50 percent of Americans in favor of legalizing marijuana use. This follows a consistent upward trend, picking up speed in 2006 when 36 percent of Americans favored marijuana legalization.