tisiwoota

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A UCLA student (evidently Islamic) was tasered multiple times by campus police simply for not showing his ID at the library. In the video (below) you can hear the officers demanding that the student stand up and walk, threatening to taser him again if he does not comply– well beyond the point where he seemed physically able.

CNN: On the eve of a showdown over what could be a historic overhaul of U.S. immigration law, congressmen drew lines in the sand Sunday, leaving it all but impossible to envision what kind of legislation might ultimately win passage.

You can speak up to Congress here

A friend of mine who has done a lot of research on migrant farm laborers has passed along notice of anti-immigrant legislation that was passed by the House of Representatives and will now come before the Senate sometime this winter:

“[The bill] would make somewhere from 10 to 20 million workers in the United States aggravated felons for their simple presence. It is now nearly impossible to buy any food item that did not in some way depend on labor from an undocumented (”illegal”) worker, and in most cities, even as far North as Portland, Maine, many, if not most buildings are now built by undocumented construction workers. Agriculture/Horticulture/Silviculture/Fishing/Meat and construction are only the two industries with which I’ve had the most contact that depend heavily on undocumented labor, but the same is true of many health care workers, janitors, gardeners, and workers in all kinds of factories. The bill is also significant because, depending on the breadth of their interpretation, it also criminalizes any kind of contact with undocumented workers. For example, for the summers I interpreted for farm workers to help them receive medical treatment, I would now be punished by up to 5 years in prison if the bill were passed by the Senate. Bush has already said he would sign it.”

A group called United Farm Workers has issued an action alert as follows: (more…)

…by your printer, the EFF has discovered.

EFF and its partners report that the dots contains information about the date and time that a page was made, as well as the serial number of the printer used. These are encoded in a simple grid, in which the eight rows represent different values that are added up to reveal 5 kinds of information held in 15 columns. The final column, which is often blank, codes for something that is still a mystery to EFF researchers.

They think the information is probably used in police inquiries about counterfeiting and to track down the source of printed documents in crime cases. Their findings are published in a Dot Decoding Guide on the EFF website.

Want to know what I did during my winter in San Francisco?

I was just forwarded a link to a radio-interview with the people who run Freedom Archives, a non-profit with over 8000 hours of audiotapes from the civil rights and other solidarity movements. The director, Claude Marks, is an ex-political prisoner (it wasn’t until googling him just now, in fact, that I learned– via “The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base”– what for).

Anyway, it’s a great project. Check out the interview here (note: link launches an mp3 file). The segment begins at 24:08 (at least on MusicMatch Jukebox– the email said it began at 12:00; so perhaps results vary with the program?).

The Senate has just approved a measure sponsored by Senator McCain to block the use of torture by American armed forces.

After the way that many involved in Abu Ghraib were let off without being held accountable, it is refreshing to see some meaningful action actually being taken on this…

The below joint-degree discussion reminded me of a lecture I happened to attend while interning at AAAS, by a sociology professor who found parallels between the social dynamics that led to the institutionalization of torture in the Brazilian police force and the conditions that led torture to be instutionalized at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. That talk (quite thought-provoking) is available here [pdf], but the key facets of torture-prone environments are as follows:

1) The word “torture” is mislabeled or avoided by perpetrators and responsible officials.

[ie, Brazilian torturers often referred to it as “that type of conduct”, “a conversation with our prisoners”, or “conducting research… and looking for data”]

2) Evidence of torture is ignored, hidden, denied, and lied about.

[Think Rumsfeld’s “ghost detainees” whose existence was taken off the books and hidden from Red Cross inspectors]

3) Ad-hoc legalism is employed.

[Reclassification of Guantanamo prisoners’ legal status so that Geneva Convention standards would not apply]

4) Ideologies of “national security” are advanced.

[”Where a ‘threat’ is said to operate outside civilized law, it is argued that the response can and must be uncivilized]

5) Torture is systemic, rather than just the work of a few “bad apples”

6) Multiple actors are complicit

[”The direct perpetrators… [cannot] serially[ ] torture[] without a range of facilitators who provided organizational, technical, legal, and financial support for their violence. In the immediate torture environment [of Abu Ghraib], facilitators included translators, medical doctors, nurses, medics, guards, and dog handlers, among many others.”]

7. Responsibility is diffused; impunity is widespread.

…

And the statement that best sums up:

“Asking why someone would torture another therefore only explores a small part of the problem. Understanding that direct perpetrators’ violent actions can only occur within a system that includes facilitators and their organizations, makes it clear that facilitators are even more essential to the long-term stability and protection of a torture system than its more visible direct perpetrators.”

This past week in the joint-degree seminar we heard from med-school prof Steven Miles, who presented his research on the role of medical personnel during abuses of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. The full-text Lancet article is available here [pdf], but I thought I would transcribe some of the things I’d jotted down that I hadn’t known before:

1. Generally, that the medical personnel were not only present during tortures, in a few instances they actually took part themselves (and also used knowledge of patients’ medical records to make tortures more effectively tailored to detainees’ vulnerabilities). They also helped fake medical reports so that death certificates would not accurately reflect the role that torture played. Most medical personnel did not report abuses, and the very few who did were promptly dismissed or reassigned.

2. Further, there was widespread medical neglect– patients in need of medication often did not receive it, and those with chronic health problems were not monitored. According to Professor Miles, the US hasn’t been involved in a comparably-severe degree of medical neglect in a time of conflict since the Civil War.

3. Another interesting thing I learned is just how upset the FBI was with the Army’s approach to interrogation (which shut out experienced interrogators from setting up or overseeing the operations). Indeed, it was high-ranking professional interrogators in the FBI who played the most significant role in putting the abuses in the public spotlight.

4. Relatedly, one of the structural reasons Abu Ghraib interrogations devolved into torture was that, whereas in “normal” expert-conducted interrogations the “softening-up” [physical and psychological intimidation] and the interrogation take place in separate rooms, in Abu Ghraib that divide broke down, such that both steps were inflicted on prisoners at the same time.

5. Professor Miles also made reference to 20th century stories of torture methods: In response to fears that the enemy was developing “Manchurian Candidate” brainwashing techniques, the CIA conducted a comprehensice series of studies on torture from 1953-1974. Among other things, they concluded that making death threats was “less than useless” because it generally only yielded false confessions.
The Israelis conducted similar studies, and found that for torturees (in their case, Palistinians), torture functioned as a sort of “rite of passage” for radical groups and only _increased_ allegiance to the group.

There have been a number of articles in the news recently about China’s censorship of bloggers who [attempt to] write about democracy or human rights– In particular, Microsoft has come under fire for facilitating China’s censorship efforts by setting certain words [eg, “freedom”, “democracy”] as triggers for a disabling error message.*

Today I learned of a wiki project that coordinates “adoption” of Chinese blogs through web-hosting by volunteer bloggers:

This is how it works. A blog (or any website, really) using an independent hosting service hosts a blocked blog. (This simply means creating a subdirectory where the adopted blog can be published and store its files.) The host blog should not have a significant readership in the country where the adopted blog is blocked, because the host blog is running a (small) risk of being blocked in that country.

…By distributing the blocked blogs across a variety of hosts, the task of blocking a large number of blogs becomes increasingly difficult. If any adopted blog is blocked, it can say its thank yous and farewells to its host and then move onto a new host.

I’m not exactly sure why hosting is necessary, seeing as there are quite a few free services out there… Do those tend to be blocked? Can someone explain why such an adoption system is necessary?

…

* Iran has also tightened its internet controls– and interestingly, both countries’ repressive tactics seem limited in effectiveness only to their respective native languages. For example:

Anti-censorship activists have found that if a user creates the blog in English, it bypasses such filtering, even if it is later switched to Chinese.

…

** Also of interest: Reporters without Borders has released a list of the best blogs defending freedom of expression– definitely worth taking a look at. Some of the authors face imprisonment or other threats for their writing.

C/o PaperChase News: “Wiretaps increased by 19 percent last year, with federal and state judges approving 1,710 applications while denying none, the Administrative Office of the US Courts reported Thursday.”

This essay by William Safire in the Time’s Book Review is a good overview of threats to privacy posed by what he terms “the new security-industrial complex.”

As he notes:
“The first civil-liberty fire wall to fall was the one within government that separated the domestic security powers of the F.B.I. from the more intrusive foreign surveillance powers of the C.I.A. The 9/11 commission successfully mobilized public opinion to put dot-connection first and privacy protection last. But the second fire wall crumbled with far less public notice or approval: that was the separation between law enforcement recordkeeping and commercial market research. Almost overnight, the law’s suspect list married the corporations’ prospect list.”

This is one of the reasons I’m wary about things like national DNA databases: while Xaosseed is probably right in noting that such databases are “no worse than most of the other information ‘held in confidence’ by all your service providers”, the existing precedents provide scant reassurance that implementation would remain rigorous and that information would be kept out of the hands of those who might wish to use it for targeting specific persons or groups.