Queer journalist seeks answers after G20 nab

James Burrell /Xtra National

“The Pride weekend has shown that an overwhelming majority of the community appreciate and support (the) police,” says Thomas Decker, the Toronto Police Service’s lesbian, gay, bi and trans [LGBT] liaison officer.

Decker’s comments come after a June 30 Pride week reception, held by police chief Bill Blair at the 519 Church St Community Centre, turned ugly. Police kept gay and trans people out of the 519 for more than an hour as a growing crowd on the sidewalk demanded answers about police conduct during the G20 summit.

Pride Toronto (PT) executive director Tracey Sandilands told the crowd through a megaphone that the event was organized by Toronto Police — not her organization — and that event organizers were dealing with capacity issues. In fact, the event was organized by the Toronto Police Services Board as a PT affiliate event. The PT logo appeared on the invitations and photos taken inside show the reception room well below capacity.

Blair arrived in a dark SUV to chants of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Surrounded by police, he pushed through the crowd, entering through the front door. He paused to tip his hat, a flippant move that seemed only to anger the crowd.

Journalist Lisa Walter outside the June 30 police Pride reception. Watch the video at the end of this story.

Lisa Walter was among the crowd at the 519. As a journalist covering the G20 for Our Times, an independent Canadian labour magazine, she was arrested on June 26 after shooting photos and video of the arrests of two colleagues.

“We had shown our press passes; officers said mine was fake. I was called ‘a fucking dyke,’ a ‘douchebag’ and other slurs by officers,” she says. “The most aggressive sergeant loudly questioned my gender and started calling me ‘sir’ and ‘mister’. He mocked my need for medication and later claimed I was the ‘girl in high school who never got laid.’”

Decker says anyone who feels they were mistreated should file a formal complaint to have their case investigated.

“All interactions with members of the public at the Prisoner Processing Centre were recorded using CCTV recording equipment,” he says. “As allegations proceed to formal complaints, they will be fully investigated. Persons who feel they have been treated inappropriately can file a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD).”

“Like the overwhelming majority of people, I was not informed why I was arrested, given access to a lawyer or phone, nor informed of my rights,” says Walter, who has since retained a lawyer and filed a complaint with the OIPRD.

“I was handcuffed with plastic ties the entire 13 hours of my detention, and my medication was withheld for about nine hours. When an officer finally arrived to give it to me, I was told I had to be in a separate cell. I was released at about 1:30 am… without having been charged with any violation. Later I discovered that my video camera’s hard drive had been erased, and the memory card from my other camera taken.”

Event organizers told a crowd of angry gay people that they were being kept out of their own community centre due to capacity issues on June 30. But photos taken inside show the room nearly empty.

(Matt Mills photo)

“We do know that some in the LGBT community were unfairly and illegally arrested as part of the mass arrests that occurred,” says Nathalie Des Rosiers, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA).

“And, as such, they also share much of the same treatment that was given to many other people who were peacefully demonstrating as well as some journalists, human-rights monitors and passersby.”

Des Rosiers says she has heard several reports of officers acting with courtesy and respect when dealing with the public during the summit but admits the relationship between the community and police force has been affected.

She says law reforms are needed if both sides are to move forward.

“Unfortunately, there has been some loss of confidence and trust, and it is my hope that it will be regained by the way in which they confront the mistakes that were made and make the changes that are appropriate so that it does not happen again,” says Des Rosiers.

To file a complaint with the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD), go to oiprd.on.ca.

Watch our video report from the June 30 protest at the police Pride reception:

The White House’s Bait and Switch on the LGBT Community

Posted by lauraflanders at Alternet.org
July 13, 2010

LGBT voters came out and contributed en masse to Barack Obama’s campaign. A year ago, he promised them action on, among other things, repeal of the military’s discrimination policy, Don’t ask Don’t Tell. This May it seemed as if they’d won. To much ballyhoo, on the eve of a war appropriation vote, the White House announced what sounded like repeal.

Now half the LGBT community thinks Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is already repealed, Miriam Perez of Feministing told GRITtv recently.

Except what the President actually announced wasn’t repeal. It was a compromise that opened the way for a vote on repeal if a Pentagon working group, the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all approved such a thing.

Now it turns out that 400,000 service members are going to have their say as well.

As the jobless go with nothing and school libraries are shut up tight for lack of cash, we the taxpayers have, it turns out, paid a research firm some $4.4 million to send an email-survey to 400,000 troops.

Leaked copies include the following questions: “If a wartime situation made it necessary for you to share a room, berth or field tent with someone you believe to be a gay or lesbian service member, what are you likely to do?” (The survey offers options.) “If Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is repealed and you are assigned to bathroom facilities with open bay showers with a gay or lesbian service member, would you: Take no action? Use shower at different time?”

There’s also a question asking service members, if a gay or lesbian member moved into military housing with a same-sex partner, would they pick up their family and move out.

There’s no question about how troops feel about serving under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (of course.)

And — no question, this is a first. No one surveyed the troops when it was time to desegregate. No one surveyed male soldiers about allowing women in. When it came to school desegregation, the Supreme Court didn’t survey white kids. In fact it’s impossible to imagine such a thing.

About as impossible as imagining that LGBT campaign contributors will be doling out much cash to Democratic candidates this fall.

The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Support us by signing up for our podcast, and follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.

Are You a “Perfect Citizen”?

By Tom Burghardt – BLN Contributing Writer

Big Brother Deploys Snooping Sensors on Private Networks

Rather than addressing an impending social catastrophe, Western governments, which serve the interests of the economic elites, have installed a “Big Brother” police state with a mandate to confront and repress all forms of opposition and social dissent. — Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Preface, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, Montreal: Global Research, 2010, p. xx.

In a sign that illegal surveillance programs launched by the Bush administration are accelerating under President Obama, The Wall Street Journal revealed last week that a National Security Agency (NSA) program, PERFECT CITIZEN, is under development.

With a cover story that this is merely a “research” effort meant to “detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants,” it is also clear that the next phase in pervasive government spying is underway.

With “cybersecurity” morphing into a new “public-private” iteration of the “War On Terror,” WSJ reporter Siobhan Gorman disclosed that giant defense contractor Raytheon “recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that Raytheon had positioned itself, and profited from, a media-driven panic. As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock documented for CorpWatch, “as the primary spying unit of defense industry giant Raytheon,” the firm’s Intelligence and Information Services division (Raytheon IIS) is the premier provider of command and control systems “capable of transforming data into actionable intelligence.”

According to Shorrock, the unit’s “most important clients … are the NSA, NGA, and NRO, for which it provides signals and imaging processing, as well as information security software and tools;” in other words, agencies that are at the heart of America’s electronic warfare complex.

The program, Gorman writes, “would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack.” While Journal sources claim the program “wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system,” a leaked Raytheon email paints a different picture, in line with other NSA intrusions into domestic affairs.

“The overall purpose of the [program] is our Government…feel[s] that they need to insure the Public Sector is doing all they can to secure Infrastructure critical to our National Security,” the whistleblower writes. “Perfect Citizen is Big Brother.”

These revelations have triggered concerns that projects like PERFECT CITIZEN, and others that remain classified, signal a new round of secret state surveillance and privacy-killing programs under the catch-all euphemism “cybersecurity.”

The Journal reports that information captured by PERFECT CITIZEN “could also have applications beyond the critical infrastructure sector, officials said, serving as a data bank that would also help companies and agencies who call upon NSA for help with investigations of cyber attacks, as Google did when it sustained a major attack late last year.”

In other words, the program will have major implications “beyond the critical infrastructure sector” and could adversely affect the privacy rights of all Americans. In fact, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to hypothesize that PERFECT CITIZEN may very well be related to other “intrusion detection programs” such as Einstein 3′s deep-packet inspection capabilities that can read, and catalogue, the content of email messages flowing across private telecommunications networks.

One unnamed military source told the Journal, “you’ve got to instrument the network to know what’s going on, so you have situational awareness to take action.”

However, as the UK publication The Register noted, “many of the networks that the NSA would wish to place Perfect Citizen equipment on are privately owned, however, and some could also potentially carry information offering scope for ‘mission creep’ outside an infrastructure-security context.”

The Register’s Lewis Page, a former Royal Navy Commander and frequent critic of the surveillance state, writes that “full access to power company systems might allow the NSA to work out whether anyone was at home at a given address. Transport and telecoms information would also make for a potential bonanza for intrusive monitoring.”

When queried whether the program would be yet another snooping tool deployed against the public, NSA spokesperson Judith Emmel told The Register Friday: “PERFECT CITIZEN is purely a vulnerabilities-assessment and capabilities-development contract.”

According to NSA, “This is a research and engineering effort. There is no monitoring activity involved, and no sensors are employed in this endeavor. Specifically, it does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems.”

When specifically asked by Page if NSA is “seeking to spy on US citizens by means of examining their power or phone usage, tracking them through transport systems etc, the NSA would simply never think of such a thing.”

“Any suggestions that there are illegal or invasive domestic activities associated with this contracted effort are simply not true. We strictly adhere to both the spirit and the letter of US laws and regulations,” insisted Emmel.

Which raises an inevitable question: what would lead a Raytheon insider to compare the project to “Big Brother”? This is strong language from an employee of one of America’s largest defense firms, a company in the No. 4 slot on Washington Technology’s 2010 Top 100 list of prime federal contractors with some $6.7 billion in total revenue, 88% of which are derived from defense contracts.

At this point we don’t know, and Siobhan Gorman hasn’t told us since the Journal, as of this writing, hasn’t seen fit to enlighten the public with the full text, if one exists, as to why someone obviously familiar with the program would put their job at risk if PERFECT CITIZEN were simply a “vulnerabilities-assessment and capabilities-development contract” and not something far more sinister.

The Pentagon Rules. Any Questions?

The Journal reported that the project began as “a small-scale effort” under the code name APRIL STRAWBERRY. Over time, the classified program was “expanded with funding from the multibillion-dollar Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, which started at the end of the Bush administration and has been continued by the Obama administration,” Gorman wrote. Now, with billions of dollars available “the NSA is now seeking to map out intrusions into critical infrastructure across the country.”

As Antifascist Calling reported earlier this year (see: “Obama’s National Cybersecurity Initiative Puts NSA in the Driver’s Seat”), although the administration has released portions of the Bush regime’s National Security Presidential Directive 54 (NSPD-54) in a sanitized version called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), the full scope of the program remains shrouded in secrecy.

Indeed, most of NSPD-54 and CNCI have never been released to the public. This led the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) to write in a 2008 report that “virtually everything about the initiative is classified, and most of the information that is not classified is categorized as ‘For Official Use Only’.”

Due to the opacity of the highly-secretive program and stonewalling by the administration, the SASC joined their colleagues on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and called for the initiative to be scaled-back “because policy and legal reviews are not complete, and because the technology is not mature.”

Hardly beacons of transparency themselves when it comes to overseeing depredations wrought by the secret state, nevertheless SASC questioned the wisdom of a program that “preclude public education, awareness and debate about the policy and legal issues, real or imagined, that the initiative poses in the areas of privacy and civil liberties. … The Committee strongly urges the [Bush] Administration to reconsider the necessity and wisdom of the blanket, indiscriminate classification levels established for the initiative.”

In fact, as the investigative journalism web site ProPublica reported last summer, the White House “has erased all mention of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from its Web site. The removal, which was done with no public notice, has underlined questions about the Obama administration’s commitment to the board.” As of this writing, it remains an empty shell.

Despite repeated efforts by civil liberties and privacy groups, the Obama administration has been no more forthcoming than the previous regime in answering these critical concerns, particularly when the “policy and legal issues” are cloaked in secrecy under a cover of “national security.”

Instead, CNCI’s “Initiative #12. Define the Federal role for extending cybersecurity into critical infrastructure domains,” offer little more than linguistic sedatives meant to lull the public as to how and through what means the administration plans to build “on the existing and ongoing partnership between the Federal Government and the public and private sector owners and operators of Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR).”

While the administration claims that the “Department of Homeland Security and its private-sector partners have developed a plan of shared action with an aggressive series of milestones and activities,” as we now know the civilian, though securocratic-minded Homeland Security bureaucracy is being supplanted by the Pentagon’s National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command as the invisible hands guiding the nation’s “cybersecurity” policies.

As I reported last month (see: “Through the Wormhole: The Secret State’s Mad Scheme to Control the Internet”), corporate greed and venality aren’t the only motives behind hyped-up “cyber threats.” Armed with multibillion dollar budgets, most of which are concealed from public view under a black cone of top secret classifications, agencies such as NSA are positioning themselves as gatekeepers over America’s electronic communications infrastructure.

The Media’s Role

With corporate media serving as “message force multipliers” for the flood of alarmist reports emanating from industry-sponsored think tanks such as the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), or lobby shops like the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), it is becoming clear that consensus has been reached amongst Washington power brokers, one that will have a deleterious effect on the free speech and privacy rights of all Americans.

Floated perhaps as a means to test the waters for restricting internet access, The New York Times reported July 4 that “the Internet affords anonymity to its users–a boon to privacy and freedom of speech. But that very anonymity is also behind the explosion of cybercrime that has swept across the Web.”

Reporter John Markoff, a conduit for “cyberwar” scaremongering, informs us that “Howard Schmidt, the nation’s cyberczar, offered the Obama administration’s proposal to make the Web a safer place–a ‘voluntary trusted identity’ system that would be the high-tech equivalent of a physical key, a fingerprint and a photo ID card, all rolled into one.”

“The system” Markoff writes, “might use a smart identity card, or a digital credential linked to a specific computer, and would authenticate users at a range of online services.”

Schmidt has described the Obama administration’s approach (note the warm and fuzzy phrase hiding the steel fist) as a “voluntary ecosystem” in which “individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on.”

Markoff’s reporting would be humorous if we didn’t already know that secret state agencies themselves have already compromised the Secure Socket Layer certification process (SSL, the tiny lock that appears during supposedly “secure” online transactions), as computer security and privacy researchers Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm revealed in their paper, Certified Lies: Detecting and Defeating Government Interception Attacks Against SSL.

In March, Soghoian and Stamm introduced the public to “a new attack, the compelled certificate creation attack, in which government agencies compel a certificate authority to issue false SSL certificates that are then used by intelligence agencies to covertly intercept and hijack individuals’ secure Web-based communications.” They provided “alarming evidence” that suggests “that this attack is in active use,” and that a niche security firm, Packet Forensics, is already marketing “extremely small, covert surveillance devices for networks” to government agencies.

Not everyone is thrilled by Schmidt’s call to create this allegedly “voluntary” system. Lauren Weinstein, the editor of Privacy Journal, told the Times that “such a scheme is a pre-emptive push toward what would eventually be a mandated Internet ‘driver’s license’ mentality.”

The stampede for increased state controls are accelerating. Stewart Baker, the NSA’s chief counsel under Bush, told the Times that the “privacy standards the administration wants to adopt will make the system both unwieldy and less effective and not good for security.” Baker and his ilk argue that all internet users “should be forced to register and identify themselves, in the same way that drivers must be licensed to drive on public roads.”

Considering that police have increasingly turned to license plate readers that are fast becoming “a fixture in local police arsenals,” as the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed last month, and that such devices have been deployed for political surveillance here in the heimat and abroad, as both The Guardian and Seattle Weekly disclosed in reports documenting outrageous secret state spying, a licensing scheme for internet users is an ominous analogy indeed!

The Grim Road Ahead

A confidence game only works when “marks,” in this case American citizens, allow themselves to be defrauded by a person or group who have gained their trust.

And when trust cannot be won through reason, fear tends to take over as a powerful motivator. This is amply on display when it comes to Washington’s ginned-up “cybersecurity” panic.

According to this reading, fraudulent internet schemes, identity theft, even espionage by state- and non-state actors (say corporate spies who benefit from NSA’s ECHELON program) have been transformed into a “war,” one which Bush’s former Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, currently an executive vice president with the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm, claims the U.S. is “losing.”

But as security technology expert Bruce Schneier wrote last week, “There’s a power struggle going on in the U.S. government right now.

“It’s about who is in charge of cyber security, and how much control the government will exert over civilian networks. And by beating the drums of war, the military is coming out on top.”

Schneier avers that “the entire national debate on cyberwar is plagued with exaggerations and hyperbole.” Googling “cyberwar,” as well as “‘cyber Pearl Harbor,’ ‘cyber Katrina,’ and even ‘cyber Armageddon’–gives some idea how pervasive these memes are. Prefix ‘cyber’ to something scary, and you end up with something really scary.”

Hackers, criminals and sociopaths have been around since the birth of the “information superhighway.” Schneier writes, “we surely need to improve our cybersecurity. But words have meaning, and metaphors matter. There’s a power struggle going on for control of our nation’s cybersecurity strategy, and the NSA and DoD are winning. If we frame the debate in terms of war, if we accept the military’s expansive cyberspace definition of ‘war,’ we feed our fears.”

This is precisely the intent of our political masters. And if the purpose of “cyberwar” hype is to breed fear, mistrust and helplessness in the face of relentless attacks by shadowy actors only a mouse click away then, as Schneier sagely warns: “We reinforce the notion that we’re helpless–what person or organization can defend itself in a war?–and others need to protect us. We invite the military to take over security, and to ignore the limits on power that often get jettisoned during wartime.”

Destroy trust, increase fear: create the “Perfect Citizen.”

Gayle King Speaks Out for Marriage Equality

Gayle King who is the editor of O Magazine and host of the Gayle King radio show has spoken up in favor of marriage equality for same-gender couples. King is best known for being Oprah Winfrey’s closest friend and has been given a national platform thanks to their close relationship.

New allies are always welcome and we applaud Ms. King for speaking out in favor of LGBT civil rights.

Lady Gaga loves her gay Canadian little monsters

Lady Gaga brought her Monster Ball tour back to Toronto last night, and she certainly lived up to her nickname “Lady Gay Gay.”

During the closing number “Bad Romance,” Gaga grabbed a Canadian rainbow flag that was thrown onto the stage, and she held it high. Check it out (starting around the 4:15 mark):

Lady Gaga defends teen’s “Lady Gay Gay” shirt

Lady Gaga has come to the defence of a US teen who was sent home from school because he wore a shirt that read “I Heart Lady Gay Gay.”

The pop star tweeted last night: “I love you cole, you just be yourself. You’re perfect the way God made you. #colethegreat @fiercefaggot.” Earlier in the day, Gaga tweeted, “Thank u for wearing your tee-shirt proud at school, you make me so proud, at the monsterball, you are an inspiration to us all. I love you.X”

His mother said if other students are allowed to express themselves by wearing religious and rebel flag shirts, her son should be able to wear shirts that reflect his views on sexual orientation. (read more and watch a video report at WSMV)

The Nashville high school sent 15-year-old Cole Goforth home and asked him to change out of the shirt, reports WSMV:

“We’ve had a few disruptions the last few days, and we thought the slogan on that shirt would continue to escalate those incidents that had occurred,” said Danny Weeks, assistant director of the school board.

Cole sees it differently.

“I just think my sexuality isn’t widely accepted around here, so of course they are going to single me out,” he said.

POSTED BY BrentCreelman @xtra.ca

Intellectual Property Eats Itself

Posted by Kevin Carson on Jul 9, 2010 

Back in the days of slavery, advocates for that institution pretended to regard it as a normal form of property.  But far from simply desiring that whites should be free to own black slaves or not as they saw fit, or to dispose of this “property” as they saw fit, they made it clear by their actions that their real goal for was slavery to predominate and spread as an institution.  This meant restricting the individual slave-owner’s right of disposition of his own “property” through even voluntary manumission of his own slaves — because it would undermine a social order based on slavery as its dominant institution.

Likewise, the Copyright Nazis have made it clear their real goal is to defend “intellectual property” as the institutional basis of the corporate economic order — even if it means undermining, by the terms of their own law, the right of individuals to dispose of their own “intellectual property” in ways that undermine IP as an institution.

The ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers) recently sent out a fundraising letter announcing its campaign against Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote ‘Copyleft’ in order to undermine our ‘Copyright.’ They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth in these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.”

Umm, Creative Commons is a set of options for a copyright holder to license his own work.  No one may license anything under Creative Commons except what he holds the copyright on.  So apparently, ASCAP doesn’t believe in the right of copyright holders to license their own “property” as they see fit if it undermines the predominance of proprietary business models.

This follows a recent campaign by the International Intellectual Property Alliance for the U.S Trade Representative to put several countries on a “special 301 watch list” because their governments have adopted open-source software systems like Linux in preference to purchasing proprietary software.  Such action supposedly undermines “intellectual property.”  So even though open source-software is, by the Copyright Nazis’ own laws, a legitimate form of private property licensed under the terms of copyright law, governments are obligated to purchase more expensive proprietary software in order to avoid undermining the proprietary business model.  Cough cough Davis-Bacon cough.

The Copyright Nazis, despite all their rhetoric, don’t simply regard “intellectual property” as a normal form of property which the owner may dispose of as he sees fit, or own or not own as he sees fit — any more than the slaveocracy of 150 years ago saw slavery as a normal form of property among many.

The Copyright Nazis, like the slaveocrats, see copyright as the institutional basis of a social order, to be defended even at the expense of restricting the individual copyright holder’s right of free disposition over his own “property.”  The slaveocracy opposed the right of slave-owners to voluntarily manumit their  own slaves, even though this would follow as a matter of course if it were a normal form of property, because it undermined slavery as the institutional basis of social order.  And the Copyright Nazis oppose the free licensing of one’s own copyrights, under the terms of open source licenses, because it undermines proprietary culture as the institutional basis of the corporate economic system.

As for their agenda of publicly challenging the EFF, I say bring it on!  As it is, the mainstream press simply reports the position of groups like the MPAA and RIAA, along with some quip from Joe Biden, with no indication that there’s even a debate — the “other side” is just a bunch of freeloading teenagers who want to get free stuff.

If ASCAP publicizes this as a fight, it will require the press  to report — for the first time — that there IS a fight, with at least a boilerplace paragraph stating what it’s about.  Even reporting that there ARE such organizations as EFF, that challenge the maximalist copyright position on a principled basis, will be a first for many mainstream news organizations.

Just goes to show, once again, that we’ll eventually display their bleeding heads on our battlements.

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

Homeland Security Mission Creep: Anti-Globalization

Posted by Kevin Carson on Jul 10, 2010

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

Any time law enforcement is given expanded powers for some ostensible purpose, you can count on those new police state powers being used for purposes other than the avowed purpose of the original legislation.  A good example is counter-terrorism legislation.

The U.S. government already had an animus against the anti-globalization movement, long before the September 11 attacks.  After the Seattle demonstrations in December 1999, it replaced the militia/constitutionalist movement as the primary target of federal law enforcement.  With a public much more disposed to give federal “authorities” the benefit of the doubt after 9-11, and with the formal extension of police state powers including the USA PATRIOT Act and the creation of Homeland Security, it’s not surprising that the feds interpreted their increased  powers to “fight terrorism” broadly enough to include going after the anti-globalists.

An instructive example is the career of John Timoney, police commissioner in Philadelphia during the 2000 GOP convention.  According to Paul Rosenberg, whose “The Empire Strikes Back:  Police Repression of Protest from Seattle to L.A.” recounted incidents of police repression at anti-globalization demonstrations from Seattle through late 2000, Timoney had been one of the most fiendishly creative local law enforcement officials to date in unwarranted surveillance of activists, preemptive mass arrests of organizers before the beginning of demonstrations on every imaginable kind of trumped-up charge, and brutal police tactics against demonstrators.  His trumped-up charges to take organizers out of action included classifying gaspacho as homemade pepper spray, and the rags from painting marionettes as raw material for molotov cocktails.

Timoney worked hand-in-glove with then Governor Tom Ridge, who provided political cover for the former’s wicked impersonation of Mayor Daley ca. 1968.

From the Seattle demo on, Timoney had had a personal vendetta against the anti-globalization movement reminiscent of police Red-baiting against Wobblies and socialists during the War Hysteria of WWI, or the local “Red Squads” of the 1920s.  He was a fanatical proponent of using the RICO statutes to suppress the anti-globalization movement on “racketeering” charges.

With the nomination of Ridge to Homeland Security, Timoney was personally associated with the highest circles in federal law enforcement.  He found time to serve as Miami police chief, meanwhile, outdoing his Philadelphia performance to reach new levels of police brutality during the anti-FTAA demonstrations in 2002.  Since Ridge’s replacement, Timoney has attached himself like a leech to the growing security-industrial complex, the crony capitalist bonanza where the national security state intersects with “private” contractors, as described by Naomi Klein in “Shock Therapy.”

If you think Timoney was a fluke, think again.  He was representative of the broad nexus where “counter-terrorism” overlaps with the drug war, the suppression of anti-globalist activism, and an increasingly draconian federal role in enforcing so-called “intellectual property.”

I  recently across another example — although much more civil and personable one than Timoney — of the same coalition of law enforcement interests:  Col. Jennifer Hesterman (USAF, retired).  Her USAF career involved work as an analyst on issues of international terrorism, and particularly how international criminal activity like the drug trade and “intellectual property crime” contributed to it.  On her personal blog (Counter Terror Forum), she recently commented on the demonstrations at the G-20 meeting in Toronto in the context of the blog’s broad focus on counter-terrorism issues.  (No word, as far as I could see, on the comparative rates of violence and lawlessness between the cops and demonstrators; compared to the criminal thuggery of those in uniform, the demonstrators in my opinion were strictly small-time.)

Using Col. Hesterman’s work as a jumping-off point, I’ll be writing some follow-up columns on Homeland Security’s mission creep into the War on Drug and the Copyright Nazis’ war on file-sharing.

In the meantime, just bear in mind that if the primary image that comes to your mind when you hear the words “fighting terrorism” is Osama Bin Laden and the top leadership of Al Qaeda, you have a very different mindset from the people actually running our so-called war on terror.  For those people, the boundary between Bin Laden and a guy selling a lid of weed, somebody committing civil disobedience and minor property damage at an anti-G20 demonstration, and somebody downloading a song at The Pirate Bay, is — let’s just say — quite indistinct.

If you give those people a big hammer, they’ll never stop finding new nails.

We need to realign Libertarianism with the Vast Left

There has been an emergence of people looking for a new alternative to our current options of ideologies inside our Governmental systems in Canada and The States.  People are wanting something new and fresh, or at least ideas from someone that is new and fresh.  Citizens of the West are tired of the same BS over and over again with no real progress for them from these Governmental bodies.  However, it seems there is only few options to choose from and it is Republican, Democrat, Conservative, Liberal or Green.  Yet,  I believe, no make that I know there are other options out there and one of them is Libertarian Government.

At this time though one turns on the television to find those “labeled” libertarian to be  monsters of the right wing agenda. Horrible Corporatist scum whom are against what seems to be progressive measures and even Civil Rights.  This was not always the case and we need to dis-spell these views as unrealistic of the types of libertarians one finds when they meet and greet with them. In fact, we need to let people in whom are not in the know of the backdrop to libertarianism and the many strains of it.  For just as you cannot judge Feminists based on horribly biased media coverage and not covering their meaning the same is with libertarian values.

What will follow this post will be some lesson posts, which yes will include info from Public Domain places such as Wikipedia and others.  These will be lessons on what libertarianism stands for and what it does not stand for.

HIV/AIDS May be Fueled by War on Drugs

HIV/AIDS May be Fueled by War on Drugs

Joe DeCapua 28 June 2010

The fight against HIV/AIDS may have a better chance of success if the war against drugs were waged differently.  That’s according to an official document released Monday, prior to next month’s 18^th International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

The Vienna Declaration calls for a scientific approach to illicit drug use and questions the effectiveness of the criminalization of injection drug users.  The document, written by medical and academic professionals, does not criticize law enforcement personnel, but rather the policies they carry out.  It says those policies are helping to spread HIV/AIDS.

Failed strategy?

Dr. Evan Wood is chair of the Vienna Declaration Writing Committee and director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the British Columbia Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS in Vancouver, Canada.

“The Vienna Declaration is basically a scientific statement from the scientific community about the harms of illegal drugs in our society, and drawing important attention to the fact that many of the policies, which are in place around the world – this notion of sort of a war on drugs and this over emphasis on law enforcement does more harm than good,” he says.

Locking up drug users is a failed strategy, says the declaration.

“The war on drugs has failed to achieve its stated objectives in terms of reducing drug supply or use.  And on the contrary, if you look at all the international surveillance systems, the prices of drugs continue to go down; and the purity of drugs continues to go up. And that’s despite ever increasing numbers of individuals that we’re locking up.” says Wood.

What’s more, he says, incarcerating all those arrested on drug use charges is “hemorrhaging taxpayers’ dollars.”

Supply and demand

He says the economic of principle of supply and demand keeps the drug trade alive.

“Even conservative economists like Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize, have long known that this sort of war on drugs approach would not be successful,” he says, adding, “Economists will tell you that no market has ever been controlled by the supply side.  And any time that law enforcement has any success at taking out a drug dealer…that has the perverse effect of making it that much more profitable for someone else to get into the market.”

AIDS 2010

Wood says the Vienna Declaration does not criticize law enforcement officers who “risk their lives” to protect communities.  But, he says, “The reality of the situation is that trying to control the drug problem through law enforcement does not work and of course it has a number of unintended consequences.”

The Vienna Declaration begins by stating:

The criminalization of illicit drug users is fueling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences.  A full policy reorientation is needed.

“We know that illegal drugs are more available to young people today than even alcohol or tobacco.  So the starting point for the whole discussion, in terms of an evidence-based, sort of science based discussion about the drug problem and drug policies, needs to be really that things could not get any worse in terms of trying to limit drug supply to young people,” says Dr. Wood.

Eastern Europe and Central Asia

The declaration says that outside of sub-Saharan Africa,

Injection drug use accounts for approximately one in three new cases of HIV.  In some areas where HIV is spreading rapidly, such as Eastern Europe and central Asia, HIV prevalence can be as high as 70 percent among people who inject drugs, and in some areas more than 80 percent of all HIV cases are among this group.

“We know that around the world the HIV rates among drug users are highest in countries that place the greatest emphasis on law enforcement,” he says, “First of all, those countries tend to not to employ public health approaches to try and prevent the spread of HIV….and there’s also the problem with the fact that when you’re chasing drug users around they tend to up in abandoned buildings or under viaducts or other hidden environments.”

As a result, it’s difficult for them to have access to treatment and prevention programs.  What’s more, risky behavior is more common in such environments.  Wood also says drugs are the source of much violence, whether in communities or in Mexico, where the government is battling drug cartels just across the U.S. border.

Scientific approach

Dr. Wood says in using “evidence based policy making” you use what works and discard what doesn’t.  “But when it comes to illegal drug use, we’re in a situation where policymakers continue with a war on drugs approach, even though we certainly know that it doesn’t work.”

He says, for example, that methadone maintenance therapy is the “most effective medication” that we have to treat heroin addiction.  In many areas of the world, where HIV is spreading most rapidly among heroin users, the drug is severely limited or in some place like Russia it’s illegal.”

About five years ago, Portugal weighed the costs of drug user incarceration and decided to take a very different approach.  It decriminalized drugs.

“People like myself, I’m a physician, I’m a public health researcher, we all kind of held our breath,” he says.

He adds, “What’s quite remarkable is that not only has Portugal reduced its drug problem in terms of health issues, like the spread of HIV and the number of overdose fatalities among drug users, but it actually has the lowest rate of marijuana use in the European Union now.”

A website has been set up to gather public support for the declaration: www.viennadeclaration.com

Some estimates say in the United States alone so far this year, over $25 billion has been spent by the federal and state governments on illegal drugs.

The term “war on drugs” is believed first used by President Nixon.  Its goal is to halt the production, distribution and use of illegal narcotics.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced it would boost resources for prevention and treatment of drug abuse in its 2011 National Drug Control Budget.

It’s estimated that as many as 1.5 million people in the U.S. are arrested each year on drug charges, with up to a half million sentenced to prison.

Authorities have raised concern that drug traffickers could help fund terrorists.  Drug routes usually start in South America and the Caribbean, extend through Africa, and then on to Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.