Big Brother is Watching You

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Techdirt: Rutgers Lecturer Forcibly Sent For Psych Evaluation By NYPD For Some Tweets About The Election

The US Supreme Court has declared that flag burning is perfectly legal and protected expression, and has upheld the 2nd Amendment. It turns out that talking about burning a flag, or asking a rhetorical question about the 2nd Amendment, is not.

Based on past history he'll probably get billed for the ambulance ride and evaluation.

[Vrede too]

Don't know about NJ policy, but the cops bring us non-injured, non-OD psych patients in their squad cars all the time.

... Update: It also appears that Allred deleted the original tweet on the second point which was certainly noticeably different than the way he describes it above. It wasn't just a question in the nature stated, but rather a more direct question of what would happen when he went out and started to shoot white people. That's still protected speech,

I'm not 100% sure about that. It depends on the legal definition of communicating threats.

but at least there's slightly more of an explanation for why law enforcement wanted to go visit him. But it's still not necessarily a reason to detain him.

The Rutgers police and NYPD apparently disagreed. They forced him to go to a psychiatric hospital to be evaluated.

Forestalling an ADA claim when they fire him?

Kevin Allred
‏@KevinAllred

will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting atrandom white people or no...? . .

https://web.archive.org/web/20161116144 ... 2119673856

Comments:

Two things

OK, two things. First, this article says "Either way, last night he Tweeted that the NYPD had come to his house because the police at Rutgers believed he was 'a threat' based on some of his tweets." But his tweet says "NYPD just came to my house bc Rutgers Police told them i'm a threat based on political statements i've made on campus and on twitter." We perhaps know what he said on Twitter, but we don't know what he said on campus.

Good point.

Second, is there any source for this besides the person in question? All the links in the article just go to his tweets (except the one to Wikipedia indicating that flag burning is legal.) It seems to me that he's not exactly a neutral source. How do we know this happened? How do we know there's not something else going on?

Good point.

If it IS true, then it's unacceptable, and someone needs to be held accountable.

That tweet, which appears to have been deleted, said "will the 2nd amendment be as cool when i buy a gun and start shooting atrandom while people or no...?"

He also apparently tweeted "if I see any Trump bumper stickers on the road today, my brakes will go out and I'll run you off the road."

I don't know if that's verified.

So how many tweets like that can someone make before someone reasonably becomes concerned?

Reasonable question. The posts are pretty extreme, and they certainly aren't helpful to we anti-Trump folks. I'd say that people should have learned that Twitter rants can be damaging, but Trump proved the opposite.

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Top US intelligence official: I submitted my resignation

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday he had submitted his letter of resignation on Wednesday night.

"(I) submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," he said before the panel of lawmakers....

We finally agree! It feels pretty good to me, too.

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The federal government has a new plan to hack Americans’ computers.

Stand with Senator Wyden: Congress must pass the Stopping Mass Hacking Act!

Petition to Congress:
Please pass the Stopping Mass Hacking Act to stop the changes to Rule 41 and prevent the federal government from getting mass hacking powers on December 1, 2016.

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Titanpointe
The NSA’s Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight

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Sign the petition to Facebook: Don't Censor Human Rights Documentation

[O Really]

Reading material for anyone interested... "Surveillance Nation"
https://www.thenation.com/ebooks/?utm_s ... erm=master

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FBI's NIT Hit 8,000 Computers In 120 Countries... As Did The Child Porn It Was Redistributing

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We Don’t Like ‘Fake News’ Either, But the Creation of a Neo-McCarthyite Committee to Counter Russian Propaganda Is Most Definitely NOT the Answer

Manning in Prison, Snowden in Exile, Petraeus in…the Next Presidential Cabinet?

The lessons:
Be careless but without actually leaking anything, lose the election.
Do it to expose war crimes, go to prison.
Do it to defend the 4th Amendment, go into permanent exile.
Do it for sex, get a Cabinet post.

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More Americans support torture than Afghans, Iraqis and South Sudanese. Why?

The United States has a higher tolerance for torture than any other country on the U.N. Security Council, and Americans are more comfortable with torture than citizens of war-ravaged countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine.

Those are two key findings reported by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday, in a new report highlighting global perspectives on war.

The data comes during a renewed debate over torture in the United States. In the presidential election in November, Americans picked Donald Trump, who has endorsed the use of waterboarding and, he said in February, “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” to extract information from terrorism suspects....

But there’s also a shocking lack of awareness that those rules exist — 39 percent of the Americans who supported torture told the ICRC they “didn’t realize my country had agreed to ban torture” as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions.

The ICRC study is not the first to establish Americans’ increasing tolerance for torture in recent years.

A Pew Research Center study in February found that 58 percent of Americans think the torture of suspected terrorists can be justified. Of 38 nations surveyed, only five countries have a higher tolerance for torturing suspected terrorists, the Pew study found: Uganda (78 percent), Lebanon (72 percent), Israel (62 percent), Kenya (62 percent) and Nigeria (61 percent)....

[O Really]

The lessons:
Be careless but without actually leaking anything, lose the election.
Do it to expose war crimes, go to prison.
Do it to defend the 4th Amendment, go into permanent exile.
Do it for sex, get a Cabinet post.

Good point, but if you look at it not in terms of intent, but in actual harm or potential harm, Betrayus and Hillary should still be pretty much in for no more than a scolding. Snowden says the information Beetrayus disclosed was more sensitive or more highly classified than what he did, but then again, Betrayus didn't give the information to his biographer expecting (or instructing) her to publish it to the world. Personally, I can overlook Hillary's private server, forgive Betrayus in light of the rest of his career, and let Manning out to live in his own own private Hell. Snowden can keep working on his Russian or Chinese.

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Snowden can keep working on his Russian or Chinese.

Spanish. He was heading for South America, but the US government trapped him enroute in Russia through cancelling his passport and other measures. Even the US government obviously agrees with this point; they forced the President of Bolivia's plane to land so that they could search it for Snowden.

Snowden gave information to the enemies of the US government, but only if you define US citizens as the enemies of the US government.

[O Really]

... but only if you define US citizens as the enemies of the US government.

Could anyone argue there aren't a lot of those who are? Including many Trumpettes.

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Tell Obama to Release the Senate Torture Report (petition)

[O Really]

Tell Obama to Release the Senate Torture Report (petition)

Damn, that was disappointing. I thought it was about torturing senators. I could get into that.

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Sorry. Fair's fair, they torture us.

At least we know this: The Senate torture report won’t be destroyed when Obama leaves office.

He has taken an important step to make sure it is preserved for posterity by including it in his presidential records and sending it to the National Archives.

This is good news, but the President has not gone as far as we asked:

He has not declassified and released the report.
He has not instructed agencies to read, and learn from, the report.
He has not made the report available to lawyers for Guantanamo detainees who have been cleared for release but who seem destined to remain imprisoned indefinitely.

The 6,700 pages and 38,000 footnotes will not disappear, but they will remain classified for another 12 years.

We cannot wait until 2029 to have the truth about US torture exposed, especially when the incoming President believe torture is effective and acceptable. In early January, we will deliver the thousands of signatures, including yours, on our petition demanding that President Obama release the report before he leaves office.

We are proud to work with you and thousands of others who still believe in the rule of law, accountability, and that torture is never justified.

Stay Loud, Stay Strong,

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Police’s secret cellphone-surveillance tool can also block calls by the innocent

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Some argue that Snowden should have registered his concerns through existing channels.

NSA Watchdog Removed for Whistleblower Retaliation

Top NSA Watchdog Who Insisted Snowden Should Have Come to Him Receives Termination Notice for Retaliating Against a Whistleblower

Until just a few months ago, George Ellard occupied a position of trust as top watchdog of the National Security Agency, America’s principal collector of signals intelligence. Ellard was not only NSA’s Inspector General, but an outspoken critic of Edward Snowden, the former contract employee who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified emails to publicly expose the agency’s domestic surveillance program. Snowden claimed, among other things, that his concerns about NSA’s domestic eavesdropping were ignored by the agency, and that he feared retaliation. Ellard publicly argued in 2014 that Snowden could have safely reported the allegations of NSA’s domestic surveillance directly to him.

Then last May, after eight months of inquiry and deliberation, a high-level Intelligence Community panel found that Ellard himself had previously retaliated against an NSA whistleblower, sources tell the Project On Government Oversight. Informed of that finding, NSA’s Director, Admiral Michael Rogers, promptly issued Ellard a notice of proposed termination, although Ellard apparently remains an agency employee while on administrative leave, pending a possible response to his appeal from Secretary of Defense Ash Carter....

Tell President Obama: Pardon Edward Snowden now! (petition)

[O Really]

It says Ellard retaliated against a whistleblower. If so, he should indeed by fired.

But no mention of the whistleblower or what he blew about or whether what he blew was true. As an example, all non-harassment policies have a prohibition of retaliation. (Not that it stops it, since there are more retal cases than original harassment cases and lots of people with losing harassment cases have won their retal claim). But all those policies say something like, "nobody who brings a good faith complaint will be penalized or suffer any retaliation"... but "unfounded claims or complaints brought maliciously puts you as fair game for severe flogging." (not exact language, but still.)

Seems to me bringing forth evidence of wrongdoing, particularly illegal acts ought to be protected. Dissatisfaction over policies, even sleazy ones, not so much.

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Is violating the 4th Amendment an illegal act?