industryterm:law enforcement

The Evolving State of American Policing - Pacific Standard
▻http://www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/the-evolving-state-of-american-policing

http://a2.files.psmag.com/image/upload/c_fit,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,h_1200,q_80,w_1200/MTM1MDA1NjE2MTI4MTY5MjM0.jpg

“Never at any time in the world’s history has it been possible for so many people to know, so promptly, of the dereliction of one police officer in such lack of context as to cause distrust and lack of respect for all,” Police Chief Frank Ramon tells his colleagues. It’s the annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and hundreds of law enforcement executives from around the country are gathered together to talk about recent and troubling publicity around police forces pretty much across the country—California, New York, South Carolina, Maryland. Reflecting on the crisis in policing, he continues, “the law enforcement image is dependent on the professional, competent performance of the men and women who protect and serve their community.”

But Ramon, the chief of police of the Seattle Police Department, isn’t talking about viral videos shot by bystanders with cell phones, or about footage from dashboard cameras. All of that is still many years away. Ramon is speaking in the year 1965.

Yet Ramon’s comments could just as easily have been made in 2015—and, in fact, they sort of were. Over the course of the 2015 IACP, many speakers echoed the sentiments expressed at the conference opening by Chicago Police Department Superintendent Garry McCarthy (who resigned a month later when the Laquan McDonald cover-up was brought to light). “We’re in a tough time for policing right now,” McCarthy said. “And I believe we’re at a crossroads. I don’t think this climate has ever existed in the history of American policing.... Never have we been going through the scrutiny of every single action that we deal with like we do today, in the digital age.”
If police have been made responsible for measures both punitive and provisional in many low-income communities, this is not entirely by accident.

“Emergency” Measures May Be Written Into The French Constitution
▻https://theintercept.com/2015/12/12/terrorist-attacks-spark-crackdown-constitutional-changes-in-france

JUST HOURS INTO A TERRORIST ATTACK that started on the evening of Nov. 13, and would eventually claim 130 lives, François Hollande announced that France was reestablishing border controls, and used a 1955 law to proclaim a state of emergency. This 60-year-old law gives French law enforcement wide and sweeping powers, freeing them from much of the normal judicial oversight. The law gives prefects, the French government’s local representatives, the ability to place people under house arrest, (...) #LDH #législation #surveillance #France

TSG IntelBrief : Recalibrating the Terror Threat Radar
December 7, 2015 INTELBRIEFS
▻http://soufangroup.com/tsg-intelbrief-recalibrating-the-terror-threat-radar

Le groupe « Soufan », sur les limites du #contre-terrorisme, apte à prévenir des attentats du type 11 septembre 2001, mais impuissant à empêcher des actions à plus petite échelle (mais à « grand impact ») comme celles de Paris et San Bernardino, qui sont donc amenées à se reproduire.

Last week’s terrorist attack in San Bernardino is the latest to show the limits of the counterterrorism ‘radar’ constructed after 9/11 to detect and disrupt network-based attacks•

While the current terror radar has worked quite well in preventing enormous plots like 9/11, the threat of under-the-radar attacks is growing•

President Obama’s Oval Office address on December 6, which reiterated current counterterrorism tactics, brought up uncomfortable questions regarding the current terror threat radar’s ability to detect potential threats•

It is unlikely that any counterterrorism or law enforcement construct that is both feasible and acceptable in a democracy can disrupt plots of exceedingly small size but large impact..

[...]

Monitoring financial wire transfers and international communications will remain crucial tools of the modern CT approach, but inspired terrorists will avoid CT radar detection by flying low and silent before popping up to kill.Calls for more data collection without sufficient analysis will only produce more accurate investigations, in hindsight of attacks. There is no computer program that can detect and predict violent radicalization at the granular level of two individuals. For relatively small-scale attacks that result in large-scale responses—the ‘New Terror Spectacular‘—the ability to deter and detect is exactly the same as it is for any crime; the odds are in the criminals’ favor if they keep quiet and act quickly.This is the true threat of groups such as the Islamic State, and the ideology of bin Ladinism that drives them.

Driving the Islamic State out of its strongholds in Syria and Iraq is vital to diminishing the group, as it will puncture its appeal as an inevitable and unconquerable foe. Yet its narrative of hatred and violence will continue to resonate with disaffected and maladjusted people across the globe.

Demonstrably toppling the so-called caliphate is a required step in the fight against the Islamic State, but the battles are now taking place in Paris and in San Bernardino. As impossible as it is to eradicate violent crime, it is impossible to eradicate terrorism, especially attacks planned under-the-radar.

There are lessons to be learned from the San Bernardino attack, and one of them might be that there will be more such attacks in the future, despite our best efforts.

Identity Is an Inside Joke - Issue 30: Identity
▻http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/identity-is-an-inside-joke

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I got one for you: It’s 1990, and there’s this group of 27 people who go to a six-week law enforcement leadership course in Ottawa. The first day, the newly elected class president announces that at the start of class each day, he wants someone to tell a joke. The president is from Newfoundland, and so he leads by example—basically, a Newfoundlander finds a genie in a bottle and is granted two wishes. His first wish is to be on a beach on Tahiti, which the genie grants immediately. For his second wish, he says, “I don’t want to work no more.” Instantly, he finds himself on the streets of Sydney, Nova Scotia, a town known among Canadians for its high rate of unemployment. Everybody laughs. This is a pretty funny joke. This is also a good move by the Newfie class president. These people come (...)

Q&A: How Does the Syrian Refugee Screening Process Work?
▻http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2015/11/18/qa-how-does-the-syrian-refugee-screening-process-work/?mod=WSJBlog

Q: What kind of screenings do Syrian refugees go through?

A: Refugees from all countries receive “the most rigorous screening and security vetting of any category of traveler to the United States,” a senior administration official told reporters Tuesday. That process includes biographic and biometric security checks – i.e. checking records and doing fingerprinting. Law enforcement, the Pentagon and the intelligence community all vet information provided by and obtained about refugees to help make a determination about whether they will ultimately be allowed to come to the U.S. Syrian refugees go through an enhanced review process on top of that with extra national security checks. All Syrian refugees considered for resettlement in the U.S. are interviewed in person by specially trained staff, mostly in Amman and Istanbul, but also in Cairo and elsewhere. Refugees must also undergo health screenings and a cultural orientation before they arrive in the U.S.

Q: How long does it take?

A: The process usually takes between 18 to 24 months and generally begins with a referral from the U.N. refugee agency. Those referrals include biographic and other information that the Department of Homeland Security uses to determine if the cases meet the criteria for refugee status. If DHS decides a refugee qualifies on one of five protected grounds – race, religion, nationalist, political views or belonging to a certain social group, the extensive screening processes described earlier begin. For comparison, an international student seeking to study in the U.S., for example, usually schedules a consular interview three to five months in advance of beginning schooling.

Q: Who are the Syrian refugees coming to the U.S.?

A: Half of the Syrian refugees resettled in the U.S. so far are children, according to a senior administration official. Of the rest, 2.5% are adults over 60 and 2% are single men. The refugees are roughly half men and half women, with slightly more men.

#migrants #réfugiés #Syrie #Etats-Unis #sécurité

Thirteen women came forward to accuse former police officer Daniel Holtzclaw of misconduct. Why aren’t more people outraged?
▻http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a49050/daniel-holtzclaw-trial-oklahoma

His victims reportedly ranged in age from 17 to late 50s, but the unifying thread of his accusers is #race. Holtzclaw targeted African-American women.

[...]

Despite the horrific nature of the allegations, and increased national attention and debate about issues of racially motivated police misconduct, the investigation of and subsequent trial for Holtzclaw remains largely under- and unreported in many major news outlets. In a historical moment in which campaigns to end sexual violence and to address racism at all levels of the criminal justice system thrive, a case involving an alleged serial rapist of black women has garnered far too little national outrage. Holtzclaw, a man accused of heinous crimes of sexual violation against both an underage girl and a grandmother, is not a household name.

#viol #Etats-Unis #déshumanisation

Suspects detained across Europe in anti-terror operation | World news | The Guardian

▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/12/suspects-detained-across-europe-in-anti-terror-operation

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ba25ddd97f1b46521fe76accef6187e36f77c45d/0_58_3768_2263/2000.jpg?w=1200&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=7edea282265987be920c34ce171098c5

European law enforcement authorities say they have broken up a Norway-based recruitment ring that sent fighters to Iraq and Syria.

Officials have issued arrest warrants for 17 people in half a dozen European countries and the Middle East.

The UK’s north-east counter-terrorism unit said four men had been arrested in Britain in connection with the operation, which has been led by Italian authorities. The four were aged 32, 33, 38 and 52, and were held at addresses in Hull, Derby, Birmingham and Sheffield respectively.

#norvège #krekar (suite)

Jerusalem: A city governed by fear
Oct. 27, 2015
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768505

’Everyone is afraid’

When Palestinians are viewed by the state as a threatening enemy, the fear that fuels attacks by Israelis becomes state-sanctioned and promoted.

Abu Sarah agrees that the government is part of the problem. “Telling Jewish citizens that everyone should carry a firearm... to ‘shoot first, ask later’... these kinds of things make a difference,” he said.

Abu Sarah says that the majority of attacks in the city are happening to Palestinians, but these aren’t the attacks that Israeli media reports.

“Police say you can do whatever you want if it’s towards a Palestinian,” he told Ma’an.

“I was watching the TV last week and a police commander said, ‘Our job here is to defend the Jewish residents… to protect all residents.’ His initial statement says a lot.”

Israeli officials have called on police and soldiers to shoot — rather than arrest — Palestinian attackers, while right-wing Israelis have searched Jerusalem streets for Palestinians, largely uninhibited by Israeli law enforcement.

Fear of being attacked again kept his nephew Mohammad inside for at least a week following the violent assault.

Fear has also changed Abu al-Hummus’ daily life, and he knows it has changed that of his Jewish neighbors in the French Hill settlement.

“There are relations between Jews and Palestinians here,” Abu Hummus explained. "But because of the security situation, everyone is afraid. The situation became fear. He is afraid of me. I am afraid of him. We say everything’s alright, but on the inside, it’s not alright.”

CISA : Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act

The main provisions of the bill make it easier for private companies to share cyber threat information with the government. Without requiring such information sharing, the bill creates a system for federal agencies to receive threat information from private companies. The bill also provides legal immunity from privacy and antitrust laws to the companies which provide such information.

→ A company can promise to keep your data private, and then break that promise, leaving you with no legal recourse.

▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersecurity_Information_Sharing_Act

Opponents question CISA’s value, believing it will move responsibility from private business to the government, thereby increasing vulnerability of personal private information, as well as dispersing personal private information across seven government agencies, including the NSA and local police.

▻http://www.wired.com/2015/03/cisa-security-bill-gets-f-security-spying

CISA goes far beyond [cybersecurity], and permits law enforcement to use information it receives for investigations and prosecutions of a wide range of crimes involving any level of physical force,” reads the letter from the coalition opposing CISA. “The lack of use limitations creates yet another loophole for law enforcement to conduct backdoor searches on Americans—including searches of digital communications that would otherwise require law enforcement to obtain a warrant based on probable cause. This undermines Fourth Amendment protections and constitutional principles.

[...]

Sophisticated DDOS attacks often impersonate legitimate traffic, raising the risk that innocent traffic—and identifying IP addresses—would be included in data shared with the government. “At the time of sharing it will be very unclear if it’s innocent activity,” says Sanchez. “And there’s no obligation to do due diligence to figure out if it’s innocent or isn’t.”

But a problem is that CISA does not do what it claims (protect us from cyber attacks) but instead makes it easier for the government to spy electronically. Moreover, it is expected that most data alerts from systems shared under CISA will be false alarms.

And also, the CISA does not require the government to further strengthen its own cybersecurity systems. Currently, governmental organisations even fail in installing basic security mechanisms such as two-factor authentication and encryption. There is still too much of an insouciance toward cybersecurity.
(eg. the Office of Personnel Management (#OPM) data breach of 21.5 million social security numbers [1])
And now they want American citizens to hand them over even more sensitive data?
Non mais allô quoi.

An informational video about CISA

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz24ZI6lOVU

Follow the bill & its status, or read the full text:

▻https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/754

#CISA
#privacy
#cybersecurity

[1]
Hacking of Government Computers Exposed 21.5 Million People

▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/us/office-of-personnel-management-hackers-got-data-of-millions.html?_r=0

OPM says 5.6 million fingerprints stolen in cyberattack, five times as many as previously thought

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/09/23/opm-now-says-more-than-five-million-fingerprints-compromised-in-brea

Has It Become Impossible to Prosecute White-Collar Crime?
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/has-it-become-impossible-to-prosecute-white-collar-crime-

The Justice Department acknowledged that things haven’t been going too well in this area when it released new guidelines in September for prosecuting corporate crime. One of the key changes, it said, would be that the department would focus more on individual financial criminals. There’s nothing wrong with bringing an ambitious case to trial and losing. But the pattern suggests that law enforcement may have lost the ability to choose the right cases, or that it lacks the expertise to try them in a courtroom in a way that makes sense to jurors, many drawn from the ranks of working people who must struggle to understand the vast, mind-boggling modern financial system.

Cops are asking Ancestry.com and 23andMe for their customers’ DNA | Fusion
▻http://fusion.net/story/215204/law-enforcement-agencies-are-asking-ancestry-com-and-23andme-for-their-custo

When companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe first invited people to send in their DNA for genealogy tracing and medical diagnostic tests, privacy advocates warned about the creation of giant genetic databases that might one day be used against participants by law enforcement. DNA, after all, can be a key to solving crimes. It “has serious information about you and your family,” genetic privacy advocate Jeremy Gruber told me back in 2010 when such services were just getting popular.

Now, five years later, when 23andMe and Ancestry both have over a million customers, those warnings are looking prescient. “Your relative’s DNA could turn you into a suspect,” warns Wired, writing about a case from earlier this year, in which New Orleans filmmaker Michael Usry became a suspect in an unsolved murder case after cops did a familial genetic search using semen collected in 1996. The cops searched an Ancestry.com database and got a familial match to a saliva sample Usry’s father had given years earlier. Usry was ultimately determined to be innocent and the Electronic Frontier Foundation called it a “wild goose chase” that demonstrated “the very real threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by law enforcement access to private genetic databases.”

The FBI maintains a national genetic database with samples from convicts and arrestees, but this was the most public example of cops turning to private genetic databases to find a suspect. But it’s not the only time it’s happened, and it means that people who submitted genetic samples for reasons of health, curiosity, or to advance science could now end up in a genetic line-up of criminal suspects.

Both Ancestry.com and 23andMe stipulate in their privacy policies that they will turn information over to law enforcement if served with a court order. 23andMe says it’s received a couple of requests from both state law enforcement and the FBI, but that it has “successfully resisted them.”

23andMe’s first privacy officer Kate Black, who joined the company in February, says 23andMe plans to launch a transparency report, like those published by Google, Facebook and Twitter, within the next month or so. The report, she says, will reveal how many government requests for information the company has received, and presumably, how many it complies with. (Update: The company released the report a week later.)

“In the event we are required by law to make a disclosure, we will notify the affected customer through the contact information provided to us, unless doing so would violate the law or a court order,” said Black by email.

Ancestry.com would not say specifically how many requests it’s gotten from law enforcement. It wanted to clarify that in the Usry case, the particular database searched was a publicly available one that Ancestry has since taken offline with a message about the site being “used for purposes other than that which it was intended.” Police came to Ancestry.com with a warrant to get the name that matched the DNA.

“On occasion when required by law to do so, and in this instance we were, we have cooperated with law enforcement and the courts to provide only the specific information requested but we don’t comment on the specifics of cases,” said a spokesperson.

As NYU law professor Erin Murphy told the New Orleans Advocate regarding the Usry case, gathering DNA information is “a series of totally reasonable steps by law enforcement.” If you’re a cop trying to solve a crime, and you have DNA at your disposal, you’re going to want to use it to further your investigation. But the fact that your signing up for 23andMe or Ancestry.com means that you and all of your current and future family members could become genetic criminal suspects is not something most users probably have in mind when trying to find out where their ancestors came from.

“It has this really Orwellian state feeling to it,” Murphy said to the Advocate.

If the idea of investigators poking through your DNA freaks you out, both Ancestry.com and 23andMe have options to delete your information with the sites. 23andMe says it will delete information within 30 days upon request.

150 School Shootings In America Since 2013 - EverytownResearch.org
▻http://everytownresearch.org/school-shootings/2982

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/716/22187654155_dbef532703_o_d.png

October 3, 2015
Since 2013, there have been at least 150 school shootings in America — an average of nearly one a week.

How many more before our leaders pass common-sense laws to prevent gun violence and save lives? Communities all over the country live in fear of gun violence. That’s unacceptable. We should feel secure in sending our children to school — comforted by the knowledge that they’re safe.

#états-unis #armes #armement #massacres #meurtres #écoles

Consistent with expert advice and common sense, Everytown uses a straightforward, fair, and comprehensive definition for a school shooting: anytime a firearm is discharged inside a school building or on a school campus or grounds, as documented by the press and confirmed through further inquiries with law enforcement. Incidents in which guns were brought into schools but not fired, or were fired off school grounds after having been possessed in schools, are not included. 1 The database is updated as new shootings occur or as new evidence emerges about prior incidents.

Illegal overfishing and the return of Somalia’s pirates - Al Jazeera English
▻http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/10/illegal-overfishing-return-somalia-pirates-151006111159994.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2015/10/6/80bf910e6bb24e6a83ed032b27647e6f_18.jpg

A hundred years ago, it was a bustling port that served the vibrant fishing community living along Somalia’s coastline, the longest on mainland Africa.

Now, Durduri is a sun-bleached, wind-swept, white-sand graveyard of stone structures. There is no harbour, no jetty. The drying and smoking house is just a tumble of bricks.

This is one of many historical coastal trading towns that have risen and fallen with empires. When the busy trade routes moved away, fishing was one of the few lifelines left.

Talk to locals now and you will find this too has dried up - they say there are no more fish in the sea. They blame not the pirates who brought the attention of international law enforcement to Somalia’s waters, but the foreign fishing boats that have plundered sea-life stocks.
Inside Somalia’s Eyl, families pay for piracy crackdown

And if things don’t change, they say, a return to piracy will be their only way of survival.

#pêche #supêche #piraterie #mer #Somalie via @albertocampiphoto

Stolen Sisters - Emmanuelle Walter - Hardcover
▻http://www.harpercollins.ca/9781443445160/stolen-sisters

http://c36efb0e77d3f603c85f-e0a47ada9ef95f2c97a4e2339424967d.r45.cf2.rackcdn.com/harpercollins_us_frontbookcovers_145W/9781443445160.jpg

In 2014, the nation was rocked by the brutal violence against young Aboriginal women Loretta Saunders, Tina Fontaine and Rinelle Harper. But tragically, they were not the only Aboriginal women to suffer that year. In fact, an official report revealed that since 1980, 1,200 Canadian Aboriginal women have been murdered or have gone missing. This alarming official figure reveals a national tragedy and the systemic failure of law enforcement and of all levels of government to address the issue.

Journalist Emmanuelle Walter spent two years investigating this crisis and has crafted a moving representative account of the disappearance of two young women, Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander, teenagers from western Quebec, who have been missing since September 2008. Via personal testimonies, interviews, press clippings and official documents, Walter pieces together the disappearance and loss of these two young lives, revealing these young women to us through the voices of family members and witnesses.

Stolen Sisters is a moving and deeply shocking work of investigative journalism that makes the claim that not only is Canada failing its First Nations communities, but that a feminicide is taking place.

#filles #peuples_premiers #assassinat #crime #Canada #histoire #livre

Is Ukraine blocking Swiss investigation of Yatsenyuk ally?
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/is-ukraine-blocking-swiss-investigation-of-yatsenyuk-ally-398159.html

A powerful Ukrainian lawmaker facing a criminal investigation by Swiss law enforcement is being protected from prosecution by Ukrainian authorities, lawmakers allege.

Member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko, who is part of President Petro Poroshenko’s dominant faction, sounded the alarm over the case at the Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv on Sept. 12.

He asked why Mykola Martynenko, deputy head of Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front faction, had not been ousted from his post as head of parliament’s energy committee or even investigated in Ukraine, despite Switzerland having launched a criminal investigation into him on suspected bribery.

Martynenko, widely believed to handle finances for Yatsenyuk’s faction, faces bribery accusations by Swiss prosecutors in a case that has been kept secret for nearly two years.
[…]
Ukrainian authorities may have good reason for playing down the investigation: Swiss journalists reported that Martynenko accepted bribes from Skoda JS, a nuclear engineering company that positions itself as Czech-owned but is actually part of Russia’s OMZ engineering group – which is controlled by Kremlin-run Gazprombank.

Martynenko is accused of accepting roughly $30 million in bribes, though it was not clear how much of that allegedly came from Skoda JS.

Swiss newspaper Sonntagszeitung cited Swiss prosecutors as saying in March that Martynenko is suspected of taking bribes from Skoda JS in 2013 in order to grant the company a contract for the maintenance of nuclear reactors in Ukraine.

Skoda JS and Ukraine’s #Energoatom signed a memorandum of understanding on the deal last October, prompting some criticism from experts in nuclear energy.

“With this contract, the government in Kyiv wanted to create the impression among its people and the European Union that Ukraine had begun to depend on the West in the nuclear sector,” Yan Haverkamp, an expert on nuclear energy at Greenpeace, was cited as saying by Ukrainian media.

#Drone Aid: A useful tool with a toxic image — by Michiel Hofman, Senior Humanitarian Specialist, and Jonathan Whittall, Head of Humanitarian Analysis | MSF UK
▻http://www.msf.org.uk/article/opinion-and-debate-drone-aid-a-useful-tool-with-a-toxic-image

https://media.msf.org/Docs/MSF/Media/TR1/0/4/9/0/MSF147992.jpg

Drone technology – that can gather data on ‘suspicious behaviour’ – can now be used to identify potential ‘terrorists’ and drone targets. The #SCHIEBEL Camcopter-S100 surveillance drone has come under recent scrutiny for its ability to easily be converted into a drone that can fire missiles. This ‘Camcopter’ is one of the most prolific drones in the world, serving in at least 11 militaries [3]

Initially the #MOAS website proudly displayed the partnership with #MSF alongside the logo of SCHIEBEL and a Marine oil company as ‘sponsors’ of MOAS. (...) MOAS has been using this new partnership also to promote its association with the drone manufacturer. The founder of MOAS, who owns a insurance/risk management/intelligence company ‘TANGIERS[4]’ in Malta on his blog for MOAS in April published an article called ‘humanitarian drones: bots without borders’[5]

(...) some of the Italian and British press reported that data from the MOAS/MSF drone was shared with Italian law enforcement agencies in order to identify smugglers.[6]

(...) data shared with the EU authorities can now be considered as #military_intelligence. Combined with the type of drone used – the Schiebel ‘camcopter’, MSF is now the first international humanitarian organisation to be associated with military grade drone equipment in an area of military operation.

This leaves the image of MSF particularly vulnerable. Very quickly the reputation of the small ‘search and rescue’ cam-copter has become one of the many military drones deployed in order to hunt down and destroy people smugglers. The fact that MSF does not pay for the drone, that the MSF logo has been removed from the SCHIEBEL/MOAS webpage, that MSF itself does not give information to the military authorities does not matter if MSF does not very loudly say so. SCHIEBEL continues to market the partnership with MOAS/MSF to profile civilian use for its equipment, whilst MSF stays silent on the issue.

The military association with drone use in the Mediterranean is illustrative of the dangers of drone technology for humanitarian actors in general. Specifically for MSF, the debate is on whether or not the negative image associated with drones means that even the use of small scale drones in Papua New Guinea or the Philippines should be discontinued. Drones may be very useful, but for humanitarian use, their reputation may just be too toxic for MSF.

#technologies_duales #humanitaire #armée

Police killings since Ferguson, in one map

Fatal Encounters, a nonprofit, has tracked these killings by collecting reports from the media, public, and law enforcement and verifying them through news reports. Some of the data is incomplete, with details about a victim’s race, age, and other factors sometimes missing. It also includes killings that were potentially legally justified, and is likely missing some killings entirely.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CL-TlLPWcAAs2nD.png

Slovak officials seize 130 kilograms of smuggled ‘amber’ at border with Ukraine
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/business/slovak-officials-seize-130-kilograms-of-smuggled-amber-at-border-with-ukra

Slovak customs officials confiscated more than 130 kilograms of what they suspect to be undeclared amber at the Vysne Nemecke border crossing from a vehicle driven by a Ukrainian with a Hungarian passenger inside, Slovak newspaper Michalovsky Korzar reported on Aug. 11.
[…]
Ukrainian Interior Ministry Arsen Avakov estimates the size of the nation’s black market for amber to be $500 million. Authorities say the gemstones are mostly extracted in the northern areas of Zhytomyr, Rivne and Volyn oblasts in a pine forest range known as Polissya.

Some 150-300 tons of amber is extracted yearly in Ukraine, of which only 3-4 tons is mined legally, according to Ukraine’s environmental ministry.

On Aug. 4 a law enforcement task force seized 2.6 tons of allegedly illegally mined amber in Rivne Oblast preliminarily valued at $3 million, Avakov stated on his Facebook page.

http://www.kyivpost.com/media/images/2015/08/06/p19s2c1faj1j19dcl59r1el617sk4/original.jpg

‘Black Lives Matter’ and the G.O.P. - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/opinion/charles-m-blow-black-lives-matter-and-the-gop.html

http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/01/opinion/blow-circular/blow-circular-superJumbo-v2.png

Look at it this way: Many local municipalities experience budgetary pressure. Rather than raise taxes or cut services in response, things that are often politically unpalatable, they turn to law enforcement and courts to make up the difference in tickets and fines. Some can also increase the number of finable offenses and stiffen the penalties.

Officers, already disproportionately deployed and arrayed in so-called “high-crime” neighborhoods — invariably poor and minority neighborhoods — are then charged with doing the dirty work. The increase in sheer numbers of interactions creates friction with targeted populations and ups the odds that individual biases will be introduced.

Society itself is to blame. There is blood on everyone’s hands, including the hands still clutching the tax revenue that those cities needed but refused to solicit, instead shifting the mission of entire police departments “from ‘protect and serve’ to ‘punish and profit,’ ” as Mother Jones magazine recently put it in a fascinating article on this subject.

Is it a coincidence that many of the recent cases involving black people killed by the police began with stops for minor offenses?

That is why when people respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter,” it grates. All Lives Matter may be one’s personal position, but until this country values all lives equally, it is both reasonable and indeed necessary to specify the lives it seems to value less.

Mari Bastashevski

▻http://maribastashevski.com

My work is spread across investigative research, journalism, and art and deliberately blurs these boundaries among them in an attempt to challenge existing information delivery modes and bridge between these practices.

My ongoing project “State Business”focuses on the international conflict participants, defence and cyber surveillance industries, and layers of state secrecy under which they operate.

In addition, I’m working on “It’s Nothing Personal” an ongoing project about the contrast between the corporate branding of western surveillance firms and what the testimonies of those affected by these products disclose.

In 2014 I worked in Ukraine on “Empty, with a whiff of blood and fumes” addressing the nexus of money, power, and organised crime in Ukraine in build up to the 2014 hybrid war.

And between 2007 and 2010, in the Russian North Caucasus on “File-126,” a project about the abductions of civilians under the guise of Russian counterterrorism regime.

Video of Mari speaking in the context of the Prix Elysée she received in 2014:

▻https://vimeo.com/118032488

Mari interviewing #Hacking_Team for Motherboard:

▻http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacking-team-we-dont-do-business-with-north-korea

Aricle in Wired:

▻http://www.wired.com/2013/11/mari-bastashevski

#Mari_Bastashevski
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Keyword food:

State Business

State Business is a project that sorts through the mundane routine of international conflict and state security commerce and the information vacuum preserved around it. In a series of specific case studies, it maps the sale of services or commodities from their point of origins to their final destinations. The installation consists of photographs, texts, and documents.

The photography is used to define the extent of access to those who form the supply-and-demand chain. Each photograph represents a concrete governmental entity, a broker, or a business. Each is made with the awareness of someone in position of power to grant or forbid access. When permission is summarily denied, usually due to security reasons, I continue the dialogue by asking to narrow down the distance from which the photograph cannot be made, allowing those involved to draw their own perimeter of power, be it assumed or defined by law.

The goal of this project is not only to identify the process by which conflict commerce is put in motion, but how information about the industry itself – be it in the form of shared testimonies, or permitted photographs – becomes a commodity in the hands of its sources, each with a political, economical, or personal agenda.

It’s Nothing Personal

The installation, It’s Nothing Personal, set in the space between what global surveillance firms promote in their self-representation, and what the testimonies of those directly affected by these technologies disclose.

In the past decade, the industry that satisfies governments’ demand for surveillance of mass communications has skyrocketed, and it is one of today’s most rapidly burgeoning markets.Five years from now, the lawful interception industry will earn five times the U.S. 1.5 million profit it generated in 2014. Most surveillance technologies will be produced by American, European, and Israeli companies and pitched to law enforcement or intelligence agencies across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, often to entities that don’t require an additional permit to intercept, and are answerable to no one.

A variety of products sold includes ready-to-use monitoring centers that are able to silently access, process, and store years of electronic communications of entire countries. Forged SSL certificates and HTTP aggregators allow state agents to stand between the server and the user, and collect user names, passwords, and trace movements across cyber space. And governments and companies can seamlessly and remotely insert eavesdropping viruses into mobile phones and computers.

While most of these products are undetectable by design, those who sell them have developed a strong corporate image. Branding concepts applied in promotional materials—brochures, videos, and websites—emphasize protection against vague but potent threats, technical capacities, and an ease of application. Access to intimate details of correspondence is presented as impersonal data, petabytes stored and packets inspected. This image further incorporated within the open to view, physical spaces in which the industry exists.

The detached technical jargon and sanitized clip-art aesthetic work to obscure a deep-rooted partiality. Communication surveillance is a fundamental part of law enforcement operations meant to benefit those it vows to protect, in as much as it is a weapon for preserving power by infringing on the privacy of those who oppose it.

The exhibition consists of photographs of the companies HQs and distribution venues, a cache of promotional material and documentation obtained through collaborating with the community of privacy advocates and technologists and a record of the correspondence between the companies and state entities that ensued during the making of this project.

The disturbing messages in police recruiting videos - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/16/the-disturbing-messages-in-police-recruiting-videos

La police étasunienne veut recruter des pervers sadiques.

Now ask yourself: What sort of person would be attracted to a career in law enforcement based on the images and activities depicted in that video? And is that the sort of person you’d want wearing a badge and carrying a gun in your neighborhood?

All Israelis Are Guilty of Setting a Palestinian Family on Fire
Gideon Levy Aug 02, 2015
▻http://www.haaretz.com/beta/.premium-1.669005

It’s simply not possible to cheer for the brigade commander who shoots a Palestinian teenager, and then be shocked by settlers who throw a firebomb at an inhabited house.

Israelis stab gay people and burn children. There isn’t a shred of slander, the slightest degree of exaggeration, in this dry description. True, these are the actions of a few. True, too, that their numbers are increasing. It’s true that all of them – all the murderers, everyone who torches, who stabs, who uproots trees – are from the same political camp. But the opposing camp also shares the blame.

All those who thought that it would possible to sustain islands of liberalism in the sea of Israeli fascism were shown up this weekend, once and for all. It’s simply not possible to cheer for the brigade commander who shoots a teenager, and then be shocked by the settlers who set a family on fire; to support gay rights, and hold a founding conference in Ariel; to be enlightened, and then pander to the right and seek to partner with it. Evil knows no bounds; it begins in one place and quickly spreads in every direction.

The first breeding ground of those who torched the Dawabsheh family was the Israel Defense Forces, even if the offenders didn’t serve in it. When the killing of 500 children in the Gaza Strip is legitimate, and doesn’t even compel a debate, a moral reckoning, then what’s so terrible about setting a house on fire, together with its inhabitants? After all, what’s the difference between lobbing a fire bomb and dropping a bomb? In terms of the intention, or the intent, there is no difference.

When the shooting of Palestinians becomes an almost daily occurrence – two more have already been killed since the family was burned: one in the West Bank, another on the border of the Gaza Strip – who are we to complain about the fire throwers in Duma? When the lives of Palestinians are officially the army’s for the taking, their blood cheap in the eyes of Israeli society, then settler militias are also permitted to kill them. When the IDF’s ethic in the Gaza Strip is that it is permitted to do anything in order to save one soldier, who are we to complain about right-wingers like Baruch Marzel, who told me this weekend it was permissible to kill thousands of Palestinians in order to protect a single hair from the head of a Jew. Such is the atmosphere, such is the result. Original responsibility for it goes to the IDF.

No less to blame, of course, are the governments and politicians who vie with each other over who can suck up the most to the settlers. Whoever gives them 300 new homes in exchange for their violence at the flagship settlement of Beit El is telling them not only that violence is permissible, but also that it pays. It is already hard to draw the line between throwing bags of urine at police officers and fire bombs into people’s homes.

Also to blame, of course, are the law enforcement authorities, starting with the Judea and Samaria District Police – the most ridiculous and scandalous of all police districts, and not by chance. Nine Palestinian homes were torched in the past three years, according to B’Tselem. How many people have been prosecuted? None. So what happened in Duma on Friday? The fire was simply better, in the eyes of the arsonists and their minions.

Their minions also include the silent, the forgiving and all those who think the evil will remain forever within the confines of the West Bank. Their minions also include the Israelis who are convinced that the People of Israel is the chosen people, and as a result is permitted to do anything – including torching the homes of non-Jews, with their inhabitants inside.

So, too, many of those who were shocked by the act, including figures who have visited the victims in Sheba Medical Center, outside Tel Aviv – the president, the prime minister, the opposition leader and their aides – imbibed the racist, infuriating “You have chosen us from all the peoples” with their mothers’ milk.

At the end of a terrible day, it is this that leads to the burning of families whom God did not choose. No principle in Israeli society is more destructive, or more dangerous, than this principle. Nor, unfortunately, more common. If you were to examine closely what is concealed beneath the skin of most Israelis, you would find: the chosen people. When that is a fundamental principle, the next torching is only a matter of time.

Their minions are everywhere, and most of them are now tsk-tsking and expressing dismay at what happened. But what occurred couldn’t have not happened; what happened was dictated by the needs of reality, the reality of Israel and its value system. What happened will happen again, and no one will be spared. We all torched the Dawabsheh family.

Police Shootings Won’t Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People | Mother Jones
▻http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/police-shootings-traffic-stops-excessive-fines

http://www.motherjones.com/files/shakedown_630x354.jpg

But consider: In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount—$3.1 million—providing nearly a quarter of the city’s $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.

“Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can’t be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning,” said William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in “nontraffic-related fines.”

And not just a crime, but a crime that comes with fines that are strictly enforced. In 2014, Ferguson’s bottom-line-driven police force issued 16,000 arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town’s total population of 21,000. Stop and think about that for a moment: In Ferguson, 75 percent of all residents had active outstanding arrest warrants. Most of the entire city was a virtual plantation of indentured revenue producers.

When the poor come to understand that they are likely to be detained and fined for comically absurd crimes, it can’t be a surprise to the police that their officers are viewed with increasing distrust. In this environment, running away from a cop is not an act of suspicion; it’s common sense.

Cops like to talk about “good police.” They say, “That guy is good police”—a top compliment, by which they mean cool under the pressure of the street and cunning at getting people to give up the details of a crime. Good police look bad when sharing the street with crummy police. But when budgetary whims replace peacekeeping as the central motivation of law enforcement, who is more likely to write up more tickets, the good cop or the crummy one? When the mission of the entire department shifts from “protect and serve” to “punish and profit,” then just what constitutes good police?

Saakashvili signs reforms deal with US on regional support for Odesa
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/saakashvili-signs-reforms-deal-with-us-on-regional-support-for-odesa-39393

Odesa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili has signed a memorandum with the United States, assuring American support in reforming the region. The memorandum was counter-signed by William R. Brownfield, assistant secretary of state for drugs and law enforcement. It marks the first agreement between the U.S. and a regional Ukrainian government.

Posting pictures of the ceremony on his Facebook page, the former Georgian president said that the U.S. will assist in “reforming customs, administrative services and the provision of free legal services to volunteers.” Police officers from California, who are training Odesa’s new police patrol, were also present during the signing ceremony.

The U.S. State Department announced the forthcoming agreement Brownfield’s visit via a website update on July 6, stating that it “strongly supports” Odesa’s anti-corruption initiative.

“We are funding an anti-corruption action team of Ukrainian and international experts in the governor’s office, and launching a new anti-corruption grants program to broaden and deepen our cooperation with civil society partners,” according to the State Department announcement.
[…]
Speaking to reporters at a press briefing held on July 17 at the U.S. embassy in Budapest, Brownfield stated that he was “proud of the newly-trained police” in Odesa, but asked that “you not hold us to a standard of seeing nirvana and paradise arrive in 24 hours.”

He continued: “Any new police institution requires time to understand their communities and their people.”

Yuriy Lutsenko : Mukacheve incident is a collision between mafia and militants
▻http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/yuriy-lutsenko-mukacheve-incident-collision-between-mafia-militants-393319

The events in Mukacheve, Zakarpattia oblast, were a result of the conflict of interests between illegal armed groups and a mafia overtly cooperating with law enforcers, says Yuriy Lutsenko, the leader of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc parliamentary faction.

He was referring to a shooting incident that occurred in Mukacheve on July 11 between members of Right Sector, an extremist organization banned in Russia, and police officers, in which three people were killed and at least eleven injured.

#Transcarpathie : si je comprends bien ce (bref) communiqué, la mafia, locale, elle, collabore avec le gouvernement…