The U.S. military is aiding police in a California conduct ''counterinsurgency'' operations as part of a crack down on gang related violence in the city of Salinas, a relationship officials admit pushes the boundaries of the constitutional bar on the military operating within U.S. borders but one that should be expanded nationwide.
Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. One man, who has no criminal record, was stopped more than 25 times in less than three years after a "protest" marker was placed against his car after he attended a small protest against duck and pheasant shooting. ANPR "interceptor teams" are being deployed on roads leading to protests to monitor attendance.
A disabled pensioner was hauled before the courts and charged with assault after she prodded a teenage 'hoodie' in the chest with her finger. Renate Bowling, 71, confronted the 17-year-old youth in the street after stones were thrown at her home. During the conversation the frail widow, who fled to Britain from Communist East Germany and walks with a steel frame, prodded the youth in the chest with her finger.
The 'Internet Eyes' service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers. Players who help catch the most criminals each month will win cash prizes up to 1,000.
President Barack Obama has quietly decided to bypass Congress and allow the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects without charges. The move, which was controversial when the idea was first floated in The Washington Post in May, has sparked serious concern among civil liberties advocates. Such a decision allows the president to unilaterally hold "combatants" without habeas corpus -- a legal term literally meaning "you shall have the body" -- which forces prosecutors to charge a suspect with a crime to justify the suspect's detention.
The Obama administration supports extending three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of the year, the Justice Department told Congress in a letter made public Tuesday. Lawmakers and civil rights groups had been pressing the Democratic administration to say whether it wants to preserve the post-Sept. 11 law's authority to access business records, as well as monitor so-called ''lone wolf'' terrorists and conduct roving wiretaps.
Welcome to Tiburon. Click. Your presence has been noted. The posh and picturesque town that juts into San Francisco Bay is poised to do something unprecedented: use cameras to record the license plate number of every vehicle that crosses city limits.
The East Hampton Town Police Department will acquire a license plate reader (LPR), which will allow cameras on a passing patrol car to read the license plates of nearby cars and check them against Motor Vehicle Department records automatically, within the next few months. Funded through a grant from the district attorneys office, East Hampton Town Chief of Police Todd Sarris said he is waiting for the equipment to arrive. ... Cameras on the LPR system can read the license plates of parked or moving vehicles. According to Chief Sarris, the LPR system will be an effective enforcement tool and a deterrent to those who drive with suspended registrations.
Police in Grand Forks are testing a new system that scans license plates of passing vehicles. Police say the device reads an average of 3,500 license plates daily to see if any are stolen or if the owners are wanted by authorities. The license numbers are checked through the FBI's National Crime Information Center and other databases.
Jacqueline Mercado, a 33-year-old Peruvian immigrant, took a few photos of her young children at bath time. A week later, Richardson police were rummaging through her house for kiddie porn, and a state child welfare worker came to take her kids away. The photo in question: Jacqueline Mercado and Johnny Fernandez say they took this image last October to memorialize the breast-feeding stage of their son's life. Below: The Lucca Madonna, painted in the 15th century by the Dutch master Jan van Eyck. Defense lawyers argued that while breast-feeding images are a second-degree felony in Richardson, they are also on public display in the finest art museums in the world.
The discovery was made by software developer and Pre owner Joey Hess, who found that his phone was reporting his location over a secure connection back to Palm. It also sent back information about application crashes - even those not seen by a Pre owner. Also in the daily update sent to Palm was a list of the third party applications installed on the phone.
Then the group noticed five or six police cruisers surrounding two cars in an apparent traffic stop on the other side of the street. It seemed to Tuma that was more cops than necessary. "That's why I hate the police," Tuma said. He told the Huffington Post that in a loud sing-song voice, he then chanted, "I hate the police, I hate the police."
My simple calculations guessed that we were going to achieve economic sustainability on Earth by depopulating down to a population of approximately 500 million people from our then current global population of 6 billion. I was a portfolio strategist used to looking at numbers from a very high level. Those around me could not fathom how all the different threads I was integrating could lead to such a conclusion. To me, we had to have radical change in how we governed resources or depopulate. It was a mathematical result.
Federal law now criminalizes activities that the average person would never dream would land him in prison. Consequently, every year, thousands of upstanding, responsible Americans run afoul of some incomprehensible federal law and end up serving time in federal prison.
Equality Maryland, the state's largest gay rights group, was among the peaceful protest groups to be classified as terrorists in a Maryland State Police database. The group was designated a "security threat" by the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division, which also kept dossiers on dozens of activists and at least a dozen groups. Police kept files on Equality Maryland's plans to hold rallies outside the State House in Annapolis to press for legislation reversing the state's ban on same-sex marriage. They plan to purge the files.
Three anglers claim they were arrested under anti-terror laws in Woodley after using laser pens to frighten ducks away from their bait hooks. The three men were taken into Loddon Valley Police Station late on Friday, March 7, and two were held overnight, DNA tested, fingerprinted and then released without charge.
Savana Redding still remembers the clothes she had on black stretch pants with butterfly patches and a pink T-shirt the day school officials here forced her to strip six years ago. She was 13 and in eighth grade. Savana Redding, 19, was strip searched six years ago when teachers suspected she had brought prescription pills to school. An assistant principal, enforcing the schools antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils. The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side, she said. They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear. Ms. Redding, an honors student, had no pills. But she had a furious mother and a lawyer, and now her case has reached the Supreme Court, which will hear arguments on April 21.
For 30 years I have been travelling to unfree places, from East Germany to Burma, and writing about them in the belief that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world. I wanted people in those places to enjoy more of what we had. In the last few years, I have woken up - late in the day, but better late than never - to the way in which individual liberty, privacy and human rights have been sliced away in Britain
You do not actually have to have committed any offence for the act to be enforced. Section 27 gives police the powers to move anybody, from any place, at anytime, if they think there's a possibility an alcohol related offence may be committed.
As the police attacks on protesters in Minnesota continue -- see this video of the police swarming a bus transporting members of Earth Justice, seizing the bus and leaving the group members stranded on the side of the highway -- it appears increasingly clear that it is the Federal Government that is directing this intimidation campaign. Minnesota Public Radio reported yesterday that "the searches were led by the Ramsey County Sheriff's office. Deputies coordinated searches with the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets.
About 100 protesters were being processed early today at Denver's temporary processing center in a former warehouse.
Depending on their charges, they should be processed by 4 a.m. or 5 a.m., said Capt. Frank Gale of the Denver Sheriff's Office.
"It's working exactly the way it is supposed to do," Gale said of the facility.
If the detainees have the resources, they could post bond, Gale said. Others could end up being taken back to the main jail.
During the arrest, one of the officers can be heard saying to Eslocker, "You're lucky I didn't knock the f..k out of you." [Note, that is actually incorrect English.]
