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Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program And Persistent Tracking
As the nation erupts in protests against racially-infused police violence, the Baltimore Police Department has just launched a six-month, day-time aerial surveillance experiment. A Texas billionaire has funded the project that is being operated by an Ohio-based company, Persistent Surveillance Systems. The plane flies overhead and records the movements of everyone in the city.
Michael Harrision, Baltimore Police Commissioner, has justified the nearly $4 million experiment by saying, “There is no expectation of privacy on a public street, a sidewalk.”
The Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program is, by contract, limited to monitoring such felony crimes as robberies, car jackings, shootings and homicides. Images recorded are, in theory, to be used solely in criminal investigations and will be stored for 45 days. A first prong of the program was conducted covertly in 2016 under a different police commissioner.
The ACLU of Maryland calls this initiative the most comprehensive surveillance of a U.S. city in history. ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah said, “It’s the virtual equivalent of having a police officer follow a resident every time they walk out the door, and if that happened in real life, all of us would understand the huge privacy implications in doing that.”
Guest – ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah has worked on a number of significant cases involving free speech, police misconduct, privacy, election law and more. In 2011 he was an inaugural recipient of the James Baldwin Medal for Civil Rights. David previously worked as a Senior Trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the US Dept of Justice, focusing on police misconduct and conditions in prisons, jails and other state institutions.
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President Trump Withdraws From The Treaty On Open Skies – PART 2
The chance for nuclear war which would destroy human life on Earth has never been higher. Just last week President Donald Trump withdrew America from The Treaty On Open Skies. This treaty is an agreement between 34 nations that allows each country to fly over each other’s territories. The treaty is designed to provide transparency and mutual observation of military developments. He also withdrew from the Intermediary Intermediary Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia. As a consequence the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has pushed the hands of its doomsday clock on its magazine forward to almost midnight
Shortly after taking office Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal. Trump enjoys the financial and political backing of big business, the banks, the hedge funds, and the military industrial complex. These money interests profit greatly from the nuclear rearmament which is now going on. First under Obama and then Trump $1 trillion is planned to be spent over the next 30 years for a new generation of nuclear weapons, including low yield ones, which are likely to be used.
Whistleblowing truth teller Daniel Ellsberg has recently written the grimly important book The Doomsday Machine. He believes that so far, avoidance of a nuclear war has been miraculous and that the danger is as present today as it was during the Cold War. He thinks seeking profit in spite of the risk of nuclear winter is “institutional madness.“
Guest – Paul Jay is the editor of the blog the theanalysis.news. We will discuss with him the kind of movement that is needed to reverse the nuclear arms race as well as to bring about a democratic organization of the economy.
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