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Police Spy On Social Media
In late 2016, a trove of emails revealed that law enforcement had been monitoring the social media accounts of Black Lives Matter protesters. One police sergeant in Memphis, Tennessee even opened a fake Facebook account to impersonate a black activist, infiltrate online black protest spaces, and gather intelligence on hundreds of activists. In Minnesota, an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force used a confidential information with access to private social media communications about a BLM protest and fed that information to local police.
It turns out that such tracking is routine among local and federal police agencies. They use it in criminal investigations and to keep tabs on lawful First Amendment protected activities of dissent.
And as we’ve seen in other areas of surveillance, police watching persons online usually impacts historically over-police communities. It also has a chilling effect on free speech and online communications.
The Brennan Center in New York has issued a comprehensive report on social media monitoring. It shows how personal information gleaned from social media posts is used to target dissent and subject religious and ethnic minorities to increased vetting and surveillance.
Guest – Harsha Panduranga is counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program. His work has been featured in numerous press outlets including the Atlantic, Slate, Daily Beast, and Just Security. Harsha received his BA and JD from the University of Michigan.
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Co-conspirator For Justice: The Revolutionary Life Of Dr. Alan Berkman
After battling recurrent cancer for half his life Dr. Alan Berkman died in a New York City hospital on June 5th, 11 years ago. It was not the worst struggles of his life.
Alan was first struck by cancer when he was in prison, accused and then convicted for his political work in the political underground. He was a leader of the small May 19th movement, an offshoot of Prairie Fire then controlled by those in the Weather Underground. While hidden from public view,Alan and his comrades did non-lethal bombings of political targets, including an FBI office and the U.S. Senate, to protest American imperial and racist atrocities, and did armed robberies, which they called “expropriation‘s“, to support themselves.
Caught in 1985, Alan served eight years in some of the worst prisons in America, nearly half that time in solitary. He had two rounds of cancer, but the authorities stalled again and again on giving him adequate medical care. They hated him for being a socialist, a Jew, a doctor, and a supporter of black, Latin and Native American peoples and those harmed by American imperialism around the globe. The authorities labeled him a terrorist.
Alan came of age in the 1960s, but really did not become political until he went to medical school. He left a prestigious medical residency, on track to become a research scientist, to become a community doctor for 10 years in New York’s poorest neighborhoods throughout the 1970s. He was forced underground for years because he wouldn’t give up the name of the woman he treated for a gunshot wound she got in a failed Brinks armored truck robbery that killed two police officers and a security guard in Rockland county, just outside New York City.
After eight years in prison, amazingly, radical attorney Ron Kuby prevented New York state from not renewing his medical license. Alan, having learned about AIDS in prison, started working as an AIDS doctor in the South Bronx. In a year he became the medical director of the program.
At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Alan increasingly was horrified by the failure to provide treatment for HIV/AIDS patients in the Global South. He helped form Health GAP (Global Access Project) with the help of ACT UP and Housing Works. They fought big Pharma, which controlled manufacturing and distribution of the anti-viral AIDS medicine “cocktail” which cost $10-$15,000 a year, an exorbitant price guaranteed to them by their ownership of medical patents, their intellectual property. People could not afford the drugs, especially outside the United States, and thousands died needlessly.
Dr. Alan Berkman helped change that, not having the requisite respect for private property in a public health crisis. He got sick people drugs that were produced generically and brought the cost of the drug down to $87 a year. Some 4 million people in the global south took the medicine, prolonging or saving their lives
Michael Smith’s review of Susan’s book – The Revolutionary Life Of Dr. Alan Berkman
Guest – Susan Reverby, author of the recently published Co-conspirator for Justice: the Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman. She is the Marian Butler MacLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas and Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and It’s Legacy, and other books on gender, race, health, nursing, and medicine.
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