Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Surveillance
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U.S. Information Technology And Cyber Security Awareness
America’s information technology infrastructure is especially inviting to adversarial attacks, as news headlines tell us again and again. Some say that our national cyber defense is inadequate to protect against cyber incidents, defined by the Department of Homeland Security as those “likely to result in demonstrable harm to the national security interests, foreign relations, or economy of the United States or to the public confidence, civil liberties, or public health and safety of the American people.”
We read how hackers gain access to our personal information stored by huge retailers such as Target and Home Depot, gaining access to millions of credit and debit card numbers. In 2014 JP Morgan Chase announced a breach affecting 76 million households and 7 million small businesses. The Government Accountability Organization reports a nearly 800 percent increase of threats to federal agencies from 2006 to 2012 at a cost likely to exceed $400 billion.
Despite this and evidence of Russian tampering with the 2016 elections, President Trump recently announced that he was getting rid of its top cyber policy adviser role, a position designed to help streamline the government’s overall approach to cybersecurity policy across federal agencies. Compounding problems of coordination is a lack of shortage of trained cybersecurity professionals to fill the growing number of jobs.
Guest – Professor Nasir Memon, founder and chair of New York University Tandon’s School of Engineering’s cybersecurity program. The Engineering School was one of the first to implement a cybersecurity program at the undergraduate level. In 2002, Nasir founded Cyber Security Awareness Week, an annual conference where tens of thousands of students compete in events and learn skills in cyber security. He is also co-founder of Digital Assembly, a software company that develops digital forensics and data recovery and Vivic, a company that produces malware detection software. Nasir’s research and commentary is widely published in scholarly and mainstream press, and he is a frequent radio and television guest.
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Attorney Client Privilege
The attorney-client privilege has been in the news with the unfolding Trump scandals in bringing about the FBI raid on Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room where a number of documents and computer files were seized.
What is the attorney-client privilege? And to whom does it apply? Generally speaking, the privilege is owned by the client and unless the client waived her rights her lawyer is barred not only from revealing any information about the client but even revealing who the client is.
An exception in the case of the FBI raid and Donald Trump‘s attorney’s Office, Home, and hotel room was made on the grounds that there is a “fraud exception“ to the attorney-client privilege. Defenders of the attorney-client privilege, even if it has to do with protecting Donald Trump, have argued that it is illegal and unprincipled for the Justice Department to get a search warrant from a federal magistrate and violate the principle. These people argue that it is wrong to argue that “any stick will do to beat a dog” and that making an exception in the case of Trump could backfire.
Guest – Minneapolis Attorney Carla Kjellberg, has worked with victims of child sexual assault who have sued priests, litigated sensitive family law matters, and worked with unions and political activists.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, Iran, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Political Analysis: United States Attacks On Syria
The recent American cruise missile attack on alleged chemical war infrastructure in Douma, Syria have been defended as legitimate, if not legal. Trump called Syrian president Assad “ an animal“ who gassed his own people and had to be deterred from further attacks on them.
Critics of the attack have said that it violated both American and international law and risked nuclear warfare. They argued that our Constitution states that only Congress can declare war, that there was no question of self-defense, that the United States was under attack, and that in any case The United Nations charter, to which the United States is a signatory, precludes what United States did. The UN charter is a treaty which binds America and is part of American law.
Guest – Attorney Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former NLG president. My book, ‘Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues,’ was recently published in a second, updated edition. marjoriecohn.com.
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Inside Iran: The Real History And Politics Of The Islamic Republic Of Iran
Medea Benjamin presented a powerful book talk at the A.J Muste Memorial Institute. Medea was introduced by our own Heidi Boghosian.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. She has been an advocate for social justice for more than 40 years. Described as “one of America’s most committed — and most effective — fighters for human rights” by New York Newsday, and “one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement” by the Los Angeles Times, she was one of 1,000 exemplary women from 140 countries nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the millions of women who do the essential work of peace worldwide. She received numerous prices, including: the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Peace Prize by the US Peace Memorial, the Gandhi Peace Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Award. She is a former economist and nutritionist with the United Nations and World Health Organization.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Iraq War, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Truth to Power, War Resister
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Mass Support Needed For Julian Assange
Two weeks ago, WikiLeaks founder and internet publisher Julian Assange , who is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, had his Internet access cut off due to pressure by the British and American governments on Ecuador. Ecuador had granted him political asylum in their embassy where he has been living in two small sunless rooms for five years. Ecuador gave him political asylum after he sought refuge in the embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, which would have sent him to the US. Assange was under protracted investigation for a rape claim, made up by the Swedish police and Swedish prosecutor and denied by the purported women victim. Sweden finally dropped the case, but Assange remains subject to arrest in Britain jumping bail.
Assange and WikiLeaks had been steadily revealing the war crimes and illegalities of the American government since it first published the Iraq war logs eight years ago. The war logs included video footage of American soldiers assassinating Iraqi civilians and a Reuters journalist. Chelsea Manning, who was recently released after seven years in prison, furnished WikiLeaks with the war logs.
The United States government is seeking to capture Assange and bring him back to the United States to stand trial for espionage, a crime which carries the death penalty.
Guest – John Pilger, an Australian-British journalist based in London. John has worked in many facets of journalism, including a correspondent in the Vietnam War, the Middle East Desk for Reuters in London, a documentary film maker, and a producer for the Independent Television Network in London. Pilger is known for his conscience, bravery and acute historical insight. His articles appear worldwide in newspapers such as the Guardian, the Independent, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times.
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You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice: Intellectual Property
Laws protecting artwork and intellectual property are increasingly being put to the test amid claims from rising artists marketing their work online whose work is being copied by others.
Art piracy can include music posters, clothing design, book cover art, signage, record sleeve art, and typography. Under copyright law, one artist using another artist’s idea is generally legal, while one artist using another’s expression of that idea is generally illegal. Only a fact-intensive analysis can provide a bit of clarity, and even that is subject to a judge’s or jury’s review.
Sometimes copyright cases expand into major litigation. A New York judge recently ruled that graffiti, or aerosol artists, were entitled to a $6.7 million verdict after New York developer Gerald Wolkoff destroyed their well-known public work. The claim in the so-called FivePointz case arose under the Visual Artists’ Rights Act, or VARA. It’s the kind of case that attorney Scott Burroughs says rarely goes to trial. Several artists created aerosol art pieces on the walls of an abandoned development in the once downtrodden and now gentrified neighborhood of Long Island City, Queens. Wolkoff destroyed their art as part of a development plan. Read Scott’s Column Above The Law.
Guest – Attorney Scott Burroughs, an advocate for artists’ rights who curates the art law blog You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice and has a weekly copyright law column on legal website Above the Law.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Prison Industry, Surveillance, Targeting Muslims, Torture, Uncategorized, War Resister
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Gina Haspel, Rule of Law And Torture
Nazi generals and Nazi leaders were prosecuted at the end of World War II for war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide. These crimes were incorporated into international law.
The chief prosecutor was Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court judge. The Nazis defended themselves by arguing that they were just following orders. This defense was deemed unavailing. In many cases, they were found guilty and sentenced to lengthy prison terms or hung. He said that the war crimes tribunal at Nirenberg was not merely victors’ justice. But that the principles it followed would be universal and applied in the future, to all countries including the USA. And indeed, the United States signed on to the Geneva Conventions and Convention Against Torture and incorporate both the crimes and the concept of universal jurisdiction into its law.
Gina Haspel has been nominated by President Donald Trump to head the CIA. She is a war criminal. She violated both international and national law by running a black site secret detention center in Thailand where men were tortured. Although there were several court orders that the evidence be preserved, Gina Haspel had the videotapes of torture destroyed.
John Brennan, Obama’s ex head of the CIA, who was involved in the torture program, recently came to her defense, stating that she was just following orders: The Nazi defense.
Trump supports torture. He believes that torture works. This is both immoral and untrue. He says he is for waterboarding and worse. He now has a subordinate with whom he is in agreement.
Obama refused to prosecute the lawbreakers. Instead he threw CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou in prison for two years for disclosing American torture. He said we must look forward, not backward. This greenlighted what is going on now with Haspel.
Michael Ratner warned us about this eventuality. The European Center for Human and Constitutional Rights may seek Haspel’s arrest if she goes to Germany.
Such is the irony of history that the German fascist government that perpetrated the greatest crimes against humanity has been superseded by an American government which condones and is perpetuating them as well.
Guest – John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, he is the author of Doing Time Like a Spy: How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. He spent 15 years working for the CIA including the period following September 11 2001. The next year he was invited to be certified in enhanced interrogation techniques and said no, rightly recognizing it as sanctioned torture. He was privy to all the details of the American torture program and personally knew Gina Haspel. In 2007 when ABC News asked him to rebut charges that he tortured and Al Qaeda prisoner he went on the air and disclose details about American torture policy. For this the CIA had him tried and convicted. He spent 23 months in prison.
Guest – Katherine Gallagher is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. She works on universal jurisdiction and international criminal law cases involving U.S. and foreign officials and torture and other war crimes, and cases involving private military corporations and torture at Abu Ghraib. Her major cases include Al Shimari v. CACI, the international U.S. torture accountability cases, andSurvivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) v. Vatican, seeking accountability for the crimes against humanity of sexual violence by clergy and cover-up.
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The National Immigration Project And Protecting Haitian Refugees
The National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild filed a lawsuit in Brooklyn on March 15 to block President Trump’s cancellation of temporary protected status which had been granted to more than 50,000 Haitian refugees because of the terrible conditions in that country since the hurricane in 2010. The National Immigration Project declared President Trump’s actions to be unlawful, racially motivated, and evidence of a complete lack of knowledge of immigration law.
The TPS program exempts from deportation people from countries in turmoil due to war, natural disasters, and other extraordinary conditions.
The suit alleges that the federal government was arbitrary and capricious in his decision to end the program and was motivated by Donald Trump’s “racial and national origin animus towards patients.” The suit cites Trump’s demeaning remarks towards Haitians and Haiti. He has said that Haitians have AIDS and Haiti is a “s&*t hole” country. The Trump administration‘s position is that protecting Haitians is no longer necessary because conditions in Haiti have improved.
Guest – National Lawyers Guild Attorney Sejal Zota is the Legal Director of the National Immigration Project of the Guild. Sejal works on issues of removal defense, post-conviction, enforcement, and immigration consequences of crimes through litigation, education, and technical assistance. Previously, Sejal taught and wrote about the impacts of immigration on state and local government at University of North Carolina’s School of Government. She also regularly trained and advised defense attorneys throughout North Carolina on the immigration consequences of crime, and is the lead author of Immigration Consequences of a Criminal Conviction in North Carolina.
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Brooklyn Folk Festival 2018
Co-host Michael Smith reminds listeners of this year’s Brooklyn Folk Festival.
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Civil Liberties, Criminalizing Dissent, FBI Intrusion, Human Rights, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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Pipeline Resistance Groups and the film On A Knife Edge
It’s now more than one year since law enforcement evicted the last Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camps. The pipeline was near completion and was supposed to cross sacred Indian land in South Dakota in order to bring Canadian tar sand oil from north to south through the United States.
Then the project was stalled by a tremendous solidarity movement lead by indigenous peoples along with their allies only to be green lighted by the newly elected Trump administration which has proven to be a handmaiden of the fossil fuel industry.
Guest – Eli Kane, a Brooklyn-based producer who has worked in film and music for 15 years. He has made two other documentaries for PBS about land rights and food sovereignty, including Land Rush, which won a Peabody Award in 2013.
Guest – Attorney Pamela Spees is an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights and represents environmental justice groups opposing the efforts of Tigerswan, a private military company which worked with corporate and governmental entities at Standing Rock in an attempt to suppress the movement against the pipeline, to operate in Louisiana.
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Perpetual War and the Anti-War Movement
The United States of America has been in a perpetual state of war since September 11, 2001 and before that almost continuously since 1918. The United States has overthrown democratically elected governments it could not control since the invasion of Mexico in 1848. It has overturned elected government and assassinated or attempted to assassinate many heads of foreign states.
World War I was a massive slaughter between imperial powers with the United States, France, Britain and Russia on one side against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the other. In one week alone, Great Britain lost 250,000 young men. The war wiped out almost an entire generation. It had been billed as “the war to end all wars.“
November 11th is known as the armistice between the hostile countries and was made a national holiday to venerate peace. It was called Armistice Day. But by 1953 Armistice Day was turned into “Veterans’ Day” and fighting was glorified.
Donald Trump plans to spend $30 million on a massive military parade in Washington DC this coming November 11, Veterans’ Day. Tanks, missiles and troops will be paraded through the streets of our nations’ capital in a show of military force and adulation of Trump. A coalition of antiwar organizations are planning mass actions against this military parade and the normalization of war, violence and authoritarianism
Guest – Ajamu Baraka, an initiator and leader of the Black Alliance for Peace, an organization which is part of the coalition. He has also just returned from a meeting of international leaders because the USA’s involvement of a possible overthrow of the government of Venezuela. Ajamu Baraka helped organize a conference in Baltimore Last month concerning USA’s 800 bases abroad particularly the new ones in Africa.
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CIA Sponsored Terror, Civil Liberties, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Political Prisoner, Surveillance, Truth to Power
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The Freedom Fast and Time’s Up Wendy’s March
Immokalee, Florida was the site of some of the most brutal human rights atrocities in the United States. One third of all the nation’s tomatoes are grown there. Since 1997, the Justice Department has prosecuted seven slavery cases in Florida, four involving tomato harvesters. More than 1,200 persons have been freed from agricultural slavery rings in Florida during the last 10 to 15 years.
Workers report brutal beatings, being shackled in chains at night, not receiving regular pay, and having to share small quarters with dozens of others in a mobile home for $200.00 a month. They work without breaks, in the beating sun for 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
In 1993 a small group of workers who had been meeting in a church founded the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Their mission was to improve the lives of tomato pickers in Southern Florida. After years of organizing in Immokalee, the Coalition launched its first boycott of a national of a fast food company—Taco Bell—in 2001. Four years later, the company agreed to support wage increases and workplace protections for tomato pickers. Since then, food corporations, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Whole Foods, Subway, and Walmart have followed suit. Today, 14 of the world’s largest food retailers and restaurants have signed fair food agreements with the CIW.
In May the Coalition will receive the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism for their continued efforts to protect the rights of agricultural workers, prevent involuntary servitude, and create a food supply chain that is fair from bottom to top.
Guest – Lupe Gonzalo is a senior staff member and leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). She has worked in the agricultural fields of the United States for the last 12 years as a migrant farmworker, including in the harvesting of tomatoes, citrus, peppers, and many other vegetables and fruits. As part of the Fair Food Program education team, Lupe and her colleagues conduct workers’ rights education in seven states along the East Coast throughout the year
Guest – Patricia Cipollitti, Patricia organizes alongside faith communities as part of her staff role within the Alliance for Fair Food. The Alliance for Fair Food is a national network of people working in partnership with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers for farmworker justice.
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The Prometheus Radio Project And LPFM
Where do you turn on your radio dial to hear diverse viewpoints, community voices, or even local musicians? If you’re like thousands across the country you might tune into Low Power FM or LPFM noncommercial broadcast stations. They operate at a lower transmission power and serve smaller areas than full power stations.
In 1999, the Federal Communications Commission launched the low power FM radio service, opening up an opportunity for community radio broadcasting in more than two decades. LPFM’s broadcast from 10 to 100 watts and are run by non-profit organizations, unions, schools, churches, and other local, non-commercial organizations. Today there are more than 800 low power radio stations on the air, committing to giving 8 hours a day of air time to local voices.
Law and Disorder is thrilled to be carried on several LPFM stations but it hasn’t been an easy road. Early on, corporate sponsored big broadcasters have pushed Congress to limit low power radio as soon as it started. Fortunately, The Prometheus Radio Project fought for years to support the Local Community Radio Act that would return authority to the FCC, and allow them to license low power stations in cities for the first time.
Guest – Paul Bane got hooked on Grassroots Radio by listening to Boulder’s KGNU in the mid 90’s. That also led him into activism for global economic dignity in the “Seattle-era” street movement. Along the way he also stood against police brutality, for an end of racism toward Native Americans and others, an end of media bias including that at NPR, of discrimination and dehumanization aimed at women, LGBT, and undocumented immigrants. When he co-founded Grassroots Radio station KRFC between 1997 and 2003, he also co-founded its news collective. After chatting with Prometheus at Grassroots Radio Coalition conferences for a decade or so and leaving his Fortune 100 R&D job, Paul volunteered at Prometheus in 2010 and is currently our nerdiest engineer. His electrical engineering degree and ham radio experience comes in handy for FCC application engineering, station design, construction and troubleshooting. Paul also created and maintains the free-to-use RFree software to make application engineering easier.
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