Law and Disorder September 6, 2021

 Alison Cornyn: The Incorrigibles

People in America are currently living through multiple crises. The economy is in tatters with unemployment very high. The health situation is a disaster with over a third of 1 million people dead from Covid and tens of millions uninsured.

The educational system has been ravaged, underfunded, inflicted with charter schools. Billionaire right-wing secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has only recently resigned. Almost half of the population is living in poverty. Families are in bad shape with suicides, drug addiction, and divorces soaring. Many don’t have enough food and homelessness is rapidly increasing. All this within the framework of a divided society, deeply impacted by racism.

How does this affect young people? And especially rebellious teenage girls? What laws apply to young people? How are they treated in a criminal justice system, historically and currently? What do we know about the level of abuse and neglect including sexual abuse?

Guest –  Alison Cornyn, is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, activist, and educator. She has focused her career on social justice issues. A special interest of Allison Cornyn’s has been the criminal justice system treatment of “wayward” teenage girls. She has focused her career on social justice issues and teaches in New York at the School of Visual Art’s Design for Social Innovation Program.

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Surveillance State and Tor

As computer technology has evolved and communications providers have profited, law enforcement and government intelligence organizations increasingly lobby to mandate that data services be engineered to allow them “back door” access to encrypted data.

Even as expansive anti-terrorism legislation provides more ways for the government to harvest our personal data, calls still continue for regulation of technology to ensure extra access channels. With each high-profile criminal attack, on U.S. soil or elsewhere across the world, government efforts to access personal communications gain momentum.

Years ago, many considered TOR, software that enables anonymous communication, to be equivalent to the Dark Net, the nefarious sites and services accessible on the Tor network that promote/enable illegal activity such as drug and gun marketplaces. After Edward Snowden’s massive data release, however, TOR use in the last year has grown quickly.

Guest – Shari Steele, Executive Director of the Tor Project. As the former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Shari built it into the nation’s preeminent digital rights organization.

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Law and Disorder August 16, 2021

 

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

The spectacle of President Donald Trump and the palace intrigue in the White House has served daily to distract people from the political strategy and accomplishments of the radical right, which is taking over the Republican Party.

Over time, the GOP has been transformed into operation conducting a concerted effort to curb democratic rule in favor of capitalist interests in every branch of government, whatever the consequences. It is marching ever closer to the ultimate goal of reshaping the Constitution to protect monied interests. This gradual take over of a major political party happened steadily, over several decades, and often in plain sight.

Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean exposes the architecture of this change and it’s ultimate aim. She has written that “both my research and my observations as a citizen lead me to believe American democracy is in peril”.

Guest – Professor Nancy MacLean, whose new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, has been described by Publishers Weekly as “a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative… [and] a feat of American intellectual and political history.” Booklist called it “perhaps the best explanation to date of the roots of the political divide that threatens to irrevocably alter American government.” The author of four other books, including Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006) called by the Chicago Tribune “contemporary history at its best,” and Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan,named a New York Times “noteworthy” book of 1994, MacLean is the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy.

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The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World

In 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act which led to formation of the National Security Council and, under its direction, the CIA. Its original mandate was to collect and analyze strategic information for use in war. Though shrouded in secrecy, some CIA activities—such as covert military and cybersecurity operations—have drawn public scrutiny and criticism.

In 1948 the Security Council approved a secret directive, NSC 10/2, authorizing the CIA to carry out an array of covert operations. This essentially allowed the CIA to become a paramilitary organization. Before he died, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and Cold War strategist who sponsored the directive said that “in light of latter history, it was the greatest mistake I ever made.”

Since NSC 10/2 authorized violation of international law it also established an official policy of lying so as to cover up the lawbreaking.

Guest – Douglas Valentine, author of The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World. Mr. Valentine’s rare access to CIA officials has resulted in portions of his research materials being archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center and John Jay College. He has written three books on CIA operations, including The Phoenix Program which documented the CIA’s elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture and assassination in Vietnam. His new book describes how many of these practices remain operational today.

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Law and Disorder July 26, 2021

Charges Dropped Against Pipeline Activists

The climate movement won a significant victory on July 13 when all charges were dropped against 16 pipeline protesters and a journalist. The local district attorney in Saint Martinsville, Louisiana rejected all criminal charges and vowed not to prosecute them for alleged violations of Louisiana’s anti-protest amendments to their critical infrastructure law.

The Bayou Bridge pipeline is the tail end of the infamous 1172 mile long Dakota access pipeline which brings dirty oil from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico. The end of the pipeline runs from Texas to Louisiana.

In 2018, in the midst of fierce opposition to the Bainbridge Pipeline and at the urging of an industry association to Louisiana legislator added pipelines to the definition of critical infrastructure to significantly raise the penalties for people protesting pipeline project. Those found guilty could be punished with five years in prison with or without hard labor.

This critical infrastructure law is part of a national effort to crack down an environmental activists across the US. The law in Louisiana was adopted from model legislation put forward by ALEC, the corporate funded politically conservative group. Similar legislation aimed at pipeline protesters has been introduced more than 23 times in 18 states since 2017 and is in effect in 15.

Karen Savage, an independent journalist who was arrested, said that “the first amendment guarantees water protectors the right to protest and protects my right as a journalist to report those protest without fear of retribution.“

Guest – Anne White Hat, one of the people arrested and charged under the law.  Whitehat Botanicals

Guest – Attorney Pam Spees, one of the team of attorneys that handled the criminal defense case. She’s also representing Anne White Hat in a case challenging the constitutionality of the Louisiana law. Whitehat v. Landry

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Continued Erosion Of Voting Rights In The United States

We are in the middle of a second great disenfranchisement in America. The first was after the Civil War reconstruction ended and Black people were stripped of their right to vote and their ability to hold office. This disenfranchisement lasted almost 100 years until the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Legislatures in Republican run states are imposing new voting restrictions particularly on non-white voters. The Brennan Center found that as of June 20th, 17 states enacted 28 new laws restricting the ability to vote since the start of the year.

Republican run states hastened to restrict voting by mail and in person, voting hours and locations, and the implementation of voter registration and voter ID requirements.

Georgia banned giving food or water to voters waiting in long lines, lines that were caused by reduced access to ballot casting locations in Black precincts. They get away with this by raising the imaginary problem of voter fraud.

The Supreme Court has six reactionary judges and three liberals. Three of the reactionaries were added to the court by Donald Trump. The reactionaries recent decision in Brnovich v Democratic National Committee delivered a huge hit to American democracy, such as it is. The decision makes the Court look like an obvious political institution where justices are simply partisan politicians with robes.

In the recent Brnovich decision, the court eviscerated the strongest remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act rights of 1965 which held that election laws and voting rules that actually had a racially discriminatory impact could be blocked.

The first major blow to the voting rights act was in 2013 when the court held in Shelby versus Holder that federal authorities could no longer block regressive new election laws or voting rules in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination.

“Effectively, most of the Voting Rights Act is now dead,” declared Hamlin University scholar David Schultz who specializes in elections.

Guest – Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught from 1991-2016, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She lectures, writes, and provides commentary for local, regional, national and international media outlets. Professor Cohn has served as a news consultant for CBS News and a legal analyst for Court TV, and a legal and political commentator on the BBC, CNN, NPR, and other major stations.

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Law and Disorder July 19, 2021

 

Source For The Intercept Outed, Faces 10 Years In Prison

In 2019 the Department of Justice indicted Daniel Hale—a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force and NSA—for giving classified national defense information to Jeremy Scahill for the online publication The Intercept. The events in question took place between 2013 and 2015. In late March, Daniel pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady on July 27, 2021.

Hale was named as the source of several documents that revealed grave government wrong-doing, much related to the Obama administration’s expansion of the drone war and other counterterrorism programs that lacked adequate oversight and have brought about as yet unknown numbers of civilian deaths abroad. One document published in the Intercept in 2014 revealed that most of the individuals in the government’s terror suspect database had no affiliation with any terror group.

Many have criticized the Intercept for its failure of source protection. As we recently covered in an interview with Reality Winner’s attorney, The Intercept’s lapses resulted in her identifying information being shared by the Intercept with the government.

StandWithDaniel

Guest – William Neuheisel, the Development and Program Manager for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, (WHISPeR), at ExposeFacts. William brings nearly a decade of marketing, communications, and development experience to WHISPeR as well as an expertise and passion for privacy, civil liberties, and First Amendment advocacy.

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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 Harrison, 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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Law and Disorder July 12, 2021

Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim by Professor Richard Falk

If we are ever to have a world not threatened by catastrophic climate change and devastating nuclear war we will need a world governed by respect for the rule of law, democracy, and the democratic right of peoples to self- determination. After the World War II, the United Nations was established in 1945 in an effort to prevent future wars. In this it has failed. The United States of America has been at war almost every year since its beginning and almost every year since the 50’s starting with Korea, then Vietnam, then Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Today the United States has 800 bases abroad in 80 countries. It spends $753 billion a year on the military, which is 53 cents out of every tax dollar.

Michael Ratner, a founder of Law And Disorder Radio and who practiced human rights law internationally, used to say that you cannot have imperialism abroad and democracy at home. He said it was a truth established by the decline of both the Greek and Roman empires thousands of years ago.

Guest – International Law Professor Richard Falk who is still teaching and going strong at age 90. He has recently had published his magnificent memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Professor Falk is a leading international law professor, prominent activist, public author, and a pioneer thinker dedicated to peace and justice. He taught at Princeton University for 40 years and was active in seeking an end to the Vietnam war, a better understanding of Iran, a just solution for Israel/Palestine, and improved democracy everywhere. He also served as the UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine. He has written 50 books. Since 2009 he has been nominated annually for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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In Defense of Whistleblowers: Attorney Sarah Alexander

James Glenn was working for NetDesign, a Cisco Systems reseller in Denmark when he came across a vulnerability in software made for a line of Cisco’s video surveillance cameras. The flaw made it easy for would-be hackers to access the systems running the devices and to penetrate the systems on a deeper level after gaining entry. Glenn made the discovery after taking part in his company’s “own medicine” initiative, where staffers test equipment and software for security holes. In 2008 he reported the issue to his employer and to Cisco, assuming that he’d be praised for finding the problem. Instead, he was fired.

Cisco Systems is one of the world’s leading information technology and networking companies. With a market cap of close to $195 billion, Cisco dominates the networking and communications devices industry. Glenn notes that he learned the cameras and software were still being used by the Los Angeles International Airport, and in 2010 he spoke with law enforcement personnel about his concerns regarding LAX. According to court filings cited by Glenn’s attorneys, Cisco failed to fix the vulnerability until an updated version of the software was released in 2012. It then took the company 3 more years to release a security advisory to companies using the previous, flawed version of the software.

Stories like this are all too common. Whistleblowers frequently lose their jobs and suffer significant personal hardships as a result of coming forward on behalf of the public’s interest.

Guest – Attorney Sarah Poppy Alexander of the law firm Constantine, Cannon. Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in so called “qui tam” lawsuits in both federal and state court, as well as under the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission’s whistleblower programs. Poppy has been selected to the Northern California Super Lawyers Rising Stars list every year since 2016. Before joining Constantine Cannon, Poppy was an associate attorney at Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld LLP, where she worked to ensure prisoners received appropriate medical and mental health care and adequate accommodations for disabilities in jails and prisons. Poppy graduated from Harvard Law School and holds an M.A. in Political Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale College.

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Law and Disorder July 5, 2021

Former NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s License To Practice Law Suspended

Two weeks ago former president Donald Trump‘s attorney Rudy Giuliani’s license to practice law was suspended. The disciplinary committee of the New York City appellate division court where Giuliani had been licensed to practice law ruled that “he communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public at large in his capacity as a lawyer for Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020. In addition, on January 6, the committee took notice of Giuliani‘s urging the crowd in Washington DC make law by “engaging in combat.”

The disciplinary committee found that Giuliani’s conduct “immediately threatened the public interest in warranted interim suspension for the practice of law.” Giuliani became the first attorney to experience professional consequences for perpetuating lies about fraud in the 2020 election.

He had been the main prosecutor in the Southern District of New York before becoming mayor. After 911 he was widely viewed as a hero and denominated “Americas mayor“. He went on to practice law representing a number of corporations and becoming rich before becoming Trump’s attorney.

Guest – Professor and attorney Ellen Yaroshefsky, is one of the signatories to one of the complaints against Giuliani. Professor Yaroshefsky is the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development, Howard Lichtenstein Distinguished Professor of Legal Ethics, and Executive Director of the Monroe H. Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal Ethics.

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The Capital Riot Aftermath Evaluation: Attorney Margaret Ratner-Kunstler

At the same time we have a radicalization of the left we also have one on the right. The one on the right has been building for 40 years. A right wing racist nationalist demagogue, Donald Trump, got 74 million votes in the last election. People and organizations supporting Trump and egged on by him ransacked the Capital on January 6.

“The military was an active participant by refusing cars to intervene to stop the invasion of the building, “Barry Shepard wrote in Green Left Weekly. “They stood by for some four hours. Eventually it was the Washington DC police who finally ended it.“
Caroline Or, writing in Byline Times wrote that “the Capital riot was not a spontaneous outburst of violence, but rather a carefully orchestrated, well-funded attempt to violently overthrow the election and bring an end to democracy in America.“ Further, she wrote that “there is a close alliance between violent extremist and mainstream factions of the Republican Party, including wealthy donors and elected officials.“

The Republicans in Congress succeeded in blocking a proposal to convene a bipartisan committee to investigate the interaction. For his part, Biden has avoided talking about it in an evident attempt to assure his allies overseas that America is still a democracy.
Who did it, what did they hope to accomplish, love and what has been done by way of an investigation and criminal prosecution?

Guest – human rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler who has worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights and is the editor of the recent book In Defense of Julian Assange.

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