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Amazon Ring Of Surveillance

When it comes to e-commerce, the multinational tech company Amazon.com has laid claim to a huge corner on the market. Now, it’s venturing into the business of surveillance.

Amazon is aggressively pursuing law enforcement partnerships. More than 400 police departments across the nation have already joined forces with the tech giant’s so-called smart doorbell program, called Ring. Part of Amazon’s outreach strategy in gaining new police partners is to play on fears of increasing property crime.

Ring doesn’t just show you who is at your door. It films and records any interaction or movement at owners’ doors, then alerts users’ phones. With partnerships between mega corporations and law enforcement to use new surveillance systems in the public–leaving out community input–come a host of civil liberties concerns, including racial profiling.

Guest – Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Matthew is a policy analyst working on issues of surveillance and privacy at the local, state, and federal level. He is a frequent contributor to the Freedom of Information-centered outlet Muckrock and his bylines have appeared in the Washington Post and Motherboard.

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North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five

North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five is the recent publication by our guest attorney Martin Garbus.

This case was one of the most significant ones in recent times. Attorney Len Weinglass had originally taken the case to appeal the matter for already convicted Cuban Five. The appeal was ultimately lost. Weinglass died and his dear friend our guest Martin Garbus stepped in to what looked like a lost cause. Four of the five men were in prison serving long sentences.

Cuba had been an American colony up until 1959 when the widely popular Cuban revolution succeeded in gaining the country’s independence from the USA.

To reverse this has been American policy ever since. The Helms-Burton Act was a counter- revolution as an American government policy written into American law.

Martin Garbus started representing Cuban Five member Gerardo Hernandez who at the time had then been found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage against United States sometime in the future as well as murder.

Hernandez and his four comrades had been sent from Cuba to Miami by the government of Cuba to spy, not on the United States, but on the counter-revolutionary Cubans in Miami who were launching terrorist activities from Florida directed at persons and property in Cuba, attempting to sabotage the Cuban tourist economy which was in bad shape when a new Russian government cut them off.

The Cubans gathered information on the Miami-based terrorists, compiling a lengthy dossier on their murders activities, and turned it over to the FBI. They asked the US government to stop the terrorists, who were targeting the Cuban tourist industry by planting bombs at the Havana Airport, on buses, and in a hotel, killing an Italian vacationer. But instead of stopping the terrorists the US government used the dossier to figure out the identities of the Cuban five. They were arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced long prison terms.

While the Cubans were in Miami, a group of counter-revolutionary Cubans calling themselves “Brothers to the Rescue” were provocatively flying small planes over Havana dropping anti-Castro leaflets. They were warned by the Cuban government that if they persisted the planes will be shot down. They persisted. The planes were shot down. Hernandez was convicted of murder although he had no prior knowledge about the shoot down.

Guest – Martin Garbus is one of our great trial lawyers. He has appeared before the United States Supreme Court on leading First Amendment and constitutional law cases.

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