Tag: Boston PD

Globe reports on Saturday’s NSA/fusion center picnic

Michael Morisy at the Globe reports:

With speeches, flyers, and some family friendly songs, a few dozen protesters joined outside the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) yesterday to push back against what they said were increasingly invasive government intrusions into individuals’ privacy.

The event was dubbed an Orwell Day protest, after George Orwell’s 1984 (the date was 8/4), a novel about a totalitarian regime that maintains control largely through an aggressive surveillance program.

“I believe in the constitution, I believe in the Fourth Amendment,” said Alex Marthews, founder of Digital Fourth, a non-profit which advocates for strong Fourth Amendment protections and a strong emphasis on privacy. He blasted BRIC as an ineffective institution that wasted time and money investigating peace activists and graffiti artists rather than more serious threats.

“An agency that does no good and wastes your money should be closed,” he said.

Maximum attendance was around 75, which was much larger than the first event – looks like the movement is growing. Here’s full footage of the first hour, featuring great speeches from Steve Revilak of the Mass Pirates and Joan Livingston of Veterans for Peace. Many thanks to the activists from #MassOps and Restore the Fourth Boston who put the event together!

NSA Resistance Picnic, SW Corridor Park by Boston Police HQ, Sunday 8/4, 3-6pm

Join #MassOps, Restore the Fourth, and the Massachusetts Pirates on Sunday, August 4th (19-8/4) in the SW Corridor Park behind Boston Police HQ and the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), just round the corner from the Ruggles T stop on the Orange Line. There will be food, training in cryptographic techniques, barbecue, and a series of great speakers.

swcorridorpark

Confirmed speakers include: Alex Marthews – President, Digital Fourth (that’d be me); Kinetic Theorist – Founder, MassOps; Chris Faraone – Journalist, Author, Mensch; Nadeem Mazen – Candidate, Cambridge City Council; Kade Crockford – ACLU activist; Jeffrey Nunes – Occupy activist; (Name withheld by request) – Activist targeted by the BRIC; Steve Revilak – Quartermaster, Mass Pirate Party; Joan Livingston – Veterans for Peace; Dan Consigli – Student; + Gabriel Camacho of the American Friends Service Committee.

From 5pm-6pm, the Mass Pirates will hold a “Cryptoparty”. Bring your laptops and find out how to protect yourself and your data from the surveillance state; if you have them, bring binoculars (quis custodet ipsos custodes?).

For background on the fusion centers issue, and on how they spy on innocent Boston residents and label them as extremists, see our previous reporting here.

leo_reynolds_spy_modified

July 4, 10am: Restore The Fourth MA!

restorethe4th

Over 150 people are already coming to the rally to Restore the Fourth tomorrow in Boston. Thousands more will be rallying across the country. But this is Massachusetts. We invented the Fourth Amendment, and people will be watching Boston more than any other city tomorrow. Come with us and let the government know that we don’t need their fearmongering, and will not allow them to take our liberties.

Schedule
09:00 – 10:00: Gathering outside the Old State House in preparation for the day.
10:00 – 11:00: Listening reverently to the Declaration of Independence. Be respectful: save the protesting for after.
11:00 – 12:00: Talking with the crowds that gathered for the reading, followed by a peaceful “Cease and Desist” action at mobile stores to protest at their cooperation with the NSA. Then to Boston Common.
12:00 – 13:00: We’ll be demonstrating on the Common, as well as gathering signatures against the upcoming MA wiretapping bill. This bill aims to expand the Commonwealth’s use of electronic surveillance against its residents.
13:00 – 14:00: Make our way to Dewey Square.
14:30 – 17:00: March throughout Boston including Faneuil Hall and the Esplanade.

What to bring
Water (in clear plastic containers)
Fliers if you can print them (don’t print too many, they’ll likely get thrown away)
SIGNS. Lots of signs. Here are some ideas we came up with for some slogans.
Restore the Fourth!
No Warrant, No Search
Repeal the Patriot Act / NDAA
Don’t Spy on Me
Abolish DHS
No “Random” Searches
Save Edward Snowden
No Secret Courts

A Helpful PSA from the Boston Regional Intelligence Center

nwa_prodigy

Here at the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, we have watched in sorrow as misinformation about our work to defend America and keep Americans safe here in America has appeared in certain scurrilous publications. We felt it was important to get the truth out about what we do and why we do it.

Some crypto-Marxist at the Jamaica Plain Gazette decided to ask this week why we were busy tracking the activities of local peace activists and the Occupy movement, instead of, say, paying attention to intelligence reports we had received from Russia about some guy called Tsarnasomethin Whatshisface.

God, you people! It’s like you think that just because we’ve taken billions of your dollars and told you we’ll use it to prevent terror attacks, you expect us to actually prevent them!

Allow us to break it down for you point-missing morons.

Continue reading A Helpful PSA from the Boston Regional Intelligence Center

#MassOps Fusion Center Protest Rally: BRIC, Boston, June 1, 2:30pm

943113_10101876407226772_1289446623_n

#MassOps, supported by the Defend the Fourth Coalition and Digital Fourth, are putting together a protest rally at the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. This is located at the headquarters of Boston PD, at One Schroeder Plaza, Roxbury, MA 02120. The rally is at 2:30pm, and there’s a pub crawl starting around 6:00-6:30pm.

For background on fusion centers and why they are so dangerous to our liberty, check out this prior article. If you want to RSVP, you can contact the organizers directly here.

leo_reynolds_spy_modified

The Fourth Amendment and the Boston Marathon Attacks: Racialized “Reasonable Suspicion” and the Search of the Saudi Marathoner’s Apartment

The Boston Marathon attacks have brought to the surface some of the best and the worst in Massachusetts.

On the one side, many news sources reported responsibly and refused to speculate too quickly and without foundation about who the bombers were or why they might have done what they did. There seems at this stage good evidence on which to base the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Above all, he was taken into custody quickly and alive, and Bostonians will be able to learn more about the motivations behind the attacks.

On the other side, panic, prejudice and the needs of the news cycle fueled an almost certainly unconstitutional search of an innocent Saudi marathoner’s house, an attack on a Muslim doctor in Malden, a call for genocide of Muslims, and a martial law-style lockdown of a vast area of metropolitan Boston.

This is the blog for the Campaign for Digital Fourth Amendment Rights, so unsurprisingly I’m going to focus on some of the Fourth Amendment issues arising out of the attacks; principally, the stop of the Saudi marathoner and the search of his apartment in Revere, and the constitutional issues raised when a householder refuses entry to law enforcement during house-to-house searches for a fugitive.

Follow me below the fold for the first of these!

Continue reading The Fourth Amendment and the Boston Marathon Attacks: Racialized “Reasonable Suspicion” and the Search of the Saudi Marathoner’s Apartment

Security Mania and the Threat to Civic Life: Tom Brokaw, Edward Davis, and the West Stockbridge Zucchini Festival

Tom Brokaw, who in his long career has received every accolade a TV news journalist could receive, reacted on Monday to the Boston Marathon attack as follows:

Everyone has to understand tonight, however, beginning tomorrow morning early there’s going to be much tougher security considerations across the country. However exhausted we may be by them. We have to live with them and get along and go forward and not let them bring us to our knees.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis’s less panicky reaction was much better:

We’ve done as much as we can. Our aim is not to turn this into a police state. We have to allow commerce to occur.

It’s easy to call for more security after what happened on Monday. It’s much harder to recognize that in truth, we were already doing all that we reasonably could to thwart attacks and more.

Continue reading Security Mania and the Threat to Civic Life: Tom Brokaw, Edward Davis, and the West Stockbridge Zucchini Festival

The Boston Marathon: Generalized Surveillance Fails To Thwart Attack

Headline updated [x2].

Today, by the finish line of the Boston Marathon, on the same city block as the church I go to, two bombs went off. I feel shocked and sad beyond belief.

 

Photo credit: KVLY
Photo credit: KVLY.

My thoughts and prayers are with those who died or were hurt, with their families, and with all the people stranded in Boston on this cold night.

The former district attorney of Middlesex County, Gerry Leone, has taken to the airwaves to talk about how great the efforts have been before this attack to get a Joint Terrorism Task Force going, how well it has been working together, how smooth the state and federal collaboration has been, and how the appropriate response will be to increase random surveillance. Governor Patrick has also echoed his perspective, talking about the need for increased vigilance and random bag searches on the MBTA, which we have covered, and opposed, before.

It won’t surprise regular readers to know that my perspective on this is a little different and more skeptical. Even while massively and systematically abusing the Fourth Amendment, law enforcement wasn’t able to prevent this attack. The amount of data collected through warrantless electronic means by the centers Leone is talking about has been vast, and none of it, none of it, has thwarted a terrorist attack. Now, once again, they have failed us all.

Continue reading The Boston Marathon: Generalized Surveillance Fails To Thwart Attack

Major Crimes Plunge, But AG’s Office Still Pressing To Wiretap All The Things

One Catch-22 of criminal justice reform is that law enforcement will always ask for more powers, whether crime is down or crime is up. If crime is up, they need more powers to deal with criminals who have “gotten the upper hand.” If crime is down, they need more powers to keep it from rising again.

The Globe reports that major crimes in Boston are sharply down in the first three months of 2013 compared to 2012. In case you think this is a momentary glitch in the overall statistics, let’s look again at how crime per head in Massachusetts has been falling for a long time:

Martha Coakley's terrifying crime wave
Martha Coakley’s terrifying crime wave

Mayor Menino attributes the drop to community policing and neighborhood watch groups, assisted by the more severe winter. It’s almost as if militaristic and confrontational policing is actually less effective at reducing crime than people like to think.

So, we have a simple challenge for Attorney-General Martha Coakley. How far does crime have to fall, before you back off on your biennial demand for vastly expanded powers to take out electronic wiretaps when investigating minor crimes? Lazy, “one crime is too many” thinking is not enough when our Fourth Amendment rights are on the line. We don’t just need better community policing; we need an AG’s office that is willing to look at criminalization as a problem rather than looking at every person drawn into the criminal justice system as a victory for them.

Microscope Monday: Analysis of Massachusetts’ proposed Free Speech Act, S. 642 / H. 1357

steampunk_microscope

Have you ever wondered why your Mondays have become an unending bliss of delight, falling upon you like Zeus visiting Danae in a shower of gold? It must surely be because of Microscope Monday, your weekly look at notable surveillance-related bills on Beacon Hill.

This week’s bill, tying in with our new Campaign to Close the Fusion Centers, is “An Act to protect freedom of speech and association”, more conveniently referred to as the “Free Speech Act”. The bill updates last legislative session’s “Act to protect privacy and personal data”, covered in October 2012 on this blog here. It was proposed by Assistant Majority Leader Sen. Harriette Chandler (D-Worcester) and Rep. Jason Lewis (D-Winchester). Its basic purpose is to deal with the fallout from the Policing Dissent scandal, where the Boston Police Department, in concert with the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, was found to have been spying on peaceful groups like Veterans for Peace and defining them as “extremists.” Protesters, including one person I knew, were hauled in and interrogated about their associates, without any actual crime having been committed.

We’re glad to see some action being taken to deal with these problems. But, what does the bill actually say?

[Previous Microscope Mondays covered: the Electronic Privacy Bill; the Drone Privacy Bill; and the infamous Act Updating the Wire Interception Law.]

Continue reading Microscope Monday: Analysis of Massachusetts’ proposed Free Speech Act, S. 642 / H. 1357