Iris Photographs by Police, Not So Optional, Occupiers Among Others Subjected

By Common Dreams

United States -  In 2010 the NYPD began a new iris-photographing program. Officials began photographing the irises of suspects arrested for any reason as a routine procedure. Once an individual's iris is in the database, a hand-held scanning device can identify a 'suspect' in seconds.

The program has now been expanded across all five boroughs of New York, and many are now coming forward to protest the procedure; the NYPD has allegedly coerced some into this 'optional' scanning.
New York Times reports:

After her arrest at an Occupy Wall Street protest in December, Samantha Wilson expected to be booked, fingerprinted and subjected to a mug shot. But when a police officer raised a small device to her face and began photographing her eyes, she declined

Ms. Wilson, 32, said her refusal resulted in a threat from the officer.

“He said: ‘It’s not really optional. It’ll take you longer to get out of here if you don’t do it,’ ” she recalled.
The New York Police Department began photographing the irises of people arrested in Manhattan in 2010; officials said then that the images would help prevent suspects from escaping. But the program drew criticism from criminal defense lawyers and civil liberties experts who expressed concern that it could infringe on individuals’ privacy, especially in cases in which the charges were eventually dropped

More than a year later, as the program has been extended across the city, opponents have renewed their objections and accused officers of sometimes pressuring people to submit to the photographs — which are supposed to be optional — by keeping those who do not comply in custody longer.

Concern over the program has taken several forms. Some opponents object to the fact that it was instituted without public announcement or comment. Others fear that cataloging eye data could place the innocent under a lasting cloud of suspicion.

Steven Banks, the attorney in chief for the Legal Aid Society said it was problematic that the police were applying the program “without any legislative authorization to New Yorkers who may well be wrongfully accused of misconduct.”

Megan Morris, a lawyer who has been helping coordinate the defense of people arrested in connection with Occupy Wall Street demonstrations for the National Lawyers Guild, said that dozens of the group’s clients had been held longer than usual after refusing iris photographs.

Why Does the FBI Treat Videotaping Corporate Animal Abuse As Terrorism?

By Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Activists who expose animal abuses on factory farms face the risk of being prosecuted as domestic terrorists.

 

Using the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush in November 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has kept files on animal rights activists who have recorded incidents of cruelty towards animals on large farming operations.  Now, though, a bureau task force has even recommended trying these individuals as terrorism suspects.

 

Activist Ryan Shapiro, who used the Freedom of Information Act to discover what the FBI was up to, told the Los Angeles Times that “it’s simply outrageous to consider civil disobedience as terrorism.”

 

“Civil disobedience” he added, “has a long and proud place in our nation’s history, from Martin Luther King to Occupy Wall Street, and the AETA takes that kind of advocacy that we celebrate from the civil rights movement and turns it into a terrorist event.”

 

The Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a lawsuit challenging the AETA as unconstitutional, claiming the law is too vague and is discouraging political activism.

Occupy Wall Street is Back

New York - For those who don't know, Zuccotti Park has been liberated again, once more falling into the hands of Occupy Wall Street.  Thanks to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union. the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers Guild’s New York City chapter, barricades meant to keep the protestors out were found to be unconstitutional as well a violation of zoning laws.  Here is the letter responsible for it.

Unfortunately erecting a tent is not allowed but thankfully the charges against two dozen of them were dropped. 

Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested by Adam Martin

New York City - Occupy Wall Street is in the middle of one of its day-long marches in New York Tuesday, protesting the National Defense Authorization Act, but for those following along on the Global Revolution livestream, the real action is happening in the broadcast studio itself. That's because police have apparently just raided the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv and taken some of the project's key volunteers into custody.
  The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others.

In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui.

If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left.

But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission.

Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick, Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective:

There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved.

In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer." By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Anti-Wall Street Protesters Make a Show at Rose Parade By Hillel Aron

Pasadena – Hundreds of anti-Wall Street protesters sought to upstage the 123rd Tournament of Roses parade on Monday but were largely confined to the sidelines.

Several hundred protesters marched in a "human float" that followed behind the official parade, unfurling a 250-foot banner of the constitution and also displayed an approximately 70-foot octopus made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

"Everything is not coming up roses," one protester's sign said. Another read, "This is what democracy looks like."

Onlookers were allowed to walk along the parade route behind the official floats, so the protesters were joined by thousands of spectators and even a handful of counter-protesters, one of whom admonished the protesters to "get a job" on his megaphone.

The iconic Tournament of Roses parade, which was first held on New Year's Day in 1890, is broadcast on several U.S. television networks and in dozens of countries around the world.
The protesters' attempts to gain national attention were largely thwarted by television networks, which gave little attention to their efforts.

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed during the Iraq war, joined the march and told supporters: "I haven't paid my income tax since my son was killed. I refuse to be a funder for their crimes against humanity."

Police estimated that roughly 300 to 400 protesters followed the parade route.

"They did exactly what they said they were going to do," said Pasadena Police spokeswoman Lt. Phlunte Riddle, who added that no arrests were made during the parade.

Three activists who were seated along parade the route did manage to unfurl a banner that read "Stop Foreclosures" across from the television news cameras when a Wells Fargo-sponsored carriage passed by before police quickly took it down.

"We wanted to send a message to Wells Fargo and every other bank," said Joshua Taylor, one of the three protesters.

Some protesters who marched behind the parade were wearing tents in a nod to the movement's origins, which was launched in New York in September and quickly saw tent cities spring up in major cities across the country to protest against economic inequality, corporate excesses, high unemployment and bailouts of major banks.

Protesters have since embraced a range of other causes, and in some cities the demonstrations have also focused on grievances about excessive police use of force.

Noam Chomsky at Occupy Boston

Raw Story's Blatant Hit Job

The Raw Story released an article in which they claim "Less than two days after police cracked down on Occupy Albany in a violent raid, apparently anti-capitalist vandals went after a holiday display in Washington Park."  This alone rang out to me to be an obvious hit piece.  For them to even imply they had anything to do with it would be journalistic malfeasance.  Do they mean to tell people they aren't able to get to the bottom of who actually did it before they put it on the internet? Why didn't any of the editors, who should be reading over each and every article, sit on Megan Carpentier's piece until more information was available?

In the slightly more than three months since Occupy Wall Street has been around there have been no shows of violence from any of the groups in spite of the fact they were justified in doing so more than a few times.  However, they not only didn't take violent action against the city, police, media, or other figures who obviously had it out for them, they also stopped people from fighting back against the cops. What in the world would make anyone, much less Raw Story, think to imply this act was done by Occupy Albany?

Bad reporting on your end Raw Story.  It makes one wonder what else is newsworthy or true.

Update: Here's the video.



Another update: Raw Story states authorities in Albany say there's no link between the protesters and the vandalism.

Eight Soldiers Charged in Death of Fellow Asian Serviceman

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.

Kabul/New York - The death of Danny Chen is thought have occurred after he was allegedly taunted and bullied by his companions about his heritage.  

The military said it is not only investigating his death but the events surrounding what happened until that point.  Spokesman Chris Grey said of the incident  "You can be sure that United States Army Criminal Investigation Command will continue to conduct a professional and very thorough investigation. We are not releasing any details to the public at this point to protect the integrity of our ongoing investigation."

 On December 21st 400 people, some from Occupy Wall Street, showed support for the family as they demanded answers for Danny's death.  During the event his family read aloud several letters he sent home that showed his feelings of isolation incurred by the harassment he suffered.  One of them read:

"'Feb. 27, 2011: Since I am the only Chinese person here, everyone knows me by Chen.  They ask if I'm from China a few times a day... They also call out my name Chen in a goat-like voice sometimes for no reason.'"

Some of the charges facing the accused are dereliction of duty, involuntary manslaughter, assault, and negligent homicide.  They were moved to another location, undisclosed of course, for their own security.

President of the New York chapter of the Organization of Chinese-Americans Elizabeth OuYang said "Whether suicide or homicide, those responsible for mistreating Danny caused his death. They must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for the killing of Danny Chen."

Update on Danny Chen's death:

Cops Win NYSE Battle, But Will Lose War

New York City - The police won a fight against Occupy Wall Street when they prevented the group from shutting down the New York Stock Exchange.

By barricading “the narrow streets around Wall Street” and using “batons to push protesters onto the sidewalk as they marched through the area,” they prevented the general strike from occurring as planned. With their identification and police on their side, they walked into the building as protesters, separated from them with barricades, chanted “We are the 99 percent.” To the police were the chants "You're sexy, you're blue, now take off that riot suit."

The real winner is all of this however is the people who work at the NYSE. While police fight protesters, they are flaunting the fact they are getting way with their crimes to our faces. The police are clearly paid by someone to do all of these things. When the cops stop arresting and abusing people in the OWS movement this will not go away.

Philly Retired Police Captain Arrested at Occupy Wall Street

More will be written later.  Here's the video.

Jon Corzine Gets a Sketch from OWS

New York – Jon Corzine has more problems on his hands than most people think. Enter Wall streetartist named Geoffrey Raymond. He made his name known for his paintings of Wall Street people who found themselves in trouble.

Raymond said after he heard the news about Corzine he went to his studio and instead of doing a sketch of Ken Lewis, he'd do one of Jon Corzine.

When asked what inspired him to do this sketch instead of the Ken Burns one he said “The missing $600 million dollars” making a reference to the amount of missing money from MF Global customers' future accounts when Corzine failed to turn the brokerage into an investment bank.

So far 35 portraits of executives, politicians, and government officials have been painted since he quit his job in 2006. Originally he painted waitresses and bartenders. His old job was as a PR executive.