“Those who make nonviolent revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” – JFK
“God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Power concedes nothing without a demand … The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” – Frederick Douglass
If you’ve ever noticed an inconspicuous dome-shaped camera out in public, chances are good that a private company called Abraxas, consisting of highly-skilled CIA elites in Northern Virginia, have noticed you. And above just noticing you on camera, they have your face on file, track your movements from place to place, and know what car you drive, your home address, your occupation, and only God (and the CIA) knows what else, thanks to a program called TrapWire unearthed by Wikileaks and Anonymous. A whitewash scrub storyby the New York Times calls the program “counter-terrorism software,” but these leaked Stratfor emailsshow that TrapWire is mainly used to monitor activists, not terrorists.
The biggest news of the week that nobody’s noticed thanks to the Olympics and Miley Cyrus’s new haircut is that the Obama administration is appealing Manhattan federal judge Katherine Forrest’s ruling that the indefinite detention clause of the National Defense Authorization Act is unconstitutional. The White House has presented no evidence to support their case, but they’re still appealing, based on their claim that the executive branch has the right to put anyone deemed a potential terrorist threat in military jail for an indefinite period of time. The most troubling part of this story is that the White House refuses to say whether or not they’re still indefinitely detaining people even after Forrest’s ruling.
And the anti-protest law, HR 347, that was easily passed through both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Obama without so much as a peep from the media, makes it a felony for anyone to protest anyone, anywhere, where there is secret service protection. To capture the sad irony award of the year, the Department of Homeland Security assisted the Philadelphia Police Department in arresting dozens of nonviolent protesters guilty of nothing else than expressing First Amendment rights of free speech and free assembly at the Occupy National Gathering, in the same city that’s home to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell of all places, on the 4th of July weekend, of all times. On this chilling video, the last feed of the last livestreamer shortly before an unjustified arrest, you can hear the cameraman remind his fellow kettled protesters that they haven’t been given any charges, nor any opportunity to disperse before a mass illegal arrest, which is technically a kidnapping.
Perhaps the calculated media silence is because corrupt governments and corporations don’t like to have their corruption documented on film and seen by the public. In my current city, Manchester, New Hampshire, one man is facing 21 years in prison, or 3 7-year counts of felony wiretapping, for recording a Manchester police officer slamming the face of a high school student into a cafeteria table.
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