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Inside the Military-Police Center That Spies On Baltimore's Rioters
Lasrick writes: Adam Weinstein on a program designed to catch terrorists attacking Baltimore that is now being used to spy on protesters: 'On Ambassador Road, just off I-695 around the corner from the FBI, nearly 100 employees sit in a high-tech suite and wait for terrorists to attack Baltimore. They've waited 11 years. But they still have plenty of work to do, like using the intel community's toys to target this week's street protests.' Great read.
Pretty much ignoring the law in the process. 9/11 really, really screwed America. It's amazing how little it takes the scare the $h!t out of enough of us to throw everything away. So many folks I knew went on and on about ho 9/11 changed everything, but it didn't really. We let it change after the fact, but there was no good reason why we had to let everything go to hell...
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This is a perfect illustration of why the "if you have nothing to hide" argument in favor of government spying is so short-sighted. Yes, they always *say* that they will only use such powers of surveillance against foreign enemies and terrorists and child molesters and so on. But once they have such power, they will *inevitably* start using it against American citizens who are engaged in the Constitutionally protected activity of criticizing their government.
Anyone who has ever argued in favor of government spy powers needs to think long and hard about what kind of country we're becoming as a result of those powers, and whether we really want to be that kind of country.
Maybe if they'd spent the 11 years using these resources to rein in police racism and brutality, there wouldn't be a need for protests.
Bad cops and systemic police racism are what's terrorizing the populace in cities like Baltimore - that's your terrorist threat right there. But law enforcement are also the ones running these centers. It's the old problem of who's watching the watchers.
Yeah... If anything this is a better justification than they had before. There were looters running through stores, rioters burning down buildings, and the one guy even puncturing the fire hose when the fire department tried to put the flames out. There is a much more credible, obvious, proximate threat to life and property than there would be with some shadowy nonspecific radical-jihadist plot. Things were literally on fire, people.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Was Mr. Gray really a victim or part of the greater problem? He was in fact a habitual criminal with past of selling drugs like heroin.
He is the victim. He is a human being with the constitutional right not to have his spine broken by someone. He still has his constitutional rights even if you think he is a bad person. And there is that thing about human rights. You have them as a human, completely independent of you behaviour. I know that some people dream of stripping other people of their human rights because they dislike them. But that's a thinking we usually call totalitarian.
The city fucking deserves what it got!
If Baltimore's police wasn't made up of murderous, jackbooted thugs, then there wouldn't be any riots in the first place.
Compare and contrast Baltimore or Ferguson to Charleston and how the latter city handled the Walter Scott murder. Whereas the governments of Ferguson and Baltimore (until recently) dug in their heels against their own citizens in defense of their corrupt police, Charleston's leadership had the basic decency to prosecute a blatantly obvious crime without trying to spin or weasel their way out of it. As a direct consequence, there have been no riots in Charleston.
The lesson for government here is simple: if you don't want riots, then respect the citizens' rights!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah I thought the summary's equation of "Protestors" and "Rioters" (headline uses the latter, main text the former, apparently referring to the same people - for the record, the number of protestors in Baltimore last week was some figure conservatively estimated in the tens of thousands; the number of rioters was less than 2,000 - probably much less, being made up largely of local gangs) was rather reflective of the kneejerk reaction against any politicial activity by "the masses" in this country.
The other day I mentioned the (thankfully debunked) neo-urban-legend about a nearby Florida sheriff saying it was OK to run over protestors if they get in your way to some people in the office. At least one was fully in favor, giving a whoop when he heard it.
I was brought up in the UK, moving to the US when I was 25. The idea of treating political protests as something horrific astounds me, it's normal activity over there, you'd expect it to be accepted and supported in the country that invented the first amendment. But apparently not.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
does is it really destroy society? Or is it the cops killing American citizens that destroys society?
“I was watching the news last night,” said Morgan Freeman. “and said, ‘You know, when we were out here marching peacefully, nobody was here. And now we start burning the place down, everybody is listening. What do you think we’re gonna do to be heard?’
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Was Mr. Gray really a victim or part of the greater problem? He was in fact a habitual
Judging others is a surprisingly worthless enterprise.
criminal with past of selling drugs like heroin.
One of the underlying problems governments face is they refuse to understand use of force to preserve "freedom for all" only works against outliers.
Illicit drug trade is one of the worlds largest enterprises. Millions of people use illicit drugs in the USA. Governments everywhere are squandering their legitimacy to create artificial scarcity fueling a self-destructive feedback loop. As a result entire countries have or are on the verge of loosing their monopoly on the use of force.
Oh and by the way capitalism, technology and global labor markets are not free. If winners (those who have means) are not serious about helping losers don't expect resulting society to not suck.
have military doing crowd control exercises and practicing for martial law and yet we protest over the death of a drug dealer?
We can all walk and chew gum at the same time. Unprofessional behavior of LEA causes real injury and death. Preparing for the next apocalypse is in and of itself mostly harmless.
Yes, let's disarm the police and see how badly order falls in these neighborhoods.
The more you find yourself having to rely on force, rise of police agencies indistinguishable from military and associated panopticon bullshit that would make NSA proud the more you are losing. The focus should be on winning not losing.
I have a nasty habit of blaming the media. Full of tired, utterly lazy and stupid talking heads who increasingly only cares about itself.. willing to accept no responsibility for the aggregate effect of deliberate intentional selection of train wreck narratives propagated 24x7.
Media promotion of FUD and strife is doing real damage poisoning the minds of voters into seeking out counterproductive policy decisions and dividing rather than uniting tribes.
No, it's within the limits of the law. The National Guard Military Police units are considered to be troops controlled by the individual state (think the 13 colonies initially). In this case they were ordered onto the street by the state governor.
As for Federal troops, the Posse Comitatus Act deals with using Federal troops in police enforcement and has only been around since 1878. There has been an ongoing tension between what powers belonged to the states and what belonged to the federal government.
Now, in reality, there's relatively little difference between the Guard and federal troops, and the Guard can be "federalized" with an order from the President, and there are several other exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act. But, it falls within the letter of the law.
There was a quote from the Orioles' VP, John Angelos:
"That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night's property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American's civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state."
People need to understand the above, as it is the root cause for these types of issues. If things continue down the path we're on, the unrest will only worsen. The truly dangerous and foolish will be the ones who advocate for more extreme police measures as a response, rather than addressing the underlying causes of the unhappiness.
Blah, blah, blah.
I have one word -- just one word -- that renders your entire argument moot. You want to know what it is? Alright, here it comes:
EUROPE.
Somehow, the police in Europe manage to deal with the same kinds of crime we have here, yet manage to do it without killing nearly as many people as our police do. One statistic I've heard is that American police killed more people in March than the UK police have since 1900. That's one month vs. more than a century. (And I don't care that the US population is higher; it doesn't matter -- we're talking orders of magnitude here!) There is no explanation, other than American police having a SYSTEMIC problem of incompetence, corruption, and needless brutality.
Also note that, while bad cops are bad cops, "good" cops that cover for bad cops are bad cops too. The problem in Ferguson and Baltimore is not that one bad cop fucked up, it's that one bad cop fucked up and all the other bad cops -- namely, the vast majority of the cops in those jurisdictions -- defended him!
In other words, it's "only" 99% of cops who make the rest look bad.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz