Google Group Members to Use Facial Recognition to Identify London Rioters →

The idea that a group of people would team up online to use (misuse?) facial recognition technologies in this way, notably outside professional law enforcement channels, seems like a modern take on vigilante style justice, where the torches of the angry villagers have turned into APIs and algorithms.

The sad truth behind London riot →

As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here’s a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent? “Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

The TV reporter from Britain’s ITV had no response. So the young man pressed his advantage. “Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation: Know Your Rights! [PDF] →

EFF has designed this guide to help you understand your rights if officers try to search the data stored on your computer or portable electronic device, or seize it for further examination somewhere else.

Policing the Police: The Apps That Let You Spy on the Cops →

An article on OpenWatch, “a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures”:

CopRecorder can record audio without indicating that it’s doing so like the Voice Memos app does. It comes with a built-in uploader to OpenWatch, so that Jones can do “analysis” of the recording and scrub any personally identifying data before posting the audio. He said he receives between 50 and 100 submissions per day, with a really interesting encounter with an authority figure coming in about every day and a half.

Richmond Cops Mistakenly Hand Over Anti-Protest Guides to Anarchist Activist →

cuntymint:

redguard:

After filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the Richmond Police Department for police training documents, Mo Karn received much more than expected in return: homeland security and crowd control guides that show how the police target protests.

The police filed for an emergency court order yesterday to prohibit Karn from publicizing any of the documents, which should never have been released. The cops’ reasoning? “Defendant Mo Karn is a known and admitted anarchist.”

The documents, however, have already been published online. And buried in the training guides are insights into three trends in law enforcement that have been occurring not just in Virginia, but nationally: the demonization of protest, the militarization of police, and turning local cops into “terrorism” officials.

Fucking dumb pigs.

For the Canadian context, one comment in this article links to “Training material used by Canadian police to inculcate its officers in the lead-up to the G20 summit in Toronto…Apparently bagpipers are particularly suspicious!” (Here)

(via 20yardsoflinen)

G8/G20 Communique: Report from the courts: Monday August 23, 2010 →

Three courtrooms at the fortified 2201 Finch Avenue court house were dedicated exclusively to handling the 303 G20 arrestees who arrived early for their set date hearings on Monday August 23 2010; where heavily armed Emergency Task Force officers patrolled the hallways.

The G20 arrestees were divided up into groups loosely based on the location of their arrest and processed through the system; sometimes only spending a few minutes in front of the judge before hearing that their charges had been dropped.

All 17 community organizers accused of being “ringleaders” to the G20 Summit protests — thus given a variety of conspiracy based charges - had their hearings put over to September 27, 2010.

"Crowdsourcing Disaster Relief" →

On Thursday July 8, 2010, residents of Oakland took to the streets after a jury convicted police officer Johannes Mehserle of involuntary manslaughter of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black youth. Race-related riots are not new to California. But this time, the first people to learn about violent incidents tied to the protests weren’t riot cops — they were the Oakland residents behind OscarGrantProtests.com, a website that allowed people near the action to map incidents of violence and view reports from others. Established in a few days, OscarGrantProtests employs crisis mapping technology from a group of open-source developers called Ushahidi, who built the software to report violence in the aftermath of the 2008 disputed Kenyan presidential election.

My apologies for the original article (which is actually via TechCrunch, written by Luka Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, and Leila Janah, CEO of Samasource). Of its ten paragraphs, nine are devoted to explaining Ushahidi. The remaining, introductory paragraph (cited above), relates to Oscar Grant.

Ushahidi, as the article notes, was created to “report violence in the aftermath of the 2008 disputed Kenyan presidential election,” and has been used in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti — and more recently in the wildfires in Russia.

Where does the response to the murder of Oscar Grant fit among these responses to crises?

Are “race-related riots” a “natural disaster”?

Is protest against injustice a crisis?

Ushahidi was created in response to unrest, but does the aftermath of the Mehserle trial fit with responses to repression, earthquakes, and other crises? OscarGrantProtests.com seems more a tool for avoiding being a citizen, rather than crisis mapping.

And where is the relief? What is the relief?

No drugs found, but the State keeps seized money →

Although a search of a vehicle that yielded a backpack full of cash that smelled like marijuana was ruled invalid, the money was never returned to the vehicle’s occupants.

In June the appellate division of the state Superior Court ruled the search was invalid but many readers — including John Paff, who is chairman of the New Jersey Libertarian Party’s Open Government Advocacy Project — were curious as to what happened to the smelly money.

It was divided between the agencies involved in the case. The Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s Office got $25,197.60, the Readington Police Department $37,796.40 and the state kept the remaining $41,906.

Crowdsourcing… Criminals Catching? →

So in May, the INTERPOL launched a program – Operation Infra-Red – to help out find 450 wanted criminals across the globe.

The thing is, with the deadline approaching (16th July) they released a call for for everyone out there to help out, and meant to leverage the power of the social networks ubiquitous in our everyday life.