SHADOWPROOF—No official body has engaged in a major attempt to challenge the FBI’s routine abuses in the past decade. Gibbons contends, “Constituencies on the left who traditionally have been skeptical of the FBI as a threat to civil liberties now find themselves as the Bureau’s defenders. Constituencies on the right who have advocated expansive police authority to maintain order, thwart subversion, and counter terrorism now find themselves speaking of the FBI’s potential to be a political police.” Overall, there is bipartisan complicity and indifference toward FBI abuses. The 2010 FBI raids unfolded under President Barack Obama while Eric Holder was Attorney General. Robert Mueller was still FBI director.
POLICE STATE
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Key witness in trial and conviction of police officer Amber Guyger murdered in Dallas
10 minutes readKEVIN REED—The fatal shooting in the chest of 26-year-old Jean, a black man, by white off-duty police officer Guyger and her sentencing to ten years in prison by a black judge—especially given Guyger’s “mistaken apartment” defense—had already generated national attention as a rare conviction of a police officer for murder, which resulted in a lenient sentence.
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Local police and foreign-deployed US militaries both practice a kind of “community policing” designed to control and gather intelligence on occupied populations, said Dererka Purnell, a movement lawyer, writer and activist. Purnell recently published an article in War and Peace, titled “Mass Shootings, Militarism and Policing are Chapters in the Same Manifesto.”
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—A recent Bloomberg article titled “U.S. Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation” reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a new project called the Semantic Forensics program with which “the military research agency hopes it can spot fake news with malicious intent before going viral.” “If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society,” Bloomberg reports. DARPA (formerly ARPA) is a top contender among some very stiff competition for the absolute creepiest of all US government agencies. Journalist Yasha Levine has done a lot of work documenting the way the agency has been intimately involved in internet surveillance since before the internet was even really a thing.
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Dissent Is Being Criminalized Right Under Our Noses
16 minutes readMIKE SIEGEL—The proposed bill would create a broad definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any attempt to “affect” or “influence” government policy or actions. And it would include property damage—even attempted property damage—as a terrorist act subject to a 25-year prison sentence. In other words, if you opposed the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and wanted the government to revoke the pipeline permit, you might be considered a terrorist. If you painted “Black Lives Matter” on a wall to advocate against police violence, that could be terrorism, too.