spying

The NSA made the most boring and controversial Tumblr in the United States; also, best news reads on spying

Erica Hanna
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The NSA made the most boring and controversial Tumblr in the United States; also, best news reads on spying

Tumblr is a hub for social media literate millenials, a magical place for Doctor Who animated GIFs, reblogged Instagram photos of your lunch and an endless sea of porn. But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has a new use for it: boilerplate press releases meant to stem the tide of negative news against the National Security Agency’s spying practices.

Here’s an excerpt from their Tumblr blog addressing their bad press: 

“While the specifics of how our intelligence agencies carry out this cryptanalytic mission have been kept secret, the fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news. Indeed, NSA’s public website states that its mission includes leading ‘the U.S. Government in cryptology … in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies.'”

Well of course it’s not news that the NSA spies on folks, that’s their purpose. But when the federal government can read the emails and digital records of ordinary citizens without so much as a constitutional please-and-thank you, something is definitely wrong. And thanks to a bombshell dropped by The UK Guardian, the New York Times and Pro Publica partnering to release Edward Snowden’s newest leak, we now know that the NSA can decrypt just about anything on the internet. 

And sometimes the NSA uses it to spy on their love interests. 

Luckily, there are folks who are on this. The Electronic Frontier Foundation just achieved a major victory by suing the government under the Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA, to get their hands on documents related to the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law the NSA has used to justify searching through the digital lives of Americans. 

You can read more about their victory here.

The EFF is based in San Francisco, which of course means that there is a video of them at Comic-Con.

And the EFF even outlined ways citizens can help: 

“Faced with so much bad news, it’s easy to give in to privacy nihilism and despair. After all, if the NSA has found ways to decrypt a significant portion of encrypted online communications, why should we bother using encryption at all? But this massive disruption of communications infrastructure need not be tolerated. Here are some of the steps you can take to fight back:

  • Sign the petition to stop NSA spying. Let Congress know that It’s time for a full accounting of America’s secret spying programs—and an end to unconstitutional surveillance. If you are not in the US, please take the time to sign our international petition.
  • In addition to signing our petition, take the time to call your elected representative using the dedicated call line: 1-STOP-323-NSA (1-786-732-3672) to voice your opposition.
  • Use secure communications tools (read some useful tips by security expert Bruce Schneier). Your communications are still significantly more protected if you are using encrypted communications tools such as messaging over OTR or browsing the web usingHTTPS Everywhere than if you are sending your communications in the clear.
  • Finally, the engineers responsible for building our infrastructure can fight back by building and deploying better and more usable cryptosystems.

The NSA is attacking our secure communications on many fronts and we must oppose them using every method we have at our disposal. Engineers, policy makers, and netizens all have key roles to play in standing up to the unchecked surveillance state. The more we learn about the extent of the NSA’s abuses, the more important it is for us to take steps to take back our privacy. Don’t let the NSA’s attack on secure communications be the end game. Let it be a call to arms.”

Get educated, and bone up on the most recent news on the NSA’s spying tactics and policies:

 

Pro Publica, New York Times, Guardian UK  

Revealed: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption

 

Electronic Frontier Foundation

NSA Spying on Americans, Full timeline of events

https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

 

Guardian.co.uk

The NSA Files — All UK Guardian stories on the NSA spying program

http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

And until everything gets better, I’m going to keep using Tumblr the way it was intended: reblogging GIFs of the best Doctor, David Tennant.

Screen shot of Doctor Who Tumblr post

Still secret

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Still secret

news@sfbg.com
A high-profile local civil rights ordinance passed last year to shine light on the San Francisco Police Department’s joint activities with the FBI has been undermined by the SFPD’s refusal to disclose its surveillance activities. This comes at a time when the public is learning more than ever about the federal government’s intrusion into the privacy of law-abiding US citizens.

In May 2012, the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance, which Mayor Ed Lee signed in a photo-op ceremony with Police Chief Greg Suhr and the activists who supported it. They claimed the board’s passage of the ordinance ushered in a new era of transparency over the SFPD’s previously secretive work with the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“The ordinance basically requires three things,” Nasrina Bargzie, a civil rights attorney at the Asian Law Caucus who worked on the measure, told the Bay Guardian. “The first part requires that the Police Department work with the JTTF has to follow the California constitutional rights of privacy, so they’re not following the lax standards of the [US] Department of Justice. The second part is that they can no longer enter into any secret agreements with the FBI; it has to go before the Police Commission in a public setting. The final part of the ordinance exists to make sure the rules are being followed, so there is a requirement for a yearly report.”

At the time of its passage, activists told the Guardian that the ordinance was only as strong as the SFPD’s willingness to disclose its activities (see “Mayor Lee signs watered-down limits on SFPD spying,” 5/9/12). But the SFPD’s refusal to disclose even minimal, basic information calls into question the ordinance’s value.

After the release of multiple reports earlier this year that activists called inadequate, Suhr is now maintaining silence regarding the JTTF, while claiming the department is in full compliance with the ordinance. According to Bargzie, Suhr told her the FBI is barring him from disclosing the requested information.

Following multiple efforts by the Guardian to get a comment out of SFPD about the ordinance and whether the department was indeed taking a subservient role to the FBI, SFPD Sgt. Dennis Toomer told us, “We’re not talking about that at all.”

LACK OF RESPONSE

Activists have sparred with Chief Suhr over implementation of the ordinance and its required annual report since at least the beginning of 2013.

Deputy Chief John Loftus presented the first report to the Police Commission on Jan. 23, which claimed the SFPD was in “full compliance” with the ordinance without providing any details. Activists and the public quickly demanded a real response.

“The commission presented this short oral report, which was a little short of two minutes long,” Bargzie told us. “There was no data that we were not already aware of. It was just basic statements claiming that they were complying with the ordinance.”

Suhr apologized for the omissions while stating his department was still in compliance with the ordinance’s guidelines, pledging to be more forthcoming. At this time, SFPD Sgt. Michael Andraychak told the Guardian: “The Chief’s Office is in the process of scheduling meetings with Nasrina Bargzie [of the Asian Law Caucus] to develop a report with more detail so those concerned and the public can be as informed as possible. Chief Suhr is committed to remain in compliance with the ordinance.”

The Coalition for Safe San Francisco, an activist group consisting of Muslim Legal Fund of America, Asian Law Caucus, and dozens of other groups, met with Suhr to discuss setting up a template for the reports.

Suhr then released a second report, which contained more relevant information, stating that SFPD officers did not act as informants in 2012 and three full-time SFPD officers were assigned to the JTTF.

But the report still omitted key oversight information, such as whether any prosecutions resulted from JTTF and SFPD investigations, which would allow the Muslim Legal Fund of America and other groups to determine who the SFPD is arresting and why.

Last year, Suhr told a San Francisco Examiner reporter that his officers followed up on 2,000 tips regarding counterterrorism activities. However, this information curiously did not make it into the official report.

“We contacted the chief to let him know we were not okay with this. We had another meeting with him and he said he’d think about it and get back to us and now he is claiming he cannot honor a basic component of the ordinance,” Bargzie told us. “He asserts in writing this is because the FBI will not let him share the basic information.”

WEAKENED LEGISLATION

The weak efforts behind the implementation of the SSFCRO date back to Mayor Lee’s veto of a stronger ordinance in April 2012, which would have codified privacy protections and given the Police Commission more power to stop FBI-SFPD activities that did not comply with Department General Order (DGO) 8.10, the 1990 policy aimed at protecting First Amendment activities. After Lee’s veto, the Board of Supervisors passed a weaker version. Both were sponsored by Sup. Jane Kim.

John Crew, a former police practices expert with the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union, raised concerns to the Guardian about the weakened legislation. “It is a step in the right direction, there’s no doubt it’s progress,” Crew told us at the time. “But whether it’s real progress depends on the implementation. Ultimately, it will come down to political will at the Police Commission to enforce privacy protections.”

Much of the ordinance’s failure stems from the apparent lack of real intent to disclose what the activists sought. Critics painted the SSFCRO signing ceremony as a hollow symbolic act, a way for Mayor Lee and Chief Suhr to publicly promote civil rights and progressive ideals with an ordinance they purposefully weakened.

“My sense is that [the SFPD] is not taking this seriously,” Bargzie told us. “I think they probably believe that they are providing as much information as the FBI will let them and Chief Suhr thinks it’s fine that the FBI can tell him to share what they tell him to.”

The lack of transparency regarding the JTTF’s work with the SFPD requires the public to trust the federal government to safeguard civil liberties. But in the wake of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leak exposing the expansive surveillance system by the National Security Agency and the SFPD’s notorious history of illegal surveillance and racial profiling, the public has little reason to trust the authorities.

HISTORY OF SPYING
The passage of the SSFCRO is the latest effort to counter a long history of racial profiling, spying on radical political groups, and other constitutional violations, episodes that have been followed by progressive reforms in San Francisco.
Prior to the passage of DGO 8.10 in 1990, the SFPD notoriously participated in the surveillance of non-criminal, pacifist political organizations. During the 1984 Democratic National Convention, the SFPD carried out surveillance on law-abiding organizations and, throughout the 1980s, it created files on civil, labor, and special interest groups in the Bay Area, revelations that led to the adoption of DGO 8.10.
But even after that, disclosures surfaced showing that the SFPD was blatantly violating its own rules. They included then-Police Chief Tony Ribera admitting that files on non-criminal political activity were not destroyed (as required by the ’90s reforms), the selling of confidential intelligence material to foreign governments and private entities, and the actions of SFPD Intelligence Officer Tom Gerad, who informed on local political groups for the FBI.
In the subsequent years following the Gerad scandal, San Francisco sought to strengthen DGO 8.10, requiring more transparency and oversight. But this progress was undercut in 2007 when the SFPD secretly signed a secret JTTF Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) undermining DGO 8.10.
San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission held hearings in which the community voiced concerns over illegal police and federal surveillance. In response, the SFPD said they were unable to discuss arrangements with the JTTF without the permission of the FBI.
In 2011, the previously secret MOU was unearthed by the ACLU (see “Spies in blue,” 4/26/11), prompting Suhr to issue Bureau Order #2011-07, which reinforced that SFPD personnel were under the jurisdiction of local and state privacy protections and did not spy on law-abiding groups. SFPD Public Information Officer Albie Esparza said the order reversed the language of the 2007 memo.
Part of Suhr’s amendment to SFPD policy at the time included the necessity of a predicate offense in all SFPD investigations. Thus, the SFPD could not investigate or spy on those who were not suspected of violating the California Penal Code or federal law.
Activists wanted those protections enshrined in city law, which resulted in last’s vetoed ordinance and passage of the watered down Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance in 2012, which activists now say they feel duped by.
“We have been extremely disappointed at the lack of information that has been included in the reports,” Summer K. Hararah, Regional Director for the Greater San Francisco Area Muslim Legal Fund of America told us. “If the SFPD is going to violate rights of Arab-Americans, the police chief has a responsibility to stand up to the FBI.”

POST 9/11 WORLD
Lax federal guidelines for counterterrorism have been building since the Bush Administration began implementing emergency measures after 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In San Francisco’s case, the FBI has subjected local law enforcement to these rules.
Since 9/11, both the ACLU of Northern California and the Human Rights Commission have publicized cases of racial profiling and surveillance of pacifist, non-criminal Muslim and Middle-Eastern groups in San Francisco. A 2007 FBI memorandum illustrated a prominent instance of this profiling in which FBI agents attended Ramadan Iftar dinners in San Francisco purportedly as part of the FBI’s mosque outreach program. Under this guise, the agents collected data on certain attendants, including names, the content of conversations, and other information covered by the First Amendment. According to the FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, the JTTF is permitted to conduct surveillance of this nature, by identifying “locations of concentrated ethnic communities in the Field Office’s domain, if these locations will reasonably aid in the analysis of the potential threats and vulnerabilities, and, overall assist domain awareness for the purpose of performing intelligence analysis.” These policies directly contradict SSFCO, DGO 8.10, and the California Constitution’s privacy protections. In Portland, Ore., the local government successfully fought this issue by bifurcating local law enforcement from the JTTF after the public and the ACLU raised concerns over similar constitutional violations and racial profiling. This Portland model is now a precedent for activist groups nationwide, seeking to end the lack of oversight permeating their local police departments. “Portland has been a great model,” Hararah told us. “When the FBI began to interview Muslim men in mass after 9/11, Portland was one of the few that said ‘absolutely not.'” But in San Francisco, Lee (whose office also didn’t respond to our request for comment) and Suhr’s symbolic promotion of civil rights has diminished into a case of them basically bullshitting the public. “Civil rights is not a symbolic issue,” Hararah told us. “The mayor backed this legislation and we want to see that the commitment is put forth with global insurance. The first step is having info about what the JTTF is doing to be sure it abides by human rights protections and is appropriate.”

Solomon: Oiling the war machinery, from Oslo to Heathrow to Washington

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Solomon: Oiling the war machinery, from Oslo to Heathrow to Washington

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information on the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

In Oslo, the world’s most important peace prize has been hijacked for war.

In London, government authority has just fired a new shot at freedom of the press.

And in Washington, the Obama administration continues to escalate its attacks on whistleblowers, journalism and civil liberties.

As a nation at peace becomes a fading memory, so does privacy. Commitments to idealism — seeking real alternatives to war and upholding democratic values — are under constant assault from the peaks of power.

Normalizing endless war and shameless surveillance, Uncle Sam and Big Brother are no longer just close. They’re the same, with a vast global reach.

Last week, I met with the Research Director of the Nobel Committee at its headquarters in Oslo. We sat at one end of a long polished conference table, next to boxes of petitions signed by 100,000 people urging that the Nobel Peace Prize go to Bradley Manning.

The Nobel official, Asle Toje, remained polite but frosty when I urged — as I had two hours earlier at a news conference — that the Nobel Committee show independence from the U.S. government by awarding the Peace Prize to Manning. Four years after the prize went to President Obama, his leadership for perpetual war is incontrovertible — while Manning’s brave whistleblowing for peace is inspiring.

In recent times, I pointed out, the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to some dissenters who were anathema to their governments’ leaders — but not to any recipient who profoundly displeased the U.S. government. Toje responded by mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., a rejoinder that struck me as odd; King received the prize 49 years ago, and more than two years passed after then until, in April 1967, he angered the White House with his first full-throated denunciation of the Vietnam War.

I motioned to the stacks of the petition, which has included personal comments from tens of thousands of signers — reflecting deep distrust of the present-day Nobel Peace Prize, especially after Obama won it in 2009 while massively escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

We were in the grand and ornate building that has housed the Nobel Committee for more than a hundred years. Outside, a bust of Alfred Nobel graces the front entrance, and just across a small traffic circle is the U.S. Embassy, an imposing dark gray presence with several stories, hundreds of windows on each of its three sides and plenty of electronic gear on its roof. (That intersection is widely understood to be a base for American surveillance operations.) More than ever in recent years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee building’s physical proximity to the U.S. Embassy is an apt metaphor for its political alignment.

Over the weekend, the British government showed more toxic aspects of its “special relationship” with the U.S. government. As the Guardian reported, “The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programs by the U.S. National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London’s Heathrow Airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.” David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, “was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. … Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and game consoles.”

Assaulting press freedom is part of a comprehensive agenda that President Obama is now pursuing more flagrantly than ever. From seizing phone records of AP reporters to spying on a Fox News reporter to successfully fighting for a federal court decision to compel reporter James Risen to reveal his source for a New York Times story, Obama’s war on journalism is serving executive impunity — for surveillance that fundamentally violates the Fourth Amendment and for perpetual war that, by force of arms and force of example, pushes the world into further bloody chaos.

The destructive effects of these policies are countless. And along the way, for the Nobel Committee, more than ever, war is peace. Across the globe, aligned with and/or intimidated by official Washington, many governments are enablers of an American warfare/surveillance multinational state. And in Washington, at the top of the government, when it comes to civil liberties and war and so much more, the moral compass has gone due south.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” Information on the documentary based on the book is at www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.

(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his blogs and emails b3, edits and writes the Bruce Blog for the Bay Guardian.  He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and the former editor and co-founder and co-publisher, 1966-2013.)

Waiting to connect

Michael Redmond
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Waiting to connect

news@sfbg.com

Eight years ago, San Francisco almost gave away an enormously lucrative public utility to Google and Earthlink: a citywide Wi-Fi connection. The hastily drawn up plan was championed by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom after a Google executive pitched him on the idea of citywide wireless Internet access at a dinner party.

Google’s Wi-Fi scheme would have blanketed the city with coverage, but it would also have required users to obtain Google accounts to sign in, thereby facilitating the company’s vacuum-like data harvesting practices that suck up everything from search queries and emails to the geographic locations of smartphones and tablets. Google’s Wi-Fi plan would have allowed the tech giant to insert “prioritized placement” of ads and brands into a Wi-Fi user’s feed, limiting choice of content through profit-driven algorithms.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU of Northern California, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and we at the Bay Guardian all criticized the plan (see “Tech Disconnect,” 11/9/05). Earthlink, Google’s partner in the privatization deal, nearly went bankrupt in 2007 and the company bailed on the Wi-Fi proposal. That was the end of the city’s first Wi-Fi scheme. Thousands of free networks in cafes and hotels popped up in the meantime, leading many to question the purpose of building municipal Wi-Fi.

But municipal Wi-Fi is back. Sup. Mark Farrell and Mayor Ed Lee announced recently that free Wi-Fi is coming to 31 San Francisco parks. Google is involved yet again, but officials in the city’s Department of Technology say that the network will be not be controlled by Google, nor directly susceptible to privacy invasions by the “don’t be evil” company or its affiliates. In short, it will be a public utility.

 

PUBLIC UTILITY

“I think a lot of the prior debate around free Wi-Fi in San Francisco that never moved forward was because of different questions around business models,” Farrell told us. “To emphasize, this is a free gift [from Google] of financial benefit to the city of San Francisco with no strings attached.”

For the parks, Google has agreed to give a $600,000 contribution to fund Wi-Fi installation and two years of operation. Farrell said this is the company’s only role. There will be no Google hardware or software allowing the company to devour user data or steer traffic.

San Francisco’s reinvigorated push to build out public Wi-Fi comes just as major telecom companies and Internet giants like Google are again targeting large Wi-Fi networks for privatization. In the late 2000s, many tech companies abandoned Wi-Fi services as unprofitable. Telecom companies were busy expanding their cellphone infrastructure.

But thanks to the proliferation and technical advances of smartphones, cellular networks are now choking on megabits of traffic. Telecom companies see Wi-Fi as a means of offloading mobile traffic onto broadband infrastructure. Google and other companies see Wi-Fi networks as vast troves of consumer data, and airwaves on which to advertise.

Google’s grant for Wi-Fi in San Francisco’s parks comes after months of bad press for the company and the tech sector, including revelations that all of Silicon Valley’s top companies readily cooperated with the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs.

Google also recently paid out $7 million to settle state investigations into its “Wi-Spy” data collection activities: wireless receivers hidden in Google’s Street View vehicles sopped up communications data, including passwords and even email content, from millions of networks in the United States and Europe. Beside Google’s numerous spying scandals, the company has also come under criticism for aggressively avoiding federal taxes, and locally for its impact on San Francisco’s transportation and housing problems.

If the $600,000 gift is designed to bolster Google’s image as a good corporate citizen, it probably also makes good business sense. “Thousands of Googlers live and work in SF,” said Jenna Wandres, a spokesperson for the company replied to our inquiries by email.

Marc Touitou, director of the city’s Department of Technology, told us the park Wi-Fi system will be entirely the city’s, and that no third party corporation will determine who can use the service or under what terms.

“It’s not a Google network, it’s not a Wi-Fi name from Google. It’s a donation, a gesture,” said Touitou. He added that talks with AT&T to let the company roll out a Wi-Fi network for all of Market Street were recently cut off because his office has decided to build the system as a fully municipal network instead.

 

CORPORATE GIFTS

Touitou’s office has plans to light up free municipal Wi-Fi along the Embarcadero, in the Castro, Noe Valley, and perhaps even on Muni buses in the near future. With the parks, Touitou said the idea is to gain back the confidence of the public, to show that the city can do this on its own. Touitou also said that he hopes the city will budget funds for these Wi-Fi systems so that they’re not reliant on corporate gifts.

“We reserve right to leverage this model where companies can put money in because it’s in their interest,” Touitou said. “They don’t care what name is on the network so long as they can dump their traffic on it.”

A public utility model will allow San Francisco to own and operate Wi-Fi across the city and to allow telecom companies to funnel mobile traffic through the city’s infrastructure, likely for a fee. Touitou said it doesn’t make sense for the city to give away its Wi-Fi infrastructure as it is a limited and increasingly valuable asset.

“The day we sell it would be a sad day,” Touitou added.

He described the city’s two radio towers, 200 buildings, thousands of utility poles, and the fiber optic grid that can connect these as the backbone of a robust municipal wireless network. Telecom and Internet companies will pay to use the infrastructure under this model. Most privacy experts who examined San Francisco’s prior Wi-Fi plans have yet to weigh in on the parks network. Revelations about the NSA’s vast spying programs have consumed the attention of groups like EFF and the ACLU.

Touitou said, however, that the city’s Wi-Fi privacy policies will be strong. “This isn’t a third party network trying to market to you,” explained Touitou. “It’s a city network that wants to facilitate traffic, and we want to have the privacy respected.”

Even as San Francisco plans its next steps with city Wi-Fi, Google is rapidly expanding its own wireless network operations. Already the company controls the citywide Wi-Fi network for Mountain View where the “Googleplex” is located. Google also has Wi-Fi networks scooping up communications in Boston’s South Station and New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The terms of Google’s Mountain View deal do not limit Google from collecting data, and users are required to sign in with a Google account. Google also recently announced that it will take control over Starbucks’ thousands of Wi-Fi networks, creating a potentially vast trove of consumer data and a marketing platform for both companies. Starbucks has 50 locations in San Francisco.

AT&T, which lost the Starbucks contract to Google, and also lost its bid to take over Market Street’s airwaves, has its own data mining projects that tap the company’s Wi-Fi networks in 30 countries for personal information, and to route telecom traffic.

So even with municipal Wi-Fi, tech and telecom companies will still have ample ability to siphon off communications data straight from wireless networks and hand it to the feds or to advertisers.

Silent films, racing snails, haunted houses, and more in weekend movies!

Sue Vaughan
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Silent films, racing snails, haunted houses, and more in weekend movies!

Those long, well-dressed lines wrapping around the Castro Theatre signal the advent of the annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, now in its 18th year and popular as ever. Though the fest opened last night, programming continues through the weekend; check out my take on some of the films (including one of tonight’s selections, 1928 rom-com The Patsy) here.

Elsewhere, in first-run and rep theaters, it’s a robust week for openings. There’s something for nearly every age and appetite (plus a few recommendations on what to avoid) in the short reviews below.

Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me The ultimate pop-rock cult band’s history is chronicled in Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s documentary. Alex Chilton sold four million copies of 1967 Box Tops single “The Letter,” recorded when he was 15 years old. After years of relentless touring, he quit that unit and returned home just as fellow Memphis native and teenage musical prodigy Chris Bell was looking to accentuate his own as-yet-unnamed band. Big Star’s 1973 debut LP #1 Record, like subsequent years’ follow-ups Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers, got great reviews — but won no commercial success whatsoever, in part due to distribution woes, record-company politics, and so forth. The troubled Bell struggled to get a toehold on a solo career, while barely-more-together Chilton changed his style drastically once invigorated by the punk invasion. At the least the latter lived long enough to see Big Star get salvaged by an ever-growing worshipful cult that includes many musicians heard from here, including Robyn Hitchcock, Matthew Sweet, and Tav Falco, plus members of the Posies, Flaming Lips, Teenage Fanclub, Yo La Tengo, R.E.M., Mitch Easter, the dB’s, and Meat Puppets. Unfortunately the spoken input from Chilton and Bell is mostly limited to audio (didn’t anyone actually film interviews back then?) Still, this semi-tragic story of musical brilliance, commercial failure, and belated “legendary” beknighting is compelling — not to mention a must for anyone interested in the annals of power pop. Now, would somebody please make documentaries about Emitt Rhodes, Game Theory, and SF’s own Oranger? (1:53) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjk2So3KvSQ

The Conjuring Irony can be so overrated. Paying tribute to those dead-serious ‘70s-era accounts of demonic possession — like 1973’s The Exorcist, which seemed all the scarier because it were based on supposedly real-life events — the sober Conjuring runs the risk of coming off as just more Catholic propaganda, as so many exorcism-is-the-cure creepers can be. But from the sound of the long-coming development of this project — producer Tony DeRosa-Grund had apparently been wanting to make the movie for more than a dozen years — 2004’s Saw and 2010’s Insidious director James Wan was merely applying the same careful dedication to this story’s unfolding as those that came before him, down to setting it in those groovy VW van-borne ‘70s that saw more families torn apart by politics and cultural change than those ever-symbolic demonic forces. This time, the narrative framework is built around the paranormal investigators, clairvoyant Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) and demonologist Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson), rather than the victims: the sprawling Perron family, which includes five daughters all ripe for possession or haunting, it seems. The tale of two families opens with the Warrens hard at work on looking into creepy dolls and violent possessions, as Carolyn (Lili Taylor) and Roger Perron (Ron Livingston) move into a freezing old Victorian farmhouse. A very eerie basement is revealed, and hide-and-seek games become increasingly creepy, as Carolyn finds unexplained bruises on her body, one girl is tugged by the foot in the night, and another takes on a new invisible pal. The slow, scary build is the achievement here, with Wan admirably handling the flow of the scares, which go from no-budg effects and implied presences that rely on the viewer’s imagination, to turns of the screws that will have audiences jumping in their seats. Even better are the performances by The Conjuring’s dueling mothers, in the trenches of a genre that so often flirts with misogyny: each battling the specter of maternal filicide, Farmiga and Taylor infuse their parts with an empathetic warmth and wrenching intensity, turning this bewitched horror throwback into a kind of women’s story. (1:52) (Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=expPMt-TX_k

Crystal Fairy Mysteriously given a tepid reception at Sundance this year, Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva’s new film is — like his 2009 breakout The Maid — a wickedly funny portrait of repellent behavior that turns unexpectedly transcendent and emotionally generous in its last laps. Michael Cera plays a Yank youth living in Santiago for unspecified reasons, tolerated by flatmate Champa (José Miguel Silva) and his brothers even less explicably — as he’s selfish, neurotic, judgmental, hyper, hyper-annoying, and borderline-desperately in endless pursuit of mind-altering substances. At a party he meets a spacey New Age chick who calls herself Crystal Fairy (Gaby Hoffman). The next morning he’s horrified to discover he’d invited her on a road trip whose goal is to do drugs at an isolated ocean beach, but despite their own discomfort, Champa and company insist he honor his obligation. What ensues is near-plotless, yet always lively and eventually rather wonderful. If you have an allergy to Cera, beware — he plays a shallow (if possibly redeemable) American brat all too well here. But it would be a shame to miss a movie as spontaneous and surprising as this primarily English-language one, which underlines Silva’s stature as a talent likely well worth following for the long haul. (1:40) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqNgrsxcwiY

Girl Most Likely Even an above-average cast (Kristen Wiig, Annette Bening, Matt Dillon) can’t elevate this indie entry from Shari Springer Bergman and Robert Pulcini (2003’s American Splendor) above so many life-crisis comedies that have come before. Blame the script by Michelle Morgan (who also cameos), which never veers from the familiar, except when it dips into cliché. After she’s dumped by her suit-wearing boyfriend, failed playwright Imogene (Wiig) realizes her life is superficial and meaningless. Oopsies! A faux suicide attempt forces her to leave the cold sparkle of NYC for the neon glimmer of the Jersey shore, where her batty mother (Bening, in “tacky broad” mode) lives with her says-he’s-a-CIA-agent boyfriend (Dillon) and Imogene’s older brother (Christopher Fitzgerald), an Asperger’s-y sort obsessed with hermit crabs. Also in the mix — because in a movie like this, the adorably depressed lead can only heal with the help of a new romance — is Glee‘s Darren Criss; by the time you realize his character is a Backstreet Boys impersonator who also happens to be a fluent-in-French Yale grad with the patience and kindness to help a bitchy stranger work through her personal drama, you’re either gonna be OK with Girl Most Likely‘s embrace of the contrived, or you’ll have given up on it already. The takeaway is a fervent hope that the talented Wiig will write more of her own scripts in the future. (1:43) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtdYdT17Vuk

The Look of Love Though his name means little in the US, in the UK Paul Raymond was as famous as Hugh Hefner. Realizing early on that sex does indeed sell, he (played by Steve Coogan) began sticking half-naked girls in 1950s club revues, then once the Sexual Revolution arrived, helped pull down a prudish country’s censorship barriers with a variety of cheesy, nudie stage comedies, “members-only” clubs, and girly mags. En route he abandoned a first wife (Anna Friel) for a bombshell actress-model (Tamsin Egerton), all the while continuing to play the field mightily. Nothing — lawsuits, police raids, public denunciations of his smutmongering — seemed to give him pause, save the eventually tragic flailing about of a daughter (Imogen Poots) who was perhaps the only person he ever loved in more than a physical sense. This fourth collaboration between director Michael Winterbottom and actor Coogan is one of those biopics about a driven cipher; if we never quite learn what made Raymond tick, that may be because he was simply an unreflective man satisfied with a rich (he was for a time Britain’s wealthiest citizen), shallow, hedonistic life. But all that surface excess is very entertainingly brought to life in a movie that’s largely an ode to the tackiest decor, fashions, and music of a heady three-decade period. (1:41) Smith Rafael. (Dennis Harvey)

Only God Forgives Julian (Ryan Gosling) and Billy (Tom Burke) are American brothers who run a Bangkok boxing club as a front for their real business of drug dealing. When the latter kills a young prostitute for kicks, then is killed himself, this instigates a chain reaction bloodbath of retribution slayings. Their primary orchestrators: police chief Chang (Vithaya Pansingarm), who always has a samurai-type sword beneath his shirt, pressed against his spine, and incongruously sings the most saccharine songs to his cop subordinates at karaoke; and Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas, doing a sort of Kabuki Cruella de Vil), who flies in to avenge her son’s death. (When told he’d raped and slaughtered a 16-year-old girl, she shrugs “I’m sure he had his reasons.”) Notoriously loathed at Cannes, this second collaboration between director-scenarist Nicolas Winding Refn and star-producer Gosling certainly isn’t for those who found their 2011 Drive insufferably pretentious and mannered. But that movie was downright gritty realism compared to this insanely stylized action abstraction, which blares its influences from Walter Hill and Michael Mann to Suzuki and Argento. The last-named particularly resonates in Suspira-level useage of garishly extreme lighting effects, much crazy wallpaper, and a great score by Cliff Martinez that duly references Goblin (among others). The performances push iconic-toughguy (and toughmutha) minimalism toward a breaking point; the ultraviolence renders a term like “gratuitous” superfluous. But there’s a macabre wit to all this shameless cineaste self-indulgence, and even haters won’t be able to deny that virtually every shot is knockout gorgeous. Haters gonna hate in the short term, but God is guaranteed a future of fervent cult adoration. (1:30) (Dennis Harvey)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COpJwAeuWHo

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty Terence Nance’s original, imaginative feature is a freeform cinematic essay slash unrequited-love letter. He and Namik Minter play fictionalized versions of themselves — two young, African American aspiring filmmakers in Manhattan, their relationship hovering uneasily between “just friends” and something more. To woo her toward the latter, he makes an hour-long film called How Would You Feel?, and the movie incorporates that as well as following what happens after he’s shown it to Minter. En route, there’s a great deal of animation (in many different styles), endless ruminative narration, and … not much plot. The ephemeral structure and general naval-gazing can get tiresome, but Beauty‘s risk-taking plusses outweigh its uneven qualities. (1:24) Roxie. (Dennis Harvey)

Red 2 Sequel to the 2010 action hit starring Bruce Willis about a squad of “retired, extremely dangerous” secret agents. (1:56)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X07xNrVd7DU

R.I.P.D. Expect to see many reviews of R.I.P.D. calling the film “D.O.A.” — with good reason. This flatly unfunny buddy-cop movie hijacks elements from Ghost (1990), Ghostbusters (1984), and the Men in Black series, but even 2012’s lackluster third entry in the MIB franchise had more zest and originality than this sad piece of work. Ryan Reynolds plays Boston police officer Nick, recruited into the afterlife’s “Rest In Peace Department” after he’s gunned down by his crooked partner (Kevin Bacon). His new partner is Wild West casualty Roy, embodied by a scenery-chomping Jeff Bridges in an apparent parody of both his own turn in 2010’s True Grit and Sam Elliott’s in 1998’s The Big Lebowski. Tasked with preventing ghosts who appear to be human (known as “deados”) from assembling an ancient artifact that’ll empower a deado takeover, Nick and Roy zoom around town cloaked by new physical identities that only living humans can see. In a joke that gets old fast, Roy’s earthly form resembles a Victoria’s Secret supermodel, while Nick is stuck with “Chinese grandpa.” That the latter’s avatar is portrayed by James Hong — deliciously villainous as Lo Pan in 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China, a vastly superior supernatural action comedy — is one bright spot in what’s otherwise the cinematic equivalent of a shoulder shrug. (1:36) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv_Rl0CBPNs

Still Mine Canadian production Still Mine is based on the true story of Craig Morrison (James Cromwell), an elderly man whose decision to build a new house on his own land — using materials he’d harvested himself, and techniques taught to him by his shipwright father — doesn’t go over well with local bureaucrats, who point out he’s violating nearly every building code on the books. But Craig has a higher purpose than just challenging the system; he’s crafting the home for the comfort of his physically and mentally ailing wife of 61 years (Geneviève Bujold). It’s pretty clear from the opening courtroom scene how Still Mine will end; though it’s well-crafted — and boasts moving turns by Cromwell and Bujold — it ultimately can’t overcome its sentimental, TV-movie vibe. A heartfelt tale, nonetheless. (1:43) (Cheryl Eddy)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADuKkRTiCfI

Turbo It’s unclear whether the irony of coupling racing — long the purview of white southern NASCAR lovers — with an animated leap into “urban” South Central LA is lost on the makers of Turbo, but even if it is, they’re probably too busy dreaming of getting caught in the drift of Fast and Furious box office success to care much. After all, director David Soren, who came up with the original idea, digs into the main challenge — how does one make a snail’s life, before and after a certain magical makeover, at all visually compelling? — with a gusto that presumes that he’s fully aware of the delicious conundrums he’s set up for himself. Here, Theo (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) is your ordinary garden snail with big, big dreams — he wants to be a race car driver like ace Guy Gagne (Bill Hader). Those reveries threaten to distract him dangerously from his work at the plant, otherwise known as the tomato plant, in the garden where he and brother Chet (Paul Giamatti) live and toil. One day, however, Theo makes his way out of the garden and falls into the guts of a souped-up vehicle in the midst of a street race, gobbles a dose of nitrous oxide, and becomes a miraculous mini version of a high-powered race car. It takes a meeting with another dreamer, taco truck driver Tito (Michael Pena), for Theo, a.k.a. Turbo, to meet up with a crew of streetwise racing snails who overcome their physical limitations to get where they want to go (Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, Michael Bell). One viral video, several Snoop tracks, and one “Eye of the Tiger” remix later, the Indianapolis 500 is, amazingly, in Turbo’s headlights — though will Chet ever overcome his doubts and fears to get behind his bro? The hip-hop soundtrack, scrappy strip-mall setting, and voice cast go a long way to revving up and selling this Cinderella tall/small tale about the bottommost feeder in the food chain who dared to go big, and fast; chances are Turbo will cross over in more ways than one. (1:36) (Kimberly Chun)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2i6gJjzX2Y

V/H/S/2 This surprisingly terrific sequel to last year’s just-OK indie horror omnibus rachets up the tension and energy in each of its four segments, again connected by a thread involving creepy “home videos” found in a seemingly abandoned house. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett’s Phase 1 Clinical Trials is a straightforwardly scary tale in which the former stars as a wealthy slacker who finds himself victim to predatory ghosts after surgery changes his physiological makeup. Reunited Blair Witch Project (1999) alumni Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale’s A Ride in the Park reinvigorates zombie clichés with gleefully funny bad taste. The most ambitious narrative, Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw’s Safe Haven, wades into a Jonestown type cult and takes it a few steps beyond mere mass suicide. Finally, Hobo With a Shotgun (2011) auteur Jason Eisener’s Slumber Party Alien Abduction delivers on that title and then some, as hearty-partying teens and their spying little brothers face something a whole lot more malevolent than each others’ payback pranks. The found-footage conceit never gets old in this diverse and imaginative feature. Plus, kudos to any horror sequel that actually improves upon the original. V/H/S/3? Bring it on. (1:36) Clay. (Dennis Harvey)

Solomon: Denouncing NSA surveillance isn’t enough–we need the power to stop it!

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Solomon: Denouncing NSA surveillance isn’t enough–we need the power to stop it!

By Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

For more than a month, outrage has been profuse in response to news about NSA surveillance and other evidence that all three branches of the U.S. government are turning Uncle Sam into Big Brother.

Now what?

Continuing to expose and denounce the assaults on civil liberties is essential. So is supporting Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers — past, present and future. But those vital efforts are far from sufficient.

For a moment, walk a mile in the iron-heeled shoes of the military-industrial-digital complex. Its leaders don’t like clarity about what they’re doing, and they certainly don’t like being exposed or denounced — but right now the surveillance state is in no danger of losing what it needs to keep going: power.

The huge digi-tech firms and the government have become mutual tools for gaining humungous profits and tightening political control. The partnerships are deeply enmeshed in military and surveillance realms, whether cruise missiles and drones or vast metadata records and capacities to squirrel away trillions of emails

At the core of the surveillance state is the hollowness of its democratic pretenses. Only with authentic democracy can we save ourselves from devastating evisceration of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

The enormous corporate leverage over government policies doesn’t change the fact that the nexus of the surveillance state — and the only organization with enough potential torque to reverse its anti-democratic trajectory — is government itself.

The necessity is to subdue the corporate-military forces that have so extensively hijacked the government. To do that, we’ll need to accomplish what progressives are currently ill-positioned for: democratic mobilization to challenge the surveillance state’s hold on power.

These days, progressives are way too deferential and nice to elected Democrats who should be confronted for their active or passive complicity with abysmal policies of the Obama White House. An example is Al Franken, senator from Minnesota, who declared his support for the NSA surveillance program last month: “I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.”

The right-wing Tea Party types realized years ago what progressive activists and groups are much less likely to face — that namby-pamby “lobbying” gets much weaker results than identifying crucial issues and making clear a willingness to mount primary challenges.

Progressives should be turning up the heat and building electoral capacities. But right now, many Democrats in Congress are cakewalking toward re-election in progressive districts where they should be on the defensive for their anemic “opposition” to — or outright support for — NSA surveillance.

Meanwhile, such officials with national profiles should encounter progressive pushback wherever they go. A step in that direction will happen just north of the Golden Gate Bridge this weekend, when House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi appears as guest of honor to raise money for the party (up to $32,400 per couple) at a Marin County reception. There will also be a different kind of reception that Pelosi hadn’t been counting on — a picket line challenging her steadfast support for NSA surveillance.

In the first days of this week, upwards of 20,000 people responded to a RootsAction.org action alert by sending their senators and representative an email urging an end to the Insider Threat Program — the creepily Orwellian concoction that, as McClatchy news service revealed last month, “requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions.”

Messages to Congress members, vocal protests and many other forms of public outcry are important — but they should lay the groundwork for much stronger actions to wrest control of the government away from the military-industrial-digital complex. That may seem impossible, but it’s certainly imperative: if we’re going to prevent the destruction of civil liberties. In the long run, denunciations of the surveillance state will mean little unless we can build the political capacity to end it.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

(Bruce B. Brugmann, who signs his name B3 in his emails and blogs, writes and edits the Bruce blog at SFBG.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and the former editor and the former co-founder and co-publisher  with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012. He can be reached at bruce@sfbg.com.)

 
      
         

Torture lawyer John Yoo drafted legal rationale for NSA spying, protesters targeting his talk in SF tonight

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Former U.S. Department of Justice attorney John Yoo is no stranger to protests. He’s responsible for drafting controversial memos under the Bush Administration to provide legal justification for torture, and as a result, anti-war activists have been following him around for years.

Turns out, Yoo also drafted legal opinions justifying the NSA’s surveillance program. The attorney and law professor will be the San Francisco Republican Party’s guest of honor tonight, at an event in North Beach.

Yoo will speak on “the recent revelations of the NSA’s PRISM program, the status of Edward Snowden, outcomes of recent Supreme Court decisions, and any other interesting topics of the day,” according to the event announcement. Naturally, his talk will be a magnet for protesters, who plan to congregate outside Villa Taverna, the restaurant where he’ll be speaking.

Just how important a role did Yoo play in providing legal justification for the spying program? Here’s some insight from Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Barton Gellman, who was interviewed for a recent report on PBS NewsHour:

“Well, the brief history of [the spying program] is that it was invented largely by Vice President Dick Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, with the help of Mike Hayden, who was running the NSA. The Justice Department had secret opinions written by John Yoo, who’s the same guy who wrote the torture opinions and some others that became quite controversial later.”

This bit of history hasn’t escaped the notice of Bay Area anti-war activists with World Can’t Wait, who’ve turned out in the past at UC Berkeley, where Yoo teaches Constitutional law, to target him for his involvement in the torture memos. Yoo recently wrote that the NSA spying program “will not prove as bad as it first seems” and opined that it presents “no clear constitutional violations.”

World Can’t Wait has also rallied behind NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. “The people of the world want the U.S. to take its hands off Edward Snowden,” says World Can’t Wait spokesperson Linda Jacobs. “There is an enormous wellspring of public support for him.” Jacobs is rallying the troops to show up outside Yoo’s talk tonight.

As illustrated by this screen shot from their website, Snowden obviously hit all the right notes for World Can’t Wait.

Yoo has sparked the ire of Snowden supporters. In an editorial for the National Review Online last month, he wrote, “Edward Snowden should go to jail, as quickly and for as long as possible.”

By the way, the hilarious response this provoked from Wonkette’s Alex Ruthrauff is totally worth a read:

“Remember all the fun we had debating whether torture was torture? Well, the good times don’t have to end, because everyone’s favorite unindicted war criminal John Yoo is back at National Review Online’s Treasury of Travesties “The Corner” to remind us all that John Yoo is a fucking disgrace. In this installment of ‘John Yoo’s John Yoo Is A Fucking Disgrace Internet Column,’ John Yoo informs us that we must “Prosecute Snowden.” A fascinating thesis that is arguably true! But will John Yoo make our heads explode by padding out his column with infuriating conflations and First Amendment hypocrisy? Ha, does the Pope wash lady feet?”

A hackivist’s call for a culture of engagement

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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By Shava Nerad

[Editor’s note: Last week, the Guardian reached out to a number of experts and technologists to gauge reactions on revelations of the massive National Security Agency spying program that recently came to light. Shava Nerad, who started her career as a software engineer and was previously involved with the Tor Project, which offers online anonymity in web browsing, has also been engaged in various forms of political activism. Nerad submitted comments via email in response to the Bay Guardian’s request for an interview. We’ve published an edited version of her thoughts here.]

My dad worked with MLK and the SCLC [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] every summer of the early/mid 60s — and the FBI knew who he had lunch with every day of those summers — this stuff isn’t really that new, it’s just automated. I got to go from “We Shall Overcome” to making sure that the Tor Project could get US nonprofit status, a good foundation of funding, a great reputation internationally, and become infrastructural for free press, free speech, and free expression on the net.

I come from a family of old style liberals from a time before the 60s, when intellectual liberals were in the military, in finance, in civil service and all parts of civic life. We moderated all parts of American society. After the 60s, to a large extent, it became uncool for liberals and intellectuals (even non-hippie types) to go into these Establishment pastimes, especially the volunteer or low paying scutwork that keeps this country running. So after half a century, what are we seeing? Largely unmoderated by liberal intellectual thought, with two generations of kids who don’t even know how to go to a public meeting or why or how politics actually works at most levels in this country, we are a goddamn mess.

I have a son in the military, and I have friends in the [Department of Homeland Security], law enforcement, a friend who’s a retired CIA analyst. But many of my friends consider me an outspoken lefty liberal (I don’t) because I am a Democratic Party activist, a strong civil libertarian, a union member … and a sort of hippie chick.

I love this wonderful flawed country. I want to tell every one of my folks here, get out of your ergonomic chairs … and get involved. Congress’ approval rating is up two percent since March to fifteen percent — and they won’t fix the USA PATRIOT Act because they aren’t a bit afraid of your disapproval!  In fact, if you say you disapprove, they will make googly eyes at you, and say “Oooooo TERRORISTS!!!” and expect you to back down and shut up — and unfortunately they are probably right.

If we are the engineers and the scientists, the innovators and the entrepreneurs — can’t we find the best way to fix our culture of engagement?  Make our culture a culture where the makers learn applied civics and share their successes on social networking?

Many of us who are “hactivists” are post-conventional thinkers, if you are familiar with that concept. Most of us do not believe that the system is irrevocably broken — we are not revolutionaries or traitors or terrorists. This is why we are making moves that are aimed toward waking up the public, not blowing them up.  If that isn’t clear enough, I can’t see what would be — we certainly have ample examples of violence in the world. We are sending signals that say, “Please, see that everything is not exactly as you have been told. You are citizens of a Republic. Take the reins and bring it back to rights. Your rights.”

Civil disobedients, whistleblowers, leakers, facilitators like Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, William Binney, Nicholas Merrill, Jake Appelbaum and more — these people should be honored rather than vilified as people who were willing to risk everything they had in order to send up a distress signal to the nation to say, “All is not right.”

But if every person of good character left all the military, law enforcement, DHS, government — then we would be a mess. Not everyone can leave. Someone has to break ranks, betray unit cohesion, take these risks, and risk being branded as a traitor even (and all of those men have been by some people).  

The American public has to wake up and understand that all is not right BECAUSE IT IS NOT.  DHS cannot fix the USA PATRIOT Act. Congress won’t fix it so long as the people moan about it on blogs and don’t insist that action be taken.

I have spoken to people in DHS since 9/11 who have been waiting to exhale for over a decade. Do you understand the situation that many in the career diplomatic services believed that they were in during [George W. Bush’s]’s administration? That they were hanging on by their fingernails, as professional diplomats and civil servants? 

Well, oddly, when Obama came in, State gave a great many of these people an opportunity to exhale. But … oddly, the new boss, and the Congress just piled on more of the same. No reprieve.

So we have the State Department declaring Internet Freedom and distributing Tor overseas, and Prism turned inward at our own people?  What sense does this make?  Praising the Arab Spring, and chasing American citizens with drones?  

The nation is sleeping or ostriching, and I’m sorry, but the press is sleeping or at the least, distracted by survivability issues. We need to turn this into a great and heroic national adventure story, or it’s going to turn into a national tragedy.

One ringy-dingy

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One ringy-dingy

marke@sfbg.com

STAGE “Oh, Ernestine has plenty to say about the current phone-surveillance thing,” the irrepressible Lily Tomlin told me, referencing her famous “one ringy-dingy” phone operator character and the recent NSA spying revelations. (Tomlin was driving down an LA freeway on her way to do some errands, popping in and out of coverage on her hands-free.)

In fact, another classic phrase from Ernestine, who’s been snooping on calls since Tomlin’s 1970s days on Martin and Rowan’s Laugh-In, rather appropriately sums up the civilian surveillance clusterbuck: “Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o

“Back during the whole Bush wiretapping time, Ernestine became an emblem for political cartoonists,” Tomlin continues. “But her association with government shenanigans goes back through Iran-Contra, all the way to Nixon and Watergate. In fact, during Iran-Contra in the ’80s, I was performing at the Emmys — I was up for one that year — and I called up G. Gordon Liddy to do a skit with Ernestine. He was going to play Oliver North! And I would be eavesdropping on him. He agreed, but then I backed off because I thought I was making too much light of the whole thing.”

The rogue’s gallery in the above paragraph gives some indication of Tomlin’s longevity in the biz, as well as her necessity. “I’ve been performing since I could basically walk,” she says. “When I was growing up in Detroit, I used to hang a blanket as a curtain on my back porch and put on shows for my family and neighbors. And then, because it started to get dangerous on the streets, I immersed myself in afterschool arts programs. I started incorporating film in to my performances, as well as comedy, drama, a little of this and a whole lot of that. I think I was the original performance artist!”   

Along with Ernestine, Tomlin’s essential characters like Edith Ann, Mrs. Beaszley, Sister Boogie Woman — maybe even her characters from 9 to 5 and Big Business, please? — will be in tow for “An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin” worth trekking up to Napa to catch. The show, a version of which Tomlin performs 30-50 times a year, is a a kind of constantly evolving greatest hits extravaganza. “These characters never leave me; I’m constantly playing with them in my head, like some weird kind of checkerboard,” Tomlin said with a laugh. “But they have to say something, something relevant. Somehow, of course, it always seems like there’s something for them to say, especially lately.”

Now 73, Tomlin’s coming off a season on TV as the pot-happy hillbilly grandma from Reba McEntire’s sitcom Malibu Country and the Tina Fey movie Admission. She’s also a regular as Lisa Kudrow’s mother on web series Web Therapy, an avid social media user, and a crusader for several causes. “Darn good genes,” she says when I gasp at her energy, roughly 1000 times any other human’s. “I had an aunt just pass away at 91. Marke, she would have lived to 120 if the smoker’s emphysema hadn’t slowed her down.”

And her maverick feminist spirit still shines bright. “There’s more opportunity for women in this business now than when I started out. Working with Tina and Lisa was inspirational, and now with new media, the possibilities are really opening up. I mean, people used to think women did comedy only because they were too ugly to do anything else. When I first started getting better known, I can’t tell you how many people came up to me saying, ‘Oh, Lily, you’re so much prettier than you are on television!’ Ha. Can you believe that?”

“AN EVENING OF CLASSIC LILY TOMLIN”

Doors 7pm, show 8pm, $70-$85

The Uptown

1350 Third St., Napa

(707) 259-0123

You can’t see me

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You can’t see me

caitlin@sfbg.com

SURVEILLANCE It’s all a mess: the government is suddenly (to those of us waking from our Twinkie nap) spying on us. Mulder and Scully were right, trust is for the foolish and undisturbed sleep is for the ignorant.

All the more reason to go out. Authoritarian regime is no excuse for poor style, says New York high tech fashion designer Adam Harvey. And armed with his projects, drone-defeating tactics can look damn good.

Even before Edward Snowden’s heroic leak of documents laid bare the NSA’s wide-ranging surveillance of American citizens, Harvey was busying himself merging privacy rights with fashion. Witness his LED-aided clutches that deflected the flash of cameras — the ultimate accessory for A-list independents (“Camoflash”, 2009).

But perhaps you are more of the sporty type? Harvey’s newest collection, “Stealth Wear” includes a half-hoodie that deflects thermal imaging surveillance. Heat-seeking systems won’t be able to see you, but that babe in the club sure will. His designs have an anti-colonial gaze: two “Stealth Wear” garments take the form of burqa and hijab. He’s also developed “CV Dazzle”, a series of makeup looks that foil facial recognition software and “OFF Pocket”, a sleek envelope that blocks one’s cell phone from sending or receiving signals.

We caught up with him through an insecure email account.

SFBG “CV Dazzle”‘s look seems very of-the-moment when it comes to the avant-garde fashion you see in clubs. What’s the inspiration? 

Adam Harvey The first look, with the black-and-white makeup, developed from my fascination with the Boombox scene in London. I studied party photographs as well as tribal face painting, especially from Pacific Islands. What I found was that only one of these styles worked, club fashion. Tribal body decoration does more to enhance key facial features which make a face easier to detect. The bold, ambiguous looks of the club scene were more algorithmically resistant. From there, I worked with Pia Vivas, a hair stylist to create the first look. And then collaborated with DIS Magazine to create the second and third looks.

SFBG How have the recent NSA revelations informed your work? 

AH The news struck while my collaborator and I were planning production for the “OFF Pocket.” It’s the first time I’m taking an art project and turning it into a marketable product. A lot of my work in privacy arts is speculative and provocative, but I think some concepts can be even more provocative when they’re accessible to more people. What happens when countersurveillance goes mainstream? That’s a discussion we need to have because if the government doesn’t respect privacy, then I think we should have the right to countersurveillance.

SFBG Where is “OFF Pocket” at in the production process? Have you sent one to Edward Snowden? 

AH It’s very close. I’ve gone through a lot of prototyping and testing to ensure that the product works well. Once a phone is inside and the case is properly closed, you really can’t access any part of it. If I knew where Edward Snowden was, I would send him a thankful dozen.

 

Panel sees Orwellian overtones in NSA spying scandal

Sasha Cuttler
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Panel sees Orwellian overtones in NSA spying scandal

It is now public knowledge that the NSA has been spying on us (unless you’ve been living under a rock and, lucky for you, exempt from digital surveillance) thanks to the information leaked by Edward Snowden last week.

In the wake of this scandal, people crowded into St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley on Tuesday, June 11, to participate in a panel discussion titled “Our Vanishing Civil Liberties,” centered around the intricacies of government intrusion and spying in the age of the War on Terror.

Among the panel members were Daniel Ellsberg, famed leaker of the Pentagon papers; Birgitta Jónsdóttir, member of the Icelandic Parliament; Normon Solomon, activist and author; and Nadia Kayyali, a legal fellow with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.

As Kayyali noted, we now know about the NSA’s capability of obtaining the metadata for all domestic phone calls in the United States, which can include the call length, who you’re calling and in some cases the location of the phone calls.

So is Snowden a patriot or a traitor? For the panel members, the answer was obviously in support of the former. However, for California’s own US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose name the crowd constantly met with a crescendo of hissing, Snowden is a criminal, guilty of treason.

Solomon rallied against officials like Feinstein, who he believes should not be entrusted with the protection of our privacy. “What we discover is that the leaders in Congress, the leaders in the White House, the leaders in the courts unfortunately as well cannot be trusted with our lives and that includes our civil liberties,” he said.  

Ellsberg spoke of the comparisons between Snowden and Bradley Manning, an ex-U.S. soldier arrested in 2010 for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, noting that Manning’s leaks dealt solely with issues “over there,” specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, while Snowden’s case is inherently more domestic.

“The American people, like other humans, are unfortunately not that concerned about what is done to people over there,” said Ellsberg. “Especially when their leaders tell them that it is necessary to their safety. What strikes me about Snowden is that it affects us, you, everybody.”

However, the repercussions of Snowden’s leak are not solely rooted in America. Jónsdóttir informed the crowd that many European Union countries are concerned with the extended power of the NSA. 

“Our leaders in the many different countries in Europe are so worried about this probing into the privacy of citizens of the EU that they are thinking of building a fortress around Europe to protect us against the surveillance and the invasion of our privacy from the United States,” said Jónsdóttir.

Our challenge now, as Ellsberg stated, is escaping the abyss of unchecked government surveillance. But can we do it? For this question, Ellsberg didn’t have an answer.

The panel raised intertwining issues of government overreach and public apathy, painting the picture of a United States embodying the Orwellian dystopia of 1984 combined with Aldous Huxley’s portrait of apathetic hedonism in Brave New World.

However, Kayyali appeared optimistic for the future, calling upon education and public discussion as the only potential to escape from the intrusive acts of the NSA.

“Never stop educating yourself,” Kayyali told the crowd. “Take everything that you’ve learned here tonight and share it with those around you. The only way we are going to see any change is if we have an educated populace, something that we are severely lacking right now.”

Without action, Ellsberg warned of the potential for a country in which privacy is nonexistent, or what he colloquially refers to as, “The United Stasi of America.”

In her closing statement, Jónsdóttir offered this coda in the form of a poem: “Now is the time to yield to the call of growth, to the call of action. You are the change makers. Sleepers of all ages, wake up now.”

Solomon: An open letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee

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Solomon: An open letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee


By Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Dear Senator Feinstein:

On Thursday, when you responded to news about massive ongoing surveillance of phone records of people in the United States, you slipped past the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you seem to be in the habit of treating the Bill of Rights as merely advisory.

The Constitution doesn’t get any better than this: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The greatness of the Fourth Amendment explains why so many Americans took it to heart in civics class, and why so many of us treasure it today. But along with other high-ranking members of Congress and the president of the United States, you have continued to chip away at this sacred bedrock of civil liberties.

As The Guardian reported the night before your sudden news conference, the leaked secret court order “shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk — regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.”

One of the most chilling parts of that just-revealed Surveillance Court order can be found at the bottom of the first page, where it says “Declassify on: 12 April 2038.”

Apparently you thought — or at least hoped — that we, the people of the United States, wouldn’t find out for 25 years. And the fact that we learned about this extreme violation of our rights in 2013 instead of 2038 seems to bother you a lot.

Rather than call for protection of the Fourth Amendment, you want authorities to catch and punish whoever leaked this secret order. You seem to fear that people can actually discover what their own government is doing to them with vast surveillance.

Meanwhile, the Executive Branch is being run by kindred spirits, as hostile to the First Amendment as to the Fourth. On Thursday night, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement saying the “unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”

That statement from Clapper is utter and complete hogwash. Whoever leaked the four-page Surveillance Court document to Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian deserves a medal and an honorary parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Nation’s Capital. The only “threats” assisted by disclosure of that document are the possibilities of meaningful public discourse and informed consent of the governed.

Let’s be candid about the most clear and present danger to our country’s democratic values. The poisonous danger is spewing from arrogance of power in the highest places. The antidotes depend on transparency of sunlight that only whistleblowers, a free press and an engaged citizenry can bring.

As Greenwald tweeted after your news conference: “The reason there are leakers is precisely because the govt is filled with people like Dianne Feinstein who do horrendous things in secret.” And, he pointed out, “The real story isn’t just the spying itself: it’s that we have this massive, ubiquitous Surveillance State, operating in total secrecy.”

Obviously, you like it that way, and so do most other members of the Senate and House. And so does the president. You’re all playing abhorrent roles, maintaining a destructive siege of precious civil liberties. While building a surveillance state, you are patting citizens on the head and telling them not to worry.

Perhaps you should have a conversation with Al Gore and ask about his statement: “Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?” Actually, many millions of Americans understand that the blanket surveillance is obscenely outrageous.

As a constituent, I would like to offer an invitation. A short drive from your mansion overlooking San Francisco Bay, hundreds of us will be meeting June 11 at a public forum on “Disappearing Civil Liberties in the United States.” (You’d be welcome to my time on the panel.) One of the speakers, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, could explain to you how the assaults on civil liberties and the wars you keep supporting go hand in hand, undermining the Constitution and causing untold misery.

Senator Feinstein, your energetic contempt for the Bill of Rights is serving a bipartisan power structure that threatens to crush our democratic possibilities.

A huge number of people in California and around the country will oppose your efforts for the surveillance state at every turn.

Sincerely,

Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

(Bruce B. Brugmann, or b3 as he signs his blogs and emails, writes and edits the Bruce blog on the website of the San Francisco Bay Guardian  at sfbg.com. He is the editor at large of the Bay Guardian and former editor and co-founder and co-publisher of the Bay Guardian  with his wife Jean Dibble, 1966-2012.  He can be contacted at bruce@sfbg.com.) b3

A thought on the PRISM program

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A thought on the PRISM program

The huge story of the last week was the UK Guardian’s revelations of massive data mining by the US government of Verizon and the outrage in its wake. Naturally, the paranoia is ramped up, as is the apologist rebuttal. But one thing no one wants to talk about is this: What is to stop a government determined to “get” someone from simply fabricating electronically transmitted data? If someone is perceived as a “threat to national security” (for whatever reason), isn’t it possible to create fake emails and texts?

Like a cyber version of a “throwdown gun“?

Not going all “line the walls with tinfoil, here comes the New World Order, Alex Jones is Christ incarnate” on you, but as such a thing is now doable, who’s to stop it? Certainly not a rubber stamp like the FISA courts. Certainly not the “benevolent nature” of politicians. 

Something to consider when you are sanguine about “they’re only protecting me”.

NSA spying on Verizon calls is nothing new

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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So, the federal government is spying on millions of Americans. Still. And this time, there’s a document to prove it.

In a momentous scoop by journalist Glenn Greenwald, the UK Guardian has published a top secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to turn over all call records to the National Security Agency.

It does not matter if you are suspected of wrongdoing, or what your political beliefs are. It’s now been confirmed that if you are a Verizon subscriber, your “telephony metadata” is being handed over the NSA, “on an ongoing daily basis,” along with the records of millions of other subscribers.

What can this metadata reveal about a telecom subscriber?

“Every call made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other ‘identifying information’ for the phone and call,” according to this cogent explanation provided by Electronic Frontier Foundation attorneys Cindy Cohn and Mark Rumold (in full disclosure, my former coworkers). Take a moment to let that sink in. We’re not just talking about every number dialed, but the geographic location of every phone.

Further raising eyebrows: “There is no indication that this order to Verizon was unique or novel,” Cohn and Rumold note. “It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that, if you make calls in the United States, the NSA has those records.” (Emphasis mine.)

President Barack Obama has defended the practice, calling it “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.” 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a news conference in D.C. that the court order in question “is a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice,” according to the Associated Press.

Former Vice President Al Gore tweeted that the domestic surveillance program is “obscenely outrageous.” More than 16,000 people have signed an emergency petition urging Congress to “investigate,” while the American Civil Liberties Union has launched a petition calling on the Obama Administration to stop it already.

Amid the well-founded outrage over a document conclusively revealing a widespread domestic spying program, what’s really fascinating is the ho-hum response of two whistleblowers formerly employed by the NSA, who went on Democracy Now! and basically said, duh, what took the mainstream media so long to notice? 

“Where has the mainstream media been? These are routine orders, nothing new,” Thomas Drake told program host Amy Goodman. “What’s new is we’re seeing an actual order. And people are somehow surprised by it. The fact remains that this program has been in place for quite some time. It was actually started shortly after 9/11. The Patriot Act was the enabling mechanism that allowed the United States government in secret to acquire subscriber records from any company.”

NSA whistleblower William Binney chimed in: “NSA has been doing all this stuff all along, and it’s been all the companies, not just one. And I basically looked at [the top secret order] and said, well, if Verizon got one, so did everybody else, which means that, you know, they’re just continuing the collection of this kind of information on all U.S. citizens. … There’s just—in my estimate, it was—if you collapse it down to all uniques, it’s a little over 280 million U.S. citizens are in there, each in there several hundred to several thousand times.”

The publication of this court order also came less as a revelation, and more of a confirmation of what they’ve been saying all along, for San Francisco-based EFF attorneys, who have been mired in a legal battle against the NSA on warrantless wiretapping for the better part of a decade.

(Things started to get rolling on that front on Jan. 20, 2006, when former AT&T employee Mark Klein waltzed into EFF’s office clutching a manila envelope containing technical corporate documents, “detailing the construction of the NSA’s secret spying room in AT&T’s San Francisco facility” on Folsom Street.)

“This type of untargeted, wholly domestic surveillance is exactly what EFF, and others, have been suing about for years,” Cohn and Rumold remind us.

Legally speaking, much of this debate pertains to Section 215 of the U.S. Patriot Act, which the federal government has relied upon to claim it has legal authority to conduct mass surveillance of communications.

In May of 2011, Sen. Ron Wyden issued a cryptic warning during a debate about the reauthorization of Section 215. “I want to deliver a warning this afternoon,” Wyden said. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

Has that day arrived?

Boston, a day later

Zelda Bronstein
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Boston, a day later

It’s hard to know what to say about the Boston Marathon bombings. Except that I don’t believe the guy on the roof did it, and I don’t believe the government did it to get its hand down our pants, and nobody has any idea if some organized domestic or foreign terrorist group was responsible or if it was a lone nut. Whoever it was, the person doesn’t seem to have been overly sophisticated in the making of explosive devices; this one was pretty crude. Or maybe the bombmaker knew exactly what he (could be she, but there aren’t many female mad bombers) was doing, and wanted to look like an amateur.

We do know this wasn’t a suicide bomber. The perp wanted to get away.

I suspect we will find him soon enough. There are so many agencies and people looking for the bomber; unless this was the work of someone who remotely triggered the bombs by cell phone from somewhere far, far away, there’s not going to be anywhere to hide. Also: So many cameras everywhere these days. The bomber — or the person who placed the bombs — is on film in downtown Boston. Almost certainly.

As we did after 9/11, we will probably over-react. New invasive rules on transport systems, more spying, more surveillance …. all things that wouldn’t have prevented a single angry bomber from carrying out the attacks. People who are opposed to gun control will say: See! Gun-control laws won’t stop pressure-cooker bombs!

There will be increased security at public sports events. I don’t know how they’re going to deal with Bay to Breakers, which not only winds through the city, past lots of places where bombs could be hidden, but also involves thousands of trash cans and porta-potties. You can’t get rid of those; the people who live along the course would be livid when their front yards and driveways became trash heaps and pissoirs. Searches will be more serious at AT&T park, which means lines will be longer. We can live with that. 

If you want some perspective on what it feels like to be terrorized, check out my old friend Don Ray’s blog on “the sitting duck syndrome.” He notes:

The bombs that exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon have created the same response in people across the United States. The repeated blasts (repeated and repeated and repeated on television) have communicated with the primitive, “I have to survive” reptilian brains of millions of people. It has put them on notice that, “It could happen here. Today. Tomorrow. Even right now.” Welcome to the world of terrorism. It’s very effective. People in other parts of the world already know about this. So in the coming weeks and months, some of us will feel the need to carry weapons or to avoid crowds completely. Others of us will look at the violence that’s happening in distant parts of the world and maybe begin to become a little bit empathic. Maybe — just maybe — some of us will equate U.S. drones and missiles and bombs with the sitting duck, unexpected violence that is the intended byproduct of terrorists.

Not to get all foreign-policy preachy here, but that’s something to think about.

ABC shows more concern about expanding police video surveillance than Mayor Lee

Sasha Cuttler
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ABC shows more concern about expanding police video surveillance than Mayor Lee

The SFPD has quietly expanded its reach and authority to obtain video surveillance from in and around bars, clubs, and markets through a condition it has begun recommending on new liquor licenses, as I reported in today’s issue, effectively bypassing controls on city-operated surveillance cameras established through extensive public hearings in 2005.

But the Mayor’s Office doesn’t seem concerned about the new trend, echoing SFPD’s point that it is the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control that decides whether to heed the SFPD’s request to include the video surveillance condition. “There is no new policy. SFPD makes recommendations as far as I know, not requirements,” Mayoral Press Secretary Christine Falvey wrote to me in an email responses to our questions.

Certainly, everyone from bar owners to the ACLU to Sups. Scott Wiener and David Campos – who have called a hearing on the policy for later this month – consider it a new policy, or at least one that the public has just learned of after it was adopted internally right after the idea was shot down in public hearings in 2011.

ABC spokesperson John Carr had told me the department “routinely denied requests for conditions by SFPD per section 23800(e) of the Californian Business and Professions Code, occasionally these denials include the surveillance condition,” but he wasn’t able to provide me any examples of that happening by press time.

But today, he was able to find one. On Oct. 3, 2012, ABC rejected the SFPD’s request for video surveillance at Bush Market at 820 Bush on a quiet residential block of Nob Hill, noting that state law requires such requests be supported by “substantial evidence” that problems exist at the site that would be mitigated by the condition.

“I regret to inform you that the Department is unable to impose conditions pursuant to your request because no evidence was provided to establish that a problem exists at the premises or in it immediate vicinity,” ABC District Administrator Justin Gebb wrote in what was essentially a form letter.

Carr shared an identical letter that the ABC sent to the SFPD denying some of its requested conditions for another liquor license transfer on Feb. 12, this one for the Space 550 event venue at 550 Barneveld Ave. But in that case, the ABC decided to support the SFPD’s request for video surveillance “that is able to view the inside and outside of the premises” and which must be given to the cops “upon demand.”

As I wrote in this week’s paper, the ACLU considers that kind of extrajudicial expansion of the SFPD’s ability to require and obtain video surveillance to be unconstitutional, and we furnished a copy of the article and the issues it raised to try to get a more substantial comment from the Mayor’s Office, which seems to be less concerned with the civil rights of San Franciscans than the bureaucrats in Sacramento are.

“Balancing public safety with vibrant cultural and nightlife activities is a concern of mayor. He expects the Police Department to work in partnership with the neighborhood and its businesses to lawfully collect evidence that can help keep the public safe and neighborhoods active,” Falvey wrote.

So I had a few follow-up questions, for which I’m still awaiting answers, and I’ll update this post if and when I get them: “The ACLU’s position is that this is not a lawful way to collect evidence, and that it violates the state constitution’s privacy protections and the rules San Francisco established in 2005 regulating when and how the SFPD may request and use video surveillance. Does the mayor reject those concerns and has he sought any legal advice to support his position? In the absence of any judicial review, shouldn’t the city have some guidelines and policies governing this expansion of SFPD’s video surveillance authority? Does the mayor believe the 2005 guidelines should no longer apply? And does the mayor agree with Sups. Wiener and Campos that it would be appropriate to have a public hearing on this issue, particularly given the strong public opposition to requiring expanded video surveillance by bars two years ago?”

The FBI and Occupy

Zelda Bronstein
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The FBI and Occupy

A federal judge will decide March 15 whether to dismiss a lawsuit by the ACLU and the Bay Guardian seeking access to FBI records showing the agency’s involvement with the Occupy movement.

As if often the case, the FBI’s legal motions tell an interesting story that sheds light on what some of the still-unreleased documents might show.
The filings make it clear that the FBI was not only spying on the Occupy movement but was sharing data with local law-enforcement agencies — and at some point may have classified some part of the Occupy movement as international terrorists.

The Guardian and the ACLU have been fighting for more than a year to get the agency to release its complete files on Occupy. After a March 8, 2012 Freedom of Information Act request yielded only a few pages, and the FBI claimed it had no more documents, the ACLU filed suit.

In a declaration dated March 15, 2013, David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI’s Information Section, confirms that the agency was sharing information on Occupy with other police agencies. He states that “The mention of the FBI sharing intelligence with another agency doesn’t mean that the document becomes and intelligence or planning document. It is simply documenting that information was shared.”

Among the documents that the feds did release is a Nov. 2, 2011 memo discussing the FBI’s contact with the Port of Stockton Police Department to “share intelligence about Occupy protesters targetting the Port of Oakland.”

And of course, the fact that the FBI is sharing intelligence means that it was gathering intelligence as well.

By law, the FBI can only investigate when there are federal crimes or federal statutes involved, and the vast majority, if not all, of the Occupy actions in cities all over the country were local in nature. Occupy was a famously diverse group of community-based organizations that had no national structure or leadership. In the few instances were Occupy protesters were charged with crimes — mostly in cases of civil disobedience or minor vandalism — there were no federal laws even remotely involved.

In his declaration, however, Hardy defends the FBI’s refusal to release some documents by saying that “the FBI’s general investigative authority … and its general authority to collect records …. provides the statutory basis for the FBI’s role in providing services and support to state and local law enforcement agencies in investigating crimes and terrorism related to the enforcement of federal laws. The FBI is also assigned the lead role in investigating terrorism and in the collection of terrorism threat information within the United States.”

The case is before Judge Susan Illston.

Suhr apologizes for sparse spying report, pledges more info

Sasha Cuttler
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Suhr apologizes for sparse spying report, pledges more info

Police Chief Greg Suhr has issued an apology for the sparse report on joint SFPD-FBI surveillance activities that his department gave last week, pledging to work with the activists who had criticized it as failing to comply with a city law adopted last year. But it remains to be seen whether the two sides will agree on the level of detail that would constitute meaningful civilian oversight of sensitive domestic spying operations.

“The report was accurate and complied with the ordinance, but briefer than what he had hoped for,” SFPD Sgt. Michael Andraychak told the Guardian this afternoon. “Chief Suhr has ensured compliance with the ordinance but did not have an opportunity to review the report prior to the presentation to the commission. The chief personally apologizes to those who attended the commission meeting for the brevity of the report and promised to have future reports more developed. The Chief’s Office is in the process of scheduling meetings with Nasrina Bargzie [of the Asian Law Caucus] to develop a report with more detail so those concerned and the public can be as informed as possible. Chief Suhr is committed to remain in compliance with the ordinance.”

While Bargzie said she welcomes the apology and pledge to be more forthcoming, “We disagree that the report that was issued was in compliance with the ordinance.” While that watered down version of a stronger ordinance that Mayor Ed Lee had vetoed was vague, Bargzie said that, “It does require that the commission be given enough information to provide oversight.”

In correspondence between Bargzie and Suhr over the last year, the Coalition insisted that the report include details on the number of investigations or assessments requested by the FBI, how many requests SFPD personnel refused, how disputes were resolved, and other information, which she said Suhr told her last year that he would provide.

But he seemed to dispute that in a Jan. 23 letter to her, writing, “I assured you that the Department’s JTTF report would include all public information required by the ordinance. I did not commit to provide all information requested in your letter dated June 8, 2012.”

Sup. Jane Kim, who sponsored both the stronger original legislation that Lee vetoed and the compromise measure that followed, expressed hope Suhr and the Coalition will find common ground. “The chief himself met with me and apologized for it,” she told us. “He acknowledged that it was not a good report and said he would work with the Coalition on this.”

She acknowledged that the ordinance itself doesn’t spell out the specificity that the Coalition is seeking. “In order for us to get the compromise, we had to work with the Mayor’s Office. It was watered down,” she said. Yet Kim said meaningful oversight is still what she expects to see: “We need a lot more specificity and the details the Coalition would like to see.”

Activists slam hollow report on SFPD-FBI spying

Sasha Cuttler
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Activists slam hollow report on SFPD-FBI spying

UPDATE: SUHR APOLOGIZES FOR REPORT The San Francisco Police Department continues to resist meaningful oversight of its partnership with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. After last year pressuring Mayor Ed Lee into vetoing a strong oversight measure and signing a weaker version, the SFPD last week issued a required report that activists are slamming as “grossly inadequate.”

The Coalition for a Safe San Francisco – which includes civil libertarians and members of Muslim groups and other targets of racial and religious profiling by the FBI – last May stood with Police Chief Greg Suhr and sponsoring Sup. Jane Kim as Lee signed what they called this “historic civil rights legislation.”

But at the time, the activists told the Guardian that the value of the watered-down legislation depended entirely on how it was implemented, particularly in the annual reports on SFPD-FBI operations that it required. To ensure they were specific enough to be meaningful, the coalition says it communicated with Suhr several times asking him to include the number of joint investigations undertaken, how many times FBI requests were denied by the SFPD, and possible violations of department policy and how they were handled.

Instead, when Deputy Chief John Loftus gave the first of these annual reports to the Police Commission on Jan. 23, he spoke for only a couple minutes and said the SFPD was in “full compliance” with the ordinance and a Suhr general order banning surveillance of law-abiding citizens, offering no further details.

“We were very clear with the chief about what we expected to see,” Nadia Kayyali of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a coalition member, told the Guardian. She also said the report “was slipped on the agenda at the last minute,” despite assurances that the coalition would be notified and given a chance to respond. “It does show a lack of regard for the ordinance and the work that went into it.”

The activists say that Suhr broke his promise to them to include the more specific information that they sought, even after they recently followed up with messages reminding him about that assurance. “I was in the meeting where he said he would,” Nasrina Bargzie with the Asian Law Caucus, another coalition member, told us. Bargzie said she was disappointed and dismayed by what the report included, “but we’re going to keep pushing on it.”

The controversy surrounding possible SFPD-FBI spying on people who haven’t violated any laws – which is illegal under local and state law – broke almost two years ago when the American Civil Liberties Union obtained a secret 2007 SFPD-FBI memorandum of understanding placing SFPD officers under FBI command. It seemed to bypass local restrictions adopted after past SFPD scandals involving police spying on political groups.

Suhr tried to quell the controversy by issuing a general order banning officers from participating in surveillance that violates local rules or the state constitution’s privacy protections, but activists pushed for a stronger assurance. The Board of Supervisors then voted 6-5 to codify those protections into city law, but Suhr objected and Lee vetoed the measure. A weaker version calling for annual reports and Police Commission reviews of future SFPD-FBI MOUs was approved unanimously by the board.

Now, it appears the SFPD has done little to soften the “trust us” stance that it has taken from the beginning, frustrating activists who had pushed for more, here and in other cities that do domestic surveillance with the FBI.

“These policies are explicit and unequivocal. San Francisco Police Department members and their Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisors are aware of and familiar with these policies,” Loftus told the commission, explaining that the SFPD did its required quarterly reviews in November and two weeks ago, finding nothing to report.

Police Commissioner Suzy Loftus asked if he could “explain a bit more” and Suhr – who was at the stand giving his report as Deputy Chief Loftus (no relation) gave his from the lectern – answered: “All San Francisco police officers are held to the San Francisco Police Department policies and procedures and the policies and laws of San Francisco, whichever is more strict. So depending on wherever they are, their fallback, if you will, is whatever the policies, procedures, laws, ordinances, and all of San Francisco.”

Suhr’s answer seemed to satisfy the commission, which defended the SFPD’s secretive approach rather than asking any more questions.

“Our officers will not participate in any investigation unless there is a predicate offense that is a violation of the California Penal Code or the United States code, so they will not be involved in random surveillance or random assessments or talking to people,” Commission President Thomas Mazzucco said.

Commissioner Joe Marshall also said he trusts Suhr and we all should too: “I want the public to feel reassured that when the chief says that’s going to be the way it is, that’s the way it is.”

But the coalition, which includes 79 organizations, was less than satisfied with that answer. In a statement issued today, it wrote, “Deputy Chief Loftus’ report completely failed to provide the information required to ensure the accountability and transparency required under the Safe San Francisco Civil Rights Ordinance. The Coalition calls on the Chief of Police to promptly issue a public written report containing the information he promised he would provide.”

Neither Kim – who sponsored both the original legislation and weaker alternative – nor the SFPD have returned Guardian calls for comment yet, but I’ll update this post if and when they do. You can watch the hearing yourself here, with that item beginning at the 48:20 mark.

 

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