Early Monday morning, Foxconn released a statement indicating that the riot started as a personal disagreement between factory workers in a dormitory and was eventually brought under control by police, but this clashes with reports trickling in from users of China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo. Much like with the situations in Egypt and other Arab Spring countries earlier this year, microbloggers are painting a different picture than the one presented by official sources; numerous Weibo posts indicate that the riots were started not by a fight between workers in off-campus housing, but instead by security guards beating one or more workers nearly to death. Regardless of the cause, pictures leaking out from the scene show some destruction, including broken windows and a toppled guard post building.
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Foxconn worker riot closes factory | Ars Technica - 0 views
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Police Delete Aftermath Footage Of Suspect Shot 41 Times | Techdirt - 0 views
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indienationnews 2012 police yourrights privacy law civil Public+disclosure
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Wallace took cellphone pictures and video after the shooting stopped, but he said Mesquite police confiscated the phone and deleted the video and pictures. The phone was returned four days later, he said.
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The law states that police need a court order to confiscate a camera unless it was used in a commission of a crime. The only exception is if there are exigent circumstances, such as a strong belief that the witness will destroy the photos, therefore destroying evidence. Under no circumstances do police have the right to delete footage.
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Massachusetts Man Charged Criminally For Videotaping Cop... Despite Earlier Lawsuit Rej... - 0 views
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massachusetts lawsuit law legal wiretapping police yourrights publicrecording youtube
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You may remember a high-profile, landmark ruling last year in Massachusetts, where charges against Simon Glik -- arrested for violating a state law that said it's "wiretapping" to record a police officer in public without his permission -- weren't just dropped, but the arrest was found to be both a First and Fourth Amendment violation. In the end, Boston was forced to pay Glik $170,000 for violating his civil rights. You would think that story would spread across Massachusetts pretty quickly and law enforcement officials and local district attorneys would recognize that filing similar charges would be a certified bad idea. Not so, apparently, in the town of Shrewsbury. Irving J. Espinosa-Rodrigue was apparently arrested and charged under the very same statute after having a passenger in his car videotape a traffic stop for speeding, and then posting the video on YouTube. Once again, the "issue" is that Massachusetts is a "two-party consent" state, whereby an audio recording can't be done without first notifying the person being recorded, or its deemed a "wiretap." This interpretation, especially when dealing with cops in public, is flat-out ridiculous and unconstitutional, as the Glik ruling showed.
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US Court Secretly Lets Government Share Megaupload Evidence With Copyright Industry | T... - 0 views
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2013 law legal tech megaupload evidence court due+process yourrights exparte litigation MPAA filesharing copyright
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Apparently part of the issue for the original filing to reveal this information was that some copyright holders are getting antsy that as the case drags on, they won't also be able to file civil cases against Megaupload before the three-year statute of limitations expires. However, as Megaupload's lawyers point out, there is no urgency here since the government itself made no move to share this information over the past two years. If it really wanted to share the information it had ample time to make the request and allow Megaupload's lawyers to review and take part in the process, rather than trying to route around them entirely. I'm guessing the recent successes against IsoHunt and Hotfile may have contributed to the timing as well. The MPAA pretty clearly thinks it can use those two cases to go after Megaupload as well, outside of the criminal case which will continue.
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FBI surveillance malware in bomb threat case tests constitutional limits | Ars Technica - 0 views
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2013 law due+process surveillance fbi constitutional malware spying legal yourrights
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The FBI has an elite hacker team that creates customized malware to identify or monitor high-value suspects who are adept at covering their tracks online, according to a published report.
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as the capability to remotely activate video cameras and report users' geographic locations—is pushing the boundaries of constitutional limits on searches and seizures
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Critics compare it to a physical search that indiscriminately seizes the entire contents of a home, rather than just those items linked to a suspected crime. Former US officials said the FBI uses the technique sparingly, in part to prevent it from being widely known.
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"We have transitioned into a world where law enforcement is hacking into people’s computers, and we have never had public debate,” Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post, speaking of the case against Mo. "Judges are having to make up these powers as they go along."
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Lawsuit Claims Accidental Google Search Led To Years Of Government Investigation And Ha... - 0 views
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lawsuit google government investigation search yourrignts law legal litigation yourrights surveillance security spying stalking
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Jeffrey Kantor, who was fired by Appian Corporation, sued a host of government officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry in Federal Court, alleging civil rights violations, disclosure of private information and retaliation… He also sued Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Rand Beers, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, EPA Administrator Regina McCarthy and U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta.
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"In October of 2009, Kantor used the search engine Google to try to find, 'How do I build a radio-controlled airplane,'" he states in his complaint. "He ran this search a couple weeks before the birthday of his son with the thought of building one together as a birthday present. After typing, 'how do I build a radio controlled', Google auto-completed his search to, 'how do I build a radio controlled bomb.'" From that point on, Kantor alleges coworkers, supervisors and government investigators all began "group stalking" him. Investigators used the good cop/bad cop approach, with the "bad cop" allegedly deploying anti-Semitic remarks frequently. In addition, his coworkers at Appian (a government contractor) would make remarks about regular people committing murder-suicides (whenever Kantor expressed anger) or how normal people just dropped dead of hypertension (whenever Kantor remained calm while being harassed)
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Kantor also claims he was intensely surveilled by the government from that point forward.
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the law says that the timeline is based on when the citizen had a reasonable chance to discover the violation. Since the PRISM program was only declassified in July of 2013, these earlier violations should not be time-barred.
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All in all, the filing doesn't build a very credible case and comes across more as a paranoiac narrative than a coherent detailing of possible government harassment and surveillance. Here are just a few of the highlights.
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Brazil looks to protect privacy and net neutrality with internet bill of rights | The V... - 0 views
www.theverge.com/...-neutrality-with-internet-bill
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"The internet you want is only possible in an environment of respect for human rights," Rousseff said in a statement on her website, "especially privacy and freedom of expression."
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The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views
www.eff.org/...ta-report-good-bad-and-missing
2014 EFF mass data indienationnews law technology legal White House report review privacy yourrights notice and consent
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one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
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an example of this in Boston, which had a pilot program to allow residents to report potholes through a mobile app but soon recognized that the program was inherently flawed because “wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.”
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The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.
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metadata (the details associated with your communications, content, or actions, like who you called, or what a file you uploaded file is named, or where you were when you visited a particular website) can expose just as much information about you as the “regular” data it is associated with, so it deserves the same sort of privacy protections as “regular” data.
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The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
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several other government reports have taken a much stronger stance and explicitly stated that metadata deserves the same level of privacy protections as “regular” data.
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We think the report should have followed the lead of the PCAST report and acknowledged that the distinction between data and metadata is an artificial one, and recommended the appropriate reforms.
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the White House suggested advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which includes the idea that “consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it,” as well as “a right to access and correct personal data.”
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Consumers have a right to know when their data is exposed, whether through corporate misconduct, malicious hackers, or under other circumstances. Recognizing this important consumer safeguard, the report recommends that Congress “should pass legislation that provides a single national data breach standard along the lines of the Administration's May 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.”
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While at first blush this may seem like a powerful consumer protection, we don’t think that proposal is as strong as existing California law. The proposed federal data breach notification scheme would preempt state notification laws, removing the strong California standard and replacing it with a weaker standard.
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the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan
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First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers
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Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.
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Over 1.4 million people hold top-secret security clearances. In 2012, the government classified 95 million documents. And by some estimates, the government controls more classified information than there is in the entire Library of Congress.
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The report argues that in today’s connected world it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with all the data streams they generate (intentionally or not), so the existing “notice and consent” framework (in which companies must notify and get a user’s consent before collecting data) is obsolete. Instead, they suggest that more attention should be paid to how data is used, rather than how it is collected.
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While we agree that putting more emphasis on responsible use of big data is important, doing so should not completely replace the notice and consent framework.
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Despite being a fairly thorough analysis of the privacy implications of big data, there is one topic that it glaringly omits: the NSA’s use of big data to spy on innocent Americans.
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Even though the review that led to this report was announced during President Obama’s speech on NSA reform, and even though respondents to the White House’s Big Data Survey “were most wary of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies are collecting and using data about them,” the report itself is surprisingly silent on the issue.2 This is especially confusing given how much the report talks about the need for more transparency in the private sector when it comes to big data. Given that this same logic could well be applied to intelligence big data programs, we don’t understand why the report did not address this vital issue.
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Cops Seize Car When Told To Get A Warrant, Tell Owner That's What He Gets For 'Exercisi... - 0 views
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2014 indienationnews 2014.09.29-TNN abuse yourrights search seizure dueProcess law legal
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Officer Hatch spent most of his time trying to talk Zullo into allowing him to search the vehicle without a warrant. Hatch seemed to be convinced that Zullo was involved with the heroin traffickers he was searching for. Hatch tried everything, including lying.
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As the officers and Zullo waited for the tow truck, they continued to try to get his permission for a search. Zullo held firm, so the cops ditched him miles from home in 20-degree weather. Mr. Zullo asked Hatch if he could retrieve his money and cell phone from his car, because he did not know how he would get home without either item. Hatch refused, saying that getting home was “not my problem,” and warned Mr. Zullo that if he attempted to retrieve those items from the car he would be arrested. When Mr. Zullo walked towards his car, Hatch placed his hands on Mr. Zullo to restrain him from reaching the car. After the tow truck arrived and took Mr. Zullo’s car, Hatch and the second state trooper left the scene, leaving Mr. Zullo stranded on the side of Route 7.
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After being seized, Zullo's car was searched by Officer Hatch using an actual drug dog and an actual warrant [pdf link]. Nothing illegal was uncovered.
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Both the drug angle and the registration sticker angle dead end into a search and seizure based on non-criminal actions. The state does have an out (one that will likely be deployed in its defense against Zully's lawsuit) that still allows law enforcement to search for marijuana, even if what's discovered isn't a criminal amount.
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Hundreds of Colorado students stage protest over history curriculum | World news | theg... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...t-protest-history-school-board
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Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.
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nvolving six high schools in the state’s second-largest school district follows a sick-out from teachers that shut down two high schools in the politically and economically diverse area that has become a key political battleground.
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The proposal from Julie Williams, part of the board’s conservative majority, has not been voted on and was put on hold last week. She didn’t return a call from the Associated Press seeking comment Tuesday, but previously told Chalkbeat Colorado, a school news website, that she recognizes there are negative events that are part of US history that need to be taught.
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The proposal comes from an elected board with three conservative members who took office in November. The other two board members were elected in 2011 and oppose the new plan, which was drafted in response to a national framework for teaching history that supporters say encourages discussion and critical thinking. Detractors, however, say it puts an outsize emphasis on the nation’s problems. Tension over high school education has cropped up recently in Texas, where conservative school board officials are facing criticism over new textbooks. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, conservatives have called on an education oversight committee to ask the College Board, which oversees Advanced Placement courses, to rewrite their framework to make sure there is no ideological bias.
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Earth's Impending Magnetic Flip - Scientific American - 0 views
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The European Space Agency's satellite array dubbed “Swarm” revealed that Earth's magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century. A weakening magnetic field may indicate an impending reversal, which scientists predict could begin in less than 2,000 years. Magnetic north itself appears to be moving toward Siberia.
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There is a good chance the weakening magnetic field that the Swarm satellites observed will not lead to a full flip. Indeed, Glatzmaier notes that there have been several false starts over geologic history. The intensity of Earth's magnetic field, though waning, now equals its average strength over millions of years. The field would need to weaken at its current rate for around 2,000 years before the reversal process actually begins.
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It is hard to know how a geomagnetic reversal would impact our modern-day civilization, but it is unlikely to spell disaster. Although the field provides essential protection from the sun's powerful radiation, fossil records reveal no mass extinctions or increased radiation damage during past reversals. A flip could possibly interfere with power grids and communications systems—external magnetic field disturbances have burned out transformers and caused blackouts in the past. But Glatzmaier is not worried. “A thousand years from now we probably won't have power lines,” he says. “We'll have advanced so much that we'll almost certainly have the technology to cope with a magnetic-field reversal.”
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Federal Prosecutors, in a Policy Shift, Cite Warrantless Wiretaps as Evidence - NYTimes... - 0 views
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2013 spying wiretapping law legal government US court+decisions nytimes evidence policy federal
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The practice contradicted what Mr. Verrilli had told the Supreme Court last year in a case challenging the law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Legalizing a form of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless surveillance, the law authorized the government to wiretap Americans’ e-mails and phone calls without an individual court order and on domestic soil so long as the surveillance is “targeted” at a foreigner abroad. A group of plaintiffs led by Amnesty International had challenged the law as unconstitutional. But Mr. Verrilli last year urged the Supreme Court to dismiss the case because those plaintiffs could not prove that they had been wiretapped. In making that argument, he said a defendant who faced evidence derived from the law would have proper legal standing and would be notified, so dismissing the lawsuit by Amnesty International would not close the door to judicial review of the 2008 law. The court accepted that logic, voting 5-to-4 to dismiss the case. In a statement, Patrick Toomey, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which had represented Amnesty International and the other plaintiffs, hailed the move but criticized the Justice Department’s prior practice.
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Still, it remains unclear how many other cases — including closed matters in which convicts are already service prison sentences — involved evidence derived from warrantless wiretapping in which the National Security Division did not provide full notice to defendants, nor whether the department will belatedly notify them. Such a notice could lead to efforts to reopen those cases.