Showing posts with label Freedom of Information Act. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freedom of Information Act. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Judge here rejects bid for FBI documents in 1975 slayings of two agents

Indian activist convicted in case loses
By Phil Fairbanks

News Staff Reporter Buffalo News
July 25, 2012

A federal judge has rejected Leonard Peltier's request for FBI documents about the man he was with when he was arrested in the killing of two agents in South Dakota in 1975.

After examining the documents, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah J. McCarthy ruled that they do not fall within the guidelines of what Peltier's lawyer had asked for as part of his lawsuit against the government.

Michael Kuzma, a Buffalo lawyer and member of Peltier's legal defense team, was seeking 900-plus pages of documents, once kept in Buffalo, related to a man Peltier was with at the time of his arrest.
"We're still going to press and push for the release of all documents related to the shadowy figure who used the name Frank Blackhorse," Kuzma said this week.

When Peltier was arrested in connection with the killing of FBI agents Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams, Blackhorse was with him, but Blackhorse, whose real name was Frank DeLuca, was never charged and decades later remains a free man.

Peltier wants to know why.

"He's a mystery man," Peter A. Reese, a lawyer who is representing Kuzma in his efforts to get the Buffalo-related documents, said of Blackhorse. "It's pretty obvious this guy was an employee or informant of the FBI."

Kuzma said he has already filed new Freedom of Information requests about Blackhorse and Curtis A. Fitzgerald, the former FBI agent Blackhorse was accused of shooting at Wounded Knee, S.D., two years earlier.

Now 67, Peltier, an American Indian Movement leader in the 1970s, has maintained his innocence, and supporters have tried to get his 1977 murder conviction overturned.

As part of that effort, Kuzma asked McCarthy to release FBI documents he believes may help vindicate Peltier.

Even now, nearly 40 years later, the killings of Coler and Williams are a source of great passion among current and former agents. When Peltier came up for parole in 2009, the FBI was among those who pushed hard to keep him in prison. He is serving two life terms at the federal penitentiary in Coleman, Fla.

The FBI declined to comment on the judge's ruling.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Local Attorneys Seek Federal Leonard Peltier Documents

by George Sax Art Voice

Attorney Michael Kuzma addresses a rally in front of Buffalo's federal courthouse on Saturday, February 4, the day after he filed a suit against the US Department of Justice for failure to answer his FOIA requests for information regarding the case of Leonard Peltier.

On May 13, 2004, Buffalo attorney Michael Kuzma filed an application with the US Department of Justice for all records in its possession relating to one Frank Black Horse. Kuzma represented Leonard Peltier, a federal prisoner since 1976, convicted of killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota on June 26, 1975, during a siege of a reservation ranch by federal agents.

Last Friday, on Kuzma’s behalf, local attorneys Peter A. Reese and Daire Brian Irwin filed a suit in the US District Court in Buffalo seeking an order directing the Justice Department to release the requested records of Black Horse. (Reese has represented both Artvoice and one of its staffers.)

Black Horse, whose real name is Frank Deluca and who is no Indian despite his alias, has been a resident of Canada since 1976 when, under federal indictment, he fled this country after shooting and wounding an FBI agent at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. He and Peltier were both arrested in Hinton, Alberta on February 6, 1976, but only Peltier, a leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM), was extradited to the States to stand trial. Despite the federal indictment against him, Black Horse has remained free across the border ever since. Peltier’s supporters, legal counsel and a number of independent observers have regarded this shadowy figure as someone who could shed light on what they regard as a concerted effort by federal authorities to railroad Peltier for crimes he didn’t commit. Hence, Kuzma’s long, dedicated, and tortuous attempt to obtain the Justice Department’s records on Black Horse.

The paper filed in federal court by Reese and Irwin included a list of events, turns and turnarounds in Kuzma’s unsuccessful over seven-and-a-half-year-long quest, accompanied by 21 copies of correspondence between him and either Justice or the FBI. Reese and Irwin’s suit alleges that Kuzma “has exhausted the applicable administrative remedies with respect to his FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request,” and that the government “has wrongfully withheld the requested records from the plaintiff.”

Very early in his tangled negotiation with the federal government, Kuzma agreed to accept only those “public-source” records in the government’s possession—such as news reports—and not seek any documents whose release could invade the privacy of third parties. These public-source documents, he explained in an interview Tuesday in his office, are very difficult or impossible to track down today because of their obscurity, age, and lack of availability on the Internet. The fact that the FBI collected them may be significant in explaining what its goals and methods were in this case.

And on November 14, 2008, after a number of delays and dead ends, an FBI official, David M. Hardy, wrote Kuzma informing him the bureau had “located approximately 927 pages which are potentially responsive to your request.” Hardy even provided an estimate of the cost to duplicate them: $82.70. But after Kuzma promptly remitted that sum, it was returned, with no explanation. In response to his puzzled inquiry, the bureau eventually told him that it had no public-source records it could share with him, after all. Despite several subsequent twists, including backing off from and then reinstating this position, Justice and the FBI have continued to deny Kuzma’s applications. (In a brief telephone interview, US Attorney William Hochul said he was unaware of the suit, but doubted that Justice would have any comment. Maureen Dempsey, a press representative at the FBI’s Buffalo office, said it knew of the action but could not make any statement about a pending civil suit.)

Peltier’s arrest, conviction, and imprisonment have long been regarded by many people as a product of the FBI’s illicit COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program) that was secretly operated from the 1950s through the 1970s, all too often in violation of the law and federal court decisions. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was a targeted victim of the FBI’s spying and character assassination, as depicted in Clint Eastwood’s recent movie, J. Edgar. In his A People’s History of the United States, the late Boston University historian Howard Zinn described the government’s massive response with over 200 heavily armed federal agents when AIM occupied the reservation village of Wounded Knee in 1973 to protest the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ miserable treatment of Native Americans. This was the political backdrop to the charges against Peltier.

Kuzma said that “the FBI set the wheels in motion that got its agents killed.” It had apparently infiltrated AIM with informants, including the bogus and violent Black Horse. Kuzma cites a document, previously obtained by Peltier’s defense, from January 15, 1976, in which Deputy Director General (Ops) M. S. Sexsmith of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RMCP) wrote to a colleague about Black Horse’s surreptitious provision of information from inside AIM.

Kuzma says it’s his hope that a federal magistrate judge will review the withheld material and say it should be released. Under FOIA, he said, “disclosure, not secrecy, is the focus.”

Tuesday, one of Kuzma’s lawyers, Irwin, said his goal is “to discover why it’s so important to the government to keep [Peltier] in prison,” and keep their documents secret. “What are they hiding?”

Nelson Mandela and 55 members of the US Congress, among others, have called for Peltier’s release.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Revealed: The FBI's Secretive Practice of "Blackballing" Files

by: Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

(Photo: kalavinka; Edited: JR / TO)

Have you ever filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI and received a written response from the agency stating that it could not locate records responsive to your request?

If so, there's a chance the FBI may have found some documents, but for unknown reasons, the agency's FOIA analysts determined it was not responsive and "blackballed" the file, crucial information the FBI withholds from a requester when it issues a "no records" response.

The FBI's practice of "blackballing" files has never been publicly disclosed before. With the exception of one open government expert, a half-dozen others contacted by Truthout said they were unfamiliar with the process of "blackballing" and had never heard of the term.

Trevor Griffey learned about "blackballing" last year when he filed a FOIA/Privacy Act request with the FBI to determine whether Manning Marable, a Columbia University professor who founded the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, sought the FBI's files on Malcolm X under FOIA. At the time of his death last April, Marable had just finished writing an exhaustive biography on the late civil rights activist. Griffey filed the FOIA hoping he would receive records to assist him with research related to a long-term civil rights project he has been working on.

In a letter the agency sent in response to his FOIA, the FBI told Griffey that it could not locate "main file records" on Marable responsive to his request. Last November, in response to a FOIA request Truthout filed with the FBI for a wide-range of documents on the Occupy Wall Street, the agency also said it was unable to "identify main file records responsive to [our] FOIA," despite the fact that internal FBI documents related to the protest movement had already been posted on the Internet. The FBI has been criticized in the past for responding to more than half of the FOIA requests the agency had received by claiming it could not locate responsive files.

Griffey, who also teaches US history at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and is co-editor of the book, "Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action and the Construction Industry," was baffled. He found it difficult to believe that Marable would not have filed a FOIA for Malcolm X's FBI file. So, he sent an email to an FBI FOIA analyst asking for clarification.

The FBI FOIA analyst responded to Griffey in an email, asking him to supply additional "keywords" to assist in a search of the agency's main file records for documents on Marable responsive to his FOIA request. The analyst then disclosed to Griffey, perhaps mistakenly, that a search for previous requests for records on Marable turned up a single file that was "blackballed" per the agency's "standard operating procedure."

So last May, Griffey again turned to FOIA, this time to try and gain insight into the blackballing process. He filed a FOIA request with the FBI seeking a copy of the agency's standard operating procedure for "blackballing" files.

Two months later, he received five pages from an untitled and undated PowerPoint presentation that outlined procedures for blackballing files from FOIA requests. The FBI cited three exemptions under the law to justify withholding a complete and unredacted copy of the PowerPoint:

(b)(6) Personnel and medical files and similar files, the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.

(b)(7) Records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that the production of such law enforcement records or information:

C. Could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy;

E. Would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law ...

Griffey appealed the FBI's decision to withhold information contained in the PowerPoint under the (b)(7)(E) exemption, but it was denied.

Still, the PowerPoint pages the FBI did turn over to Griffey provide insight into the "blackballing" process. On a page titled, "Blackball Files," it says files identified as 190 and 197 "main files," which are FBI classifications pertaining to FOIA/Privacy Act requests for files on people and civil litigation, are blackballed unless "specifically ask[ed] for" by the requester when an initial FOIA request is made.

Moreover, the agency deems certain "control files," "separate files which relate to a specific matter and is used as an administrative means of managing, or 'controlling' a certain program or investigative matter," that pop up and are unresponsive to a FOIA to be ripe for blackballing. However, a FOIA analyst must first get permission from a supervisor before a "control file" can be blackballed.

Finally, according to the PowerPoint, some files are automatically blackballed by an FBI FOIA analyst, but the public is not permitted to know the classification of files that fall into that category because the FBI redacted that part of the PowerPoint, claiming disclosure would reveal "techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations and procedures."

"Not only are we not told when the FBI withholds material from FOIA requests, but we are not even allowed to know all of the kinds of material it withholds," Griffey told Truthout. "The law itself and not just its enforcement, is now effectively secret."

But Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman, told Truthout in an interview that "blackballing" is not about secrecy nor is the process used in any way to conceal responsive records, which the Justice Department revealed it has been doing for more than two decades in certain cases.

"Blackball is a term of art used by the [FBI's] FOIA section people in the records management division," he said. "It's an unfortunate term. It applies to people and events. It means that we pulled a file that initially looked responsive but after a review it turned out it wasn't because the file didn't match the requesters' specific request" for records.

Carter sent Truthout an email that contained an explanation of the blackballing process as provided to him by Dennis Argall, the assistant section chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section, FBI's Records Management Division:

"[B]lackball" is a term we typically use to describe a file (not a request) that initially looked responsive but upon review we find it's for a different guy or event. It can also be used to describe a file that we won't process because, i.e., a guy makes a request for his "FBI file" in 2005 and [we] process it for him. When he makes another request for his "FBI file" in 2011, we will only process his "records" but will not process the file that was created to respond to the 2005 FOIA request, which is 190 file series [the classification the FBI uses for files requested on people].

That's exactly how the FBI described the blackballing process to attorney Kel McClanahan, executive director of Arlington, Virginia-based National Security Counselors, a public interest law firm.

McClanahan told Truthout in an email interview that he first learned about blackballing when the term was used in a set of FBI "processing notes" he requested from the agency to determine how FBI FOIA analysts had handled one of his FOIA requests.

Although McClanahan believes there is "definitely a place for blackballing in the FOIA process" he said the way the FBI "does blackballing leaves a lot to be desired."

"First of all, even though [the FBI] may blackball 50 records and release 3, they never tell the requester about the 50," McClanahan said, hitting on Griffey's main complaint about blackballing. "They never mention word one about 'and we found other records that we deemed non-responsive.' The requester is left to wonder why the FBI only found 3 records about the subject in question and he will never know that they found 50 others that they ultimately deemed non-responsive unless he has the foresight to FOIA the FBI's processing notes for his request. Knowledge like that is very important when a requester is trying to decide whether or not to tie up [the Justice Department's's Office of Information Policy] with an administrative appeal, let alone litigation."

McClanahan said his concerns would largely be addressed if the FBI "only blackballed records for good reasons."

"If I could trust the FBI only to blackball things that were clearly non-responsive, I don't need to know that they found completely unrelated records," he added. "However, that's not what the FBI does. I have seen it blackball records because they 'weren't FBI records,' even though they were in FBI files (they were FBI copies of other agencies' records, which any FOIA person worth his salt knows are still responsive to a FOIA request made to FBI). I've seen it blackball records because the request asked for 'internal FBI records' and the records in question were sent outside of the FBI, based on a strained interpretation of the word 'internal.'"

The FBI will be forced to make a choice "if it wants to apply FOIA correctly," McClanahan said.

"The agency can either limit its blackballing to records that nobody would think are responsive (e.g. different people with the same name, records outside a set time frame); or it can tell requesters in the administrative stage that it determined that certain records were non-responsive and why," he said. "Failing to do either, however, is bad FOIA."

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Richmond Police Withdraw Lawsuit Against Anarchists

Jan. 11, 2011 Infoshop News

The Richmond Police Department and the City of Richmond have dropped their
lawsuit against us.

Yay?

Sorry, I guess I’m not as excited as I should be. This is the best
possible thing the RPD could have done… for themselves. Why? Because it
puts this situation out of the public eye as quickly as possible, and
allows them to attempt to save face before exposing themselves to even
more public ridicule and calls for the resignation of Chief Norwood. (Not
from us – we’d like to give him a “Best Anarchist of the Year” award for
drawing so much attention to anarchist projects happening in the city.
Thanks and keep up the good work!)

But there are some other subtler and more interesting things to take into
consideration when looking at the RPD’s decision to drop the case. The
court documents we were provided with claimed that the manuals and
protocols we had recieved through FOIA “jeopardizes and endangers
Richmond’s Police Officers and citizens,” yet one of the statements made
to the media in regards to why the case was dropped was that the state
didn’t want to “waste resources.”

If there’s one thing cops are good at, it’s protecting other cops. If the
reasoning behind the lawsuit actually had anything to do with keeping the
pigs safe, there is NO way it would have been dropped just because it
might be a little difficult to win. The speed with which this case was
dropped really just cements the fact that this case was a politically
motivated attempt to intimidate a dissident group into turning over
documents that we had received through THEIR OWN BEAUREAUCRATIC PROCESS.

Norwood claims that his objective in filing the lawsuit was to get the
documents back quickly, but doesn’t even wait for the initial hearing
date. Did he expect us to see the legalese, the statements saying they
wanted the documents back, and come rushing to his office crying “OH
PLEASE DON’T SUE US, WE’RE SO SORRY!”

WE

ARE

NOT

AFRAID OF YOU

We are anarchists. We come from a centuries (or millenia, depending on how
you want to look at it) old history of resistance to the state and
perpetual struggle for liberty. We’re not going to stop just because the
latest overpromoted fascist with a gun and a badge gets upset about giving
us some documents we asked for.

This is not about “Freedom of Speech” or “Constitutional Rights”, or any
of those other feel-good-pseudopatriotic platitudes that are so often
quoted in “support” of us. This is about exposing the machinery of the
state for what it is – self perpetuating, self protecting, and uncaring of
those who it steps on in the process. We are fortunate enough to have the
ability to defend ourselves from many of the encroachments of the
oppressive apparatus of the state, but others have not been as lucky as we
have. Jailed, beaten, murdered, endlessly harrassed, many have stood
strong in the face of far greater repression than we have faced to date.

It would be a great disservice to the memories of our comrades, past and
present, as well as to ourselves and our community, to capitulate to such
oafish attempts at oppression. We’re here to stay.

They say they are here to protect and serve. The question is – who do they
protect and who do they serve? Certainly not ME, and probably not you
either. (Unless you’re one of our loyal following of cops who read this)

This is a war. It doesn’t always look like one, but it is. It’s a war of
information. A war of ideas. A war to determine what the shape of the
future will be.

To us, our sides of the trenches are beautiful. An abundance of free food
and gardens, laughing neighbors, shared resources, and a fierce network of
international solidarity. Cooperation, sharing, mutual defence, self
determination, and a willingness to be accountable for our actions because
they are really and truly OURS.

Their side? It looks like the underside of a boot. The barrel of a gun in
your face. A cage from which you can never leave. Monstrosities of steel
and concrete to which people devote their lives just trying to “get by.” A
lifetime of slavery in a prison/cubicle, rewarded with toys and privileges
for “good behavior,” punished with deprivation, beatings, and execution
for bad.

We will settle for nothing less than the immediate cessation of all
oppression, and the liberation of the entire world. The RPD and the city
are right (from their worldview) to try to suppress us at every turn. They
know who their enemies are.

Do you?

Monday, January 10, 2011

WikiLeaks - The month that changed the war on information

by Wally Cuddeford Works in Progress Jan. 2011

On a cold night in 1971, a group known only as the "Citizens' Commission
to Investigate the FBI" drove up to the FBI field office in Media,
Pennsylvania, broke in, wheeled every last file cabinet into their trucks,
and drove off into the night. Over the next several months, the documents
(over 1000 of them) were anonymously mailed out to major press
organizations, and eventually they were printed en masse by the War
Resisters League. It was one of the most significant classified documents
leaks in U.S. history.

Many of the documents were labeled "COINTELPRO." At the time, all people
could tell was this was some sort of mysterious acronym for something, but
not what it stood for, or what its relevance was. Only through public
revelation of the documents, and ensuing revelations from other sources of
information, did it finally come out that "COINTELPRO" was short for
"Counter-Intelligence Program," and that it was the codename for the FBI's
dirty little secret.

While the Pentagon Papers get much of the credit for exposing government
malfeasance in Southeast Asia, the "COINTELPRO Papers" exposed the
extensive and highly illegal activity the FBI was engaged in domestically,
going back decades, to undermine the civil rights, labor and anti-war
movements. Not limiting themselves to mere spying on law-abiding activists
(illegal as that was), disinformation campaigns were used to actively pit
Black nationalist groups against each other, and to alienate them from
their support base. Paid infiltrators were sent to disrupt organizing
efforts, and false evidence was planted to secure convictions. Field
agents were even scolded for not misreporting their observations in such a
way as to justify more government repression of free assembly.

In the wake of these revelations, Congress formed the Church Committee to
investigate abuses of power by the FBI. Fundamental changes were proposed,
and some were implemented. COINTELPRO, by name, was discontinued (although
much of the same activities continued without the name). Most importantly,
the Freedom of Information Act was significantly expanded in the following
years (thanks in part to the COINTELPRO leak, as well as the Pentagon
Papers and the Watergate cover-up), to better enable open discovery of
government activity.

However, while the FoIA reaffirmed in written law the right of the public
to know what its government is up to (a position supported by the spirit
of the Constitution, if not the letter of it), like all
government-supervised sources of transparency, it was fundamentally
flawed. Government agencies themselves were at liberty to redact whatever
portions of whatever documents they deemed "sensitive." Often, applicants
would receive whole pages of endless black bars. And as it has since been
discovered, this privilege of secrecy has been abused to withhold
information not sensitive to "national security" (as it is commonly
defined), but information unflattering to individuals in power. Another
ironic flaw is that, while FoIA was expanded to address COINTELPRO, nobody
could have requested documents on COINTELPRO because nobody knew
"COINTELPRO" by that name even existed.

The actions of the Citizens' Commission were perfectly tailored to their
era. However, the rise of the surveillance state ensured that the days of
heisting your local FBI office had long since passed, or so it was
thought. But now, the growth of information technologies - many of which
are still largely undefined in their potential applications (as well as
their vulnerabilities) - has brought this era back, bigger than ever. And
while Daniel Ellsberg had to Xerox each and every one of the Pentagon
Papers by hand, now whistleblowers can download reams upon reams of
"sensitive" documents onto a small thumb drive in seconds (or, as in the
case of Bradley Manning, burn them onto a mock-up of a Lady Gaga CD).

As creative individuals and collectives continue to explore the potential
uses of the Internet and related technologies, thus shaping the face of
the still-budding Information Age, so too do they shape the landscape on
which wars of information are waged, and the tools and tactics with which
the battles are fought. And the last 30 days have been, perhaps, the most
pivotal 30 days ever in setting the tone for what's to come.

Proving ground

While WikiLeaks was not the first website to publish government documents,
it has come to define the genre. In April 2010, the site rose to
prominence through the release of the "Collateral Murder" video from 2007,
showing U.S. helicopter pilots in Iraq killing targets, civilians, and
even Reuters journalists indiscriminately. (Reuters had requested that
video through the FoIA, but was unsuccessful.)

In July, WikiLeaks published the "Afghan War Diary" - 75,000 documents
(with more pending) - which at the time was the largest ever leak of
classified government documents in U.S. history. In October, the release
of the 391,832-paper "Iraq War Logs" broke that record. And in November,
WikiLeaks broadened the scope, by releasing the first set of a
251,287-document cache of U.S. State Department communication cables. At
the current rate of about 80 documents a day, the "Diplomatic Cables"
releases will provide new revelations on geopolitics every week from now
through July 4, 2019. (Let's hope they find more vetting volunteers and
pick up that pace a little.)

More than the other releases, the Diplomatic Cables compelled our first
significant discussion on unauthorized publication of classified material
in the public sphere in decades. Having crossed that bridge, the future of
whistleblowing in the Information Age would depend on this one battle.
Would it be seen as dangerous and fruitless? Or would democracy and the
freedom of information prevail?

Public discourse

WikiLeaks quickly garnered a broad range of support, from people as
diverse as Daniel Ellsberg, Republican Congresspeople Ron Paul and Connie
Mack, and President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez. A staff editorial in the
Atlantic wrote, in part, "Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters
and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology
systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that
is slowly suffocating the American press." On the other hand, condemnation
of WikiLeaks by some has been sharp. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
said the release was "an attack on America's foreign policy" and "the
international community," while Congressperson Peter King said WikiLeaks
should be labeled a terrorist organization. Newt Gingrich called
WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange an "enemy combatant," and former Nixon
aide G. Gordon Liddy said Assange should be put on a "kill list."

As in many conflicts, when the first salvo was fired depends on your
perspective. Those who defend tyranny and government secrecy surely see
WikiLeaks' publication of these files as the opening volley against
authority, and the ensuing repression as an inevitable response. However,
for those of us who value accountability and courageous journalism, the
first shot was fired on December 1, when Amazon suspended service for
WikiLeaks hosting on its servers.

WikiLeaks had already been forced to relocate to Amazon from its original
hosting due to ongoing "denial-of-service" attacks, a phenomenon common to
politically-charged websites. But in dropping WikiLeaks, Amazon made it
clear the decision was not based on technical concerns. Instead, Amazon
cited a number of highly specious political arguments, including the
implication that human rights groups have condemned WikiLeaks' actions.
(In fact, only one human rights-related criticism has been levied - that
civilians' names may not be adequately redacted; otherwise, WikiLeaks
enjoys universal support from human rights groups, including awards.) The
world learned about Amazon's maneuver when Senator Joe Lieberman first
bragged that the company had dropped WikiLeaks, which it turns out
happened not long after one of his aides had contacted the company.

Amazon was the first domino in a chain of corporate isolation of
WikiLeaks. PayPal suspended WikiLeaks' account, claiming that they were
engaged in "illegal activity." The Swiss bank PostFinance followed suit,
and later on, Bank of America, MasterCard and Visa all announced they
would not process any transactions believed to be intended for WikiLeaks.
Apple removed a WikiLeaks application from its App Store. Even Tableau
Software withdrew WikiLeaks' license to use its graphing software. It was
also no secret that various world governments - including the United
States, China, France and Australia - were directly involved in efforts to
isolate WikiLeaks from online services.

The result was, successive channels of funding were all frozen, and
WikiLeaks had lost use of its trademark domain name "www.wikileaks.org."
These are the traditional tools of people in power in their war on
information: intimidate the source, divide them from their support base,
sever them from their resources, and lastly, suppress the service they
provide.

Although this was all very disappointing for WikiLeaks supporters
worldwide, it should come as no surprise. Corporations may be as
ubiquitous as the government, and often more powerful, but they've never
claimed to champion free speech - except for their own right to lie to the
public. Still, the justifications provided, that WikiLeaks' activity was
"illegal" or "subversive," and agents of the government pursuing this
isolation on those terms, is especially chilling. WikiLeaks is innocent,
if for no other reason, because they have not yet been proven guilty in
court. And unlike the Citizens' Commission, nobody is contending WikiLeaks
broke into any secured area to steal these files; the files were provided
to them, and having analyzed them, they've now begun providing them to the
public in accordance with the public's need to know, as respectable
journalists.

In the traditional venue, there was little ordinary people of good
conscience could do about these maneuverings. A lawsuit would take years,
and the burden of proof would be on the plaintiff. The law in a capitalist
society protects the right of corporations to provide their services
discriminately, even when an effective cartel prohibits access to those
services for someone across the board. The public good doesn't come into
that equation, especially when that public good is in stark contrast to
both government and private enterprise. Traditionally, the status quo is
mutually reinforcing.

However, this battle of information was far from "traditional."

Guerilla tactics

Concurrent to the fight for logistics, an innovative form of Internet
conflict was being waged. The primary weapon in this conflict was
"distributed denial of service," or DDoS. DDoS is an updated version of a
"black fax" campaign, in which the fax machine of an offending agency is
flooded with as many all-black faxes as possible. (Maybe some of those
fully-redacted FoIA documents were put to good use). With DDoS, several
hundred computers can simultaneously annoy a chosen website with as much
garbage data as possible, overloading their system. When enough computers
are involved, any website, no matter how high-profile or sophisticated,
can be made inaccessible.

For years, DDoS shutdowns have been used for commercial purposes - to shut
down competitors' websites, or in extortion schemes. But more recently,
DDoS has become a routine occurrence in the grassroots fight over Internet
piracy. The collectivist hacker group "Anonymous" has conducted several
DDoS attacks against the websites of the Motion Picture Association of
America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the websites
of their lawyers, all in response to anti-piracy crackdowns. Anonymous has
also employed DDoS against white supremacist groups, the Church of
Scientology, Hustler, the U.S. Copyright Office, and various world
governments involved in Internet censorship.

As one member of Anonymous stated, "While we don't have much of an
affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want
transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks
are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and
are unable to express our opinions and ideas."

Anonymous' established base of support was quickly mobilized to conduct
DDoS attacks against several websites suppressing WikiLeaks. Amazon was
shut down throughout Europe for close to an hour. (Amazon blamed this on
"hardware failure.") Visa was also shut down for close to 2 hours,
MasterCard for 7 hours, PayPal for 8 hours, and PostFinance for 11 hours.
The websites for the Swedish government and the Swedish prosecutor's
office were also shut down for several hours.

Unlike some other targets of Anonymous, none of these sites were actually
hacked into and altered, and none of their secure data was accessed, so
the attacks likely did not result in any significant financial
consequences in the long-term. Nonetheless, the message was much louder
than the cost, and that message was that the people do have power after
all.

While DDoS can be conducted through a coordinated popular campaign, as in
the case with Anonymous, it can also be done through exploitation of
others' resources. A malware program can be installed on someone's
computer, designed to silently conduct a function like DDoS without the
user's knowledge. This program could even be made to be self-replicating.
Thus, relatively few people could conduct DDoS operations using the
computer power of many, against their will. It's believed this method was
used for several DDoS strikes against WikiLeaks, both just prior to the
release of the diplomatic cables and just after.

Nothing is stopping Anonymous from engaging in this exploitive form of
DDoS as well. However, the targets they predominantly choose, and the fact
that they openly solicit volunteers to run the DDoS software consensually,
signify an ethos contrary to exploitation. On the other hand, nothing is
also stopping the U.S. military or other government agency from conducting
exploitive DDoS against WikiLeaks, though no evidence has yet surfaced to
prove they have.

While DDoS is effective in shutting down a centralized establishment, it's
ineffective against decentralized operations. An increased number of
targets requires exponentially more resources to effectively shut them all
down.

It was in this limitation that WikiLeaks found its solution. Just as
momentum was highest, both in the grassroots fight to save WikiLeaks and
the government campaign to shut them down, WikiLeaks organizers called on
its supporters worldwide to mass-mirror the site. Anyone could add a copy
of WikiLeaks to their own website, or set up a franchise (so to speak)
with a new URL. In two weeks time, over 2000 mirrors of WikiLeaks sprang
up across the Internet, and across the globe. These mirror-sites are
routinely updated by the central organizing core of WikiLeaks, independent
of its founder Julian Assange (who had been in jail during most of these
updates).

While this is old news to many, it bears consideration how this
complicates governments' war on free information. Everything about
WikiLeaks, outside of its trusted core of organizers, has now been
decentralized. And much the way wide distribution of their services over
thousands of locations has made WikiLeaks invulnerable to any future DDoS
shutdowns, their distribution over several hundred legal jurisdictions,
and several hundred webhosting services, has made them nearly invulnerable
to any concentrated government campaign - at least any campaign that won't
be immediately rebuked by the courts. Plus, while the services of
WikiLeaks have been decentralized, so too has their information cache,
protecting it from deletion as well.

It should be noted that this solution, while perfectly tailored to
WikiLeaks and other sources of free speech, would do little good to
businesses like PayPal or Amazon - not unless they want customers' credit
card numbers and personal information strewn across the web.
Mass-mirroring would also do little good for, say, the website of the
Swedish Prosecutor's Office, who is unlikely to garner the same upswell of
grassroots support. It's a tactic befitting popular resistance and freedom
of information, and one to which a high-tech response has yet to be
developed.

Meanwhile, the private sector has developed a response of its own.
E-retailers have begun taking out new insurance policies for
politically-motivated Internet attacks, thus insulating their profit
margins from what nominal financial consequences DDoS does inflict.

Hearts and minds

Where attacks on logistics aren't enough, and where technological
dominance fails to produce results, power turns its attention to the fight
for legitimacy. And with the mainstream media relying on government
spokespeople for the foundation of its coverage, WikiLeaks' opponents have
unmatched capacity to craft the dominant narrative.

A common method of discrediting someone is to define them solely by one
aspect of their operation, and then to characterize them as lacking depth.
WikiLeaks is a multi-purpose whistleblower site, and has published leaks
from various world banks and other private institutions, and is expected
to publish leaks from BP and Bank of America in 2011. All leaks have been
vetted prior to release. (In fact, WikiLeaks asked the State Department to
aid the vetting of the diplomatic cables, to ensure individuals were not
put at risk; the State Department declined their offer.) Yet, government
critics have labeled them as "anarchist" and "treasonous," and as having a
personal vendetta against government in particular.

Dismissal of the organization is supplemented with character assassination
of the individual. Open speculation by law enforcement as to whether
Assange can in fact be charged with anything at all has been spun into the
message that he's a "fugitive" and a "wanted criminal." This narrative has
been further fueled by the Swedish government's pursuit of Assange over a
rape allegation - a case which was considered closed right up until
Assange's political actions embarrassed government leaders, and they
needed something to charge him with. (If all these government officials
cared half as much about women's sovereignty as they opportunistically
claim to, we might see some real change as opposed to this circus.) At the
same time, while exerting pressure on companies to drop WikiLeaks aids the
fight over logistics, it also feeds into this narrative; if all these
companies say WikiLeaks is involved in "illegal activity," it must be
true.

There should be no mistake that the mischaracterizations, the repeated
references to "illegal activity," and the selective pursuit of rape
charges by law enforcement are all part and parcel of the information war,
every bit as much as political pressure and DDoS attacks. In many ways,
COINTELPRO was a concentrated campaign to isolate political threats by
delegitimizing them in the eyes of the very people who should be
supporting them. Many of the same tactics still work today, 40 years
later.

What wasn't around 40 years ago however, is the ubiquitous spin media
establishment. Instead of putting these events into the rich historical
context of whistleblowing and government secrecy, mainstream outlets
severed Wikileaks from that history altogether by portraying the
organization as a groundbreaking curiosity. Viewers were also riddled with
such vague philosophical questions as "Does this really count as
journalism?" That WikiLeaks cannot be significantly differentiated from
other recognized journalistic outfits (outside of a stated focus) doesn't
matter; just by asking the question repeatedly, the media calls WikiLeaks'
creditability unduly into question.

Fearmongering

Perhaps the most reliable tool of power and hierarchy is good old
fashioned fear. While the government cannot force the people to stop doing
as they will, a culture of fear ensures the people will police themselves.

In an effort to suppress the leaks, the Library of Congress has banned
access to WikiLeaks, and the Commerce Department has reminded its staff
that, as government employees, accessing the files is unauthorized.
Military personnel have been ordered not to visit the WikiLeaks website,
and the Education Department instructed students hoping for a career in
diplomacy not to read or discuss the WikiLeaks cables.

This position has puzzled even pundits on the side of government. As some
have argued, the information is already out there; if "our enemies" can
learn from it, why is the U.S. not allowing their own personnel to learn
from it the same? The answer is twofold. First, the so-called "strategic
value" of the documents is overblown; they don't reveal American
vulnerabilities as much as they reveal the criminal acts of these
employees' bosses, thus there's nothing the government would want their
employees to "learn from." Second, it's part of a broader attempt at
establishing the study, discussion, or dissemination of WikiLeaks as
"thoughtcrime." Since many working people rely on the government for their
living, that's a large swath of the population that can be forced to
self-police, and that sentiment will permeate further.

As for the rest of us, government is looking to go after the source, as
punishment, and to make an example. The CIA has formed the WikiLeaks Task
Force (or "WTF"), and a secret grand jury has reportedly been convened to
look into ways Assange can be convicted. Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Peter
King also introduced the SHIELD Act in Congress, which would modify the
WWI-era Espionage Act to make it illegal for anyone to report "classified
information related to certain intelligence activities of the United
States." (The Act is currently in committee in both the House and Senate.)
It remains to be seen if such codified thoughtcrime would survive in the
courts on the basis of so-called "national security."

Meanwhile, on the electronic front, the government did to DDoS what it
does to all effective and irrepressible tactics of democratic
accountability - they made it arbitrarily illegal. In the United Kingdom,
the Police and Justice Act of 2006 specifically outlawed DDoS, with
violators potentially facing an excessive 10 years in prison for
participating in a DDoS attack. The U.S. is likely to pass similar
legislation in the near future.

The trump card

Usually, the combination of media spin, fearmongering, bullying and
collusion is enough for those in power to get what they want. But never
has an enemy of the state had a trump card quite like the one WikiLeaks
has. The entirety of the diplomatic cables, as well as unspecified future
releases, have all been compressed into one file, locked with a 256-key
encryption to prevent access. When the pressure first ramped up against
WikiLeaks, this file was distributed directly to supporters around the
world, then to anyone in the file-sharing world through bittorrent, and
later through the mass-mirror project. So it was declared, if anything
malicious happened to the WikiLeaks organization or to Julian Assange, as
a last resort the key to this file would be revealed, and the whole dump
of diplomatic cables would be released to the world, unredacted - as a
last resort.

It bears consideration just how the "insurance strategy" will change the
face of information war going forward. Information clearinghouses now have
the power to globally disseminate information in short order, perhaps even
surreptitiously, and yet withhold its announcement until that
dissemination is complete, thus eliminating the most vulnerable point in
the process. And unlike past leaks, which relied on major news
organizations to simultaneously print the news, and hence filter it (or
withhold it altogether), that information can be supplied directly to the
people. This is one example of new technologies (as well as new
applications for old techniques) democratizing the flow of information,
right before our eyes.

It's impossible to know how things would have played out differently if
WikiLeaks had not had this ace in the hole. Would the enemies of Julian
Assange have made good on their threats against him? Would governmental
abuse of power have crushed WikiLeaks in its infancy? All that can be said
for certain is, it would not be the first time U.S. law enforcement agents
broke all their own rules to meet their objective, allowing the courts
rebuke them years later, after the damage to free information had been
done. Finally, however, we the people have a freedom-of-information tactic
that even flippant dismissal of jurisprudence cannot address.

How the government responds in the future to this "insurance" tactic has
yet to be seen, as pro-establishment think tanks are, no doubt, trying to
think of ways to put genies back into bottles.

The delusions of the powerful

Recently, in Olympia, WA, the Army concluded their investigation into John
Towery, an employee of military intelligence who for years had infiltrated
anti-war groups under the name "John Jacob." However, the Army has decided
to withhold the results of their investigation, for now. The reason given
is because there's an ongoing lawsuit against the military for their
illegal spying. Translated, this literally means, "We're not letting you
have this information because it might make us - the military or
individuals in it - look bad, and it might get us in trouble." Never mind
that if this information helps the lawsuit succeed, then it should
succeed. Never mind that many of us not affiliated with the lawsuit have a
right to know. This, after the Army assured the public in this specific
case that "our goal is transparency."

This is just one example of how unchecked entitlement has made those in
power lose touch with reality. Over the last several years, with the
government's monopoly on information becoming more and more absolute,
abuses of power have become more extreme, while justifications have become
more transparent. Some of the released cables, including the one that
falsely claimed Cuba was suppressing Michael Moore's film Sicko, show how
the State Department has even taken to fooling itself - a very dangerous
thing to do. And yet, those in power always think they can get away with
more.

Until now, losing touch with reality hasn't caused their power to ebb,
because the old dirty tricks for suppressing dissent have worked just
fine. Successful strategies of suppression and bullying are
self-reinforcing. However, when such strategies fail, as we're now seeing,
the consequences for the bully are disastrous.

Panicked politicians are now flailing for an answer to WikiLeaks. Joe
Lieberman has suggested investigating the New York Times for violating the
Espionage Act, a course of action which is both unflattering and,
considering the Times' minimal involvement in reporting the leak,
ineffectual. Some lawmakers have even expressed what amounts to a
willingness to rip the Constitution to shreds, just to make this
defacement go away. All the while, day after day, breaking news on further
government attempts at suppression of free speech run concurrently with
breaking news of yet another scandal being revealed.

Assessing the aftermath

In the end, government was responsible for its own undoing. Their repeated
cover-ups of their own wrongdoings have convinced countless to side with
the exposer rather than the exposed. Their obsession with keeping secrets,
even unnecessary ones, resulted in the over-classification of documents,
meaning more people had to be given higher clearances, increasing the
chances that someone out there who doesn't see things in the same way is
given the key to the candy store. And as we have seen, the government's
attempts at suppressing the information - traditional and high-tech - have
only made the situation worse for them.

WikiLeaks has become stronger than ever. The original wikileaks.org domain
is back, and the money-transfer service XIPWIRE has since opened a
donation account for WikiLeaks and waived the service fee, replacing the
services cut off by PayPal and such. What once was one website has evolved
into a phenomenon, inspiring a number of spinoff sites including
OpenLeaks, TradeLeaks and EnviroLeaks. There can be no doubt that
WikiLeaks won this battle. And while there's a push to criminalize the
concept of WikiLeaks, there's enough support for WikiLeaks within the
halls of government, legal protection for whistleblower journalism, and
court precedent protecting the rights of journalists to keep that from
happening. Eventually the push for criminalization will fade as
unstoppable mega-leaks become more and more commonplace.

New events and new innovations will continue to shape the landscape of
information war in ways we cannot foresee. The most likely result, for us,
is that the pendulum of governmental power will begin to swing the other
way. These latest revelations, as damning as they are, are just the tip of
the iceberg. Much as it did in the wake of the Watergate cover-up, the
COINTELPRO revelations, and the Pentagon Papers, so-called "liberal
democracy" will have to make a number of concessions soon if it wants to
maintain the myth that we live in freedom, that the government is
answerable to the people, and that it has our best interests at heart.

Wally Cuddeford is an independent journalist, anti-war and social justice
activist, and a US Navy veteran. He's a lifelong resident of Olympia, WA.

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Richmond Police Department Bringing Court Case Against Me?!? Who Me?

4 Jan. 2011 Anarchy Mo

It is fairly common knowledge that being an anarchist is fairly
criminalized in the United States. So it comes as no surprise when the
State tries to use one’s anarchist belief against them.

In this case, the Richmond City Police Department is using court
proceedings to try and ‘compel’ me to give back some of the documents that
we got using the Freedom of Information Act. I am the person named in the
documents, because someone has to make the FOIA request. But the documents
being requested was an idea that came from Richmond Copwatch. We wanted to
get copies of the police protocols so we could know when the police are
breaking their own rules.

We submitted our request, were informed that there were many different
sets of protocols, so we asked for a list. Then we chose from the list. We
got that information right before Christmas. We then scanned and uploaded
all of the information onto the internet- to save others the trouble and
expense of a FOIA request.

Today someone came to the Wingnut and hand delivered a package from the
Office of the City Attorney of the City of Richmond. I opened up the
envelope to find just 2 documents full of lawyer speak. No cover letter,
no explanation. Just 2 documents not even addressed to me, but about me.
Apparently the CITY OF RICHMOND POLICE CHIEF BRYAN NORWOOD and the CITY OF
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA are filing a complaint against me, the defendant Mo
Karn (not even my legal name you sillies). They want some of their FOIA
Documents back. Because they say they shouldn’t have given them to me, and
importantly, I am a known and admitted anarchist.

So the first I hear of this is court documents. No email, no letter, no
phone call asking for them back. Just a copy of a complaint they filed.

The second document they sent me today was an “EMERGENCY MOTION FOR
PROTECTIVE ORDER AND TO COMPEL THE RETURN OF TACTICAL INFORMATION AND TO
PREVENT THE DISCLOSURE OF SAID INFORMATION“

Apparently they want their information back. I don’t think they understand
the internet. You can’t really get that information back. We’ve got it,
the internet has it, and hundreds of people have looked at it. The
documents they specifically request back are Emergency Operations Plan
Part 1 of 2 Emergency Operations Plan Part 2 of 2, Canine Unit Manual,
Crowd Management Team, Focus Mission Team Property Crimes Detectives
Operating Manual, Homeland Security Criminal Intelligence Unit, Mobile
Command Center Operating Manual, Mounted Unit Operating Manual, Traffic
Enforcement Unit, Police Cyclist Operating Manual, and Police Segway
Operating Manual. These are just some of the almost 50 documents we have
made available at http://www.wingnutrva.org under the tab Richmond Police
Department Documents.

Who knows if these motions will be approved by a judge. They don’t have a
case number on them, and they don’t have a court date or any useful
information like that at all.

I don’t believe the information in these documents is classified or should
be exempt from FOIA. Its not like it is manuals on how to drive their
various vehicles or anything actually explicit. Beyond that I definitely
believe this has a lot more to do with politics. Their FIRST point for
their motion is that “1. Defendant Mo Karn is a known and admitted
anarchist. See generally
http://anarchymo.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/foia-rocks.” Yup. And that has
what to do with FOIA? Freedom of Information Act Except for Anarchists
would be FOIAEFA. I didn’t request shit through FOIAEFA.

In the spirit of FOIA and making RPD documents available online, here are
copies of the documents they sent me in the mail today.

Emergency Motion for Protective Order by Richmond Police Department V. Mo
Karn

Complaint by Chief of Police Bryan Norwood And The City of Richmond V. Mo
Karn


FOIA'd Again at the Wingnut in Richmond

From Anarchy Mo

Today we received an interesting package from the City of Richmond, hand
delivered to our door.

The documents within informed us about a court case in the works (“The
Chief of Police Bryan Norwood and The City of Richmond v. Mo Karn”), and
include an:

“Emergency Motion for Protective Order and to Compel the Return of
Tactical Information and to Prevent the Disclosure of Said Information on
behalf of Plaintiffs Chief of Police Bryan Norwood and The City of
Richmond”
[FOIA = Fucking Orangutan Insurrection of @]

You can see the documents here (they are almost identical):

* Emergency Motion for Protective Order by Richmond Police Department V.
Mo Karn
* Complaint by Chief of Police Bryan Norwood And The City of Richmond V.Mo
Karn

What it boils down to is they’re trying to sue Mo Karn, saying some of the
police documents we received via the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) are
documents they shouldn’t have sent us, specifically ones including
“tactical plans”. They are going to attempt to get an order “(A)
compelling the return of certain exempt information, (B) preventing the
disclosure of this information to the general public, (C) enjoining the
defendant from publicizing this information, and (D) granting such other
relief as the Court deems appropriate.”

The first reason stated for this in the Emergency Motion is the most obvious:

“1. Defendant Mo Karn is a known and admitted anarchist. See generally
http://anarchymo.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/foia-rocks

It goes on to detail most of the mundanely routine email conversation
between Mo and the Angela Harrison (Associate General Counsel, although
titled in the case documents as a “Program Manager”) of the RPD, to whom
our FOIA request was directed. When she mentioned that certain documents
included tactical plans, Mo stated very clearly, “I understand that
tactical plans may not be subject to FOIA. However if any of the manuals
and orders I have requested include tactical plans I would expect that
tactical plans sections to be blacked out, but the non-tactical
information surrounding them in the manual to still be included.”

In the official response to the FOIA request, the bit about redacting
information goes thusly: “in order to completely and properly respond
without negatively impacting public safety and our intense operational
responsibilities, the Department is entitled to and elects to utilize
seven additional work days to respond”.

Well, despite addressing those concerns and the seven days the RPD had to
go over the documents, apparently we got some information they thought we
shouldn’t have anyway. The Program Manager’s “production of these
documents exceeded the authority granted to her,” and she sent them
“without first obtaining permission to do so from Chief Norwood.”

Unfortunately that means not shit to us. If the RPD feels they shouldn’t
have sent out these documents, maybe they shouldn’t have done so. The idea
that they can sue anybody for having information that they gave us is
utterly ridiculous.

That said, the list of documents that the RPD feels you shouldn’t read
include the following:

* Emergency Operations Plan (Part 2)
* Canine Unit
* Crowd Management Team
* Focus Mission Team
* Homeland Security and Criminal Intelligence
* Mobile Command Center
* Mounted Unit
* Traffic Enforcement Unit
* Police Cyclist
* Police Segways

Sadly, we already uploaded ALL of these ostensibly public documents
(linked above) prior to learning about their illicit nature. We no longer
have the ability to remove them from the internet, or the public domain.
We encourage you to look through these documents and more on our Richmond
Police Department Documents page.

For our part we’re seeking legal counsel on the issue. If it ever goes to
court we promise you’ll hear about it.

www.wingnutrva.org wingnut_collective@yahoo.com