Photo by flickr user G20Voice

For the second time in a week, federal anti-terrorism agents raided the location of New York activist Elliot Madison, saying that he and another man had been using Twitter to direct the movements of G20 protesters and update them about movements of police in Pittsburgh.

Madison was arrested mid-Tweet last week in a Pittsburgh motel room. This past Thursday his Queens home was raided and searched for 16-hours while helicopters circled overhead.

Madison's attorney Martin Stolar says the search by FBI agents was illegal. Stolar has obtained a temporary order from federal Judge Dora Irizarry prohibiting the government from searching the seized
material, which included books and a picture of Vladimir Lenin.

Madison is known for his work with the People's Law Collective, which has provided legal support to thousands of people arrested during demonstrations in New York and other cities.

How Can the Government Say it's a Crime to Tweet?

2009 is the year when Twitter and other social networking tools have emerged to have a major impact in social movements in Burma, Moldova and Iran. It is difficult to understand the justification for the raids in Pittsburgh and Queens considering the applause in the press for Twitter's use as a tool to undermine authoritarian governments around the world. Twitter was the best source for instant news from the streets during the protests about the Iranian elections, with raw, impossible-to-verify-in-the-moment Tweets appearing on the websites of the New York Times, the Atlantic and Huffington Post. In fact the U.S. State Department considered Twitter to be so important in Iran that it intervened to make sure that Twitter did not shut down for maintenance at a key point during the demonstrations.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told CBS News, "we noticed people creating accounts during the riots [in Iran] presumably because they heard Twitter was the most efficient way to discover and share what was happening in the moment."

Hmm. It sounds like the activists in Pittsburgh might have been using Twitter for the very same reasons Iranians did, doesn't it? So what's the problem?

Although the U.S. State Department has encouraged activists to use Twitter internationally, U.S. Army Intelligence has called Twitter a potential terrorist tool, referring to activists' use of Twitter domestically during the 2008 Republican National Convention.

There are myriad examples of governments in other countries cracking down on activists who share information on the Internet. After Moldova's short-lived "Twitter revolution," journalist Natalia Morar was charged with organizing an anti-Communist flashmob and spent three weeks under house arrest. In Guatemala a man was charged with advising in a Tweet that people should take their money out of a corrupt government bank. According to Hadi Ghaemi, who runs the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, many people have been arrested for Internet activity in Iran.

Former U.S. Attorney Cynthia Kouril, blogging at Firedoglake, asks "what legal steps the prosecution is taking to distinguish between political speech and real time reporting versus criminal accessory conduct and incitement to riot."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted several legal documents related to the raids, including the criminal complaint, search warrants and motions from Madison's attorneys.

We are now living in a world in which technology allows us to share information on a real-time basis. So, what country should the U.S. government take its cues from when making policies about this? Moldova? Burma? Guatemala? Iran? Or, should we try for something a bit more radical? You might call it homegrown freedom.

>> Watch the video from Glass Bead Collective and Pittsburgh Indymedia

After days of abuse by police officers during last week's Pittsburgh G-20 demonstrations, activists marched to protest police brutality on Saturday night. As the group walked along Pittsburgh sidewalks, three large men, dressed in black with their faces covered, showed up in their midst. The appearance of the men seemed to mimic the stereotypical style of anarchists participating in a black bloc action. Yet these guys were not in sync with the crowd of demonstrators. Their body language and demeanor were threatening. Soon, one of them actually attacked a camera person, breaking the flash off of his camera.

>> Watch Video

See update below: Police chief refuses to investigate

Video has emerged which shows a platoon of riot police on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh taking a group portrait with a prisoner who is handcuffed behind his back. The prisoner is walked into the center of the group of officers and posed by the police so that he is down in front on both knees. The officer who is taking the photograph is wearing a white shirt. In New York City this would mean that he is a supervisor, but we do not know the police agency involved in this incident.

Watch Video: YouTube

(See updates below.)

I-Witness Video is not present at the G-20 meetings taking place in Pittsburgh this week, but we can see from voluminous web postings and video that some very strange things seem to be going on—including what appears to be a kidnapping in broad daylight.

Watch video: YouTube

I-Witness Video was alarmed to discover this week that Paul J. Browne, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, appears to have lied under oath. The revelations came in the wake of a deposition during the proceedings of a civil lawsuit brought against the City of New York by members of the Five Borough Bicycle Club (5BBC). In the course of answering questions put to him by the bike club's pro bono attorneys from the law firm of Debovoise, Plimpton, Browne attempted to stonewall. Even though he was generally asked only basic information about how he does his job, Browne denied being able to remember specific details, such as who told him a fact, or where he read something. Browne said, "I don't recall" on 40 occasions and he answered, "I don't know" 62 times.

Do you remember seeing a YouTube video this summer of an NYPD officer brutally tackling a bicyclist in Times Square? The bicyclist was charged with assaulting a police officer, among other things. But the video showed the opposite: Officer Patrick Pogan singling out bicyclist Chris Long for a sickeningly hard tackle that threw Long into the air and onto a crowded sidewalk.

Nick Morgan of Iraq Veterans Against the War is trampled by a police horse outside the last presidential debate. (Photo copyright Emily Forman, I-Witness Video)

Watch video: YouTube | blip.tv | QuickTime | still images

Last Wednesday, while presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain debated domestic policy issues in front of a live television audience at the Long Island campus of Hofstra University, Nassau county police faced off with a few hundred spirited but peaceful demonstrators. And using excessive force, police -- on horses and in full riot gear -- trampled several people including Iraq vet Nick Morgan. I-Witness Video member Emily Forman captured the ensuing bedlam, police violence, and injuries on tape.

Police Violence in the Streets

The members of I-Witness Video have been appalled to see a high level of violence directed against peaceful demonstrators, medics, legal observers and journalists at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Concussion grenades, smoke bombs, CS gas (tear gas), rubber bullets and pepper spray were used to attack and herd demonstrators.

In particular, pepper spray was used excessively and indiscriminately to torment and punish demonstrators in a manner that violates widely accepted law enforcement standards. In one instance a man was pepper-sprayed while handcuffed and then punched in the kidneys. Peaceful demonstrators have been restrained and forced to kneel on pavement for hours after being pepper sprayed without being given medical attention. In another instance where pepper spray was used to preemptively punish a person who was perceived by police to be a protester, a lone street medic was entering her car when police drove up, sprayed a small fire extinguisher sized canister of pepper spray into her car, completely soaking her head to toe before driving away, leaving her gasping for air and collapsing. The medic was neither arrested nor charged.

Here is a clip showing police use of pepper spray.

At about 2:45 this past afternoon (Sept. 3), police wielding batons and a battering ram entered the professional office building on Selby Avenue in St. Paul where I-Witness Video is renting work space.

I-Witness Video members and friends in handcuffs during a police raid on their house in St. Paul, August 30, 2008. (AP: Matt Rourke)

The work of the I-Witness Video collective was interrupted this past Saturday, August 30, 2008, when St. Paul police detained 7 members of the group (along with an assortment of other individuals) for several hours. The NYC-based video collective is in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests at the Republican National Convention.

Here is the text of the letter:

Hello folks,

All of our people have been released. As you know from our earlier messages, several of us experienced a house raid earlier today. Two others who were in a car were picked up and held for four hours. Three people were also detained for a couple of hours.

There was a significant media presence documenting our detention--several local television stations, the NY Times, NPR station WNYC, Democracy Now and others.

Now we need to take some time to document what has happened to us and re-group with our people.

We all received many e-mails and phone calls. Thanks again for calling the St. Paul Mayor's office.

We will write again soon.

This is Eileen. The house raid is over. We have been released from our cuffs and the police have left our house. Our belongings were searched. But we have not inventoried them so we do not yet know yet if something is missing.

5 other I-Witness Video folks were detained, both on bicycles and in a rental car. Moments ago, I heard that 3 were released. We do not know the status of the other 2.

Please keep phoning the St. Paul Mayor's office. Many thanks for your calls and ongoing support.

I will write later.

-- Eileen

This is Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video, a NYC-based video collective that's in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week's Republican National Convention.

The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don't know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.

New Yorkers and people across the U.S. were stunned to see the YouTube video of a police officer tackling a bicyclist in Times Square, unprovoked and without warning. Even more surprising, in a sworn statement, the police officer alleged that he ordered the cyclist to stop, and that instead the cyclist "steered into" the officer and drove the bicycle over him, knocking him down and injuring him. The video clearly shows the cyclist veering away from the officer and getting tackled, football-style, landing on the sidewalk. It appears that he was never ordered to stop.

This is a photo of completely unrelated video archivists. But they look about as comfortable in this picture as we feel. (Photo by Chris Bouldin for The Pine Log.)

In April, I-Witness Video received the first of two subpoenas from the New York City Law Department in connection with the civil lawsuits filed by people arrested at the 2004 Republican National Convention. We received a second subpoena, seeking additional material, in early June.

The subpoenas demand videotapes, photographs, documents and other "potential evidence" related to "protests, demonstrations, and arrests" during the RNC.

Yesterday, our attorneys filed a Motion to Quash the City's subpoenas.

Dyke March marshal, June 2007, New York City
Photo: Annulla of Blather From Brooklyn

Through the spring and summer months, the New York City Police Department has continued its campaign to shut down, suppress and contain political demonstrations, often in a completely unreasonable, ill-informed and even insulting manner. Recently, the Police Department has outright refused or stalled permits for events organized by the African Diaspora Education Society, Gays and Lesbians of Bushwick Empowered, the PrideFest and the Audre Lorde Project's Trans Day of Action.

Yet, even as many groups scramble to assemble pro-bono teams of attorneys to fight for permission to hold events, the NYPD has secretly issued a parade permit to the largest annual unauthorized political gathering on a Manhattan street, the 15th annual New York City Dyke March. Later today, tens of thousands of lesbians and their supporters will sally forth onto Fifth Avenue in a parade of lesbian visibility without knowing that their display has received the seal of government approval.

That's right, unrequested by and unbeknownst to the organizers, the NYPD has granted legally permitted status to the Dyke March and has done so for years.

How do we know this? Because Assistant Chief Thomas Graham, the commander of the Disorder Control Unit and the NYPD's expert on managing political demonstrations, says so in sworn testimony.

In a statement given under oath on March 23, 2005, then Inspector Thomas Graham, describes what he calls the "big secret." Here is an excerpt from the court transcript in which he is questioned by attorney James Meyerson:

The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care is protesting death threats made against New York City Councilmember Charles Barron on the NYPD Rant website earlier this week. They want to find out if NYPD officers were responsible for the threats and to have the officers fired if that's true. The NYPD says they are looking into the threat. But this is not the first time that an NYPD Rant'er has threatened Barron. In December of last year someone posting on NYPD Rant under the screen name "EA1025" urged that Barron be "shot on site" [sic].

Federal authorities in Germany intend to use police dogs to track activists at the upcoming G8 summit, according to the Associated Press. A spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office has confirmed that the police have already taken scent samples from "several" activists.

Scent tracking was a tool of the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police. The AP story quotes Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble saying that "potentially violent" activists may be placed in "preventative detention" for up to two weeks. The summit will be taking place in Heiligendamm, a Baltic Sea resort town in the former East Germany, from June 6-8. If you think this kind of thing could not happen here in the U.S., take a look at this recent item on the "Danger Room" blog. A U.S. government research agency is hoping to develop a device to "collect human scent for future use to track a specific target."

So many choices. The NYPD RNC Intelligence documents are available on four websites which each offer different possibilities for searching the files.

Since none of the available navigation tools will answer every need, the serious researcher should consult more than one navigation aid. While the indexes provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times are helpful guides which enable the reader to grasp the broad features of the surveillance program, they do not capture every instance in which a group or individual appears in the documents. For example, the Times index does not include any citations for I-Witness Video, which is written about on five pages of the intelligence documents. Nor does the Times list "Stonewalk," an event organized by family members of September 11th victims, which is cited on four pages of the documents. The NYCLU's index appears to be more complete, but even so, activist Lisa Fithian, whose name appears on eighteen pages of the documents, is cited as appearing on only thirteen pages by the civil liberties union. The I-Witness Video search capability is the most successful in ferreting out each citation; it uses optical character recognition (OCR) software to make the scanned documents searchable as text, but is occasionally inaccurate because that conversion is imperfect.

Here are the NYPD Intelligence documents from the Republican National Convention spy campaign that lawyers for New York City fought desperately to keep from public view.

City lawyers argued that "The documents were not written for consumption by the general public," and "The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information." Additionally, the news media would "fixate and sensationalize" on the intelligence documents.

Now you can see for yourself.

We have begun the process of posting all 600 pages of documents to the website. We will get them up just as soon as we can. We'll also be adding new indexing and searching capabilities to help you navigate through the documents.

Members of the National Socialist Movement pose in Orlando. Ohio NSM leader Mark Martin stands in back row, far left; FBI informant David Gletty kneels in front row, third from left.

David Gletty, the lead organizer of a neo-Nazi march through a historically black neighborhood in Orlando, Florida has been named as an FBI informant by the Orlando Sentinel. Shocked Orlando community leaders have demanded an investigation. Alzo Reddick, a former Florida state legislator, asked, "Was the FBI informant an activist or participant? Was he an agent provocateur from the get-go?"

>> Watch blimp-cam

>> Watch body-cam

>> Watch helicopter-cam

Even though the NYPD's written policy of blanket surveillance of demonstrations has been enjoined by a federal judge, the scope of the police spying is not widely known. The official police rationale for videotaping public events—that it helps to "prevent and detect terrorist activity"—hints at the vast potential applications of the policy in a time of public anxiety over the possibility of terrorist acts.

Judge Charles Haight delivered a withering blow to NYPD's blanket surveillance of public gatherings in a carefully rendered, 47-page decision.

Haight's decision clarified the Handschu guidelines, the rules which the NYPD must follow when videotaping or photographing political activity. He ordered that the current NYPD policy of wholesale surveillance of demonstrations stop immediately.

Newsday picked up the I-Witness Video story about the Chief Smolka video. This is the first time video from this website has been cited in the mainstream news media. In true "old media" style, Newsday doesn't credit I-Witness Video or the videographer by name or even link to the video as a service to its readers; but the article says the video "is making waves on the Internet and in the department."

The Newsday article brings some new information to light. Cynthia Greenberg speaks about what is not visible in the video. She says Chief Smolka kicked her repeatedly in the head and body, resulting in a concussion. She also says that, as he assaulted her, he called her a "fucking cunt" and accused her of "resisting" him. (Newsday censors the expletives.)

The article also describes a deposition of Chief Smolka, where he offers a convoluted explanation of how his knee perhaps happened to come in contact with Cynthia Greenberg's head.

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola summarizes the scene caught on tape like this: "Although only seconds long, it looks bad."

Readers of an earlier post may have been puzzled about why NYPD Chief Bruce Smolka's unique talents would be in demand at a leading purveyor of beauty products for women.

I-Witness Video received this note over the transom from a legal observer who did not wish to be identified. It provides some insight into the history of the relationship between Revlon and the NYPD.

FluxRostrum, whose videocamera was stolen by NYPD officers on October 30, 2006, is still fighting for possession of his camera and tape. Sources tell us that the Civilian Complaint Review Board has opened an investigation into the matter. The blogger Aldon Hynes sent a complaint to the NYPD via e-mail and received a follow-up phone call from a Sgt. Hanlon of Internal Affairs. Hynes reports,

After 26 years on the police force, two-star NYPD Chief Bruce Smolka is retiring and leaving for a security job at Revlon. The timing of his departure is both striking and curious. Since the Street Crimes Unit which he commanded was forced to close after the killing of Amadou Diallo, Chief Smolka has had a meteoric rise within the NYPD. He is currently the borough commander of Manhattan south of 59th Street, which is the plum patrol assignment at his level within the department.

Why would Chief Smolka choose to leave now, at the height of his career, holding one of the most prestigious assignments the department has to offer?

By law we cannot arrest someone just because he may call a cop a pig. We cannot arrest someone because he asks for a name or a badge or takes a picture.

-- Lorenzo Casanova, Deputy Police Commissioner, NYPD. [1]

We know that NYPD officers harass photographers for taking pictures of stuff that the police decide is "sensitive." But what if police officers decide that they themselves are the "sensitive" stuff?

In my previous post, we found that taking photographs in public places is firmly protected under the Constitution.

Yet, in the cold light of post-September 11th New York City, the NYPD seems to think that it should be able to decide who is allowed to take pictures of anything that the police deem "sensitive." This kind of thinking is justified under the rubric of fighting terrorism.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about whether or not people can be prevented from taking pictures or shooting video in public. Just what is the law around taking pictures in public places?

Over 18,000 people have viewed FluxRostrum's video Get That Camera! since it was posted on this website and others last week. The videotaped assault on Flux and the theft of his camera by NYPD officers has been re-posted to scores of blogs including Amanda Congdon's high-profile ABC News video blog.

On October 30, 2006 at a demonstration protesting the murder of journalist Brad Will in Mexico, members of the NYPD assaulted an independent videographer and stole his videocamera.

I-Witness Video was born in the wake of the crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly which followed the embattled Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in 1999. Since 2000, we have used video as the foundation for our investigations into police and government misconduct in and around political demonstrations.