MEDIA ROOTS — From warrantless wiretapping to SMART meter invasion of privacy, it seems everywhere we turn we are allowing erosion of our rights to privacy.  Meanwhile, the state wants it both ways, as it’s pushed to stifle police transparency by outlawing videotaping of on-duty cops in some states.  Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley, has noted the absurdity of that move:  “The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law—requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and and can say that this is utter nonsense.”

As the U.S.A. undergoes unprecedented erosion of human rights, ACLU affiliates filed hundreds of public records requests last summer with law enforcement agencies regarding their policies for tracking cell phones.  And now the results have been made public.  “While virtually all of the over 200 police departments […] said they track cell phones,” according to the newly released documents, almost none demonstrate probable cause nor obtain warrants.”

Messina

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ACLU — In January, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in U.S. v. Jones, ruling unanimously that when the D.C. police and the FBI attached a GPS device to Antoine Jones’s car and tracked him for 28 days, they violated the Fourth Amendment. But now the government — instead of fixing the way it conducts this kind of invasive surveillance — has simply set its sights on another way to obtain people’s location information: their cell phones.

Late last week, during preliminary proceedings before Jones’s retrial, his attorney revealed that prosecutors have also obtained records showing the location and movement of Jones’s cell phone over the course of five months. Since the GPS data from Jones’s car was thrown out by the Supreme Court, it seems the prosecution intends to use Jones’s cell phone data to get another bite at the apple. Like the GPS device on the car, the government was able to obtain the cell phone information without a probable cause warrant. Instead, it only had to claim that the data was “relevant and material” to an ongoing investigation.

Unfortunately, this story is all too common. As a recent nationwide ACLU public records request revealed, hundreds of law enforcement agencies engage in cell phone tracking on a regular basis. Many of these agencies obtain cell phone location data without getting a warrant and demonstrating probable cause.

The government is clearly trying to avoid the main point of the Jones decision. If using a GPS device to track a car’s movements over time requires a warrant based on probable cause, then surely law enforcement must be held to the same standard when obtaining the same type of information about an individual’s cell phone. If anything, that data is even more sensitive, since most people take their cell phones with them wherever they go. Moreover, many popular smartphones now include GPS, which means that in some cases we’re talking about exactly the same technology.

Requiring the government to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before engaging in any kind of electronic location tracking is necessary to protect Americans’ privacy, and it’s also what the Constitution requires. A few of the law enforcement agencies that responded to our public records request told us that they do hold themselves to a standard requiring a warrant and probable cause. This strikes the right balance between privacy and public safety. Rather than dancing around the issue, it’s time for the government to fully accept the Court’s Jones decision, and respect that ordinary Americans shouldn’t have to worry about the government tracking their every move.

State and federal lawmakers should pass laws requiring a warrant for police to engage in location tracking in non-emergency situations. In Congress, there are two pending bipartisan efforts, entitled the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, which would require law enforcement agents to obtain a warrant in order to access location information.

TAKE ACTION: Tell your representatives in Washington to support these important pieces of legislation.

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While you wait for Breaking Bad to come back on the air, you try to fill the ‘TV-show void’ with things like Enlightened, The Walking Dead, Californication, or even Dexter (this is one I’m embarrassed to say I did).  In modern TV show canon, Breaking Bad is unparalleled in its caliber of acting, characters, and writing.  Dare we say it, perhaps the greatest TV show ever (besides The Wire)?  The genius behind Breaking Bad is Vince Gilligan.  Vince grew up in Richmond, Virginia, bringing his southern charm to the medium.  He tells dark tales that remind one of the Coen brothers (Fargo, No Country for Old Men) and Joe Dante (Gremlins, The ‘Burbs), effortlessly mixing together comedy, horror, and thriller while not seeming like a trite mixture of the three.  

A perfect example of these sensibilities is when in Episode 2 of Breaking Bad, Jesse and Walt have to dispose of a body.  Walt suggests using acid that eats through flesh and bone but not a particular kind of plastic barrel, he sends Jesse to the store, but Jesse gives up after a cursory search for said barrel. While in the midst of a meth bender, Jesse decides to use the upstairs aluminum bathtub instead; and you can probably guess the rest.  Before Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan was responsible for some of the more strange, gory, and borderline-funny episodes of The X-Files, which if you look closely contain some of the kernels that would later be used as the groundwork for Bad.

Vince Gilligan’s X-Files Work

Pusher
Season 3’s “Pusher” pitted Mulder and Scully against a ‘mentalist’ who could convince another person to commit suicide simply by whispering in his ear.  This killer is tracked down via a classified advertisement he places in a mercenary magazine offering his services.  Gilligan showed his affinity here for the expert criminal mastermind ‘hiding in plain sight,’ much like Gus in Breaking Bad.  One notable scene involves a SWAT team going after the Pusher, only to find one SWAT member returning covered in gasoline and holding a lighter, mumbling incomprehensibly before setting himself ablaze.

Leonard Betts
Even before ‘Bad you can see that Gilligan was interested in pushing the censorship boundaries. Season 4’s ‘Leonard Betts’ that singlehandedly pushed the limits of what you could show on network television.  The episode opens up with a pair of paramedics on an ambulance helping a man who’s dying of an unknown illness (Leonard knows simply by touching the man that he has cancer).  The ambulance crashes in a high speed collision.  At the scene of the accident you see Leonard’s severed head lying on the street.  Later you find out that he can ‘grow’ another head (which they show you with no cut away) because you see he is part Lizard, oh and eats cancer to survive.



Bad Blood
“Bad Blood” from Season 5 (where Vince Gilligan and the show itself really hit it’s stride), follows the team to a remote trailer park in the south where a vampire is drugging people unconscious and sucking their blood.  The episode starts with Mulder using a piece of a broken wooden chair to kill what appears to be a child; Mulder in fervor thinks he just killed a vampire.  He pulls out of the kids mouth a pair of fake sharpened vampire teeth and exclaims, ‘Oh, … Shiii’ interrupted by the X-files theme.  Again, the hiding in plain sight theme is present with vampires sleeping in coffins inside their RVs.  Could this scenario have been inspired by Vince’s affinity for the trailer park meth underworld?



Folie A Deux
Using the background of a cold call in center for an employee going postal, but not because he’s depressed, but because his boss is a insect hybrid who creates human zombies out of his own employees by injecting them through the neck with poison fangs.  In the episode, Mulder finds the clue ‘hiding in the light’ linking back to an old case about a shape-shifter who appears normal until seen in the dark. We don’t want to be redundant, but Vince seems to really like this theme.

Hungry
Alan Moore likes to deconstruct and flip upside-down super-hero tropes with Watchmen, where super heroes are portrayed as flawed destructive human beings.  Vince takes the X-files trope of ‘monster of the week’ and shows us the inverse effect.  What if you were a cannibal mutant working at a shitty fast food restaurant but were also a nice guy?  The entire episode revolves around the monster this time instead of Mulder and Scully.

Other Notable Gilligan Episodes
“Field Trip,” Season 6
“Dreamland,” Season 6



Vince Gilligan’s Film Work

Vince Gilligan has also taken a stab at full length movies, not just writing scripts, but also directing his own material.  His first film was Wilder Napalm that he wrote, but not directed—a very uneven first theatrical film attempt starring Dennis Quaid about two life-long best friends with supernatural powers to manifest fire.  Mixing a love triangle romantic comedy with some really dark and strange subject matter, the movie never quite coheres.  Some parts work, like the idea of portraying grown men who have god-like powers in shitty jobs like a circus clown.  The full movie is viewable on YouTube.



Home Fries, the first film Gilligan directed.  The marketing for this film was completely wrong, giving the impression it was a throw-away romantic comedy when, in fact, it was a movie about a very dysfunctional family whose matriarchal mother, through passive-aggressive behavior and coercion, gets her two grown military sons to commit murder for her.  In the opening scene Luke Wilson plays opposite Jake Busey who chases down a man leaving a fast food drive-thru with an attack helicopter.  They fire at him when he tries to surrender.  They just wanted to ‘scare him’ by using blanks, but the man has a heart attack.

It turns out this man was their stepfather who was caught cheating by their mother.

The mother won’t let it end there, however, and sends her boys out on a scouting mission to find out who the woman is.  Luke Wilson’s character quickly discovers it’s a totally innocent fast-food employee played by Drew Barrymore.  The rest of the movie involves him trying to misdirect Busey’s character into getting closer to assassinating her.  It has its flaws but the plot and acting is top tier and there aren’t very many if any movies like it.  Catherine O’Hara as the psychotic mother should have garnered an Oscar nomination.  Home Fries may be viewed in it’s entirety on YouTube.



Hancock, a more recent film starring Will Smith as a drunk, abusive, and destructive super hero was by all accounts a misfire.  Directed not by Gilligan, but by Peter Berg (who can’t direct his way out of a paper bag) and based on a script by Gilligan.  Some decent ideas thrown into the mix but has a third act, which completely ruins the entire film.

So, while you have your Gilligan withdrawals try some of those in the meantime (and go here if you need even more).  After all Breaking Bad’s 5^th will be its final season.  In many interviews, Gilligan has said that his goal from the very beginning was to turn ‘Mr Chips into Scarface,’ in reference to Walt.  If you have watched Breaking Bad up until its most recent conclusion, and you are familiar with Scarface, short of trying his own product and shooting a family member dead, Walt has pretty much surpassed Scarface.  I, for one, am excited to see where this man’s mind takes us next; maybe somebody will see his value as a filmmaker, similar to how studios plucked J.J. Abrams from TV.  Let’s hope, for his next project, he’s not as prescient as he was in The Lone Gunman pilot.

Written by Robbie Martin

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MEDIA ROOTS — A new law proposed in the UK could erode privacy to a level not yet seen in any western country (besides the United States).  The law mimics the warrantless wiretapping and ‘sneak and peak’ provisions laid out in the now eleven-year old U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. 

Robbie Martin of Media Roots

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ZDNET — Controversial new British legislation could allow the UK’s electronics intelligence agency GCHQ access in real-time data of phone calls, emails, social networks, and Web traffic by all UK residents.

The UK is already the most surveilled country in the world, with number plate recognition systems, ISP deep-packet inspection, and a surveillance camera seemingly on every corner. These proposals would propel the UK into the lacking privacy realms of China, Burma, and Russia. But it already faces the possibility of stiff opposition at a European level unless safeguards are put into place that limits the scope of that monitoring. Though yet to be announced in the Queen’s speech, set for around May, which dictates the UK government’s legislative agenda for the year, it would allow the widespread monitoring of citizens’ activity — despite current UK laws making such actions only available by court-ordered search warrants.

Likened to the U.S.’ Patriot Act, it would grant the UK government access to personal data of ordinary citizens, despite the government’s defence that only certain people will be actively investigated.
Data collected would include the time a call, email, or website was visited, the duration of which, and which websites or phone numbers were called. Details of the sender and recipient of emails, such as IP addresses, would also be collected. Everything scrap of data will be stored by ISPs, but not all of this data will be made available to GCHQ without a court order or Home Secretary-sanctioned authority.

Read more about UK’s ‘Patriot Act’ Web monitoring law could face European veto. 

Photo by Flickr user Kevin Hoogheem

MEDIA ROOTS — Many well educated and politically aware people in the United States would like to believe that the so-called ‘War On Terror,’ a false war against a tactic, will have no effect on their personal lives.  As long as it’s not affecting you, it’s not a problem, right?  Well, the problem is that many people who have chosen to lead politically active lifestyles have encountered, on a regular basis, the totalitarian weight of the ‘War On Terror,’ not because they are overly sensitive civil libertarians, but because they are being targeted specifically on U.S. soil for their political activism.  Political documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras is one such individual.

Written by Robbie Martin

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SALON — [Poitras’ next film] will examine the way in which The War on Terror has been imported onto U.S. soil, with a focus on the U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance, its expanding covert domestic NSA activities (including construction of a massive new NSA facilityin Bluffdale, Utah), its attacks on whistleblowers, and the movement to foster government transparency and to safeguard Internet anonymity. In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters (a 2004 film she produced for PBS on gentrification of an Ohio town won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy).

But Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.

She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).

Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work — to ensure that she can engage in her journalism and produce her films without the U.S. Government intruding into everything she is doing. She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.

Read more about U.S. filmmaker repeatedly detained at border.

MEDIA ROOTS — Former Air America radio show host Rachel Maddow has, by now, become MSNBC’s de facto ‘liberal watch dog,’ long since the network kicked Keith Olbermann to the curb and told Cenk Uyger that Washington ‘doesn’t like his tone.’

In a world where the Republican propaganda machine has been able to characterize a network part-owned by software giant Microsoft and General Electric, one of the world’s biggest
corporate conglomerates, as the ‘liberal media,’ black is white and up is down.

In an interesting twist, Rachel Maddow has now come out with a book, MSNBC’s version of an anti-war history lesson.  Even Glenn Greenwald, one of our favorite authors here at Media Roots, seemed comfortable lavishing praise on Maddow’s masterful work of omission, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.  Another writer and journalist,  David Swanson, has a very different take on the matter.  (David Swanson has also appeared as a guest on Media Roots Radio back in 2011.)  

Written by Robbie Martin of Media Roots

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WAR IS A CRIME — Maddow’s book picks out episodes, from the war on Vietnam to the present — episodes in the expansion of the military industrial complex and in the aggrandizement of presidential war powers. Some of the episodes are extremely revealing and well told. Maddow’s is perhaps the best collection I’ve seen of nuclear near-miss and screw-up stories. But much is missing from the book. And some of what is there is misleading.

Missing is the fact that U.S. wars kill people other than U.S. troops. The U.S. Civil War’s battles, in Maddow’s view “remain, to this day, America’s most terrifying and costly battles.” That depends what (or whom) you consider a cost. A listing of U.S. dead on the television show “Nightline,” Maddow writes, “would be a televised memorial to those who had died in a year of war.”  Would it really?  Everyone who had died? Victims of U.S. wars make an appearance in these pages as the sex slaves of U.S. mercenaries, but not as the victims of murder on a large scale. This absence is in contrast to a large focus on the damage done to U.S. troops, and a much larger focus on financial costs — and not even on the tradeoffs, not even on the things that we could be spending money on, but rather on the “threat” of deficits and debt. Maddow notes the dramatic conversion from weapons factories to automobile, tractor, and refrigerator factories that followed World War II, but she does not propose such a conversion process now.

Missing is resistance and conscientious objection. “War will exist,” wrote President John Kennedy, “until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”  That day grows more distant with books like Maddow’s. In “Drift,” everything warriors do is called “defense” (except with the Russians whose actions are called “strategic (aka offensive)”; when the troops do things they are “serving”; they are “patriotic”; and in times when the military becomes widely respected that is considered a positive development. Jim Webb is “an extraordinary soldier.”  Soldiers in Vietnam “served honorably,” but sadly the military was “diminished” and the troops “demoralized.” Or is it de-moral-ized?  Maddow fills out her book with dramatic accounts of Navy SEALs trying to invade Grenada that appear to have been included purely for the adventure drama or the pro-troopiness — although there’s always some SNAFU in such stories as well.

War, in Maddow’s world, is not in need of abolition so much as proper execution, which sometimes means more massive and less hesitant execution. LBJ “tried to fight a war on the cheap,” Maddow quotes a member of Johnson’s administration as recalling. On the other hand, when Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf propose five or six aircraft carriers for the First War on Iraq, Maddow recounts that this “would leave naval power dangerously thin in the rest of the world.” Dangerous for whom?

Read more about Catching Rachel Maddow’s Drift.

Photo by upstateNYer from Wikimedia Commons