MEDIA ROOTS — When you’re Julian Assange, you just can’t do right.  The USA’s establishment has got it in for him now.  Doubtless, they’d like to grab him like Bradley Manning.  Assange says he’ll be called a traitor for interviewing radicals.  Journalist Glenn Greenwald says the attacks on Assange and RT reveal as much about the critics:

“The real cause of American media hostility toward RT is the same as what causes it to hate Assange: the reporting it does reflects poorly on the U.S. Government, the ultimate sin in the eyes of our ‘adversarial’ press corps.”

“In other words, like Assange, [at RT] they engage in real adversarial journalism with regard to American political power. And they are thus scorned and ridiculed by those who pretend to do that but never actually do.”

Messina

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SALON — A new news show hosted by Julian Assange debuted yesterday on RT, the global media outlet funded by the Russian government and carried by several of America’s largest cable providers. His first show was devoted to an interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (video below), who has not given a television interview since 2006. The combination of Assange and a Russian-owned TV network has triggered a predictable wave of snide, smug attacks from American media figures, attacks that found their purest expression in this New York Times review yesterday of Assange’s new program by Alessandra Stanly.

Much is revealed by these media attacks on Assange and RT — not about Assange or RT but about their media critics. We yet again find, for instance, the revealing paradox that nothing prompts media scorn more than bringing about unauthorized transparency for the U.S. government. As a result, it’s worth examining a few passages from Stanley’s analysis. It begins this way:

“When Anderson Cooper began a syndicated talk show, his first guest was the grieving father of Amy Winehouse.”

“Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, unveiled a new talk show on Tuesday with his own version of a sensational get: the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.”

That contrast — between one of America’s Most Serious Journalists and Assange — speaks volumes already about who is interested in actual journalism and who is not. Then we have this, a trite little point, impressed by its own cleverness, found at the center of almost all of these sneering pieces on Assange’s new program:

“Mr. Assange says the theme of his half-hour show on RT is ‘the world tomorrow.’ But there is something almost atavistic about the outlet he chose. RT, first known as Russia Today, is an English-language news network created by the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin in 2005 to promote the Kremlin line abroad. (It also broadcasts in Spanish and Arabic.) It’s like the Voice of America, only with more money and a zesty anti-American slant. A few correspondents can sound at times like Boris and Natasha of ‘Rocky & Bullwinkle’ fame. Basically, it’s an improbable platform for a man who poses as a radical left-wing whistleblower and free-speech frondeur battling the superpowers that be.”

Let’s examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it’s perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government (Kaplan/The Washington Post), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it’s an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from?

Also, while it’s certainly true that the coverage of RT is at times overly deferential to the Russian government, that media outlet never mindlessly disseminated government propaganda to help to start a falsehood-fueled devastating war, the way that Alessandra Stanley’s employer (along with most leading American media outlets) did. When it comes to destruction brought about by uncritical media fealty to government propaganda, RT — as the Russia expert Mark Adomanis documented when American media figures began attacking RT  – is far behind virtually all of the corporate employers of its American media critics.

Read more about Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics.

© 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow: Hassan Nasrallah (E1)

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RT – Assange ‘traitor,’ show ‘foul’ – The World Tomorrow Sparks Media Frenzy

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Photo by Flickr user Espenmoe

MEDIA ROOTS — Independent journalists have a passion to get information out to individuals who might not otherwise receive it and most often require supplementary sources of income to survive.  Here at Media Roots, life’s no different.

My second line of work is operating a pedicab, a three-wheeler that helps shuttle tourists to various monuments, memorials, and museums in the nation’s capital.  Pedicabs have been in operation here for over five years and boast a perfect safety record and a near-perfect customer satisfaction record.  And while 38 police departments now claim jurisdiction within the District, only the U.S. Park Police find issue with the hard-working and generally light-hearted independents operating on the National Mall.

Most pedicabbers have other lines of work, like indy journalists, and are typically rather articulate and rational.  The majority have never had previous issue with the law and are not looking to create any unnecessary trouble for law enforcement.  But after only a few hours at the third-most popular tourist attraction in the United States, anyone can witness how the aggressors wear an official costume, while the pacifists cruise around accepting gratuities.

While peddling on Sunday, March 25, I found myself pulling up to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum at approximately 3:00 pm.  Another pedicab appeared to have been abandoned in front of the museum.  And nearby was a Park Police cruiser.  In order to prevent the missing operator from having to pay the $195 to recover the cab from the impound lot, I briefly attempted to cart the empty cab back to our shop downtown.

Almost immediately, Officer Blake of the U.S. Park Police, the same officer whom had issued me a previous citation just weeks before (only to be dismissed by DC adjudication services), appeared and ordered me to not take the human-powered vehicle.  I immediately complied and moved approximately 20 feet from the scene.  Blake would follow me and continued to instruct me I couldn’t stop where I had – in front of a parked tour bus.

“Where would you like me to go?” I asked.

“Off the Mall,” he would reply with an unlawful attempt to exile me from over 300 acres of public property.

Unsure how to respond, I steered my pedicab to what appeared to be a legal parking spot a motor vehicle had just vacated.  Again, the officer was hot on my trail.

“Give me your ID. You’re getting a ticket.”  I complied with no hesitation.  In order to maintain a level of accountability, I also pulled out my video camera to capture the scene.

“Put your camera away,” he continued.

“I don’t have to put my camera away.”  After all, I am the organizer for DC CopBlock and quite familiar with the First Amendment.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

I had officially been placed under arrest, despite the fact that two other pedicabbers were seemingly ignored by officer Blake.  I was in utter disbelief that not only was I getting arrested again (the first arrest in November, also a charge for resisting arrest, was eventually dismissed by federal prosecutors), but I was now getting arrested for a Constitutionally-protected act.

As the handcuffs were aggressively placed on my already-sore wrists, I became dizzy and uncertain about the officers’ intentions.  They screamed orders at me, even though I was not talking back nor were there any loud noises nearby.  A tourist and his son a few feet away were visibly traumatized by the incident with the younger crying and his father yelling at the police for their blatant display of excessive force.

“Stop resisting,” Officer Hiatt continued to yell at me, even though he was close enough to kiss me.

“I’m not resisting,” I calmly replied, uncertain what else to say.

The officer then slammed me down to the gravel.  Because I was already cuffed, I couldn’t break my fall and ended up landing face-first.  The fall knocked me out for a minute and the trauma to my shoulder is still present to this day.  But the emotional damage of a tyrannical police force, operating without regard to the law or morality might take years to recover from.

Oskar Mosco is a regular contributor for Media Roots

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TBD — Two Park Police officers bend down to look at another groaning black-haired pedicab operator, his face against the grass and lying on his stomach on the National Mall. They talk into their radio. On the street is a little green pedicab, abandoned. One officer fastens handcuffs on the young man, a manager at National Pedicabs.

This pedicab operator calls himself Oskar Mosco and is the same one who was arrested last fall and formed the D.C. Pedicab Operators’ Association to advocate for operators amid the evolving regulations and allegations of harassment that have come up in the last year.  He was last arrested in November, but the case was dismissed earlier this year.  The National Park Service controls the pedicab territory of the National Mall, and Park Police enforce the rules.  Yet the NPS is still developing its formal pedicab regulations, which will apparently mirror those the District Department of Transportation released last year.  The Park Police note that D.C. traffic regulations apply, however, and regularly write tickets to the region’s pedicabbers.

Mosco attempts to ask what orders he disobeyed.

“We are no longer discussing this,” the Park Police officer tells him. “You are under arrest.”

The two officers pull Mosco to his feet and escort him to a police car, in which a second pedicab operator sits, as Mosco shouts that he was arrested for videotaping the police. “You should not get arrested for videotaping a police officer!” Mosco yelled to onlookers in front of the Natural History Museum. “This is a free country, not a police state!”

Pedicabs are a human-powered transportation option that fill a unique demand in an increasingly petroleum-dependent society. They have proven to be safe and fun in areas that demand a variety of transportation options. The very survival of America’s emerging pedicab industry depend on a population that is informed, and concerned, with the what else can be possible. Those interested in following the development of American pedicab culture can follow the page Everything Pedicab.

Read more about Two D.C. pedicab operators were arrested on the National Mall.

© 2012 TBD

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Photo provided by Daniel Blackwell. 

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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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 – The IRS and DEA came to downtown Oakland this afternoon to aggressively raid multiple medical marijuana dispensaries as well as Oaksterdam, an educational facility that teaches plant cultivation to medical marijuana patients.

Robbie Martin of Media Roots ran to catch the raid and captured an intense standoff between the people and the federal officials. He also confronts an ABC 7 news reporter after he hears them tell the police they are doing an ‘amazing job.’

Abby

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Robbie Martin of Media Roots films the IRS & DEA Raid on Oaksterdam, Oakland

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Photo by flickr user NeetaLind