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@betterangelscollective-blog
We're entering indefinite hiatus.
While we believe this work is important, we do not currently have the resources to do it effectively. Our code is still totally open and accessible and we would love for you to play with it, hack it, and run with what we've started.
P.S. Fuck the police.
Cops Don’t Keep Us Safe, and Other Facts; A Response to Durham City Council
We as members of the Durham community fully oppose the building of a new police headquarters and the proposed multi-million dollar expansion of policing in our neighborhoods. We want the city of Durham to divest from police and instead fund Black futures and invest in Black and Brown community. We gave members of the Durham City Council a deadline of this past Monday, May 16th to repeal their decision to construct a new police headquarters. Instead, we understand they are planning to vote soon to allocate over $2 million of our community’s money to a firm to begin construction on the headquarters.
We’re telling you. The people of Durham do not want this headquarters.
Thus far we have received generous support and valuable feedback from the community on our Durham Beyond Policing campaign. Over 500 Durham residents have signed on to our petition opposing the new police HQ. We have held a town hall forum, a rally, weekly pickets alongside Durham city workers for almost 8 weeks now, and canvassed areas in East Durham, NC Central University, and the Bus Station to pass along our petition and gather stories about incidences between residents and the police.
We want that $70 million instead to be given back to the community for a participatory people’s budget that allocates resources and services for what we actually need in Durham. We demand that those most marginalized play a meaningful role in this process. This means poor Black folks in East Durham. This means LGBTQ youth of color. This means our homeless population. This means low-wage-earning black womyn. This means our undocumented family.
We appreciate that councilman Steve Schewel acknowledged in his response to our emails that the “key to ending crime is decent housing, a good education for every child, an end to hunger in America, and a good job for everyone that wants one, and an end to gun violence”. However, when he says that we are not yet ready for a Durham beyond policing, alluding to the myth that cops keep us safe, we must respectfully disagree. There is no conclusive evidence to support that increased policing leads to increased safety, especially in majority Black and Brown working class communities. Here is what we do know: The Durham police has a well documented practice of targeting Black and Brown community members. What we do know: The Durham police department was found lying about 911 calls to break into people’s homes and arrest them less than 2 years ago. What we do know: Durham cops that are temporarily suspended for misconduct are consistently kept in the police department and face few consequences for their actions and little transparency and accountability to the public. What we do know: for people who are arrested, the majority of whom are Black and Brown and working class, they are sent to a jail with a well documented history of verbal abuse, physical violence, unsanitary conditions, and a jail where at least 3 community members have died while in custody in the last 2 years.
We will not backtrack on our demand that cops do not keep us safe and in addition, to reward a police department with such a deep history of racism and violence with a $70 million headquarters is obscene. We refuse to believe there are not more inexpensive options. We refuse to believe that it is acceptable to allow a $70 million headquarters be built when community members who live less than 5 minutes away, East Durham residents we have talked to, had no idea this police headquarters is even being built. This is not how we want our local democracy to be run. The two public information sessions the city held last year were not for these residents – poor and working-class African American and Latinx residents of Durham. They were for and were attended by business owners and other Durham residents who cared most about the aesthetics of the headquarters, and how it would affect property values, rather than how increased police presence will terrorize the Durham community and further push residents of color out of their homes. It is violent to build a site of police surveillance in a predominantly Black area where community members are already over-policed and is doubly offensive to continue with plans to build without knowledge or buy in from residents in that neighborhood. We want to put an end to this. We expect the council to cease putting more money in the headquarters and listen to Durham residents calls for participatory budgeting. The people of Durham deserve better.
We want living wage jobs, not cops; raises for city workers, not cops; funding for early childhood education, not cops; access to mental health services, not cops; sustainable food and water sources, not cops; affordable housing, not cops; free public transportation, not cops; free childcare, not cops. We want a Durham where the police no longer get more support than residents and we exercise a democracy that allows us to dictate where our money is spent.
We are again asking City Council to cease all plans to construct this new headquarters, including the proposed contract here, and consider what real safety for our community looks like outside of the police. $70 plus million dollars funneled into a new police headquarters is a huge waste of taxpayers money and this money could be used to provide youth centers, affordable housing, services for the homeless, and street maintenance, to name a just few alternatives.
We hope City Council will do the right thing.
Black Lives Matter.
When people ask me, “Who will protect us, I want to say: Who protects you now?
Hear, hear!
Rojava's anti-ISIS and anticapitalist fighters: "ultimate aim is to abolish police"
"Just to get a sense of how radical this is," Graeber said, "when I was in Rojava, people told me ‘we're anti-capitalist. But we've learned from the 20th century that you can't destroy capitalism unless you get rid of the state. And that you can't get rid of the state unless you get rid of patriarchy.’ So that's why you see all those women soldiers. How to get rid of patriarchy? Well, making sure all women have access to automatic weapons is an obvious start."
Graeber added, "One of the first places they took me was a police academy, where they said, their ultimate aim was to give everyone in the country six weeks of police training, then abolish the police."
[…]
The US is not a fan. In March of this year, US State Department spokesman John Kirby told Reuters that "We don't support self-ruled, semi-autonomous zones inside Syria. We just don't."
[…I]n a moment of snark, Phineas Phisher told Ars:
If you do talk about [Rojava's] politics, misrepresent them as a Kurdish nationalist movement fighting to establish a Kurdish state. Because of course a neoliberal "democratic" state is what any freedom loving people would want. Ignore the fact that while mostly Kurds, there's a variety of ethnicities, religions, and languages in Rojava. Absolutely do not mention words like "democratic confederalism," "direct democracy," "anticapitalist," "feminism," "social ecology," or "libertarian socialism". Remember, according to Fukuyama we've reached the "end of history." And according to Thatcher, "there is no alternative." That depends on you not talking about the alternative.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/05/robin-hood-hacker-rojava-syria-bitcoin-donation/2/
#Abolish-the-Police #politics #anticapitalism #abolish-all-nation-States
original post
In FOIA docs: cops contract with social media surveillance firms funded by CIA
We not only dug into the corporate profiles of some of the companies police contract to snoop on your Tweets and Facebook rants, we also filed freedom of information requests to twenty police departments across the country to find out how, when, and why they monitor social media.
[…O]ne particularly well-connected firm that we believe is worth highlighting here is ZeroFOX, which actively monitored prominent Black Lives Matter protesters in Baltimore and labeled some of them, including former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay McKesson, “threat actors.”
The company reached out to Baltimore officials first, offering it services pro-bono, which ZeroFOX executives painted as a selfless gesture of civic responsibility. But city officials may have been especially receptive to ZeroFOX’s pitch because of the powerful names standing behind it. The company’s leadership includes former NSA Director Mike McConnell, who is the former vice chair and current senior executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton, and Robert Rodriguez, who has ties to the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, and a security firm started by top Bush-era security official Michael Chertoff.
http://littlesis.org/news/2016/05/18/you-are-being-followed-the-business-of-social-media-surveillance/
#surveillance #BlackLivesMatter
original post
John Oliver: 911 is failing us. Help us build a better system.
On last week's episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver dug into just how badly 911 is failing people in crisis.
Topping the list of 911's failures is the inability of the dispatcher to accurately determine your location when you call, a problem that is so easy to fix with modern technology, our first prototype of Buoy, our free and open source 9-1-1 software, gave responders the crisis location with an accuracy down to several meters.
John Oliver also discussed the government's vague plans for "next generation 911," which would "allow dispatchers to receive videos and pictures in situations where making a voice call isn't safe, such as domestic violence situations." Again, this is something Buoy did in its first alpha test version, and a feature set we've continued to refine since then. Today, Buoy can do much more than share recorded videos and pictures with responders. Using Buoy, you can livestream HD audio and video to emergency responders in as few as two taps of your finger!
Finally, John Oliver also pointed out the prevalence of financial fraud plaguing the 911 system. In New York State, for example, more than 77 million dollars from your telephone bill's "911 service fee" was diverted to the State's General Fund. So those tax dollars New Yorkers spent that were earmarked for emergency response services never actually got spent on emergency response services at all.
And the list goes on! Watch the full 15 minute segment here.
We deserve better. We are already doing better with Buoy. And our total budget to date? $50. Yup, five-zero. Fifty.
Check out Buoy and get it set up for your community or neighborhood today: https://betterangels.github.io/
911 is a joke!
original post
Private Prisons: American Slavery, Under New Management
The "Criminal Justice System" is the absurd euphemism that wealthy slave owners have convinced people to call what is actually today's slave trade.
[E]ven as the U.S. crime rate has dropped and dropped, the country’s prison population has soared. The symmetry is almost comically perfect: Since its peak in 1991, the U.S. crime rate has been cut almost exactly in half. Yet over that same time frame, the country’s prison population has almost exactly doubled (and since 1980, it’s quadrupled).
[…]
As of 2014, over eight percent of U.S. prisoners and 62 percent of immigrant detainees are held in privately-owned prisons.
These private prisons are run by corporations, and like all other corporations, they are beholden to investors and are in the business of making profits. And in the U.S., the for-profit prison industry is booming.
[…]
[The two largest private prison companies,] CCA and GEO each spend well over $1 million a year contributing to political campaigns (in addition to untold lobbying costs likely in the tens of millions) in order to make sure that both the laws being written and the government contracts being handed down keep their private prisons stocked with inmates.
It’s working. And with so many prisoners, profits have shot sky high. CCA revenue hit a whopping $1.79 billion in 2015, up from the year before, while GEO revenue hit an even higher $1.84 billion, likewise an improvement over their previous year.
Now, how exactly do these corporations turn prisoners into well over $3 billion worth of revenue every year?
It’s not quite slavery, but it’s close.
Read the full article: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/private-prisons-us-stats
original post
State Police troopers from Massachusetts and New Hampshire are now off the job after a police chase in Nashua, NH, ended with punches thrown.
Instead of chasing this guy down and assaulting him, what if they had just minded their own business? Police don't prevent crimes, they commit them.
This Sat! Hacker Highschool, Lesson 1: Hack Everything. Harm None.
Just a reminder that this Saturday is our first Hacker Highschool lesson! If you're on Facebook, you can RSVP and share the event here. We'll start by building a foundation and later on in the year we'll play hacking capture-the-flag games with tools like Facebook's CTF. Invite your anti-authoritarian friends! :)
Event description is reposted in full below:
Become a hacker! Learn to do more than just shoulder-surfing or using script kiddie tools. Nurture your creativity, resourcefulness, and motivation in an endless cycle of discovery, curiosity, and exploration!
The Better Angels collective is hosting a free, live video training session about the fundamentals of hacking, and the tools we use to discover information relating to computer, network, and even physical security. The video class will offer live instruction to guide you through hands-on exercises in finding, installing, and using real hacking and penetration testing tools. This free class is open to the public and ASSUMES NO PRIOR BACKGROUND. Complete n00bs are welcomed & encouraged to join.
Go to https://gitter.im/betterangels/buoy and watch for a link to the video conference.
Join us for Lesson 1: HACK EVERYTHING BUT HARM NONE.
What you may think you know about hackers is that they can break into other computers and take over other people's accounts. They can read your email without you knowing. They can look through your web cam without your permission and can see you and hear you in the supposed privacy of your own home. That's not untrue. ;)
Some hackers see network security as just another challenge, so they tinker with ways to trick or fool the system, but really what they're trying to do is out-think the network installers or designers. They discover as much about the network as they can, where it gets its instructions, the rules it uses, and how it interacts with operating systems, the other systems around it, the users who have access to it and the administrators who manage it. Then they use that to try different ways of getting what they want. This kind of hacking can be greatly beneficial to the world for understanding how to be safer and for building even better technology.
In this introductory lesson, we will cover:
The joy of hacking
Benefits of becoming a hacker
Hacking terms and jargon (attack surfaces, exposures, exploits, OPSEC, and more)
Handles, nicks, and nyms
How to Hack: Understanding Trusts and Accesses
The OSSTMM "Four Point Process"
What to Hack: COMMSEC, PHYSEC, SPECSEC
Basics of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
How to find and learn from hacking resources
To prepare for the class, please skim "Hacker Highschool Lesson 1: Being a Hacker" from ISECOM: http://www.hackerhighschool.org/lessons/HHS_en1_Being_a_Hacker.v2.pdf
The Better Angels is an anarchist collective creating liberatory software. Our first project is Buoy, a cop-free alternative to 9-1-1. We are 100% volunteer driven and rely solely on donations. Support our work: https://www.generosity.com/community-fundraising/buoy-empowering-community-based-crisis-response
original post
Despite legalization, new gov report shows cannabis arrests up for Black teens, down for whites
Injustice at the intersection of race, youth, and forced schooling:
> The state report analyzed which schools, specifically, were suspending, expelling, and arresting the most adolescents for marijuana crimes: “The drug suspension rates are lowest in schools with a smaller proportion of minorities … Schools with the highest proportion of minorities have a drug suspension rate 110% higher than schools with the lowest proportion of minorities.”
This is unsurprising and a perfect illustration of why legalization is a neoliberal scam. We support full decriminalization, instead. Pot criminalization was from the very beginning always about further entrenching anti-Black racism and its legalization today paves the way for white people to get rich doing the exact same thing Black people are still being jailed for.
Pair with Colorado's First Black Woman Pot Entrepreneur on Edibles, Incarceration & the Industry's Whiteness.
#racism #marijuana #legalization #decriminalization #neoliberalism #the-law-is-a-weapon-of-the-ruling-class #school-resource-officers-are-child-abusers #police #abolish-the-police
original post
Facebook will work with law enforcement agencies across the country to delete Facebook accounts that belong to inmates to help combat rising smartphone and social media usage within prisons.
Facebook is openly colluding with the prison industrial complex. We deserve better.
Join a WebRTC video conference powered by the Jitsi Videobridge
Join us for a live git tutorial!
State "solutions" to crises rely on a culture of snitching and violent retribution. We're building a replacement. http://buoy.maymay.net/
The guards at a Florida correctional facility beat and starved inmates—and even killed one—but the psychiatric staff was too afraid to speak up.
Mad liberation and prison abolition go hand-in-hand. We hope Buoy contributes to both.
The Better Angels collective is hosting a free, live video training session about how we use git to collaborate on building a cop-free alternative to 9-1-1, called Buoy. This free online class is open to the public. You do not have to be a project contributor to participate.
This event will be on Monday at 5:30pm EDT. More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/930471347066608/
Buoy is a free and open source, decentralized tool designed to quickly connect users with trusted friends, family members, advocates, and other allies in times of need. Buoy is a c…
If you missed our appearance on FLOSS Weekly, you can watch the recording here!
