Rand Corp. Studies Militarized “Stability Police”

The RAND Corporation, one of the most prolific research arms of the Military-Industrial-Homeland Security Complex, has released a study entitled A Stability Police Force for the United States: Justification and Creating U.S. Capabilities.

See .PDF Report: Here

The SPFOR (to use the inevitable acronym) would be a “hybrid” military/law enforcement unit created within the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) for use “in a range of tasks such as crowd and riot control, special weapons and tactics (SWAT), and investigations of organized criminal groups” — both abroad, in UN-directed multilateral military operations, and at home, as dictated by the needs of the government.

Initially as small as 2–6,000 personnel, the SPFOR’s size “could be increased by augmenting it with additional federal, state, or local police from the United States” as necessary.

The RAND study, which was conducted for the U.S. Army’s Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute, recommended using the Marshals Service rather than the US Army’s Military Police as host for the SPFOR in order to avoid conflicts with the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids (albeit in principle more than in practice) the domestic use of the military as a law enforcement body.

“The USMS hybrid option … provides an important nondeployed mission for the force: augmenting state and local agencies, many of which currently suffer from severe personnel shortages,” states the report without explaining how the SPFOR could at once “augment” those under-manned agencies while at the same time being “augmented” by them if necessary.

That little lapse in logic is one of several indications that the report’s authors weren’t so much addressing a “problem” as making a case for a preordained “solution” — in this case, creating the vanguard of a militarized internal security force.

Building the SPFOR within the Marshals Service “would place it where its members can develop the needed skills under the hybrid staffing option,” summarizes the document. “Furthermore, the USMS has the broadest law enforcement mandate of any U.S. law enforcement agency…. [This model] provides significant domestic policing and homeland security benefits by providing thousands of additional police officers across the United States.” (Emphasis added.)

Back in 1961, the U.S. Government produced a document entitled “Freedom From War” that envisioned the creation of a globe-spanning United Nations “Peace Force” that would work in collaboration with a militarized “internal security” force in each country. Since that time, critics of the UN have anticipated the day when foreign “peacekeepers” would be assigned to police American streets and, if necessary, confiscate privately owned firearms.

While the monstrosity headquartered on the East River is a proper target of our scorn and hostility, the new RAND study underscores the fact that if “peacekeepers” end up patrolling American streets, they probably won’t be foreigners in blue berets, but homegrown jackboots commanded by Washington.

Secret Copyright Treaty Leaked

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. And It’s bad, It says:

* That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

H/T @miccolis, @ilabra & @exposur3

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The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together

From EFF.org:

Negotiations on the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement start in a few hours in Seoul, South Korea. This week’s closed negotiations will focus on “enforcement in the digital environment.” Negotiators will be discussing the Internet provisions drafted by the US government. No text has been officially released but as Professor Michael Geist and IDG are reporting, leaks have surfaced. The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations. The Internet provisions have nothing to do with addressing counterfeit products, but are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet, including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies, and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.

As expected, the Internet provisions will go beyond existing international treaty obligations and follow the language of Article 18.10.30 of the recent U.S. – South Korea Free Trade Agreement. We see three points of concern.

First, according to the leaks, ACTA member countries will be required to provide for third-party (Internet Intermediary) liability. This is not required by any of the major international IP treaties – not by the 1994 Trade Related Aspects of IP agreement, nor the WIPO Copyright and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty. However, US copyright owners have long sought this. (For instance, see page 19 of the Industry Functional Advisory Committee report on the 2003 US- Singapore Free Trade Agreement noting the need for introducing a system of ISP liability). (Previously available at http://www.ustr.gov/new/fta/Singapore/advisor_reports.htm.)

Second and more importantly, ACTA will include some limitations on Internet Intermediary liability. Many ACTA negotiating countries already have these regimes in place: the US, EU, Australia, Japan, South Korea. To get the benefit of the ACTA safe harbors, Internet intermediaries will need to follow notice and takedown regimes, and put in place policies to deter unauthorized storage and transmission of allegedly copyright infringing content.

Read the rest here

Police Seek Portable Pain Weapon

Portable Microwave Pain Inducing Weapon

THE Pentagon’s efforts to develop a beam weapon that can deter an adversary by causing a burning sensation on their skin has taken a step forward with the development of a small, potentially hand-held, version. The weapon, which is claimed to cause no permanent harm, could also end up being used by police to control civilians.

The idea of the weapon is to “create a heating sensation that repels individual adversaries”, according to the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, which develops less-lethal weapons for the US military and coastguard.

Tests with a rifle-mounted infrared laser, carried out at a US air force lab near Dayton, Ohio, have determined a combination of laser pulse power and wavelength that causes an alarming, hot sensation on the skin, but which stops short of causing a burn, says JNLWD project engineer Wesley Burgei.

“We have established the minimum irradiance to cause a sensation and have characterised where thermal injury begins,” he says. “But the exact operating irradiance which balances a useful military effect with a conservative margin of safety has not been nailed down yet.”

That’s something that will have to be done before the weapon is deployed, as too powerful a laser beam could permanently blind someone if fired at their eyes. Weapons that do this are banned under the UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.

Burgei says it is possible to create a beam that will affect the skin without damaging the cornea, and do so at a wavelength that does not penetrate to the retina “and would therefore be retina safe”.

The JNLWD says that tests at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s human effectiveness lab have established that the skin heating effect causes no permanent damage – suggesting it may have “military utility”. The tests also highlighted areas in need of improvement before troops can use it, says lab manager Semih Kumru – though what those features are has not been revealed.

The proposed system is rifle mounted, with a sight above it and a visible low-power laser beam that the soldier uses to aim the invisible infrared laser. The solid-state laser system is battery-powered, and could become hand-held “in the near future”, Burgei says.

The weapon, which has been evolving since 2005, is officially known at the Pentagon as the Thermal Laser System. The US National Institute of Justice, which is also funding the weapon’s development in the hope that it may prove useful for the police, refers to it as the IR-Lesslethal device.

The Pentagon already has a large crowd control weapon called the Active Denial System that can heat whole groups of people, causing them to flee. It uses a flat-plate antenna mounted on a truck or aircraft to aim a 2-metre-wide microwave beam at the crowd.

Like all supposedly non-lethal weapons that could be used to control civilians, the Pentagon’s new portable weapon is raising concerns. “I’d like to know why they want another advanced pain compliance weapon like this,” says Steve Wright, non-lethal weapons analyst at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK. “Persuading by pain rather than brain – through conversation – has led to push-button torture in the past. If it leaves no mark on the skin how will anyone prove it’s been abused?”

Militarization of Law Enforcement

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One of the most alarming side effects of the federal government’s war on drugs is the militarization of law enforcement in America. There are two aspects to the militarization phenomenon. First, the American tradition of civil-military separation is breaking down as Congress assigns more and more law enforcement responsibilities to the armed forces. Second, state and local police officers are increasingly emulating the war-fighting tactics of soldiers. Most Americans are unaware of the militarization phenomenon simply because it has been creeping along imperceptibly for many years. To get perspective, it will be useful to consider some recent events:

The U.S. military played a role in the Waco incident. In preparation for their disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound, federal law enforcement agents were trained by Army Special Forces at Fort Hood, Texas. And Delta Force commanders would later advise Attorney General Janet Reno to insert gas into the compound to end the 51-day siege. Waco resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths ever arising from a law enforcement operation.1

Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of Defense gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired 600 Army surplus M-16s. Even small-town police departments are getting into the act. The seven-officer department in Jasper, Florida, is now equipped with fully automatic M-16s.2

In 1996 President Bill Clinton appointed a military commander, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, to oversee enforcement of the federal drug laws as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.3

Since the mid-1990s U.S. Special Forces have been going after drug dealers in foreign countries. According to the U.S. Southern Command, American soldiers occupy three radar sites in Colombia to help monitor drug flights. And Navy SEALs have assisted in drug interdiction in the port city of Cap-Haitien, Haiti.4

The U.S. Marine Corps is now patrolling the Mexican border to keep drugs and illegal immigrants out of this country. In 1997 a Marine anti-drug patrol shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez as he was tending his family’s herd of goats on private property. The Justice Department settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the Hernandez family for $1.9 million. 5 … Continue Reading

Iranian Cops out of Control

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Here we see a young man being harassed by members of the Iranian Police, a victim of police brutality.

They cut his hair, burn his hair, and he gets a slap in the face somewhere in this short video.

It just leaves me wondering what he may have looked like upon his final release, it appears that the cop on the right started to partially restrain the cop on the left after he started burning the prisoners hair, it seemed as if the police were in some way offended by the prisoners “appearance”

To me this looks like cops out of control, but over there?, who knows, behavior like this may be common practice.