Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Google has been asked by a US law enforcement agency to remove several videos exposing police brutality from the video sharing service YouTube

Class warfare indeed...........  Elites are classless 1% and classy are the other 99%.

https://rt.com/news/google-report-police-brutality-767/
Excerpt:
Google has been asked by a US law enforcement agency to remove several videos exposing police brutality from the video sharing service YouTube, the company has revealed in its latest update to an online transparency report.
Another request filed by a different agency required Google to remove videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. The two requests were among 92 submissions for content removal by various authorities in the US filed between January and June 2011. Both were rejected by Google along with 27 per cent of the submissions.
The IT giant says the overall number of requests for content removal it receives from governmental agencies has risen, and so has the number of requests to disclose the private data of Google users.
Brazil heads the first list with 224 separate demands to remove a total of 689 items from its search results, as well as from YouTube and various other services. Google says its social networking service Orkut is very popular in the Latin American country, which partially explains the number of requests.
Heading the list of countries requesting the disclosure of personal data is the United States, where a total of 5,950 submissions targeting 11,057 user accounts have been filed. Google fully or partially complied with 93 per cent of those requests. Second on the list is India, with 1,732 requests over a six-month period.
Russian officials filed fewer than 10 requests to remove content and 42 requests to disclose user information (which was the first time the number reached Google’s threshold for reporting). The company complied with 75 per cent of the Russian requests concerning content and none of those concerning user data.
Google says it hopes that its report will contribute to the ongoing public discussion on the ways the internet needs to be regulated.
Commenting on the incident, Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, points out that YouTube is a public platform and any steps to censor it should be backed with a court order.
Police seem to be advising Google on what material might be breaking the law, and then Google decides to censor this material without a court order,” he said, stressing that a court appearance should be part of making such judgments.
Ultimately, public media seem to becoming more of a police tool to gather evidence. Killock recalled British Prime Minister David Cameron urging the news outlets to hand over material collected during the UK riots – both published and unpublished – to the police.
It completely compromises the freedom of the media,” Kilock told RT.

embed video

http://www.codepinkalert.org/article.php?id=5987
Excerpt:

http://gothamist.com/2010/05/27/protesters_plan_to_occupy_bp_statio.php
Excerpt:

Protesters Plan to Occupy BP Station on Houston Friday Night

If you're feeling a need to vent about this whole oil spill nightmare, there's some direct action protest planned for Friday night at the BP station on Houston Street between Broadway and Lafayette. According to this Facebook event, the progressive activist group Code Pink has a hand in organizing the demonstration, set for 6 p.m. "on the Friday before Memorial Day, as the good citizens of New York gather to gas up for a three day weekend, we will direct their business AWAY from BP." For you convenience, there are two protest options: night in the Tombs or night out of the Tombs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Excerpt:
The Bonus Army was the popular name of an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers—17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C., in the spring and summer of 1932 to demand immediate cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Its organizers called it the Bonus Expeditionary Force to echo the name of World War I's American Expeditionary Force, while the media called it the Bonus March. It was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_bullet
Excerpt:
Rubber bullets are rubber or rubber-coated projectiles that can be fired from either standard firearms or dedicated riot guns. They are intended to be a non-lethal alternative to metal projectiles. Like other similar projectiles made from plastic, wax, and wood, rubber bullets may be used for short range practice and animal control, but are most commonly associated with use in riot control and to disperse protests.[1][2][3] These types of projectiles are more correctly called baton rounds.[4] Rubber projectiles have largely been replaced by other materials as rubber tends to bounce uncontrollably.[5]
Such "kinetic impact munitions" are meant to cause pain but not serious injury. They are expected to produce contusions, abrasions, and hematomas.[6] However, they may cause bone fractures, injuries to internal organs, or death. In a study of 90 patients in Northern Ireland, one died, 17 suffered permanent disabilities or deformities and 41 required hospital treatment after being fired upon with rubber bullets.[7]

http://www.truth-out.org/occupy-wall-streets-battle-against-american-style-authoritarianism/1319570241
Excerpt:

Occupy Wall Street's Battle Against American-Style Authoritarianism

by: Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis

Occupy Wall Street, Liberty Park, New York, October 10, 2011. (Photo: DoctorTongs)
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.
        -Theodor Adorno

The Occupy Wall Street movement is raising new questions about an emerging form of authoritarianism in the United States, one that threatens the collective survival of vast numbers of people, not through overt physical injury or worse, but through an aggressive assault on social provisions that millions of Americans depend on. For those pondering the meaning of the pedagogical and political challenges being addressed by the protesters, it might be wise to revisit a classic essay by German sociologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno titled "Education After Auschwitz," in which he tries to grapple with the relationship between education and morality in light of the horrors perpetrated in the name of authoritarianism and its industrialization of death.[1]
Adorno's essay, first published in 1967, asserted that the demands and questions raised by Auschwitz had barely penetrated the consciousness of peoples' minds such that the conditions that made it possible continued, as he put it, "largely unchanged." Mindful that the societal pressures that produced the Holocaust had far from receded in post-war Germany, and that under such circumstances this act of barbarism could easily be repeated in the future, Adorno argued that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible.[2] For Adorno, the need for a general public to come to grips with the challenges arising from the reality of Auschwitz was both a political question and a crucial educational consideration. Realizing that education before and after Auschwitz in Germany was separated by an unbridgeable chasm, Adorno wanted to invoke the promise of education through the moral and political imperative of never allowing the genocide witnessed at Auschwitz to be repeated.
For such a goal to become meaningful and realizable, Adorno contended that education had to be addressed as both an emancipatory promise and a democratic project

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