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Watch What You Tweet
A social worker from New York City was arrested last week while in Pittsburgh for the G-20 protests, then subjected to an FBI raid this week at home -- all for using Twitter. Elliot Madison faces charges of hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. He was posting to a Twitter feed (or tweeting, as it is called) publicly available information about police activities around the G-20 protests, including information about where police had issued orders to disperse.
While alerting people to public information may not seem to be an arrestable offense, be forewarned: Many people have been arrested for the same "crime" -- in Iran, that is.
Last June 20, as Iranians protested against the conduct and results of their national election, President Barack Obama said in a statement, "The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights."
His statement was released in English, Farsi and Arabic and posted on the White House's very own Twitter feed. His tweet read, "We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people."
U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging her to pressure European nations to restrict sales of eavesdropping technology to Iran. They wrote: "Following recent elections, the Iranian government has used a new communications monitoring center to interfere with and suppress Internet and cell phone communications as part of efforts to crackdown on Iranian citizens peacefully demonstrating ... including voice calls, email, text messaging, instant messages, and Web traffic, as well as posts to social networking sites such as Twitter, MySpace and Facebook."
The U.S. State Department, impressed with the importance of Twitter to Iranian protests, asked Twitter to delay system maintenance that might have interrupted the service during the Iranian protests.
While Madison optimistically mused, "I'm expecting the State Department will come out and support us also," his lawyer, respected civil rights attorney Martin Stolar, said: "This is just unbelievable. It is the thinnest, silliest case that I've ever seen. It tends to criminalize support services for people who are involved in lawful protest activity. And it's just shocking that somebody could be arrested for essentially walking next to somebody and saying: 'Hey, don't go down that street, because the police have issued an order to disperse. Stay away from there.'"
Madison, his wife and housemates were roused from sleep during the weekend when the Joint Terrorism Task Force swept into their house, handcuffing them for hours, searching the house and removing computers and other property from everyone in the house. Madison said the FBI "for 16 hours, proceeded to take everything, from plush toys to kitchen magnets and lots of books ... they took Curious George stuffed animals."
Rather than encourage and support the use of distributed, decentralized social networks to strengthen our democracy and dissent (remember, the Obama campaign itself relied extensively on these online and mobile tools), the government seems headed in the opposite direction. Los Angeles Chief of Police William Bratton recently won acclaim at the annual meeting of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a professional organization of police executives representing 63 of the largest cities in the United States and Canada. Bratton has launched "I Watch LA," described as "a community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism." The iWatch program, despite Bratton's assertion otherwise, is about spying on your neighbors and turning them in to the police.
One Iranian twitterer for the virtual news hub Tehran Bureau recalled the June protests in an essay: "An officer spoke to us through a loud speaker: 'Disperse: This is your last warning.' The sight of them made my knees tremble, but the wave pushed on and so I went along." He was beaten, bloodied, arrested and held for 20 days. While Elliot Madison was not physically harmed, his legal battles are just beginning, and his case could prove central to the future of free speech in the mobile, digital age.
It is time for the digital censors here in the U.S. to disperse.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
- Posted in
33 Comments so far
Show AllHow soon until they start disabling wireless forms of communication at these protests?
Re zmann October 7th, 2009 10:03 am, who asks,
"How soon until they start disabling wireless forms of communication at these protests?"
I had thought the system had so many points of redundancy that there was no practical way to "flip a switch and shut it down." Also, if public wireless were capable of being disabled in such a way, wouldn't the cops' communications systems be equally vulnerable?
Somebody who knows, please enlighten me.
Jamming devices are commercially available. They're legally used in some other countries to prevent cell phone use in theaters, restaurants, and etc. It'd be a simple matter to deploy a few on police vehicles and park them near the area of interest.
Re mudbass October 7th, 2009 11:20 am
Thanks for your reply. Not to carp, but I was hoping for a more detailed technical explanation of how the cops could selectively prevent protesters from communicating while not taking down nearby stock tickers, random pacemakers, fire/first aid radios and other "non-target species."
I believe successful jamming is frequency-dependent. Don't cellular networks share their frequency range with other types of devices?
Given the events coming to light from The Pitt, do you think the police really care that they will be screwing the cellphones of 'civilians' (that's how police now refer to citizens)?
Yeah, but not really the range of devices you're thinking of. There's a wide spectrum out there and dissimilar devices tend to shy from similar frequency ranges nowadays, as better digital technology has made footprints smaller.
They could do it very easily. I'm convinced there are already several places here in New York (privately owned) where such technology is already in use on the sly.
""I Watch LA," described as "a community awareness program created to educate the public about behaviors and activities that may have a connection to terrorism." The iWatch program, despite Bratton's assertion otherwise, is about spying on your neighbors and turning them in to the police."
How is this crap, and similar crap in the UK, any different from what happened in East Germany, or Romania, to use a couple examples from the past?
While I have considerable respect for Ms. Goodman, her bringing Iran into her piece is unwarranted. Unlike the US, Iran has seen its democratically elected government overthrown through foreign machinations. It is under threat of attack (US/Israel), and the US occupies Iran's immediate neighbors to the East and West.
Ms. Goodman's comparisons with Iran are gratuitous.
Ms. Goodman was not comparing what happened in Pittsburgh to what happened in Iran. Rather, she was comparing how U.S. politicians and law enforcement officials spoke of the right to free speech and how they spoke of the use of technology by protesters* in the two situations.
___________
* Many of the people who were arrested in Pittsburgh claim that they were not protesting anything at the time of their arrest. Some were just curious to see what was going on. Some were just part of the same crowd that's out on the streets around the University of Pittsburgh on any Friday night.
Correlation does not imply causality.
Your comment is confusing. I think you may have misunderstood.
Amy Goodman's pointing to Obama's interjecting himself into the Iran protests was purely tactical on Obama's part.
OBAMA's intention was to facilitate the protests in Iran BECAUSE it was a democratically-run election. OUR government wants their own guy in there so that they CAN attack.
The protests in Pittsburgh at the G20 summit were not in Obama's grand scheme. Our government only protects the right to assembly when it suits their purposes.
"Madison, his wife and housemates were roused from sleep during the weekend when the Joint Terrorism Task Force swept into their house, handcuffing them for hours, searching the house and removing computers and other property from everyone in the house. Madison said the FBI 'for 16 hours, proceeded to take everything, from plush toys to kitchen magnets and lots of books ... they took Curious George stuffed animals.'"
Change you can believe in. Yup.
Don't let the plush coat and friendly face fool you. Curiousity can lead to thinking, thinking to rebellion... That little monkey is a radical in the making.
Joe
I was listening to a police scanner on Friday Sep 25 when the bulk of the arrests were made. Even while the police were ordering people in Schenley Plaza* to disperse, their tactical commanders were directing officers to close off every escape route. One voice on the radio warned his men, "If you let them get out to Bouquet St., then we'll have to do this all over again somewhere else."
The proscecutor is technically correct. By telling people to avoid areas where the police were giving orders to disperse, Mr. Madison was interfering with the officer's ability to carry out their mission. That is, to entrap and arrest as many people as possible in the streets around the University of Pittsburgh, without regard for why those people were there**.
_______
* A public square that is adjacent to the University of Pittsburgh's main library, some academic buildings, and the student union.
** Some arrestees report being grabbed by the police as they stepped out of restaurants. Some students say they were arrested in the hallways of their own dorms.
i guess only corporations have free speech
Excellent article highlighting the hypocracy of the United States. Gestapo tactics cometh. First they came for the trade unions but I was not a trade unionist, so I did not object...
"... and when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."
I love that quote by "Martin Niemoller, a Protestant Pastor in Nazi Germany.
Yes, it sounds like the Gestapo tactics are already here. Scary.
Amy Goodman, thank you for this article. I read the news on this previously but cannot hear enough about this injustice.
Common Dreams, please keep following this tragic story.
I am outraged as every person should be. And Obama was always who he is now. That's why I did not vote for him.
This would not happen with Dennis Kucinich as President.
So ... Don't sell surveillance equipment to Iran, to help prevent government interference in legal activities? What appear to be mass arrests of people in Pittsburgh walking around in public is OK? I have conservative(really, really conservative) relatives who are worried about the Obama presidency turning into a dictatorship. Unfortunately, they would view this recent police activity as somehow fighting terrorism. I have often commented the Republicans and conservatives in general are more concerned with maintaining "order", than they are about (the rule of) law.
'Tweets' are not free speech.
Free speech is what lobbyists place in the pockets of their CONgressional representatives.
Now go back to your work stations.
To paraphrase "free speech isn't free".
Ms. Goodman, why did you support Obama? You knew he was a McCain/Plain clone. Stop complaining now, it's too late.
In what way has Ms. Goodman supported Obama? Are you actually listening to the same Democracy Now? Are you some kind of agent-provocateur?
She regularly reports news, and invited guests, which are critical of him - including almost regularly, Nader, and did so through his presidential campaign and even before, going back to least his DNC keynote speech in 2004. Indeed, DN was the most reliable source for deconstructing Obama's campaign.
Yes. Unlike many others we love (Maddow, sometimes Olbermann), Amy Goodman runs a news show, not an opinion show. Her guests do have opinions, however. Very few people seem able to tell the difference anymore between opinion/commentary and news reporting.
Look around the Common Dreams site and you will see Uncle Charlie posting the same comment on any article that is critical of Obama.
Oh, for crying out loud, let all who voted for 0bama join in a rising chorus of complaint!
(I seem to have missed this moment in Ms Goodman's programming, BTW.)
Has this been one of several attempts-- including your arrest Amy--by the gov't to expose us to the police state of the future? To make us more and more uncomfortable about practicing our civil rights? To get us Americans afraid of being sent off to homemade government interment camps? Can't help wondering how bad it will get for us. A dirty war like Chile's? You, too, can become desparecidos, folks. The US knows all about these things-- right, Mr. Kissinger?
Be afraid, be very afraid.
There is no threat of that.
Too many people don't seem to understand that we citizens are not the media's customers, we are it's product which the media sells to its actual clients - corporate advertizers.
Pursuant to this, the modern mass media has immersed all of us in a continuum - a cognitive sea - where all our seemingly independent desires and aspirations are carefully manfactured and calibrated to meet the needs of their corporate advertizers. And increasinlgy, the advertizers are increasingly just the parent companies of the media corporations themselves. And popular power runs directly against their interests!
A similar, parallel effort, albeit a bit cruder is applied to those who are supposed to be serving our interests in Government, with similar success.
This is not science fiction, it was all designed by brilliant minds in the early 20th century like Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman, who saw the threat of a populace who might take democracy seriously.
So, to answer your question, it is unlikely that such crude measures as Pinochet's or the Argentine Junta's will ever be needed again. Aside from tiny, little-reported distrubances like Pittsburgh's, the methods of thought control in modern democracies have been perfected.
Sioux Rose
PJD: I wouldn't be so confident, if I were you. VIOLENCE on the part of the uniformed guards IS taking place at otherwise peaceful protests. And as for the parallel with Chile, doesn't it seem that the senseless wars in the Middle East, added to the giveaway to bankers have so bankrupt the US treasury that similar program cutbacks, like those practiced throughout much of South America under "neo-liberalism" supposedly to bring down those nations' debts so they could benefit from World Bank loans, TARGETED the very programs citizens rely most upon? The parallels are striking. How violent it will get is yet to be seen. The more people go hungry, lose their jobs and homes and previous identities, the greater the sparks available to ignite the ignition switch of aggression.
The many TV shows that provide viewers with an entertaining means to spy on persons, many involved in inordinately compromised (Cops/Survivor) positions, have desensitized millions of citizens to the very premise of privacy. The hate being drummed up by the ubiquitous right wing media voices is not emptying into a vacuum.
While I agree that a lot of programming is passive, intended to retain obedient consumers and a zombie-like work force, in the final analysis (which has yet to come down the pike), that is NOT the whole story. There is ample cause for fearing the worst, and it's likely to happen as the MSM is relaying an illusion of the exact opposite.
I wish I didn't, but I can't help seeing your words as those of a cock-eyed optimist. I've sensed something sinister about our government's treatment of its citizens ever since participating in the first anti-Iraq war march in D.C. Call it paranoia, call it paranormal, but it's in my gut to stay until our Constitutional rights are restored.
Our attention is the product media sells - that's a good observation, and Bernays and Lippman are good sources, as you obviously know.
However, I don't see that as any indication that Pinochetismo has become outdated. Sadly, the evidence that our self-appointed keepers agree has become rather strong.
Check out the fresh crop of new crowd control weapons just christened at Pittsburg.
Control of large numbers of people - like a population - involves various levels of coercion and manipulation. Certainly the elites prefer to not have to assault people. Pinochet preferred obedience to coercion, too. Coercing people raises the state's overhead. It ties up the resources of the coercer and it pretty thoroughly eliminates any real cooperation on the part of the coerced.
However, not everyone quaffs the Kool-Aid. You, for example, seem set against it. The US currently holds more and less secret prisoners. It currently tortures some of them. Some are US citizens. Some are legal residents. Some are foreigners caught within the United States. Some are citizens of foreign countries kidnapped abroad.
It does this at the same time it practices a descendent of the techniques recommended by Lippman and Bernays. It uses the propaganda to cover the torture and the desaparacidos, and it uses the torture to protect the propaganda as well.
Not only is the threat in place, it has been executed.
djb they will by the end of this scotus session!
Just goes to show that those that work for these organizations against the people are literally total scumbags.
Let's see? In the US torture by police and soldiers is legal and tweeting is a crime? Got it!