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May 16th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
Information is power, and when access to information is unbalanced, so is power.
Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice wrote this week about the use of technology to surveil communities, especially black communities, to suppress dissidence and the use of technology by those communities to watch back. This is one reason why protecting net neutrality is a fundamental struggle. Cyril concludes with “The open internet can represent the future of digital democracy, or we can use technology to continue encoding inequality into our modern world.”
Violating our civil rights
Technology is being used in many ways to suppress dissent. Censorship of social media for political purposes is one method. Justin Raimondo discovered that Twitter is censoring his tweets as “sensitive content.” We’ve experienced this twice this month in which Facebook removed event pages for actions without notice or explanation (one was for an action protesting the FCC’s attack on net neutrality).
Raimondo reveals that academics are promoting the idea of censorship on the Internet. This is exactly why we need net neutrality – it prevents both the government and corporations from discriminating against legal content.
Another method is mass surveillance using facial recognition software. Researchers at the Georgetown University Law School have a project called “The Perpetual Lineup” to study the use and regulation of facial recognition technology. Their study found “one in every two American adults is enrolled in a criminal face recognition network and that ‘few agencies have instituted meaningful protections to prevent the misuse of the technology.’” This week they filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department for its failure to release information about its facial recognition system.
A lawsuit was also filed this week by the ACLU against the sheriff’s department in Madison County Mississippi because “Deputies routinely set up vehicular roadblocks and pedestrian ‘checkpoints’ around black neighborhoods, where they carry out ‘intrusive, pretextual, and suspicionless searches and seizures.’” These practices occur throughout the United States. In Ferguson, MO, young activists with the Black Lives Matter movement are dying. Edward Crawford, who died on May 4, is the third activist to be found shot in his car. He is known for the iconic photo of him throwing a teargas canister back towards police.
This week US Attorney General Jeff Sessions “issued a memo ordering Justice Department staff to charge criminal suspects – specifically low-level, non-violent drug offenders – with the most severe crime possible and pursue the toughest sentences allowed.” Tighe Barry, who was arrested while protesting the confirmation of Sessions, describes more ways that Sessions is dismantling progress made in civil rights. And Robert Weissman of Public Citizen criticizes Sessions for going after vulnerable people while he ignores corporate criminals.
We can anticipate a rise in the prison population, which benefits private prison corporations like CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America). Project South with the Penn State Law Center for Immigrants Rights released a report outlining the serious human rights abuses at two CoreCivic prisons in Georgia.
Fight for our rights to a future
There are also ways to suppress dissent through economic measures. The student debt crisis is one that shackles our youth and their adult supporters to a life of financial servitude. Michael Corcoran’s excellent interview with Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice describes the predatory nature of the student loan industry and the harm it causes. The best solution to this crisis is a student debt jubilee.
College students turned their backs and booed Betsy DeVos, the current Secretary of Education who favors profiteering off of students through charter schools, when she spoke at Bethune-Cookman University, an historically black institution. They saw through her facade of concern to her destructive policies. This new report on charter schools in Chicago “confirms what many charter critics have long said, that lobbying from pro-privatization forces swayed the city’ political leaders to impose top-down reforms that riled neighborhoods, undermined traditional K-12 schools, increased segregation and did not lead to schools with better academic results.”
IGOR BOBIC / HUFFPOST
Health care is another area where profits come before people’s lives. Representative Tom MacArthur is the author of the amendment that made it possible for the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to pass in the House. This week, MacArthur held a tightly-controlled town hall. His constituents grilled him for hours on health care and at times drowned him out with shouts for single payer.
The AHCA has a ways to go before it becomes law and there is strong opposition to it for many reasons. One reason is the removal of protections for people with pre-existing conditions. When journalist Dan Heyman tried to question Health Secretary Tom Price about that, he was arrested for being ‘disruptive.’ Adam Gaffney explains why we should be fighting for nothing short of a National Improved Medicare for All single payer healthcare system. To join the campaign for National Improved Medicare for All, visit HealthOverProfit.org.
The United States is also headed the wrong way on dealing with the climate crisis. The Trump administration is considering withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty. This week activists protested at the Trump Hotel in Washington, DC and at the EPA to demand that the US not only stay in the treaty but also that stronger measures are taken to reduce carbon emissions. And environmental groups continue to fight the censorship of climate science on government websites. Now they are using the Freedom of Information Act.
Fights to stop fossil fuel projects continue. Front line community members attended a Dominion shareholder meeting in Richmond, VA this week to let investors know about their concerns over the hazards of Dominion’s projects. Residents of Cove Point in Maryland, where a fracked gas refinery and export terminal are under construction in a residential neighborhood, put Dominion CEO Tom Farrell on the defensive when they inquired about major safety concerns at the facility. They are demanding a formal safety study and a halt to construction until it is determined that it appropriate for the facility to be built there. Visit WeAreCovePoint.org to learn more.
Equal Access to Information
By Eleanor Goldfield.
At the heart of our work for justice is the need for access to information so that we know what is happening in our communities and our country. That access is threatened by the new FCC Chair Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer. He and FCC commissioner Mike O’Reilly have been openly calling for an end to net neutrality. O’Reilly asked ALEC for help in achieving it.
Not only is Pai actively working to take net neutrality away, but he is also allowing media mergers in an already highly monopolistic market. FAIR reports that the FCC allowed Sinclair Broadcasting to purchase Tribune Media, which gives it access to 69% of homes in the country (the previous limit was 39%). This appears to be a direct political favor by the Trump administration for positive coverage by Sinclair outlets during the campaign. Michael Corcoran calls media consolidation a threat to democracy.
Taking away net neutrality will allow similar media consolidation to accelerate on the Internet. The Internet is a highly democratized platform, but that will be undermined if its classification as a common carrier is taken away. Chairman Pai plans to start the process of dismantling net neutrality this Thursday at the public meeting. Popular Resistance is pressuring Pai to back down.
We delivered hundreds of door hangers to his neighbors letting them know what was happening and followed that up with a vigil outside his house on May 14. The response has been positive with neighbors joining the vigil and offering their bathrooms to vigilers. The vigil will continue each evening through Wednesday and Thursday morning we will sit-in at the FCC before the meeting to express opposition to dismantling net neutrality.
In 2014, we occupied the FCC prior to its public meeting to put net neutrality on the table. Now is the critical time to keep it off the chopping block. Join us in Washington, DC if you can. And if you can’t, please use this tool to let Chairman Pai know that you support an open and equal Internet.
Source Article from https://popularresistance.org/newsletter-information-is-power/
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