Law and Disorder

September 14, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

50th Anniversary Of The Attica Prison Uprising; and Stevens Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice by Bruce Levine

September 9th marks the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising and the subsequent massacre by New York State police and prison guards. The rebellion at Attica prison, a medieval looking place near Buffalo New York, began on September 9, 1971 and ended four days later with governor Nelson Rockefeller, and aspiring presidential candidate, ordering the massacre. It resulted in the most people ever killed in a civil setting in the history of the USA. The rebellion was inspiring to many around the country and around the world in that it represented a growing movement fighting for prisoners and human rights. Guest " attorney Michael Deutsch from the Peoples Law Office in Chicago. He along with the late attorney Elizabeth Fink were the main lawyers for the Attica brothers.

The 1861 to 1865 Civil War and the reconstruction period which followed it is widely considered to be the second American revolution. The promise of the declaration of independence that all men are equal before the law was fulfilled, at least for a while. Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens was the foremost political leader in the struggle, even more than Abraham Lincoln. Guest " Bruce Levine, emeritus professor of history at the University Illinois and the author of four previous books on the Civil War era.

September 7, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

Alison Cornyn: The Incorrigibles; and Surveillance State and Tor

People in America are currently living through multiple crises. The economy is in tatters with unemployment very high. The health situation is a disaster and the educational system has been ravaged, underfunded, inflicted with charter schools. How does this affect young people? And especially rebellious teenage girls? What laws apply to young people? How are they treated in a criminal justice system, historically and currently. Guest " Alison Cornyn, is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, activist, and educator. She has focused her career on social justice issues.

As computer technology has evolved and communications providers have profited, law enforcement and government intelligence organizations increasingly lobby to mandate that data services be engineered to allow them back door access to encrypted data. Years ago, many considered TOR, software that enables anonymous communication, to be equivalent to the Dark Net. After Edward Snowdens massive data release, however, TOR use in the last year has grown quickly. Guest " Shari Steele, Executive Director of the Tor Project. As the former director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Shari built it into the nations preeminent digital rights organization.

August 31, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

David Gilbert Granted Clemency; Remembering The Life Of Glen Ford; and American Spring: Unfolding Crisis

David Gilbert was granted clemency by Governor Cuomo on August 23, 2021. David had served 40 years in almost every maximum-security prison in the state of New York. He had been sentenced to 75 years to life for his role as a getaway driver in the infamous 1980 Brinks armored truck robbery in in Rockland County. He was convicted of felony murder, though he didn't shoot anybody.

Glen Ford died last July 28 of lung cancer. I first met him in 2014 after a speech that he gave at Harlem's Riverside Church church on the occasion of the 7th anniversary of the Black Agenda Report of which he was the executive editor. That night he spoke about what he called the Black misleadership class, a description he coined, and how it was an enemy of the movement. Glen was the real thing. A Black nationalist and a socialist, as he described himself. He was a former Black Panther and usually wore a black beret when he spoke.

The Chinese word for crisis consists of two characters. One means danger, the other means opportunity. We currently are in an historically unprecedented situation fraught with both danger and possibilities. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin once remarked that sometimes nothing happens in decades and other times decades happen in a few weeks. This is our situation now. We see an American spring unfolding. The public lynching of George Floyd has triggered massive outpourings in several thousands of American cities, both large and small. Black Lives Matter is supported by a majority of Americans including a majority of whites

August 24, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

“I Have Nothing to Hide” and 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy; and Julian Assange Update: Attorney Marjorie Cohn

Should we give up our privacy all together because we think we have nothing to hide? This is the perhaps the most pervasive of the myths about surveillance and privacy that Heidi Boghosian explores in her new book titled I Have Nothing to Hide and 20 Other Myths About Surveillance and Privacy. Other popular misconceptions detailed in the book include the notion that surveillance makes the nation safer, no one wants to spy on kids, police don't monitor social media, metadata doesn't reveal much about me, Congress and the courts protect us from surveillance, and there's nothing I can do to stop surveillance. Guest - Attorney Heidi Boghosian is a New York City attorney, activist, and nonprofit director.

The Julian Assange case is the most important civil liberties first amendment freedom to write/freedom to learn case of our times. Democracy cannot thrive without a free press that watches over the government and tells the truth. The government wants secrecy. We need transparency. Julian Assange was a young Australian computer genius when he figured out a way for whistle blowers to reveal truths of government corruption, duplicity, and war crimes. Whistleblowers could report these things with anonymity. WikiLeaks, of which Assange is founder and publisher, exposed the secrets and lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, the murderous role of the Pentagon in dozens of countries, the blueprint for the 20-year catastrophe in Afghanistan, the attempts by Washington to overthrow elected governments such as Venezuela's. Guest - Attorney Marjorie Cohn is a retired constitutional law professor from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. She is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild

August 17, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World; and Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America

In 1948 the Security Council approved a secret directive, NSC 10/2, authorizing the CIA to carry out an array of covert operations. This essentially allowed the CIA to become a paramilitary organization. Before he died, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and Cold War strategist who sponsored the directive said that in light of latter history, it was the greatest mistake I ever made. Guest " Douglas Valentine, author of The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World.

The spectacle of President Donald Trump and the palace intrigue in the White House has served daily to distract people from the political strategy and accomplishments of the radical right, which is taking over the Republican Party. The GOP has been transformed into operation conducting a concerted effort to curb democratic rule in favor of capitalist interests in every branch of government, whatever the consequences. It is marching ever closer to the ultimate goal of reshaping the Constitution to protect monied interests. This gradual take over of a major political party happened steadily, over several decades, and often in plain sight. Guest " Professor Nancy MacLean, whose new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Rights Stealth Plan for America, has been described by Publishers Weekly as a thoroughly researched and gripping narrative [and] a feat of American intellectual and political history.

August 10, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

50th Anniversary Of The Attica Prison Uprising; and Cuban Uprising: Analysis

September 9th marks the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising and the subsequent massacre by New York State police and prison guards. The rebellion at Attica prison, a medieval looking place near Buffalo New York, began on September 9, 1971 and ended four days later with governor Nelson Rockefeller, and aspiring presidential candidate, ordering the massacre. It resulted in the most people ever killed in a civil setting in the history of the USA. The rebellion was inspiring to many around the country and around the world in that it represented a growing movement fighting for prisoners and human rights. Guest - attorney Michael Deutsch from the Peoples Law Office in Chicago.

The Cuban revolution of 1959 was a blow to the American empire from which it has never recovered. The Cuban revolution was basically a nationalist one. It has been the 61 year policy of USA to destroy and reverse the revolution by setting up a economic financial and commercial blockade of the island. The American policy was cruel and intentionally set out to cause suffering and misery. In this thing have succeeded. Protests broke out on July 11. The protesters were Cuban workers fed up with their terrible conditions, intellectuals protesting restrictions, and American paid for counterrevolutionaries seeking to destabilize the government. Guest - Arnold August is a Canadian journalist who has traveled often to Cuba and has written three books on the subject including his latest, Cuba " US relations: Obama and Beyond.

August 3, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

Project YANO, JROTC, and Textbook Project; and Freedom House 2021 Report: Democracy Under Siege

The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps, or JROTC, is a federal program sponsored by the US Armed Forces in high schools and some middle schools across the nation and at US military bases globally. It currently teaches its lessons to more than half a million students in approximately 3,400 high schools nationwide. In recent years, the military and its supporters have been promoting the idea of a significant increase in the number of high schools with JROTC. Because of this, one nonprofit decided it was time to examine the textbooks used in JROTC classes to see what they are teaching. Guest - Rick Jahnkow, a co-founder and board member of Project YANO.

Freedom House, a nonprofit organization founded in 1941, assigns a grade to countries based on how free they are. In 1973, it began using social science analysis methods to assess the level of freedom by nation, attaching a numerical score and ranking them as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free. The 2021 report, Democracy Under Seige noted that the pandemic, combined with economic and physical insecurity along with violent conflict, struck a heavy blow to defenders of democracy. It shifted the international balance in favor of tyranny. Guest - Sarah Repucci, Vice President of Research & Analysis at Freedom House.

July 27, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

Charges Dropped Against Pipeline Activists; and Continued Erosion Of Voting Rights In The United States

The climate movement won a significant victory on July 13 when all charges were dropped against 16 pipeline protesters and a journalist. The local district attorney in Saint Martinsville, Louisiana rejected all criminal charges and vowed not to prosecute them for alleged violations of Louisianas anti-protest amendments to their critical infrastructure law. The Bayou Bridge pipeline is the tail end of the infamous 1172 mile long Dakota access pipeline which brings dirty oil from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico. Guest - Attorney Pam Spees, one of the team of attorneys that handled the criminal defense case.

We are in the middle of a second great disenfranchisement in America. The first was after the Civil War reconstruction ended and Black people were stripped of their right to vote and their ability to hold office. This disenfranchisement lasted almost 100 years until the modern civil rights movement of the 1960s. Legislatures in Republican run states are imposing new voting restrictions particularly on non-white voters. The Brennan Center found that as of June 20th, 17 states enacted 28 new laws restricting the ability to vote since the start of the year. Guest - Marjorie Cohn, professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law where she taught from 1991-2016, and a former president of the National Lawyers Guild.

July 20, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

Source For The Intercept Outed, Faces 10 Years In Prison; and Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program And Persistent Tracking

In 2019 the Department of Justice indicted Daniel Hale"a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Air Force and NSA"for giving classified national defense information to Jeremy Scahill for the online publication The Intercept. The events in question took place between 2013 and 2015. In late March, Daniel pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Espionage Act, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Many have criticized the Intercept for its failure of source protection. Guest - William Neuheisel, the Development and Program Manager for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, (WHISPeR), at ExposeFacts.

As the nation erupts in protests against racially-infused police violence, the Baltimore Police Department has just launched a six-month, day-time aerial surveillance experiment. A Texas billionaire has funded the project. The plane flies overhead and records the movements of everyone in the city. Michael Harrison, Baltimore Police Commissioner, has justified the nearly $4 million experiment by saying, There is no expectation of privacy on a public street, a sidewalk. Guest " ACLU Senior Staff attorney David Rocah has worked on a number of significant cases involving free speech, police misconduct, privacy, election law and more.

July 13, 2021 National, News & Public Affairs

Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim by Professor Richard Falk; and In Defense of Whistleblowers: Attorney Sarah Alexander

If we are ever to have a world not threatened by catastrophic climate change and devastating nuclear war we will need a world governed by respect for the rule of law, democracy, and the democratic right of peoples to self- determination. After the World War II, the United Nations was established in 1945 in an effort to prevent future wars. In this it has failed. Michael Ratner, a founder of Law And Disorder Radio and who practiced human rights law internationally, used to say that you cannot have imperialism abroad and democracy at home. Guest - International Law Professor Richard Falk who is still teaching and going strong at age 90. He has recently had published his magnificent memoir titled Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim. Professor Falk is a leading international law professor, prominent activist, public author, and a pioneer thinker dedicated to peace and justice.

James Glenn was working for NetDesign, a Cisco Systems reseller in Denmark when he came across a vulnerability in software made for a line of Cisco's video surveillance cameras. The flaw made it easy for would-be hackers to access the systems running the devices and to penetrate the systems on a deeper level. Glenn learned the cameras and software were still being used by the Los Angeles International Airport in 2010. He spoke with law enforcement personnel about his concerns regarding LAX. Cisco failed to fix the vulnerability until an updated version of the software was released in 2012. It took the company 3 more years to release a security advisory to companies using the flawed version of the software. Whistleblowers frequently lose their jobs and suffer significant personal hardships as a result of coming forward on behalf of the publics interest. Guest - Attorney Sarah Poppy Alexander of the law firm Constantine, Cannon. Poppy represents whistleblowers and government entities in so called qui tam lawsuits in both federal and state court, as well as under the IRS and Securities and Exchange Commissions whistleblower programs.