A smartphone app which has been on our radar screen for the past year is now available in Spanish with new features and to a whole new audience: undocumented immigrants who may need help before, during and after a raid from ICE. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

The app, called Cell 411 is a smartphone app available for both Android and iOS platforms; it allows users to organize themselves in regional “cells” or groups which are decentralized and managed by the users themselves. The cells can have as little as 2 members and as many as 1,000 members or more, allowing users who are in distress to alerts the rest of the cell of the nature of their problem and the exact location of where they need help.  When sending out an alert, the users’s GPS coordinates are broadcast to their trusted friends and cell members with turn by turn direction to their location.  This allows in essence for the crowd-sourcing of emergencies without the involvement of police, which are often not trusted by communities of immigrants and minorities.

The startup, Cell 411 Inc. was founded by Virgil Vaduva, who is an immigrant himself, after being arrested during an anti-police brutality protest after which he had no means to alert his family and friends of what happened and his whereabouts. The app was built as a decentralized means of helping communities and neighborhoods organize themselves to offer each other mutual aid in case of emergencies without asking for assistance from government, police and other state agencies.

You can also create private cells which are only visible to you an not other users, and you can add your friends to your private cells.

The bluetooth button from Cell 411 Inc.

The app allows you to send emergency alerts about medical problems, police abuse, vehicle problems, crime, and other issues; the alerts are tagged with your exact GPS coordinates and your friends can get turn-by-turn directions to your location, should they decide to come and offer you help.  You can stream live video to your cells and friends, and the video cannot be erased by a malicious user who may gain access to your phone.  The video can also be streamed to YouTube and Facebook and is distributed instantly to all your friends, making it nearly impossible to be destroyed.

The app also has a ride-sharing feature available and real-time chat between cell members, allowing users to discuss how an event unfolds in real time in order to offer help as necessary. (Note: chat feature will be released on March 3)

Last year the company introduced a bluetooth panic button, which can be worn on a wrist, key-chain or a belt clip and allows users to send our an emergency alert much faster, without having to unlock or touch their smart phone.

Available in Spanish, English, German, Portuguese and Romanian, the app is free and does not carry any service cost associated with the use.

It can be downloaded from http://getcell411.com/download

The short video below describes how Cell 411 works and how it can help communities engage in mutual aid activities.

Another walkthrough video also goes into more details on how the app functions.

An easy but misleading comparison.

I don’t really like football. I can appreciate and admire the dedication and raw talent it takes to compete athletically on a national level, but being a spectator to the sport has fairly limited appeal for me. The same goes for pretty much all sports, actually. In this I am sometimes seen as a deviant by my friends, and certainly the rest of my family, the latter of whom I think it’s safe to say meet the bar for “football fanatic.” They watch, talk, and argue about teams, players, strategies. They go so far as to base their home decor around the priority of their team favor, dedicating wall real estate proportionally to each team.

I don’t really understand the emotional investment many seem to have in their preferred teams. Players themselves rarely seem to show a similar loyalty, and even at the college level, the role money and athletic scouts play seems to make the location and name of a given team more of a branding decision than any real representation of the people in that particular area. Yet it’s teams that are nearest to where a fan lives (or where they grew up) that seems to play the biggest role in whether a team is liked. I have to admit it: I just don’t get it.

Me irl on Thanksgiving, trying to blend in

Because spectator sports are something so well-liked, and at the same time so alien to me, its preference as a cultural pastime is something I’m really only capable of thinking about as an outsider. As an outsider to the fandom, I frequently encounter a meme that, in addition to being unfair, inaccurate, and pretentious, is rooted in a kind of unwarranted elitism that is, in my opinion, even more harmful to the cognitive potential of the person holding the opinion than the “divisiveness” caused by maintaining a rude or dismissive belief.

You’ve probably seen someone say something along these lines. “Football is the opiate of the masses.” It’s the contemporary bread and circuses of our modern-day Roman Empire, so says the supposed intellectual — even he who admittedly enjoys the gladiator bouts himself. I’ve seen the opinion spouted by everyone from well-thought activists and philosophers, to pseudo-intellectual posers, and even the arguably well-meaning but laughable walking meme factory Alex Jones.

Maybe the idea took off because it’s easy for an outsider to believe at a glance. To someone who’s not into spectator sports, strangers watching the game can become hordes of faceless sports fans, often encountered while drunk and loud at bars and restaurants, painting the caricature of a tribalist idiot more concerned with what men in tights are doing than the realities of what’s going on around them. What’s “really going on,” of course, is entirely subjective. “Imminent societal collapse,” especially in the wake of a recent presidential election, is a pretty popular one.

Assuming football is such an effective distraction, let me ask you this. What do you really think would happen if people stopped watching football and “woke up?” What would you have them do, stand in crowds waving signs every moment they weren’t watching the game? Football does literally nothing to prevent people from engaging in the political process. People aren’t so distracted by sports that they cannot take the time to get informed and vote. They’re already doing that, and all of the other things you think are helping, and it’s accomplishing nothing.

Good thing these people didn’t waste time watching the playoffs.

The truth is that sports have nothing to do with it. Even the most zealous fan is not an opium addict, and the belief that escapism is the problem — especially “their” preferred type — is a stupid and detrimental belief. It rejects the reality that many humans are capable of complex, varied, and sometimes contradictory thought in favor of masturbatory pomp. It’s detrimental because it distracts from the very realization it masquerades as: that we really are alive in an era of bread and circuses, and it has little to do with television or smartphones.

The plebs of the classical era were regularly beaten into submission, starved, manipulated, and killed for small amounts of material gain. Concepts like economic and social progression were wildly out of scope for what they could ever hope to achieve. Practically all of them suffered living conditions that are almost unfathomable to us today.

If rebellion sounded like it might net some reward, and seemed even remotely within grasp, a violent insurrection was very probable — which is why dissent in the age before easy access to information was punished with incredible brutality. It was quelled not only with barbaric treachery, or even with simple social distraction, but by providing comforts that were otherwise out of reach.

Technology has enabled unprecedented access to information, including the ability to share experience. The restriction to information as a safeguard to the patrician has been removed, and to counter, the old bread and circuses have been done away with. The new opiate is the obfuscation of violence.

Violence, especially violence against otherwise peaceful people, permeates all modern societies. Because it is rarely acted upon, the average person has stopped detecting it. Like the smell of bread in a bakery, you forget it’s even there when you’re not tasting it for yourself. Even when your friends are taxed into oblivion, unable to afford adequate healthcare, or beaten by police, you’re directed to submit written petitions asking for relief. Maybe the state will get around to it, maybe it won’t — it all depends on if the right people get the vote, right?

“is this meme dank? y/n”

It isn’t working, and you don’t need them. You don’t voluntarily pay for the things the state provides or the rules it makes, even when you think it’s a wonderful idea. You can’t escape this, certainly not by voting or protesting, and if you try to, you risk having violence used against you. This arrangement is not only unnecessary, but it keeps you the subject of a system which does not have your interest at heart. The bread and circus of the modern era is the idea that you are a part of the social contract; the opiate of the masses is the belief that you are not a pleb.

Stop shitting on football and start stabbing tyrants.

— David Neely, written for TruthVoice

On Thursday, December 10th, 2015, two NYPD detectives interrogated me in the hallway of my apartment building under the suspicion that I supported the Islamic State. I let the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force into my living room five days later so they could do the same thing. The whole process was stressful and infuriating, but I refuse to identify as the victim of this story. Instead, please send your sympathies to the fear-riddled soul who turned me in. He or she caught me reading a widely-circulated news story about the Islamic extremist group ISIS while I was aboard an airplane, and called the authorities.

Here’s how this all to came to pass. It was shaping up to be a lazy evening at home with cocktails and friends when my door buzzer rang at 9:30. The voice crackled through: “This is the police. We need you to let us in right now.” I buzzed them in, turned down the music, and pondered everything I’ve done in the last year that could’ve been illegal.

When they arrived at the door, the two plainclothes detectives asked for me by name: “We need to speak to Aaron Saltzman.” After they showed me their badges and I showed them my ID, the questions came quickly and with the predictability of an 1980s cop flick.

“Were you on a flight from Tampa on the 21st of November?”

“Um, yes.”

“Which airline did you take?”

“Maybe JetBlue?”

“Maybe it was JetBlue? How do you not recall exactly? And why do you look so nervous?”

“When two police detectives show up at your door, nervousness is not an unreasonable response.”

“What were you doing on that flight?”

“Sleeping, probably.”

This line of questioning continued for another ten minutes: what did I do for a living, where did I do it, how long had I been doing it. I finally told them I wanted a lawyer before answering any more of their queries. They had just one more question before leaving.

For context, I’m a white guy who works in the entertainment industry, no flag-waving political revolutionary. My only associations with the Middle East was a two-week trip to Israel in August of 2009, a trip that included a few days of laying on the beach in Northern Egypt. I “support” Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but it’s mostly for laughs and to get a rise out of my more-liberal friends online. I’m a Jewish kid who lives in Brooklyn — do you think I sympathize with ISIS?

I pieced it together while we stood there in the hallway. I had spent part of that fated flight reading an article in The Atlantic titled “What ISIS Really Wants.” I was reading news and being questioned about it.

The header image is a red and orange photo with an ISIS fighter holding his gun in the air. It’s jarring, but it’s certainly no worse than how any other news outlet would choose artwork for their stories related to the terrorist group. The cops were unamused.

“Funny how you first said you were sleeping, and now you’re telling us you were reading something related to the Islamic State.”

I walked back into my house at a loss for words. It’s no longer unique or special to be targeted by overzealous, militarized bureaucracies. People of color, most women, and the LGBT community can identify with my surreal experience, though on a more disturbing, chronic level. I was and still am very confused.

On Tuesday the 15th, it happened again. I woke up that morning to a phone call from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, informing me that they needed to come by my house to speak to me. I let them in around 11 AM — I wanted this done once and for all.

The agents were marginally more understanding than the NYPD detectives, but they also ended things with one final question:“Do you have any deep issues with the United States of America?”

I gave my answer with sincerity: “I am America’s biggest fan.”

In reality, I had a few issues with the America I was living in, and these cops and federal agents who walked intimidatingly through my front door each of those mornings brought the biggest one of all with them: fear. Fear has been the emotional engine powering most of this country’s troubled moments. Consider the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in the 1940s. Fear leads us to panic and call the police on our neighbors.

America is close to electing a new president, and fear is powerful enough to be a trigger on both sides of the aisle. Just as my beloved Donald Trump makes sweeping, fear-filled anti-immigrant statements, Bernie Sanders wails that if we don’t solve the problems of big banks now, we are doomed. Each exploits an environment of fear to his advantage, but neither created it. All of us create it; it’s a blend of hate, anger, and anxiety that is constantly fed by everyone from senators to bartenders, which is then amplified by the media and sold back to us as pointed infotainment. When everyone is yelling, no one is listening.

We are stuck in a feedback loop. News outlets reports on what gets ratings, just as companies sell whatever makes them money. In a world of total media saturation, we are becoming addicted to outrage porn. When do we acknowledge our habits with smut-grade news media is hurting society in a real way?

When we calm down, and think clearly, we can find answers together. We, as a society, have moved companies like Nike and Apple to implement better working conditions for their laborers. We have influenced grocery stores to carry healthier food at more affordable prices. We have glamorized “going green” as a popular, selfless path for any business to take. What kind of emoji will it take for us to elevate the state of our public discourse? Even when we don’t agree, we can set a common agenda and find answers through the fog. We have done it before.

In President Obama’s final State of the Union address this month, he shared his biggest regret of his presidency: a growing divide between our political parties. We all complain about the inefficiency of Washington and its constant political gridlock, yet we proudly declare how many “ignorant morons” we unfriended on Facebook for sharing views that don’t line up with our own. Stop the de-friending, stop closing your ears to opposing views, and stop writing people off so quickly. Perhaps the person who vehemently disagrees with you does so not out of malice, but simply out of patriotism. Put the burden on yourself to find validity in what they say, even if you have to look hard to unearth it. Opinions only reflect our life experiences; they’re going to be varied and diverse by default.

Our citizenry need to be able to  discuss big issues in a sober manner. Instead, we tend to grab our figurative pitchforks of revolution and wave them in the air. We have to decide what kind of society we want to live in, and I don’t think it’s one in which we are calling the FBI to report strangers on airplanes for trying to stay informed.

Aaron Saltzman is the manager of YOUNG & SICK. You can contact Aaron at aaronsaltzman.com, or join his email list here.

Dystopian truth is stranger than dystopian fiction.

In New York City, the police now maintain an unknown number of military-grade vans outfitted with X-ray radiation, enabling cops to look through the walls of buildings or the sides of trucks. The technology was used in Afghanistan before being loosed on U.S. streets. Each X-ray van costs an estimated $729,000 to $825,000.

The NYPD will not reveal when, where, or how often they are used.

“I will not talk about anything at all about this,” New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told a journalist for the New York Post who pressed for details on the vans. “It falls into the range of security and counter-terrorism activity that we engage in.”

He added that “they’re not used to scan people for weapons.”

Here are some specific questions that New York City refuses to answer:

• How is the NYPD ensuring that innocent New Yorkers are not subject to harmful X-ray radiation?
• How long is the NYPD keeping the images that it takes and who can look at them?
• Is the NYPD obtaining judicial authorization prior to taking images, and if so, what type of authorization?
• Is the technology funded by taxpayer money, and has the use of the vans justified the price tag?

Those specifics are taken from a New York Civil Liberties Union court filing. The legal organization is seeking to assist a lawsuit filed by Pro Publica journalist Michael Grabell, who has been fighting New York City for answers about X-ray vans for 3 years.

“ProPublica filed the request as part of its investigation into the proliferation of security equipment, including airport body scanners, that expose people to ionizing radiation, which can mutate DNA and increase the risk of cancer,” he explained. (For fear of a terrorist “dirty bomb,” America’s security apparatus is exposing its population to radiation as a matter of course.)

A state court has already ruled that the NYPD has to turn over policies, procedures, and training manuals that shape uses of X-rays; reports on past deployments; information on the costs of the X-ray devices and the number of vans purchased; and information on the health and safety effects of the technology. But New York City is fighting on appeal to suppress that information and more, as if it is some kind of spy agency rather than a municipal police department operating on domestic soil, ostensibly at the pleasure of city residents.

Its insistence on extreme secrecy is part of an alarming trend. The people of New York City are effectively being denied the ability to decide how they want to be policed.

“Technologies––from x-ray scanners to drones, automatic license plate readers that record license plates of cars passing by, and ‘Stingrays’ that spy on nearby cell phones by imitating cell phone towers—have brought rapid advances to law enforcement capacity to monitor citizens,” the NYCLU notes. “Some of these new technologies have filtered in from the battlefields into the hands of local law enforcement with little notice to the public and with little oversight. These technologies raise legitimate questions about cost, effectiveness, and the impact on the rights of everyday people to live in a society free of unwarranted government surveillance.”

A New York Police Department (NYPD) officer keeps guard during New Year’s Eve celebrations in Times Square December 31, 2014. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith 

For all we know, the NYPD might be bombarding apartment houses with radiation while people are inside or peering inside vehicles on the street as unwitting passersby are exposed to radiation. The city’s position—that New Yorkers have no right to know if that is happening or not—is so absurd that one can hardly believe they’re taking it. These are properly political questions. And it’s unlikely a target would ever notice. “Once equipped, the van—which looks like a standard delivery van—takes less than 15 seconds to scan a vehicle,” Fox News reported after looking at X-ray vans owned by the federal government. “It can be operated remotely from more than 1,500 feet and can be equipped with optional technology to identify radioactivity as well.”

In her ruling, Judge Doris Ling-Cohan highlights the fact that beyond the privacy questions raised by the technology are very real health and safety concerns. She writes:

Petitioner states in his affidavit, and respondent does not dispute, that: backscatter technology, previously deployed in European Union airports, was banned in 2011, because of health concerns; an internal presentation from American Science and Engineering, Inc., the company that manufactures the vans, determined that the vans deliver a radiation dose 40 percent larger than delivered by a backscatter airport scanner; bystanders present when the van is in use are exposed to the radiation that the van emits… moreover, petitioner maintains, and it is not disputed by the NYPD, that ‘there may be significant health risks associated with the use of backscatter x-ray devices as these machines use ionizing radiation, a type of radiation long known to mutate DNA and cause cancer.

Finally, petitioner states, again without dispute, that, on August 2011, the United States Customs and Border Protection Agency, which used the vans to scan vehicles crossing into and out of the United States, despite repeated testing and analysis of the amount of radiation emitted by such devices, nevertheless, prohibited continued use of the vans to scan occupied vehicles, until approval was granted by the United States Custom and Border Protection Radiation and Safety Committee…

And since the technology can see through clothing, it is easy to imagine a misbehaving NYPD officer abusing it if there are not sufficient safeguards in place. Trusting the NYPD to choose prudent, sufficient safeguards under cover of secrecy is folly. This is the same department that spent 6 years conducting surveillance on innocent Muslims Americans in a program so unfocused that it produced zero leads—and that has brutalized New York City protestors on numerous occasions. Time and again it’s shown that outside oversight is needed.
Lest readers outside New York City presume that their walls still stand between them and their local law enforcement agency, that isn’t necessarily the case. Back in January, in an article that got remarkably little attention, USA Today reported the following:

At least 50 U.S. law enforcementagencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance. Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person’s house without first obtaining a search warrant. The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

The overarching theme here is a law enforcement community that has never seen a technology that causes it to say, “We’d better ask if the public wants us to use this or not.”

Instead, the usual protocol is not only to adopt new technology without permission—regardless of the privacy, health and safety, or moral questions that it raises—but to keep having done so a secret as long as possible, and to hide the true nature of the technology in question even after the public has been alerted to its existence. The fact that this pattern has held in regards to a device that can look through walls while emitting radiation on the streets of New York City raises questions including “What’s next?” “What else don’t we know about?” and “Will any technology on the military-to-police pipeline ever cause cops to ask permission first?”

By Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic

The US Department of Transportation announced Monday that purchasers of drones will have to register the devices with the federal government as part of a new “national registry.”

The plan comes following several close calls with drones and passenger aircraft at airports nationwide and as firefighters have said they have had their aerial firefighting hindered because of drones being in the way. Hundreds of thousands of the small unmanned aircraft are expected to be sold in the coming weeks ahead of the holiday season.

“Registering unmanned aircraft will help build a culture of accountability and responsibility, especially with new users who have no experience operating in the US aviation system,” Anthony Foxx, the transportation secretary, said. “It will help protect public safety in the air and on the ground.”

At a news conference, Foxx said the US is creating a “national registry of folks who are owners of drones and users of drones.”

Two weeks ago, the Air Line Pilots Association told lawmakers that registering drones could help the authorities track down misbehaving drone pilots. Lawmakers have also called on regulators to take action, too. Rep. Peter DeFazio, (D-OR) told a House panel two weeks ago that flight regulators should consider registration because “there should be a way to track these things back to irresponsible owners.”

The government announced a task force to determine which aircraft should be exempt from registration “due to a low safety risk,” which might include “toys” and other devices. The recommendations, and the details of how the registration process will work, should be delivered to the agency by Nov. 20, Foxx said. Registered drones will likely host an identifying number linking to its owner.

The task force, the government said, will be composed of up to 30 people from government, the drone industry, and other stakeholders. Foxx said he expects to have a “streamlined registration process” in place “by the middle part of December.”

The government is also finalizing formal rules to allow the commercial use of drones nationwide. About 200 clearances have already been granted.

A German man whose identity has yet to be released was arrested at the airport in Frankfurt after security personal noticed he had microwaved his ID in an attempt to deactivate the microchip, and protect his privacy. He has been charged with Illegally Modifying Official Documents, and Tampering with State property.

These charges are worrisome as there are potentially thousands of people who have done the same thing.  The practice is not uncommon in the EU, as the populace has been subjected to surveillance, and other tactics aimed at eroding privacy. Here in the US we have found out that very similar programs are operational in the US after Snowden made public his information leak revolving around domestic surveillance.

The practice of microchipping IDs in Germany has been going on for 5 years, and they are not alone when it comes to E-ID, 20 other countries including Israel, Spain, and Portugal. In the Snowden leaks it was uncovered that the NSA had spied on German telecommunications, through the “Treasure Map” program.

Germans take their privacy so seriously that after it was released that the NSA had intercepted calls in Germany, typewriter purchases went through the roof as people thought letters would be harder for US intelligence analysts to get their hands on. After decades of state spying, from Nazi Germany to the fall of the Berlin wall its only natural that the population would hold a healthy distrust of state surveillance.

Markwart Faussner in an interview with Washington Posts WorldViews had this to say about the practice.

“Much of this can be explained historically, Germans have experienced observation throughout the 20th century. After the Nazi era, the Stasi intelligence service in the former East Germany monitored most of the country’s citizens. When the Berlin Wall fell, East Germans suddenly found out from official government files that their friends or even family members had spied on them for years or decades. Hence, there is still a deeply rooted suspicion of state authorities in Germany,”

Here is a video of someone microwaving their ID.

A trial lawyer who testified last month before the House Committee on the Judiciary Over-Criminalization Task Force said the U.S. is “in danger of becoming a nation of criminals,” estimating that over 68 million Americans have criminal records – more than the population of France.

Rick Jones, executive director of Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, testified on June 26 on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, that “68 million people living with convictions – more than the entire population of France. We are in danger of becoming a nation of criminals, because we are policing from a place of fear.”

In written testimony, Jones estimated that “some 65 million people have a criminal record, citing a reportfrom the National Employment Law Project, titled, “65 Million Need Not Apply: The Case for Reforming Criminal Background Checks for Employment” – a product of NELP’s Second Chance Labor Project, “which promotes the employment rights of people with criminal records and fairer and more accurate criminal background checks for employment.”

The report’s findings were based on information from the 2008 “Survey of State Criminal History Information Systems” by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Strategic Plan 2005-2008, under the heading “Criminal History Records,” 68 million people had criminal records at the close of 2003. “At the close of 2003, States and the FBI maintained criminal history records on approximately 68 million individuals. Of these, over 50 million records were available for interstate background checks.”

“Since the initiation of the BJS National Criminal History Record Improvement Program (NCHIP) in 1995, the number of criminal records has increased 35%, and the number of records which are now shareable among the States increased 97%,” BJS said.

According to the latest World Bank data, France has a population of 66 million as of 2013.

“68 million people in this country are living with a criminal record. That’s one in every four adults – 20 million people with felony convictions, 14 million new arrests every year, 2.2 million people residing in jail or prison. That’s more than anywhere else in the world,” Jones told the task force.

He proposed that the U.S. “move from penalty, prosecution and endless punishment to forgiveness, redemption and restoration,” specifically calling for a “national restoration of rights day.”

A once-a-year national restoration of rights day would consist of: “educational programs for employers, skills training workshops for the affected community, jobs fairs, certificate of relief programs at no-cost and … no-cost opportunities to clean up your rap sheet.”

By Melanie Hunter for cnsnews.com

In some countries, people feel the Police has way too many rights and policemen can do pretty much what they please as the law is there to protect them should anything hit the fan. Looking at the number of convicted policemen versus the number of reported abuse cases, you have to feel there’s some truth to that.

On the other hand, policemen do need a kind of special protection if they’re to continue fighting crime effectively. Also, the image of the law and order institution has to be kept clean so that policemen can command respect.

The problem is some people take this “keeping the image clean” thing a bit wrong, covering up abuses and thus committing several more of them, generating a vicious circle that can backfire ten-fold when/if exposed.

It appears Spain has recently passed a law – ironically called Citizens Security Law – which forbids “the unauthorized use of images of police officers that might jeopardize their or their family’s safety or that of protected facilities or police operations.”

You’ll notice it says nothing about “image”, instead concerning strictly the safety of policemen, their families and Police activity.

So what really happened?

Based on this law, a woman was fined 600 euros (about $660) for taking the image you see above and posting it online. The image shows a Police Nissan Qashqai in a parking space reserved for disabled people.

The Police response was that the two officers were on a mission responding to an act of vandalism, in which case they are allowed to park anywhere. Clearly, if you’re ever in need of Police assistance, you wouldn’t like them to arrive ten minutes late because they couldn’t find a parking space, so that absolutely makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is fining the woman. When she posted the image, she had no idea the two policemen were on a mission, so it’s not a case of ill intention. Whether the two were indeed answering a distress call can easily be confirmed, so we’ll assume it’s true.

The reason cited for the fine was “the honor of the two officers was attacked.” I don’t know about you, but I find “attacked” a word too strong, deliberately chosen to impress and to stretch a connection between this case ant the aforementioned law. In my opinion, a simple comment on behalf of the Spanish Police clearing out the situation coupled with the takedown of the image would have sufficed.

The solution chosen by the Police smells of bullying and is probably an attempt to make people think twice before pointing out possible Police abuses in the future. There’s a reason why that law is called the “gag law” in Spain.

Most carry-on luggage is free, but one man’s may have cost him $75,000.

That’s the astounding amount of cash that was reportedly confiscated from a single suitcase while rolling through security at Virginia’s Richmond International Airport.

“If you had $75,000, is this how you’d transport it? Just asking! TSA @ #RIC spotted this traveler’s preferred method,”TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein tweeted Tuesday with a photo showing the stacks of $20 bills.

Farbstein’s post may have meant to draw laughs, but it was received with public backlash instead.

“Depends on who’s more apt to steal the money: Baggage handlers or the @TSA,” snapped @AndStrats.

“Since when does the TSA publicly advertise the private contents of people’s luggage?” asked @Coyoteblog.

“Maybe you have a pic of my Kobold watch that was stole from my checked baggage at Logan…” added @Kevikev10.

“So wait. Carrying US currency is illegal now? Since when?” asked @PAntompietri.

While carrying loads of cash is not illegal, it is undoubtedly suspicious and can lead to it being confiscated for further review — especially if its handler is unable to account for it, according a TSA blog post.

“TSA officers routinely come across evidence of criminal activity at the airport checkpoint. Examples include evidence of illegal drug trafficking, money laundering, and violations of currency reporting requirements prior to international trips,” the post explains.

“When presented with a passenger carrying a large sum of money through the screening checkpoint, the TSA officer will frequently engage in dialog with the passenger to determine whether a referral to law-enforcement authorities is warranted,” it continues.

Civil asset forfeiture laws specifically allow authorities to seize cash and property from those suspected of a crime.

As evident in the outcry on Twitter, the practice has become contentious with some people never convicted or even charged with a crime.

“Forfeiture was originally presented as a way to cripple large-scale criminal enterprises by diverting their resources. But today, aided by deeply flawed federal and state laws, many police departments use forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated by profit rather than crime-fighting,” the American Civil Liberties Union claims.

A Richmond airport spokesman, reached by the Washington Post, said that this particular passenger’s luggage was seized by a federal agency, likely the Drug Enforcement Administration.

“I don’t believe the person was issued a summons or a citation,” Tony Bell told the paper. “The traveler was allowed to continue on his way.”

Written by Nina Golgowski for the New York Daily News

Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appears live via video during a student organized world affairs conference at the Upper Canada College private high school in Toronto, February 2, 2015.

NSA documents leaked to the Guardian in 2013 described a covert program called XKeyscore, which involved a searchable database for intelligence analysts to scan intercepted data.

Now, new documents show the breadth of this program and just what sort of data XKeyscore catalogs.

According to a new report from The Intercept, the amount of data XKeyscore scoops up as well as the sort of data it collects is much larger than originally thought.

Here are a few highlights from the new report:

• The XKeyescore database is “fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the back of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing,” the new report writes. Its servers collect all of this data for up to five days, and store the metadata of this traffic for up to 45 days.
• Web traffic wasn’t XKeyscore’s only target. In fact, according to the documents posted by The Intercept, it was able to gather data like voice recordings. A list of the intercepted data included “pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.“
• How the search works is very advanced. The new documents detail ways that analysts can query the database for information on people based on location, nationality, and previous web traffic.
• XKeyscore was also used to help hack into computer networks for both the US and its spying allies. One document dated in 2009 claims that the program could be used to gain access into unencrypted networks. 
• Using XKeyscore was reportedly insanely easy. “The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds,” security researcher Jonathan Brossard told The Intercept. “Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

While XKeyscore has been known as an intelligence tool for years now, these new documents highlight just how advanced and far-reaching the program’s surveillance is.

The NSA, in a statement to The Intercept, claims that all of its intelligence operations are “authorized by law.” It added, “NSA goes to great lengths to narrowly tailor and focus its signals intelligence operations on the collection of communications that are most likely to contain foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information.”

Written by Solarina Ho for Reuters, with additional reporting and writing by Alastair Sharp and editing by Chris Reese and Peter Galloway