August 31, 2010 – Vibration throughout the frequency spectrum of sound, heat, and light, is the organizational principle of matter.  Sound is the organizational principle of our Universe, of physical matter and most importantly, living matter.

The science of Cymatics illustrates that when sound waves move thru a physical medium (air, water, sand, metallic particles, etc.) the frequency of the waves has a direct effect upon the structures that are created by the sound waves as they pass thru that particular medium.

——————–

Imagine an incredibly powerful, wealthy person who secretly prospers from conflict, disease and war learns that certain sound frequencies (those easily divisible by two, signifying opposition) create conflict, discord and disharmony while those divisible by three  (signifying balance, polity, reconciliation, harmony) produce symmetry, and visually harmonic, pleasing structures.

Now imagine that he has the power to establish the tuning standard of all musical instruments throughout the Western World.

Imagine that he bases the entire scale of musical artistic creation upon a frequency that would skew vibrations towards discord.

It sounds like science fiction.  Yet this is exactly what transpired in September 1939 when Rockefeller (Illuminati) financial interests dictated that the standard tuning for the note of “A” above middle C would henceforth be said to vibrate at precisely 440 cycles per second.

This unnatural standard tuning frequency, removed from the symmetry of sacred vibrations and overtones, has declared war on the subconscious mind of Western Man.

The standard tuning fork, which is set to vibrate the note “A” above middle C at 440 cycles per second, is based upon a frequency only divisible by two rather than three, which means that all of the musical notes both above and below it are affected.

Despite the apparent “sweet music” a symphony orchestra can produce, when all instruments are tuned based on the A=440Hz key frequency, they are covert weapons no matter what “music” they may be playing.

These destructive frequencies entrain the thoughts towards disruption, disharmony, and disunity.  Additionally, they also stimulate the controlling organ of the body – the brain – into disharmonious resonance, which ultimately creates disease and war.

In a paper entitled “Musical Cult Control,” Dr. Leonard Horowitz writes:

The music industry “…features this imposed frequency that is ‘herding’ populations into greater aggression, psycho social agitation, and emotional distress predisposing people to physical illness….” while the agents of this conspiracy provide ‘therapeutic’ pacification in the form of myriad psychotropic drugs and tranquilizers for the stress they purposely created, and chemotherapy for the more serious illnesses it inspires.”

He says, “Energy (vibration) impacts “life” (biology) and our bodies through the most common medium of life:  water.  Our body weight, which is nearly 80 percent water, vibrates and resonates to frequencies, and frequencies entrain our physical matter as well as thought processes.  Light and sound have been shown as the primary drivers of intercellular communication, which indicates that our health, or lack of it, may indeed by a product of the vibrational resonance of sound and light.”

As noted, the Rothschild-Rockefeller (Illuminati) alliance chose “….to determine the musical factors capable of producing psycho pathology, emotional distress and ‘mass hysteria.’”

The initial effort to make A=440 Hz the basis of standard tuning took place in 1910 when the Rockefeller Foundation issued a grant to the American Federation of Musicians to popularize the concept.  The initial effort failed.

However, the BSI — British Standards Institute — officially adopted A=440 Hz in 1939, promoted by the strange consortium of Rockefeller Foundation influence and the Nazi government.  Ironically, The British adopted a tuning standard promoted by the Third Reich, just as both went to war.  While 440Hz had been rejected by British musicians only 3 months prior, Josef Goebbels persuaded the BSI to adapt 440Hz saying it was of extraordinary importance.

As Dr. Leonard Horowitz concludes:  “Music bioenergetically affects your body chemistry, psycho  neuro immunology, and health.  Your body is now vibrating musically, audibly and subliminally, according to an institutionally imposed frequency in harmony with aggression and in dissonance rather than vibrating in harmony with Love.”

Musical instrument tuning using the artificially imposed standard of A=440Hz may promote physical and mental disease and distrust, while effectively suppressing spirituality, intuition and creativity.  This universal tuning frequency has been empirically shown to suppress the creative, intuitive aspects of our mind, while negatively affecting our body chemistry and our immune systems.

I don’t know if anyone can prove a direct link between aggression, disassociation, paranoia and violence to a tuning system that was promoted by both the Rockefellers and the Third Reich.  However, just the fact that these two entities came together to push this standard is more than suspicious in my mind.

Although more than a few people have made the connection between the music of John Philip Sousa and his marching music as a stimulus to war, that specific link is in reference to composition, not frequency and vibration based on a tuning system.

“Intuitively, I think my sources are correct.  But how does one go about proving that a specific frequency tuning is creating social stress, disharmony or physical violence and war?  But the fact that the Rockefellers and the Third Reich pushed this tuning standard over the opposition of British musicians makes it suspicious, even sinister.”

The Rockefeller–Illuminati axis, their money and research, imposed this artificial tuning “standard” upon Mankind for the purpose of creating chaos. It continues to this day to funnel our minds and emotions along paths of negativity.  It is high time for new, good vibrations to become ascendant and a “new standard” of vibrational tuning to emerge.   It is time for the power of Love to triumph!
L C Vincent
lcvincent88@bigstring.com

Popularity: 3% [?]

By Wendy Holden

LONDON, England – August 11, 2010 – What do an ironing board, a haircut and a case of wine have in common? In order to get them, I was expected to hand over information I’d think twice about giving a policeman.

It was on a sunny Friday morning in Majestic Wine Warehouse that my problems began. I’d popped in to replenish our stocks of Côtes de Provence rosé. When I handed over my debit card at the till, the assistant asked for all my details – address, phone number, email, mobile phone – to put on a computer. When I asked why, as I didn’t need credit or to have the stuff delivered, he said it was so I could receive information about Majestic events, plus a copy of the company magazine.

Luckily, my social life is full enough not to depend on promotional events by wine retailers, and I buy more glossy magazines than I ever get through, even if the Majestic one has Catherine Zeta-Jones on the cover. So I politely turned him down. His evident amazement was less surprising than the implication that my act was unprecedented in the history of the store.

But why? Why should retail outlets casually expect us to divulge personal information; even more amazingly, why do we go along with it? We have fought for personal freedom and the rule of law in two world wars, we have fiercely resisted the onset of ID cards, we see our homes as our castles and we fanatically shred every last supermarket receipt.

And yet in the shops we’re expected to hand over our emails, addresses and phone numbers like sheep. It even happens in John Lewis – yes, that national treasure of a store, byword for all that is best and British and decent. The other day I couldn’t even buy an ironing board there without relinquishing name, rank and serial number. “It’s a customer requirement,” said the assistant. But as I was taking the board with me, why? Is there something innately suspicious about people who iron?

What’s fine in the doctor’s surgery or passport application office is not fine in the high street if you’re not asking for credit or not arranging delivery. Yet, for refuseniks like myself, shopping is becoming a Stalinist nightmare. And while I doubt there has been any nefarious use of details thus garnered, I may have spotted a link between giving info willy-nilly and those tidal waves of junk mail and Nigerian banks spam in one’s inbox. Why should we hand over our privacy for others to profit from?

Earlier this week, the BBC highlighted how easy it is to give away personal data. Its technology correspondent booby-trapped a mobile phone application so that the owner’s private information – including passwords – could in theory be silently stolen and used for identity theft and other cyber crimes.

My identity crisis came to a head, as it were, in a hair salon in Cornwall last week. Having a rare hour to myself (husband and children having gone off to see Toy Story 3), I decided to get my hoary locks trimmed. Scene as follows:

Me (entering salon): Could you trim my hair, please?

Spiky-haired middle-youth on reception desk: Yeah, sure, no problem. I’ll just take a few details down on the computer [fingers poised over keyboard]. Name, address?

Me: Do you mind if I don’t? I just want a haircut.

Him (clearly stunned): But we always take people’s details. We need them to keep in touch with our customers.

Me: I’d rather not. All I want is a haircut.

By now the whole salon was staring at me and it was tempting to turn on my flip-flopped heel. However, I felt my position was reasonable and I wanted my hair cut.

Whereupon the following conversation took place:

Haircutter (called Don, snip-snipping with his scissors): Look, about that computer thing, we only take personal details to keep in touch with our customers, OK? Build up a relationship. Keep them informed.

Me: Yes. But I just didn’t want to, that was all.

Don (still agitated): We’re not going to do anything with it. This information you don’t want to give us. Nothing funny or anything. [I don’t reply.] So, you on holiday?

Me (relieved he has changed subject): Yes

Don (sarcastically): Incognito, eh?

Me: Look, Don, I think you should just get over me not wanting to give you all my details. It isn’t necessary.

Don (aggressively): OK, OK, I am over it, OK. I am. Over it. Look, I’ll just cut in complete silence, shall I? Happy?

Actually, as Don’s sharp scissors were millimeters from my neck, I wasn’t that happy. I didn’t want to be the first martyr to the cause of the right of the individual to shop without full disclosure. The cut was finished in sulky silence. I paid – cash – and left.

I will go on with my campaign against this invasive lunacy, however; and I invite you all to join me. When you’re asked for personal details, do as I do. Just say no.

Popularity: 4% [?]

LONDON, England – July 26, 2010 – Ministers are ready to hand sweeping Big Brother powers to EU states so they can spy on British citizens.

Foreign police will be able to travel to the UK and take part in the arrest of Britons.

They will be able to place them under surveillance, bug telephone conversations, monitor bank accounts and demand fingerprints, DNA or blood samples.

Anyone who refuses to comply with a formal request for co-operation by a foreign-based force is likely to be arrested by UK officers.

The move will spark a damaging row with backbench Tory MPs opposed to giving such draconian powers to Brussels.

The Tories were opposed to the directive in opposition, saying it showed a ‘relish for surveillance and disdain for civil liberties’.

But ministers have made a dramatic U-turn since joining the pro-EU Lib Dems in government, and the wide-ranging powers are due to be approved later this week.

According to the campaign group Fair Trials International, under the new rules it would be possible, for example, for Spanish police investigating a murder in a nightclub to demand the ID of every British citizen who flew to the country in the month the offense took place.

They could also force the UK to search its DNA database – which contains nearly one million innocent people – and send samples belonging to anybody who was in Spain at the time.

Source: Daily Mail

Popularity: 7% [?]

LONDON, England – July 16, 2010 – British citizens face being subjected to chilling new EU ‘Big Brother’ surveillance and investigation powers.

Bureaucrats want foreign officials to be able to travel to the UK and immediately assume the powers of our own police.

They would be able to order undercover-spying missions, demand DNA and even pursue people for ‘crimes’ that are not recognized in UK law – such as criminal defamation.

Other EU countries could demand the personal details of entire planeloads of holidaymakers, and force hard-pressed British police to trail suspects on their behalf.

The countries demanding the new powers on behalf of the European Union include ex-Eastern Bloc states Bulgaria, Estonia and Slovenia.

Tory MPs are putting pressure on the coalition to reject the new regime outright. But, astonishingly, the pro-European LibDems are understood to be keen to sign-up to the Directive.

A decision will be taken in the next two weeks – with Fair Trials International leading demands for Britain to opt-out.

They fear miscarriages of justice and civil liberties abuses.

Tory MP Dominic Raab, who raised his concerns in the Commons yesterday, said, “Britain should not opt into this half-baked measure. It would allow European police to order British officers to embark on wild-goose chases. It would force our police to hand over personal information on British citizens, even if they are not suspects and the conduct under investigation is not a crime in this country; and it gives foreign police law enforcement authority on British soil. The Order won’t help tackle crime – it will waste police time and ditch safeguards that UK citizens expect from the British justice system.”

Source:  Big Brother

Popularity: 6% [?]

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – July 18, 2010 – A small change in Sweden’s schooling law is about to make a big difference for Swedish homeschooling families, potentially causing them to flee to other countries or bring cases to international courts to protect religious and parental rights in the socialist country.

The Swedish Liberal Party pushed a new 1,500-page schooling law through last month, one paragraph of which will make homeschooling as an expression of religion or philosophy effectively impossible for Swedish families, other than in “exceptional circumstances” such as health issues or distance from a public school. The law also severely restricts religious practice in Sweden’s “confessional” schools.

Sweden’s officials defend the homeschool ban, which takes effect next July, saying homeschooling is unnecessary since the state provides a “comprehensive and objective” education.

This is exactly the problem, said Christopher Barnekov, director of Scandinavia House in Fort Wayne, Indiana, an assistance program for Swedish Lutheran pastors studying in the United States.

 ”The thrust of the law was to make schools across Sweden more uniform,” Barnekov said, adding that the law also requires Sweden’s religious schools to follow the same curriculum as its secular schools and restricts their prayer and chapel services.

 Source: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/18/home-school-ban-in-sweden-forces-families-to-mull-/

Popularity: 4% [?]

NELSON, New Zealand – July 15, 2010 – Nelson’s top police officer does not believe frontline officers should be armed, but is backing calls for restrictions on the sale of high-powered air rifles.

Tasman district commander Superintendent Gary Knowles said frontline police in the district already had access to guns and all frontline officers had completed Taser training.

“We will obviously be reviewing our own procedures, but at this stage we will not be fully arming any of my staff.”

Police Minister Judith Collins has said that police should have easier access to guns by Christmas in the wake of the shooting of two Christchurch policemen this week.

Dog-handler Senior Constable Bruce Lamb, 50, and Constable Mitchel Alatalo, 30, were shot while carrying out routine inquiries in the suburb of Phillipstown.

Six-year-old police dog Gage was shot dead, and 34-year-old Christopher Graeme Smith faces serious charges, including attempted murder.

Mr Knowles said he agreed with Mrs Collins that police who needed access to guns should get it by Christmas.

He said the Tasman police district probably had more Tasers available to police officers per head of population due to the district’s geographical isolation.

It also probably had more officers trained in the use of Tasers, and he was also looking at extending the Taser training to other officers.

Since Tasers were rolled out to frontline staff earlier this year, no-one had been Tasered but staff had sought permission to deploy them.

He thought Tasers were a good middle-ground tactical option for police to have.

“At the end of the day you’ve got to really say to the public of New Zealand do you want to see police officers walking up and down the main street of Nelson carrying a gun? And I’d say nine times out of 10 they would say `No’.

“Ask them, `Do you think police should have firearms available?’ and they would say `Yes’,” he said.

However, Mr Knowles said he “absolutely” believed that laws should be tightened around the sale of high-powered air rifles.

“I think it’s a loophole in the law that needs to be closed. The days of Johnny having an air rifle and going down to the paddock and shooting a rabbit is over. A lot of these air rifles are just as powerful as any other firearm.

“Some of those slug guns are higher pressure and velocity than a .22, yet we have to have a licence for those.”

The government is looking at laws to restrict the sale of high-powered air rifles which are blamed for two recent Auckland slayings.

Undercover policeman Sergeant Don Wilkinson died in 2008 after he was shot with a FX Monsoon air gun.

The same weapon was used in the slaying of Keith Kahi, 44, in Botany Downs Auckland 10 days ago.

Anyone over the age of 18 can purchase an air rifle.

In Nelson, Hamills manager Brady Tasker said he and his staff used their discretion when selling air rifles and other equipment in the store and he had turned down people wishing to buy them. “There’s no requirement for me not to sell them to someone, but … if I don’t like them I won’t sell it.”

Mr Tasker said his Bridge St store sold a range of air rifles, which ranged in price from $70 to $1400.

He said he sold a lot of the high-powered air rifles to people living on lifestyle properties who did not have a gun licence but needed a gun to get rid of pests like rabbits and possums.

“I would say the majority of people that buy an air rifle are lifestylers that don’t have a gun license and fathers buying them for their kids who want to teach their kids how to handle guns responsibly.”

He said restricting their sale would only harm those who were responsible and used the rifles for legitimate purposes and he did not believe it would stop the weapons getting into the hands of criminals.

Popularity: 6% [?]

The day when you’ll be able to hold up your phone and identify a stranger through a viewfinder is getting closer.

Google’s Goggles, a mobile app for visual search, has a facial recognition version unreleased to the public, while Israeli startup Face.com’s technology can tag people’s faces in Facebook photos. Facebook even released a basic version of face detection last night, although it doesn’t have recognition.

So in a world where technology chips away at our ability to remain anonymous, how does one reclaim some semblance of control?

It turns out there’s actually a pretty simple way around the facial recognition technology available in the market today, according to Adam Harvey, a graduate student at NYU’s ITP (the same program that produced Foursquare chief executive Dennis Crowley and that Twitter’s location guru Raffi Krikorian taught at).

If you change the contrast in certain parts of your face — either through a watermark or by wearing a strategically-placed sticker or facepaint, recognition technology can’t identify that your face is a human face.

“It breaks apart the gestalt of the face,” he said. “That’s what original camouflage was supposed to do.”

Harvey said he got his idea from studying camouflage methods use during World War I and World War II. His project, CV Dazzle, is based on the original dazzle camouflage used by the military to hide ships in the 1940s.

While the flashy geometric patterns don’t seem like they would be able obscure a thing, they thwarted the enemy’s ability to tell the make or size of the ship. Similarly, zebra camouflage does little to blend the animal into the background of the savannah. But when zebras are in herds, predators like lions have difficulty picking out animals from the herd. (Dazzle camouflage was eventually phased out by the military as aviation technology and rangefinders improved.)

Harvey says there a couple of projects that could stem from idea. He could either build a basic watermarking technology that could render faces unidentifiable to these programs while still being recognizable to humans. Or he could work with make-up artists and designers to create interesting real-world looks that prevent facial recognition.

“Putting paint on your face isn’t always practical,” he said. “This is just the way that I wanted to test this. But if you wanted to be covert, you could try wearing different styles of make-up or accessories. You could position a Band-aid on the right spot on your face. The power of this idea is that people can interpret it in their own way.”

You can see face-detection evading makeup below. The examples that have red squares around them were identified. But the ones that don’t have squares passed facial recognition software undetected

t seems like a pretty far-off idea given that if Facebook ever did release full-fledged facial recognition, it would never be completely automated. Humans would most likely have final say to tag or untag themselves. It’s also unclear how Google could ever release a facial recognition Google Goggles, given the privacy concerns it is already facing from European governments and consumers alike.

But if an augmented reality app that automatically identified people from your phone ever emerged, perhaps we could see a fad of facial camouflage.

Popularity: 5% [?]

ALEXANDRIA, Virgnia – July 2, 2010 – Last November a police officer shot and killed David Masters, an unarmed motorist, as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car on the side of Richmond Highway, a major thoroughfare in Fairfax County, Virginia. Masters was wanted for allegedly stealing flowers from a planter. He had been given a ticket the day before for running a red light and then evading the police, though in a slow and not particularly dangerous manner.

In January of this year, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Raymond Morrogh announced through a press release that he would not be filing any charges against the officer who shot Masters. The shooting, Morrogh found, was justified due to a “furtive gesture” that suggested Masters had a weapon. The only eyewitness to this gesture was the police officer who pulled the trigger.

There exists dash-camera video of Masters’ shooting. There are also police interviews of other witnesses, and there is the police report itself. But the public and the press are unlikely to see those, or even to learn the officer’s name. That’s because the Fairfax County Police Department – along with the neighboring municipal police departments of Arlington and Alexandria – is among the most secretive, least transparent law enforcement agencies in the country.

Michael Pope, a reporter who covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers chain and for WAMU-FM, filed a series of open records requests related to the Masters shooting with the Fairfax County Police Department. All were denied.

In March, Pope asked Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won’t at least release the incident report on Masters’ death, given the concerns that some have raised about the shooting. “Let us hear that concern,” Jennings shot back. “We are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual reporters.”

Except the media? That’s exactly who you would expect to file most open records requests. Asked why her department won’t even release the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. “What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?” Jennings asked. “I’d be curious to know why they want the name of an officer.”

Well, for starters, because he’s a government employee, paid by taxpayers and entrusted with the power to arrest, detain, coerce, and kill. And he recently used the most serious of those powers on an unarmed man. Releasing the name would allow reporters to see if the officer has been involved in other shootings or if there have been prior disciplinary measures or citizen complaints against him. It would allow the media to assess whether the Fairfax County Police Department has done an adequate job of training him in the use of lethal force.

Then again, journalists can’t get that other information either. The default position of the Fairfax County Police Department, Pope says, is to decline all requests for information; and not just from media. When a member of the county SWAT team shot and killed 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi Jr. in 2006, it took nearly a year, plus legal action, to get the department to release information about its investigation of the shooting to Culosi’s family. Culosi, who had been suspected of wagering on football games with friends, was also unarmed when he was killed.

In a state that the professional journalism association Investigative Reporters and Editors ranks the fifth most transparent in the country, the police departments in Fairfax County, Arlington, and Alexandria have managed to interpret the open records law in a way that lets them be almost completely opaque. “Part of my daily routine when I worked in Florida was to drive to the police station and get a copy of the previous day’s incident reports,” Pope says. “I was just dumbfounded when I started working in Virginia.” The police rejected all his requests for information – even for incident reports about arrests the same department had described in press releases.

Invoking a phrase that traditionally refers to censorship, Fairfax County’s Jennings told Pope that releasing police reports to the press would have a “chilling effect” on victims and witnesses, discouraging them from coming forward to report crimes. As Pope notes, that doesn’t appear to be the case in cities that routinely release police reports, as nearly all do. When Pope asked Jennings what evidence she has to support her theory, she replied, “I don’t know if there’s evidence or not. All I have is what our investigators and what our commanders and the police administration believe.”

Don’t expect elected officials to correct any of this. “I am in the corner of trusting our police department,” Arlington County Board Member Barbara Favola told Pope. “If they push back I am not going to override them, and I don’t think I could get three votes on the board to override them either.”

Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel fired off an indignant letter to the editor after Pope wrote about the secrecy in the northern Virginia police departments. Calling Pope’s well-reported piece a “rant” that was “thinly disguised as a news story,” Sengel declared, “Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are not carried out for the primary purpose of providing fodder for his paper.” Mocking the media’s role as a watchdog, Sengel added, “The sacred ‘right of the public to know’ is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility,” as if those two adjectives were incompatible with a journalist inquiring about the details of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.

“The most offensive theme of this article,” Sengel complained, “is the notion that law enforcement agencies decline to release these reports to protect their own, or to conceal corrupt behavior. Believe it or not, the reporter and his colleagues are not the last true guardians of truth and justice, the attainment of which does not hang on unfettered exercise of journalistic zeal. Last time I checked there were multiple safeguards in place to assure the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

These are remarkably wrongheaded sentiments, especially coming from an elected prosecutor. There have been several cases across the country where police reports haven’t jibed with video evidence or have otherwise turned out to be inaccurate. Journalists and advocacy groups have used public records to shed light on bogus arrests, police cover-ups, poor police training, and wrongful convictions. Sengel seems indignant at the very idea that a lowly journalist might be looking over his shoulder, or over the shoulders of the cops who bring him the people he prosecutes. Fairfax County hasn’t charged a police officer for an on-duty shooting in 70 years. Perhaps that’s because no officer there has deserved to be charged. But perhaps local police and prosecutors have too cozy a relationship. The point is, we don’t know. And northern Virginia’s cops have made it almost impossible to find out.

ALEXANDRIA, Virgnia – July 2, 2010 – Last November a police officer shot and killed David Masters, an unarmed motorist, as he sat in the driver’s seat of his car on the side of Richmond Highway, a major thoroughfare in Fairfax County, Virginia. Masters was wanted for allegedly stealing flowers from a planter. He had been given a ticket the day before for running a red light and then evading the police, though in a slow and not particularly dangerous manner.

In January of this year, Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Raymond Morrogh announced through a press release that he would not be filing any charges against the officer who shot Masters. The shooting, Morrogh found, was justified due to a “furtive gesture” that suggested Masters had a weapon. The only eyewitness to this gesture was the police officer who pulled the trigger.

There exists dash-camera video of Masters’ shooting. There are also police interviews of other witnesses, and there is the police report itself. But the public and the press are unlikely to see those, or even to learn the officer’s name. That’s because the Fairfax County Police Department – along with the neighboring municipal police departments of Arlington and Alexandria – is among the most secretive, least transparent law enforcement agencies in the country.

Michael Pope, a reporter who covers Northern Virginia for the Connection Newspapers chain and for WAMU-FM, filed a series of open records requests related to the Masters shooting with the Fairfax County Police Department. All were denied.

In March, Pope asked Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won’t at least release the incident report on Masters’ death, given the concerns that some have raised about the shooting. “Let us hear that concern,” Jennings shot back. “We are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual reporters.”

Except the media? That’s exactly who you would expect to file most open records requests. Asked why her department won’t even release the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. “What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?” Jennings asked. “I’d be curious to know why they want the name of an officer.”

Well, for starters, because he’s a government employee, paid by taxpayers and entrusted with the power to arrest, detain, coerce, and kill. And he recently used the most serious of those powers on an unarmed man. Releasing the name would allow reporters to see if the officer has been involved in other shootings or if there have been prior disciplinary measures or citizen complaints against him. It would allow the media to assess whether the Fairfax County Police Department has done an adequate job of training him in the use of lethal force.

Then again, journalists can’t get that other information either. The default position of the Fairfax County Police Department, Pope says, is to decline all requests for information; and not just from media. When a member of the county SWAT team shot and killed 38-year-old optometrist Sal Culosi Jr. in 2006, it took nearly a year, plus legal action, to get the department to release information about its investigation of the shooting to Culosi’s family. Culosi, who had been suspected of wagering on football games with friends, was also unarmed when he was killed.

In a state that the professional journalism association Investigative Reporters and Editors ranks the fifth most transparent in the country, the police departments in Fairfax County, Arlington, and Alexandria have managed to interpret the open records law in a way that lets them be almost completely opaque. “Part of my daily routine when I worked in Florida was to drive to the police station and get a copy of the previous day’s incident reports,” Pope says. “I was just dumbfounded when I started working in Virginia.” The police rejected all his requests for information – even for incident reports about arrests the same department had described in press releases.

Invoking a phrase that traditionally refers to censorship, Fairfax County’s Jennings told Pope that releasing police reports to the press would have a “chilling effect” on victims and witnesses, discouraging them from coming forward to report crimes. As Pope notes, that doesn’t appear to be the case in cities that routinely release police reports, as nearly all do. When Pope asked Jennings what evidence she has to support her theory, she replied, “I don’t know if there’s evidence or not. All I have is what our investigators and what our commanders and the police administration believe.”

Don’t expect elected officials to correct any of this. “I am in the corner of trusting our police department,” Arlington County Board Member Barbara Favola told Pope. “If they push back I am not going to override them, and I don’t think I could get three votes on the board to override them either.”

Alexandria Commonwealth Attorney Randolph Sengel fired off an indignant letter to the editor after Pope wrote about the secrecy in the northern Virginia police departments. Calling Pope’s well-reported piece a “rant” that was “thinly disguised as a news story,” Sengel declared, “Law enforcement investigations and prosecutions are not carried out for the primary purpose of providing fodder for his paper.” Mocking the media’s role as a watchdog, Sengel added, “The sacred ‘right of the public to know’ is still (barely) governed by standards of reasonableness and civility,” as if those two adjectives were incompatible with a journalist inquiring about the details of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed man.

“The most offensive theme of this article,” Sengel complained, “is the notion that law enforcement agencies decline to release these reports to protect their own, or to conceal corrupt behavior. Believe it or not, the reporter and his colleagues are not the last true guardians of truth and justice, the attainment of which does not hang on unfettered exercise of journalistic zeal. Last time I checked there were multiple safeguards in place to assure the integrity of the criminal justice system.”

These are remarkably wrongheaded sentiments, especially coming from an elected prosecutor. There have been several cases across the country where police reports haven’t jibed with video evidence or have otherwise turned out to be inaccurate. Journalists and advocacy groups have used public records to shed light on bogus arrests, police cover-ups, poor police training, and wrongful convictions. Sengel seems indignant at the very idea that a lowly journalist might be looking over his shoulder, or over the shoulders of the cops who bring him the people he prosecutes. Fairfax County hasn’t charged a police officer for an on-duty shooting in 70 years. Perhaps that’s because no officer there has deserved to be charged. But perhaps local police and prosecutors have too cozy a relationship. The point is, we don’t know. And northern Virginia’s cops have made it almost impossible to find out.

Popularity: 7% [?]

LONDON, England – June 23, 2010 – The debate over hundreds of surveillance cameras quietly installed to spy on whole communities in Birmingham – including my own – has grown louder and louder, forcing a halt to the scheme that now hangs suspended, dangling in mid-crisis just like the unwanted cameras. “Project Champion” now looks like a real loser.

The offending lenses will be covered over with bags, we are told, and a full public consultation will follow. Liberty is mounting a legal challenge and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) will be investigating West Midlands police over whether they briefed or misled local councillors. My MP, Roger Godsiff, has tabled a debate in parliament and John Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley, informed me he has raised the issue with the Home Secretary.

This is quite a result for the campaign I started only two months ago. Along with a few other local residents and councillors who were also alert enough to have concerns and ask questions about the scheme, we have succeeded in exposing a major counterterrorism operation for what it is: ill conceived, poorly implemented, botched and – worst of all – potentially counterproductive.

Surely the plan to spy on whole communities in Birmingham could not have remained secret for long. The camera posts are hardly invisible: they resemble machine-gun turrets and are everywhere. And yet Britain is a society so used to the proliferation of CCTV cameras that they have become just part of our street furniture and are regarded as normal. All those other cameras act as camouflage; would anyone notice a few more? They are everywhere we look, except we have become sufficiently inured that we just don’t see them any more. For that reason the whole affair could well have gone unnoticed and slipped under the radar, as intended.

The police strategy appears to have relied on the idea that nobody would notice a few hundred more cameras. After all, the population has been hoodwinked into believing these things are substitute police officers, a panacea for all types of crime, and that support for CCTV is somehow linked to good citizenship. Surely the only privacy-loving miscreants who would object to their every move being tracked and recorded on a database must be criminals? After all, if you were not doing anything wrong, why would you mind? These dangerous assumptions are wrong and must be challenged. It’s worrying that few people I’ve spoken to recently seem to know what the words “civil liberties” mean. Fewer still will stand up and fight to protect them. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, it’s said, and never was that truer than right now in Birmingham.

Watching Nick Clegg’s political reform speech on TV in May was a defining moment in my campaign. When the deputy prime minister promised that his government would “end the culture of spying on its citizens” I cheered as if England had just scored a goal. “Britain must not be a country where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question.” Back of the net! It was as though I had written it myself.

I set up a Facebook group and a web site to launch my campaign, then I wrote an article for a local magazine, started a petition and lobbied MPs and councillors to denounce the spy-cam scheme. After passing the story to Paul Lewis at the Guardian and Liberty, I found I had officially become an activist, the leader and spokesman for the campaign to have the cameras removed. The campaign group, NO CCTV also contacted me. They had been following my campaign and were behind me all the way, offering support and useful information.

After I was quoted in two Guardian articles my phone did not stop ringing and I soon found myself at the centre of the storm, campaigning on local and national radio and television culminating in five media appearances in one day. It is safe to say now that the truth is out, but whether the spy-cam scheme will be abandoned remains to be seen.

Civil libertarians should watch with interest to see what happens next in Birmingham, as it has grave implications for the relationship between the state and the private individual. I suspect that apart from the home secretary, there is only one other person with the power to order a stop to this. So if you’re listening, Nick Clegg, come to Birmingham’s aid and restore our civil liberties, as you promised. It’s an open goal and now is your chance to score.

Popularity: 2% [?]

BUFFALO, New York – June 22, 2010 – Non-tribal people who buy cigarettes from Native American retailers in New York will have to pay taxes on those smokes under a measure approved yesterday – a move that will end an important source of income for some tribes.

Earlier, as the Legislature contemplated the move, J.C. Seneca, a Seneca Nation leader, said the tribe would regard it as “an act of war,” according to the Buffalo News’ Tom Precious. Seneca has called it “economic terrorism,” and some legislators worried about a “class of cultures” and a backlash from tribes.

The move to raise taxes on all smokes, and to collect them on the tribal cigarettes, makes cigarette taxes in New York the highest in the nation, and will raise the cost of a pack of cigarettes to $9.20 a pack in the state, and more than $11 in New York City, which has its own taxes. More to the point, as far as New York state is concerned, it will add $440 million to the state’s short-of-cash coffers.

The legislation will permit the state to start collecting taxes on Indian cigarette sales on September 1, a move the state has threatened during the regimes of the past four governors. But critics said the bill includes a loophole to make it easier for Indian tribes, including the Seneca Nation, the nation’s largest Native American seller of tax-free cigarettes, to seek redress in federal courts.

The bill also does not end tax-free Indian sales of non-cigarette tobacco products, such as cigars, and also does not cover gasoline sales. It also could make it easier, and more lucrative with the hike in cigarette taxes, for Indian businesses to manufacture and sell tax-free their own brand of cigarettes, an increasingly popular route in New York.

The Seneca Nation has argued that the legislation could cost 3,000 tribal and nontribal jobs. A similar effort to collect the taxes in the 1990s resulted in sporadic violence as tribes shut down portions of the New York Thruway in protest.

“This is nothing less than a deliberate effort to sabotage our federal treaty rights and rape our economy to bail out New York State. Governor Paterson and members of the state legislature should be ashamed of themselves for looting our economy because they’ve squandered theirs through overspending and poor management,” Seneca President Barry Snyder Sr. said in a statement.

Popularity: 16% [?]