Marylanders participating in Occupy DC and Freedom Plaza/Human Needs Not Corporate Greed encampments have now also begun organizing to convene a General Assembly or “People’s Assembly” to bring the Occupy movement to Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Wheaton and surrounding neighborhoods in Montgomery County. Their next (2nd) organizing meeting is this Saturday February 11 at 1p.m. at the Electric Maid Community Exchange in Takoma Park – 1 block up from Takoma metro station on Carroll. Contrary to some reports in the mainstream media, Occupy movement is not “over” in the DC area and many folks that are still active with Occupy DC and Freedom Plaza are expanding into surrounding neighborhoods. Occupy Mt. Pleasant, and Occupy Towsend University are also ramping up. Folks are encouraged to spread the word and come and help us build for a General Assembly/People’s Assembly in Montgomery County. Proposed topics for Saturday:
Occupy Values – Why we Occupy and support the Occupy Movement
Issues/Campaigns that matter to us and the Mo Co community
General Assembly structure/parameters and outreach planning
Last night I went to an organizing meeting for A.N.S.W.E.R. coalition’s campaign to support the MD Dream Act and fight against a “repeal referendum” that will be on the ballot in November 2012 in Maryand. The Maryland Dream Act passed in 2011 and gives undocumented Maryland high-school students the ability to apply for in-state tuition rates if they are accepted to a public college and meet other criteria, including requirement to have attended high school in MD for at least 3 years, and proof that parents paid MD taxes for the same period. Many states are taking up the Dream Act on their own, since the federal Dream Act has stalled. The meeting organizers reported on the effort to repeal the MD Dream Act via a public referendum – organized by what they say are racist anti-immigrant groups. In July the State Board of Elections announced that opponents had succeeded in gathering the necessary petition signatures to get the repeal measure on the ballot, and as a result its implementation has been put on hold pending referendum result. There is a lawsuit filed to block the referendum measure by Dream Act advocacy groups, stating that the Dream Act is an appropriations bill and cannot be put to referendum. A.N.S.W.E.R. is organizing a demonstration against the main leader of repeal referendum, MD Delegate Pat McDonough, who is speaking to Dream Act opponents this Saturday at Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville. Supporters of the Maryland Dream Act are asked to sign a pledge to “Vote No” to the referendum in November. For more information on the demonstration this Saturday contact dreamact@answercoalition.org.
Occupy Congress General Assembly (click for slideshow)
I started my day with Kit and Sue, colleagues and friends from MCCRC, meeting with our Maryland Senators’ aides at the Hart Senate Offices building. We lobbied hard against the indefinite detention provisions that just passed. Cardin’s aide indicating that these provisions were indeed why Cardin voted against the bill and we thanked him for that. Milkulski voted for the bill, and her aide said that due to the other aspects of bill, she felt she couldn’t vote it down. (BOO!) Kit asked each of the Senator’s aides what groups like MCCRC could do to support efforts by Congress to defend civil liberties and constitutional rights. To our surprise, both aides said that providing educational events to the public is the best way to build support and advance our cause. They also advised us that when we wanted to advocate on an issue, writing an actual letter and mailing it to our elected Congressional officials was considered much more seriously than sending form letters, signing online petitions or participating in a call-in action.
After the meetings we headed down to the capitol lawn to meet up with other occupiers and attend the GA. I attended a few meetings of the Occupy DC J17 Occupy Congress organizing committee earlier in January. The DC group worked with Occupy organizers all around the country to prepare for the event and I am so impressed with how quickly they pulled it all together. Many occupiers were against with the idea of meeting with congressional reps/aides (i.e. why should we bother when they’re already bought and owned by corporate special interests) and others planned to head inside the rep offices and demand to be heard. Organizers kept action positions flexible – those that wanted to go inside to lobby or even protest should do so but might risk arrest and those that wanted to stay outside and just protest should do so. I’m sure folks were expecting a higher turnout on the 17th but no doubt the cold rainy weather had an impact. I also noticed less police presence than usual for similar size gatherings. After an hour or so of mingling around and chatting with folks (I spotted Sgt. Shamar Thomas, the Marine that was captured on YouTube viral videos telling off NY cops, dancing to hip-hop that blared briefly – was there an amplification permit?) at around noon the mic-check calls began gathering folks in groups by state for the General Assembly. It was a large group, so facilitators helped us practice a 3 level “human microphone” process to ensure everyone could hear the speakers. They gave information and hand-outs on how to find representatives in the office buildings across the street, and warned folks to stay peaceful or risk arrest. It went on a little bit too long in my view, considering that everyone was fired up and ready to get going.
Meeting with State Senator Jamie Raskin and Delegate Sheila Hixson. Click image for more photos
I drove to Annapolis last Monday for the Death Penalty Repeal Rally and Lobby Night hoping this would be the last time I’d have to lobby my Maryland reps on this particular issue. The event was co-sponsored by organizations Maryland CASE (Citizens Against State Executions), CEDP (Campaign to End the Death Penalty), and Amnesty International, and brought out a diverse group of Marylanders from around the state. I had an early appointment with my District 20 state delegate Heather Mizeur’s aide so I wasn’t able to attend the entire Repeal Rally kick-off on Lawyers Mall, but was able to talk to a few folks and get a few pics. Unfortunately I missed hearing Kim Davis, sister of Troy Davis, speak but was able to meet her after the session in the state house later that evening and expressed my condolences for the loss of both her brother Troy and her sister Martina this past year. Martina Correia, a tireless fighter for her brother, died after a long battle with cancer not long after Troy was executed.
I was also able to meet with delegate Tom Hucker’s aide that afternoon and then held a joint meeting with State Sen. Jamie Raskin and Delegate Sheila Hixson and other Dist 20 citizen lobbyists in Sheila Hixson’s office. (Jamie Raskin met with us there due to a flood in the James Senate building – hope Jamie’s office is okay/dry by now!) Holly from our lobby group is on the board of MD CASE. She reported to our reps that they believe they do have the votes to repeal the death penalty if the bill is allowed out of committee to go to the floor for a vote. Jamie (now Senate Majority Whip) promised to do all he can to make it happen – we all agreed that this is the year to make this happen! No more state executions!! The death penalty is expensive (more so than life in prison) and has been shown time and time again to be racist and arbitrary.
Using encryption for correspondence in America is older than the country and as American as apple pie, so much so that Thomas Jefferson even invented an encryption device during the Revolution and later used it for dispatches while he was ambassador to France.
Public Key Encryption
Protecting the exchange of information through correspondence has always been a primary goal of encryption. After millennia of scientific and mathematical analysis, the array of possible codes and ciphers is multifarious and bewildering, from the highly secure one-time pad to the hard-to-detect book cipher. For today’s typical computer user, the cryptographic choice is likely to be public-key encryption, which is widely available for email in two forms: S/MIME and PGP.
Public-key encryption has the advantage of addressing two basic needs: 1) it preserves the confidentiality of data in transit and 2) it allows the recipient to verify the identity of the sender. This is accomplished by “encrypting” and “signing” a message, each of which may be done separately or in combination.
S/MIME
In some ways, S/MIME is the easier of the two standards to implement and the more transparent to the user, so although PGP has other advantages, I am going to defer a discussion of PGP to a future post.
The guiding principle behind S/MIME is that users are issued cryptographic certificates that are signed by an “authority” who guarantees the genuine nature of the certificate and (in varying degrees) the identity of the user. Obtaining a certificate with significant identifying information, particularly for an organization, can be an expensive proposition, but it is possible for individual users to obtain certificates suitable for email encryption and verification for free from providers such as Comodo.
Each certificate contains a public key and a private key. At the risk of oversimplifying, you use your private key to sign and encrypt messages you are sending to someone else. Your public key is used by other people to send messages to you. You should always protect the physical security of your certificate, because no one else should ever have access to your private key.
Download Your Certificate
When your obtain your certificate, providers of certificates will typically install it in your browser, and it will need to exported from your preferences and saved in a “.p12″ or “.pfx” file. For example, in Firefox, go to Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Encryption>View Certificates. Click on View Certificates and then Your Certificates. You should see your certificate listed. Click on Backup and then enter a pair of arbitrary passwords (don’t forget them!) when prompted. Your certificate will now be saved as a *.p12 file suitable for importation into your mail program of choice.
Settings in other browsers will vary, but they should follow the same overall pattern.
Installing Your Certificate
Most popular email software is already equipped to handle S/MIME encryption, including Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Apple’s iPhone.
Instructions to import your certificate from your *.p12 file into particular mail clients are readily available on the Internet, for example, for multiple clients, for Outlook 2007, for Thunderbird, and for iPhone.
I have even had some success with the Penango plugin for Firefox that allows you to encrypt mail in Gmail, although my experience has not been wholly trouble free.
The National Coalition for the Protection of Civil Freedoms held a town hall last Sunday at the Martin Luther King Library in Washington, DC. Headlined “Know Your Rights — before they’re read to you!”, the town hall provided both important advice on how to handle an unexpected knock on the door by the FBI, and moving testimony about people ensnared in a web of informants, vague charges, prejudice, and draconian sentences.
“Give me your card; I’ll have my lawyer call you”
That is what you should say if the FBI or other law enforcement come knocking on your door without a search warrant. A skit illustrating what not to do and then what one should do in that situation was put on by civil rights lawyer Ashraf Nubani, Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad (Minaret of Freedom Institute), and a friend:
NCPCF chair Peter Erlinder (a law professor in Minnesota), noted that you should say that even if you don’t yet have a lawyer, and suggested contacting the National Lawyer’s Guild if you ever need help in a situation like this. The trap that can be sprung is lying — even in a small way, i.e., leaving out something — to federal law enforcement, which is a federal offense. The threat of being charged for that can be used to pressure people to become informants and trap friends and acquaintances into statements or actions that are all too easily and willingly misconstrued by prosecutors, grand juries, juries, and judges.
“Homegrown terrorists” or victims of preemptive prosecution? That may be part of what happened to Hysen Sherifi, Ziyad Yaghi, and Omar Hassan in North Carolina. The three were recently punished with breathtaking sentences of 45, 31.5, and 15 years for charges that, as NCPCF executive director Steve Downs put it, “are very hard to understand.”* They were essentially convicted of thought crimes in advance of any overt violent act — which it is not at all clear was intended. Instead, things like trips to Israel and Kosovo, gun purchases, and some Facebook trash talk — all still legal, last I checked — were among the thin reeds with which prosecutors built their tale of a terror conspiracy. The leader of their paintball and target practice club, one Daniel Patrick Boyd, apparently turned informant after being caught in misstatements to federal customs officials.
You can learn more about the case and how you can help at freeziyadyaghi.com. Sherifi’s brother Shkumbin spoke to the town hall about his brother (video soon); he and his sisters Merve and Julia also talked more about the case to journalist Pete Tucker and myself afterwards: Continue reading →
End Indefinite Detention: Charge or Release. Click photo for slideshow.
Despite the cold and wet weather last Wednesday, between one and two hundred people made their way to Lafayette Park to protest both the 10th anniversary of detentions at Guantanamo and the recent passage of the NDAA ratifying indefinite detentions. Others protested near Congress and the Supreme Court. I joined the Lafayette Park contingent, and captured a bit of what transpired in photos and video. (The video was shot with a small camera which lost sound when zooming in or back out from a subject; sorry.) The videos, below, are of the protesters, remarks by Naeem Baig (Islamic Circle of North America), and remarks — hip hop style! — by Shahid Buttar (BORDC), who closed with a rousing chant of “Jail John Yoo! Impeach Jay Bybee!”
Freeahmed.com
Guantanamo isn’t the half of it; while the right to a trial is a prerequisite of justice, it may do little good if the deck is stacked against the defendant. Americans — often Muslim-Americans — are being put away for decades in American prisons for trumped-up “conspiracy” and “material support” charges. One case I learned of on Wednesday was that of Ahmed Abu Ali, an American resident of Falls Church, Virginia, who was jailed by Saudi Arabia’s Mukhabarat, confessed to conspiracy to terrorism after torture — and whose confession was then used in a U.S. court to put him away first for 30 years and then for life — on a cross-appeal. You can learn more about the case and judge for yourself by visiting freeahmed.com.
What the heck — WordPress.com prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog, have a look.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,400 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people. Continue reading →
Flyer; please feel free to adapt it for your own use (click links in text)
As promised by Twitter, Facebook, and email,we returned to the Obama Kensington campaign office yesterday to protest the imminent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act. A cold and windy late winter afternoon probably helped keep our own numbers low – as it turned out, there would be only two of us. (Thanks, M.!)
To our surprise, though, no Obama volunteers were there either. A staffer who was checking out around 4:30 — our announced arrival time — claimed that an Internet service outage had caused the office to cancel its scheduled phonebank. Indeed, the third floor appeared to be dark.
The evening wasn’t a loss; some volunteers exiting the building took our flyers — both the small one depicted here (4-panel front, back), and a longer one similar to last week’s. We also spoke with a non-volunteer from the same building who heard us out, took our flyers, and expressed strong support.
After a brief stint of traffic flyering — approaching cars stopped at red lights — M. and I parted ways for the evening. When I returned to the Obama campaign office building, I got in my car to wait for any late arriving NDAA protesters.
Instead, at least three more Obama volunteers showed up — only to find their own office abandoned for the evening. Apparently, they hadn’t been notified of the cancellation. I gave them all flyers, and gave some extra ones to a volunteer captain who assured me all her friends at the meeting she was going to next would want the information.
"...a vocal opponent of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s (WMATA) policy of random searches of passenger bags..." -- Government Security News "fantastic work organizing around WMATA's search policy!" -- ACLU-Maryland
