Schleuder

Schleuder is a  GPG-enabled mailing list manager with remailing-capabilities. Schleuder is a group’s email-gateway: subscribers can exchange encrypted emails among themselves, receive emails from non-subscribers and send emails to non-subscribers via the list.

If you run a mailing list, Schleuder is a useful tool to add security to your list. It provides encrypted communication for members of your list, while allowing secure communication with non-subscribers.
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Flashbang Grenades

There is debate and discussion about the use of flashbang grenades against a crowd of demonstrators in Portland, OR on August 4, 2018. Was it necessary? Was it excessive force? Was it legal?

In a 2015 report co-published by ProPublica and the Atlantic we learn more about the police use of flashbang grenades. Flashbang grenades can sever hands and fingers, induce heart attacks, burn down homes and kill pets, the investigation found, and there are few checks on officers who want to use them.

A 2013 article in the Huffington Post asks: "It’s one thing for the U.S. military to raid a compound in Kabul using incendiary grenades to secure and enter the premises. It’s quite another thing for U.S. police officers to execute a search warrant by throwing “flash-bang” grenades into a home, raining the place with rubber bullets, and kicking down every door in the house. Is that conduct necessary? Is it reasonable? Does the Fourth Amendment allow it?"

Is there a place for flashbang grenades in police tactics? Yes, absolutely against armed and violent subjects the flashbang grenade serves as a way for the police to gain control of a violent person using a less lethal device. Good for the police, and good for the bad guy who doesn't get shot.

Should these same flashbang grenades be used to raid homes and disperse non-violent crowds from public streets? Well, this is where the debate comes in...

If police do nothing to break up illegal demonstrations they can easily turn into riots. If police use excessive force against non-violent crowds it can case the crowds to turn violent, or to directly target the police themselves. The YouTube video "How to Stop a Riot" explains some of the problems police face when dealing with large crowds.

In this YouTube video we see flashbang grenades being used against a crowd of demonstrators in Portland on November 10, 2016.

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DHS Implementing Facial Recognition in Top 20 US Airports

At these 10 airports: Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Logan in Boston, O’Hare in Chicago, Hobby and George Bush in Houston, McCarran in Las Vegas, Miami International, John F. Kennedy in New York, and Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—specifically U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—has ramped up and expanded its Biometric Exit program, which gathers biometric data from international individuals exiting the United States to document and verify that they’ve left. But instead of the fingerprints or document review DHS had been using as biometrics verifiers since 2004, the focus now is on facial recognition.

John Wagner, deputy assistant commissioner at CBP, outlined the program vision in early May. It was initially trialed in June 2016 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Wagner is arguing for the expansion of facial recognition technology not just to the flight check-in process, but also to airport waiting areas, external cameras, and other aspects of airport travel.

Wagner went on to say that this could mean using facial recognition to identify travelers arriving in the United States, including passport-holding citizens, regardless of their citizenship status. It could also be applied to TSA checkpoints or airport lounge access, according to the Verge. “As soon as you check in for arrivals or departure, we’re going to stage your photo in that database,” Wagner said.

The agency hopes to implement this program in the 20 highest-traffic airports by the end of next year. But while DHS and CBP see this as a way to help address national security and immigration, others are concerned about the civil rights and surveillance implications of the continued rollout of such a system. “They’re using facial recognition on American citizens without any explicit authorization,” said Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology who has been studying the program. “That’s a big deal.”

Congress has been clear that the Biometric Exit program is about collecting biometrics from foreign nationals but never giving DHS permission collect biometrics from U.S. citizens—but that’s exactly what DHS is doing.  (Medium)
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There may be a legitimate value to a "Biometric Exit Program" that uses facial recognition technology (maybe?), but the problem is the expansion of this technology into a mass surveillance program that tracks and enters into a government database everyone that travels through a US airport.

 

Gun Owners Are Least Likely Criminals, Report Finds

According to an August 9, 2018 report in the Daily Signal, concealed-carry permit holders are nearly the most law-abiding demographic of any group of Americans. “Indeed, it is impossible to think of any other group in the U.S. that is anywhere near as law-abiding,” says the report, titled “Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States 2016.”

The study compared permit holders to police... “We find that permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at less than a sixth the rate for police officers,” the report says. “Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is only 2.4 per 100,000. That is just one-seventh of the rate for police officers.”

“In 2014, the seven states that allowed concealed carry without a permit had much lower rates of murder and violent crime than did the seven jurisdictions with the lowest percentage of permit holders,” the Crime Prevention Research Center report reads. “Indeed, the murder rate was 31 percent lower in the states not requiring permits. The violent crime rate was 28 percent lower. Compared to the rest of the country, the 25 states with the highest rates of permit-holding experienced markedly lower rates of murder and violent crime.”
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Baltimore Police Officer Suspended After Video Shows Him Punching A Man

According to King 5 News (August 11, 2018) a Baltimore police officer has been suspended after a viral video showed him repeatedly punching and tackling to the ground a man who did not return the blows, authorities say.

The incident occurred Saturday, Baltimore Police Detective Jeremy Silbert confirmed to USA TODAY. It was not immediately clear what prompted an initial police response to the scene.

The video, shared online by journalists, activists and community members, shows a Baltimore police officer speaking to a man on a sidewalk. Another office is standing in front of the two men, talking to others on the sidewalk.

The man, responding to the officer, shouts, "For what?" The officer standing in front of them blocks the view of the camera, but the man then shouts, "Don't touch me," before the officer begins punching.

The officer hits the man with an onslaught of blows as he wrestles him onto the top of a house's front steps. He punches the man's head multiple times as he lays on the steps, eventually holding him down to the ground.

The man, who doesn't return a punch to the officer in the video, appears to bleed from his mouth as the officer holds a forearm to his face while grabbing his arm.

Throughout the video, the second officer does not stop the officer throwing the punches.
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It is too often the case that we only see video of conflict between police and suspects after the event has become physical. In the case of the Baltimore video we see the event from prior to the escalation of force (when the officer and suspect are having a conversation) until the suspect is on the ground following the escalation of force.

This is a incident in Baltimore, being reported on a Seattle news site. There may be (likely is) more to this incident than what got posted on-line, but what is posted is what people across the nation see, and what they see is, at least in part, what forms their opinion of the police.

According to a 2017 Gallup Poll 70% of Blacks in America lack confidence in the police. Only 44% of all Americans age 18-34 have confidence in the police. We need to change that perception from one of mistrust, to one of respect for the law and respect for the police.
  

King County Detective Suspended for Attacking Uber Driver

SEATTLE (AP) — The King County Sheriff's Office says a detective was suspended for four days without pay after an internal investigation determined she punched, kicked, scratched and slapped an Uber driver while she was off duty.

King County Sheriff Mitzi Johanknecht said this week that detective Janette Luitgaarden would serve the suspension for unbecoming conduct in the Nov. 4, 2017 incident.

The Washington State Patrol says Luitgaarden appeared significantly intoxicated after she attacked the driver while the car was southbound Interstate 405.

A police report says that Luitgaarden began yelling that she was being kidnapped while in the vehicle and tried to jump out of the moving car. The report says she attacked the driver after the driver grabbed her arm to keep her from jumping.

Luitgaarden's union representative said she was experiencing personal problems that night and was embarrassed by her actions.
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In August 2012 Detective Luitgaarden filed a claim for damages of $1.5-million - $3-million against the King County Sheriff's Office claiming sexual and gender based harassment, unfair criticism of her work product, and threats of retaliation... 

Nobody is excusing Detective Luitgaarden's attack on the Uber driver, but there may be issues within the King County Sheriff's Office that are resulting in highly inappropriate conduct by its deputies.

As another example, in August 2017, Detective Richard Rowe, who was in plainclothes and driving an unmarked car, pulled a gun on a motorcyclist whom he claimed was driving recklessly. The King County Sheriff is currently being sued because of Detective Rowe's misconduct.

When members of a police department are subjected to regular and re-occurring harassment, when leadership does nothing to stop that harassment, and when the victims of this harassment are subjected to sanctions, restrictions, and retaliation for reporting misconduct within the department - even the most stable person may be driven over the edge.

 

 

3-D Printed Phantom Ghost Guns are an Imaginary Problem

Bad news for Gotham: Batman isn’t real.

Neither are high-tech phantom polymer guns — and all the angst and wailing about 3D printers churning out plastic gats from sea to shining sea doesn’t change that.

Urban legends are a poor basis for making public policy.

The federal government has undertaken two significant initiatives on the matter of undetectable plastic guns: banning them on the one hand, and then trying to invent them on the other. In the 1980s, the Pentagon invested in what turned out to be a fruitless project to build nonmetal firearms using ceramics. At the same time, Ronald Reagan signed into law a ban on the possession of firearms that can pass unseen through metal detectors.

That’s government work for you: banning something that doesn’t exist while spending great heaping piles of money trying to invent the thing you want to ban, and failing.

The unhappy truth is that you don’t need a space-age plastic gun to sneak past airport security. A 2015 test found a 95 percent failure rate among TSA agents trying to identify guns and other contraband. By 2017, ABC News reports, the TSA failure rate was down to around 80 percent.

We have an odd tendency to focus on the exotic when it comes to gun violence in the United States. There isn’t any evidence of undetectable homemade guns being used in violent crime in the United States. It just doesn’t happen. In the same way, politicians and television producers love the charismatic rat-a-rat of a machine gun but, here in the real world, legally owned fully automatic weapons have been used in — count ’em — two homicides since 1934, when the government started keeping score. Both were in Ohio, and one of the perpetrators was a police officer using a department-issued firearm.

The Obama administration had attempted, under the flimsiest of pretexts, to suppress the online publication of plans for building such weapons by classifying them as munitions subject to export controls. We’ve been down that road before: In the 1990s, the Clinton administration tried the same thing with an encryption tool called Pretty Good Privacy, insisting that anybody who sent a copy to a friend in Canada was an illegal international arms dealer. It was bull, and everybody knew it. The government eventually relented, and now ordinary Canadians and Belgians have access to strong encryption — which doesn’t seem to have mattered very much.

Approximately 0.0 percent of the homicides committed annually in New York City involve a 3D printed gun. Approximately 90 percent of them involve somebody with a prior police record, including many offenders previously charged with violent crimes and illegal firearms possession — a problem about which the powers that be are doing approximately squat. It’s worse in Chicago and Los Angeles.

We have real problems. Why focus on the imaginary ones?  (New York Post, August 4, 2018)
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Building a working firearm in a home workshop is not particularly difficult, and as long as the firearm you build complies with existing law - barrel and overall length, not a machinegun, etc. - it is perfectly legal to build your own guns.

https://ghostgunner.net/