NYPD have a “discussion” with OWS protesters in 2011

Last night, several Occupy Wall Street activists were paid a visit at their homes by the NYPD who wanted to inquire about the activities they had planned for today’s mass protests. Gawker’s Adrian Chen reports that Gideon Oliver, the New York Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild’s president, told him, “They were asking what are your May Day plans, do you know who the leaders are—these are classic political surveillance questions.”

In the first case: activist Zachary Dempster said that six NYPD officers broke down the door of his Bushwick, Brooklyn apartment at around 6:15am this morning. Dempster said they were armed with a warrant for the arrest of his roommate, musician Joe Crow Ryan, for a six-year-old open container violation. But Dempster believes this was an excuse to check in on him, as he’d been arrested in February at an Occupy Wall Street Party that was broken up by cops, and charged with assaulting a police office and inciting a riot.

WTF? SIX COPS knocked this guy’s fucking door down for a SIX-YEAR-OLD OPEN CONTAINER VIOLATION??? Talk about a flimsy excuse for a SIX COP RAID!

They got a warrant and broke a door down because of a 2006 misdemeanor? (Or is it merely an infraction?) Remarkable!

That will teach that Communist hippie about cracking open a beer in public!

That they were able to secure a warrant to break the door down is something I hope to hear Mayor Bloomberg forced to explain…

After running his ID, a detective questioned Dempster in his bedroom for about five minutes about tomorrow’s May Day protest, he said.

“They asked what I was doing tomorrow, and if I knew of any activities, any events—that was how the conversation started,” Dempster said. Dempster said he’s not planning doing much, as his case from February is still open. Dempster’s roommate was also asked about him and May Day.

About an hour later, an activist friend of Dempster’s who runs in anarchist circles said his apartment in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where he lives with a half-dozen other activists and Occupy Wall Street organizers was visited by six NYPD cops—possibly the same ones. The activist said police used arrest warrants for two men who no longer lived there as pretext for the raid. The officers ran the IDs of everyone who was in the apartment, then booked our source when they discovered he had an outstanding open container violation. Police never asked about Occupy Wall Street or May Day, but our source said the message was clear: We’re watching you.

Another open container violation? This is real “my dog ate my homework” shit, isn’t it? Open container violations! Imagine having your door knocked down by six police officers for a jay-walking ticket you didn’t pay.

“We obviously don’t think it’s an accident that it happened the day before May Day, where people in the house are organizers,” he said.

This afternoon, NYPD also visited the home of Greek anarchist artist Georgia Sagri, who has been part of Occupy Wall Street from the beginning and led the occupation of a SoHo art gallery last October. Turns out she was giving a press conference about May Day at Zuccotti Park at the time. Police waited for about an hour outside her home, then left.

“My roommate gave me a call and told me the NYPD was looking for me,” Sagri said. “Since that time, I didn’t go home. So I’m basically on the street. My May Day has already started which is fine, I don’t mind.” She said she has no idea why NYPD visited her.

This isn’t the first time NYPD has been criticized for aggressive surveillance of protesters: The NYPD infiltrated activist groups around the country before 2004’s New York Ciy Republican National Convention. And The New York Times has ably detailed the extent to which NYPD has harassed and spied on Occupy Wall Street protesters.

“The intention behind this I’m sure is to try to create fear and silence dissent,” said Marina Sitrin, a lawyer and member of Occupy Wall Street’s legal working group, “and to keep people from coming out into the streets.”

There are several marches, blockades and acts of civil disobedience planned across New York City today. From what I can tell via what precocious few media reports there have been, the rain is ending in the city and the protests are now starting to really gear up in Times Square, in front of Fox News and in the business district. If you can’t support the actions because you can’t get out of work, there is a mass rally expected in lower Manhattan after the work day.

Interesting to note (and I’m basing this observation from sampling through the live “Occupy Wall Street Superchannel” at UStream) the protests this time are more diffuse and spread out all over New York. Whereas it may not make for the same sort of TV-ready drama that attempts to close the Brooklyn Bridge off did last year, it makes the NYPD’s job a lot harder. You can “bottle,” contain and squeeze a large group, but it’s much harder to do anything about hundred of sites happening at once. Nice to see that the tactics are evolving.

 
Marxist anthropologist David Harvey talks to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about what to expect during tomorrow’s May Day protests.

On Tuesday, May 1st, known as May Day or International Workers Day, Occupy Wall Street protesters hope to mobilize tens of thousands of people across the country under the slogan, “General Strike. No Work. No Shopping. Occupy Everywhere.” Events are planned in 125 cities. We speak with leading social theorist David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, about how Occupy Wall Street compares to other large-scale grassroots movements throughout modern history.

“It’s struck a chord,” Harvey says of the Occupy movement. “I hope tomorrow there’ll be a situation in which many more people will say, ‘Look, things have got to change. Something different has to happen.’”

David Harvey’s latest book is Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.
 

 
Via Alternet

 
I love me some Annie Sprinkle, she’s been there and done that and showed many of us how to go there and do that, but I wonder what she was thinking (back in 1992) when she made Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop.

Sprinkle is either just coming down from some heavy duty mystical epiphany and has momentarily been blinded by the all pervasive light of Shakti power or she’s doing a brilliant spot-on parody of the new age and self-help movements. My guess: a bit of both.

Rainbow Buffalo Cornwoman? Yeah. It was 1969. She was a former go-go dancer and fire-eater from San Francisco, wore leather bell-bottoms, had a tattoo that said “speed kills” and a crescent-shaped abdominal scar that looked like the new moon or one of Madame Blavatsky’s toenail clippings. She called me “Tex” and I called her…as often as possible.
 

 
I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a teenager in school. Though I didn’t buy into his hype for religion, I took much comfort and inspiration from his biography at a difficult time in my life. I was on the receiving end of bullying from a small but vicious clique of wannabe Nazis. I was a peacenik, who confused inaction with pacifism. Instead I should have been smart and quick enough to stop the bullying then and there. I didn’t, and rode it out for 2 years.

Not fun. But it showed me everyone got fucked over somewhere down the line, and made me aware that I could never tolerate that happening to anyone. Or as I read it in Malcolm X’s autobiography:

“Hence, I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight.”

Here Malcolm X is interrogated by a group of hard-headed white men, who can’t get beyond their own prejudice to discuss, as one human to another, Malcolm X’s thoughts on religion, history and life. Throughout Malcolm X is an example of intelligence, dignity and grace, never allowing himself to be goaded by his detractors. Recorded in Chicago, March 17, 1963, for City Desk, with Malcolm X, and journalists Jim Hurlbut, Len O’Connor, Floyd Kalber, and Charles McCuen.
 

 
Occupy History is videographer Paul McIsaac‘s short film on the importance of direct, collective and non-violent action - from the first occupy movement (the Bonus Army of World War One veterans, who marched and occupied Washington DC in 1932), to the Flint Sit-Down Strike in 1936, through the ideas of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Spring, and on today’s Occupy Wall Street Movement. McIsaac’s film is a springboard into action, focussing on the potential of such collective action, rather than any critical examination of the disparate reasons behind each of the events documented.
 

 
With thanks to Hans Echnaton Schano
 

 
Your Bank of America... it’s all yours!

Not to be confused with that other Bank of America.

(Spread this one around now, before they take it down.)

Thank you Glen E. Friedman

 
Filmed in Philadelphia during the first Earth Day in April of 1970, Circuit Earth is a fascinating glimpse at the roots of the ecology movement and a sad reminder of how little things have changed when it comes to humanity’s relationship to our planet in the 42 years since the film was made. The environmental crisis continues and is getting worse as we continue to not learn from our mistakes.

Circuit Earth The idea behind “Circuit Earth” was to draw connections between concern for the environment and spiritual impoverishment manifested by war, overpopulation, mindless consumption, and drug addiction. This “underground” documentary raised issues that are now in the mainstream, including the impact of warfare, climate change, and population growth on the environment. It focused on concerns that are as true today as they were then, such as the dependence on fossil fuels, which is at the core of the energy debate today. Circuit Earth anticipated the need for a holistic and global approach to the environment that requires an informed citizenry as well as knowledge-based political leadership. This film underscores the global nature of technology and the environment, and the complex interaction of natural and human systems.

Featuring Allen Ginsberg, Sen. Ed Muskie, the Broadway cast of Hair, Jerry Rubin, Alan Watts, Redbone and Ed Sanders of the Fugs.

Circuit Earth was shown in 1971 and at a few conferences, but was never in distribution and has not been released on video.
 

 
Former Labor secretary Robert Reich explains why the “magic” of private equity is really a magic trick and one that’s being played on you and me.

The top YouTube comment, from “tapolna,” sums it up quite nicely:

The irony of all this is that Romney made his millions exploiting a system that fired workers, and reduced benefits for the remaining workers, all at the expense of taxpayers, us!

Then he wants us to vote for him!

But the tragedy is that some us will ACTUALLY VOTE FOR HIM.

 
Hactivists at Anonymous Operations UK have launched a successful cyber-attack on the British Prime Minister and his government’s Home Office websites by flooding them with unwanted internet traffic. Anonymous’ actions are in support of hacker Gary McKinnon and TV Shack’s Richard O’Dwyer who face extradition from Britain to the United States, and in support of retired business man Christopher Tappin, who has already been extradited.

@AnonOpUk used a Distributed Denial of Service action to block the government’s websites, an offense punishable by prison. During the attack, which started at 9pm UK time,  AnonOpUK tweeted:
 

 
Word of an attack on the Home Office websites had been known since yesterday when Hacker News reported:

Anonymous Plans 7 April Attack on British governmentUK hackers linked to the Anonymous group are encouraging supporters to attack the Home Office website this Saturday (7 April) in protest at the extradition of three UK citizens to the US. Called #OpTrialAtHome, the hacktivist group @AnonOpUK posted a warning on its Twitter page that an attack on the Home Office was planned for Saturday, 7 April.

An associated photo/poster shows images of Gary McKinnon, Richard O’Dwyer and Christopher Tappin. McKinnon and O’Dwyer are awaiting extradition from the UK to the US. Tappin’s extradition was effected on 24 February when he was flown to El Paso, Texas.

Supporters have been encouraged to launch denial-of-service attacks on the Home Office’s IP address, which Anonymous has revealed. Those not savvy enough to launch automated attacks on the site could contribute to the effect by simply visiting the site in large numbers.

Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief and founder of WikiLeaks, was arrested in the UK under an EAW issued by Sweden, and is currently fighting extradition to Sweden.

McKinnon, a Scottish systems administrator, was arrested in 2002 for allegedly hacking into US military and Nasa computers in 2001 and 2002 and deleting files and copying data.

Tappin, a retired British businessman, is accused by the US government of illegally exporting materials to Iran for building surface-to-air missiles.

O’Dwyer, the owner of TVShack.net, is charged with hosting copyrighted materials on his site and the US Justice Department has been seeking his extradition since May 2011.

Anonymous’ #OpTrialAtHome is timed to commence at 9:00pm on Saturday, April 7, with a DDoS attack on the Home Office website.

It was also promoted on Anonymous’ Tumblr site.

AnonOpUK’s actions have been erroneously reported, by both the BBC and Sky News, that the DDoS attack was over the British government’s latest “draconian surveillance proposals”, to which @AnonOpUk responded:

Both @BBCNews & @SkyNews reporting that #Anonymous is protesting surveillance laws. Main focus is anti-extradition, but fuck those laws too.

AnonOpUk has since tweeted:

@AnonOpUK
#OpTrialAtHome Our online protest was successful, I am going quiet. BUT if you have itchy trigger fingers still. #OpLithChild #IsAGoodCause

@AnonOpUK
via @Anon_Central Do you know why we launched #OpTrialAtHome? This is the reason: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-17355203 | #UK #Anonymous

Currently the Home Office and Prime Minister appear disrupted.

Follow AnonOpUK here.

Petition to stop extradition of Richard O’Dwyer.

Campaign to Free Gary McKinnon.

Petition to Free Christopher Tappin.

Read more at Naked Security.

Update

This morning, April 8th, the BBC have now correctly reported the reasons for Anonymous’ cyber attack, highlighting the issues over extradition of U.K. citizens to the U.S.

In the following video news clip Karen Todner talks about the extradition of Richard O’Dwyer, Gary McKinnon and Christopher Tappin
 

Photo: Bob Oliver

BBC news program Week In, Week Out covers the the heroin problem in Wales. Your host: John Cale.

The director of the documentary, Nick Skinner, talks about making the film with Cale:

The world I explored with John Cale was much darker. In the rundown post-industrial towns of South Wales, and the backstreets of Cardiff and Swansea, we came in contact with a the dark side of drug use. Teenagers shooting up because their mates do it, because there’s nothing else to do, because they are blocking out the pain of an abusive past. Adults trapped in a downward spiral of drugs, crime, prison and more drugs.

Heroin, Wales And Me.