By Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica, Nov. 21, 2012

Getting the agencies responsible for national security to communicate better was one of the main reasons the Department of Homeland Security was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But according to a recent report from the department's inspector general, one aspect of this mission remains far from accomplished.

DHS has spent $430 million over the past nine years to provide radios tuned to a common, secure channel to 123,000 employees across the country. Problem is, no one seems to know how to use them.

Only one of 479 DHS employees surveyed by the inspector general's office was actually able to use the common channel, according to the report. Most of those surveyed — 72 percent — didn't even know the common channel existed. Another 25 percent knew the channel existed but weren't able to find it; 3 percent were able to find an older common channel, but not the current one.

The investigators also found that more than half of the radios did not have the settings for the common channel programmed into them. Only 20 percent of radios tested had all the correct settings.

The radios are supposed to help employees of Customs and Border Patrol, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service, and other agencies with DHS communicate during crises, as well as normal operations.

DHS officials did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica about what effect the radio problems could have on how the agency handles an emergency.

The $430 million paid for radio infrastructure and maintenance as well as the actual radios.

In a response letter to the report, Jim H. Crumpacker, the Department of Homeland Security's liaison between the Government Accountability Office and the inspector general, wrote that DHS had made "significant strides" in improving emergency communications since 2003. But he acknowledged that DHS "has had some challenges in achieving Department-wide interoperable communications goals."

The recent inspector general's report is the latest in a string of critical assessments DHS has received on its efforts to improve communication between federal, state and local agencies. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2007 that the Department of Homeland Security had "generally not achieved" this  goal.

DHS has assigned a blizzard of offices and committees to oversee its radio effort since 2003, which the inspector general's report claimed had "hindered DHS' ability to provide effective oversight."

Also, none of the entities "had the authority to implement and enforce their recommendations," the report concluded. Tanya Callender, a spokeswoman for the inspector general, said the current office overseeing the effort hadn't been given the authority to force agencies to use the common channel or even to provide instructions for programming the radios.

The inspector general recommended DHS standardize its policies regarding radios, which DHS agreed to do. But it rejected a second recommendation that it overhaul the office overseeing the radios to give it more authority.

"DHS believes that it has already established a structure with the necessary authority to ensure" that its various agencies can communicate, Crumpacker wrote in his response letter.

As the Israeli army rains shells on the Gaza strip Thursday, it’s also taken the offensive online, posting videos of its attacks on Hamas targets and live-tweeting its campaign. Now the hacktivist group Anonymous has responded with a digital bombardment of its own.

In a coordinated action that began at 3 a.m. ET Thursday, hackers attacked web sites belonging to the Israel Defense Forces, the prime minister’s office, Israeli banks, airlines and security companies by flooding them with web traffic, in an operation they called #OpIsrael. “We Anonymous will not sit back and watch a cowardly Zionist State demolish innocent people’s lives.” reads one message posted to a defaced site, along with an image of smoke rising over what appears to be a Palestinian city.

Anonymous Twitter accounts provided links to what they described as an Anonymous Gaza Care Package with tools for staying online if Israel cuts Internet service the Gaza Strip during its military action. Another hacker group, Telecomix, provided its own detailed instructions in English and Arabic for using dial-up connections.

"Anonymous does not support violence by the I.D.F. or by Palestinian Resistance/Hamas. Our concern is for the children of Israel and Palestinian Territories and the rights of the people in Gaza to maintain open lines of communication with the outside world," reads a press statement from Anonymous.

View more videos at: http://nbcconnecticut.com.

The Connecticut State Supreme Court overturned the sexual assault conviction of a man who had sex with a woman who “has severe cerebral palsy, has the intellectual functional equivalent of a 3-year-old and cannot verbally communicate.” The Court held that, because Connecticut statutes define physical incapacity for the purpose of sexual assault as “unconscious or for any other reason so uncommunicative that she was physically unable to communicate unwillingness to an act,” the defendant could not be convicted if there was any chance that the victim could have communicated her lack of consent. Since the victim in this case was capable of “biting, kicking, scratching, screeching, groaning or gesturing,” the Court ruled that that victim could have communicated lack of consent despite her serious mental deficiencies:

When we consider this evidence in the light most favorable to sustaining the verdict, and in a manner that is consistent with the state’s theory of guilt at trial, we, like the Appellate Court, ‘are not persuaded that the state produced any credible evidence that the [victim] was either unconscious or so uncommunicative that she was physically incapable of manifesting to the defendant her lack of consent to sexual intercourse at the time of the alleged sexual assault.’

Anna Doroghazi, director of public policy and communication at Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services expressed concern that “The court’s interpretation of what it means to be ‘physically helpless’ jeopardizes the safety of people with disabilities.”

“By implying that the victim in this case should have bitten or kicked her assailant, this ruling effectively holds people with disabilities to a higher standard than the rest of the population when it comes to proving lack of consent in sexual assault cases,” Doroghazi said. “Failing to bite an assailant is not the same thing as consenting to sexual activity.”

Shorter version? Nothing new here, the actual report hasn't been released to the public, and the recommendations for the Oakland Police Department might get done someday, if they get the money, and if they get the time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's code for maybe the next administration will get around to it.

Via:

Oakland police received some harsh criticism for the way they handled the Occupy demonstrations last fall, but Oakland's police chief is not taking offense.

Details of the 121-page report were made available to city leaders more than six weeks ago, but they held on to it. They released it to the media less than five minutes before they held a carefully worded and brief press conference.
...

The report was not kind. Among the criticisms, it calls the Oakland Police Department's response to protesters last year, "flawed by inadequate staffing, insufficient planning and lack of understanding of crowd management techniques." The report even called many of their policing methods "outdated".
...

The report recommends that OPD institute a mutual aid policy to include OPD and responding agencies abilities -- a move Jordan says, will require time and additional resources.

"These are things that we can't do overnight, these are long range changes that I intend to implement. It's just not something we're going to do right away," said Jordan.

Possibly the worst part of this "report" is the fact that city officials claim to have paid $100,000 for it. There's your tax dollars at work, Oakland, a report that restates the obvious and doesn't place any blame on any of the city's officials.

No doubt you all remember the shocking pepper spray attack on peaceful student protesters at UC Davis last November. Today the report into that incident has been released and the results are damning, accusing the Chancellor of poor leadership and concluding that the use of pepper spray was unjustified and should have been prevented. The laissez-faire attitude of the UC Davis police chief is especially appalling.

CNN:

The report spreads blame for the events that led to the confrontation across several members of the UC-Davis leadership but said Pike was primarily responsible for the "objectively unreasonable decision" to pepper-spray the demonstrators.

"On balance, the evidence does not provide an objective, factual basis for Lt. Pike's purported belief that he was trapped, that any of his officers were trapped, or that the safety of their arrestees was at issue," the report states. "Further, there is little evidence that any protesters attempted to use violence against the police."

But while criticizing Pike, the report also cites "systemic and repeated failures" among campus administrators it said "put officers in the unfortunate situation in which they found themselves."

The type of pepper-spray canister he carried was "not an authorized weapon" under campus police guidelines, and the officers "were not trained in how to use it correctly," according to the report.

Chancellor Linda Katehi told investigators that she envisioned "a limited operation in which police would demand that the tents be taken down but would use no other force," the report found.

However other top-level officials did not receive that message because the chancellor "did not effectively communicate this" during deliberations.

According to the report Chief Spicuzza initially tried to convince officers not to wear riot gear or use batons or pepper spray, but she was unsuccessful.

It also found "There is also evidence that she wanted her officers to withdraw if they encountered resistance," but as investigators weren't allowed to interview her they had no further details.

No one in the campus leadership took responsibility for ensuring they understood the way the police operation was to be handled, the report stated.

"The command and leadership structure of the (campus police) is very dysfunctional," the report adds. "Lieutenants refused to follow directives of the chief."

This conclusion stemmed in part from "heated exchanges" between Spicuzza and those in her charge had regarding how to proceed with the operation and her eventual "concession that her officers will do things their own way and there is nothing she can do about it."[Emphasis mine.] What was this, "mob rule" of the campus police? Spicuzza may as well have given the investigative team their interview and replied with a "Meh" to every question.

The report also takes on the claims by campus police that the video footage of the pepper-spraying incident shows that they were under threat and facing a "hostile crowd." It blasts those claims out of the water with video images of Pike and another officer who "were able to move through the crowd freely" and stepped over seated protesters three times "just minutes before Lt. Pike sprayed those same protesters."

The report contains recommendations to about how to improve communication and the police force, and how to better respect freedom of speech issues as well as various aspects of life on a university campus.

There were no recommendations regarding disciplinary actions.

The full report is available here in pdf format.

Occupy. Still Here. Still Free. March 17th marks six months of American occupation and raising of social consciousness. Tents are a medium of expression, nodes for social services. We have so much yet to communicate, so much yet to give. When you're ready, we'll still be here; we'll still be free.

99%, take a chance.

Recently I reported on the Manhattan District Attorney who subpoenaed the Twitter account of @destructuremal (aka 23-year-old Brooklyn writer Malcolm Harris) because of his participation in Occupy Wall Street.

As it turns out, Harris is the twit person who tricked thousand of New Yorkers into showing up at Occupy Wall Street for a Radiohead concert that was never going to happen. He was chosen as one of Gawker's Most Loathsome Gawker Characters of 2011 for the prank.

If thousands of disappointed New Yorkers wasn't enough, now Harris has dragged Gawker's Adrian Chen into the prosecutorial Twitter morass.

Chen writes:

Harris may not commit crimes on Twitter, but he did use the site's direct message function to trick me, on September 30th, into believing Radiohead was performing an impromptu show for Occupy Wall Street protesters down in Zuccotti Park. Harris, who writes for the New Inquiry magazine, was at the time a blogger for the radical journal Jacobin. He told me he'd heard the story about Radiohead, but his editor wouldn't allow him to print it.

Here are the two twitter messages Harris sent me the morning September 30th, which would likely be released to the DA under the subpoena.

Art+Culture committee will announce at Noon that Radiohead is the 4pm musical guest, my [editor] won't let me run it cuz band doesn't want media

Whereas I don't give a f-ck about what Radiohead wants. You didn't hear it from me, though.

"As more of our everyday communications take place on third-parties like Twitter, it's crucial to resist overly-broad intrusions by law enforcement, which is certainly what the DA's move appears to be," adds Chen, "It's not just Harris' privacy at stake, but that of anyone who communicated with him—no matter how full of sh-t he was."

It's still difficult to imagine what the Manhattan DA's office might want with such tweets, unless he waited patiently for hours at Zuccotti Park for Radiohead to show up and is still unhappy about that.

I do think it's no doubt a safe guess that Harris has a spot reserved on Gawker's "Most Loathsome Gawker Characters of 2012" list.

Link. Some context. A related video. A NY Mag article. A Boston Globe article.

Ape Lad is the guy behind this.

[Hat tip Xeni Jardin]