Boston PD’s bizarre Occupy subpoena to Twitter
A reader writes, “Boston PD subpoenas Twitter for info on users tweeting about Occupy Boston; they say it relates to a ‘criminal investigation’. Also notice their ignorance when asking for account info on tags such as ‘#occupyboston’. Smart cookies over there.”
Note that they’re also looking for IP addresses for Guido Fawkes, a well-known, right-leaning British blogger (real name Paul Staines) who — as far as I know — has nothing to do with Boston (let alone Occupy Boston). My guess is that they’ve somehow mistaken Guido Fawkes for some kind of superdistributor of Guy Fawkes masks or similar (the historical Guy Fawkes did adopt the name Guido while fighting in Spain in the the 16th cen), which is to say that they’re not just on a fishing expedition, they’re on a fishing expedition that’s grounded in profound ignorance.
And yup, they don’t know the difference between a hashtag and an account.
http://tinyurl.com/bn2u6wx
Suffolk District Attorney subpoenas Occupy Boston Twitter info
The subpoena requests “available subscriber information, for the account or accounts associated with the following information, including IP address logs for account creation” but, inexplicably, includes not only account names, but also hashtags and a term which is neither account name nor hashtag. The “accounts” which Goldberger has subpoenaed about are Guido Fawkes, @po0isAn0N, @OccupyBoston, #BostonPD and #d0xcak3. “Guido Fawkes” appears to be a reference to Guy Fawkes, the stylized mask of whom has come to be associated with the hacker group “Anonymous.” That same group might be referenced in the “@po0isAn0N” user name. “#d0xcak3” seems to be a reference to “doxing” i.e. releasing personal information about people over the Internet.
http://tinyurl.com/86drpts
2011 Year in Review: Top 5 Topics in U.S. Politics
1. Occupy Wall Street
But something happened that people didn’t expect: Occupy Wall Street caught on. The protesters did not leave. They set up camp in Zuccotti Park and stayed there for two months before the New York Police Department evicted them in mid-November — and after that, they regrouped and continued to organize marches and other actions throughout the city.
More importantly, Occupy Wall Street inspired similar actions in dozens of cities across the country and around the world, many of which are ongoing. In Washington, politicians from both parties have been forced to take sides on the issue of economic inequality, bringing the protesters’ talking points into the national spotlight in a way they had not been before. Many people blasted Occupy Wall Street’s positions, but nobody could ignore them. Even the people cursing them out were talking about them — and that was the point. It’s too soon to guage Occupy Wall Street’s impact on U.S. public policy — the movement has not experienced even one congressional election yet — but it is safe to say that the Occupy coalition has changed the political culture in the United States — it has “restructured the debate” to the point that income inequality is now on the mind of senators and representatives.
http://tinyurl.com/7gwb24w
The corporations that occupy Congress
These and other companies have access to lawmakers and regulators that are unavailable to ordinary Americans.
Doubt that? Dial the Capitol switchboard at 1 (202) 224-3121, ask for your representative’s office and request a five-minute audience, in person, at the lawmaker’s convenience back in the home district.
In more than a decade of lectures recommending this, I have yet to have a single person email me (see address to the right) about having scored a private meeting with the representative called.
http://tinyurl.com/88qmjh4
Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies – attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis – as states slash mental health services and the country’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
“These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost sometimes their homes, they can’t provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed,” said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
http://tinyurl.com/8428nz9
Another face of the U.S. recession: homeless children
As her mother sat in a homeless shelter in downtown Miami, talking about her economic struggles and loss of faith in the U.S. political system, 3-year-old Aeisha Touray blurted out what sounded like a new slogan for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement.
“How dare you!” the girl said abruptly as she nudged a toy car across a conference room table at the Chapman Partnership shelter in Miami’s tough and predominantly black Overtown neighborhood. There was no telling what Aeisha was thinking as her 32-year-old mother, Nairkahe Touray, spoke of how she burned through her savings and wound up living in a car with five of her eight children earlier this year.
But how dare you indeed? How does anyone explain to kids like Aeisha and countless others how they wound up homeless in the world’s richest nation?
http://tinyurl.com/78aohx6
Consumer, business spending point to slower growth
The Commerce Department said non-defense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, a closely watched proxy for business spending, fell 1.2 percent last month after declining 0.9 percent in October.
Shipments of these so-called core capital goods, which go into calculations of U.S. gross domestic product, dropped for a third straight month.
This suggests that business spending, which has been robust since the start of the recovery in mid-2009, could slow considerably from the third-quarter’s 15.7 growth percent pace.
http://tinyurl.com/bqoo99y
Tens of thousands of protesters pressure Putin
Tens of thousands of flag-waving and chanting protesters called Saturday for a disputed parliamentary election to be rerun and an end to Vladimir Putin’s rule, increasing pressure on the Russian leader as he tries to win back the presidency.
The protesters shouted “Russia without Putin” and “New elections, New elections” as one speaker after another called for an end to Putin’s 12-year domination of the country at the second big opposition rally in two weeks in central Moscow.
http://tinyurl.com/733tx8m
Museums are collecting Occupy Wall Street artifacts
Occupy Wall Street may still be working to shake the notion it represents a passing outburst of rage, but some establishment institutions have already decided the movement’s artifacts are worthy of historic preservation.
More than a half-dozen major museums and organizations from the Smithsonian Institution to the New-York Historical Society have been avidly collecting materials produced by the Occupy movement.
Staffers have been sent to occupied parks to rummage for buttons, signs, posters and documents. Websites and tweets have been archived for digital eternity. And museums have approached individual protesters directly to obtain posters and other ephemera.
The Museum of the City of New York is planning an exhibition on Occupy for next month.
7 Responses to “The OB Media Rundown for 12/25/11”
it seems weird when you post these things with urls to the original, but *no attribution* here in the rundown. And it is actually pretty rude (and likely a violation of copyright) to completely cut and paste the entire article – especially when the article is written by a supporter, like Cory Doctorow (whose stuff is almost completely released as CC-BY-SA).
Articles should be attributed, you should use the full URL so we know where we are going (not a tinyurl), it should be clickable, and a proper media rundown should be summaries or the first 3-4 lines, not the entire article. This looks a little amateur.
At six sentences, the Cory Doctorow ‘brief’ is so brief it wouldn’t make much sense or be justified to appear here if we excerpted it at, say, two sentences. The call that was made was between not linking the brief at all, or posting it as is, which might have a value to Doctorow of providing a link that drives traffic to participate in any conversations going on in the comments section at his site. At first glance, nobody reading it knows that is the end of the article so those who are interested will likely click through.
One of the important purposes of the media roundup is to gather as many stories as we can find about Occupy Boston for the community to be aware of, within the limitations of unpaid volunteers using their home computers and the Internet working on their own time. The roundup is a product of volunteer labor love for the movement, not a paid day job, and therefore other responsibilities like jobs and families limit us to a format that is relatively easy to produce, while still being readable and somewhat engaging.
Summaries wouldn’t work here because many articles are about the same subject, so we would just be posting the same summaries over and over on some days depending on what’s in the news. The format of the roundup is standard otherwise and falls within legal guidelines for fair use.
actually, no, without attributing to Doctorow, it is not legal for fair use, since you used the entire article. That actually is not a disputable item, regardless what you think. Doctorow will not care, I am certain, but if you do it with other articles, such as the ones from Reuters, it will get you in trouble. Doing this without citation (and easily followed links), though, is going to wind up with a bunch of people who have no idea where the information comes from (bloggers, free press, corporate media), and as a result will weigh it all of equal value. By making *all* items blind, the result is actually pretty valueless.
Posting without attribution probably is a copyright violation if there’s no link to the original, but the legality seems to me less important than being fair and transparent. Despite what many people think, just because something is posted online does not put it in the public domain for anyone to use. Users should ask permission for any use beyond short excerpts, and even then they should give clear credit. Personally, as someone whose articles and photos are found all over the Internet, I do find it annoying when I’m not credited (I’m not talking about not being paid, just not being acknowledged).
Using a shortened tinyurl might be enough to avoid violating the law, but I agree with thespian that full urls would be better. Lots of people won’t click on a disguised url because they’re concerned about computer viruses.
I really appreciate this OB Media Rundown. Thanks.
wow thespian, got anymore tidbits of information. i love reading your suggestions. you seem to genuinely care about the occupy movement and love all people.
Has anyone from the Boston pd or the district attorneys office asked for any subpoena information in the freaudulent mortage scandal, or in any of the continued crimminal activity that is bankrupting this nation? Probably not. Seems to me that the Boston pd is carrying their 235 year tradition of selling out to the highest bidder. Good work boys you certainly will enjoy living on that pension that is dwindling ever smaller with your every act of official oppression you carry out for those on Wall street
on December 28th, 2011 at 1:34 pm #
[…] The OB Media Rundown for 12/25/11 […]