On an unseasonably warm New Hampshire night, Occupiers from across the northeast danced and chanted to a band marching through the little streets of Saint Anselm College before Saturday’s ABC News/Yahoo! debate.

In a parking lot nearby, Eric Lawson and four other members of Occupy Boston were hastily assembling a 10-foot tall wooden elephant, struggling to mount it on a wheeled base. Lawson, a molecular biologist, said about 60 people had come up from Boston, and dozens from other areas of the northeast, to protest the G.O.P. primary candidates, and that they had used the elephant in a parade earlier in the day.

http://tinyurl.com/6vpdrs2

Twitter fights to reveal more Subpoenas, this time from the DOJ against Wikileak volunteers – Google and Facebook implicated in government snooping by their silence

Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir – a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament – announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information “about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009.”  Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir’s announcement.

What hasn’t been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter – which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested – seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange.  It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks’ Twitter account.
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And the key question now is this:  did other Internet and social network companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) receive similar Orders and then quietly comply?  It’s difficult to imagine why the DOJ would want information only from Twitter; if anything, given the limited information it has about users, Twitter would seem one of the least fruitful avenues to pursue.

http://tinyurl.com/7na3ov2

More questions about suppression of citizen journalists in wake of Global Revolution raid

Last Monday, the headquarters of Global Revolution TV, the livestream that puts out video for Occupy Wall Street content, was raided by New York City building inspectors. Despite having paid $2,000 a month for rent on their apartment and studio space at 13 Thames St. in Bushwick for two years, Vlad Teichberg and his pregnant wife Nikky suddenly found themselves at 8 p.m. on the day after New Year’s, with guns allegedly pointed at their faces as cops and firefighters accompanied the Inspectors who deemed their floor unlivable. They were forced to leave. The next day, Mr. Teichberg and six of the Global Revolution operatives were arrested for trespassing and (Mr. Teichberg was also held for 30 hours and charged for assaulting his landlord) when they tried to go back into their own home and retrieve papers from their apartment.
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It does strike us as odd that the police would  arrest Mr. Teichberg and the Global Revolution crew-and only those individuals-for living in a commercial space that was being leased out to a whole building’s worth of residents. And here are some more questions: Why was Global Revolution’s floor the only one served an eviction notice? Wouldn’t the bigger issue be that the landlord, Mr. Wing Chow was illegally leasing “”imminently perilous to life” commercial space as Bushwick lofts and artist studios? Why was the surprise building inspecting check  performed on a national holiday, with police and firefighters in tow, and why were none of the other floors’ residents  evacuated if the building had indeed been zoned as commercial instead of residential.

http://tinyurl.com/7m82zrg

Democracy Now interviews Boston Occupier Mark Provost about his confrontation with Mitt Romney

MARK PROVOST: I asked him-you know, because the corporate profits have reached record highs, directly at the expense of wages, and I cited a JPMorgan report, and, you know, his response was that corporations are people. And I think he had two statements of fact in that three-minute ramble. And one of them was that buildings don’t pay taxes, which I was already aware of-I think most people are. And the second was that corporations don’t pay taxes, but the people in them do. The corporations are actually supposed to pay taxes, but they’re-you know, corporate taxes as a percentage of federal revenue and as a percentage of GDP are both at, you know, 50-year lows.

http://tinyurl.com/83d2hzr

OPINION: How Occupy is changing the world by building a better one

Occupy has qualities of both a desperate and deliberate action: It is direct and calculated, unpredictable and long-term. While I can’t honestly say that the movement is applying itself flawlessly, it is less vulnerable to the two most common tactics used against progressive movements: the law and simple patience. Legal action against the movement generally takes the form of evicting the camps. After Boston police cleared Dewey Square, small occupations popped up all over the suburbs, scattered but as strong as ever. As for patience…well, the tents were pretty comfortable.

http://tinyurl.com/74qpuuu

National Fire Protection Association: For fire officials, concern and frustration over the Occupy sites

On a chilly, rainy December afternoon, a member of Occupy Boston led a reporter on a tour of the site’s fire safety features. The Occupier, a young man named Seth M. – he declined to give his last name – sporting a thin beard and a Red Sox cap, pointed to the white buckets, designated as cigarette receptacles, that dotted the site’s perimeter. Numerous signs were posted to remind Occupiers that heating sources were prohibited. Seth talked about the nearly $400 worth of fire extinguishers that were purchased by the group and placed “methodically” throughout the site. He also noted that a retired firefighter donated 50 smoke alarms that were placed in the tents that housed nearly 250 residents.

The unrelenting rain didn’t seem to dampen the activity in Dewey Square, a small plot of green space across the street from the Federal Reserve building in the city’s financial district. As Seth conducted his tour along the site’s makeshift walkways, passers-by approached the Occupy Boston information booth and slid money into a donation box, or handed over food items and other goods. Protesters in rain gear and bulky coats walked among the dozens of tightly packed tents that had occupied the site since late September.

http://tinyurl.com/7bnfaf7

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