Law Enforcement


Your Camera May Be A Weapon

Certainly!
If you are standing within arms reach you could use it as a club. In more desparate straights you could through it at someone at a distance.
This guy would have needed Mr. Fantastic like powers to use his camera as a weapon before he was attacked by police:

When one woman was told to stop recording, she gave the videocamera to Waterhouse. He walked to the edge of the property, climbed up a dirt embankment and continued to record. At one point, he yelled to his friend, “Yes, I got it all on film. They had no right to come on this property.”
He says in the suit that police immediately came after him, and yelled at him “put it down.” Officers moved towards him, and he said, “Don’t come after me.” Waterhouse said seconds later he was shot with a bean bag gun and a Taser and fell to the ground.
Officers wrote in their reports that Waterhouse ran off, they chased and then bean-bagged and Tasered him. One officer wrote, “He had refused to drop the camera which could be used as a weapon.”
Waterhouse was arrested, accused of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. A jury acquitted him of all charges.

Rightfully so!
When you have interactions with police or see police activity film it! It may save you or a fellow human from police misconduct. You have every right to do so:

Earlier this summer Radley Balko penned a compelling column arguing in favor of a citizen’s right to videotape police (the related ITA post and comments can be found here). The evidence supporting such freedom seemingly mounts daily as ordinary citizens videotape police conducting illegal or unethical activities, typically to the citizens’ detriment.

If they are properly serving their employers, you and me, then police officers should have no objection to being filmed.

In a free country any objections they might have are irrelevant.

Update 10/18: Kip’s thoughts on this.



The International Traveler

Kafka would be hard put to one up the folks at homeland security:

Under the proposed rules, orders by the CBP [Customs adn Border Patrol] to common carriers not to transport specific persons would not be based on restraining orders (injunctions) issued by competent judicial authorities. Instead,they would be based on an undefined, secret, administrative permission-to-travel (“clearance”) procedure subject to none of the procedural or substantive due process required for orders prohibiting or restricting the exercise of protected First Amendment rights.

Jill provides perspective:

I remember watching Sound of Music when I was a child and feeling my heart race as the Von Trapp family made its escape from Nazified Austria. I could never have imagined that a day would come when those wanting to leave the United States would be forced to “make a run” for the border to evade a myriad of obstacles placed by an American government in the path of those who wished to exercise their fundamental human right to emigrate.
That day has not yet arrived. But it will on January 14.

Don’t count on the Mexican or Canadian borders being your safety valve. The fences and the electronic surveillance can be just as effective at keeping people in as at keeping people out.

The newly powerful dems need to put the elimination of this star chamber behavior close to the top of their early 2007 agenda . If they don’t then a free people would be well within their rights to take the job into their own hands.


The american taliban Expands Its Reach

The us congress has passed legislation which prohibits US banking institutions from processing credit card and funds transfer transactions by once free residents of the United States with internet gambling companies.
dictator bush is expected to sign the legislation.
Much gambling is pretty much a waste of money if not outright theft and I don’t participate in any kind of internet gambling and don’t anticipate doing so. However, free people make their own choices.
Governments, if they have any role at all, protect free people from those who would physically harm them, defraud them, steal from them, etc. They do this by demonstrating in an open court that some person or business has performed one of these acts and they assure that proper restitution is made.
Does anyone else expect the stock of British and other international banks to rise a bit as folks move some of their money to foreign banks which the us governement can not control?
I think I’ll open a British account and start using it for some of my infrequent debit/credit card transactions (I use cash for most of my in person purchasing). Does anyone have guidance on how to open an overseas account?

The way things are going financial diversification may become even more important.