The incident confirmed a fear shared by civil liberties advocates: police departments around the country were buying surveillance equipment with FEMA homeland security grants with little oversight. Each year, over $1 billion of these grants are funneled to municipalities across the country, bypassing local budget processes and leaving community members in the dark about the acquisition of advanced surveillance arsenals. Cities in California have purchased or attempted to acquire drones, cellphone tower simulators, and other tools previously reserved for the federal government.

Late last month, The New York Times published a piece, headlined “Hollywood-Style Heroism Is Latest Trend in Police Videos,” about body camera footage that depicts police officers as paragons of bravery. One video, from the Hamden Police Department in Connecticut, showed an officer pulling a troubled man away from the edge of a building. Another, from the Topeka Police Department in Kansas, showed an officer rescuing a drowning boy from a pond. These videos were not released at the request of journalists or civilians hoping to shed light on police activity. They were instead released by police employees as counter programming — a way to characterize cops positively when tales of “bad apples” overtook the news cycle. “The chief talked to me about how Topeka was really getting beat up in the news with some shootings, some homicides,” an officer told the Times. “Topeka really needed a good story.”

Unions representing journalists at more than 20 French media outlets including AFP, BFMTV, Libération and Le Monde say the government of President Emmanuel Macron is showing “extremely worrying” signs of hostility towards media independence.

“Faced with the freedom to inform, the new government has chosen to pressure [media outlets],” read a statement by the chapters of the Societe des Journalistes (SDJ) association, released by AFP on Tuesday.

The Washington Post published photographs of the deployed Marine unit equipped with white phosphorus projectiles, as well as similar pictures showing white phosphorus projectiles with US Army units outside Mosul.

„The NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 used between 10 and 15 tons of depleted uranium, which caused a major environmental disaster,“ said Srdjan Aleksic, a Serbian lawyer who leads the legal team, which includes lawyers from the EU, Russia, China and India. The legal team was formed by the Serbian Royal Academy of Scientists and Artists.

He added that the information the TSA collects is stored in a database for 75 years. That database, he said, is accessed by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies looking to match fingerprints to those lifted from crime scenes, and for background checks.
„What started as a criminal database to link arrestees to other crimes is being turned into an all-purpose database of fingerprint identifiers,“ Nojeim said at the time.

U.S. troops based in Syria‘s southeastern desert have expanded their footprint, rebels there say, increasing the risk of direct ground confrontation between the Americans and Iran-backed pro-government forces.

Das Musikfestival Rock Am Ring wurde als Versuchslabor für Sippenhaft missbraucht, weil der Polizei „Namen von Logistikmitarbeitern nicht in der korrekten Schreibweise übermittelt“ wurden, aber „eine phonetische Ähnlichkeit mit den realen Schreibweisen“ aufwiesen . Sagt Polizeipräsident Hinz (Name zum Schutz des Betroffenen geändert).

Er verschleiert dabei die Information, dass er etwa zum Mitlauschen eines Whatsapp-Gesprächs das betreffende Gerät zuerst hacken muss, was zwangsläufig mit üblen Nebenwirkungen verbunden ist und außerdem auch Informationen abgreifen kann, die niemals eine Kommunikation geworden wären. Dazu gehören beispielsweise Texte, die man eintippt, aber nie absendet oder noch umformuliert. Letztlich schnüffelt der Staat dann in den Gedanken, daher ist die Maßnahme auch rechtlich fragwürdig.

Unter den Ministern sei es unstrittig, dass es beispielsweise bei einem „Terrorverdacht“ Zugriff auf die Dienste geben solle, sagte Strobl am Mittwoch im Südwestrundfunk. Es sei sinnwidrig, dass dies bei SMS oder Telefongesprächen, aber nicht bei Messengerdiensten möglich sei. Was als „Terrorverdacht“ gilt, entscheidet die Regierung.

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