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Anonymous Posts St. Louis Police Dispatch Tapes From Day of Ferguson Shooting

by Celia34Vuvukbw Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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This was just posted by @theanonmessage, a twitter account affiliated with Anonymous’ Operation Ferguson, a member of which I interviewed last night. According to @theanonmessage, this recording contains audio excerpts from St. Louis County police dispatch over several hours on August 9, 2014, the day Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer. The dispatcher starts talking about the Brown shooting around the 10-minute mark, while intermittently handling other calls. We are still listening to the recordings and working to corroborate their authenticity; see below the recording for an updating list of interesting moments, with time stamps included.

If you want to try to decipher the dispatch codes, here’s a dictionary for that.

9:35: “Ferguson is asking for assistance with crowd control . . .”

10:58: “Now they have a large group gathering there, she doesn’t know any further. . .”

11:20: “We just got another call stating it was an officer-involved shooting . . .”

11:30: “Be advised, this information came from the news . . .”

11:55: “We’re just getting information from the news and we just called Ferguson back again and they don’t know anything about it . . .”

20:00: “. . .destruction of property . . .”

21:55: “They are requesting more cars. Do you want me to send more of your cars?”

43:55: “Attention all cars, be advised that in reference to the call 2947 Canfield Drive, we are switching over to the riot channel at this time . . .”

Update, 4:40 p.m. ET: I tried to verify the dispatch recordings with St. Louis County Police but their media contact, Brian Shelman, did not answer the phone and his voicemail was full.

Update 2, 5:05 p.m. ET: Mashable is confirming that the St. Louis County Police Department is “aware of this and currently investigating.”

Update 3, 6:05 p.m. ET: A twitter follower of mine points out that the dispatch recording probably comes from Broadcastify, a database of public safety radio audio streams that’s available to anyone who pays for a subscription. It’s “far from a hack,” he says.

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Anonymous Posts St. Louis Police Dispatch Tapes From Day of Ferguson Shooting

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Anonymous’ "Op Ferguson" Says It Will ID the Officer Who Killed Michael Brown

by Jaqueline2060 Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Update (4:12 p.m. ET): Anonymous has obtained and posted St. Louis police dispatch tapes from the day of the shooting.

The police chief of Ferguson, Missouri, says he is withholding the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, out of concern for the safety of the officer and his family. But that might be easier said than done. Just a few hours later, the hacktivist group Anonymous announced on Twitter that it was now “making a final confirmation on the name of Mike Brown’s murderer,” adding: “It will be released the moment we receive it.”

I traded emails last night with one of the half-dozen core Anonymous members working on Operation Ferguson, as the group’s effort to pressure and shame the local police department is known. They were still working to verify the identity of the shooter. “I can only tell you that our source is very close personally to the officer who killed Mike Brown, and that this person is terrified to be our source,” said the anon, whom I will call Fawkes. He added that the source “reached out to us, we did not seek out this person.”

The claim to have outed the Ferguson shooter comes only two days after Anonymous announced the launch of Operation Ferguson in this video:

The computer-generated voice, graphics, and hacking threats are trademark Anonymous, but one aspect is unusual: a demand for federal legislation “that will set strict national standards for police misconduct and misbehavior.” Though Anonymous has a strong anarchist strain that disdains politics, Fawkes told me that the idea wasn’t controversial within the group. “We have done a few of these ‘justice ops’ and it seems there needs to be a larger solution to the problem on a nationwide level,” he told me. “There was no debate—everyone on the team embraced the idea.”

Ferguson is 60 percent black. Virtually all its cops are white. Read more stats ››

It has been a busy few days for Operation Ferguson. The hackers shut down the city’s website for a few hours on Sunday night and Tuesday morning, posted the home address and number of St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar, and dropped an email bomb that crammed city and police inboxes with junk messages. The goal was “to get journalists like you to do interviews with us, and incidentally maybe talk about the issue at hand in the process,” Fawkes told me. “Looks like it worked.”

In previous “justice ops,” Anonymous hackers have targeted the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to protest the Charles Hill and Oscar Grant shootings and the transit system’s attempt to dampen protests by shutting down cellphone signals. Other Anonymous ops have uncovered criminal evidence or the names of suspects. “It’s actually back to the classics,” said McGill University cultural anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, author of the forthcoming book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, whom I met last night in a chatroom where hackers were plotting their next moves. She added that “a lot of old-school folks came back for this,” though they’ve been careful to avoid the attention of law enforcement and other anons by using fresh pseudonyms.

But the veterans’ participation hasn’t stopped Op Ferguson from seeming unhinged at times. On Tuesday afternoon, one Anonymous Twitter account threatened to release information about the police chief’s daughter unless he disclosed the name of the officer who’d killed Brown. (The threat was later withdrawn.) And the op’s Twitter account repeated a bogus internet rumor attributing a screenshot of a racist Facebook tirade to Belmar’s wife—the tweet has since been deleted.

“We are not exactly known for being ‘responsible,’ nor for worrying overly much about the safety of cops,” Fawkes told me. “After all, they have vests and assault weapons. I think they can look after themselves. This is psychological and information warfare, not a love fest.”

Half outlaw, half idealist, Anonymous has always operated at the margins of legitimacy, its tactics ranging from gumshoe detective work to illegal hacking and shameless PR stunts. It’s hard to know whether its current claim to have ID’d Brown’s killer will be borne out. “I don’t think they have it,” Coleman told me. But, she added: “I would not be surprised if they do soon.”

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Anonymous’ "Op Ferguson" Says It Will ID the Officer Who Killed Michael Brown

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Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

by AveryWinder Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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Black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, the working-class city in northern St. Louis county where an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by police officers on Saturday, say the town has been a “powder keg” of racial imbalance for decades. “They treat us like second class all the way down the line,” one black resident told the LA Times. A black city alderman said the ensuing protests are “a boiling over of tensions that had been going on for a long while.”

Here’s a by-the-numbers look at who lives in Ferguson, who’s in charge, who gets stopped by police, and more.

All icons courtesy of the Noun Project. Houses: Laurène Smith

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the number of black members of Ferguson’s school board.

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Ferguson Is 60 Percent Black. Virtually All Its Cops Are White.

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How the US Willingly Blew a Chance to Prevent More Wars in Gaza

by ClaritaArnold Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Alongside the toll of death and broken lives, perhaps the saddest reality of the latest Gaza war, like the Gaza wars before it, is how easy it would have been to avoid. For the last eight years, Israel and the US had repeated opportunities to opt for a diplomatic solution in Gaza. Each time, they have chosen war, with devastating consequences for the families of Gaza.

Let’s begin in June 2006, when the University of Maryland’s Jerome Segal, founder of the Jewish Peace Lobby, carried a high-level private message from Gaza to Washington. Segal had just returned from a meeting with Ismail Haniyeh, whose Hamas faction had recently won free and fair elections and taken power in Gaza. Hamas was seeking a unity government with the rival Fatah faction overseen by Mahmoud Abbas.

The previous year, Israel had withdrawn its soldiers and 8,000 settlers from Gaza, though its armed forces maintained a lockdown of the territory by air, land, and sea, controlling the flow of goods and people. Gazans believed they were trapped in the world’s largest open-air prison. For generations they had lived in overcrowded refugee camps, after their villages were depopulated by Israel and new Israeli cities built on their ruins in the years that followed Israel’s birth in 1948. By voting for Hamas in 2006, Palestinians signaled their weariness with Fatah’s corruption and its failure to deliver an independent state, or even a long-promised safe passage corridor between the West Bank and Gaza. In the wake of its surprise election victory, Hamas was in turn showing signs of edging toward the political center, despite its militant history.

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How the US Willingly Blew a Chance to Prevent More Wars in Gaza

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

by MargherBearden Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Early August 1966, Christian groups, primarily in the Southern United States took to the streets to burn the sin out of their beloved Beatles records in response to John Lennon’s remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.”

Birmingham disc jockeys Tommy Charles, left, and Doug Layton of Radio Station WAQY, rip and break materials representing the British pop group The Beatles, in Birmingham, Ala., Aug. 8, 1966. The broadcasters started a “Ban The Beatles” campaign. AP

Like all good moments of mass hysteria, getting a little context helps put things in perspective.

The quote originally appeared in March 1966, in part of an interview with Lennon published in the London Evening Standard. The interviewer, Maureen Cleave, commented that Lennon was at the time reading about religion. Here is the full, original quote from Lennon:

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

In late July, five months after its original publication, a U.S. teen mag called Datebook republished the interview with Lennon. Turning to the tried and true method of generating scandal to gin up sales, Datebook put the “We’re more popular than Jesus” part of the quote on the cover. Woo-boy. Two Birmingham DJs picked up on the quote, vowing to never play the Beatles and on August 8th, started a “Ban the Beatles” campaign. Christian groups across the South rose up to protest the Beatles who, as it happened, were just about embark on what would be their last U.S. tour. Beatles records were burned, crushed, broken. Never a group to miss out on a good bonfire, the Ku Klux Klan got involved.

South Carolina Grand Dragon, Bob Scoggin of the Klu Klux Klan tosses Beatle records into the flames of a burning cross, in Chester, South Carolina, Aug. 11, 1966. The “Beatle Bonfire” was staged to take exception to a statement attributed to John Lennon, when he was quoted as saying that his group was more popular than Jesus. AP

On August 12, 1966 the Beatles set out on tour, meeting protests and stupid questions about the quote all along the way. It would be the last tour the Beatles would ever do in the United States, ending on August 29 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Young churchfolk from Sunnyvale on the San Francisco peninsula protest against the Beatles and John Lennon’s remark that The Beatles are “more popular than Jesus” outside Candlestick Park where the Beatles are holding a concert in San Francisco, Ca., Aug. 29, 1966. The picketers were seen by many of the teenagers but missed by the entertainers, who arrived and departed from a different direction. Some 25,000 fans went through the gates for The Beatles’ final U.S. performance on their tour. AP

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Burn Your Beatles Records!

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Are Your Kids’ Rainbow Bracelets Toxic?

by AnnelieMackenna Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bracelets and other trinkets made on the wildly popular Rainbow Loom—a toy that allows kids to weave together brightly colored elastic bands—could contain cancer-causing chemicals, a British laboratory has found.

In a study commissioned by a British toy retailer, the Assay Laboratory in Birmingham, United Kingdom, tested charms meant to be attached to bracelets and necklaces woven on the looms. The researchers found that while Rainbow Loom’s own name-brand products were safe, some charms made by knockoff brands contained high levels of phthalates, a class of carcinogenic chemicals. Some of the knockoff charms were composed of as much as 50 percent (by weight) phthalates, the Irish blog Mummy Pages reports. (It’s currently illegal in the United States to sell a toy that contains more than 0.1 percent of six kinds of phthalates, though some products still slip through the cracks.)

Marion Wilson, a spokeswoman from the lab, told Mummy Pages that while only the charms were tested, it was likely that the bands themselves also contained phthalates. In an email to Mother Jones, Wilson declined to share the names of the brands that were found to have high phthalate levels. “We would never share our customer information as it is clearly commercially sensitive,” she wrote. “However, please note that the customers that have received test results like this will have tested the product prior to it going on the market.” It’s unclear whether the brands tested at the lab are sold in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom.

Phthalates aren’t the only dangerous thing about Rainbow Looms: BuzzFeed notes other horrors, including injuries to children. Animal advocates in the Philippines say that the bands can harm creatures that swallow them.

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Are Your Kids’ Rainbow Bracelets Toxic?

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The Faces of Outside Lands 2014

by NickolaHennessy Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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For the seventh straight year, the Outside Lands Music and Art Festival took over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park this past weekend for an extravaganza of wine, beer, shopping, all manner of hip food, panel talks with chefs, and comedy shows. Oh, and there was also the music, increasingly just one draw in the overall festival experience. Thousands of party-seekers and music fans showed up for what was considered one of the most expansive—both in sheer size and range of offerings—OSL fests ever. It may not be a national event like Coachella, Bonnaroo, or Lollapalooza, but it didn’t lack big-name entertainers (Kanye West), rock legends (Tom Petty), or indie darlings playing afternoon sets. The attendees—200,000 in all—were locals and out-of-towners alike, old and young, costumed and non-costumed. We talked with some of them to get a sense of the pulse.

Kenny, server, San Francisco: “I just saw Big Freedia, and I’m originally from the South. It’s good to see Southern artists out here.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Dre, animal nurse, Oakland: “Outside Lands is definitely one of those things you love and you hate, because it’s so crowded, but the lineup is so good.” On her Pikachu suit: “My friends and I all have our own onesies. We roll phat.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Taylor, Adam, and TJ, from San Francisco: “I think we came more for the experience. Excited for Tycho, Boys Noize, Duck Sauce. And Macklemore. Everyone. I’m excited for everyone!” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Robert, healthcare co-op owner, San Francisco: “It’s really different from my first concert, which was Woodstock in 1969, where there were no services whatsoever… I like the enthusiasm of the young folks who are here, it’s infectious!” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Britney, student, Los Angeles: “I love wine. I’m like a wine connoisseur, and being able to be at a festival as a 21-year-old, on top of all the great music and art stuff, to be able to enjoy some wine as well is like the best thing.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Pearl, San Francisco, on this year’s crowd: “Way more biddies. Way more biddies. I think they oversold. I know they were trying to increase capacity—I think they succeeded.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Jenae and Summer, students, Burlingame, California: “It’s so much different from last year—there’s so many more people. It’s packed. The lineup was better last year, but it’s still equally fun. It’s like an experience, the whole vibe and everything.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Tom, business intelligence professional, San Francisco: “I live like three blocks away. I usually try to at least make one day a year since I’m so close. I just walk down the hill and I’m here. The lineup I wasn’t as impressed with, but it’s always a good time.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Ranjiv, an Outside Lands first-timer: “This festival is so nice. It’s so much better than all the other festivals. The people are so much better. The music is quality. I’m lovin’ it.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Michael, elementary school worker, Los Angeles: “I’m sticking around for Tom Petty. My mom is with me; she loves it. Gonna stick around for Flume—he’s my favorite artist—and catch a flight home in the morning.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Mika and Natalie, from Cupertino and New York City: “We’re here for the summer and thought it’d be cool to check this out.” Best thing they saw: “Two super happy bunny-costumed people plowing through the crowd.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Tessa, voter registration canvasser, on the hundreds signing up to vote at OSL: “It’s the really happy people, the people we want to have voting.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Jason, deliveryman, Atherton, California: “It’s definitely not as great as a lineup I’ve seen in the past. It’s definitely just as crowded. I just saw the improvised Shakespeare troupe. They were amazing.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Monty and his daughters, Portland: “It’s their first music festival. I’m corrupting them. So, you know what, their mom will complain forever because now they’re gonna love music festivals.” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

Kerry and Erin, from Reno and San Francisco, on their favorite sets: “Capital Cities was really good. Arctic Monkeys were really good, too. ” Prashanth Kamalakanthan

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The Faces of Outside Lands 2014

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Confidential Memo: Former Koch Group Insider Fears the Tea Party Is Fading

by AidanZiegler Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Americans for Prosperity, the dark-money-funded advocacy group founded by Charles and David Koch, rose to prominence in 2009 and 2010 on the back of the white-hot tea party movement. But today, even though Republicans stand a good chance of retaking the Senate and the conservative fringe has hijacked the House’s efforts to pass immigration reform, the tea party grassroots is withering away, according to a confidential AFP memo obtained by Mother Jones.

The internal AFP memo was written in April by Jason Cline, an Arkansas political consultant who left the state’s influential AFP chapter this spring. It’s clear from the memo that Cline clashed with higher-ups in AFP’s national office, including Teresa Oelke, a former AFP-Arkansas director who now is AFP’s vice president of state operations. In the memo, Cline responds to various allegations leveled against him by Oelke and others, including that Cline was “sexist toward women,” “prejudiced against old people,” and mismanaged AFP-Arkansas.

Cline writes in response that he was not biased against elderly activists but rather sought out younger activists for AFP-Arkansas due to a dropoff in support among older tea party followers. He explains:

We have a declining tea party engagement and we need to engage new forms of activists. The comment made by Cline to a fellow activist was specifically, ‘These old people are not gonna get it done. These kids are workers.’ Not in the sense that they can’t accomplish it, but that there are too few of them.

The problem of declining support from older tea partiers, Cline continues, is a national problem:

On my very first phone call with Jen Stefano as my new AFP regional director, I asked her if declining tea party engagement was just an Arkansas problem or if everyone was experiencing that. Her comment was that it’s a problem everywhere.

At the time, Cline and Stefano were prominent figures within AFP. As the director of AFP-Arkansas, Cline led one of AFP’s strongest chapters. Stefano is a national regional director for AFP and a fixture on Fox News and Fox Business News. If they believe tea party support is drying up, the problem is probably real. AFP spokesman Levi Russell declined to comment, and Stefano did not respond to a request for comment.

This year’s primary season has borne out Cline and Stefano’s observations. Unlike 2010 and 2012, when tea party favorites Mike Lee and Ted Cruz ousted establishment Republicans, the 2014 Senate primary season has seen the defeat of every single tea-party-aligned challenger. The major surprise of this election cycle has been economics professor David Brat’s victory over then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). Yet neither AFP or FreedomWorks, the two major national tea party groups, spent money to elect Brat.

Of course, establishment Republicans won in 2014 in part because they tacked hard to the right in anticipation of a tea party challenge. Likewise, the Republican Party has become more hardline in the past five years. The tea party, then, has won an ideological victory. But as a source of manpower on the ground, the movement is no longer what it once was.

Read Cline’s 19-page memo below (some personal information has been redacted):

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Confidential Memo: Former Koch Group Insider Fears the Tea Party Is Fading

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When Did Republicans Start Hating the Environment?

by KourtneyLeane Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s one of those facts that sweeps you back into an alien, almost unrecognizable era. On July 9, 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon announced to Congress his plans to create the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By the end of that year, both agencies were a reality. Nowadays, among their other tasks, they either monitor or seek to mitigate the problem of global warming—actions that make today’s Republicans, Nixon’s heirs, completely livid.

To give one example of how anti-environment the right today is, just consider this ThinkProgress analysis, finding that “over 58 percent” of congressional Republicans refuse to accept the science of climate change.

So what happened to the GOP, from the time of Nixon to the present, to turn an environmental leader into an environmental retrograde? According to a new study in the journal Social Science Research, the key change actually began around the year 1991—when the Soviet Union fell. “The conservative movement replaced the ‘Red Scare’ with a new ‘Green Scare’ and became increasingly hostile to environmental protection at that time,” argues sociologist Aaron McCright of Michigan State University and two colleagues.

So is that causal explanation right? Before getting to that question, let’s examine the study itself.

For starters, it is pretty much undebatable that Americans today are polarized over environmental issues. In a figure in their paper, McCright and his colleagues visualize this polarization by charting the average League of Conservation Voters environmental scores for congressional Democrats and Republicans from 1970 through 2013:

Polarization in environmental voting in Congress McCright et al., “Political Polarization on Support for Government Spending on Environmental Protection in the USA, 1974-2012,” Social Science Research, 2014

This figure suggests that the key left-right break point on the environment occurred sometime in the early 1990s. So does the analysis at the center of the new paper: a look at how Americans belonging to different political parties have answered the same General Social Survey question about the environment going back to the year 1974. In that year and at regular intervals ever since, the GSS has asked the following question:

We are faced with many problems in this country, none of which can be solved easily or inexpensively. I’m going to name some of these problems, and for each one I’d like you to tell me whether you think we’re spending too much money on it, too little money, or about the right amount.

One of the items then listed is “the environment” or “improving and protecting the environment.” Here’s how many Americans responded to that question over time by saying that we’re spending “too little” on environmental protection, separated by political party membership:

Polarization of Americans’ views of environmental spending McCright et al., “Political Polarization on Support for Environmental Protection in the USA, 1974-2012,” Social Science Research, 2014

Once again, the key break appears to happen in the early 1990s. (Note: You might think that this just reflects a distaste on the right for government spending in general. But using more GSS data, the authors looked at support for government spending on other issues—like space exploration and foreign aid—and controlled for this general support for spending in their analysis.)

So what happened in the early 1990s? Well, for one thing, Bill Clinton was elected, flanked by a vice president, Al Gore, who had just published a book called Earth in the Balance. That made environmental issues salient in a very political way.

And then, there was the once super-intense fight over habitat protections for the northern spotted owl. Remember that?

The authors, for their part, cite the “rise of global environmentalism with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit,” which, they say, “generated a heightened level of anti-environmental activity by the conservative movement and Congressional Republicans.” Here, they rely to a significant part on another 2008 paper, noting how the conservative think tank movement mobilized to oppose environmental protections in the early 1990s. The upshot is that as environmentalism became an increasingly global movement, many conservatives tarred it with the label “socialism.” “Rio reflected a heightened sense of urgency for environmental protection that was seen as a threat by conservative elites, stimulating them to replace anti-communism with anti-environmentalism,” that study observed.

But this is not the only possible explanation for the trends noted above. There has been a great deal of research on why American politics have become so polarized (on all issues, not just environmental ones), and theories to explain the trend abound. For instance, one major factor is clearly “party sorting“—the idea that conservatives have moved more into the GOP over time, even as liberals have, at least to some extent, coalesced in the Democratic Party. So, the Republicans answering a General Social Survey question about the environment in 1996 or so simply were not the same bunch of people who were answering it in 1974.

One intriguing related hypothesis posits that the right wing has become more unwilling to compromise in general because it has become more psychologically authoritarian—closed-minded, prone to black-and-white thinking. That’s not a pattern that would uniquely affect environmental issues, though. If anything, it would be felt most strongly on the topics that authoritarians most care about: crime, national defense, religion in public life, and matters of that ilk.

Whatever the cause, the consequence is clear: We can’t get anything done in a bipartisan way on the environment any longer. “The situation,” conclude the authors, “does not bode well for our nation’s ability to deal effectively with the wide range of environmental problems—from local toxics to global climate change—we currently face.”

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When Did Republicans Start Hating the Environment?

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Robin Williams Has Died at 63

by Lyndon2393 Posted on August 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Just awful. I’m speechless.

Rest in peace.

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Robin Williams Has Died at 63

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