St Louis - Shooting - Riots - Anonymous Threats

[Luther Blissett]

https://storify.com/AthertonKD/veterans-on-ferguson

[seemslikeadream]

FBI takes control over all police operations in Ferguson

[Luther Blissett]

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.opferguson.com

this is a website not the twitter account ...correct?

#opferguson

[American Dream]

http://samidoun.ca/2014/08/solidarity-w ... ppression/

Solidarity with Ferguson: Justice for Michael Brown, End Police Oppression

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses its solidarity to the steadfast and struggling people of Ferguson, Missouri, U.S., who are currently facing a militarized police occupation of their community following the police killing of Michael Brown, a young Black man, on Saturday, August 9.

The community of Ferguson have taken to the streets to demand justice, and they have been met with impunity, as the killing police officer’s name is kept secret, and as massive militarized machinery, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and military vehicles have entered their town, occupying it – denying entry, barring journalists, keeping people from their homes, attacking pregnant women for daring to “talk back”. All this has come while the people of Ferguson, and particularly Black people, have been labeled as “animals” and the root of the problem for daring to protest and resist the oppression leveled against them, their children and their community.

The killing of Brown is only the latest in a long line of ongoing police violence and repression directed at Black people in the United States, from the genocide of slavery, to lynching and Jim Crow, to the ongoing racist oppression and police/state violence directed against Black communities and lives. The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement noted in 2012 that “every 36 hours one Black person every 36 hours was executed. This wanton disregard for Black life resulted in the killing of 13 year-old children, fathers taking care of their kids, women driving the wrong cars, as well as people with mental health and drug problems.”

The tear gas, rubber bullets, wooden baton rounds and military vehicles occupying the streets of Ferguson have filled US police departments at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security through the same programs that push Joint Terror Task Forces to infiltrate and spy on Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, and to step up repression in Black communities as well as Latino, Asian and other communities of colour. Journalist Antonio French reported that Ferguson, whose population is two-thirds Black, has a police force with 53 officers, only 3 of whom are Black.

The racist logics of militarized police repression in the US, a settler colonial state, are engaged in a joint partnership with racist militarized repression in the Israeli state, a settler colonial state armed and backed by the US. As Kristian Davis Bailey wrote in Ebony, “Since 2001, thousands of top police officials from cities across the US have gone to Israel for training alongside its military or have participated in joint exercises here. Just weeks before Oakland police violently broke up an Occupy rally, they had trained with repressive forces from Israel and Bahrain. In Georgia in 2006, a 92-year-old black woman was shot and killed by Atlanta police who had participated in an exchange program with Israeli soldiers on counterterrorism and drug enforcement. Our governments literally share resources and tactics with each other that directly harm our respective communities.”

Black people in the US are targeted for mass incarceration – one in three Black men is likely to be subject to imprisonment during his life, as are 40% of Palestinian men living under occupation. The military vehicles, the rubber bullets, the tear gas, the checkpoints, the criminalization of resistance, and the closed entry gates are the mechanisms of occupation, of settler colonialism, of racist violence and racist oppression that defines the nature of Zionism and white supremacy. And as we demand an end to Zionist oppression in Palestine, it is critically important to confront, resist and defeat white supremacy and racist oppression in North America.

Just as the Palestinian people have continually resisted occupation and oppression, Black people and Black movements for liberation have continually struggled and resisted. The Black Liberation Movement and the Palestinian liberation movement are struggles to defeat racism, colonialism and imperialism and achieve self determination and liberation.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes the people of Ferguson, joins their call for justice for Michael Brown and for an end to police oppression, mass incarceration and militarization, and stands in solidarity with Black movements struggling for justice and liberation.

[Luther Blissett]

http://www.opferguson.com

this is a website not the twitter account ...correct?

#opferguson

Yes, the twitter accounts, hashtag, actual ops are for the most part "legit" (or as legit as can be). The website linked above is an admitted honeytrap for logging IPs, and is allegedly (as per my screenshot) hosted at cia.gov (sloppy, seemingly unbelievable).

[seemslikeadream]

this guy is a St. Louis alderman Antonio French..he had been arrested last night

https://twitter.com/OpFerguson
Antonio French
‏@AntonioFrench
This woman who was helping to calm the crowd last night got shot by a rubber bullet later on.

The Guardian
Missouri police fired wooden bullets at crowd during protest over teen's death
Solid wood pellets discovered after demonstration to protest the killing by a police officer of unarmed teenager Michael Brown

[2012 Countdown]

Oh, I like this, lulz...

Retweeted by Operation Ferguson
☭ ישי בן-אברהם ☭ @SFTovarishch · 24m
#BREAKING NYC looters continue to defy rule of law, steal billions, leave thousands homeless. No arrests. #Ferguson

my contribution...

[seemslikeadream]

[Nordic]

We're all Gazans. Gaza is the future.

[zangtang]

I thought it was Ciudad Juarez.
why wasnt i informed?

[seemslikeadream]

officers name to be released today

no arrests made overnight

MotherJones
Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?

Under Occupation
The Shortest Distance Between Palestine and Ferguson
by JAIME OMAR YASSIN
The superficially coincidental images coming from both Gaza and Ferguson this month have created some surprising and sudden currents of solidarity. Many have looked on with amazement, for example, as Gazans offer tips via twitter to those who have been involved in the uprising and faced the absurd and excessively militarized response to it by Ferguson police. And participants in “peaceful” vigils and more militant confrontations in Ferguson have invoked Gaza by now a dozens times.
Few have looked at images coming out of Ferguson and not been tempted to draw the same allusions between the 2/3 Black suburb policed by a nearly all-white police force, and Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. It would be difficult not to draw that comparison at the moment given the spectacle of the massive armory gifted to the FPD by the federal government in the name of stopping “terror”–which has so often been given a Palestinian face in the US–and the revelation that the former police chief of Ferguson studied “counter-terror” measures in Israel in 2011. Ironically, it seems Black Americans are now the target of anti-terror funding and training, which was ostensibly meant to target those from the Muslim and Arab world.

While there is nothing happening within the US anything like the now-cyclical Israeli slaughter of thousands of Gazans, the reality is that life for Black Americans in places like Ferguson does not vary in much from blockaded Gaza, and West Bank Bantustans in off-attack times . The similarities are not just coincidental in terms of the timing of the events–they are in fact, concurrent and historical.

Ferguson is a majority Black, segregated community, run almost entirely by white people. Almost all of its political representatives, and all but 3 of it’s 53 person police force, are white. Such areas, populated by the disenfranchised, are growing throughout the US, as the white and associated enfranchised classes move back to the cities and to ex-urbs or new white suburbs, leaving geographically isolated and service-poor communities behind. The result has been, as is on display in Ferguson, an easy to lock-down community full of people the mainstream has forgotten–policed by an authority trained from birth to distrust and marginalize Black people with the full backing of the Federal government. Unbelievably, the FAA declared a no-fly zone over Ferguson and FPD mounted roadblocks at its city limits as it began its peace-keeping operation of its own citizens–chillingly reminiscent of the media-blockade conducted during Cast Lead and during other Israeli operations.

While the struggle in Palestine is often painted in ideological, ethnic and religious terms, it too is becoming not so different than those in the US, wedded as much to economic concerns as white supremacist structures. As Haaretz recently reported, the larger settlements of the West Bank—which have grown astronomically since the signing of the Oslo Agreement with the Palestinian Authority—are now in the midst of a housing bubble that is outstripping prices in Tel Aviv and its suburbs. Young urban professionals, with no interest in ideology or perhaps even in Zionism, flock to these well-financed and subsidized cities, where the attendant express highways spirit them quickly back and forth from Tel Aviv. Israel’s military industrial complex gives them security from the tenants of the land they’ve stolen.

As these suburbs, grow, perhaps, and as the twisted “peace process” between the compliant Palestinian Authority and Israel evolves, we may in decades to come see a Palestine—or what is left of it—not unlike the US’s black underclass cities and towns. Perhaps it may yet become a broken and discontiguous economic-ethnic series of hamlets—segregated underemployed communities of service workers kept under lock and key by a less visible series of cages and walls, no less violent than military occupation. Given the current state of negotiations, with Israel shaping a Palestinian Authority take-over of the rubble of Gaza, perhaps one tiny wall separating these two territories will be lifted, and Gaza allowed to enjoy the slightly less onerous open-air prison system of the West Bank.

Perhaps then people will also wonder what the Palestinian’s problem is. Why they can’t keep out of trouble with the authorities. Why their men line the halls of the entity’s prisons. Why they cannot simply learn to stop being racists and love their oppressor. Why they are rioting. This is, in fact, the reality that Israel is striving for in the West Bank, institutional apartheid that becomes so well-camouflaged and accepted over time that it begins to look like the US’s honed version of it—an “unfortunate” remnant of the past that is always explainable, always the victim’s fault, and is always in the midst of being fixed, with, not surprisingly, little success. Between the decimation of Gaza and the continued madcap pace of colonization in the West Bank and Jerusalem, they are closer than ever to this goal.

Which brings us to a final, and perhaps most alarming, similarity between Ferguson and Palestine. Both places nominally have a president who superficially represents them, from a similar ethnic and economic background, the product of a historic and unprecedented process. It was an event that overturned years of conventional wisdom that claimed the disenfranchised would never know representative state leaders.

The last dispiriting likeness is the betrayal of that hope–that leader who works for the very structure oppressing the people he seems to most represent, who is revealed to be only the latest trick for a white supremacist system of violence and dispossession that can superficially change, but will not budge. The leader that arms the enemy, kills for them, lies for them, and prevents racial and economic justice for his own ostensible people. For the people of Palestine, it is Abbas. For the people of Ferguson, Sanford, Oakland and other cities, this is Obama–whose bloodless and offensive commentary on the murder of Mike Brown shocked a nation of angry people perhaps as much as the FPD response did. They couldn’t seem any more different superficially, of course, but more and more, we see they have the same white supremacist, capitalist boss.

[Luther Blissett]

What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson:
Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson

Ferguson is about many things, starting first with race and policing in America.

But it’s also about internet, net neutrality and algorithmic filtering.

It’s a clear example of why “saving the Internet”, as it often phrased, is not an abstract issue of concern only to nerds, Silicon Valley bosses, and few NGOs. It’s why “algorithmic filtering” is not a vague concern.

It’s a clear example why net neutrality is a human rights issue; a free speech issue; and an issue of the voiceless being heard, on their own terms.

I saw this play out in multiple countries — my home country of Turkey included — but last night, it became even more heartbreakingly apparent in the United States as well.

For me, last night’s Ferguson “coverage” began when people started retweeting pictures of armored vehicles with heavily armored “robocops” on top of them, aiming their muzzle at the protesters, who seemed to number a few hundred. It was the fourth night after an unarmed black man, Michael Brown, was shot by a — still unnamed — police officer after a “jaywalking” incident. Witnesses say he died hands in the air, saying “don’t shoot”.

The first night Mike Brown was shot, a friend asked on Twitter whether this would ever make the national news. It deserved to be national news as multiple significant, ongoing crises intersect at Ferguson: the loss of jobs which hit these communities worst; the militarization of US police departments; race; chronic multi-generational poverty.

But those very factors often make it less likely such places make the news, except as trouble spots. Places to be ignored. Avoided. “We” hear it only through official statements, often dismissing local concerns, painting them as looters, thugs, troublemakers.

Yes Ferguson will make news, another friend tweeted, because… well, here you go: Twitter.

It seems like a world ago in which such places, and such incidents, would be buried in silence, though, of course, residents knew of their own ignored plight. Now, we expect documentation, live-feeds, streaming video, real time Tweets.

I watched this interaction online. When local the police department in Ferguson showed up at the first vigils for this young man with dogs, the outrage spilled over to people who may not have been following it the first day. When night after night, reports of tear gas came in, more national journalists went to the area, as well as more residents turning on their cameras, deliberately. More and more people started talking about this.

Yesterday, national journalists were harassed, assaulted, arrested — without paperwork — while sitting quietly, recharging their phones at McDonald's — captured on video. Police positioned like snipers on top of armored, anti-mine vehicles kept their rifles — I have no idea what kind — aimed at protester within full view of national media, in broad daylight — pictured from multiple angles.

This unfolded in real time on my social media feed which was pretty soon taken over by the topic — and yes, it’s a function of who I follow but I follow across the political spectrum, on purpose, and also globally. Egyptians and Turks were tweeting tear gas advice. Journalists with national profiles started going live on TV. And yes, there were people from the left and the right who expressed outrage.

I write and talk often about protest over-policing in multiple countries, so the topic was not a new one to me but I saw many people who I know don’t necessarily follow this day-to-day (and don’t condemn — not everyone can, or should, follow every worthy issue) start talking about it.

And this is what happened to “Ferguson” on Twitter:


And then I switched to non net-neutral Internet to see what was up. I mostly have a similar a composition of friends on Facebook as I do on Twitter.

Nada, zip, nada.

No Ferguson on Facebook last night. I scrolled. Refreshed.

This morning, though, my Facebook feed is also very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson. Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now — seems to have bubbled them up, probably as people engaged them more.

But I wonder: what if Ferguson had started to bubble, but there was no Twitter to catch on nationally? Would it ever make it through the algorithmic filtering on Facebook? Maybe, but with no transparency to the decisions, I cannot be sure.

Would Ferguson be buried in algorithmic censorship?

Would we even have a chance to see her?


This isn’t about Facebook per se—maybe it will do a good job, maybe not—but the fact that algorithmic filtering, as a layer, controls what you see on the Internet. Net neutrality (or lack thereof) will be yet another layer determining this. This will come on top of existing inequalities in attention, coverage and control.

Twitter was also affected by algorithmic filtering. “Ferguson” did not trend in the US on Twitter but it did trend locally. [I’ve since learned from @gilgul that that it *briefly* trended but mostly trended at localities.] So, there were fewer chances for people not already following the news to see it on their “trending” bar. Why? Almost certainly because there was already national, simmering discussion for many days and Twitter’s trending algorithm (said to be based on a method called “term frequency inverse document frequency”) rewards spikes… So, as people in localities who had not been talking a lot about Ferguson started to mention it, it trended there though the national build-up in the last five days penalized Ferguson.

Algorithms have consequences.

Mass media, typically, does not do very well covering chronic problems of unprivileged populations, poor urban blacks bear the brunt of this, but they are not alone. Rural mostly white America, too, is almost always ignored except for the occasional “meth labs everywhere” story. But yesterday, many outlets were trying, except police didn’t let them. Chris Hayes says that police ordered satellite trucks off the area so that they could not go live from the area. Washington Post was only one outlet whose journalists were arrested — citizen journalists were targeted as well.

On the scrappy live feed kept up by frequently tear-gassed, coughing citizen journalists, I heard the announcements calling on them to “turn off their cameras.”

But maybe in the future, they don’t have to bother to arrest journalists and force cameras off. In California, legislation is being considered for “kill switches” in phones — a feature I honestly cannot imagine a good use for this in the United States.

The citizen journalists held on, even as choked from the gas, some traditional media started going live from the region, and today, it’s on the front page of many newspapers.

Maybe, just maybe, there can be a national conversation on these topics long-ignored outside these communities. That’s not everything: it may be a first step, or it may get drowned out.

But at least, we are here.

But I’m not quite sure that without the neutral side of the Internet—the livestreams whose “packets” were fast as commercial, corporate and moneyed speech that travels on our networks, Twitter feeds which are not determined by an opaque corporate algorithms but my own choices,—we’d be having this conversation.

So, I hope that in the coming days, there will be a lot written about race in America, about militarization of police departments, lack of living wage jobs in large geographic swaths of the country.

But keep in mind, Ferguson is also a net neutrality issue. It’s also an algorithmic filtering issue. How the internet is run, governed and filtered is a human rights issue.

And despite a lot of dismal developments, this fight is far from over, and its enemy is cynicism and dismissal of this reality.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

What happens to #Ferguson affects what happens to Ferguson.

[seemslikeadream]

Darrin Wilson...6 year veteran of the Ferguson police force

[seemslikeadream]

well I guess if you are a suspect in a robbery the police have the right to kill you...if you are a suspect in the murder of an unarmed civilian...????

all this for a couple of cigarettes?