Charges Laid in G20 Abuse Scandal

But don't get too excited, it's just one officer of the however-many who were caught abusing protesters.

A Toronto police officer has been arrested and charged with assaulting a protester during the G20 summit in June.
It is the first arrest of a police officer in connection with allegations of the use of excessive force during the summit.
Const. Babak Andalib-Goortani was charged Tuesday with assault with a weapon. The charges relate to the treatment of Adam Nobody by police on the evening of June 26, said a statement released Tuesday by the province's Special Investigations Unit.
Nobody was one of about 1,000 people arrested during the two-day summit.
During his arrest at Queen's Park, Nobody suffered a fracture below his right eye and a broken nose.

So far, police have been "unable" to identify anyone shown in the video - even themselves.

The blue wall at work.

You know, cops must absolutely hate technology. In this day and age, everyone and their brother is carrying around cell phones with built-in cameras and video recorders (even my bottom-rung phone comes with these features), which makes abuses of authority much more likely to be caught. Once upon a time, it was a lot easier to get away with this sort of thing - someone gets beaten by the cops, all they really had to do was deny it. The vast majority of the time, any ensuing investigation by any of the toothless oversight agencies would simply find no wrongdoing.

Cops don't snitch on their own, after all. Without video evidence, there's not much to be done.

That simple denial would be enough. I know in times past, I would have given the police the benefit of the doubt. I mean, they're police. Why would they go around beating people utilizing their lawful right to protest - a right the police are supposed to protect for all citizens?

Certainly, tales of abuse seem a lot more common these days. From beating off-duty soldiers outside a bar, to repeatedly stun gunning a Polish immigrant, to the many, many reports of the G20 abuses. But here's what I suspect - police abuses of power aren't any more common these days than they ever have been. It's just that police are that much more likely to get caught in the act.

And even with video evidence - blatant proof of wrongdoing that's plain for everyone to see - it's often not enough. The police playbook is pretty established by this point:

-Abuse somebody because it makes you feel like a big man
-Ignore the inevitable complaint (usually by claiming it never happened)
-Backpedal when the video gets put up on Youtube
-Claim the video has been edited or otherwise doesn't show what actually happened

Usually, it doesn't get past that fourth stage. Even with this latest incident, charges weren't laid until two other corroborating videos found their way into the SIU's hands. At that point, some cops finally started to talk - probably because they felt they had to.

So, all of those people who were abused and humiliated while in detention during the G20 summit... Well, don't hold your breath waiting for justice to happen there. After all, cell phones get confiscated (with their memories usually wiped) when their owner gets arrested.

Sweden: Unable to Diplomatize

So another big infodump is going on at Wikileaks and several associated newscorps, this time involving reams and reams of diplomatic cables.  Unlike previous infodumps, this one is set to be released in a staggered fashion throughout the week, with each day getting its own focus.

Cables related to Canada is scheduled for Thursday.  Personally, I can hardly wait, though I fear there may not be anything particularly juicy - all I've heard so far is rumours about U.S. diplomats talking about Canada's "inferiority complex."  We don't have an inferiority complex, not really (our cultural problems relating to the U.S. are worse than that), but I can see how some who might not quite understand Canadian culture might mistake our identity issues for such...  So that's not really such a big deal for me.  As I said, hopefully there's something more interesting related to Soviet Canuckistan, but we'll see.

Already we've hearing the bleating objections of the powers-that-be, who are once again terribly butthurt over the whole ordeal of their secrets being revealed for all and sundry.  These leaks, they claim, stand to get a lot of people hurt or killed (where have we heard that objection before?  It's crying wolf at this point, really) and to impede the U.S. government's ability to engage with other nation-states in a diplomatic fashion, since frank diplomatic statements cannot be made without fear of public exposure.  Negotiations between nations, so the argument goes, need to be kept secret until they've reached their completion, at which point the public can hear a press release about it.  Breaking down the logic, the argument goes like this:

-Diplomacy needs secrecy to work.
-Diplomacy prevents wars.
-Transparency and secrecy are mutually exclusive.
-Therefore, transparency will prevent diplomacy from being an effective tool.
-A nation will be disinclined to use an ineffective tool.
-Thus, diplomacy will be shunned in favour of other methods.
-Ergo, transparency will cause more wars.

It's a fairly decent logical construction, but like all logical constructions it's only true if you buy into the premises.  Here's where Sweden comes into the picture.

See, there's a law in Sweden that makes the vast majority of government records and documents public.  And when I say vast majority, I mean it - to the point that every government e-mail is free for any citizen to read.  At one point, a secret Scientology document was basically made available to the public because it was sent to a high-ranking government official, which thereby made it available to Swedes at large.  Another time it got evil biotech corp Monsanto's panties in a bunch because this policy of transparency allowed Greenpeace to get its hands on a document relating to one of their evil biotech corp products.

Sweden is ranked by Transparency International as the most transparent government on the planet thanks to these and other policies (it's followed by New Zealand and Denmark.)  According to the argument laid out above, these countries would be unable to engage in any sort of diplomatic relations.  This is clearly an absurd claim.

That means the first premise in that logical construction I detailed above is untrue, and as a result the entire argument falls apart.

But all that's really besides the  point, because here's the bottom line:  Voters, citizens, have responsibilities.  These responsibilities include overseeing the people we put into place to represent us as our government.  This requires us to inform ourselves as best we can not only the things our governments do on our behalf, but also the relationships they form with other governments.  It is ludicrous to expect a governmental body to police itself.  Therefore, we need as much transparency as we can scrape together in order to hold them to task for the things they do.  There should be little to no privilege of secrecy here, because time and time again it has been proven that governments use any secrecy they can achieve for unethical behaviour.  Even if heightened transparency makes some tasks more difficult it's a small price to pay.

More nations should follow Sweden's example.  More citizens should demand their governments do so.

UPDATE:  There's a really great article at the Guardian over the whole ethical argument of leaking that I recommend reading. It lays out the same basic argument that I've been making for months in a very succinct manner:

Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global.

Another Nation May Back Out of the ACTA

This time it's Mexico.

The ACTA stands for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, basically a bunch of international standards on intellectual property and copyright that's being hammered out by a bunch of different countries - including Canada.  (This is why the Tories want to pass bill C-32, to get us up to snuff with the ACTA should it pass.  This is a topic on which blogger Michael Geist has written at length, and he's far more informed and up-to-date on this issue than I am.  Head over to his blog if you want to educate yourself.)

Thing is, a lot of the nations involved in the negotiations have become less and less keen as time has gone on.  The EU parliament, for example, is making noises that they may ultimately reject the agreement due to a lack of transparency throughout the process, combined with worry about "giving governments a blank cheque to write draconian anti-counterfeiting laws that endanger citizens' fundamental freedoms."  Many have also suggested that some parts of the ACTA have proven to be overly preferential to corporate interests.

And Mexico's now unofficially rejected the ACTA in a non-binding agreement.  Which may amount to nothing, but is more likely an indicator that Mexico's going to make its withdrawal official pretty soon.

Canada's still all up ons, though.  So, congratulations, Canadians!  Our government is now officially more secretive and beholden to corporate interests than Mexico's government.

Muzzling Federal Scientists

By my own rules, I'm allowed to use Thursdays for pretty much anything I want, so I'm going to share the other thing I wanted to talk about yesterday. As reported in the Calgary Herald, the Harper government doesn't want any federal scientists talking to the media about pesky science-related things:

Natural Resources Canada scientists were told this spring they need “pre-approval” from Minister Christian Paradis’ office to speak with national and international journalists. Their “media lines” also need ministerial approval, say documents obtained by Postmedia News through access-to-information legislation.

So, they're not allowed doing interviews or journal articles that would have national or international coverage without clearing it with their superiors first. Particularly nothing about 13,000 year old floods, oilsands, or climate change.

This is all pretty unprecedented; these are rules no government has ever made for its federal scientists before. Of course, the Harper government claims that this has been policy for years:

“Departmental officials speaking on behalf of the department are to consult the minister’s office in preparing responses,” [acting media relations manager at NRCan] Micheline Joanisse says. “While this may have been misinterpreted as being a new policy, it has been in place for years.”

This is a lie. It's a bald-faced, unequivocal lie. We know it's a lie because not only does it come as a complete shock to the scientists themselves, when asked to be pointed to where this policy was written down or officially announced, they were met with the sound of chirping crickets.

All in all, this is just another example of how the Harper government hates dealing with those pesky "experts" and their "expert opinions." It goes hand-in-hand with the destruction of the census. Stevie's not about good government, he's about maintaining power - like the worst of Cretien's and Mulroney's years put together without any of the good stuff or redeeming features. I know I keep saying stuff to that effect, but that's because it hasn't ceased being true.

Blood, Lies, and Wikileaks

Unless you've been actively avoiding the topic, most Westerners should be aware of the existence of Wikileaks by now; this is the internet media organization that's been responsible for some really astonishing leaks of government and corporate documents and news (much of which related to government and corporate malfeasance). Some of it's been so impressive that they won the Amnesty International 2009 Media Award. Anyway, some time ago Wikileaks released 77,000 classified U.S. Military documents they'd managed to get ahold of. They had 92,000, but withheld 15,000 of them which they felt would put people at undue risk based on the contents and/or classifications attached to those documents.

The end result is a pretty bleak picture of what's going on over there.

Of course, shortly after the leak went live - which was done partnered with Der Spiegel, the New York Times, and the Guardian - the media narrative has become all about how Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, now has blood on his hands because the documents released included non-redacted names of informants.

I'll admit, this is regrettable. Wikileaks, to their credit, used the NYT as a go-between with the Department of Defence to get help in redacting sensitive names found in the documents, but the Department of Defence refused. Wikileaks is an organization with all of five employees - they didn't have the manpower to do it themselves. This meant they had a choice: go forward and get the information out there, or sit on it.

Some organizations would have sat on it, denying the public its right to know the sort of things being done in their name. That's not really how Wikileaks rolls, though, so they released the documents. Go to the Wikileaks.org website if you want to take a peek.

But that's all background - this is all old news. So, why am I talking about this now, rather than when it was all fresh?

Because this article at Newsweek, about a surge in death threats and violence in the wake of the Afganistan documents leak, is pissing me off. Allow me to explain why.

This narrative much of the media is running with is based on what is basically fabrication. That newsweek article? It's based entirely on a twisted version of this news feed, which points out that the tribal elder who was killed received no death threats, no one has claimed responsibility for his killing, and was never named in the Wikileaks documents anyway. In fact, to date no one has been able to point to a single death or act of violence directly attributable to the leak. It's all hypothetical, though you can bet that if it weren't there'd be somebody at the White House crowing about it as loud as they could.

If a surge in violence is occurring in Afganistan in the wake of the Wikileaks thing - which, based on the contents of the documents, is a very suspect idea since those documents suggest that the surge of violence has been growing for years - then it's simply based on the fact that the media reported that some people in Afganistan have been working with coalition forces as informants. Which means that it doesn't matter one whit if you redact the names - people are going to be targeted for being "suspected informants" anyway. (But then that's what's been happening all along, isn't it?) So this admonishment of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, when you wipe away all the crap, becomes less "You should have redacted the names" and more "You shouldn't let the public know about things!"



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These accusations sound stunningly familiar, in fact. It's the same sort of shpiel that's been thrown out since this whole War on (Some) Terror started. Stop me if you've heard these before:

Are you an anti-war protester? Then you're hurting the troops! You must love terrorists!

Are you questioning the bombing of Baghdad? Saddam gassed his own people! How can you support that monster!

You want torturers and people who imprison others without trial brought to task and made to answer for their actions? You must hate freedom!

You're shedding light on the failure of U.S./Coalition military policy, and the frequency with which civilians are murdered collateral damaged? You've got blood on your hands!

Classification of information is abused by governments as a matter of course, and really much of the modern media just sort of rolls over and plays dead for the powers-that-be. I'm honestly not sure if this wasn't always the case - I'd like to think there was once a time when official news outlets were on a noble quest for the truth, and certainly there seems to have been a time when they were more powerful than they are now, but I suspect that in truth this golden age of news agencies never truly existed. Still, the internet and the global society that it's helping facilitate, baby step by baby step, is a pretty powerful potential source for information, as Wikileaks is fast proving.

In order for the democratic process to work, the public needs to be able to inform itself of what's being done in its name. This goes not just for the U.S., but for every citizen of every coalition nation - a group that includes me. It's tremendously regrettable if anyone gets hurt as a result of this leak - and I'm glad that no one has yet. But civilians are being slaughtered like it's going out of style in Afganistan, and my government owns a part of the responsibility for those actions by virtue of taking an active role in this bout of military adventurism. This is all being done in my name.

That means I have a right to know what's really going on there. I have a need to know, so I can act as a responsible citizen. Wikileaks is not perfect, but it helps fulfil that need, and any accusations by Coalition government bodies of its founder having "blood on his hands" is, at best, disingenuous. It's classic beam vs. mote territory, really.

Census Woes

Honestly, I don't think I can remember the last time in Canada a government did something that was so universally condemned pretty much across the board (well, minus party hardliners - aka douchebags) as a bad move. More than 200 groups oppose this change; only 3 are in support of it.

But that's what Harper's done, and it looks like he's going to get his way.

It irks me. This was done with no public input and he ignored the massive public condemnation in an almost gleeful manner. I mean, sure, it's par for the course for Harper - he's evil, after all - but it's just so blatant. Again, though, that's no surprise - he's been just as blatant in the past.

He's the only Canadian politician in living memory whom I've ever described unironically as evil. I really hope that some commentators are correct in their prediction that voters will remember this come next election, and future governments will restore the census to its proper form.

An Early Census Salvo, Blog Stats, and Awesomeness

The Federation of Francophone and Acadian Communities of Canada is making legal manoeuvres to get the courts to undo the changes Harper's made to the census. As the group claims:

The federation argues that Ottawa's move violates not only the Official Languages Act, but also the Constitution's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It says that without reliable data about the francophone presence in Canada, the quality of government services in French could suffer.

No kidding. I'm not sure that's going to work for the court - without the census, government services all across the board are going to suffer. But it's true that French-Canadians will probably see some of the worst of it (right after the immigrant communities, First Nations, students, the disabled, the elderly, etc., etc.) Which, again it's worth pointing out, is exactly the sort of thing Harper wants to happen with this move. It's certainly not to make a stronger census, for reasons I went into previously; in fact, Industry Minister Tony Clement, who's in charge of StatsCan and has been put in the unenviable position of having to champion this move, previously pleaded with Harper not to do this.

The FFACC is doing this legal action as a last resort - as they said, they "tried everything, everything we could, short of kidnapping people, to meet them."

WELL YOU DIDN'T TRY HARD ENOUGH! Stopping short of kidnapping? Show some dedication, you pantywaists! You want results, don't you?*

*ahem*

Anyway. I've also put a statcounter on this blog, mostly out of curiosity. It's only been up a day, but already I've come to the realization that my blog is... considerably more popular than I'd expected. I figured my only visitors would really be the few friends and relatives I've shared the url with, but that doesn't nearly explain the number of unique IPs that have been visiting this site.

Who are you people? How did you find this blog? And why are you all so quiet?

The title of this blogpost also promised awesomeness, so here you go: The trailer for the newest season of the Venture Bros. "I miss my breasts! Inside me is a woman screaming to get out!"


*Note:  I ask these questions out of levity. I'm not seriously suggesting that anyone kidnap Conservative politicans and hold them in a locked room, forcing them to watch Gigli over and over again until they agree to govern responsibly for a change. Probably.

Wait, You Mean There's an Actual Godwin?

So I guess the FBI's mad at Wikipedia right now. Why? Because on the Wikipedia page for the FBI, they have a picture of the FBI seal.

And they're threatening legal action if it's not removed.

I'll give you a moment to digest that idea.

Funny as that is on its own (government heraldry is not a class of protected image in any way, shape or form - nor should it be for reasons that should be obvious), it seems in the Cease & Desist letter to Wikipedia, they actually redacted the parts of the law they were citing (18 USC 701) that were inconvenient to their interpretation.

I'll give you another moment.

Wikipedia's lawyer, one Mike Godwin, has responded to their threat and put his response up on the interwebs for anyone to peruse. A choice bit I'm rather fond of personally:

It’s clear that you and Mr. Binney took the hint, although perhaps not in the way I would have preferred. Entertainingly, in support for your argument, you included a version of 701 in which you removed the very phrases that subject the statute to ejusdem generis analysis. While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version of Section
701 that you forwarded to us.

I've got a big rant on Law Enforcement and media technology that I've been allowing to bubble in the back of my brain for a while, and now seems an okay opportunity to go into it... But, nah. I'll wait until another time. Instead, I'd like to talk about Mike Godwin, Wikimedia's lawyer.

Apparently, this is not just any old lawyer - this guy is the Godwin from which Godwin's Law gets its name. (For those of you who don't know what Godwin's Law is, it's a rule about internet discussions that goes as follows: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." A commonly-cited subrule also states that the party that invokes the Nazi comparison is probably the one who's just lost the debate in question.)

Interestingly, Mike Godwin was also, once upon a time, first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and his first work was the case against the Secret Service on behalf of Steve Jackson (of Steve Jackson Games), whom he knew from his days on an Austin BBS. This was the infamous incident involving the raid on SJ Games' computers back in March of 1990, due to a misunderstanding on the parts of the completely competent Secret Service guys, who thought that GURPS: Cyberpunk held detailed instructions on real-life computer hacking and credit fraud.

I had no knowledge of most of this stuff an hour ago (well, I knew about the SJG raid), but now that I know it my life feels one step closer to being complete.

...

Oh, and I finished another character design. Here ya go, you quiet readers you.

Landmark Charter Case

It took almost eight years for the case to make its way through our court system, but in the end the precedent has been set in the Supreme Court of Canada regarding the denial of Alan Ward's rights. As the article at the CBC says:

The ruling means that people whose rights have been infringed can seek damages even if they suffered no actual loss and even if the authorities acted in good faith.

So, score one for the good guys. Luckily, the denial of citizens' rights by state authorities is incredibly rare here, so it's doubtful this precedent will ever really apply to any other cases.

Harper, Statistics, and the Left-Wing Bias of Reality

By now, most anyone who reads my blog has probably heard that Harper recently launched his latest salvo in his party's war on facts and knowledge. If not, you can read all about it in that left-wing rag, the Globe and Mail. Basically, Harper wants to scrap the long-form compulsory census and replace it with a voluntary form. But to make up for the fact that it's voluntary, he'll be mailing the census forms to many more households than previous, so that the whole thing is 30 million dollars more expensive!

That's fiscal responsibility for you. And why did he scrap the long form? Privacy complaints, goes the claim.

Guess how many complaints were made over the census in the past decade?

Go on, guess.

The answer is three.

Why am I talking about this? Well, a recent disastrous internal town hall meeting brought it into my mind. During this internal town hall, a chief statistician seems to be gearing up to resign in protest over these changes. His is just the latest voice being added in protest of this move, a chorus that indicates a potential Fed-Province battle on the horizon, with the media and scholastic circles siding firmly on the side of the provinces.

Will this finally be the straw that breaks the back of the Canadian voting populace? Will we finally vote out this evil prick? Hope springs eternal.

This is, of course, part of a pattern on Harper's part - he's long been antagonistic towards StatsCan. Now, Harper's supposed to be savvy and, to be fair, he's pretty good at twisting the political process to his own ends. In a gaming group he'd be what's called a Rules Lawyering Jerk. Everything he does may technically be within the lines, but only as much as does the "I'm Not Touching You!" game that children play in the back seat of the car. Allow me a visual aid.



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But this is a bad move. It's an obvious bad move - he had to have been aware of the chances that this could play very poorly with pretty much everyone. So, why?

The answer is ideology. The Tories are, more than any other party, driven by ideology, and rather than look at reality and allow their ideology to conform to known facts, they blaze on with their ideologically pure agenda and demand reality conform to them. It's pretty much classic neo-con, an art perfected during Bush's tenure south of the border. Anytime the Tories seek to introduce some terrible bit of legislation that directly contradicts what expert research says works, they'll come back with some rejoinder about how they couldn't give a wet fart about what some ivory tower intellectuals think. (E.g., gun registry, pensions, nuclear safety, global warming, environmental science, &c.) Still, every time they do this, it costs them.

So, they gut the census. They can't do away with it entirely, of course - that would require a vote which they'd inevitably lose. But Harper can make these changes unilaterally - it's in his power to do so - and that will effectively ruin whatever benefits the census provides, as any good statistician will tell you. Hell, anyone who's taken any statistics course whatsoever, who has even a passing familiarity with how statistics works will be able to tell you of how little value a purely voluntary census would be. Selection bias, anyone? And it even costs more! But money well spent to remove the opposition's ability to point at solid research and say "The world doesn't work the way you want it to."

Sometimes I think about the adage "you get the government you deserve," and I despair.

EDIT: Seems that Sheikh is no longer merely considering resigning... He's actually gone through with it, as reported here.

Justice Delayed, but Not Yet Denied

It's been three years, but it looks like the white-wash of Robert Dziekanski's killing is being given a proper examination... And unsurprisingly, things aren't looking so good for the officers involved.

I remember when this story first broke, and the Mounties' claims of exactly how the event went down happened to blatantly contradict the youtube video that was uploaded shortly thereafter. They revised their statements, and promised to investigate the matter themselves and - quelle surprise! - found that they hadn't done anything wrong.

I'm glad the blatant miscarriage of justice is being reviewed. Nothing can bring Mr. Dziekanski back, but once this is done hopefully his mother will be able to get some closure.

Cops must absolutely hate the age of cell phone video cameras.