If potential abuse by the the Karl Roves or Chris Christie administrations of the world are not enough reason to be concerned about an ever present and often oppressive 'security' apparatus, this story should raise concerns about the use of tax money and security agencies to enforce the agenda of major media corporations.
AMC movie theater calls “federal agents” to arrest a Google Glass User:
A early Google-Glass user who also has his eyeglass prescription installed into the turned off device visited an AMC Theater he had previously frequented wearing the same device and:
About an hour into the movie (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit), a guy comes near my seat, shoves a badge that had some sort of a shield on it, yanks the Google Glass off my face and says “follow me outside immediately”. It was quite embarrassing and outside of the theater there were about 5-10 cops and mall cops. Since I didn’t catch his name in the dark of the theater, I asked to see his badge again and I asked what was the problem and I asked for my Glass back. The response was “you see all these cops you know we are legit, we are with the ‘federal service’ and you have been caught illegally taping the movie”.
... After an embarrassing 20-30 minutes outside the movie theater, me and my wife were conducted into two separate rooms in the “management” office of Easton Mall, where the guy with the badge introduced himself again and showed me a different ID
...
After a three hour interrogation and loads of accusations:
somebody came with a laptop and an USB cable at which point he told me it was my last chance to come clean. I repeated for the hundredth time there is nothing to come clean about and this is a big misunderstanding so the FBI guy finally connected my Glass to the computer, downloaded all my personal photos and started going though them one by one (although they are dated and it was obvious there was nothing on my Glass that was from the time period they accused me of recording). Then they went through my phone, and 5 minutes later they concluded I had done nothing wrong.
After some investigation it was found the agents in questions were DHS:
From: Walls, Khaalid H [mailto:Khaalid.H.Walls@ice.dhs.gov]
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2014 1:16 PM
To: Allison Manning
Subject: ICE
H Ally,
Please attribute the below statement to me:
On Jan. 18, special agents with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations
and local authorities briefly interviewed a man suspected of using an
electronic recording device to record a film at an AMC theater in
Columbus. The man, who voluntarily answered questions, confirmed to
authorities that the suspected recording device was also a pair of
prescription eye glasses in which the recording function had been
inactive. No further action was taken.
Khaalid Walls, ICE spokesman
Khaalid Walls
Public Affairs Officer
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
Guilty of no crime a couple were detained, interrogate and their belonging searched by people supposedly protecting us from Al Qaeda, drug-lords, etc. The man, innocent, will still likely be permanently entered into national databases, such as the cases of innocent photographers or disgruntled
gamer-kids:
In Washington, TrapWire processes so-called suspicious activity reports filed by members of the community and adds them to its massive national counterterrorism database, attempting to identify threat patterns...
...One video gamer ended up in TrapWire (read the original documents) and the FBI’s terrorism database after apparent threats he made while he was playing “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” that a member of the community reported.
In one email — dated last January and obtained by Al Jazeera — Sgt. James Black of the MPD’s Homeland Security Bureau described how five “large members” of the department’s Robbery Intervention Program (RIP) and “(his) own online game expert” showed up at the home of a gamer whose name is redacted in the documents. The gamer had apparently been reported by a member of the public after making some sort of threat while playing on his computer.
The gamer “was shaking, sweating, and looking like a deer in headlights the whole time we had our interview,” Black wrote in a Jan. 18, 2013, email shared with FBI agents.
In his email Black eventually said the individual posed “ZERO” threat. However, Washington police personnel were instructed to add Black’s report to TrapWire.
Another example of this kind of abuse is the
use of the NSA and its counter-parts in the arrest and surveillance of accused copyright violater Kim Dotcom.
A new examination of previously published affidavits from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)—the New Zealand equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA)—appears to suggest that the GCSB used the “Five Eyes” international surveillance network to capture the communications of Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload.
The new analysis was posted by New Zealand journalist Keith Ng in a Thursday blog post. If the link proves to be true, it would seem that the NSA’s vast international surveillance capability can be turned against individuals unrelated to the NSA’s stated mission to aid military, counterintelligence, or counterterrorism objectives
For a primer on Trapwire's history and other related spy tools please visit one of my older diaries:
http://www.dailykos.com/...