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A North Carolina mother filed a civil rights lawsuit last Friday against a policeman who handcuffed and held her autistic 7-year-old son prone on the ground for nearly 40 minutes.

Body camera footage of the September 2018 incident, first published by WSOC-TV, shows former Statesville, North Carolina, school resource officer Michael Fattaleh pulling the child's arms behind his back and handcuffing him.

According to the lawsuit, the boy, who is identified only by the initial L.G., had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder the previous year and placed in a special needs classroom. On September 11, 2018, L.G. became overwhelmed and began acting out and spitting in class. He was taken to a "quiet room" to calm down when Fattaleh allegedly walked by and saw the boy spit on the ground. Fattaleh handcuffed L.G.'s hands behind his back and restrained him stomach-down on the floor.

Staff placed a pillow underneath L.G.'s head, and Fatalleh asked him several times if he could breath and if he was comfortable. But he also appeared to taunt L.G. at times.

"If you, my friend, are not acquainted with the juvenile justice system, you will be very shortly," Fattaleh says at one point in the body camera footage. "You ever been charged with a crime before? Well, you're fixing to be."

At another point, Fattaleh puts his knee on L.G's back and says, "Have you ever heard the term 'babysitter?' I take that term literally, my friend."

L.G.'s mother, who is also not named in the lawsuit, arrived to pick him up. Fatalleh told her L.G. was facing one to two counts of assault. The boy was not charged, and Fatalleh resigned from the department shortly after the incident.

The suit, which also names the city of Statesville and the Iredell-Statesville Board of Education as defendants, argues that Fatalleh unreasonably restrained L.G., violating his Fourth Amendment rights and inflicting emotional distress.

"It is incomprehensible to me that anyone would think this response is appropriate and necessary," Alex Heroy, a lawyer representing the family, told The Washington Post. "You don't need to put metal handcuffs on a 7-year-old and pin them down and turn their arm."

Yet it happens, and more frequently than one might think. In August, body camera footage emerged showing officers in Key West, Florida, trying and failing to handcuff an eight-year-old boy, whose wrists were too small for the cuffs. An Orlando school cop made national headlines last September when he arrested a six-year-old girl.

ABC News reported last year that, according to FBI crime data, 30,467 children under the age of 10 were arrested in the United States between 2013 and 2018. During the same period, 266,000 children between the ages of 10 and 12 were arrested.

In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd earlier this year, there have been increased calls from civil rights groups and criminal justice advocates to get police out of schools, and several major citiesMinneapolis, Denver, Seattle, Charlottesville, and Portland, Oregonhave disbanded or slashed the budgets of these programs.

Activists point to viral videos of school resource officers using excessive force on children to bolster their claims that police in schools contribute to the so-called school-to-prison pipeline. In February, an officer at a high school in Camden, Arkansas, was relieved of duty after video showed him putting a student in a chokehold and lifting the student off the ground. Last December, a North Carolina officer was fired after he brutally body-slammed a middle-schooler. In November, a sheriff's deputy in Florida was arrested and charged with child abuse after a video showed him body-slamming a 15-year-old girl at a special needs school.

Civil liberties groups and disability rights advocates have long warned that a surge in the number of Florida school resource officers was leading to unnecessary criminalization and use of force against minorities and children with disabilities. The investigation found several cases where children with diagnosed behavioral disorders were restrained, handcuffed, and involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluations because of behavior beyond their control. These cases often lead to regression and trauma for the kids involved.

According to the lawsuit, L.G. is now being homeschooled.

Excerpt from:
North Carolina Mother Sues School Resource Officer Who Handcuffed and Pinned Her 7-Year-Old Autistic Son - Reason

The Fourth Amendment has been interpreted to mean that law enforcement cant serve a warrant on tech companies like Google to try and find out what devices were near the scene of a crime. Federal courts have started to rule that police cant ask for information on every device near the scene of a crime, otherwise known as a geofencing warrant or reverse location request. These reverse location requests have increased in use around the country over the last few years and have resulted in some high profile cases of wrongful accusations. After Arizona police served a reverse location request on Google following a murder back in 2018, they ended up wrongfully accusing Jorge Molina. Molina is now suing Google for $1.5 million dollars.

These types of requests to Google are so common that Google has a name for where the data is kept: The Sensorvault. As the New York Times put it, a reverse location request turns the business of tracking cellphone users locations into a digital dragnet for law enforcement. Usually, the government asks Google for a list of cellphones that were in the vicinity of the crime during the timeframe of the crime, then narrows down the list of provided data to specific phones that the police want further, non-anonymized data from. Now, multiple courts in California and Illinois have ruled that such wide geofencing warrants are unconstitutional because they violate the Fourth Amendment. This is something that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been saying for years and the courts finally agree.

In the past, law enforcement has been able to convince judges that their reverse location requests arent unconstitutional because they are limited in scope usually focusing on a small location and for short periods of time. However, this opinion has been shot down by U.S. Magistrate Judge M. David Weisman in a recent Chicago reverse location request. Judge Weisman wrote in the recently unsealed opinion:

the geographic scope of [the] request in a congested urban area encompassing individuals residences, businesses, and healthcare providers is not narrowly tailored when the vast majority of cellular telephones likely to be identified in this geofence will have nothing whatsoever to do with the offenses under investigation.

Judge Weisman also wrote about his concern that geofencing warrants are being overused:

[t]he governments undisciplined and overuse of this investigative technique in run-of the-mill cases that present no urgency or imminent danger poses concerns to our collective sense of privacy and trust in law enforcement officials.

After being shot down by Judge Weisman, law enforcement altered marginally altered their request and were then shot down by Judge Gabriel Fuentes. Judge Fuentes drew on a 1979 Supreme court case that established that law enforcement searching a bar and bartender could not search the bars patrons.

Government agencies can still use fake cell towers or fly a plane with special equipment over a protest and try to get information about smartphones on the ground that way. In fact, law enforcement could also buy the information directly from cell phone companies who sell real time location information from smartphones to police and even bounty hunters. Alternatively, the government is also getting information from smartphones because they have access through an SDK embedded by government contractor Anomaly Six in a list of 500 popular apps. Even if the SDK only reports back what other apps are on the device, researchers have proven that a list of apps used or general internet browsing activity can be used to reidentify someone as a type of digital fingerprint and thats without the use of actual browser fingerprinting. These types of more targeted attacks might result in information that might not hold up in court the same way information derived from a reverse location request warrant would, though. All in all, the recent court rulings should hopefully tamper the use of geofencing warrants by law enforcement and should still be considered a victory for our constitutional rights.

See the original post here:
Federal courts rule that reverse location requests by police violate the Fourth Amendment - Privacy News Online

By John W. Whitehead

( Sono Creative stock.adobe.com)

No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.George Orwell

You can map the nearly 20-year journey from the 9/11 attacks to the COVID-19 pandemic by the freedoms weve lost along the way.

The road we have been traveling has been littered with the wreckage of our once-vaunted liberties, especially those enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.

The assaults on our freedoms that began with the post-9/11passage of the USA Patriot Actlaid the groundwork for the eradication of every vital constitutional safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The COVID-19 pandemic with its lockdowns, mask mandates, surveillance, snitch lines for Americans to report their fellow citizens for engaging in risky behavior, and veiled threats of forced vaccinations has merely provided the architects of the American police state with an opportunity to flex their muscles.

These have become mile markers on the road to tyranny.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the governments ongoing war on the American people. In the process, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

What the past 20 years have proven is that the U.S. government poses a greater threat to our individual and collective freedoms and national security than any terrorist, foreign threat or pandemic.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, partisan politics, pandemic scares, and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the U.S. governmentthe government that was supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, for the peoplehas become theenemyof the people.

Indeed, the U.S. government has grown so corrupt, greedy, power-hungry and tyrannical over the course of the past 240-plus years that our constitutional republic has since given way to anidiocracy, and representative government has given way to akleptocracy(a government ruled by thieves) and akakistocracy(a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens).

Although the Bill of Rightsthe first ten amendments to the Constitutionwas adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We the people have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

The bogeymans names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.

TheFirst Amendmentis supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault.Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus contempt of cop charges such as disrupting the peace or resisting arrest for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into free speech zones. And under the guise of government speech, the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a government forum.

TheSecond Amendmentwas intended to guarantee the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right,Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield.As such, this amendment has been rendered null and void.

TheThird Amendmentreinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizens home without the consent of the owner. With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forcescomplete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.it is clear thatwe now have what the founders feared mosta standing army on American soil.

TheFourth Amendmentprohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that youre up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity.Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powersthat include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

TheFifth Amendmentand theSixth Amendmentwork in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However,in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended.Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

TheSeventh Amendmentguarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yetwhen the populace has no idea of whats in the Constitutioncivic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculumsthat inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the governments actionsand thereby help balance the scales of justiceis not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that we the people retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

TheEighth Amendmentis similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Courts determination that what constitutes cruel and unusual should be dependent on the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society leaves us withlittle protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

TheNinth Amendmentprovides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereigntythe belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulersis clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since beenturned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supremeand which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an important government interest in doing so.

As for theTenth Amendments reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution,that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elitethe president, Congress and the courts.

If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this:our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the governments powers could be expanded.

Mind you, by government, Im not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, Im referring to the Deep Statethe corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that has set itself beyond the reach of the law and is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This is a government that, in conjunction with its corporate partners, views the citizenry asconsumers and bits of datato be bought, sold and traded.

This is a government thatspies on and treats its citizens as if they have no right to privacy, especially in their own homes.

This is a government that is laying the groundwork toweaponize the publics biomedical dataas a convenient means by which to penalize certain unacceptable social behaviors.

This is a government that subjects its people toscans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSAandVIPR raids on so-called soft targetslike shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes.

This is a government that usesfusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, to track the citizenrysmovements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

This is a government whose wall-to-wall surveillance has given rise to a suspect society in which the burden of proof has been reversed such that Americans are now assumed guilty until or unless they can prove their innocence.

This is a government that treats its people like second-class citizens who have no rights, and is working overtime to stigmatize and dehumanize any and all who do not fit with the governments plans for this country.

This is a government that usesfree speech zones, roving bubble zones and trespass lawsto silence, censor and marginalize Americans and restrict their First Amendment right to speak truth to power. The kinds of speech the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation, prosecution and outright elimination include: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, left-wing speech, extremist speech, politically incorrect speech, etc.

This is a government that adopts laws that criminalize Americans for otherwise lawful activities such asholding religious studies at home,growing vegetablesin their yard, andcollecting rainwater.

This is a government that persists in renewing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the president and the military to arrest and detain American citizens indefinitely.

This is a government that saddled us with the Patriot Act, which opened the door to all manner of government abuses and intrusions on our privacy.

This is a government that, in direct opposition to the dire warnings of those who founded our country, has allowed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish astanding armyby way of programs thattransfer surplus military hardware to local and state police.

This is a government that has militarized Americans domestic police, equipping them with military weapons such as tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft, in addition to armored vehicles, sound cannons and the like.

This is a government that has provided cover to police when they shoot and kill unarmed individuals just for standing a certain way, or moving a certain way, or holding somethinganythingthat police could misinterpret to be a gun, or igniting some trigger-centric fear in a police officers mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

This is a government that has allowed private corporations to get rich at taxpayer expense bylocking people up in private prisons for non-violent crimes, while providing Corporate America with asource of cheap labor.

This is a government that has created a Constitution-free zone within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States, paving the way for Border Patrol agentsto search peoples homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Incredibly, nearly66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

This is a government that treats public school studentsas if they were prison inmates, enforcing zero tolerance policies thatcriminalize childish behavior, failing to teach them their rights under the Constitution, and indoctrinating them with teaching that emphasizes rote memorization and test-taking over learning, synthesizing and critical thinking.

This is a government that is operating in the negative on every front: its spending far more than what it makes (and takes from the American taxpayers) and it is borrowing heavily (from foreign governments and Social Security) to keep the government operating and keepfunding its endless wars abroad. Meanwhile, the nations sorely neglected infrastructurerailroads, water pipelines, ports, dams, bridges, airports and roadsisrapidly deteriorating.

This is a government whose gun violenceinflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions laterposes a greater threat to the safety and security of the nation than any mass shooter. There are now reportedlymore bureaucratic (non-military) government agents armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines.

This is a government that has allowed the presidency to become a dictatorship operating above and beyond the law, regardless of which party is in power.

This is a government that treats dissidents, whistleblowers and freedom fighters as enemies of the state.

This is a governmenta warring empirethat forces its taxpayers to pay for wars abroad that serveno other purpose except to expand the reach of the military industrial complex.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the worldincluding its own citizenryin the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

This is a government that allows its agents to break laws with immunity while average Americans get the book thrown at them.

This is a government that speaks in a language of force. What is this language of force? Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras.Kevlar vests. Drones.Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force.Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists.Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality. Contempt of cop charges.

This is a government that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security, national crises and national emergencies.

This is a government that exports violence worldwide, with one of this countrys most profitable exports being weapons. Indeed, the United States, theworlds largest exporter of arms, has been selling violence to the world in order to prop up the military industrial complex and maintain its endless wars abroad.

This is a government that is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

This is a government that believes it has the authority to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrestanyindividual atanytime and for theslightestprovocation, the Constitution be damned.

In sum, this is a government that routinely undermines the Constitution and rides roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

This isnota government that believes in, let alone upholds, freedom.

So where does that leave us?

As always, the first step begins with we the people.

Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that thegovernment exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them. Our power as a citizenry comes from our ability to agree and stand united on certainfreedom principlesthat should be non-negotiable.

It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: We the people. In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American peoplethe citizenryare the arbiters and ultimate guardians of Americas welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

As I make clear in my bookBattlefield America: The War on the American People, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.

Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.

See the article here:
Mile markers of tyranny: Losing our freedoms on the road from 9/11 to COVID-19 - Augusta Free Press

For decades, a 1,4 dioxane plume has contaminated groundwater in Scio Township and Ann Arbor. Legal battles have been ongoing with the original polluter, Gelman Sciences, and its subsequent owners. Now, a new consent judgement has been reached and it is expected to improve the situation. In this week's "Issues of the Environment," WEMU's David Fair talks with the City of Ann Arbor's water treatment services manager, Brian Steglitz, about the agreement and what needs to happen next to get the settlement approved and implemented.

Issues of the Environment: 09/02/20

Overview

Gelman Settlement - Important Facts

Who is currently in charge of the cleanup?

The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).

What is 1,4-dioxane (dioxane") and what are the potential health impacts that might result from exposure to it?

Dioxane is a manmade compound that mixes easily in water. It is used in industry as a solvent to manufacture other chemicals and it is a by-product in many items, including paint strippers, dyes, greases, antifreeze and aircraft deicing fluids. It also is found in other chemicals that are used to manufacture cosmetics, detergents, deodorants and shampoos.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has determined that 1,4-dioxane is "possibly carcinogenic" to humans because it is a known carcinogen in animals. USEPA states that it is likely to be carcinogenic to humans. More information on exposure to 1,4-dioxane and its health effects is located on the State of Michigan Department of Health and Human Services website.

Where is the dioxane in the groundwater and how did it get there?

Dioxane was used from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s in the manufacturing processes at Gelman's facility on Wagner Road. Gelman's wastewater, containing dioxane, was disposed onsite during that time. In the mid-1980s dioxane was discovered offsite, in nearby surface waters and groundwater.

The groundwater in underground aquifers that is carrying dioxane is referred to as a plume. Multiple plumes have been spreading west in Scio Township and northeast then east into Ann Arbor, moving towards the Huron River. More information on dioxane and its location in the groundwater is located on the Washtenaw County Public Health Department's website.

When was the original Consent Judgment established and what does it now require?

In 1992, the Washtenaw County Circuit Court entered a Consent Judgment regarding Gelman's dioxane contamination. Three amendments to the original Consent Judgment have been approved by the Court and are in effect.

The Consent Judgment and its amendments dictate the obligations of Gelman to investigate, clean up, contain and monitor the contaminated groundwater, under the direction of EGLE.

The Court did not require full cleanup of all of the released dioxane. As one example, the portion of the plume within the City of Ann Arbor and its projected pathway toward the Huron River, including buffer areas, is designated as the Prohibition Zone." Because of existing and projected groundwater contamination within this zone, no uses of groundwater, such as residential wells for irrigation or other purposes, are permitted within this zone.

What is the Prohibition Zone (or PZ") and how does it affect my property?

In the State vs. Gelman lawsuit, the Court approved a Prohibition Zone (PZ") as an Institutional Control. This allows dioxane above the groundwater cleanup criterion to migrate, rather than be cleaned up, within the PZ. The prohibition" part of the PZ title refers to a prohibition against installing or maintaining wells for drinking water or irrigation purposes on land within the PZ boundaries. All of the PZ is within the boundaries of the City of Ann Arbor, which requires all propertiesregardless of where they are relative to the PZto connect to the city's municipal water supply system rather than get water from wells on their properties. The location of the PZ can be viewed on the map.

What is the current status of the cleanup effort?

Gelman has been pumping and treating groundwater contaminated with dioxane it released since the early 1990's. Gelman discharges the treated water into Honey Creek which is a tributary of the Huron River. The discharge is permitted by the State of Michigan through a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit.

What is the Proposed Fourth Amendment and Restatement to the Consent Judgment and what is its current status?

Following EGLE's approval of a reduction of the groundwater cleanup criterion for dioxane from 85 parts per billion (ppb) to 7.2 ppb in October 2016, a proposed fourth amendment to and restatement of the Consent Judgment has been under negotiation between Gelman, the State of Michigan (EGLE), the City of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County and its Health Department, Scio Township, and the Huron River Watershed Council since the spring of 2017. The result of this negotiation is the proposed Fourth Amendment to and Restatement of the Consent Judgment. The proposed fourth amendment and related documents, including a chart of key changes it proposes is available via the document repository webpage.

What are the major elements included in the proposed Fourth Amendment and Restated Consent Judgment that are new?

The fourth amendment and restated consent judgment includes four significant elements:

These elements are expected to result in an increasing of pump and treatment of groundwater by over 40 percent and an increase in removal of dioxane by over 200 percent. This will be completed by the installation of additional extraction wells as well as incorporation of two new treatment technologies for dioxane removal:

If I would like more information about the proposed Fourth Amendment and Restated Consent Judgment, where can I find it?

There is a document repository webpage with all the documents being considered by the Local Government Intervenors, including:

How can I provide input?

There will be opportunities for public input. It is anticipated that one or more work sessions could be scheduled of Ann Arbor City Council, Washtenaw County Board, and the Scio Township Board. Once scheduled, the date(s) will be promoted via this webpage, the city's meeting calendar and shared via city communication channels. If you would like to receive more information when scheduled, please sign up for email notifications from the city.

What are the next steps in advancing the cleanup effort?

The next steps in the cleanup effort are set out in, and are dependent on the fourth amendment to the Consent Judgment being approved and entered by the Court.

What decisions are impending, who will make them, and what is the timeline?

Following public comment hearings, the local government Intervenors (City of Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, and Scio Township) will vote on the proposed Fourth Amended and Restated Consent Judgment, Order of Dismissal, and the Settlement Agreement with that local unit of government. See the Document Repository webpage to review those documents.

When all three local governments and the Huron River Watershed Council have made their decisions, the parties will notify the court whether they and Gelman have approved or agreed to all these documents. The date for the vote by the Ann Arbor City Council will be posted once identified. If dates for the votes by the County Board of Commissioner or Scio Township Board of Trustees become known to the city, they also will be posted. There will be a hearing prior to each of these entities voting allowing for public comment.

The court will incorporate public comments before it decides whether to approve and enter the Fourth Amended and Restated Consent Judgment, Order of Dismissal, and Settlement Agreements. The parties have a court date on October 22, 2020, to report on the Intervenor votes, so the local government Intervenors are expecting to vote before then. (Source: https://www.a2gov.org/departments/water-treatment/Pages/Gelman-1,4-Dioxane-Litigation.aspx)

Lifting of Confidentiality - Public Comment Begins

Washtenaw County, the Washtenaw County Health Department, the City of Ann Arbor, Scio Township and the Huron River Watershed Council were granted intervenor rights several years ago allowing them to participate in a legal process to develop a revised Consent Judgment that will govern the continued clean-up of the Gelman site.

The Gelman site is currently contaminated with 1,4-Dioxane and there has been significant public interest in increasing the on-going clean-up efforts. Until now, the process of revising the Consent Judgment was subject to a Court Confidentiality Order dated March 23, 2017 which prohibited the parties from disclosing publicly any information about the negotiations.

The parties have now reached a point in the legal process where certain information may be shared for public review and comment after Washtenaw County Trial Court Judge Connors partially lifted the Confidentiality Order on Monday, August 31, 2020. That order allows for the following documents to be made public:

Seven short videos providing summary explanations of the proposed settlement,

These documents are available via an online repository developed by the intervening parties. The repository is available at http://www.a2gov.org/gelmanproposedsettlementdocs or through links on the intervening parties websites. (Source: https://www.a2gov.org/Pages/Gelman-Proposed-Settlement-Documents.aspx)

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David Fair is the WEMU News Director and host of Morning Edition on WEMU. You can contact David at734.487.3363, on twitter@DavidFairWEMU, or email him atdfair@emich.edu

See the original post here:
Issues Of The Environment: Consent Judgment Reached To Better Remediate Gelman 1,4 Dioxane Plume - WEMU

He has become part of the furniture when it comes to discussions about privacy rights and personal liberties, arguably an odd sort of thing for a man who also dealt in the shadows of intelligence secrets. But Edward Snowden has been doing his bit to reveal and chip away at the foundations of the national security state that continues to thrive. The advent of coronavirus and pandemic surveillance will merely serve to advance it, but in June 2013, Snowdens exposures of National Security Agency practices were raw and unsettling to the wonks of the establishment.

The most troubling of the revelations was not that the NSA conducts surveillance, its natural bread and butter; it was how such grubbily enterprising efforts as the metadata collection program were allowed to flourish with feral abandon. The forests of paranoia after the 9/11 attacks on US soil proved rich for such legislative instruments as the USA PATRIOT Act. Section 215, in particular, authorised the bulk collection by agencies of telephony metadata, known in the trade as call detail records. It had been barely read by members of Congress in a hurry; patriotism can encourage a special sort of dedicated illiteracy.

The NSA program, at least in that form, was ended with the reforms passed by the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015. Critics were quick to note that section 215 was merely given a trim and a clean. The original provision permitted the NSA to store call detail records (time, duration, the numbers communicating in a call, excluding the content of the call) and search them as required. Since the changes, such records are held by telephone companies; the agency can only request them via an order of the Foreign Intelligence Service Court.

The provision, according to Human Rights Watch, still permits the government to collect a staggering amount of data, in secret and without a warrant, on how people use their phones, chilling freedom of expression and association. Between 2015 and 2019, the program cost $10 million and could only boast one significant lead, a palpably poor return for even the most devout surveillance types.

The expiry of Section 215 powers in March 15, 2020 led to a merry legislative jig. The Senate passed the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act in May. The oversight measures proposed by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT) made it through, expanding the role of independent advisers to the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Service Act of 1978. But in so doing, the Senate failed to adopt the amendment proposed by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT), which would have prevented the government conducting warrantless surveillance on internet browsing and search histories.

Wyden was more than a touch irritated at his colleagues. The legislation, he outlined in a statement, hands the government power for warrantless collection of Americans web browsing and internet searches, as well as other private information, without having to demonstrate that those Americans have done anything wrong.

The Senate also refused to prohibit the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and surveillance conducted under the Article II executive power against people in the United States or in proceedings against them, both ideas of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).

Privacy advocates were feeling a touch deflated. It took a decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals handed down on September 2 to add a spring to their steps, if only after the fact. The decision in United States v Moalin was not bound to make them break out into a canter. The facts of the case covered the previous incarnation of bulk surveillance exposed by Snowden. The outcome was also a tad troubling. The four appellants, Somali immigrants convicted in 2013 for transferring $10,900 in support of the terrorist group al-Shabaab, had their convictions upheld.

The judges held that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment [protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures] when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans, including at least one of the defendants, pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Unfortunately for the defendants, the metadata collection, even if unconstitutional, did not taint the evidence introduced by the government at trial. The application for suppression of the evidence what were described by the defendants as the alleged fruits of the unlawful metadata collection, failed. Additionally, the FISA wiretap evidence was not held to be the fruit of the unlawful metadata collection.

Scattered through the judgment are a few sprinklings of hope for privacy advocates. Some of these are merely confirmations and recapitulations. Others are clarifications for the intelligence community. The government had, for instance, argued that ordinary criminal investigations should not be treated in the same context as those in a foreign intelligence context. The Fourth Amendment protections should be applied differently.

Not so, claimed the panel. The judges acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment required notice to be given to a defendant when the prosecution intends to enter into evidence or otherwise use or disclose information obtained or derived from the surveillance of that defendant conducted pursuant to the governments foreign intelligence authorities. As the Fourth Amendment did apply to foreign intelligence investigations, it followed that US criminal defendants against whom the government uses evidence obtained or derived from foreign intelligence may have Fourth Amendment rights to protect. The problem for the defendants here was that failure to provide notice by the government did not prejudice them.

The American Civil Liberties Unions Patrick Toomey saw the ruling as vindicating that the NSAs bulk collection of Americans records violated the Constitution. The mandatory notice requirement for authorities constituted an essential protection in a field of novel spying tools. The Snowden legacy continues to be harvested, if unevenly.

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Fruits of Illegality: The NSA, Bulk Collection and Warrantless Surveillance - CounterPunch