popping your guinea police cleared the three hundred seventy eight men from the former australian run site activists say the police destroyed their belongings to make them leave the camp was closed three weeks ago. those are your headlines the news continues on al-jazeera after the strain very soon but. what. transformed zimbabwe's finance. modern day slave trade in libya and how china's internet giant. took facebook. at this time. for me ok you're in the stream authorities building the case against inauguration day protesters in the u.s. want access to their social media accounts but civil rights advocates warn that could put americans privacy at risk today part two of our discussion on the threat to free speech in the united states. the child of six people accused of felony rioting joining us price and donald trump's inauguration is underway in washington d.c. the case could determine whether the government continues prosecuting around two hundred people arrested over the protests organized by disrupt jay twenty as an adult capitalist an anti fascist group as authorities build their case they're asking for help from facebook and other internet companies earlier this year the d.c. police department subpoenaed facebook demanding that the company hand over the social records of those arrested but privacy advocates say this is just a fishing expedition for political dissidents here to talk about this in our studio we have scott michelman he's the senior staff attorney with the american civil liberties union and the a.c.l.u. is representing several of the defendants in the case also in studio ali she's an activist whose facebook account is one of the three that. department of justice he's targeting in a search warrant joining via skype from san francisco stephanie she's a criminal defense attorney with the electronic frontier foundation and in baltimore maryland bennett would say he's the senior reporter for the real news network he covered the g. twenty protest and has been covering the trial as well hello everybody it's good to have you here. they say facebook sent you an e-mail they wrote to you and said what well facebook. sent me an e-mail i wasn't expecting anything early september my e-mail and i see that basically there's a warrant from the witch which i assume from is from the federal government for my facebook data all of my facebook data. so i kind of communicated with some of my friends and it turns out that actually there are three warrants out for myself another individual our personal private facebook data and also the facebook page just twenty and that's the the one of the groups that protested and had donald trump's inoculation the first day he took office so you see you with that and you were organizing twenty what did you do where did you go. well so i had been organizing and helping to communicate and basically tell the story of the activists who cared deeply about protesting donald trump on that day and so you know my name was all over the media work the press release our web site had my name and phone number on it and so you know i guess when the federal government decided to just. throw the book at protesters when they decided they would you know implement these strict measures to try to try to stifle dissent and they didn't have to look very hard to find my name and also the name of a few other people involved. stephanie is this possible for the government to just say we want to have a look at that social media can and that one well the government can always have a whole slew of tools that they can use to get at someone's digital information with facebook they said first subpoena and then i think followed it up with warrants and that fact actually served space spoke with a series of gatherers trying to make sure that we spoke wouldn't notify its users that this is what the d.o.j. was doing the department of justice. what's really concerning here is that they were really trying to keep this under wraps for so long i think i said because they knew that as soon as the public learned about what they were doing and how far reaching their kind of digital dragnet was cast there would be widespread protests against that and really severe public scrutiny which in fact happened once it came to light digital dragnet as a great fright. that means anything that they want they can just grab digitally is that when you mean by that well they can certainly send legal orders to various third party providers space both instagram and google for that information that you . are of your patronage of worms it's another question as to whether or not they are legally entitled to that information whether or not they've provided probable cause to get at some of that arms here in the u.s. when you serve something like this you know you're entitled to certain kinds of information this is scriber information maybe some basic like me address he made it permission however if you serve a search warrant then you might actually get to content or back our communications contact lists a whole host of other information that has very widespread consequences for not just you but all of the people that. you know and could i could i just mention to you know add on to what stephanie just said the data that they're looking for on my facebook includes you know deeply personal things i mean facebook is one of those places where your intimate life is played out you know it involves conversations with my family members that are very personal it involves like actually details about something that i'm public about which is that i'm a survivor of sexual assault and it involves also basic you know basic communication about political events and. i think we should be allowed to talk about donald trump we should be allowed to talk about you know political events as well in private so nice to have your permission to look at your facebook account so i just want to show people just to remind people what it is that you know in force that might then be out to have access to so that is about which is about you your friends the photographs and the disco dance i do want to respect your privacy but all of that is out there and then they can get in touch of all of those of the various people as well so that's pretty serious. well so i don't know scott if you want to add something about what exactly they're looking at but the. in so we basically challenge the warrants in hand with some good results actually it's got so so the a.c.l.u. . when lacey and several other folks contacted us in september we had been involved as a friend of the court in fighting the gag order that stephanie mentioned that was on facebook to prevent it from telling lacy and two other individuals about the threat to their privacy then when the gag order was lifted facebook did the right thing it notified lacy and the others they came to us and we filed these motions to quash now what that means is we said to the court these warrants go too far they ask for all of the information contained for a ninety day period in three specific accounts but all the information goes beyond subscriber basic payment records or or ip addresses it goes to their personal communications their wall posts their status their friends their deleted information their pictures their videos their private chats that they intended for only one other person the government said we're going to take all of this and then we're going to search around and see if we find anything suspicious we think we're we're looking for writing we have probable cause to believe there was this bra it that happened and they they convinced a judge they had probable cause to think there was evidence somewhere of this supposed riot but they said we're going to go through the entire ninety days worth to see what we find and that's where the fourth amendment places a very important limit what it says is the government can't go fishing the government has to specify exactly what it's looking for and show probable cause which is a legal term meaning that there's pretty good reason to suspect something. and just go straight to that thing so put in very concrete terms in the physical world if the police have probable cause to search for a car and on my property they get a warrant for the garage and they can't get a warrant for my bedroom and what they've done here. metaphysically is they've gone into. affectively gone into lacy's the personal rooms of her house. her bedroom so to speak where she talks with. a romantic partner where she talks about an experience harbel experience involving sexual assault that she survived the government doesn't need that information they have no right to that information it has nothing to do with any alleged riot i mean we obviously don't don't agree with the characterization of of a riot but but even accepting that as a premise there's no reason for them to read that information clumsy intimidation or to put i think it's intimidation i don't think it's because when we challenge the warrant and went to court a month ago the the u.s. attorney started backpedaling he said oh we don't need all the photographs for these dates we'll just take this smaller group of dates and he basically agreed that they could exempt some friends lists he agreed that they could exempt some some names of people of third parties that communicated with these facebook friends and where their posts appeared that their names would be blacked out so the court ordered significant limits we don't think the court went far enough so we're continuing to fight but the the fact the government so easily gave up and recognized that it didn't need all the information it had asked for suggests to me that they went broad and they were going fishing and they were going to they're going fishing basically until somebody stood up and said no no you can't do that and then they said oh well ok we'll just we'll pull back a little but it has a chilling effect i don't. they say they went even further than that in the dream host warrant the d.o.j. initially demanded that he does well while packing it up and explain what the dream house for an ace for anybody and dream host is actually the hosting platform that hosted the disrupt g. twenty website so they they provide the service that allows the g twenty with the disrupt a twenty web site to function and they the d.o.j. served dream host with a warrant basically requesting that it turn over nearly one point three million ip addresses of all visitors to the disrupt g. twenty website so millions of visitors activists reporters anyone who just wanted to check out the site would have records of their visits turned over to the government that would be inclusive of journalists who after the story broke about disrupt a twenty decided to click on the website to see what it was what it was about and going to show more and actually also saw production of all emails associated with the account of unpublished content like draft blog posts and photos and it really took a while to get d.o.j. to back off from how broadly they had requested the information about people that were communicating with the site but as i hate trying to get it i would just pay this to you festival this is jude ortiz he's a member of defend g twenty could have a listen to what he had to say about the situation the use of criminal charges including conspiracy and felony inciting a riot or clear indicators that this case is not about broken windows but about in the sent political organizing and political association. i suggest i see how you are pushing this. i mean it's it's a really astounding thing because we have data from one hundred eighty seven cellphones that is also part of that we have government surveillance we have police body cam footage and then these all of the web sites that they're trying to get user records from and to show how much the government knows exactly what it's doing here they try to limit all access to what we have they've they have a protective order that said it was illegal to share the body cam footage from police body kim's they overturned it that would still made it illegal to play the audio from that footage because they believe that they feel that it could be used to intimidate well these officers you know we know that the police department gave the names of all of the people arrested that day to a right wing site and so they're trying to use data that they get from defendants in this case to intimidate them while trying to keep the press from having data that should be public data like well these body camera footage so i'm just thinking about organizes what it's like to be an organizer right now in twenty seventeen we've got brown barrett so he says i probably should be a little bit more careful but i'm not going to let the regime scare me a regime just that just leapt out at me and says kind of amazing to think about america as a regime i just china to show off the face is too much in terms of what he's using on social media what he's showing how is this changing how you operate as an organizer well i think organizers are actually a little more terrified right now and you know to think that. the act of kind of planning a protest something that in the united states we've been able to do openly for a long time can be characterized as you know being part of a conspiracy to plan or riot is actually it's very chilling and you know i think that one of the one of the things that we all need to see here in terms of the big picture is the. that donald trump would love our country to be more authoritarian and would love for us to actually go in the direction of fascism you know we see countries like turkey or maybe the philippines right now that have in recent times actually taken that sharp kind of turn toward more of her authoritarianism and i i think we all need to be concerned about the dangerous direction that the united states is in danger of going actually if we if we if we are not able to to actually prevail in these cases cisco is telling you when you look at the way people who was sensual media accounts are being examined and looked at and request a tad subpoenas. is this telling you that the current administration is concerned about people not liking what they're doing but certainly it's certainly going to have a very chilling effect on two different types of things first the use of social media just to communicate for every day communication when you want to talk with your close friends or family about something personal now you have to start thinking well is the government going to get a warrant for this later is something that some friend of mine has done going to trigger their interest and they're going to have to ask the court for three months of all my communications i mean that's that's that's really quite a i love stephanie's digital dragnet phrase but but the other equally important chilling effect here is on first amendment rights because you have organizers who are using these tools to these these social media tools on facebook and twitter and elsewhere to to organize themselves to plan events and and facilitate collective action if they feel like the government is trying to map out a network of anti administration activists that is going to be very chilling and you have in fact the administration. itself investigating the very people who are protesting it so it's. and that combined with the january twentieth prosecutions for these felony charges carrying sixty years or more send a clear message if you're against this administration you're not safe and that's really clear from the when i mentioned this in the last segment but they're not prosecuting the charlottesville protesters the racists and nazis who were there who we have records of conspiring to riot or disrupt traffic that day and you're not seeing and joking about running people over at which they later we're not seeing any prosecution of people except for the political enemies of the president and as part of this prosecution they've been really conspiring with other right wing activists like project very toss. which is a sting right wing sting group that alleged that say they filled infiltrated a planning meeting i mean so the government is happy to use that footage. to prosecute people that it sees as its political enemies. she says hey on twitter i gather from what i can that most folks dismiss the stakes thinking what if i didn't break anything i won't be a stage i think this is naive two hundred and ten of the accused never broke anything either and they facing the same charges is the just going back to the situation. with so many protests of just scooped up and then arrested. experience and i say what would you respond to that tweet and how would you respond to that tweet yeah if you've got nothing to hide why would you want if they wanted to have a look into your facebook account for instance i mean i think that you know when when we as people fail to stand up for actually those who are marginalized in this case those where we're being marginalized we activists in the united states are being marginalized but also. people of color in the united states who are subject to police police violence people who are trans gender in the united states and many other marginalized communities i could go on but you know when we fail to actually stand up for those people then i mean. it basically like leads us into this place where if you are not standing in line if you're if you're not kind of marching in lockstep. you know you're made to feel that you're doing something wrong i think we need to celebrate differences we need to celebrate diversity and unfortunately i guess this is this is one of those moments where we need to stand up for the right to dissent and and just also the right to be people if i could just like mention some something that has very personally impacted my life. you know i have a family member who in you know in recent times has actually you know we started talking and the family member shared with me a very deeply personal story that impacts my family it has nothing to do with. anything else that has nothing to do with activism or politics it's just a deeply personal story well that family member had you know was communicating with me live via facebook and. has that family members sense actually felt the need to unfriend me on facebook and delete that entire conversation so i think that you know this is impacting my family this is impacting my relationships and you know we need to feel safe to talk about politics we need to feel safe about to talk about intimate details and we're not safe to talk about those things it's just it's a slippery slope down into authoritarianism and fascism stephanie i see some lawyers like the a.c.l.u. pushing back at the department of justice asking for access to people's social media accounts what about the social media platforms themselves how are they doing in this situation well i think i mean different platforms are taking different levels of defense but i think dream host is a great example of what we would expect and hope that a platform would do for its users that it would actually go to court and say no we're we're going to fight this search warrant it is overbroad we are going to stand up for the rights of our our users and say that you don't have the right to get access to all of this information so in with facebook when they tried to gagged facebook from sharing that information of just the request with its users actually you know kind of went out and into the community and kind of set up the bat signal and was like hey this is happening to us we could use some help and put out the call for amicus to weigh in with the court to explain why this was such an important issue a public import that the court really needed to scrutinize this request to keep information from the public and we share with you a comment from a joel bennett i have a listen. if it wasn't for the fact that the group i was traveling with on the twentieth of january was running seven minutes behind the morning of the twentieth i very easily could find myself included in the list of j. twenty defendants i've never in the decade plus that i've been protesting. since the bush administration i've never experienced the amount of force and complete lack of consideration it will not impede my decision to continue to protest. that's angel state but scott being realistic following the. case since the defendants what's happening with protesters around the united states what do you feel the impact is where we are right now with this idea that you can go out and protest and safely decide where where we are is in a very precarious spot where the administration's overreactions on january twentieth from the very start from the arrests on january twentieth carrying through to the overbroad searches and the overbroad prosecutions based on a guilt by association theory all of that has a dramatic chilling effect on people's willingness to communicate to go out and protest to dissent to share their views to associate for political reasons those are roshan's of core first amendment freedoms that we take for granted in the united states and we need to stand up to defend them i think that's a really good point we need to actually not let ourselves be silenced even though it might be a little scary and we need to actually keep standing up and using our voices and getting out there what platforms are you now organizing on. you know we are still organizing and we're still down maybe you can't tell me and i think i don't i don't think i should actually talk about the platforms as it might become a subject of investigation of course this is a very good delicate conversation done very well thank you so much for they see and scott and stephanie and they know us as well for being part of our conversation there are some people who do not know but not about me j twenty case why do you think that is why is it so quiet right now the mainstream press in america has done a terrible job of covering this case which is just fascinating as much as it's important with all of the kind of getting into all of these issues of digital property and private information and so it's a fascinating case i don't understand why the mainstream press when two reporters are still facing charges when hundreds of americans are facing charges that. that really threaten their first amendment right the main. reason why they should be paying more attention thank you so much with us for the. setting the stage for a serious debate up front i think this time on al-jazeera. the nature of news as it breaks the last time senegal qualified for the world cup was in two thousand to fifteen years on and hope to do even better in russia next year with detailed coverage try to imagine that only seven years ago people were living right here farming frame now the city has taken over their land from around the world donald trump is promising a major policy announcement on trade a potential challenge to caracas a missed opportunity ross. news has never been more available it's a constant barrage of it with every day but the message is a simplistic you have this brain a good logical rational people versus crazy monsters and misinformation is rife dismissal and does not go over well documented accusations and evidence is part of genocide the listening post provides a critical counterpoint trying to bring mainstream media narratives at this time on al-jazeera. if you are in beijing looking out the pacific ocean you'd see american warships when miss was that somehow time is aiming to replace america and and going to run the world well the chinese are not that stupid these guys want to dominate a huge chunk of the planet this sounds like a preparation for our first president george washington said if you want peace prepare for war the coming war on china at this time on a just sea of. algiers . well and for us. this is al jazeera.

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