Chris Boese's Weblog

A sobering look into the U.S. illegal wiretapping surveillance of Americans after 9/11

Inside Operation Highlander: the NSA's Wiretapping of Americans Abroad: Wired Threat Level Blog, Oct. 10, 2008.

US eavesdropped on "phone sex" calls of US military officers, passed them around the office, thought they were funny: Americablog, Oct. 9, 2008.

The whole time I was living in Atlanta and working at CNN, I had no idea these big surveillance operations were just up the road in Fort Gordon, GA, near Augusta.

Kind of brings it all home. There are both scary and funny bits in these two stories above. I'll try to keep them separate, but bring out the details that jumped out at me.

The whole time, I thought there was a chance what they were really doing was voyeuristic, and I used to voice that to folks around the newsroom, just in passing. People pooh-poohed me, saying "Oh, they have WAY too much data to be getting off on listening to people's private and intimate stuff! It's just computer-scanned for keywords like "bomb" or "jihad"

Uh, yeah, right.

First, from the ABC News report, by way of Americablog (and I'm listening to Rachel Maddow talk about the same thing right now too): (emphasis below comes from Americablog)

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States....

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News...

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said....

But as humorously pathetic as a bunch of drooling, giggling eavesdroppers is, Wired has the scarier stuff on 27-B-Stroke-6, with some deeper research going back before the ABC story broke. There's some real red meat below regarding official procedures BEFORE 9/11, to contrast what happened AFTER it. Those are the details I hold on to most tightly (emphasis below is mine).

Inside Operation Highlander: the NSA's Wiretapping of Americans Abroad

By Kim ZetterOctober 10, 2008 | 6:06:27 PM

A top secret NSA wiretapping facility in Georgia accused of spying on Americans illegally was hastily staffed with inexperienced reservists in the months following September 11, where they worked under conflicting orders and with little supervision, according to three former workers at the spy complex.

"Nobody knew exactly what the heck we were doing," said a former translator for the project, code named Highlander, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We were figuring out the rules as we were going along."

Former Army Reserve linguist Adrienne Kinne, who worked at the facility at Fort Gordon, won new attention this week for her year-old claim that she intercepted and transcribed satellite phone calls of American civilians in the Middle East for the National Security Agency. Senate intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) opened a probe into the alleged abuses after ABC News reported on them Thursday.

Threat Level spoke with Kinne extensively last year about the alleged systematic surveillance of Americans and others operating in the Middle East following the 9/11 attacks. She provided a number of details about some of the calls and how the operation was conducted.

Aid workers and journalists were specifically targeted in the program, and their phone numbers were added to a "priority list", Kinne said last year. Among those under surveillance were workers from nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the United Nations Developing Countries Program, as well as journalists staying in Baghdad at the time of the Iraq invasion. The intercepted calls included conversations among American, British, Australian and other civilian foreign nationals in the Middle East, as well as conversations between aid workers and journalists in the Middle East and their family members in the United States.

"If it was happening then I'm sure it's happening now, and who knows on what scale," Kinne said. "That's the thing that really bothers me."

But at the time we were unable to confirm her account of the spying. Two coworkers of Kinne's, who spoke with Threat Level on condition of anonymity, conceded that the group operated under ambiguous rules and with poor supervision, but insisted no deliberate eavesdropping on Americans occurred.

Now a second former Arabic linguist with the Navy has corroborated her claims to ABC, and to NSA expert James Bamford, who includes the story in his upcoming book Shadow Factory.

If the allegations are true, it would seem to indicate that warrantless spying of Americans approved by President Bush following 9/11 expanded rapidly beyond U.S. borders to citizens overseas, notwithstanding United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, or USSID 18 -- an NSA rule that bars overseas surveillance of Americans without authorization and probable cause.

[...]

Kinne, who is 31, served in the U.S. Army Reserves as a sergeant and an Arabic linguist from October 2001 to August 2003 at a U.S. Army Signal Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia, which operated as a listening post for the National Security Agency. Kinne had served active duty in the U.S. Army as an intelligence linguist with a top secret SCI security clearance from 1994 to 1998, and was in the reserves on September 11, 2001.

[...]

At first, Kinne didn't think they were doing anything wrong because in mid-2002, several months after the surveillance began, a supervisor told her group of linguists and analysts that they had received a "waiver" that allowed them to intercept and listen to the conversations of Americans. The waiver also gave them permission to spy on British, Canadian and Australian citizens Kinne said.

Under federal law, such a waiver would usually require special national security circumstances –- such as an imminent threat of death or attack. But Kinne said the people whose conversations she targeted didn't discuss information of a military or terrorist nature, and the interceptions occurred over the entire Middle East –- not just in war zones. The surveillance was still going on when Kinne left active reserve duty in August 2003.

Kinne's mission at Fort Gordon, which was given the name Highlander, intercepted only communication sent through satellite phones, which included faxes. This represented a change from her active duty in the 1990s when her group had intercepted only live radio transmissions involving military targets in the Middle East. The operation that began in 2001 involved region-wide interceptions, which meant that satellite calls of businessmen, journalists and other civilians were sometimes vacuumed up with everything else.

Generally, when incidental interception of Americans occurs, there are procedures for handling the intercepts. Under USSID 18, recordings of such calls are supposed to be abandoned and destroyed when a U.S. citizen is identified. The only exceptions to this rule are when the attorney general affirms that the surveillance target is believed to be an agent of a foreign power, or the purpose of the collection is to acquire "significant foreign intelligence information."

Kinne's description of the interceptions, however, indicated that U.S. aid workers and journalists were routinely targeted without cause.

To illustrate that contrast, Kinne recalled a conversation intercepted by her army intelligence unit in 1997, in which one of the parties to the call mentioned the name of a U.S. politician who was coming to the Middle East for a visit. Under USSID 18, the names of members of the U.S. legislative branch cannot appear in intelligence reports without special authorization, and Kinne said her group deleted every record they collected that mentioned the politician's name.

William Weaver, who worked in the U.S. Army signals intelligence for eight years in Berlin and Augsberg, Germany, concurred with her assessment of how seriously USSID 18 was regarded.

"The way USSID 18 was treated by us was that it came down from God and was sacrosanct," said Weaver, who is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. "We were told at training and many times after that, that if you violated USSID 18 you could spend the rest of your life in prison. The mindset was that you do not intercept U.S. citizens. And the minute you recognized that you intercepted, you immediately reported up the chain of command."

[...]

For the first couple of months Kinne and her colleagues didn't know the identity of the people connected to the phone numbers they monitored. "At that point in time, we were just given numbers and we ... were still sorting out who belonged to what," she said. "That's why we initially started collecting Americans and other nationals because we didn't know whose number belonged to whom."

Once they identified speakers, they typed the person's name or organization into the system, so that when a conversation involving that number was intercepted again, the name appeared on their computer screen. Although the system allowed them to block phone numbers identified as belonging to a nongovernmental organization or journalist, they never did so. Instead, she said, they added the numbers of humanitarian aid organizations and journalists to a priority list.

"They were 'priority five,' from what I remember," she said. "'Priority one' was terrorist organizations. 'Priority five' is middle of the road. 'Priority nine' was just unidentified numbers. Not only were we given the ability to listen to [NGOs and journalists], but it was programmed into our system to listen to them."

[...]

They wrote a report on each call, except those made to parties in the U.S. Kinne said they were just instructed to listen to those calls. She later said in another conversation that some people in her group did write reports involving conversations of Americans and Australians, but didn't reference the nationality of the speaker in their report.

"Americans 'in-country' were fair game as long as you didn't identify them as American," she said. "People wrote reports on what journalists said all the time."

[...]

For example, Kinne was reprimanded for listening to one call when she should have been focused on a fax that her unit intercepted purporting to identify the location of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The fax arrived in the middle of the night, around the time of the Iraq invasion Kinne was monitoring a call involving two English-speaking humanitarian aid workers who were in a vehicle frantically trying to reach their office to find cover before bombs began raining on the city.

"I just remember they were ... calling in their position [to their colleagues] every 10 to 15 minutes or so because they were worried about their safety," she said.

Kinne filed several reports about the aid workers and gave their location to her supervisor, believing that U.S. military personnel might help the aid workers, or at least refrain from shooting their vehicle. But while she was monitoring the workers, a fax arrived, several pages long and written in Arabic. Even though the fax was from a phone number with a higher priority, Kinne ignored it because she felt the lives of the aid workers were more important.

When another worker later read the fax and realized its significance, all of the workers were instructed to drop everything to translate it. Kinne said the fax purported to describe the location of chemical, biological and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As soon as her group completed the translation, she said it was sent to the White House -– the only time information was sent directly in this manner.

After the information was on its way, Kinne looked at the source of the document and began to doubt its authenticity. She said it came from the Iraqi National Congress or Iraqi National Accord -- she couldn't remember which.

Kinne said she expressed doubts to her commanding officer, John Berry, about the authenticity of the information and was told that her job was to collect the information, not analyze it. "He said I didn't care about our mission or our country ... and I needed to stop asking questions," she said.

Kinne was written up in an incident report for having ignored the fax when it came in.

When she later read news reports confirming that an Iraqi group had fed the military intelligence false information, she suspected the fax had been deliberately sent through an open satellite network so that her unit would intercept it and give it to the White House.

The only other conversations Kinne recalled with any detail involved journalists staying at a hotel in Baghdad around the time of the U.S. invasion. The journalists revealed their location in calls to U.S. family members. Kinne said she'd been monitoring the conversations of journalists at the hotel for a while, when the name of the hotel appeared on a military list of targets for bombing. Kinne said she brought the information to Berry's attention.

"I told him, you realize there are journalists staying in that hotel and we have just said that we are going to bomb it," she said. "I assumed that ... whoever made the targeting list didn't know journalists were staying there."

She didn't know if the information was passed on to anyone, but in April 2003, a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine hotel, which was serving as a base for many journalists. Two journalists were killed. Two subsequent investigations by the army and the Committee to Protect Journalists concluded that the gunners had never been told journalists were at the hotel.

Two fellow linguists who had worked with Kinne at Fort Gordon disputed Kinne's story of illegal surveillance. They asked to remain anonymous because they were violating orders to not discuss their work at Fort Gordon.

Both linguists said they never violated USSID 18 and had never heard about a waiver, which one of them called implausible. They said USSID 18 was drummed into their heads and was posted everywhere at work as a constant reminder.

[...]

The other translator noted that Kinne had conflicts with a number of people she worked with -- particularly her supervisor Berry -- and had a negative view of their team and its mission, which may have affected her perception of the operation. They described Berry as a problematic and hostile manager who didn't seem to know what he was doing. Adding to this was a pervasive sense of confusion around their mission, which was set up quickly on the fly and being run by reservists who had no experience intercepting phone calls.

The unit was overworked, understaffed and undertrained. They didn't have a standard of operation, or SOP, when they started the mission and had to cobble one together from other SOPs. Many conversations they had to translate were in dialects unfamiliar to them or languages, such as Pashtu, in which they had no proficiency.

[...]

It's worth noting that Kinne began speaking about her surveillance activities only after becoming an anti-war activist, and working with groups calling for the impeachment of President Bush.

When Threat Level spoke with her last year, she was working as a research assistant for the Veterans Administration in Vermont and was becoming increasingly active politically. She had worked on get-out-the-vote campaigns for Moveon.org in November 2006, and in January 2007 began meeting with members of Iraq Veterans Against the War. She participated in a rally and a sit-in at the Vermont state house and went on a bus tour with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan calling for the impeachment of President Bush.

Kinne said that after the White House announced a troop escalation in Iraq, she became very angry that the 2006 mid-term elections and subsequent changes in Congress hadn't led to pressure on the Administration to pull out of Iraq.

But it wasn't until details of the government's illegal domestic spying operation on Americans were revealed in late 2005, that she had reason to ponder her surveillance work, she said. Even then, her realization came slowly.

"I never really thought about how what we did related to [those news reports]," she said. "It took me quite a while to put the pieces together. I just figured we were one mission, and I never thought that probably military intelligence groups across the country were all being given waivers to listen to whomever they wanted."

It was another year and a half after the New York Times broke the story on the domestic surveillance program before Kinne uttered her first public words about the surveillance she had conducted on behalf of the NSA.

"I still felt like it was all classified and I wasn't supposed to talk about it," she said. "But the more I got involved in things, the more I started getting really angry that people in government were not telling the truth and that people who know what's going on [are] not speaking out. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I should tell people what I knew and hopefully that would encourage other people to say what they know."

She said she just wanted to pass the information to others who could determine whether the army and administration broke the law. To that end, she had submitted her allegations to Sen. Patrick Leahy's office (D-Vermont) in the hope that his staff would look into the matter to determine if laws had been broken. Leahy's staff sent her an e-mail indicating that they sent her letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General. But Kinne never heard anything after that.

Given her political activities and the delay in reporting the alleged abuse, the denials of her peers and the lack of corroborating evidence, Threat Level elected not to publish her claims last year. But in his upcoming book, The Shadow Factory, journalist James Bamford -- the leading civilian expert on the NSA -- reports that he confirmed the illegal surveillance with another linguist named David Murfee Faulk, who worked on the program through the Navy.  One of Faulk's coworkers -- not Kinne -- asked a supervisor about USSID 18, and was ordered to disregard the directive, Bamford reports.

[...]

Told you they'd be playing Heart, Barracuda!

RNC rolls with the 80s tonight! LOL. Wonder if Sarah had input into the music? The string of songs playing as the balloons fell sounded like the soundtrack we played on high school basketball bus trips!

More disturbing, I think, is that McCain did something with that speech that I can't quite put my finger on, until I get the transcript, but I know one thing: he was not talking to the Republican base, and said plenty of things that should either make that base nervous, or angry.

One thing for certain, he took shots at standard operating procedure politics of KARL ROVE et. al., of DeLay, of K Street, of Abramoff. He sounded more like the man who is married to the bio that played in the film about his wife, who by most rights, should be a Democrat, but that she is extremely rich, and married to John McCain. Cindy McCain was definitely intriguing, but I didn't understand how she wasn't allowed to be interesting ALONE, but always had to link her back to her Daddy, like a woman can't be that interesting by herself, without invoking Daddy.

But McCain, who were you talking to tonight? Not the Dems, but who was your audience? And was it lip service? Will Rove and the puppetmasters still call the real policy shots behind the scenes? Are the power-brokers still in power, and using you as a front man?

That's the doubt that should keep Dems fighting for Obama, because while McCain is certainly interesting, we have NO CLEAR TRUST that the evil fascist authoritarian police-staters have been exorcised from the deep bowels of Washington, where they have taken root.

The dark side of the RNC carnival in St. Paul, Minnesota

Link: St. Paul Mayor and Media Mum on Journalism Crackdown | CommonDreams.org. (from Huffington Post)

Dark news coming out of St. Paul regarding a coordinated harassment of the press covering events in and around the Republican National Convention.

I have to say, this is some of the most disturbing news I've heard in a long time, because what I read between the lines is that FEDERAL SURVEILLANCE of journalistic entities is being made in the name of the Patriot Act (the implications: convention-credentialed journalists = potential terrorists?! Pray tell, then, how did they get security clearance and credentials for the convention floor?!).

The dissemination of locations and movements of members is being shared with these so-called "Fusion Centers" of Posse Comitatus- and Insurrection Act-violating Secret Service, military and mercenary paramilitary groups (Blackwater?), police entities, and further, some unidentified "Others" that I can only think of as the "Brown Shirts" of the 2000s. The fact that this is happening at all, let alone that it now appears that journalists and citizen journalists are being targeted for wiretapping and other surveillance, should disturb all Americans.

I make this claim of surveillance because of the obvious coordination and home-targeting in the sweeps and raids. The St. Paul "enforcers" obviously knew where they were going and what they were after, in their "Department of Pre-Crime" and "non-crime" actions.

Even darker are the implications for the legions of citizen journalists (I Witness Video was one of the first groups targeted) and bloggers, who will undoubtedly be reporting on the way they were treated, and other observers who just happened to be swept up in a pincer move that left the crowd being "herded" with no way to obey the police orders, because the crowd could not move in the direction the police wanted them to go (a dead-end).

The police orders seem designed to force people to be at odds with police directions, for the sole purpose of giving them a reason to be arrested.

For further eyewitness accounts, be sure to catch Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now podcast for Tuesday, Sept 3. It is quite sobering.

It feels like little more than a new Fascist Information State. It makes the prospect of the GOP winning the presidency and continuing the policies of the Bushies who created this encroaching totalitarianism a nightmare worthy of becoming an expatriot.

Read the bits below, and you tell me if it doesn't send a massive chill up your spine.

Published on Wednesday, September 3, 2008 by The Huffington Post

St. Paul Mayor and Media Mum on Journalism Crackdown

by Timothy Karr 

In St. Paul this week, a new generation of media makers is under assault by the city's mayor and law enforcement officers.

These local officials think freedom of the press is a privilege that extends only to their closest allies in mainstream media. 

For the rest of us, it's a crime.

While reports of brutal police arrests and home invasions are still coming in, by Tuesday night the picture became clear. Dozens of journalists, photographers, bloggers and videomakers had been arrested in an orchestrated round up of independents covering the Republican National Convention.

Targeting the New Press

The list of those detained ranges from the well-known (Democracy Now's Amy Goodman) and well-established (Associated Press photographer Matt Rourke) -- to the bootstrapping bloggers and video makers who are covering local protests for TheUptake.org, Twin Cities Indymedia, I-Witness and other outlets. 

Police -- with firearms drawn -- raided a meeting of the video journalists and arrested independent media, bloggers and videomakers. Journalists covering protests have been pointed out by authorities, blasted with tear gas and pepper spray, and brutalized while in custody.

Democracy Now's Goodman reports that a U.S. Secret Service agent ripped her press credentials from her neck the moment she identified herself to him as a member of the media. Her producers emerged yesterday from their jail cells bloodied and scarred, reporting unusually harsh treatment at the hands of local and federal authorities.

Mayor Coleman's Silence

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman hasn't responded to repeated phone and e-mail requests for comments on the targeting of journalists. Instead he praised the work of Police Chief John Harrington and painted those arrested as a small band of outsiders and vandals intent upon committing felonies against the good people of his city.

In less than a day, more than 35,000 people have signed a letter from Free Press (my employer) to Mayor Coleman condemning the arrests and demanding that he and local prosecutors immediately "free all detained journalists and drop all charges against them."

But when Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald pressed Harrington and Coleman to respond to widespread reports of journalist arrests, Harrington claimed ignorance while Coleman stood silent at his side.

Police spokesman Don Walsh intervened only to say that "arrest have been made" and that all those arrested were involved in criminal activities and not "simply non-participants."

[...]

The Star Tribune itself is owned by out-of-towners from Avista Capital Partner, a New York City private equity firm specializing in energy, healthcare and media investments.

Other than a brief story about Goodman's arrest, the paper has failed to report on the apparent targeting of independent reporters, even though groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have sounded the alarm.

Sweeping Real Journalism Under the Carpet

Here we have every indication of an orchestrated assault by federal and local law enforcement agencies to stifle independent sources of information. As shocking as this conduct is, more disturbing is the fact that the mayor's office and the local daily seem so unconcerned.

[...]

As a powerful news organization, the Star Tribune should know better, and should be sticking up for a free press, regardless of what form it takes.

But this week, the democratic spirit of journalism can be witnessed not in the "Strib's" newsroom, but among the rough-hewn videos and blogs of those who are covering the convention from the ground up.

                                                                          

High Noon at the DC Corral

Link: U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down D.C. handgun ban - Los Angeles Times.

It looks like the conservative supreme court is going to turn handguns loose into that wild west that is the rest of the District of Columbia.

The federal government sits deeply embedded in a massive slum (perhaps not as bad now as it once was), but the Supremes are ready to operate under the assumption that any person you happen to be walking up to is armed. Kinda makes you think they aren't very interested in self-preservation, doesn't it?

What's next? Will D.C. go the way of Florida, where folks are allowed to pack heat in shopping malls, schools, public buildings? That should certainly be interesting.

On one hand, you have all these oppressive encroachments on civil liberties with terrorist watch lists, shakedowns, pat-downs, no-go zones around VIPs and quasi-VIPs, which essentially make the Federal part of D.C. the equivalent of the Baghdad Green Zone for rich people.

And once the Supreme Court gets through with the Second Amendment, the rest of D.C. will also start to resemble the non-Green Zone part of Baghdad as well!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-scotus19mar19,0,2685078.story

From the Los Angeles Times

U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down D.C. handgun ban

Several justices indicate they believe the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution protects individual rights.

           By David G. Savage
           Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

        10:48 AM PDT, March 18, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court justices, hearing a historic argument on the meaning of the 2nd Amendment, signaled they are likely to strike down a handgun ban in the District of Columbia and rule that homeowners have a right to keep a gun for self-defense.

But if the oral arguments are any guide, the outcome will not be unanimous. Several justices said they believed the 2nd Amendment was intended to protect the state's right to maintain a "well-regulated militia," not to give gun rights to individuals.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is the swing vote in close cases, said he believed the 2nd Amendment did more than bolster the state militia. "In my view, there is a general right to bear arms" that goes beyond serving in the militia, Kennedy said.

Most Americans believe the 2nd Amendment protects the right of law-abiding persons to "keep and bear arms." But the legal meaning of this provision remains in doubt. The high court has never invoked this right to strike down a gun law nor has it ruled that it protects a personal right to own a gun.

Justice Antonin Scalia, like Kennedy, described the 2nd Amendment as protecting individual guns. Justice Clarence Thomas is likely to join with them. And Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they believed the city council in Washington, D.C., went too far by prohibiting homeowners from having handguns.

"Why is that a reasonable regulation?" Roberts asked the lawyer defending the city's law.

Walter Dellinger, arguing for the city, said the framers of the Constitution were concerned about protecting the right of the people to defend the state or the community. The 2nd Amendment creates "a right to participate in the common defense," he said.

The amendment says: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

Dellinger also argued that the phrase "bear arms" was a military term. He said the Washington law should be upheld because it allows homeowners to have a disassembled rifle or shotgun at home, even while it bans small handguns.

It was clear several justices agreed with this view.

Justice John Paul Stevens noted that Congress and all but two states had focused the "right to keep and bear arms" on the militia, not on personal self-defense. It was seen "as the right to keep and bear arms for the common defense," he said.

But the court's liberal bloc did not appear to have the votes to uphold the law.

[...]

               

J.K. Rowling oversteps copyright... because fans are easier to pick on than academics?

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

The unique ways lawyers and authors try to stretch and distort copyright laws are reaching new levels of absurdity.

At first, I thought the article below was going to go toward a new argument about derivative fiction authorship (a case I believe can and should be made, but a more difficult argument than the point I want to make here).

Then, I realized that Rowling was actually suing what is essentially a critical VOCABULARY guide to Rowling's works.

What? What sort of absurd assumptions sit behind this suit? That the Encylopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary should have obtain copyright permission for every entry they include for a term or an entry that has a clear author with copyright?

It gets even sillier. It appears to me (check out the article below and see for yourself) that Rowling and her lawyers are going after FANS of her works largely because they are a less empowered group, rather than target FAR BIGGER offenders of the type of behavior the lawsuit seeks to punish.

What offenders am I referring to? Why, tenured academics in the humanities, of course! There is not an academic in the humanities in the U.S. who has not received tenure specifically for writing about and critically analyzing (and professionally profiting from) someone else's copyrighted work!

If what these fans are doing is a copyright violation, then nearly every scholarly book in the humanities, perhaps every college student's research paper which cites as sources CREATIVE AND COPYRIGHTED WORKS is, by virtue of the reasoning in this lawsuit, is ILLEGAL.

What a bizarro world this is.

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

J.K. Rowling's Dark Mark

Why she should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon.

By Tim Wu

 Posted Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008, at 7:59 AM ET

As I wrote in October, over the last few years, the relationship between fan-written Web sites and the copyright owners of the content they draw on, if legally murky, has at least been peaceful. Once it dawned on media companies that fan sites are the kind of marketing that they usually pay hard cash for, they generally left the fans alone. But things turned sour in the fall, when the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site announced plans to publish a book version of its fan-written guide to the Potter world. Author J.K. Rowling and publisher Warner Brothers have sued the Lexicon for copyright infringement, exposing the big unanswered question: Are fan guides actually illegal?

[...]

At issue are the giant fan-written guides like the H.P. Lexicon or the Lostpedia (for the show Lost) that try to collect all known information on topics like Harry's pet owl or the Dharma Initiative. Rowling takes the position that she, as the original author, has the right to block the publication of any such guide. In her words: "However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

But Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't. Rowling owns both the original works themselves and any effort to adapt her book or characters to other media—films, computer games, and so on. Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be "recast, transformed, or adapted." But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing. The law has never allowed authors to exercise that much control over public discussion of their creations.

Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving Potter to another medium. Their purpose, rather, is providing a reference guide with description and discussion, rather like a very long and detailed book review. Such guides have been around forever—centuries if you count the Bible, and more recently for complex works like the writings of Jorge Borges or The Lord of the Rings. As long as a guide does not copy the original work verbatim, it falls outside the category of "adaptation." And that's why it is largely unnecessary to discuss the more complex copyright doctrine of "fair use." Rowling's rights over the guide don't exist to begin with, so we don't need to go there.

[...]

Bizarrely, Rowling says that the fan guide would prevent her from writing her own guide to the Potter world. "I cannot," she said in a statement "approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book. ..." To begin with, Rowling sounds entirely too much like a Death Eater in this quote. More generally, two products in the same market isn't called pre-emption—the word is competition. Why not let consumers decide which guide they like better? Rowling might object that the fan's guide will be strewn with errors or poorly written; but it is hardly the job of copyright to protect us from bad execution. And the fan's guide might actually be better, or at least different.

There are more ethereal reasons that Rowling ought not win. For reasons anthropologists will someday understand, volunteer encyclopedias have become the place to find what passes for our collective wisdom. Wikipedia is the clearest example: It may be wrong sometimes, but it is nonetheless a statement as to what we know. To her credit, Rowling accepts this and tolerates the online version of the H.P. Lexicon. But a general rule of the kind she is asking for isn't so generous: It would, by necessity, give copyright owners power over the content of Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias that discuss their works. Not the end of the world, but certainly a subtle form of thought control.

In the end, this dispute is about the current meaning of authorship. Rowling is the initial author and deserves the bulk of the credit, respect, and financial reward. But she has all of that. What she wants is a level of control over the Potter world that just isn't healthy. The authors of fan guides, like house elves, rarely get famous or rich. They deserve legal credit for their modest contributions, not the Wizengamot.

What bothers me above is that the author, Tim Wu, while making good points, is perhaps missing the most important point.

Wu is drawing some kind of unconscious distinction between critical study through works of of analysis and cataloging and documenting done by SANCTIONED and IMPORTANT author-types (a self-appointed class, as declared by the various academic credentialing or the established publishing industry) and ordinary people, hereto referred to by the diminutive label "fans."

He never mentions this distinction in the article, but he also never reaches or sees past it. What is the difference between a fan seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of Rowling's work and a tenured professor seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of, say, Emily Dickinson's work?

And no, the fact that Emily Dickinson is dead, or supposedly "canonized" by some massive sanction system called a "literary industry" doesn't count. Current postmodern scholars have easily collapsed distinctions between so-called "high" and "low" cultural products, distinctions that were only ever really enforced by repetition.

Further, before the advent of Modernism and New Criticism in literature, the PRIMARY "product" of literary scholars was a form of criticism known as "traditional-biographical."

That means if you wanted to be a literary scholar back in that time, you had two routes to follow:

1. catalog and link the author's works against a careful biographical analysis of events or aspects of the author's life, OR

2. catalog and carefully establish the exact chronology and literary development of various textual versions of the author's works, those first drafts that establish dates, the variorum editions that attempt to argue that Emily Dickinson used male and female pronouns interchangably in her love poems, or that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night BEFORE Hamlet.

Oh yeah, and along the way, they'd argue over and create lexicons for specialized terms and metaphors, which, for authors such as Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll, mean unusual and otherworldly terms and situations, and the potential political points that were made through allegory.

Granted, literary criticism has evolved considerably since then, to the point of subjecting live and dead authors to psychological high colonics in order to analyze the symbolic systems that go along with the works (ala' Freud or Jung). Or they take apart the imperialist or foundationalist cultural assumptions an author makes (like Tim Wu above), or even just to do a micro-minutia focus on a single literary work alone, as if it doesn't even have an author, or better yet, treat it as if the work itself doesn't exist and only the reader does!

All of which FANS of ANY work can engage in and profit from just as viably as tenured academics, because the Commons is free for anyone to engage in independent and unaffiliated research, even ordinary fans, even (gasp) ordinary journalists, even ANYONE who gets up in the morning and puts her underwear on one leg at a time.

Imagine that. Shhhh. Don't tell J.K. Rowling's ambitious lawyers. Think of the field day they could have, if they were turned loose in academia.

Let us consider Iraq and the president who cried "wolf!"

Sy Hersh with more required reading, the kind of thing should just give all thinking people chills.

Let's hit the high points. Bold emphasis below is mine.

Link: Annals of National Security: Shifting Targets: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

Annals of National Security

Shifting Targets

The Administration’s plan for Iran.

by Seymour M. Hersh   October 8, 2007

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased. . . . The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”                                                                                 

[Bush is talking about Shia extremists? Like he knows anything about Shia extremists? The guy didn't even know the difference between Shia and Sunni before he went to war against Iraq! That embarrassing truth ought to keep that man from ever uttering the word "Shia" or "Sunni" ever again in this life.

You know, they must have been holed up for their August vacation hatching this brilliant PR offensive, waiting until after August, because, according to Andy Card, "When you’re rolling out a new product onto the market, you don’t do it in August—you wait until September."]

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants.

[I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that there is "suddenly" a new head to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General Peter Pace is out... too close to Rummy to be linked to a PR campaign that they want to be met with more than outright guffaws).]

The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

[...]

[You know, this should give every Republican candidate for office out there deep and meaningful pause, mid-goose-step, over where their loyalties lie. The Bush administration sees them all as expendable.

I don't know about you, but that speaks volumes about the "scorched earth" GOP tactics undertaken at the talking points direction of the White House the past 7 years. While observing those tactics myself over the years, I thought, these idiots, they either think the world is going to end before the end of Bush's run of office, or they FULLY expect the GOP to NEVER be out of power again.

My mistake was thinking that they were REPUBLICAN scorched earth politics. The realpolitic here knows no party loyalty, yet demands absolute authority over all "followers," the fanatical true believers marching behind the Machiavellis in the White House.

That the White House is ready to scorch the earth of its own party just shows the exact same strategy turned inward, and that's the part that speaks volumes. It says: THE WHITE HOUSE SEES ITSELF AS PERMANENTLY IN POWER. A PARTY UNTO ITSELF.

Consider that idea for a moment. This isn't just Caesar getting ready to cross the Rubicon or nuke Foggy Bottom. Sure, I can invoke Godwin's Law and call Iran Poland to Iraq's Czechoslovakia. I don't think either is that far off base.

But it is more than a lame duck administration which jettisons its own party and continues to act with the same power-mongering, arrogance, and bullying, as if its power is permanent, and will be retained in perpetuity. What does the White House, and Cheney's office in particular, know that we don't know?

Because by their own behavior, it's a poor lie, a pitifully transparent lie, as pathetic as their stupid PR campaigns launched in September, ham-handed, graceless, only viable because party line threats force spineless news networks to repeat them, endlessly, as talking points.

Surely we can see underneath the PR drumbeats for war against Iran for what they really are: a way to up the ante, consolidate power in an imperial permanent war president, who will not become a permanent war president so much as a holder of an office for those who control him as war footing and posturing controls the presidential campaigns all next year, war news carefully timed to bump opposition and/or embarrassing news out of the headlines through the entire electoral season.

And if the polls are looking dim, well, there can always be a declaration of martial law. That's what I see through the transparency. A scorched earth approach that intends to never be out of power. It will hold on to power legitimately as long as it can, and if it looks like these tin horn dictators will be legitimately turned out of power, "something" will "happen" to prevent that from ever happening, to prevent the election from taking place.

I know I'm not the only one thinking this unthinkable thing. These folks may not leave the White House willingly, except under police escort. I hope to god I am wrong, for all our sakes.

Is the Justice Department's long national nightmare over?

I just couldn't go with another "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead" headline, much as I wanted to.

Let me ask, were you ever so happy to see someone go?

I could be cynical and suggest that actually watching Gonzales twist in the wind, after having perjured himself before Congress (I first called it here), and then after subsequent witnesses failed to back up his concocted stories before Congress, so that he was literally dancing around on the thinnest of thin ice, had its entertainment value.

But I can't be entertained by the travesties of justice visited on US society because of Gonzales, through the politicization of the Justice Department, through the butt-wiping with the Constitution visited upon us all through the so-called "Patriot Act," and through the pathetic rationalization of torture by agents of the US government, both military and spook-based.

Much as his resignation stops some of the braying over how badly he screwed up the country (I hope it doesn't stop too much of it), far better that the housecleaning at the Justice Department begin! Here's to hoping the Senate Democrats have the guts to demand it, which the House can continue to hold Gonzales' feet to the fire..

Link: Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales Resigns - The New York Times - Politics - Washington - New York Times.

Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales Resigns

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales delivered a statement on his resignation on Monday at the Justice Department.

By STEVEN LEE MYERS and PHILIP SHENON

Published: August 27, 2007

 

WACO, Tex., Aug. 27 — Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by controversy and accusations of perjury before Congress, announced his resignation in Washington today, declaring that he had “lived the American dream” by being able to lead the Justice Department.

Mr. Gonzales, who had rebuffed calls for his resignation for months, submitted it to President Bush by telephone on Friday, a senior administration official said. There had been rumblings over the weekend that Mr. Gonzales’s departure was imminent, although the White House sought to quell the rumors.

[...]

Mr. Bush has not yet chosen a replacement but will not leave the position open long, the senior administration official said early this morning. Among those being mentioned as a possible successor were Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security who is a former federal prosecutor, assistant attorney general and federal judge; Christopher Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission; and Larry D. Thompson, a former deputy attorney general who is now senior vice president and general counsel of PepsiCo Inc.

Mr. Bush repeatedly stood by Mr. Gonzales, an old friend and colleague from Texas, even as Mr. Gonzales faced increasing scrutiny for his leadership of the Justice Department over issues including his role in the dismissals of nine United States attorneys late last year and whether he testified truthfully about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.

[...]

But Democrats cheered Mr. Gonzales’s departure. “Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader. “He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say ‘no’ to Karl Rove.”

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee and has been calling for Mr. Gonzales’s resignation for months, said this morning: “It has been a long and difficult struggle, but at last the attorney general has done the right thing and stepped down. For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional, and desperately needs new leadership.”

Senator Schumer said that “Democrats will not obstruct or impede a nominee who we are confident will put the rule of law above political considerations.”

Another Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who has been highly critical of Mr. Gonzales, Senator Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, said the next attorney general must be a person whose first loyalty is “to the law, not the president.”

[...]

 

Get ready for the new government-sponsored high colonics

The New York Times has more details about what we can expect of the federal government's new unsupervised surveillance powers, at least until this version of the recently passed legislation expires. At least I do think it still expires in six months. God, I hope so.

Either that or the next administration had better start cleaning house on this kind of crap from the instant it takes office... if it expects to get elected in the first place, that is. (emphasis below is mine)

Link: Concern Over Wider Spying Under New Law - New York Times.

Concern Over Wider Spying Under New Law

By JAMES RISEN  and ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: August 19, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 — Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans’ business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.

They also emphasized that there would be strict rules in place to minimize the extent to which Americans would be caught up in the surveillance.

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought.

It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. The new legislation is set to expire in less than six months; two weeks after it was signed into law, there is still heated debate over how much power Congress gave to the president.

“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.

Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.

These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.

[...]

It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess, rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans.

“We did not cover ourselves in glory,” said one Democratic aide, referring to how the bill was compiled.

[...]

Some civil rights advocates said they suspected that the administration made the language of the bill intentionally vague to allow it even broader discretion over wiretapping decisions. Whether intentional or not, the end result — according to top Democratic aides and other experts on national security law — is that the legislation may grant the government the right to collect a range of information on American citizens inside the United States without warrants, as long as the administration asserts that the spying concerns the monitoring of a person believed to be overseas.

[...]

“This shows why it is so risky to change the law by changing the definition” of something as basic as the meaning of electronic surveillance, said Suzanne Spaulding, a former Congressional staff member who is now a national security legal expert. “You end up with a broad range of consequences that you might not realize.”

The senior intelligence official acknowledged that Congressional staff members had raised concerns about the law in the meetings this week, and that ambiguities in the bill’s wording may have led to some confusion. “I’m sure there will be discussions about how and whether it should be fixed,” the official said.

[...]

The measure, which President Bush signed into law on Aug. 5, was written and pushed through both the House and Senate so quickly that few in Congress had time to absorb its full impact, some Congressional aides say.

Though many Democratic leaders opposed the final version of the legislation, they did not work forcefully to block its passage, largely out of fear that they would be criticized by President Bush and Republican leaders during the August recess as being soft on terrorism.

Yet Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.

At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”

[God, this presumption makes me simply ill]

[...]

Mr. Bush issued a so-called signing statement about the legislation when he signed it into law, but the statement did not assert his presidential authority to override the legislative limits.

At the Justice Department session, critics of the legislation also complained to administration officials about the diminished role of the FISA court, which is limited to determining whether the procedures set up by the executive administration for intercepting foreign intelligence are “clearly erroneous” or not.

That limitation sets a high bar to set off any court intervention, argued Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who also attended the Justice Department meeting.

“You’ve turned the court into a spectator,” Mr. Rotenberg said.

What's up with the L.A. Cops?

Did they think no media were present to report on brutality at an immigrant rights rally?  Or did they think that brutalizing the media as well would lead to good department PR?  And the bigger question is: What is Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa doing about all this? I mean, you'd think the police would be a bit more sensitive to these issues, with their boss, the first latino mayor of L.A. since 1872 (according to Wikipedia)? The dude was a labor organizer, and these rallies are all linked to May Day Labor rallies. What gives?

Hat's off to Telemundo and other L.A. media outlets, for sticking to this story and making sure it gets out.

Link: Police action on journalists at melee is assailed - Los Angeles Times.

Police action on journalists at melee is assailed

Some news outlets whose reporters and camera operators were hurt in melee mull legal claims against LAPD.

By Anna Gorman and Stuart Silverstein, Times Staff Writers
May 3, 2007

One day after several reporters and camera operators were injured while covering an altercation at an immigrant rights rally in MacArthur Park, news organizations condemned the Los Angeles Police Department for its use of batons and riot guns against members of the media, and some said they were considering legal options.

"We are sorry for what happened to our employees and find it unacceptable that they would be abused in that way when they were doing their job," said Alfredo Richard, spokesman for the Spanish-language network Telemundo, of the anchor and the reporter who were hurt during the evening rally.

Other members of the media who were injured included four employees of KVEA-TV Channel 52, a KTTV-TV Channel 11 news reporter who suffered a minor shoulder injury, a camerawoman who has a broken wrist and a reporter for KPCC-FM (89.3) who was bruised by a police baton.

"I was dumbfounded," said the KPCC reporter, Patricia Nazario. "I've covered riots. I've covered chaos. I was never hit or struck or humiliated the way the LAPD violated me yesterday."

Nazario said she was walking away from riot police when she was hit in the back.

Wearing a press pass and holding a microphone, she turned around and told the officer, "Why did you hit me? I'm moving. I'm a reporter," Nazario recalled.

Then the officer hit her on the left leg, she said, knocking her to the ground and sending her cellphone flying.

"I was shocked, trying to scramble to my feet," she said. "At that point, I just started crying…. I just felt totally vulnerable."

Pedro Sevcec was anchoring the evening news for Telemundo when he saw the riot police moving slowly toward the news crews.

A few dozen people had gathered to watch Sevcec do his live broadcast.

"The next thing I heard was the shotguns," he said.

Police knocked over monitors and lights and hit reporters and camera operators with batons, he said.

Sevcec said police hit him three times and pointed a riot gun at his face before pushing him out of the park.

An emergency anchor in Miami took over the broadcast.

"It was so ridiculous," Sevcec said. "They know what a TV camera is. This is not a secret weapon."

Telemundo reporter Carlos Botifoll said he was hit by a baton as he was waiting to go live on the broadcast.

He was carrying a microphone and standing in front of a camera.

"We were obviously reporters," he said. "There could not have been any doubt whatsoever."

Police Chief William J. Bratton, who promised an investigation, said at a news conference Wednesday that a key part of the inquiry into the officers' actions would focus on why they used force against members of the media.

"We should never be engaged in attacking anyone in the media," Bratton said.

[...]

Marc Cooper, associate director of the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice in Journalism, said the video he viewed of the clash led him to believe that the use of force by police was "unjustifiable and excessive."

"From what I saw, it just seemed gratuitous to go after the reporters," Cooper said. "They weren't really in the way, they didn't really pose a threat and, of course, they were trying to do their job."

[...]