12/11/12 – John Knefel – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
So our first guest on the show today, oh, man, I'm sorry.
I meant to ask you on hold how to say your name.
I'm going to go ahead and go with Silent K.
John Neffel, is that right?
That's correct, yeah.
All right, good.
And the article is, they can do that?
Ten outrageous tactics cops get away with.
It's at alternate.org.
And then, sorry, I'm paging down here to the bio.
Where's the bio?
There's no bio at the bottom.
I had it.
Why don't you go ahead and tell us about your own website.
I think you have a radio show of your own, correct?
Right.
I have an Internet radio show called Radio Dispatch.
The website is theradiodispatch.com.
Theradiodispatch.com.
Okay, great.
And then, so, listen, one of the things that I really liked about this article that you've written about the police state here is that it's not about political prisoners.
It's not about them giving you the MKUltra, Jose Padilla, you know, no touch torture treatment or whatever.
There's no, well, there's kind of wiretapping in here, but not the widespread national security agency type of thing.
This is more mundane than that.
It's really, I think this is sort of, you know, a terrible top ten list of things that cops are doing to Americans on a routine basis now.
It really just draws such a great portrait, kind of a snapshot of the way things are in America now, how far things have gotten.
You say it can't happen here or whatever, and then I think the retort to that was it will happen here and not by some kind of terrible communist dictatorship revolution, but without a shot being fired.
We'll just turn our own country into a dictatorship, and that's what this article really shows in ways that they seem one at a time, like, you know, maybe not that big, but by the end of the list, boy, this ain't the USA anymore, not to me.
Right.
Well, I think that when you put all these tactics together, a picture does start to emerge of the shredded Bill of Rights, but it's also important to remember that the list that I made is not exhaustive by any means, and like you said, there are a lot of elements that are not included just because it would be a different list to include elements of NSA and the incredible amount of data that's collected from citizens every single day, and that kind of thing clearly happens all the time, but a lot of what we're seeing is a lot of tactics that were created in the early 80s with the so-called war on drugs that have been perfected in communities of color, oftentimes low-income communities of color, now being more broadly used on Muslim communities and on activist communities, and so that template of surveilling people, of searching people, of weakening Fourth Amendment rights is now not confined to ghettoized communities anymore, and it's much, much broader than that by this point.
Right.
I mean, that's the thing.
People like to pretend that it hadn't been like this all along for some.
What's outrageous, this is why the TSA gets such an outrage, right?
Because now it's people who can afford or have to fly for a living kind of a thing have to put up with this.
They're not the kind of people who are used to being stopped and frisked on the side of the road, but it's not like no one is.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's the thing, is that it's very helpful to maintain illusions about rights that we have and about protections that we have from our government that are enshrined in the Constitution, and that really hasn't been the case really for people of color for all of the history of the country, obviously, but it's becoming just ever, ever broader.
And the thing is, there's really no incentive to dial back on any of the searching, any of the surveilling.
All of the incentives from the authorities' perspective is to do more, because we still live, primarily we live in this sort of fictional United States that's protected by the Bill of Rights, and so there's a very strong, a very potent kind of American exceptionalism that, just like you were saying, people think, well, even if the police in New York City stop and frisk more young black men than there are young black men in New York City, we can't be living in a dictatorship, or we can't be living in an authoritarian state, or whatever it is, because this is America.
And so, by definition, we are free from any of those forms of social control in people's popular mindset.
And what's especially effective about that is that once you believe that, by definition, you live in a free society, then the authorities are free to act however they want, in whatever oppressive and authoritarian ways that they want, because, by definition, they have to be doing something good if you operate in that mindset.
Yep.
And, not only that, but they've got the police unions, and they will never give an inch ever on anything.
Yeah, well, and when, you know, there's also all sorts of ways that, you know, governors try to divide police unions from fire department unions, and protect police unions from these harsh cutbacks, because, you know, it's obviously beneficial for the state to keep police, not super happy, but at least happier than the people they're policing.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Alright, so, now take us through this list, because, again, now we're talking about the kind of thing that, you know, just like they always said, but you never took seriously, that, hey, if they can do it to these people, they can do it to you.
This is why we give fair trials even to the worst molesters and murderers, is because we want to make sure we got the right guy, right?
We want to make sure that everybody's got a chance to say you got the wrong guy, in case they did get the wrong guy.
And if you don't provide those kind of protections to the very worst among us, then you don't get them either, and now here we are.
Yeah, well, I actually, I wrote about the military commissions that are happening at Guantanamo Bay when I went down there in October, and exactly what you're talking about is exactly what we are not doing for people accused of plotting the 9-11 attack.
And, you know, that's probably a separate, it's a related, but separate conversation.
And that idea that a jury, a trial by a jury of Europeans is the only anchor against, I can't remember what Thomas Jefferson said, the only anchor of a free society, something like that.
We've now abandoned that, and military commissions are just the way to go when you have predetermined somebody's guilt.
So the list starts off with infiltration, informants, and monitoring.
This is going to be something that's probably familiar to a lot of your listeners, and it's something that's obviously at this point problematic both in Muslim communities and activist communities, although I think that my impression is that it's more widespread in Muslim communities, especially in the Northeast under the sort of purview of the NYPD Demographics Unit, a unit that Paul Brown has previously said doesn't exist, which is just demonstrably false.
It certainly does exist.
And the Demographics Unit has, the wonderful reporting that the AP has done on this, has shown that they have surveilled mosques, businesses, bookstores, not just in New York City, although that would be bad enough, but in the entire Northeast region, stretching as far north as Maine, in New Jersey, going on camping trips, infiltrating student groups.
And so this is, at least for now, there are no courts stepping in to say that this is illegal.
In 10 or 20 years, when all of the lawsuits that may or may not be filed go through, maybe we'll find that retroactively this behavior is found to be illegal, but right now there's no real restrictions on what the Demographics Unit can do.
And it's just, it normalizes the idea of infiltration in groups that should be completely free by the constitutional right.
They should be free from any forms of entrapment or surveillance or anything like that.
But once you get used to it, then it's just easier to expand.
Right.
There you go.
Yes.
The perfect example of first they're just entrapping, you know, the slowest Muslim kid at the bookstore that they can get to, you know, agree to say something dumb into a microphone to get himself convicted.
But very soon they move on to earth first types.
They move on to, you know, so-called right wing seditionists and whoever it's already on.
Yeah.
The second one is warrantless home surveillance, which is not a police department thing, but it actually comes from the wildlife, the U.S. Wildlife Agency, a federal agent who was undercover walked into somebody's house.
They suspected this person was selling bald eagle feathers and recorded the person, the suspect without obtaining a search warrant.
And the Ninth Circuit determined that that was a lawful search, even though because, because the suspect invited the undercover in, but he was invited in under false pretenses.
So that's, you know, that's certainly very, very little comfort.
The third thing on the list is presumptive visits and harassment to the family.
One second.
I just want to make sure that everybody got that.
What you just said, cop, undercover cop walks in with a video camera on his person.
Right.
Like jackass glasses or something, I guess.
And then and then the court says, oh, well, that's fine because the guy let the undercover cop into his house.
So it's OK.
We can.
There's no exclusionary rule that applies here.
This is solid evidence and we can still use it.
Yeah.
And if people want to learn more about that case, it is a state.
The what come what?
W.A.H.H.U.M.W.A.H.
Well, just Google eagle feathers with it and you'll find it.
You know, if you Google around.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really, to me, that's a chapter, you know, a new a new page turned or something.
That's a big freaking deal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Electronic Frontier Foundation has done a lot of really good work for stuff like that.
And they've got they've got more information.
So number three is preemptive visits, which is something that we saw of Occupy activists leading up to May Day.
The NYPD visited several, quote unquote, anarchist homes.
And some of them were under the pretext of delivering a bench warrant for an open container from three years ago.
But obviously, if you're visiting the homes of, you know, well-known activists a day before one of the biggest actions of the year, you're not going there for an open container bench warrant.
And we saw this also in the run up to the no NATO protest in Chicago.
And as well as the RNC in St. Paul in 2008, the group who became known as the RNC8 were presumptively arrested.
They were they were arrested prior to any large demonstrations.
Well, you know, sorry to keep interrupting here, but this to me was is really telling stuff, especially the way that they do at the political conventions, the presidential nomination conventions, where the ratio of stormtrooper clad riot cops and all the latest fanciest black, you know, tear gas, tear gas, launching launcher holding gear and batons, whatever the ratio of those guys to actual hippies protesting is.
I don't know what, but it's grossly in favor of the cops.
It's way, way out of proportion.
And it just screams guilty conscience.
I mean, no offense to the progressives and the liberal protester types and the and the further lefties than that, who are the vast majority of who shows up at these type of events to protest.
But they are not tough and they are not scary.
And this is not, you know, you know, Vladimir Lenin and his cadres of the NKVD, you know, whatever.
These are hippies.
These are harmless pot smoking hippies who are coming to say out loud that they're angry.
The worst thing that they're going to do is break a Starbucks window or something.
And so for the cops to show up dressed like they're ready for war is to me, it seems like all the people in America who have no politics whatsoever, but see that on TV, they ought to think to themselves.
Now, wait a minute.
You know, you can't show up and protest at a political convention anymore.
Not without these goons.
I mean, what are they afraid of?
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's I think that's a great a great question.
Of course, the answer is that, as near as I can tell, the answer is they're afraid of protests achieving any efficacy.
And once nonviolent protest becomes effective and threatening to the status quo, even in the most, you know, in the earliest stages of being threatening, then the full weight of the state comes down in exactly the kind of militarized way that you're discussing.
To me.
Well, I don't know if cops are able to figure this out, but it's counterproductive unless they just really want an excuse to dress up like stormtroopers all the time, which you can see that, you know, but but otherwise they're obviously the trouble here.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the trouble is the among many other things is the full on paramilitarization of the police force.
And seemingly in in direct conflict with the Comitatus Act in in spirit, if not in in letter, I would I would argue.
Right.
All right.
Now, I interrupted and talk way too long and we got 10 minutes and I want to give you a chance to get through a lot of this stuff, because it's pretty shocking stuff.
So good substantive article again.
It's John Neffel at Alternet dot org.
They can do that.
Ten outrageous tactics cops get away with.
OK, so real try to try to fly through the rest of these here.
Number four is creating call logs from stolen phones.
Now in the in New York City, if your phone gets stolen and you alert the NYPD, they'll help you find your phone.
Great.
You say.
Right.
What's the bad side?
Well, the downside is that they subpoena your phone records from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, whatever.
And they create call logs and a searchable database of that information beginning on the day that your phone was stolen.
So not only do they get records of phone calls that maybe the person who stole your phone made, but also any phone calls that you made that day.
And in some cases, they actually continue to monitor your calls even after you purchased a new cell phone.
If you keep the same number.
So this is just one of these.
This is just a sort of recently revealed the development in the kind of way where you like.
Well, clearly, there can't be anything else that I haven't heard of.
And really, every week, it seems like there's a new a new tool in the tool belt.
The next three consent searches, stop and frisk and pretext stops all go together.
And they all well, stop and frisk less so.
But consent searches and pretext stops go back to the early 80s with the beginning of the creation of the racist war on drugs.
A consent search is when a cop comes up to you and says, would you open your bag?
And it doesn't sound like a question because it's a cop with a gun and the full weight of the state behind him or her.
But if you if you're not aware of your rights, it sounds like an order.
You're not actually under any obligation to say, yes, you can look in my bag, though.
You're free to say, am I being detained?
And if the answer is no, you're free to say no.
You can't look in my bag and walk away.
But through this type of tactic, this so-called consent search, police are able to go on just huge fishing expeditions.
You know, would you mind opening your trunk for me?
Would you open your glove compartment?
So that's how pretext stops come in.
A pretext stop is when the police decide that they don't like the look of somebody who's driving a car.
Maybe, you know, the black guy with a baseball hat.
And they follow for, you know, I don't know, a couple of minutes.
And they decide that he didn't use his turn signal early enough or he didn't stop fully enough at the stop sign.
And because of this sort of Byzantine traffic laws that that we have, it's very unlikely that if you're watched for 10 minutes, you won't make some sort of small insignificant violation.
And the Supreme Court has routinely found that using a violation like not stopping fully at a stop sign and then saying, would you open your bag, so bringing in a consent search, is not a violation of the Fourth Amendment, even though that is exactly the kind of arbitrary stopping and, you know, searching and seizing that the founders were attempting to, you know, to outlaw, to prevent against with the Fourth Amendment.
Well, of course, the implication also is like if you're on the side of the road with the guys in your car and they say, hey, we want to look in your trunk and under your back seat and whatever.
The implication is that if you don't let them, then we're all just going to sit here for another 45 minutes until the dog gets here.
And then we're going to search anyway or we're going to find a pretext to arrest you.
And then, well, geez, we're not searching your car at all.
We're merely cataloging all of your property to make sure that everything is just fine.
Now that we found a pretext to arrest you and that's there.
You know, so the hope is, you know what?
Maybe they'll look around, but they won't find the roach in the ashtray.
That's my best bet is to just go ahead and let them, you know.
I think that's right.
And the police dogs, that's actually the next thing on my list.
And the police dogs play a really important role because if you don't consent to a search of your car or your bag, say, at the airport, then the canine unit can be brought in.
And if the dog responds, that can be used as probable cause to search your belongings.
Again, maybe you're saying, okay, well, if a dog barks, then that should be probable cause.
The problem is not with the dog's nose.
Dogs' noses are actually better equipped than any machine that we have right now to detect drugs and, you know, bombs.
But dogs are also, anyone who has ever, you know, owned a dog knows this.
Dogs are very good at reading the body language of handlers.
And so if a handler has a certain disposition towards a suspect, if a handler is walking around the car and tenses at the right moment, the dog is going to give a false positive.
And this has happened in study after study.
So you see that the prejudices and the biases of the handlers result in dogs barking, sitting, signaling in some way, when there's actually no drugs, no bombs, et cetera.
So relying on a dog's nose is, it's not the nose that's the problem, it's the fact that you can elicit a false positive out of a dog subconsciously quite easily.
Right, well, and that's a good point, too, the subconsciously part, where the cop doesn't even have to be dishonest in trying to take advantage and say, hey, bark, scruffy, or whatever, because it can be just subtle.
I knew a guy who, he proved to me with a videotape that his dad's dog could do multiplication.
And, of course, the only thing is the dog just keeps barking until you want him to stop.
When you start clapping and say, yay, you did it, then good, he counted up as high as you wanted him to count.
And it's not too hard for a golden retriever to learn that, you know?
Yeah, yeah, that's called the clever Hans factor, named after the horse who could, quote, unquote, do arithmetic.
It's exactly the same thing.
Yeah, but I had to argue with my buddy about this.
I mean, he thought the cop really couldn't figure out what these words, the numbers these words represented and how to multiply them with each other, for Christ's sake.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
He would have been a great cop, I guess.
Yeah, he would have.
All right, so now tell me if he wasn't such a criminal.
Well, maybe that's why he would have been a good cop.
All right, now, so tell me about the drones, too.
And also, I like you finish up with Robocop fascism.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, again, a lot of people are familiar with the drones that we use in, I think, six countries now, that we know of maybe more.
In the next decade, the domestic drone market is going to be, some people say $2 billion, some people say $3 billion, with a B dollars.
The FAA is creating all sorts of ways for domestic drones to fly around.
They're adopting all these regulations that allow it.
And clearly, it doesn't take, you know, all that much to see that surveillance drones are going to be deployed very, very soon.
Seattle has already said that they're going to be using surveillance drones.
There was a drone that was used in the arrest of a North Dakota man because of some cattle who had wandered onto his property.
And the court in that case determined that it was lawful to use the drone because they weren't engaging in direct surveillance without a warrant.
And it's, you know, one of these cases where if you look at it in maybe the most limited way, you can see, oh, well, maybe in this case it was fine.
But, again, when you step back and when you see that the second any of these tools are taken out, they only expand.
The ratchet only goes one way.
And that's clearly how surveillance drones are going to be.
We already use them on the U.S.
-Mexico border.
And the mindset behind consent searches, behind warrantless wiretapping, behind all of these invasions of privacy is that if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to be worried about.
That, of course, used to be a kind of joke that people would say to explain a simplistic, ridiculous mindset.
But that's essentially become our nation's motto now.
And I think that, again, there are going to be a lot of incentives for police departments to use surveillance drones.
There's probably going to be a lot of funding for, you know, federal funds, DHS and whatnot that go to police departments.
There's also going to be a lot of Department of Defense contracts that go to drone makers.
So you're going to have taxpayer money not only investing in the technology to surveil us, but then taxpayer money will be used to buy that technology for the local police departments to then surveil us, again, in just very, very potentially very sweeping fashions.
And in a kind of typical United States fashion, one of the only ways that anyone gets excited about green energy is that now there's talk of solar-powered drones, some of which people think can stay aloft for up to two weeks.
So, you know, corporations banding together to kill the electric car, but once you can make that into a solar-powered surveillance drone, there's a lot of incentives to go green.
So that's the sort of weird perversion of environmentalism.
Man, you know, that's the one that really bums me out, too, because you can just see only a few years from now, you'll be able to see them, you'll be able to hear them.
We'll all be, like, Gazans with the constant buzz of the drones.
What a crappy, dark future.
I don't want to live there, man.
I liked the homeland better back when it was the USA, and it wasn't like that.
Drones, predator drones in our skies.
Yeah.
And then the last one is enlist the private sector.
This is one that I am not super familiar with, but it's a case in Arizona where the local police department coupled with a couple of other agencies.
I'm not sure if they were federal or not.
And they were sweeping a high school in Arizona, quote, unquote, looking for drugs.
And one of the agencies, one of the groups that was involved in this sweep is the Corrections Corporation of America, which is a private for-profit prison corporation.
And the for-profit prison market is something that I think a lot of people aren't as aware of as they should be, but it's an industry whose financial incentives are to imprison people.
And so when you have for-profit employees of this industry sweeping high schools looking for, quote, unquote, lawbreaking, whether it's people based on immigration status, whether it's based on minor drug crimes, as soon as you have people entering into those kind of agreements where their financial incentives are directly tied to how many of those high school students either get arrested that day or get arrested at some point in the future, you have a system that none of us should feel comfortable with.
Yeah, I mean, as long as it's the public force that's doing the arresting and the prosecuting, but then the private jails and the private prison guard industries that are doing the recipient.
I mean, you already had the cops are bad enough, the judges are bad enough, and the concrete and the iron bar manufacturers and their lobbyists, we've had to deal with them for all of history.
But now to add, you know, all the different whacking huts of the world, I guess they renamed that one.
But yeah, I mean, this is just prison fascism in the worst way.
And I have an article here somewhere actually all about prison labor.
I think maybe you link to one, too, where it's really just neo-slavery.
It's almost outright.
And the gist of this entire article that you put together here, John, you're really bumming me out because you're drawing a portrait of America that's way, way, way down.
I don't know how far it goes, but we're way low on the slippery slope.
And I don't know how the hell we're going to get back.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the first step is to spread the information.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you do a hell of a good job of that.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
And I hope I'll get a chance to check out your own radio show there.
Absolutely.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, everybody, that is John Neffel, spelled with a K.
And he's at Alternet and at theradiodispatch.com.
The piece at Alternet is called They Can Do That?
Ten Outrageous Tactics Cops Get Away With.
We'll be right back.
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