Photo: Carlos Miller

The police have deleted the footage he had taken in the moments leading up to his arrest. Another journalist is believed to have captured footage of the arrest, which has yet to be released. There is a reason that the United States has recently been downgraded to 47th place on the global Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.

You can read the first hand account of the arrest at the Photography Is Not A Crime blog. I especially appreciate Carlos’ activism and reporting, as he was the first of many bloggers to feature coverage of my Lemonade Liberation outreach last August.

Carlos Miller will be speaking in Nashua, New Hampshire on Saturday, February 25 at this year’s Liberty Forum.

This article was originally published at freeconcord.org.

Feb 4 2012: Some of the footage that was deleted by police has been recovered, and the slightly choppy video is embedded below. In a blog published today, it is noted that data recovery services will be used to restore more of the footage.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The video is briefly prefaced with text stating, “If a person walked in to vote in the 2012 New Hampshire Primary, and said the names of multiple DEAD people…Could he receive a ballot to vote without showing any ID?” “© Project Veritas” is watermarked on the screen. If you watch for the entire ten minutes, you’ll see the same scene repeated multiple times. A man walks into a polling location wearing an inconspicuous camera on his person. He says, “Do you have a (name) on your list?” When asked to confirm the address and party registration, he says, “That is the address” and, “That is the registration”. Upon receiving a ballot, the man returns the ballot and insists on retrieving identification before casting a vote. The video ends with a less than climactic interview of poor audio quality with ward moderator Ryk Bullock.

There was much publicized discontent over a plan by some house republicans earlier last year to mandate voters provide photographic identification at the polls. Currently, potential voters are entitled to a ballot so long as they are willing to sign an affidavit affirming their residence within a particular ward. It is clear what the political motivation of the actors in the video are when they insist that poll workers check their IDs.

On this point, I don’t concur with the producers of the video, who sign off with, “Reporting for the Project Veritas, James O’Keefe and Spencer Meads”. While they made a noteworthy point about the ability to receive a ballot while impersonating the deceased, they did not prove that photo IDs are an imperative necessity for New Hampshire’s election process.

The first editorial published in the Concord Monitor critical of the actions of Project Veritas was penned by Zandra Rice Hawkins, the director of Granite State Progress. Zandra characterizes the actions of O’Keefe and Meads as breaking the law and obstructing the New Hampshire primary. To justify the claim that they had broken the law, she cites the voter fraud statute. In the statute, the act of impersonating another voter is criminalized, in addition to actually casting the fraudulent ballot. While the impersonation may be technically illegal, clearly the spirit of the law is to prevent illegitimate votes from being cast.

Another law alleged to have been broken by the duo is the infamous wiretapping statute. Many who haven’t dug deeply into the applications of the statute falsely believe the law to require consent to audio record an individual. Despite the word “consent” appearing in the RSA, all that is required in the statute is that someone be aware that they could be recorded. When out in public, there’s no expectation of privacy, and apart from the voting booth itself, the polling location is considered to be a particularly public space. The process is considered so open that campaigns are permitted to host poll watchers, whose job it is to monitor the checklist for who has voted as poll workers check names off. On primary day, I volunteered in this capacity for the presidential candidate I dislike the least. While poll watching, a cameraman, likely from WMUR, set up his equipment near the entrance and got several wide shots of the slow action. He did not survey those in the room for consent to be recorded, nor was this his responsibility.

Zandra does not elaborate on how Project Veritas disrupted the primary. Nobody was prevented from voting, and it is not as though one particular poll worker is singled out in the video or made to look irresponsible. She analogizes, “It’s like saying that a bank could be robbed, then filming yourself robbing it to prove your point.” At this point, one is not even comparing apples and oranges. Robbing a bank and not casting fraudulent ballots go together like honeydew melons and predator drones.

While I strongly disagree with Zandra’s suggestion that making criminals of O’Keefe and company is a good idea, I appreciate that while making such strong statements, she was open enough to attach her name. The following day’s Concord Monitor included a follow-up piece, written under the anonymous moniker of the Monitor Editorial Board. The piece which ran on January 20 corrected the mistaken claim that Project Veritas had violated the wiretapping statute, but it took no shame in endorsing a prison sentence and tens of thousands of dollars in fines for the participants in the video. I suggest the editorial board of the Monitor give a second reading to the New Hampshire constitution, which humbly suggests in article 18 that “No wise legislature will affix the same punishment to the crimes of theft, forgery, and the like, which they do to those of murder and treason.” Amateur journalism ought be affixed the same penalty that every other nonviolent, victimless crime ought have: absolutely nothing. Those who call for noncriminals to be imprisoned are mobs endorsing institutional violence. The anonymous author exposes that (s)he cares less for election security than (s)he does seeing political opponents purged. Opening and closing with similar lines, the piece ends with, “The best way to ensure the sanctity of the vote is to make the penalty for daring to obstruct, defraud or otherwise game the system so onerous that only a fool would risk it.”

This approach is as shortsighted as the assumption that executing people for lesser offenses (such as narcotics as in Singapore and Saudi Arabia) will result in people choosing not to commit those offenses. The failure of this assumption is demonstrated as people continue to be executed in those countries year after year. In openly acknowledging in the middle of the article that nobody knows how much voter fraud goes on in the state, the author underscores the fact that putting up a tough front does nothing to deter actual criminals who are free to continue their clandestine activities.

A cheap and easy solution that doesn’t require the mass of voters to carry ID and would greatly deter the type of potential fraud that Project Veritas exposed would be to list dates of birth alongside name, address, and party registration on the voter rolls. Throwing more people in prison and putting them under tremendous financial distress does nothing but increase the State’s threshold for violence.

This article originally published at freeconcord.org.

Jan 30 2012: Yesterday’s Monitor featured a fair biographical piece on James O’Keefe. He directed the actions seen in the NH primary video from New Jersey, where he is prohibited from leaving. In early 2010, he pled guilty to entering a federal building under a false pretense, in connection to a phone jamming incident regarding a Louisiana senator. His probation is scheduled to expire in May of 2013. It turns out that O’Keefe is technically not an amateur to the extent that he is paid heavily for his exploits. Whether an amateur is defined by quality of work over whether one is paid up front, the videos that O’Keefe has produced speak for themselves.

Google as it appeared during the Jan 18 blackout.

Much abuzz online yesterday had to deal with the congressional threat to the internet known as SOPA. The Stop Online Piracy Act is a federal bill which would create a blacklist of websites which internet service providers would be required to maintain and enforce. The blacklist would allegedly include websites which either host or link to data which, per its existence, is violating copyright laws. The very concept of ‘piracy’ is on its face hyperbolic. It is laughable Newspeak to equate data sharing with the practice of pillaging vessels at sea. PIPA, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act, is the senate version of the dinosaur recording industry’s legislative attempt to thwart the free exchange of information. Also lobbying very strongly with the MPAA is the pharmaceutical industry, which profits heavily from onerous intellectual property regulation.

Reddit was the first eminent domain of the internet to announce January 18 as its blackout date to protest SOPA. Wikipedia announced its participation with similar measures. Google demonstrated its solidarity by featuring a black stripped homepage with a subheader requesting that people contact their so-called representatives and ask for a rejection of state control over the internet.

Heavy traffic to government servers hosting contact information for congress and the senate caused many pages to be inaccessible for the day.

According to Wikipedia’s article on their twenty-four hour campaign, at least six senators who had been co-sponsors of the bill had withdrawn their support by the day’s end. One of those who withdrew support was NH senator Kelly Ayotte. Jeanne Shaheen is still listed as a co-sponsor of the bill, though after a quick call to her DC office inquiring on the matter, a staffer informed me that she now has “serious reservations” about the bill after hearing from her constituents. The offices of Charlie Bass and Frank Guinta have indicated that neither of them will be supporting SOPA-style legislation.

The global campaign against SOPA and PIPA was likely the most successful decentralized coordination of consciousness raising that we have seen as a result of our abilities to communicate using the internet. Detractors of the blackout took two forms. First, there were those mildly inconvenienced by an inability to access the live version of Wikipedia (Google hosted cached versions for those who knew how to look for them). Demonstrating the inconvenience of censorship was part of the protest’s purpose. The second group of detractors were those who saw their power slip yesterday during the digital uprising. Some media moguls, such as the editorial board of the Boston Herald, classified the protest as a “hissy fit”, despite underlining the success of the event, following with, “within hours of the online protest, political supporters of the bill…began dropping like flies, thus proving how very powerful these cyber-bullies can be”.

How often is it that a corporate news agency expresses how offended it is that internet activists contacted politicians? When a mass of people engaging in the most mundane form of political action are deemed “cyber-bullies”, it is clear that the world is changing.

Internet gatekeeper Chris Dodd

One of the more disturbing quotes uttered regarding the protest comes from a man who exposes himself as tyrannically minded. Chris Dodd, former senator, democratic presidential candidate, and current Corporate Executive Officer for the Motion Picture Association of America, condemned the protest as an “abuse of power”.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services. It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today. It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

Apparently, other people’s liberties are simply privileges granted by Lord Dodd.

IP Tyranny without SOPA

As reported January 16, a British student is likely going to be extradited to the United States on IP violation charges despite never having been on US soil. It is unclear whether he’s being charged with a crime or a civil infraction.

Happy 204th!

Political philosopher and activist extraordinaire Lysander Spooner was born on this date 204 years ago. Check out his iconoclastic No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority in Free Concord’s media section.

This article was originally published at freeconcord.org.

The model for Piano’s cartelization of media is similar to that of television subscriptions. At present, more people are abandoning cable and satellite live programming for the boundless information frontier provided by the internet. Few subscription services have fared well in the purge caused by the internet, with a notable exception being the growth seen by Netflix. Piano’s model divides subscription profits with the companies participating in the paywall, giving 70% of the revenue to media distributors and keeping thirty cents on the dollar for itself. It measures traffic among clients and based on where more traffic is channeled, Piano compensates the company.

Delo, Slovenia’s largest publication, plans to put about 10% of its content behind the wall, keeping the remaining content free so as to keep constant its web traffic. In Slovakia, media giant SME has approximately 5% of its content paywalled at the moment.

It was last April that the Slovakian paywall was launched by Piano, about the same time that our hometown newspaper’s website was paywalled off. In the first nation to see its media restricted restricted en mass this way, marketplace isolation aided the endeavor in being sustainable. With limited resources in the formerly communist republic, and the Slovak language spoken only in that region, incorporating so many of the nation’s publications into the project cornered the market, and gave consumers no alternative. Similarly, paywalling the major Slovene language publications corners that nation’s market.

Such a mass paywall project has potential in the United States, but with such diverse market variety in English language media, the more comprehensive paywall project emerging in eastern Europe would be less likely to catch on here. Paywalls in the United States have most often been limited to individual publications, not networks of media distributors. Though many major cities’ newsprints are owned by a handful of companies, it is possible that a coordinated paywalling effort would result in the potentially illegal sharing of copyrighted newsprint. There’s even market potential, if such a restriction was to be imposed on this very computer literate market, for the business of interpreting paywalled information. Based off of the sheer traffic a free site will get with similar content to a paywalled site, a business could copy all of the major stories from behind paywalls and change just enough detail so as not to tread the murky waters of copyright infringement. Only with state-imposed copyright restrictions may we see such a concept as a bootleg newspaper.

Extradition over copying

Richard O’Dwyer, a resident of the UK who has never before been on US soil, is being extradited by the ‘royal’ government to the US to face charges that he linked through his website to copyrighted material hosted on other websites. In three years, he allegedly made $230,000 in advertising revenue through his site and used the funds for his college tuition.

This post originally appeared at freeconcord.org.

The previous protest that he was alleged to have been at could have possibly been one which I had attended in a journalistic capacity. Occupy New Hampshire participants had gathered outside of Romney’s campaign headquarters on Elm Street in Manchester. Some protesters waived signs over the windows while the presidential candidate talked to supporters inside. This occurred during the initial occupation of Veterans Park back in October.

The facts in Bieber’s case are vaguely similar to the circumstances that resulted in the arrest of Dave Ridley at the Radisson in Nashua on May 25.

To protest the violation of my first amendment right, I exercised different first amendment rights outside. Utilizing my speech, I chalked out against the press restrictions practiced by the monopolist court officers. I was almost finished when the head of court security exited the building and asked me to stop chalking and leave. He implied that I was doing something illegal, but never spelled out exactly what. He even identified himself as a police officer. Due to some NH court’s crackdowns on press freedom, in the more restrictive venues it is rare to see a court security officer in action, especially outside of his normal domain inside the building.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Censorship, even if done for the best of intentions, subsumes the initiation of force – something experienced by individuals seeking transparency at Keene district court and Cheshire Co. superior court. On Friday, Dec. 16, 2011 at the NH supreme court the “rules committee” took comment to determine whether they will “allow” you and me to film their actions.

Despite using different arguments and rationale, every commenter advocated for increased openness. A couple even mentioned how bad things can get when that is lacking. The “committee” seemed receptive. But even if they “rule” on the side of secret proceedings, their text on paper can only usurp your rights if you allow it so.

Below is Dennis ‘the Courtroom’ Menace a video featuring a not-so friendly public official. Are you happy you pay for such actions?

In late June Ademo was caged and charged with “improper influence” after he politely asked Ed Burke a few questions (about the unjust arrest of Beau Davis):

Shortly after Ademo’s arrest Derrick J. Freeman was arrested:

In July FreeKeene TV did a segment on this issue:

In September Jason Talley was arrested a block away in superior court:
Jason Talley Arrested at Keene Superior Court

An arraignment is pretty basic, it’s a hearing where the state decides your bail – a place holder essentially – which is to secure your appearance at future hearings/trial. If you can think of any reason you need to be outside of jail, this is where you explain that to the judge. If you’re representing yourself, the goal here is to make the judge understand that you WILL be present at the scheduled dates/times. As seen in the video above, I stated to the judge that a) I feel the charges are frivolous b) I’ve never missed a court date in the past – and I’ve had plenty c) I’m a full time activists/blogger and have ever intention of highlighting the silliness of the state’s aggression toward me. The judge seemed to agree because not only did he lower my PR bond from $10,000 to $1,000 but he also removed the clause banning me from possessing firearms. Though the DA made it clear that federal law still permitted it and I told them both that I’m a convicted felon. So the squabble was for nothing.

The only other thing I’d like to note about in the video is how the DA – Michael Valentine – stated that I wasn’t a harm to the community. Yet is going to spend alot of tax dollars attempting to cage me and a lot more if he actually succeeds.

I encourage anyone being charged with a victimless crime to visit NeverTakeAPlea.org – that’s where I’ll be posting my court hearings and where you can network with others facing similar charges. More to come from the magical land of Manchester Superior Court. Meta Post with current information and backstory – HERE.

Bradley Manning’s first pretrial hearing is happening now. Continuously updated live coverage comes from UK’s The Guardian.

http://guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/dec/16/bradley-manning-hearing-live-updates

Click here to view the embedded video.