After nearly 100 students and activists gathered at a quad at UC(University of California)-Davis, police armed in riot gear arrived to disrupt the peaceful protest. The event was a part of Occupy UC-Davis — a response of solidarity with the  Occupy Wall Street movement. At the behest of the Chancellor of the university, campus police, armed with pepper spray and weapons that resembled paintball guns, began forcibly removing students from the quad.

Police brutality and violence ensued as the campus PD approached a group of protesters simply sitting on a pathway. Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis police, standing feet away from the protesters, sprayed a cannister of pepper spray directly into their eyes and mouth. Even after the barrage of pepper spray, the protesters refused to move at which point officers arrested them with plastic zip-ties.

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Though it has been a slow and often arduous task, American populists leading the revolt against the intrusive pat-downs and cancer inducing body scanners of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have made significant headway in recent months. What began as a grassroots insurrection against governmental abuse has now attracted the support of state and federal legislators.

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On June 3, EFF will begin live coverage of a critical discussion about online freedom of expression held by the 47 member states of the U.N Human Rights Council during its seventeenth session in Geneva. The meeting will include the introduction of a landmark report to the Council by United Nations Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue that advocates safeguards to protect free expression online including privacy and anonymity.

La Rue has spent the past year meeting with local organizations, including EFF, in numerous cities around the world. He has traveled to Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Cairo, Johannesburg and Delhi to gather information about key trends that stifle free expression online. These actions include the blocking of content, monitoring and identifying activists and critics, criminalizing legitimate expression, and adopting restrictive legislation to justify such measures. In his report, La Rue recommends that United Nations member states recognize the legitimacy of anonymous expression (a core EFF value) and the critical protection it affords. La Rue argues in his report that “privacy is essential for individuals to express themselves freely.”

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EFF is proud to support SB 914, a bill that requires the police to obtain a warrant before searching a recent arrestee’s cell phone.

SB 914 is a response to a January decision of the California Supreme Court in People v. Diaz. In that case, the court authorized police officers to search any person’s cell phone after they had been arrested under a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement that permits law enforcement officers to search the area immediately around a person “incident to arrest.” This exception has two traditional rationales: ensuring officer safety by allowing a search for weapons, and protecting evidence from immediate destruction. By permitting the warrantless search of a cell phone under this exception, the Court gave officers carte blanche to rummage through all the private data and information people keep on their cell phones – emails, text messages, call history, websites they’ve visited, and their calendars, to name just a few examples –regardless of whether the police believed there was evidence of the crime on the cell phone and without any judicial oversight.

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For Washington, WikiLeaks' real crime is public humiliation.

In April, the Army transferred Private Bradley Manning from solitary confinement at Quantico, Virginia to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas. At Quantico, according to a Human Rights Watch report, the military had shackled Manning, stripped him naked, and isolated him. The government attributed this cruel treatment to their fears that Manning might commit suicide.

So badly did they want Manning alive, it appears, that his guards had orders to ask him every few minutes: "Are you OK?" This, the government admits, amounted to depriving Private Manning of sleep. Indeed, the alleged precautions taken to stop Manning from attempting to take his own life seem logically designed to drive a person to suicide.

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Just like the dark ages, women and children are once again treated as properties and chattels--and the goods must be kept moving. Women and children are victims of unspeakable abuse, gender discrimination, violence, torture and the worst form of labor called trafficking. By the way, many of them have died, and no one has been made accountable.

What is trafficking? Trafficking is procuring women and children (but it is more for their exploitation rather than their movement), to join activities ranging from what seems to be harmless ones--such as employment, training, cultural exchange, sports, marriage (with the trafficker posing as the bridegroom), and child adoption--to more serious cases of white slavery and abduction, within or across national borders, almost always leading to sexual exploitation. It is for this reason why trafficking is often linked to prostitution.

Child trafficking for purposes of using children in armed conflict; as couriers of drugs; for child labor; for recruitment into criminal gangs; and for sale of organs will be dealt with in Session 24 right after this plenary. Read more...