Combine a historically unpopular urine-headed president with a governor and state legislature doing their best to dismantle public education, eliminate women’s clinics, destroy the environment and do away with affordable healthcare, and people are going to protest. Even small-town conservative newspapers in Arizona are giving their knuckle-dragging elected representatives an earful, and citizens statewide are showing up to protest the dangerous clown in DC, who makes Mel Brooks’ governor in Blazing Saddles look gifted.
At marches, demonstrations and town halls more voters are holding office holders accountable for the Republicans’ lies and stupidity, like the border wall BS, which Arizona’s leadership has mostly embraced. In response to the grassroots pushback, the frightened pinheads at the legislature are creating new laws to restrict citizens’ rights to assemble and protest, and they monitor us when we do. Because terror or something says the border security sales literature.
The GOP’s attempts to stifle dissent blew up on the front pages last summer when Donald Trump made a campaign stop in Fountain Hills, a tony suburb of gated communities about 30 miles northeast of Phoenix. TrumpLand. Protesters blocked the main highway to the rally, delaying it more than an hour. The state senator who represents the district, John Kavanagh, a former NY cop often in cahoots with chief shithead Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who also lives in Fountain Hills), got his knickers all knotted because his Big Trump Circus was interrupted by loud, mostly brown immigrant-rights protesters.
So what’s an intolerant peckerhead to do? Pass a law, natch. Not satisfied with the 30-day jail sentence already on the books for blocking traffic to political events, Kavanagh’s bill, which Gov. Ducey signed, increased the penalty to six months and a $2,500 fine. C’mon man! Even 30 days is ridiculous for blocking traffic. Oh, I forgot, the criminals are brown. Oh, I also forgot, you’re a toady for the private-prison industry.
But, hey, people could still protest without getting arrested if they didn’t block traffic, so Mordor Nation had to invent new restrictions on speech, especially after more than 20,000 showed up for Phoenix’s Women’s March, as did about 15,000 in Tucson. So Kavanagh and a gaggle of other senate goobers crafted their next assault on the First Amendment, a bill that holds protest organizers, as well as anyone who shows up to demonstrate, responsible for the actions of everyone. If some knucklehead breaks a window, your property or other assets could be seized if you’re part of the same protest. So you might as well stay home.
The Arizona Senate on Wednesday approved a bill that makes participating in or helping organize a protest that turns into a riot an offense that could lead to criminal racketeering charges, legislation Republican backers say is needed to crack down on violent protesters.
First, there is next to no evidence of “violent protesters.” Also, laws already exist that hold protesters liable if they damage property or injure someone, so the racketeering bullpuckey is just another scare tactic to keep people off the streets. Happily, after Kavanagh’s POS bill was picked up by the national media, and the House Speaker received a shit load of calls from constituents, he tabled it.
Senate Bill 1142's demise came as it gained national attention and was widely panned as an unconstitutional attempt to silence liberal groups protesting the agenda of Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.
Its fate was sealed over the weekend, as House Speaker J.D. Mesnard, a Chandler Republican, fielded phone calls from the public to complain about the bill.
Yea public!
Not facing potential racketeering charges for exercising their First Amendment rights, then, people across the state participated in several large marches for science last weekend, with the protest in Phoenix attracting thousands—many families, lots of children, no “violent protesters.” I asked around but couldn’t find a paid protester, just lots of fact-loving people in a march that stretched for nearly a mile.
Still, officials can’t be too sure those scientists, school kids, parents, seniors and others aren’t plotting something dastardly, so their deep state troops kept an eye on us with a “Freedom on the Move” contraption.
Funded by DHS, the freedom-loving spy truck first made news here at an anti-Islamophobia protest in Tucson a couple years ago. The Tucson-based company StrongWatch developed the surveillance technology to take advantage of the mountains of cash pouring into border security, which is big business in Arizona, writes Todd Miller in Border Patrol Nation.
… inside the brightly lit convention hall in Phoenix, Arizona, where the Sixth Annual Border Security Expo takes place in March 2012. Dodds is just one of hundreds of salespeople peddling their border enforcement products and national security wares, and StrongWatch is but one of more than 100 companies scrambling for a profitable edge in an exploding market.
Beyond border security, the cameras are also being purchased by local police departments that aren’t anywhere near the border. They say the additional surveillance is for our protection.
STRONGWATCH today announced that it received a purchase order from Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office for its FREEDOM On-The-Move, mobile video surveillance system.... “FREEDOM On-The-Move hosts a powerful combination of advanced sensors, laser, gyros and electronics in a rugged, mobile platform for standard fleet vehicles. This powerful combination provides advanced situational awareness for public safety,” said STRONGWATCH Chairman & CEO, Mike Powell.
It’s anyone’s guess which municipality or agency was trolling downtown Phoenix in their unmarked camera truck last weekend, and it’s also not clear what the mobile technology was gathering—or what they intend to do with the data.
The very high-tech camera allows surveillers to keep tabs on known protestors, to save images of anyone at a march, and to conduct facial recognition scans. Beyond that, if linked to Stingray devices, which exists throughout Arizona (the ACLU is suing), operators could collect metadata from phones and other devices—a sort of drive-by government surveillance that search and seizure laws don’t usually prohibit.
While many point to the Fourth Amendment as a safeguard against mass digital surveillance, the actual data attached to a communication—known as metadata—is afforded fewer protections than the content itself...
“What we think of as the way to get information around—telephone numbers, IP addresses, email addresses, URLs, typically called routing information—tends to receive less [legal protection],” Bambauer said.
I should’ve flipped a giant 🖕at the truck when it rolled past, but I’d probably have ended up on some watchlist. Still, I imagine my mug and thousands of others are stored in some government’s bits and bytes machine, along with who knows what else. At least I blocked the license plate in the photo above, but the truck itself was probably collecting hundreds of license plate numbers.
We’re familiar with the Trump-Sessions “law and order” bullshit. It’s Joe Arpaio and his goon squad at a national level—never shy about demonstrating how stupid, uncaring, ineffective or racist they are. But the good news is voters finally booted Arpaio, which is the same fate a lot of other bigoted bozos and creationist twerps will suffer in 2018. Trump and the Arizona GOP may try to ignore facts, but demographics are one giant blue-leaning fact they can’t sweep away.