April 18th, 2016 IRC Meeting

Review & Decisions

• Endorse Aaron James
• PirateCon 2016 location. Community Church, NonProfit Center and Tent City seem to be our options. Tent City seems to have what we need for the lowest cost.
• We have been asked to sign on to this Countering Violent Extremism letter (see below)

Campaigns Status

PirateCon 2016

• Date set at 6/25. Have 1-2 speakers.
• Looking for location
• Looking at streaming options
• Jamie working sign up page and conference page. Plan to have it done by Wed.

Piratecon. Potential spaces:

• Community Church (srevilak)
• Roxbury Community college (srevilak)
• Make Shift Boston, South End, Boston (paper_waves)
• United South End Settlements, South End, Boston
• Boston non-profit center, South Boston (BenC)
• Democracy center, Harvard Sq., Cambridge - Unavailable on 6/25
• YMCA in Chinatown
• South end tech center community room, South End, Boston (Kendra)

So far, we have two people interested in speaking. Looking for more speakers.

2016 Campaign

• Aaron James running for 27th Middlesex State Rep. district
  • Vote to endorse
  • Signature gathering likely complete
  • Web site up

2016 Campaign Plan & Task Status

Upcoming Events

1. 4/13, Digital Fourth meeting, noon-1pm, 101 Main Street, Cambridge
2. 4/20, Digital Fourth meeting, noon-1pm, 101 Main Street, Cambridge
3. 4/26, Middlesex Community College Cryptoparty
4. 4/27, Digital Fourth meeting, noon-1pm, 101 Main Street, Cambridge
5. 4/27, 6-9pm, Somerville Cryptoparty, 577 Somerville Ave., Somerville
6. 4/30, Fossil Free Somerville Rally
7. 5/3, 5pm, Last day to drop off nomination papers at cities/towns for signature validation
8. 6/25, 9am-6pm, PirateCon 2016

Every Wed., Digital Fourth meeting, noon-1pm, 101 Main Street, Cambridge

Participants

• jokeefe
• srevilak

Observers

• igel
• davidd

Summary

Voted to formally endorse Aaron James as a candidate.

Voted to hold piratecon at Tent City Community room.

Countering Violent Extremism Letter

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, write to express our deep concern regarding attempts to provide “counter-messaging” against violent extremism via the flawed and discriminatory “Countering Violent Extremism” program.

There is a long-standing convention that the U.S. government should not engage in producing propaganda for domestic consumption. In 1985, Nebraska Sen. Edward Zorinsky argued that propaganda should be kept out of America so as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity." Our best-known foreign messaging effort, Voice of America, produces material for foreign consumption that aims to present the perspective of the U.S. government on foreign affairs; but it was presumed, up til to changes introduced in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, to be improper for the US government to try to shape the views of its own people. CVE changes that long-standing practice. It targets “communities of concern” — i.e., American Muslims and Arab Americans — because federal law enforcement considers views of some in those communities to be “violent extremism.” The U.S. government has no business trying to “counter-message”, surveil or intervene with U.S. citizens or residents on the basis of peacefully held views about U.S. foreign policy.

Your administration recently announced a “shake-up” of counter-messaging efforts against ISIL, that rehouses those efforts out of the State Department and into the Department of Homeland Security. In February 2016, DHS announced funding of nearly $1 billion for state and local efforts through the Homeland Security Grant Program, with CVE designated as a program priority. Part of that effort has involved outreach to Silicon Valley, to prevent social media “platforms” from being “co-opted by terrorists.” We are increasingly concerned that technology companies which participate in government-commissioned counter-messaging and content monitoring initiatives, might be unaware of the significant opposition to such initiatives from broad coalitions of local community groups and national civil rights organizations. While tech companies may in fact participate if they choose, with appropriate disclosure, in US governmental “counter-messaging” efforts abroad, acceding to US governmental requests of this kind inevitably means that tech companies may be similarly required by, say, the Chinese government to participate in “counter-messaging” in the interests of Chinese foreign policy goals relating to those companies’ users in the United States. While US governmental counter-messaging abroad is constitutional, we believe it to be ineffective in the light of ongoing and widely known US counter-terrorism policies that cause needless civilian deaths.

We oppose the Department of Homeland Security's and other federal agencies’ CVE programs. They create an environment where Arab Americans and American Muslims are subjected to intrusive surveillance, monitoring, and potential prosecution, not based on particularized probable cause of involvement in actual crimes, but based solely on their First Amendment-protected speech. The infrastructure set in place by CVE, especially its “Shared Responsibility Committees” (“SRCs”), sets up enhanced surveillance on specific communities based on ethnicity and religion. It aims to recruit professionals from the Muslim community, have them interview people suspected of being at risk of “radicalization,” and refer those they interview to the FBI or other federal law enforcement agencies if they believe they are “radicals.” This would damage law enforcement-community relations in several ways. First, the professionals are envisioned as not having to tell their clients that they are also working with federal law enforcement, which compromises the confidentiality of the relationship between psychiatrists, teachers, mentors and their clients. Similar teams in the UK, where CVE originated under the name “Prevent,” have been used to subject Muslims, including young children, to ideological interventions and surveillance. As even most law enforcement agencies driving CVE programs admit publicly, there are no reliable signs that someone is on a pathway of “mobilizing toward violence” other than an actual leaked plan to commit violence. SRCs are likely to target youth who express dissenting viewpoints or awareness of the fact that Muslims experience discrimination, or who simply engage in age-appropriate behavior while being Muslim, to humiliating and frightening interventions that violate their expectations of privacy and confidentiality in health settings and their expectations of being permitted to speak and learn safely in educational settings. Last, if implemented via public health agencies as appears to have been proposed in Boston, SRCs open the public health agency to charges of having subordinated their own public health mission to a law enforcement agenda.

The FBI’s CVE website, titled “Don’t Be A Puppet,” encourages members of the public and particularly teenagers to identify and report language they regard as being “extreme” or “radical.” Their examples of language that is a precursor to violent extremism are all First Amendment-protected, and the government has no business disrupting them. “Mistrusting the government and law enforcement” is too common to serve as a useful indicator of radicalization; and the very idea that "taking pictures of government buildings" is a terrorist/radicalization indicator would be news to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Washington, DC every year. This website goes too far, in treating as suspicious and attempting to suppress legitimate political expression and activities that are sometimes laudable.

Last, the focus of CVE lays fault improperly on personal and psychological flaws on the part of people `susceptible to radicalization.’ If someone is angry at U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, that may not be a psychological problem of “alienation” on their part; it may be a psychologically healthy reaction to actual U.S. foreign policy, even if most people in the U.S. happen to disagree with that reaction. People can validly hold views that, say, the U.S. should get out of the Middle East, without this being a sign of “radicalization” deserving of governmental intervention.

The administration would be best served by rerouting the funds for CVE to programs with a far better evidentiary basis for their positive effect on levels of violence, such as foreign aid directed at girls’ elementary and secondary education programs; and by sending a message to American Muslims that Americans are sincere in our belief that you can hold any belief that the First Amendment protects, without fear of U.S. government harassment.

Minutes

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