All posts by Lawrence Christopher Skufca, J.D.

My name is Lawrence Christopher Skufca. I am currently a civil rights activist and pro bono legal advocate in the Camden, New Jersey area. I hold a Juris Doctor in Law from Rutgers School of Law – Camden; a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Furman University; and an Associate of Arts in Humanities from Tri-County Technichal College. I passed the New Jersey and Pennsylvania State Bar Examinations in 2011. My state licensing applications have been held up by the Committee on Character and Fitness ever since. In March 2014, I discovered I was being targeted for political retaliation by George E. Norcross, III, and Rutgers University for my social advocacy. Their behavior suggests my message of economic empowerment and social justice are unwelcome in South Jersey. I am currently working on changing that culture.

Chicago prosecutor loses her fight with Black Lives Matter

By Jessica Lussenhop BBC News Magazine

Demonstrators calling for an end to gun violence and the resignation of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel march through downtown on December 31, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois.

While most of the focus of Tuesday night’s primaries was on the battle for the White House, something extraordinary occurred in two local elections. Both Chicago’s Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and Timothy McGinty, the Cuyahoga Prosecuting Attorney in Ohio, lost their bids for re-election.

In Alvarez’s case, it was a blow-out – she lost to her opponent almost 2-1.

As the so-called “top cops” in their respective jurisdictions, Alvarez and McGinty made key prosecutorial decisions in the controversial killings of unarmed African Americans by police officers. For Alvarez, it was the death of Laquan McDonald, shot 16 times by former officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014. In Cleveland, McGinty recommended that a grand jury not charge the officers who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a public park.

These are not the first prosecutors who recently failed to secure another term on name recognition and a “tough on crime” platform as the need for criminal justice reform gathers steam across the country. But they are the first ones to have faced off directly against the Black Lives Matter movement and lost.

“Black youth kicked Anita Alvarez out of office,” the Chicago activist group Assata’s Daughters wrote in a triumphant statement last night. “Just a month ago, Anita Alvarez was winning in the polls. Communities who refuse to be killed and jailed and abused without any chance at justice refused to allow that to happen.

“We did this for Laquan.”

According to the widely disseminated original account of the shooting of Laquan McDonald, the teenager had lunged at officers with a knife when he was shot. But dash camera footage of the incident – which was obtained by local journalists – showed he was moving away from police when Van Dyke opened fire, striking the 17 year old multiple times as he lay on the ground.

Though Alvarez ultimately charged Van Dyke with first-degree murder, she did it more than a year later, just before the camera footage was to be made public by a judge’s order. The timing gave the distinct impression that a cover-up had barely been averted, and that Alvarez was more interested in protecting the jobs of officers than she was in justice.

Alvarez ignored calls for her resignation and always maintained that she waited more than 400 days because she believed that a federal investigation needed to be completed before charges were brought against Van Dyke.

“I don’t believe any mistakes were made,” she insisted during the campaign.

A coalition of activists – members of Black Youth Project 100, Assata’s Daughters and Black Lives Matter Chicago – did not endorse Alvarez’s challenger, Kim Foxx. Instead they joined forces to oppose Alvarez.

Their protest and canvassing efforts culminated in the hashtag campaign #ByeAnita, words which could be seen fluttering on a huge banner trailing behind an airplane flying over downtown Chicago on election day. Alvarez started the day with a lead in the polls, but without key endorsements from former allies and the local media.

In the Rice case, McGinty encouraged a grand jury not to charge the two officers who opened fire on Rice after less than two seconds on the scene. After they obliged, McGinty said evidence showed it was indisputable that Rice was reaching to pull out his pellet gun when he was shot, despite differing expert testimony.

This was seen as a knee-jerk response to protect police, and Black Lives Matter Cleveland showed up with members of Rice’s family to picket McGinty’s home during the campaign. As Cleveland Scene editor in chief Vince Grzegorek sees it, nothing but public outrage can explain McGinty’s fall.

“It’s hard not to see the vote as anything but a referendum on McGinty’s handling of Tamir Rice and other police use-of-force cases,” he wrote in an email to BBC News.

The Black Lives Matter movement has been criticised for its lack of focus, aversion to a hierarchical structure, and inability to translate rage from street protests into tangible political goals. They have not coalesced behind a presidential candidate, and have disrupted both Democrats Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton at campaign events.

Aislinn Pulley, cofounder of Black Lives Matter Chicago, declined a recent invitation to the White House, deriding it as a “photo opportunity”. For those reasons, the movement has often been dismissed as an aimless and empty social media campaign.

Police officers push back demonstrators who continue to protest the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald as they attempt to disrupt holiday shoppers along Michigan Avenue December 24, 2015 in Chicago, Illinois. — Image captionBlack Lives Matter protesters in Chicago tried to shut down holiday shopping to draw attention to the Laquan McDonald case

But last night’s results answered those criticisms with definitive proof of the movement’s real political clout. The fact that the focus has shifted from police officers to prosecutors is significant, and these races prove that activists’ message resonates with voters. Prosecutors and politicians are now on alert – ignore their concerns at your own professional peril.

“For an evolving movement – youth-driven – to discover that it has this sort of electoral power, I can’t predict what will flow from that,” says Jamie Kalven, founder of the Invisible Institute, a non-profit journalism outfit on the south side of Chicago. “It’s really something.”

Where this newly discovered political might goes next remains to be seen. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who like Alvarez denied that he was slow to act or that he was part of a cover-up, has already survived a re-election campaign – one that took place before the tape’s release and just days before the city settled a civil lawsuit brought by McDonald’s family. He’s been called “political poison” by the Chicago Tribune – Sanders tried to hurt Clinton in the Illinois primary by pointing out her ties to Emanuel.

Police stand outside the house of Prosecutor Timothy McGinty as people protest in reaction to Cleveland police officer Michael Brelo being acquitted of manslaughter charges after he shot two people at the end of a 2012 car chase in which officers fired 137 shots May 23, 2015 in Cleveland, Ohio — Image captionLast year people protested outside of McGinty’s house in response to another officer being acquitted of manslaughter

“I’m quite sure he would concede the point that if he were on the ballot yesterday he would have been voted out emphatically,” says Kalven.

The morning after the primaries, another prosecutor – this one in Minneapolis, Minnesota – announced that he would not use a grand jury in order to decide whether to charge two officers in the shooting death of Jamar Clark in late 2015. Local Black Lives Matter activists celebrated the decision as a victory for transparency, proving once again that the movement now has prosecutors’ attention.

The new generation of prosecutors will not have a moment to rest easy. Michael O’Malley, McGinty’s successor, has demurred when asked how he would have handled the Rice case differently. Likewise, a vote for Foxx was really a vote against Alvarez, as Assata’s Daughters pointed out in their statement.

“We won’t stop until we’re free and Kim Foxx should know that as well,” they wrote.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-35817890

The Most Militarized Universities in America: A VICE News Investigation

February 7, 2016 Lawrence Christopher Skufca, J.D. Leave a comment

By William M. Arkin and Alexa O’Brien

November 6, 2015 | 7:15 am

An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America’s national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country’s educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.

Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.

But ultimately, we came to believe that no term sums up all of those elements better than militarized. Today’s national security state includes a growing cadre of technicians and security professionals who sit at computers and manage vast amounts of data; they far outnumber conventional soldiers and spies. And as the skills demanded from these digital warriors have evolved, higher education has evolved with them.

The 100 schools named in the VICE News rankings produce the greatest number of students who are employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), have the closest relationships with the national security state, and profit the most from American war-waging.

National security-related degree programs cater not just to new technologies and education needs, but also to the careers of a regimented workforce, offering distance learning, flexible credits, and easy transfers to accommodate frequent deployments, assignment changes, and shift work.

Four categories of institutions of higher education dominate the VICE News list of the 100 most militarized universities in America: schools whose students attain their degrees predominantly online; schools that are heavily involved in research and development for defense, intelligence, and security clients; schools in the Washington, DC area; and schools that are newly focused on homeland security.

Twenty of the top 100 schools that instruct people working in intelligence agencies, the military, and the worlds of law enforcement and homeland security — including their private contractor counterparts — are effectively online diploma mills. Twelve are for-profit companies; several didn’t exist before 9/11. The schools have become so important that two of them, American Military University (No. 2) and the University of Phoenix (No. 3), rank near the top of the list based on the sheer number of their graduates working in the Top Secret world.

Seventeen of the 100 top schools are in the Washington, DC area, reflecting the concentration of all things national security around the nation’s capital. The University of Maryland handily outranks all other schools at number one, while Georgetown University (No. 10), George Washington University (No. 4), and American University (No. 20) — all considered among the country’s 10 best schools for the study of international relations — rank among the top 25 most militarized schools. But post-9/11 growth in homeland security and a high demand for cyber training boost schools as diverse as George Mason (No. 5), Northern Virginia Community College (No. 16), and Strayer University (No. 8), a predominantly online school headquartered in Herndon, Virginia.

Seventeen powerhouse research universities traditionally supporting the oft-cited military-industrial complex rank in the top 100, including Johns Hopkins (No. 7), Penn State (No. 15), Georgia Tech (No. 26), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 47). Ten of these schools account for $2.05 billion in national security research and development funding, which is two-thirds of the approximately $3 billion VICE News calculates the federal government gave to the top 100 schools last year. Yet rather than traditional weapons systems, what these schools mostly research — often in classified laboratories — is intelligence technologies, cyber security, and big data analytics, challenging the common view of what militarization means.

More than 250 schools now offer certificates and degrees in homeland security, a relatively new discipline combining emergency management, physical security, and information security. Meanwhile, intelligence courses are a growing prerequisite for criminology and law enforcement education, a transformation reaching beyond federal agencies into local police. With new programs and increasing government and private sector funding, the top homeland security schools include Texas A&M (No. 14), Louisiana State (No. 96), Duke (No. 66), the University of Minnesota (No. 76), and Rutgers (No. 73).

The rankings rely on a unique dataset of more than 90,000 individuals who have worked in and around the IC since 9/11. The sample represents approximately 6 percent of all the people in the US with a Top Secret clearance, and includes military and law enforcement personnel, government civilian employees, and contractors at the federal, state, and local levels.

The rankings were initially calculated based on how many people in the IC had degrees and certificates from each school, then adjusted using 51 additional factors, running the gamut from federal funding amounts to a designation as an Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence to participation in federal domestic security task forces.

The affiliations revealed in the resumes of Top Secret workers offer unprecedented insight into the make-up of the national security state. Many of the schools that rank in the top 100 are virtually unknown outside government — schools like Cochise College (No. 6), Excelsior College (No. 13), and Central Texas College (No. 18). Each of these institutions tend to serve a specific constituency: military intelligence at Cochise, Army personnel at Central Texas College, and law enforcement at the predominantly online Excelsior, headquartered in Albany, New York.

Only three traditionally conservative schools (as determined by outside rankings), Texas A&M (No. 14), Liberty University (No. 42) and Brigham Young University (No. 84), are in the top 100, indicating that conservative social or political ideology plays little role in how schools are militarized.

Several elite schools on the list — such as Harvard (No. 32), Duke (No. 66), Stanford (No. 60), Northwestern (No. 80), and Cornell (53) — rank highly because of federal funding and specialized graduate programs. Harvard, for example, boasts a massive executive education program geared toward mid-career and senior federal employees; few Harvard-affiliated Top Secret workers obtained a bachelor’s degree at the school. That trend is repeated at other elite schools. In fact, of the top 100 ranked liberal arts colleges in America, none appear on our list of the nation’s 100 most militarized institutions.

The 20 predominately online schools on our list are akin to defense and intelligence contractors. The post-9/11 government expansion in national security and law enforcement increased the availability of tuition assistance and benefits for veterans and soldiers. For-profits have received the largest share of military education benefits, amounting to roughly 42 percent of post-GI Bill benefits between 2013 and 2014 and half of Department of Defense Tuition Assistance benefits.

In general, there are a wide range of reasons why schools end up ranking on our list. The business school at Villanova University (No. 22) educates a large number of managers and contract administrators for the classified black budget, a phenomenon only identifiable when looking at the resumes of hundreds of its graduates. West Virginia University (No. 72) is the lead academic partner of the FBI and the military for the study of biometrics, and is located near intelligence centers established after 9/11 that specialize in “identity intelligence.” The University of Central Florida (No. 50), a simulations research and curriculum specialist, is located near an Orlando-based federal training cluster and consortium that focuses on everything from war gaming to immersive training environments of the future.

A half-dozen schools in the top 100 had national security degree programs throughout the Cold War: George Washington University (No. 4), Johns Hopkins (No. 7), Georgetown (No. 10), Harvard (No. 32), MIT (No. 47), the University of Denver (No. 93), and Missouri State University (No. 95), formerly known as Southwest Missouri State. These schools continue to be well represented in the broader national security community, though national security credentials from those schools are less common in Top Secret workers minted after 9/11.

Strategic and intelligence studies programs that emerged after 9/11 at two universities are also prevalent in the educational backgrounds of the national security workforce: Duke (No. 66) and Mercyhurst University (No. 88). But fewer than 400 people out of 90,000 contained in our dataset have actual degrees in national security studies. Less than 5 percent of the total dataset have majors or advanced degrees in political science. International relations appears even less frequently, at 2 percent of the overall workforce.

Fewer than 100 people have graduate degrees in Middle Eastern studies. Less than 1 percent (fewer than 1,000 people) describe themselves as Arabic linguists. Of those, 60 percent are contractors, predominantly Arab-American citizens working for private companies under contract with national security–related agencies.

The Most Common Academic Concentrations in Top Secret Workers
1. Information Systems and Technology
2. Information Technology
3. Systems Engineering
4. Business Administration
5. Criminal Justice and Criminology
6. Computer Science
7. Political Science
8. Electrical Engineering
9. General Studies
10. Mechanical Engineering

Of the 10 most common academic concentrations present in the data, information systems, management, and systems engineering rank highest. Emergency management and disaster preparedness, which once fell under the rubric of public administration or urban and regional planning, is now largely subsumed under homeland security education alongside counter-terrorism. Degrees in intelligence-related criminal justice studies account for twice as many degrees as those in political science and international relations combined, even among military personnel.

Based on the most recent data for 2013, twenty-seven percent of those employed in the IC are civil service workers, that is, regular competitive civilian employees of the US government. Another 54 percent are military personnel, working directly for military intelligence agencies or seconded to other agencies. And 18 percent are private contractors — largely workers who were formerly members of the first two groups.

A frenzy of hiring following 9/11 after years of relative stagnation in the 1990s left the IC “dominated by senior and junior personnel, with shortfalls in the midcareer workforce,” according to a 2013 Rand Corporation study entitled Workforce Planning in the Intelligence Community. That frenzy brought in an enormous influx of junior personnel, overwhelming the formal training establishment at a time when the demand for non-traditional training shifted educational needs from military arts and sciences to information skills.

The world of drones, networks, geographic information systems, and big data were emerging and demanding new skill sets. Tens of thousands of analysts were needed to operate software-intensive intelligence systems. Much of their certification was simply outsourced to the schools on our list.

Outside of the military and intelligence communities, the situation was even more challenging. The new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created; in fact, more security personnel were hired by the DHS’s Transportation Security Administration in the first five years of its existence than the entire CIA, NSA, and State Department together employed. Online programs flourished, but skills training took over from any reliance on a liberal arts education.

On-the-job training has also influenced the educational styles of higher education institutions serving this constituency. They rely on more hands-on training and more college credits granted for experiential skills. Whether education quality has been sacrificed remains an open question, but there is no disputing that different types of workers and schooling has emerged, and that in the IC during the information era, education has often been overtaken by training.

As early as 2007, a crisis in national security education and training was already being observed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported its concerns about the uncontrolled growth and significant shortcomings in the composition and skills of the Top Secret workforce as part of its unclassified report on the classified budget. Inadequate lead times in hiring practices, the excessive use of contractors, ineffective training, and the absence of language proficiency were just some of the deficiencies they identified.

The IC and its law enforcement counterpart is consumed with acquiring an ever-increasing flood of information — like targeting and biographical data — and then processing it, moving it, analyzing it, storing it, and networking it for later retrieval. The system to do so has grown so complex that the quest to develop significant regional or cultural expertise about the lands or peoples whom we are fighting has fallen by the wayside. The education backgrounds and the areas of academic concentration show that the national security community has transformed into an information age army more consequential than traditional warriors.

The gloomy result is that the academy (and by extension the philanthropic world) has failed to establish a post-9/11 academic program to cultivate the next generation of scholars who can offer a genuinely civilian counter-narrative to the national security state similar to the civilian arms control community created during the Cold War. Even at the most elite schools that rank in the top 100, the many centers and research institutes focusing on warfare and terrorism are predominantly adjuncts of the national security state.

The IC has also become more isolated and self-perpetuating. This phenomenon is evidenced by two categories of schools that dominate the rankings: Firstly, the set of 20 online universities that subsist as the quasi-outsourced training establishment for the military and homeland security, subsidized largely by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. Second, the set of 17 Washington, DC-area schools that provide certification and post-undergraduate professional training for the inside-the-Beltway crowd.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, veterans brought more than $19.5 billion to colleges and universities through the GI Bill from August 2009 to September 2014. Nearly $8 billion of that went to for-profit colleges, according to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

It has been 14 years since 9/11, but many of the national security alliances now in place with higher education institutions have emerged in the past three years. Classified research on campuses, once highly controversial, is making a comeback. College and university administrators and campus police are increasingly being enlisted in homeland security, counter-terrorism, and counter-intelligence.

Internally since 9/11, the government has initiated an abundance of programs to improve institutional understanding of the cultures and languages in the regions where we are fighting: The Pentagon has created a program of “Afghan-Pakistan (AFPAK) hands” specializing in mentoring and training. The military has developed female engagement teams to work in the Muslim world, specifically in Afghanistan. The Army lauded its human terrain system, enlisting social scientists in network analysis and (disastrously) in interrogations. In government, there have also been reorganizations galore to face the challenges of national and international security, from the creation of DHS to the establishment of the military’s US Africa Command.

Yet there is no indicator of any significant advance in foreign language expertise or regional specialty, or indeed of any greater capacity to understand or think critically about the state of domestic or international affairs. The international order is no more stable today than it was a decade and a half ago. The homeland is not safer. The threats, both internationally and domestically, are ever increasing despite all of these efforts.

An overwhelming avalanche of intelligence information, a looming threat to cyber security, the echo chamber of Washington, DC, the outsourcing of basic training to educational contractors — these are the realities of the national security state that are exerting a tremendous influence on higher education in America. As a result, what is too often being taught at these schools is not the art of war or peace, nor the capacity to understand the costs or benefits of either.

Follow William M. Arkin (william.arkin@vice.com) on Twitter: @warkin

Follow Alexa O’Brien (email@alexaobrien.com) on Twitter: @carwinb

Economic Empowerment, Public Policy, Videos

Camden Civil Rights Project Endorses Bernie Sanders in 2016

January 31, 2016 Lawrence Christopher Skufca, J.D. Leave a comment

Bernie Sanders has a consistent thirty year track record of advocating for social justice and economic empowerment of the middle and working classes…..

Camden Civil Rights Project supports Sanders’ racial justice, women’s rights, LGBT equality, single payer healthcare, tuition free higher education, minimum living wage and corporate reform proposals

BERNIE SANDERS

On the Issues

The American people must make a fundamental decision. Do we continue the 40-year decline of our middle class and the growing gap between the very rich and everyone else, or do we fight for a progressive economic agenda that creates jobs, raises wages, protects the environment and provides health care for all? Are we prepared to take on the enormous economic and political power of the billionaire class, or do we continue to slide into economic and political oligarchy? These are the most important questions of our time, and how we answer them will determine the future of our country.

INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

IT’S TIME TO MAKE COLLEGE TUITION FREE AND DEBT FREE

GETTING BIG MONEY OUT OF POLITICS AND RESTORING DEMOCRACY

CREATING DECENT PAYING JOBS

A LIVING WAGE

COMBATING CLIMATE CHANGE TO SAVE THE PLANET

A FAIR AND HUMANE IMMIGRATION POLICY

RACIAL JUSTICE

FIGHTING FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS

FIGHTING FOR LGBT EQUALITY

CARING FOR OUR VETERANS

MEDICARE FOR ALL

FIGHTING FOR DISABILITY RIGHTS

STRENGTHEN AND EXPAND SOCIAL SECURITY

FIGHTING TO LOWER PRESCRIPTION DRUG PRICES

IMPROVING THE RURAL ECONOMY

REFORMING WALL STREET

REAL FAMILY VALUES

WAR AND PEACE

WAR SHOULD BE THE LAST OPTION: WHY I SUPPORT THE IRAN DEAL

REAL TAX REFORM POLICIES THAT SEN. SANDERS HAS PROPOSED

HOW BERNIE PAYS FOR HIS PROPOSALS

HOW BERNIE STACKS UP AGAINST THE OTHER CANDIDATES

Gender Equality, Human Trafficking, Uncategorized

Former Porn Star Lisa Ann Says Increased Demand for Abuse Porn Tends to ‘Break You Down as a Woman’

January 28, 2016 Lawrence Christopher Skufca, J.D. Leave a comment

Former adult actress says extreme scenes are harming amateur actresses

by Heather Saul

A retired adult film star has warned the growing appetite for ‘abuse’ porn is damaging amateur female performers, who are expected to take part in increasingly extreme scenes.

Lisa Ann left the industry in 2014 and now hosts a Fantasy Football show on Sirius XM radio. Unlike most performers whose careers within the industry often span just months or a few years, Ann appeared in adult films for two decades and has witnessed the industry’s trajectory towards more hardcore films.

Speaking to The Guardian, she claimed the difficulties some actresses face after leaving the adult industry often relate to the growing demand for extreme porn, and performers abusing drugs.

“There were times on set with people where I was like, ‘This is not a good situation. This is not safe. This girl is out of her mind and we’re not sure what she’s going to say when she leaves here,’” she said. “Everyone’s a ticking time bomb, and a lot of it is linked to the drugs. A lot of this new pain comes from these new girls who have to do these abusive scenes, because that does break you down as a woman.”

The demand for abuse scenes was addressed in the documentaryHot Girls Wanted, which included disturbing footage from a scene constructed to make a sex act appear forced on a female performer.

In an industry where pay rates have continuously declined, extreme acts also pay more, with the most radical commanding up to $2,500 per scene.

Rashida Jones, a producer on Hot Girls Wanted, described the cycle young women face when they start making amateur porn that she says encourages them to participate in more extreme scenes during an interview with Vice.

“Generally if you’re 18 and go to Miami, you’re done in a year, because there’s not enough amateur jobs for you. You can get some other jobs, but the niche stuff pays more, and the niche stuff is harder on your body,” she said.

“The pay can be $800, $1000 a shoot, but they still have to pay for hair and nails and make-up and travel and clothes – plus, they’re trying to live in a lavish way, so it ends up not being cost-effective. It’s not worth it.

“Then you have to make further negotiations with yourself, like, ‘Will I do torture porn? Will I do fetish porn? Will I do […] forced blowjobs?’ and things that you never expected to do.”

In 2010, a study conducted by Adult Video News reportedly found most of the scenes from 50 top-rented porn films involved the female performer appearing to be physically or verbally abused.

Rashida Jones: Young women not aware of ‘physical cost’ of porn

Gender Equality, Human Trafficking

Rashida Jones Warns Young Women About ‘Physical Cost’ of the Porn Industry

January 28, 2016 Lawrence Christopher Skufca, J.D. 1 Comment

The actor produced the film Hot Girls Wanted and cautioned young women against joining the industry

by Helen Nianias

Rashida Jones has spoken out against the “pornification” of culture, arguing that young women are exploited by the industry as it makes them believe the work is glamorous.

Speaking to Vice, Jones explained: “I have no problem with porn – also, it doesn’t matter if I have any kind of problem with porn, because it’s here to stay.

“I personally have no problem with porn as adult entertainment. I think it’s great that we have the freedom to explore our sexual fantasies, and that there’s tools to do that. The problem with me is that there’s no regulation in the industry – the average age someone watches their first porn is 11.

“For someone to learn about sex from porn, I think is really dangerous, and I think it happens a lot.”

Jones has spoken out in the past against the pop culture climate for extreme sexualisation, and described it as: “Here is the bottom of my ass”.

She has previously spoken out against the industry, saying that “because [porn is] performative, women aren’t feeling joy.”

Her documentary Hot Girls Wanted examines how young women are lured into working in pornography with the promise of being famous, only to end up in cities such as Miami expected to make “amateur porn”.

Jones explains that this genre – which is still fully scripted and operated like a regular film – focuses on plots that are “sort of like catching young, innocent girls off guard”.

She explains: “Generally if you’re 18 and go to Miami, you’re done in a year, because there’s not enough amateur jobs for you. You can get some other jobs, but the niche stuff pays more, and the niche stuff is harder on your body. The pay can be $800, $1000 a shoot, but they still have to pay for hair and nails and make-up and travel and clothes – plus, they’re trying to live in a lavish way, so it ends up not being cost-effective. It’s not worth it.”

Jones argues that the struggle for cash means women end up doing more extreme stuff.

The Parks and Recreation actor adds that her experience while making the documentary shows that the women who make this type of porn have generally only just turned 18 and may not understand the impact of the work.

“[There’s the] psychological, emotional, physiological – the physical cost of having sex for a living. [You’re] thinking about the fame part of it, so you might not be the best candidate to make a decision for yourself.”

Liz Curran of anti-violence charity Women’s Support Project argues that pornography is inherently harmful and there’s no way women can gain respect from it.

She told The Independent: “In a society where we want young women to be equal – accepting porn undermines the equality and independence of these young women.

“Women who need any support after commercial sexual exploitation should get in touch with the Object campaign or UK Feminista and they will put you in touch with the right people.”

Curran argued that “healthy relationships based on respect and consent is such a contrast to pornography.”

Rashida Jones: ‘Women should have sex and feel good’

Fourth Amendment, Privacy & Security, Privacy Rights

EFF Joins ACLU in Amicus Brief Supporting Warrant Requirement for Cell-Site Simulators

January 15, 2016 Lawrence Christopher Skufca, J.D. Leave a comment

DECEMBER 29, 2015 | BY JENNIFER LYNCH

EFF, ACLU, and ACLU of Maryland filed an amicus brief today in the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in the first case in the country (that we know of) where a judge has thrown out evidence obtained as a result of using a cell-site simulator without a warrant.

In the case, Baltimore Police used a Hailstorm—a cell-site simulator from the same company that makes Stingrays—to locate Kerron Andrews, the defendant. The police not only failed to get a warrant to use the device, they also failed to disclose it to the judge in their application for a pen register order. And it appears they even failed to tell the State’s attorney prosecuting Mr. Andrews’ case.

Luckily Mr. Andrews’ intrepid defense attorney suspected the police might have used a stingray and sent a discovery request asking specifically if they had. The prosecution stalled for months on answering that request, but, on the eve of trial, one of the investigators responsible for Baltimore PD’s stingrays finally testified in court not only that he’d used the device to find Mr. Andrews, but that he’d specifically not disclosed it in any report filed about Andrews’ arrest. The judge concluded the police had intentionally withheld information from Mr. Andrews—a clear violation of his constitutional rights.

This August, another Baltimore judge granted the defense’s request to suppress all evidence the police were able to get as a direct result of using the stingray. The judge held the use of the device without a warrant violated Andrews’ Fourth Amendment right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures. Unsurprisingly, the government appealed.

Cell-site simulators, also commonly known as IMSI catchers or stingrays, masquerade as legitimate cell phone towers, tricking phones nearby into connecting to the device instead of the tower operated by the phone company. This allows police to log the identifying numbers of mobile phones in the area and to pinpoint their locations. Police often use cell-site simulators when they are trying to find a suspect and know his phone’s identifying information.

As we learned from USA Today, the Baltimore PD has been using cell-site simulators extensively (and secretly) for at least the last eight years. A detective testified that Baltimore officers had used cell-site simulators more than 4,300 times since 2007. Like other law enforcement agencies around the country, Baltimore has used its devices for major and minor crimes—everything from trying to locate a man who had kidnapped two small children to trying to find another man who took his wife’s cellphone during an argument (and later returned it). And, like other law enforcement agencies, the Baltimore PD has regularly withheld information about Stingrays from defense attorneys, judges, and the public.

Stingrays are especially pernicious surveillance tools because they collect information on every single phone in a given area—not just the suspect’s phone—this means they allow the police to conduct indiscriminate, dragnet searches. They are also able to locate people inside traditionally-protected private spaces like homes, doctors’ offices, or places of worship—in Mr. Andrews’ case the investigators used the Stingray to pinpoint his location to within a specific apartment. Stingrays can also be configured to capture the content of communications.

This is why it’s imperative that police not only obtain a warrant based on probable cause before using a cell-site simulator but also commit to minimization procedures, including immediately deleting information about all phones not covered by the warrant and limiting the time period during which the device is used. These are not novel or onerous requirements—the Wiretap Actrequires similar procedures. And in fact, both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security recently committed to following similar procedures whenever their agents use stingrays.

We hope the Maryland Court of Special Appeals will agree that the warrantless use of a stingray is unconstitutional and uphold the lower court ruling suppressing the evidence.