Abolish Oppression

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/36341777

In the video of the incident, which the family said occurred on Tuesday, the mother can be heard demanding her daughter's return.

"They took my daughter, she's 5 years old. She has autism spectrum," the woman says in the video. "Give me my daughter back."

The mother also explained that her daughter's father "managed to run back into the parking lot of my house, but they grabbed the girl."

The family said ICE agents challenged Edward Hip, a Guatemalan man who has lived in the United States for 22 years, to leave his home for his daughter.

"Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs," an agent can be heard saying in the video, which shows him motioning toward the camera.

"Hey, I can give it through the door," a man is heard saying in response.

"You can do it right here," the agent says, pointing to the ground in front of himself.

The mother reported alleged harassment by the officers.

"They threatened us, saying that if we didn't open the door within 15 minutes, they would enter the house," she told Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra.

Leominster police arrived at the scene, recovered the child and returned her to the family.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/46341703

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee rejected a request by Democrats yesterday to subpoena four major banks — JPMorgan, BNY, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank — about their connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The subpoena would have looked into $1.5 billion worth of suspicious transactions previously flagged by the banks. It comes as the committee’s ranking member, Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin, grilled FBI Director Kash Patel yesterday about the Epstein files.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.zip/post/474740

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/37530015

Private front-end for Reddit.

(Eastern District of Michigan - Detroit)

My husband, Conrad Rockenhaus, is wrongly incarcerated in a county jail. I’m posting this here because you are one of the few communities that will understand the full technical and political reality of how he ended up there.

My husband is a former Tor operator, and at one point, he ran some of the fastest relays and exit nodes in the world.

This nightmare began when he refused to help the FBI decrypt traffic from his exit nodes.

Months later, the government arrested him. Their official reason? A minor, non-violent CFAA charge from an old workplace dispute that had nothing to do with Tor.

In fact, the statute of limitations was just a couple of months from expiring. It was a clear pretext to target him.

That minor charge was all they needed to get him into the system. To deny him bail, a U.S. Probation Officer in Texas lied under oath, telling a judge that Conrad had installed a "Linux OS called Spice" to "knock out their monitoring software" and access the "dark web."

Read the transcript

Here is the technical reality of their lie: The software was a standard SPICE graphics driver needed for his Ph.D. program. As many of you know, this is a basic utility for displaying graphics from a virtual machine. It is not an OS, has no connection to the dark web, and was technically incapable of interfering with their monitoring software.

The claim is a technical absurdity, equivalent to saying a mouse pad can hack a server.

Based on that lie alone, he was held in pre-trial detention for three years.

Now, the retaliation has escalated in Michigan. After I filed a formal complaint against his US probation officers for harassment, they used fraudulent warrants to jail my husband again.

During this violent arrest by US Marshals (who smashed in our windows and nearly shot my dog) he sustained a severe head injury that caused him to have a grand mal seizure in court. The jail’s “medical attention” was to ask him what year it was (he said 2023) and then send him back to his cell. He is being denied real medical care.

See videos:

• Feds threatening to sick dogs on us

• Feds beating by husband in the head

• Feds smashing in our windows

• Feds threaten to shoot my dog

• More threats to shoot my dog

To make matters worse, U.S. District Judge Stephen J. Murphy, III has created a procedural trap that has stripped my husband of his right to a lawyer to fight for his life, health, or innocence. He is trapped in a constitutional and medical crisis.

I am not asking for money. I am asking for your help to amplify this story. You understand the technical truth and why this fight is so important.

We have all the evidence: the court transcript of the false testimony, the fraudulent warrants, the proof of medical neglect. It’s documented on my website:

https://rockenhaus.com/

TL;DR: My husband, a former Tor operator, refused to help the FBI decrypt Tor traffic. They retaliated by using an old, unrelated CFAA offense to arrest him and then lied about him using a "graphics driver to access the dark web” to keep him in pre-trial detention for 3 years. Now he's been jailed again in Michigan on fraudulent violations, is being denied care for a head injury, and has no lawyer.

I need help getting the word out🙏

Adrienne Rockenhaus

For updates:

• Official Press

• X/Twitter

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35878026

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/53398

From In These Times via this RSS feed

“The Department of Homeland Security has become the department of state terror,” said Rep. Delia Ramirez.

Even though President Donald Trump says he is pivoting from plans to deploy the National Guard in Chicago — now eyeing Memphis as his next target — Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers appear to still be escalating operations throughout the area, with devastating consequences.

Willian Gimenez, a day laborer, was reportedly abducted outside of a barbershop in Little Village, a neighborhood in southwest Chicago, by ICE agents on Friday. On Saturday morning, immigration rights advocates, public officials and labor groups like Arise Chicago, the Chicago Workers Collaborative and Workers Center for Racial Justice, gathered with Gimenez’s friends and family outside of an ICE facility in Broadview to demand his release.

Gimenez, who is in his late 30s and is from Venezuela, is one of five migrant day laborers involved in a federal lawsuit claiming that, among many other things, they ​“endured physical violence at the hands of off-duty Chicago Police Department officers” who were working as security officers for Home Depot, according to the complaint. The lawsuit also alleges ​“a conspiracy to criminalize day laborers’ attempts to find work in Chicago.”

Speakers at a Saturday morning news conference organized by workers’ advocates said they believe he was intentionally targeted because he is a plaintiff in that suit. (An ICE spokesperson, after In These Times and Workday requested comments about the abduction, defended the arrest but would not say where Gimenez was taken or being held.)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41454997

Europe’s block on boycotting banks

No law directly prohibits boycotting banks AFAIK, but it’s effectively illegal to boycott banks because:

• It is illegal to be paid wages in cash in some (all?) countries.
• Some EU countries governments insist on tax payments by bank transfer. This is for all kinds of tax (income tax, property tax, and other forms of tax).
• EU level: all cash transactions above €10k are illegal in the whole of Europe. Most of western Europe reduces that limit to €1—3k.

Belgium’s ban on boycotting energy suppliers

Offgrid energy is illegal.

Denmark: you cannot boycott email, as of this year

Denmark eliminates the postal service this year. This essentially means you cannot boycott email because the snail mail option is generally gone. Exceptionally, you can perhaps send letters using UPS or FedEx, but that’s not really affordable if you are boycotting email. Not sure if hand-delivery is an option. Consider Germany, where postal boxes are not always public access and couriers are given a key to the lobby. If that happens in Denmark, then hand-delivery cannot be relied on.

US ban on boycotting Israel

You can boycott the US in the US if you want, but you cannot boycott Israel if your job is from the US government. This tyranny was showcased in Texas when a Palestinian school contractor who taught kids how to speak Arabic had to renew her contract. The new contract required her to agree to not boycott Israel. She could not in good conscious sign such a bizarrely oppressive contract, so she was let go.

Caleb Sickinger, 45, was sentenced to 108 months in federal prison for his role in obtaining images of a child from social media, digitally altering them to appear pornographic, and distributing the altered images to an individual in Alabama. […]
Sickinger utilized images from the woman’s social media account to mascaraed as her when distributing the material.

Caleb used AI distribute CSAM of victims on his GAN.