In the revealing PBS video documentary The Secret Government (1 hour 24 minutes), host Bill Moyers exposes the inner workings of a secret government much more vast that most people would ever imagine. Though originally broadcast in 1987, it is even more relevant today. Interviews with respected top military, intelligence, and government insiders reveal both the history and secret objectives of powerful groups in the hidden shadows of our government.
“The National Security Act of ‘47 gave us the National Security Council. Never have we had a National Security Council so concerned about the nation’s security that we’re always looking for threats and looking how to orchestrate our society to oppose those threats. National Security was invented, almost, in 1947, and now it has become the prime mover of everything we do as measured against something we invented in 1947.”
Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.
The suits against Dish are a response to the “Hopper” DVR and its “Auto Hop” feature, which automatically skips over commercials. According to the networks’ complaints, the Hopper automatically records eight days’ worth of prime time programming on the four major networks that subscribers can play back on request. Beginning a few hours after the broadcast, viewers can choose to watch a program sans ads.
These suits are yet another in a long and ignominious series of lawsuits by content owners seeking to control the features of personal electronic devices, and to capture for themselves the value of new technologies no matter who invents them. We’ve seen this movie before. Most directly, the Dish suits look like a replay of the 2002 suit against DVR maker ReplayTV. The networks sued ReplayTV for copyright infringement based on another automated commercial-skip feature. They claimed that viewers were infringing copyright when they skipped ads during playback, that skipping “robs the advertisers,” and that ReplayTV should be responsible. EFF argued then, and in a later suit on behalf of Replay’s customers, that choosing not to watch ads during playback is pretty far from being a violation of federal law. Unfortunately, the cost of the suit drove ReplayTV out of business before the court could rule on the networks’ wacky theory.
Fast forward ten years. The networks are accusing Dish of “inducing” copyright infringement. That’s a legal theory first created in the record labels’ case against peer-to-peer software maker Grokster. The problem for the networks is that a technology maker, service, or other middleman can’t be held liable for inducing copyright infringement unless their customers are actually infringing. And that means the networks will have to convince a judge that people who record a TV show, and later decide to skip over the commercials during playback, are violating federal law.
Dish is fighting back hard, filing its own lawsuit in New York to have its devices ruled legal. Hopefully, the courts won’t turn millions of American commercial-skippers into lawbreakers.
“I think I witnessed someone being murdered.”
The ACLU of Texas Immigrants’ Rights campaign and the Southern Border Communities Coalition has worked to shed light on Border Patrol brutality and rights abuses—including the eight men and boys agents have shot and killed over the past two years. On April 20, we shocked the nation with the exposé “Crossing the Line,” which aired on the PBS show Need to Know.
Since 2010, Border Patrol agents have killed eight members of U.S.-Mexico border communities and others have been seriously injured by the use of excessive force.
In June 2010, an incident that occurred along a railroad bridge connecting Juarez and El Paso made international headlines when a Border Patrol agent in El Paso shot and killed a 15-year-old boy on Mexican soil.
The Border Patrol has taken no known action against any of the agents involved in the killings; no investigation has been made public. Last week, PBS’s Need to Know aired a half hour segment exposing excessive use of deadly force that has become routine for the Border Patrol.
Mexicans: The other terrorist (sarcasm)
This video is owned by PBS and it shows the brutality of the border police as they needlessly beat and murder Hernandez Rojas.
Justice for Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas
The death of Anastasio Hernandez-Rojas, which garnered national media attention in 2010, has re-entered the limelight after PBS unearthed new footage of the incident between the Mexican citizen and border patrol agents.
In June of 2010, Hernandez-Rojas was struck with a baton by one border patrol officer and tased with a stun gun with another, after resisting deportation on the U.S.-Mexico border. He died shortly after the incident.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) insisted that Hernandez-Rojas’ behavior necessitated the use of a baton and stun gun. CBP reports maintained that he “became combative” and the baton and stun gun were used to “subdue the individual and maintain officer safety.”
But new footage has prompted some to ask if the federal agents used excessive force.
The video, shot by Seattle resident Ashley Young as she was crossing a bridge from Mexico to the United States, shows a crowd of about 20 border patrol agents standing around Hernandez-Rojas. He does not appear to be moving, and Young says in the “Need to Know” report that he was handcuffed. She said she did not witness any evidence of Hernandez-Rojas lashing out on the agents, but they are clearly heard yelling in the video for him to stop resisting. He was then tased five times while calling for help in Spanish.
A small crowd gathered on the bridge and some yelled for the agents to stop. But Young says officers came along to tell the onlookers to keep walking. One officer demanded that two witnesses hand over their cell phones or delete the video they had taken, she says, but she kept walking.
Young said she “felt like she watched someone be ‘murdered.’”
Eight individuals were killed along the border under disputed circumstances in just the past two years, according to PBS’ investigative report about Hernandez-Rojas’ death.
Two new eyewitnesses told PBS that Hernandez-Rojas “offered little or no resistance,” and the San Diego coroner’s office categorized the death as a homicide.
John Carlos Frey, an activist and documentarian who tracked down the witnesses, says in the report that he agrees with those who point out that Hernandez-Rojas was committing a crime by reentering the country.
“It is a violation of immigration law, that is true,” Frey says in the report. “It does not warrant a lethal bullet between your eyes or in your back.”
