Big Apple? More Like Big Brother

Posted on Jun 9, 2010

Collage based on photo by Flickr user bgilliard (CC-BY-SA)

Citing the specter of terrorism, an appeals court overturned a decision that would have forced New York City to turn over documents detailing the surveillance of demonstrators, street performers and other ne’er-do-wells who may have threatened the 2004 Republican convention ... and our national security, of course.

New York Times:

More than 1,800 people were arrested and fingerprinted during the convention, but lawyers for the civil liberties group, representing some of those arrested, were seeking the documents to see how and why arrests were made and what information the police may have had before they made the arrests.

In recent years, the city has paid millions of dollars to many of those who sued after their arrests, asserting that they had been improperly taken into custody. Many were herded into pens at a West Side pier in Manhattan that was dubbed Guantánamo on the Hudson.

Read more

More Below the Ad

New and Improved Comments

We are launching a major overhaul of our comments section.

In addition to more robust spam filtering and moderation, new features include the ability to rate other comments, sort how they are displayed and respond directly via e-mail or in a thread.

Unfortunately, commenters will lose their existing Truthdig identities. It's a pain, we know, but on the plus side you will now be able to log in with a plethora of options, including Google, Twitter, Facebook and Disqus accounts.

Before launching this system we spent months in discussion with our top commenters. We listened to the feedback and we hope you like what we've come up with.

Please direct any problems or concerns to us via our contact page.