The Final Straw Radio

This week on error451, the occasionally-weekly tech podcast from an anarchist perspective brought to you by The Final Straw Radio, Bursts and William Budington chat about devices crossing the U.S. border.  Now, neither of us are lawyers and situations change according to laws, precedence and actual practice with border security, so consider these better practice suggestions. We talk about full disk encryption, cloud solutions, planning a trip, if some devices are more secure than others and safer-practices if you've lost control of your device. William B suggests the Security Self-Defense series from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which employs William) as a great, free resource for getting prepared for travel and other situations and keeping up on current developments in tech. Song heard: ii by Sole from Mansbestfriend7

This week William and Disembodied Voice had the chance to interview Walidah Imarisha, who is an Oregon based writer, educator, public scholar and spoken word artist about her book Angels With Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption, her 2016 book out from AK Press and IAS, which highlights three distinct experiences that are all in different degrees tangential to the realities inherent to the prison industrial complex. This book just won the Creative Non-Fiction Award in the state of Oregon earlier in 2017. In this interview we got to touch on a wide array of topics, mostly centered on Angels With Dirty Faces but also on accountability processes and what might have to change in order for them to feel more effective, her relationship to anarchism, and some upcoming projects and appearances. We also get to touch on the book Octavia’s Brood, a compilation of speculative fiction that Imarisha co edited with Adrienne Maree Brown, who also wrote the book Emergent Strategy. More about Imarisha, her work, and upcoming events can be found at http://www.walidah.com/ Resist Package Restrictions for Those Incarcerated in New York State! The thugs who run the NYS prison system (NYS DOCCS) has issued a new directive (4911A) that describes new, draconian package rules that they are testing in 3 facilities as a ‘pilot program’. Currently, at most facilities, family and friends can drop off packages at the front desk when visiting- packages that include fresh fruit and vegetables that supplement the high carb/sugar, meager diet provided by DOCCS. These new rules are problematic in a lot of ways including: 1) Packages can be ordered only from approved vendors. 2) Fresh fruit and vegetables are not allowed. 3) Family and friends cannot drop off packages while visiting. All packages must be shipped through the vendor. 4) Each person is limited to ordering three packages a month for him or herself and receiving three packages a month from others. Each package cannot be more than 30 pounds. Of the 30 pounds per package, only 8 pounds can be food. 5) Allowable items will be the same in all facilities. (No more local permits.) 6) There are far fewer items allowed than before and of the items that are allowed, far less variety. This includes additional restrictions on clothing. 7) The pilot rules are not clear about how books, media, religious items and literature, or other items subject to First Amendment protection will be treated. This could mean that groups like NYC Books through Bars will not be able to send free books to the 52,000 people in the prison system. The pilot program implements an “approved venders only” package system. This means that only packages from approved vendors will be accepted. The vendors appear to be companies that specialize in shipping into prisons and jails. There are currently five approved vendors identified on the DOCCS website. This amounts to a cash grab for these companies. The pilot program is starting at three facilities: Taconic, Greene, and Green Haven. Those facilities will stop accepting packages from non-approved vendors on January 2, 2018. We have to make this package directive unworkable. These new rules are cruel- eliminating fresh fruit and vegetables and creating massive profits for the vampire companies that will fill the niche. WE CAN ORGANIZE TO ROLL THESE RULES BACK. Some ideas how: 1-Sign the petition- share it with your address book, share it on twitter, share it on Facebook. It takes two seconds. https://diy.rootsaction.org/…/no-package-restrictions-for-n… 2-Get in touch with your people in NYS Prisons and let them know about this. Inform them, send them the info. Massive non-cooperation on the part of NYS prisoners will play a huge role in this. 3- Flood the electeds with postcards. Send one to Governor Cuomo and one to Anthony Annucci, the acting commissioner of DOCCS. It costs 34 cents. Andrew M. Cuomo Governor of New York State NYS State Capitol Building Albany, NY 12224 Acting Commissioner Anthony Annucci NYS DOCCS Building 2, State Campus Albany, NY 12226 Some sample text: Dear Governor Cuomo, This holiday season is about giving, not taking away. I object to the new DOCCS package rules. From, (Your Name) (Your relationship to people in prison, if applicable) Dear Acting Commissioner Annucci, The new DOCCS package pilot punishes innocent families. Having a loved one in prison is already expensive and difficult—the new rules make it worse. Rescind the package pilot! From, (Your Name) (Your relationship to people in prison, if applicable) 4) Write a letter to both of these people (address above) 5)Call Cuomo’s office and leave a message about it. You won’t have to talk to anyone. Just leave your message. 518-474-8390 6) Email Cuomo: http://www.governor.ny.gov/content/governor-contact-form Annuci anthony.annucci@doccs.ny.gov 7) Tweet at Cuomo @NYGovCuomo 8) Write your NYS Senate and Assembly reps as well: 9) Get media to cover it especially outfits like Democracy Now and the Marshall Project. stories@democracynow.org pitches@themarshallproject.org ——- Show playlist here.

  This week, the show features two interviews. Anti-Fascist Organizing in Charlotte Against AntiCom The first is with an antifascist in Charlotte, NC, about the “March Against Communism” event that MIGHT be taking place in that city on Thursday, December 28th. Anticommunist Action, the nazi group that originally announced the event had hoped to hold it in Marshall Park but never applied for a permit, got told off by the city and MAYBE cancelled it. This anti-fascist, Soyboy, thinks it might still occur and wants folks to show up. (A) Healthcare Workers Respond to 7 Words Banned at CDC Then, William talked with two anarchist healthcare workers in Asheville, NC  about the Trump administration’s censorship of language regarding the  Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2018 budget proposal  documents. In this short episode we talk about what this means, some recent context for similar censorship, how CDC budget documents affect people’s everyday lives, and recommendations for how to move forward. This chat appeared as a "minisode" in our podcast feed this week. They chat about possible implications of removal of the following terms from the CDC’s budgeting proposals: fetus; transgender; science-based; evidence-based; diversity; vulnerable; & entitlement. Announcement: Asheville NYE Noise Demo On Sunday, 12/31/17 at the downtown Buncombe County jail and courthouse complex in Asheville, a noise demonstration will happen at 7pm to bring outside attention to the jail and let the folks on the inside know that we’re thinking of them. Bring noisemakers, pots, pans, horns, whatever. Here’s a link to the jpg of the flyer.  Not in Asheville? Organize your own damn thing.  Or check itsgoingdown.org to join with an existing event! Playlist

Today William talked with two anarchist healthcare workers in Asheville, NC about the Trump administration's censorship of language regarding the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's 2018 budget proposal documents. In this short episode we talk about what this means, some recent context for similar censorship, how CDC budget documents affect people's everyday lives, and recommendations for how to move forward. Unfortunately the taping of another show made it into the background of this minisode, sorry about that. If you listen closely you might learn something about the latest game. To read more about this recent censorship, you can get online and type something along the lines of "CDC list of banned words" into your web browser for some more background context.

  DefendJ20 Updates on 1st Trial Block For the hour, we spoke with Betty Rothstein of DefendJ20Resistance and Jude Ortiz of DefendJ20Resistance and the Titled Scales Collective, about how the case is going as this first trial group finishes up it's defense and the prosecution fires it's last shots. This conversation was recorded on Friday, 12/15/17 after the final arguments in the case of the first trial group of the J20 arrestees, the 194 people facing as many as 60 years in Federal prison for the property damage that occurred on January 20th, 2017, in Washington D.C.  during the inauguration of Donald Trump.  The march was advertised as an Anti-Fascist and Anti-Capitalist protest against the incoming administration.  The march started with as many as 500 participants and ranged 16 city blocks, often chased by police spraying super soaker-style guns filled with OC pepper spray, stingball grenades, concussion grenades and swinging batons.  At the intersection of 12th & L, people were pushed into a kettle where many were forced to sit in the January cold and mist for over 6 hours without water, without medication or professional medical aid, in clothing soaked in OC spray, having to relieve themselves outside and among other people. The property damage  at the center of this case amounted to 5 chain businesses windows.  And now the trial is moving forward, drawing 6-8 defendants to D.C. at a time, this first group's trial lasting 4 weeks thus far (plus however long jury deliberation will take).  The trials have led to pressures on individuals, relationships, loss of employment and income, legal and other huge costs and threaten to pave a path in this administration and beyond of the criminalization of participation in street demonstrations in the U.S.  The attempts at criminalizing street medics and journalists, as well, for being present also poses a dangerous precedent. More on the case and how to offer support can be found at DefendJ20Resistance.Org , by signing up for their email newsletter and listening to their regular podcast updates on the trial.  They are also on twitter, fedbook and instagram. Playlist pending

This week, Bursts was joined by Pat Boyle, a collective member at Unicorn Riot (more about them later in this post), radical independent media project.  We chatted about crypto-currency, Bitcoin in particular, technologies and strategies involved in the implementation of crypto-currency, recent comings to light of increased wealth coming via Bitcoin into the hands of far right racists and ecological impacts of crypto-mining. As to the far right, we referenced an article from IdaVox and one from Mic.com, as well as the twitterbot @NeoNaziWallets that can be visited to track transactions with the bitcoin wallets of well-known white supremacists. Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading of Bitcoin was brought up a few times, and it was just introduced to the Private, or secondary, Market of the NASDAQ. An example of an interesting use of cryptocurrency ongoing against the prison industrial complex is the BailBloc project that is shared between the Bronx Freedom Fund and The New Inquiry. Some great Unicorn Riot content that Pat & company have been releasing this year (an incomplete list): Black Snake Killaz, full length documentary about resistance to the #DAPL; Coverage from Greece & the G20 in Hamburg, Germany; on the ground in Charlottesville, VA for Unite The Right; the processing of TONS of documentation of the UTR organizing on the (leaked) Discord chat platform; Our interview last year with Unicorn Riot's Pat Boyle and Wendy Parker; their appearance on Delete Your Account talking about their coverage of the Alt-Right. track heard: Traffic by Babyland from their 1992 album, You Suck Crap.

Interview with RAM-NYC This week we spoke with members of The Base, which is an anarchist space in New York City, about the newly formed Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement NYC Community Bail Fund. In this episode we talk about the concept of bail and its origins, what folks have happen to them from the moment of arrest to the moment bail is set, what it means to have an explicitly abolitionist bail fund, the intricacies of the corporate bail bond system, and many many other topics! We end with a surprise follow up question to our previous interview about Burn Down the American Plantation, a text which our guests authored and put out earlier in 2017. To hear that previous interview, you can go to our blogpost about it and listen for free! To support this initiative and for more information, you can go to fundedjustice.com. To connect with our guests, you can email them at revolutionaryabolitionistmovement@protonmail.com or search that name on any of the social media platforms commonly in use (Twitter: @RevAbolitionNYC , Facebook: RevAbolitionistNYC ) Further reading on our current bail system is as follows: From the New York Times From The Nation Announcements It was announced today that members of Hudson Valley Earth First! is in the second day of a tree-sit to stop the Valley Lateral Pipeline in Wawayanda, New York.  From their press release: On December 8th, 2017, Millennium Pipeline Company started clearing trees for the Valley Lateral Pipeline, which would connect fracked natural gas from the existing Millennium Pipeline to the scandal-ridden, toxic Competitive Power Ventures (CPV) Power Plant.  Courts and government will never protect the land, but these brave beings have put their lives on the line to save endangered species and sacred wilderness. Day 2: We have a direct update from one of our treesitters: "Cut trees leading toward wetlands and eagles nest and to wetlands and farm fields and forests where I hear cutting. Pretty quiet where I am. Swaying in the breeze a bit this morning. Trying to keep snow from getting in warm bags and that's working well. This fight is only beginning and this is the first known actual treesit in the Hudson valley ever. We need more affinity groups willing to take action against these projects and their world. CPV. Millennium. Legoland and that which destroys this bioregion. Minisink Lenape indigenous land." For More Updates and Photos Hudson Valley Earth First! Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/HVEarthFirst/ If this 7.8 mile pipeline is completed, it would run through ecosystems which contain, and have the potential to contain, endangered species such as the Bald Eagle(a mating pair is known to live 30 feet from the right-of-way), the Indiana Bat, and the Bog Turtle. Additionally, if the CPV plant is fueled, the pollution from the plant release tons of chemicals known to increase cancer and asthma rates in nearby areas. This pipeline is the bottleneck to stopping this plant. Aides to Gov. Cuomo and CPV executives go to trial in January over a bribery scandal. Also, if the pipeline is stopped before August 2018, the CPV plant will likely go bankrupt and this beautiful bioregion will be spared from further ecological destruction.  After nearly 6 years of fighting this project, we are running out of options. Tree sits are a form of aerial blockade where individuals rig themselves in trees or sit on a small platforms hoisted into trees to prevent the cutting of that tree. Additionally the rigging of the treesitter’s platform can be attached to other trees to protect an entire area of forest. This tactic relies upon the unwillingness of a logger/company to take human life in the pursuit of economic enterprise, like the building of an unnecessary and polluting pipeline. Tree sits can be long term endeavors, and Hudson Valley Earth First! is prepared to stay in the trees as long as it takes to protect the wild!! Asheville Area If you're in the Asheville area, stay tuned the next two weeks during Words To Live By at 1pm on 103.3 wsfm-lp, before The Final Straw, where we will air radio shows from the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and radios, of which we are a proud member. Tell your friends! Also in Asheville, at 7pm at the County Jail on New Years Eve there will be a noise demonstration against the current jail, against the proposed new women's facility and for a world without incarceration. If you bring noisemakers and signs, it's hoped that participants can get the attention of folks on the outside to the failure of the carceral state to bring justice, only the immiseration of marginalized individuals and their communities while lining the pockets of the state and capital. And to reach out to those on the inside to let them know that we're thinking of them.  Here's where you can find the flyers! Error451 tech podcast If you haven't yet, we'd like to invite you to check out our ongoing new podcast series entitled Error451. An html451 error delineates a page being unavailable due to political censorship, a reference to Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451. Well, our occasionally weekly podcast features Bursts chatting with different folks about tech security issues from an anarchist perspective. This week, rather than our usual guest, William Budington from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we'll be joined by Pat Boyle from Unicorn Riot to talk about crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, the increased usage to enrich the far-right and how we can fight back. You can find this on Wednesday, alongside past issues of Error451 and this here Final Straw Radio show at  thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org! Playlist here.

This week, William Budington chats with Bursts about the recent exposé published by Yael Grauer at The Intercept about research by Exodus and Yale Research Group leading to the findings that hundreds of common apps available from the Android Google Play Store contain clandestine tracking apps, allowing for the scooping up of the data a phone user gives off throughout their use of the device.  Ever wonder why a free flashlight app needs permission to access your microphone?  Here's why! We also chat a bit about F-Droid, a platform for free and open-source apps outside of the Play Store, many designed at increased transparency of device usage. At one point, Bursts brings up criticisms aired about the F-Droid repository by Moxie Marlinspike, a founder of Open Whisper Systems, which makes the Signal App for free end-to-end encryption. William is kind enough to explain what the concerns come from and his views on the subject. Like this show?  Rate us on I-Tunes or dop us an email, check out other Error451 episodes or our regular feature, The Final Straw Radio. Oh, and you should know better than to be on social media, but if you are willfully ignorant, we are findable on fedbook, instagram and twitter. track heard: Ugh! Your Ugly Houses! by Chumbawamba from the album "Swingin' With Raymond"

This week we feature two segments. Prison-Related Audio Roundtable The first is a roundtable discussion with producers from various audio projects around North America that focus on prisoner struggles and amplifying incarcerated voices. In the chat you'll hear from me, two producers of The Prison Radio show on CFRC radio in Kingston, Ontario, a producer of the Prison Radio Show on CKUT from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and a producer of the June11 audio  series released this last year and revving to mark the day in solidarity with Marius Mason and other long term anarchist and ecological prisoners. Follow-Up with Walid Zazai on Manus Island The second conversation is an update from Walid Zazai, the 24 year old Afghani man being held on Manus Island off of the coast of Papua New Guinea. Walid has been in detention for 4 years now awaiting resettlement at the pleasure of the government of Australia. We spoke with Walid two weeks ago after the Manus Regional Processing Centre in which he was living had been closed and he and roughly 450 other refugees stayed in protest of their longtime lack of freedom of movement and the violence they feared from PNG security forces and locals on the island. More coverage of the struggle immigrants against the Australian border authorities and other updates from the Oceania can be found on the long running Anarchist radio show based there, Subversion1312. Subversion1312 is also a recently added member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Now For Some Fun Events If you're in the Asheville area today (December 3rd 2017), at 5pm at Firestorm Books and Coffee, Blue Ridge ABC will be hosting it's monthly letter writing session, where you can swing by, find out about political prisoners in the U.S., write to some with upcoming birthdays and meet other local radicals. After that, tonight at 8pm at the Lazy Diamond, 98-A, North Lexington Ave in downtown Asheville, comrades will be hosting a Radical Trivia night to benefit the 2nd Asheville Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, or ACAB2018, planned for this summer. Alone or in teams, you are invited to test your wits on subjects of Black Liberation, Anarchist History, Queer Resistance and more. A cash prize will go to the winning team or individual. This episodes playlist

This week on the occasionally-weekly tech podcast from The Final Straw, Error451, Bursts and guest William Budington, a tech security expert, talk about Net Neutrality.  The context is that it's back in the news as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai appears to be pushing for the revocation of the 2015 FCC decision to declare the Internet a Title II public utility in U.S. law.  The upside of this is that access to un-inhindered Internet is then supposedly enshrined in the law as a public good.  The current make up of the court includes 3 Republicans (including Pai) and 2 Democrats, so if a vote happens in mid-December along party lines, the Title II status may be revoked, possibly allowing for tiered access, which would possibly allow internet service providers and comms giants who are the gatekeepers to the web to throttle access to lower-paying services or outright deny access to certain sites and services. We chat about how Tiered Access looks in countries like Portugal, the very curious padding of at least 1.1 million online submissions to the FCC's Open Comment period misrepresenting U.S. voters perspectives on Net Neutrality and the FCC's apparent disinterest in investigating the stunt. William suggests that one action listeners can take immediately, which sadly is far from a direct action is to lobby congresspeople to block the move by Chairman Pai and protect the Internet as it is. He suggests visiting BattleForTheNet.Com and petitioning the powers that be via their suggestions.  As far as a wider lense of what we might do to increase autonomy and integrity in our information technologies, William suggests listeners check out and start playing with Mesh Networking technologies.  Mentioned in the episode are People's Open in Oakland, CA, USA & Friefunk in Germany. track heard: Connected by Stereo MCs from their album, Connected