Conspirasee

The Metropolitan police is considering the purchase of three water cannon at a cost of nearly £4m to cover London and the south east as part of a new approach to public order policing in the aftermath of the summer riots.

If the Met decides to go ahead it will be the first time that water cannon will be a routine option for police outside of Northern Ireland. The development comes as the Met also reveals that more officers are being trained to support its baton round teams, so that plastic bullets can be deployed more “spontaneously” when necessary in fast moving public order situations.

In what appears to be a toughening up of its tactics in the aftermath of the August riots, the force is examining whether further legislation is required to give officers more powers when dealing with large scale disorder as well.

Last week the Met commissioner was challenged over an apparent hardening of the approach when he appeared before the Metropolitan Police Authority. Bernard Hogan-Howe denied that there had been any policy change in relation to baton rounds or water cannon. But the interim report into the riots from the assistant commissioner Lynne Owens, which was published on Wednesday, identifies these two areas as ones where consideration is being given to a new approach following criticism over the summer that the Met had lost control of the streets.

Owens said the Met has explored “in detail” using water cannon as a policing tactic in London – even down to identifying how many are needed and how much they would cost. Having taken evidence from the situation in Northern Ireland the Met believes it would need three water cannons, at a cost of £1.3m each. Scotland Yard is exploring an option with the Association of Chief Police Officers to purchase the equipment as a regional asset for London and the south east and announce a decision next month.

During the riots, serious consideration was given to deploying baton rounds, but these were not used because of what the report said was the “agility” of the disorder and the availability of other tactics. Owens’s report shows that the Met has already taken steps to make sure that in future baton rounds could be used in such fast-moving public order situations.

Additional officers are now being trained to work alongside those firearms units who are trained to fire plastic bullets, known as Kestral teams, and making them available to borough commanders.

Owens said: “This increase in capacity will enable the MPS to make more agile use of this tactic in the future. Further expansion has also been explored in answer to the review’s findings that a more localised availability of this resource might have enabled commanders to deploy baton rounds as an effective tactic.

“The MPS is also considering the establishment of this tactic as a spontaneous response, thereby making it more readily available across London at short notice.”

Owens added that the Met was “fully aware” that active community engagement and consultation would be required before the introduction of any new tactics.

Isabella Sankey, director of policy for Liberty questioned the approach. “It’s easy to talk tough in an attempt to send signals about future riots but in practice would water cannon really help?

“It’s an indiscriminate tool capable of hurting innocent bystanders and just disperses troublemakers from one area to another.”

The Met said it was liaising with HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, before implementing any significant change. One of the greatest challenges the force has identified is intelligence gathering during public order situations, when those involved are using social media to organise and move from place to place.

“Intelligence gathering systems could not cope with the scale and speed and the spread of disorder,” said Owens. “The sheer scale of the information flows, communication requirements and co-ordination of resources posed immense challenges.”

In response the Met is developing a specialist team of officers who will focus on gathering intelligence and running any investigations which emerge out of large public order events.

The use of social media by police will be “professionalised”, the report said.

The Owens report confirms what senior officers have already said about their approach to the rioting – not enough officers were on the scene quickly enough. “The numbers were not enough and they did not arrive quickly enough to deal with the speed with which the violence escalated and its spread,” she concluded.

Guardian

Two bills are moving through the Senate and the House at the moment, aimed at creating a host of new controls and regulations over the internet, and threatening to change the way everybody does business and interacts online.

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is the House’s attempt to severely censor the internet ostensibly in order to clamp down on piracy. The companion bill in the Senate is the Protect IP Act. The two bills create an armada of new regulations that help big corporations and hurt regular people, start-ups, and clamp down on innovation.

In the Senate, Democratic senator Patrick Leahy is leading the push to pass Protect IP. In the House, Republican congressman Lamar Smith is leading the charge for SOPA. Over at the Daily Kos, kos writes:

This bill would’ve been rushed through with no debate through both chambers had it not been for the singular efforts of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a true hero of grassroots media and the social web.

Wyden has put a hold on the bill in the Senate, and has promised a full filibuster. Currently, there appear to be 60 votes to overcome that filibuster, but the delaying tactics would tie up the Senate for a full week. And if it doesn’t pass this year, supporters have to start from scratch all over again next year—this time under the full glare of a spotlight.

Wyden is now being joined with Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington, Jerry Moran of Kansas (he’s a senator that exists) and Rand Paul of Kentucky (even a stopped clock …).

I agree – Ron Wyden is one of the heroes of the Senate as far as I’m concerned. I’ve been a fan for a long time, and still think that he had the best healthcare plan of the bunch back when that was still news.

On the other side of the aisle, for all of our political disagreements, I think Rand Paul has been a breath of fresh air on many civil liberty issues.

I’ve written about this before, but I think we need a civil liberties caucus. Who cares about right or left? Progressive vs. libertarian? What I want – what I care about – are elected officials who want to stop madness like SOPA, the Patriot Act, and TSA abuses (not to mention things like assassination of US citizens and nation-building.)

The internet, for all its problems, has been an experiment in human ingenuity and creativity. These new bills could stomp on many of the best things about the internet. Free social media, collaboration, freedom of thought and opinion.

Conservative Patrick Ruffini writes:

The problem with the bill, and its Senate companion, the PROTECT IP Act, is not in its goals: no one disagrees artists should be paid for their work. It’s that it uses illegitimate means — censoring and blocking websites like they do in repressive regimes from China to Iran — to pursue these objectives. Furthermore, each subsequent version of the bill took even more draconian steps to regulate the Internet, effectively leaving any site with a user-contributed content no choice but to pre-screen every posting to comply with the law. Try that with 50 million tweets a day.

If passed, these bills will grow in size and scope with every new layer of bureaucracy and every new cave-in to powerful special interests. Once passed into law, they will be almost impossible to revoke. It’s always easier to make laws than it is to unmake them. For many Americans, the new laws will mean ordinary people will be forced to either break the law or live with a highly regulated, highly censored internet.

Or, as my Forbes colleague Andy Greenberg reported, people will have to take matters into their own hands, like some Reddit users are doing as they draw up plans to build an alternative for a post-SOPA world:

Redditors have flocked over the last week to a new subgroup on Reddit.com they’re calling the Darknet Plan–or sometimes Meshnet, as the name seems to still be in flux–with the aim of building a mesh-based version of the Internet that wouldn’t be subject to the control of any corporation or government, with a focus on anonymity, peer-to-peer architecture and strong resistance to censorship.

In the last few days, about 10,000 users have joined the group, and about 200,000 have visited, according to Chris Bresee, the 17-year old Vermonter who founded the project and goes by the name “Wolfeater” on the site. Bresee, a high school senior, created the Darknet Plan more than a year ago, but he attributes the sudden spike in interest to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the awareness of the possibilities of government censorship that the bill has created: If passed in its current form, SOPA would use Domain Name System filtering to effectively disappear infringing sites from the Internet. “I would say the Darknet Plan is driven almost in its entirety by fear of censorship coming out of Congress,” says Bresee, whose Vermont senator Patrick Leahy introduced the precursor to SOPA known as Protect-IP.”That’s what’s driven me, and I think that’s what’s driven the other ten thousand users to join.”

That’s the thing about the internet and about human ingenuity more broadly and the power of peer-to-peer interactions. Whether we’re talking about Craigslist or Reddit’s Darknet plan, the power of social collaboration and the disruptive power of the cyber-grassroots is going to be impossible to contain even with SOPA.

But it’s going to make it hard for a lot of people, especially every day people who aren’t cyber-libertarian-hacker types. For many of us, the internet is already confounding enough.

And, because a picture’s worth a thousand words:

Ruffini also lists some ways that you can help stop these very bad bills from becoming very bad laws:

Call your member of Congress. Tumblr’s call center is still up.
Sign Don’t Censor the Net’s petition against SOPA and PROTECT IP.
Sign up for Censorship Day, Round 2.
Add a Censored twibbon to your Twitter or Facebook profiles (h/t @DarrellIssa, one of the leading House opponents)
Share this video with your friends.
Follow Mike Masnick and TechDirt’s comprehensive coverage.

I don’t care if you’re a Republican a Democrat a Libertarian a Christian a Muslim or an Atheist. Your freedom of expression is universally good and government censorship is universally bad. A lot of very big money and very powerful people are trying to change the way we coexist online.

They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers.
Forbes

“Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.”