image credit: Chad Miller/Flickr

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

I have spent a great deal of time covering biometrics and how this information is centralized in a federal database which can be shared with other agencies and even international “partners” as well.

Over recent years, there has been a clear and concerted effort to increase the amount of biometric information collected on American ..., along with a rise in the force (direct and indirect) of the tactics leveraged by government agencies in their quest to obtain biometric information.

This was evidenced most recently by a disturbing, and likely illegal, tactic used against Occupy Wall Street protesters after they were arrested in one of the most brutal police actions we’ve seen in quite a time.

Indeed the arrests were so out of hand, a member of the New York City Council actually used the word “brutal” in describing the atrocious response. Members of the press were also allegedly harassed, attacked and otherwise prevented from doing their job according to many of their statements on Twitter.

One of the most disturbing incidents can be seen below when a young woman actually had a seizure at which point police carried her by her head and she had to wait a considerable amount of time (17 minutes according to some reports) before professional medical help arrived and protesters outside of the barricades reportedly had to call 911 to get the EMT to come.


This situation gets even more troublesome when we consider the statements of Ryan Devereaux on Democracy Now.

“Attorneys with the National Lawyers Guild are particularly concerned because, despite repeated efforts, they haven’t been able to speak to her,” Devereaux said.

“These attorneys have told me that in most cases, it would be easy for them to speak to a potential client, to speak to someone who is—you know, who’s in police custody but has been hospitalized. But those efforts have been stopped. It’s unclear exactly why,” he added.

If you want to know more about this situation, I encourage you to check out this link, but keep in mind that it involves Michael Moore and I do not, by any means, consider Democracy Now to be an unbiased and uncompromised source of information. I recommend taking it with a grain of salt, although that’s my point of view when it comes to any and all news sources.

The situation for these activists got even worse during arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court. While most of these protesters were charged with very minor crimes, they were soon to find out that they could not be released on their own recognizance (or ROR in courtroom jargon) if they did not agree to have their irises photographed by police.

Activists and their volunteer legal advisors discovered that the size of their bail was actually being swayed by their willingness to have their irises photographed and input into a database.

According to Runnin’ Scared, a blog with the Village Voice, photographing of irises by police and courts, at both the time of arrest and at arraignment, in the United States dates back to 2010. Nick Pinto, writing for the blog, claims that it was due to multiple instances of a mistaken identity wherein an individual facing quite serious charges was allowed to go free by impersonating an individual facing relatively minor charges.

However, I see this as part of a greater trend of increasing the amount of highly personal biometric information which is collected from the people of the United States, all to be put in centralized databases indefinitely.

Of course, there is also the major problem that, apparently, people have their irises photographed at the time of arrest and arraignment, meaning that even if they drop some frivolous charge after arresting you and let you go free with no charges filed, they still have your iris scan on file.

This is actually not the first time these problems have cropped up in the news. Indeed, in February of this year, the New York Times reported on a 32-year-old woman who was arrested at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in December.

This individual, named Samantha Wilson, said that she was threatened by an officer after she refused to have her irises photographed.

“He said: ‘It’s not really optional. It’ll take you longer to get out of here if you don’t do it,’” she said when recalling the officer’s threat. Rebecca Heinegg, Wilson’s lawyer, says that she was held for longer than usual due to her refusal to have her irises photographed and put in a database.

This program is supposedly mandatory, and obviously police pressure suspects into agreeing to the practice by holding them longer and even manipulating the amount of money they have to pay for bail.

This is not only happening to individuals arrested for activities linked to Occupy Wall Street. Indeed, when a defense lawyer for an individual charged with marijuana possession told Judge Abraham Clott that she believed that her client was not legally bound to agree to have their irises photographed, she discovered that the court did not see it that way.

Judge Clott said that while the process of having irises photographed and placed in a database might be optional in that the court can technically go forward with proceedings without the photographs if the equipment used to take the pictures breaks or some such other factor arises, they are not, in fact, optional for the defendant.

Entire article here:   http://www.activistpost.com/2012/03/ows-activists-bail-affected-by-...