Mark-Viverito fires Council whistleblower for disputing Commissioner Bratton's stats on NYPD use of force

City Council aide ­Artyom Matusov was fired for exposing a misrepresentation by Commish Bratton that "implied the percentage of arrests in which force was used had dropped in recent years"

Speaker Mark-Viverito's War on Whistleblowers A Harvard University Kennedy School of Government-educated City Council staffer was fired on Friday after he blew the whistle on inaccuracies in the official testimony provided by NYPD Commissioner William Bratton last Monday. In the City Council hearing, on the subject of police use of deadly chokeholds, Commissioner Bratton testified that police use of force was declining, stating that police officers used force in about 3 per cent. of the time out of an annual arrest rate of about 400,000. After City Council staffer Artyom Matusov heard the testimony, he did some number crunching, and Mr. Matusov discovered that Commissioner Bratton's calculations couldn't hold water. According to statistics analyzed by Mr. Matusov, Commissioner Bratton's testimony was incorrect, because police officers self-reported arrests in which force was used at a rate more than double than the rate to which Commissioner Bratton testified. That doubled rate covered approximately only 10 per cent. of annual arrests, meaning the actual use of NYPD force during arrests could be extrapolated to be at a much higher rate. Mr. Matusov claims that he was fired, "because Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito wanted to punish him for blowing the whistle on Mayor de Blasio’s police chief," The New York Daily News reported. In an interview with The New York Daily News, Mr. Matusov claimed that speaking out about Commissioner Bratton's faulty testimony cost him his job, because Speaker Mark-Viverito retaliated against him to protect Mayor de Blasio from any political fallout from Commissioner Bratton's perjury. Mr. Matusov noted how Speaker Mark-Viverito owes her political career to Mayor de Blasio, telling The New York Daily News that, “Remember, he appointed the speaker.”

RELATED Council aide claims he was fired for disputing Bratton (Capital New York) City Council analyst : I got fired by Speaker Mark-Viverito for saying Bill Bratton lied about NYPD's use of force (The New York Daily News) City Council aide says he was fired for exposing Bratton’s bogus data (The New York Post) Melissa Mark-Viverito Won’t Say Race Was a Factor in Eric Garner’s Death (The New York Observer) Michael Hayes, LMT, has practiced massage for more than 20 years as a licensed massage therapist in New York City.

FBI OWS Documents

On Page 61, redacted notes show that a sniper was being planned to take out leadership of OWS protesters in Houston, Texas. It is unclear who was planning the sniper attacks.

FBI Occupy Wall Street "OWS" Documents

On 22 November 2011, the FBI lied when it said that it had no documents on the Occupy Wall Street protests : FBI Claims It Does Not Have Any Documents on Occupy Wall Street (Truthout)

Secret FBI Subpoenas

The NYTimes doesn't believe that the U.S. Justice Department is conducting an illegal investigation of WikiLeaks. Oh, really ?

Running contrary to the characterisation of Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks activist who is also a member of Iceland’s Parliament, that U.S. prosecutors were using a court order to collect ''personal information from an elected official without having any case,'' The New York Times has reported that the scope of the court order was not unlawful.

''The news that federal prosecutors have demanded that the microblogging site Twitter provide the account details of people connected to the WikiLeaks case, including its founder, Julian Assange, isn’t noteworthy because the government’s request was unusual or intrusive. It is noteworthy because it became public.''

Let's examine just a couple of aspects of the court order :

(i) ''The order asks for subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and connection records along with other information related to the accounts.''

(ii) ''Stating that information held by Twitter was "relevant and material" to the WikiLeaks investigation, the district court ordered the startup to hand over:

• session times and connection records
• telephone numbers
• credit card information
• e-mail and IP addresses
• correspondence and notes of record''

What would the U.S. government be gaining from conducting a court-sanctioned surveillance for this kind of social media account information? Not for nothing, by focusing on subscribers and connection records, among other things, the U.S. government is casting a wide, indiscriminate net into cyberspace, and it is hoping to pull in something -- legal or otherwise, relevant or otherwise, applicable or otherwise. There is no focus to the court order ; its only objectives are to spy and to collect surveillance over both foreigners, over which the U.S. may have no jurisdiction, and citizens, who are being denied due process.

On a blog of a WikiLeaks supporter, someone asked, ''Is this not the same type of action that you, DOJ, find reprehensible in other countries?''

(As an aside, I wonder if The Times even appreciates the fact that, after the U.S. government's secret investigation of WikiLeaks has become ''public,'' those being targeted by the court order can now reasonably fight the unreasonableness of the indiscriminate scope of the court order. The owners of the social media accounts, on Twitter, Facebook, and Google, have legal rights, according to the law. How would the owners of the social media accounts know to fight the government's court order, if the government doesn't even serve the court order on the account owners? Look at how wikipedia gives context to due process violation : ''When a government harms a person, without following the exact course of the law, then that is a due process violation which offends the rule of law.'')