Arrests at Occupy Montreal mark first anniversary of protest

By The Canadian Press - Monday, October 15, 2012 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

MONTREAL – Police made at least two arrests at a small demonstration today held to mark the first anniversary of the Occupy Montreal movement.

About 50 demonstraters gathered in the downtown square across from the Montreal stock-exchange building where protesters set up camp a year ago.

After occupying the square for about a month last fall, they were forcibly removed by police in November.

One year later, people were back today to make brief speeches and several dozen then marched through downtown streets, chanting along the way.

The protesters, many of them wearing black and with their faces covered, disrupted traffic.

At one point, they tried to enter the downtown offices of Quebec’s Caisse de depot pension-fund manager, but the doors were locked. They also entered the offices of engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, but they were chased out of the building.

A few minutes later, riot-equipped police rushed the small crowd as it made its way along Ste-Catherine street, one of the city’s main downtown arteries. That’s when the arrests were made.

Twitter hands over records in Occupy Wall Street case

By Alex Katz, Colleen Long, The Associated Press - Friday, September 14, 2012 at 10:06 PM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Twitter on Friday agreed to hand over about three months’ worth of tweets to a judge overseeing the criminal trial of an Occupy Wall Street protester, a case that has become a closely watched fight over how much access law enforcement agencies should have to material posted on social networks.

The social networking site had been threatened with steep fines if it did not comply with Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr.’s order to turn over the records in the case of Malcolm Harris.

But the judge said he would keep the records sealed until after a Sept. 21 hearing challenging his ruling on the messages.

Twitter’s lawyer, Terryl Brown, called the options it faced — waiving its right to appeal or being in held in contempt of court — “unfair” and “unjust,” though ultimately Brown handed over a thick white envelope full of Harris’ information.

“We are disappointed that Twitter is essentially giving up the fight,” Harris’ attorney Martin Stolar said after the court hearing.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said Harris’ messages could show whether he was aware of the police orders he’s charged with disregarding during a protest at the Brooklyn Bridge.

The case began as one of hundreds of disorderly conduct prosecutions after an Oct. 1 march in New York that brought the Occupy protest movement its first burst of worldwide attention. Harris was among more than 700 people arrested when protesters tried to cross the bridge, many on the roadway.

Police said demonstrators ignored warnings to stay on a pedestrian path. Harris, an editor for an online culture magazine, and others say they thought they had police permission to go on the roadway.

Prosecutors want tweets and user information from Sept. 15 to Dec. 31 that were taken down from the public site. After a certain period of time, tweets are automatically flushed out by the system and placed in the site’s stored electronic records, Stolar said.

Internet privacy and civil liberties groups have said the case is important because individuals must be able to fight for their constitutional rights, but they also wanted to see how the large and influential company handled the request.

“I think the biggest implication is going to be about how companies are going to react to what happened to Twitter here,” said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier foundation. “One of the things we were happy to see is that Twitter actually took a stand and tried to challenge this — most companies wouldn’t go that far.”

Still, it’s a hard argument to make — because Twitter by nature is so public, said Joel Reidenberg, a Fordham Law Professor and expert on internet privacy issues.

“The tweets themselves are public information, it’s like speaking on a street corner,” he said. “His claim to privacy on the tweets is pretty weak, frankly.”

Harris, 23, said Friday that he did not delete any incriminating tweets. He told reporters he wasn’t sure what the tweets might contain. “Three and a half months, a lot of nonsense,” he said.

Asked whether the case had affected what he posted to Twitter, Harris said: “I guess you’d have to check the feed to find out. It’s still public.”

Earlier this year, Harris sought to block prosecutors from subpoenaing the information from Twitter Inc. The company stepped in after the judge ordered the messages to be turned over.

Harris had argued that seeking the accompanying user information violated his privacy and free association rights. The data could give prosecutors a picture of his followers, their interactions and his location at various points during the protest, Stolar said.

Twitter had said the case could put it in the unwanted position of having to take on legal fights that users could otherwise conduct on their own. Company lawyers argued that Harris had every right to fight the subpoena.

Its agreements say users own content they post and can challenge demands for their records. The company argued in a court filing that it would be “a new and overwhelming burden” for Twitter to have to champion such causes for them.

Sciarrino said he would review all the material he ordered turned over and would provide “relevant portions” to prosecutors.

Harris has pleaded not guilty and his trial is scheduled for December. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 15 days in jail or a $500 fine, his lawyer said.

“So Twitter handed over a pile of my tweets that’ll stay sealed pending a hearing on the 21st.” Harris tweeted after the hearing. “Bummer.”

Welcome to my yurt

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

Late last month the same central Asian dwelling appeared in both the posh Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue and in the park where anti-consumerist protesters with Occupy Toronto remained camped out for the long haul: the yurt, that collapsible, cylindrical hut with a conical top that for eons has housed all classes of nomads, from simple shepherds to the Great Khan.

The Neiman Marcus yurt, dubbed the “Dream Folly,” starts at $75,000, boasts an interior designed to look like the inside of a genie’s bottle, comes equipped with a Plexiglas dome, and is billed as “the ultimate girls’ club.” Photographs make it look like Martha Stewart’s grotesque shrine to the cult of Moammar Gadhafi. The Toronto protesters, meanwhile, got three authentic yurts for $20,000: imported from Mongolia by Gatineau, Que.-based Groovy Yurts Inc., they stand swathed in high-quality sheep’s felt, are covered in whimsical Mongolian designs, and sheltered Occupy Toronto’s library, media centre, assembly space and health clinic. In such incongruous pairings can the voice of the zeitgeist be heard: finally, millennia after the Greek historian Herodotus described the Scythians camping out in them, the yurt’s time has come in the West, where they’re now big business. Purveyors report sales as much as doubling, thanks to two contradictory trends—an appetite for roughing it à la luxe on one hand, and apocalyptic fears of a collapsed economy on the other.

The yurt has made its trek into modern times with few alterations: the true Mongolian yurt is assembled on the bare earth using a series of latticed wooden sections brought together in a circle, with wooden rafters meeting in the centre. It’s a skeleton that can be put up and dismantled quickly but that gives the yurt an amazing durability against wind and snow. Clad in layers of canvas and felt, it is bound together using horsehair ropes, with carpets thrown down on the packed dirt.

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The Commons: Down with inequality, up with the price of cheese

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 7:14 PM - 16 Comments

The Scene. It began with a rousing cheer for Nycole Turmel. The official opposition was perhaps behooved to loudly endorse their interim leader after a Conservative backbencher had used the House’s preceding minute to read aloud some scripted bit about how disgraceful Turmel had behaved on some matter or another.

“Mr. Speaker, over the past few months we have witnessed a protest movement on a scale never seen before,” she ventured. “The Occupy movement is denouncing economic disparity.”

There were grumbles and groans from the government side. Continue…

Vote first, solve other problems later

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 25 Comments

Kate Chappell considers the Occupy movement and the act of voting.

A sign I saw this weekend at the Occupy Ottawa camp said something to the effect of voting as an institution being broken. But if the majority of us do not engage in the activities required of us by this institution, how can we fairly and accurately assess its effectiveness? I argue that we cannot begin to do so. It is ironic that the Occupiers’ main message calls for an end to inequality. Voting is the activity most blind to socio-economic status and a free, convenient means of registering one’s preferences..

Many of the Occupiers seem to be partial to anything but what we have now. In fact, many seem partial to an anarchic or communistic system. But let’s back up a minute. What if they had all voted in the last federal election? We would likely have a different prime minister.

Jeff Jedras previously quibbled with the suggestion the the Occupiers would simply be better off voting.

The Occupy movement: from farce to tragedy and back

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 11, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 73 Comments

Darryl Dyck/CP

In Saskatoon last week, as temperatures sank below zero, residents of the local Occupy encampment began taking stock. The tiny tent community had dwindled from the 30 who’d set up camp on Oct. 15, part of a wave of occupations mounted in solidarity with lower Manhattan’s Occupy Wall Street, to about a dozen. Many who remained were less activists than they were homeless people. The activists chose to pull up stakes. “I’m not too sure whereabouts I’m going,” a homeless man named Spike said. “I just don’t know.”

So it was across Canada: from Vancouver to Halifax, workaday realities had crept in and soured utopia. At some Occupy sites, such as in London, Ont., the movement had fractured into splinter groups, multiplying the number of encampments. Elsewhere, as in Ottawa, where one group of protesters discovered a blanket soaked in bodily fluids draped over their tent and left, core supporters abandoned the movement over philosophical differences. In most cases, protesters have had to come to terms with an influx of people for whom addiction and mental health issues loom larger than concerns about wealth distribution. In every case, occupiers have tested the resolve of municipalities striving to balance their rights to free speech with long-standing bylaws, safety concerns, and the rights of neighbours to order and good government.

On Saturday, Vancouver’s drug problem infiltrated one of dozens of tents erected outside the Vancouver Art Gallery, where 23-year-old Ashlie Gough of Victoria died, likely of an overdose. She is one of just two Occupy fatalities in North America so far (18-year-old Louis Cameron Rodriguez, a homeless man who called himself “The Poet,” died of causes unknown in Oklahoma City). Mayor Gregor Robertson, in the midst of an election, used the death as the final stroke and ordered the tent city closed (an official later said the city would seek to force the matter with a court injunction). At the same time, Victoria, where authorities had already cut water and electricity to the site, officially ordered protesters out: “The city appreciates you vacating the lawn around the sequoia tree,” read the notice.

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