organization:british police

Gun Use Surges in Europe, Where Firearms Are Rare. Growing insecurity spurs more people to clear high bars for ownership

When hundreds of women were sexually assaulted on New Year’s Eve in several German cities three years ago, Carolin Matthie decided it was time to defend herself. The 26-year-old Berlin student quickly applied for a gun permit, fearing many women would have the same idea and flood the application process.

“If I don’t do it now, I will have to wait maybe another half year,” she recalls thinking.

Gun ownership is rising across Europe, a continent that until recently faced far less gun crime and violence than much of the globe. Not long ago it was rare to see armed British police.

The uptick was spurred in part by insecurity arising from terrorist attacks—many with firearms, and reflects government efforts to get illegal guns registered by offering amnesty to owners.

Europe is still far from facing the gun prevalence and violence in Latin America or the U.S., which lead the world. World-wide civilian ownership of firearms rose 32% in the decade through 2017, to 857.3 million guns, according to the Small Arms Survey, a research project in Geneva. Europe accounts for less than 10% of the total.

But Europe’s shift has been rapid, and notable in part because of strict national restrictions. In most European countries, gun permits require thorough background checks, monitored shooting practice and tests on regulations. In Belgium, France and Germany, most registered guns may only be used at shooting ranges. Permits to bear arms outside of shooting ranges are extremely difficult to obtain.

Strict registration requirements don’t account for—and may exacerbate—a surge in illegal weapons across the continent, experts say.

https://i.imgur.com/5B1hfwU.png

Europe’s unregistered weapons outnumbered legal ones in 2017, 44.5 million to 34.2 million, according to the Small Arms Survey. Many illegal weapons come from one-time war zones, such as countries of the former Yugoslavia, and others are purchased online, including from vendors in the U.S.

“Europe represents the largest market for arms trade on the dark web, generating revenues that are around five times higher than the U.S.,” concluded a recent Rand Corp. report.

With more weapons comes more gun-related violence. National police statistics in France, Germany and Belgium show an uptick in gun law violations since 2015. Europe doesn’t have current continentwide statistics.

Armed robbery and similar crimes often entail illicit guns, while legally registered firearms tend to appear in suicide and domestic-violence statistics, said Nils Duquet of the Flemish Peace Institute, a Belgian research center.

“It’s clear that illegal guns are used mostly by criminals,” he said.

In July 2016, an 18-year-old shooter killed nine people in Munich using a gun authorities concluded he bought illegally off the dark web.

In Germany, the number of legally registered weapons rose roughly 10%, to 6.1 million, in the five years through 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available, according to Germany’s National Weapons Registry. Permits to bear arms outside of shooting ranges more than tripled to 9,285, over the same five years.

Permits for less lethal air-powered guns that resemble real guns and shoot tear gas or loud blanks to scare away potential attackers roughly doubled in the three years through the end of 2017, to 557,560, according to the registry.

Ms. Matthie first bought an air gun, which her permit allowed her to carry with her.

She has since become a sports shooter, using live ammunition at shooting ranges, and is now applying for a firearm permit. She posts a daily video blog where she advocates armed self-defense.

In Belgium, firearm permits and membership in sport-shooting clubs has risen over the past three years.

https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/B3-CU997_EUROGU_M_20190104161400.jpg

Belgian applications for shooting licenses almost doubled after the terrorist attacks by an Islamic State cell in Paris in Nov. 2015 and four months later in Brussels, offering “a clear indication of why people acquired them,” said Mr. Duquet.

In Paris, the suicide bombers also used machine guns to mow down restaurant and nightclub patrons—weapons they acquired on the black market and were tracked to a shop in Slovakia.

Belgium has for years tightened regulations in response to gun violence, such as a 2006 killing spree by an 18-year-old who legally acquired a rifle.

“Before 2006, you could buy rifles simply by showing your ID,” recalled Sébastien de Thomaz, who owns two shooting ranges in Brussels and previously worked in a gun store.

“They used to let me shoot with all my stepfather’s guns whenever I joined him at the range,” said Lionel Pennings, a Belgian artist who joins his stepfather at one of Mr. De Thomaz’s shooting ranges on Sundays.

Mr. Pennings recalled that in the past he could easily fire a few rounds with his stepfather’s gun. “Now it’s much stricter,” he said. “You can only use the guns you have a permit for.”

A Belgian would-be gun owner must pass almost a year of shooting and theory tests, plus psychological checks, said Mr. De Thomaz.

The gun-range owner questions the impact of that policy. “With each terror attack, the legislation gets stricter,” he said. “For the black market, everything stays the same.”

▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/gun-use-surges-in-europe-where-firearms-are-rare-11546857000

#armes #Europe #statistiques #détention_d'armes #chiffres
ping @albertocampiphoto @reka

Europe is using smartphone data as a weapon to deport refugees

European leaders need to bring immigration numbers down, and #metadata on smartphones could be just what they need to start sending migrants back.

Smartphones have helped tens of thousands of migrants travel to Europe. A phone means you can stay in touch with your family – or with people smugglers. On the road, you can check Facebook groups that warn of border closures, policy changes or scams to watch out for. Advice on how to avoid border police spreads via WhatsApp.

Now, governments are using migrants’ smartphones to deport them.

Across the continent, migrants are being confronted by a booming mobile forensics industry that specialises in extracting a smartphone’s messages, location history, and even #WhatsApp data. That information can potentially be turned against the phone owners themselves.

In 2017 both Germany and Denmark expanded laws that enabled immigration officials to extract data from asylum seekers’ phones. Similar legislation has been proposed in Belgium and Austria, while the UK and Norway have been searching asylum seekers’ devices for years.

Following right-wing gains across the EU, beleaguered governments are scrambling to bring immigration numbers down. Tackling fraudulent asylum applications seems like an easy way to do that. As European leaders met in Brussels last week to thrash out a new, tougher framework to manage migration —which nevertheless seems insufficient to placate Angela Merkel’s critics in Germany— immigration agencies across Europe are showing new enthusiasm for laws and software that enable phone data to be used in deportation cases.

Admittedly, some refugees do lie on their asylum applications. Omar – not his real name – certainly did. He travelled to Germany via Greece. Even for Syrians like him there were few legal alternatives into the EU. But his route meant he could face deportation under the EU’s Dublin regulation, which dictates that asylum seekers must claim refugee status in the first EU country they arrive in. For Omar, that would mean settling in Greece – hardly an attractive destination considering its high unemployment and stretched social services.

Last year, more than 7,000 people were deported from Germany according to the Dublin regulation. If Omar’s phone were searched, he could have become one of them, as his location history would have revealed his route through Europe, including his arrival in Greece.

But before his asylum interview, he met Lena – also not her real name. A refugee advocate and businesswoman, Lena had read about Germany’s new surveillance laws. She encouraged Omar to throw his phone away and tell immigration officials it had been stolen in the refugee camp where he was staying. “This camp was well-known for crime,” says Lena, “so the story seemed believable.” His application is still pending.

Omar is not the only asylum seeker to hide phone data from state officials. When sociology professor Marie Gillespie researched phone use among migrants travelling to Europe in 2016, she encountered widespread fear of mobile phone surveillance. “Mobile phones were facilitators and enablers of their journeys, but they also posed a threat,” she says. In response, she saw migrants who kept up to 13 different #SIM cards, hiding them in different parts of their bodies as they travelled.

This could become a problem for immigration officials, who are increasingly using mobile phones to verify migrants’ identities, and ascertain whether they qualify for asylum. (That is: whether they are fleeing countries where they risk facing violence or persecution.) In Germany, only 40 per cent of asylum applicants in 2016 could provide official identification documents. In their absence, the nationalities of the other 60 per cent were verified through a mixture of language analysis — using human translators and computers to confirm whether their accent is authentic — and mobile phone data.

Over the six months after Germany’s phone search law came into force, immigration officials searched 8,000 phones. If they doubted an asylum seeker’s story, they would extract their phone’s metadata – digital information that can reveal the user’s language settings and the locations where they made calls or took pictures.

To do this, German authorities are using a computer programme, called Atos, that combines technology made by two mobile forensic companies – T3K and MSAB. It takes just a few minutes to download metadata. “The analysis of mobile phone data is never the sole basis on which a decision about the application for asylum is made,” says a spokesperson for BAMF, Germany’s immigration agency. But they do use the data to look for inconsistencies in an applicant’s story. If a person says they were in Turkey in September, for example, but phone data shows they were actually in Syria, they can see more investigation is needed.

Denmark is taking this a step further, by asking migrants for their Facebook passwords. Refugee groups note how the platform is being used more and more to verify an asylum seeker’s identity.

It recently happened to Assem, a 36-year-old refugee from Syria. Five minutes on his public Facebook profile will tell you two things about him: first, he supports a revolution against Syria’s Assad regime and, second, he is a devoted fan of Barcelona football club. When Danish immigration officials asked him for his password, he gave it to them willingly. “At that time, I didn’t care what they were doing. I just wanted to leave the asylum center,” he says. While Assem was not happy about the request, he now has refugee status.

The Danish immigration agency confirmed they do ask asylum applicants to see their Facebook profiles. While it is not standard procedure, it can be used if a caseworker feels they need more information. If the applicant refused their consent, they would tell them they are obliged under Danish law. Right now, they only use Facebook – not Instagram or other social platforms.

Across the EU, rights groups and opposition parties have questioned whether these searches are constitutional, raising concerns over their infringement of privacy and the effect of searching migrants like criminals.

“In my view, it’s a violation of ethics on privacy to ask for a password to Facebook or open somebody’s mobile phone,” says Michala Clante Bendixen of Denmark’s Refugees Welcome movement. “For an asylum seeker, this is often the only piece of personal and private space he or she has left.”

Information sourced from phones and social media offers an alternative reality that can compete with an asylum seeker’s own testimony. “They’re holding the phone to be a stronger testament to their history than what the person is ready to disclose,” says Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International. “That’s unprecedented.”
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Privacy campaigners note how digital information might not reflect a person’s character accurately. “Because there is so much data on a person’s phone, you can make quite sweeping judgements that might not necessarily be true,” says Christopher Weatherhead, technologist at Privacy International.

Bendixen cites the case of one man whose asylum application was rejected after Danish authorities examined his phone and saw his Facebook account had left comments during a time he said he was in prison. He explained that his brother also had access to his account, but the authorities did not believe him; he is currently waiting for appeal.

A spokesperson for the UK’s Home Office told me they don’t check the social media of asylum seekers unless they are suspected of a crime. Nonetheless, British lawyers and social workers have reported that social media searches do take place, although it is unclear whether they reflect official policy. The Home Office did not respond to requests for clarification on that matter.

Privacy International has investigated the UK police’s ability to search phones, indicating that immigration officials could possess similar powers. “What surprised us was the level of detail of these phone searches. Police could access information even you don’t have access to, such as deleted messages,” Weatherhead says.

His team found that British police are aided by Israeli mobile forensic company Cellebrite. Using their software, officials can access search history, including deleted browsing history. It can also extract WhatsApp messages from some Android phones.

There is a crippling irony that the smartphone, for so long a tool of liberation, has become a digital Judas. If you had stood in Athens’ Victoria Square in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis, you would have noticed the “smartphone stoop”: hundreds of Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans standing or sitting about this sun-baked patch of grass and concrete, were bending their heads, looking into their phones.

The smartphone has become the essential accessory for modern migration. Travelling to Europe as an asylum seeker is expensive. People who can’t afford phones typically can’t afford the journey either. Phones became a constant feature along the route to Northern Europe: young men would line the pavements outside reception centres in Berlin, hunched over their screens. In Calais, groups would crowd around charging points. In 2016, the UN refugee agency reported that phones were so important to migrants moving across Europe, that they were spending up to one third of their income on phone credit.

Now, migrants are being forced to confront a more dangerous reality, as governments worldwide expand their abilities to search asylum seekers’ phones. While European countries were relaxing their laws on metadata search, last year US immigration spent $2.2 million on phone hacking software. But asylum seekers too are changing their behaviour as they become more aware that the smartphone, the very device that has bought them so much freedom, could be the very thing used to unravel their hope of a new life.

►https://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-immigration-refugees-smartphone-metadata-deportations
#smartphone #smartphones #données #big_data #expulsions #Allemagne #Danemark #renvois #carte_SIM #Belgique #Autriche

Ecuador spent millions on spy operation for Julian Assange

▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/15/revealed-ecuador-spent-millions-julian-assange-spy-operation-embassy-lo

Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Julian Assange in its central London embassy, employing an international security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and even the British police, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

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Over more than five years, Ecuador put at least $5m (£3.7m) into a secret intelligence budget that protected the WikiLeaks founder while he had visits from Nigel Farage, members of European nationalist groups and individuals linked to the Kremlin.

Other guests included hackers, activists, lawyers and journalists.

Revealed: 779 cases of data misuse across 34 British police forces • The Register
▻https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/26/uk_police_data_handling_foi

Probe finds widespread abuse of cop IT systems by personnel

A freedom-of-information request by Huntsman Security has discovered that UK police forces detected and investigated at least 779 cases of potential data misuse by personnel between January 2016 and April 2017.

Palestinians have a legal right to armed struggle | Conflict | Al Jazeera
▻http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/07/palestinians-legal-armed-struggle-170719114812058.html

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/7/19/3e00033225974615b102d852163dae28_18.jpg

Never ones to hesitate in rewriting history, long before the establishment of the United Nations, European Zionists deemed themselves to be an occupied people as they emigrated to Palestine - a land to which any historical connection they had had long since passed through a largely voluntary transit.

Indeed, a full 50 years before the UN spoke of the right of armed struggle as a vehicle of indigenous liberation, European Zionists illegally co-opted the concept as the Irgun, Lehi and other terrorist groups undertook a decade’s long reign of deadly mayhem. 

During this time, they slaughtered not only thousands of indigenous Palestinians but targeted British police and military personnel that had long maintained a colonial presence there.

#Israel

#Assange : l’enquête pour viol en Suède classée sans suite
AFP / 19 mai 2017
▻https://www.romandie.com/news/Assange-l-enquete-pour-viol-en-Suede-classee-sans-suite_RP/797328.rom

❝Le parquet suédois a annoncé vendredi qu’il abandonnait ses poursuites pour viol contre le fondateur de WikiLeaks Julian Assange, refermant une saga judiciaire qui durait depuis 2010.

« La procureure Marianne Ny a décidé de classer sans suite l’enquête pour viol présumé contre Julian Assange », a indiqué le parquet dans un communiqué.

Why does #Nigeria still rely on the #UK to deal with those who steal from its public coffers?
▻http://africasacountry.com/2015/10/why-does-nigeria-still-rely-on-the-uk-to-deal-with-those-who-steal-

Two weeks ago, on October 6th, Nigeria’s former oil minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke, was arrested in London by British police. It’s estimated that over $20 billion went missing on her watch......

#FRONT_PAGE #corruption #Politics

A Terrorism Case in Britain Ends in Acquittal, but No One Can Say Why
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/world/europe/a-terrorism-case-in-britain-ends-in-acquittal-but-no-one-can-say-why.html

Ian Cobain, a reporter with The Guardian, is one of very few people who know why a student arrested by armed British police officers in 2013 was finally acquitted this year of terrorism charges.

Problem is, he cannot report what he knows. He was allowed to observe much of the trial, but only under strict conditions intended to keep classified material secret. His notebooks are being held by Britain’s domestic intelligence agency. And if he writes — or even talks — about the reason that the student, Erol Incedal, 27, was acquitted, Mr. Cobain faces prosecution and possibly jail.

[...]

“Not even the Russians do that to journalists,” Mr. Cobain said, speaking recently in the cafe of the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

The case is among the latest to highlight the growing debate about the proper balance between civil liberties and national security in the age of terrorism.

British Police to strike | Counterfire
►http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/163-resisting-austerity/15653-british-police-to-strike

Police officers are to be balloted on strike action over 20% cuts to front line services, before the Police Federation’s annual conference in May. The Federation took similar action four years ago when it surveyed its members on whether they would like the Federation’s Executive Board to lobby parliament for the right to strike. Of the 60 000 responses 87% were in favour.

It is currently illegal for the police force to go on strike. The last time the police went on strike was in 1919 in a dispute over low pay and conditions. The Police Act (1919) was enacted in the aftermath of the police strikes in 1918 and 1919 which were called by the National Union of Police and Prison Officers. The Act made it illegal for the Police and Prison Officers to belong to or affiliating to a trade union as well as forbidding the officers from taking industrial action or discussing the possibility of strike action with colleagues. The Police Federation was established under the 1919 Act to deal with employment grievances and provide representation to police officers.

UK police/spies colluded with giant construction firms to build illegal blacklist database of whistleblowers, trade-unionists - Boing Boing
►http://boingboing.net/2012/03/04/uk-policespies-colluded-with.html

Today’s lead story in the Observer is a maddening and excellent investigative piece revealing that for three decades, the UK’s biggest construction companies worked with British police and spy-agencies to build illegal dossiers on whistle-blowers who complained about unsafe working conditions and trade-unionists. The victims of these investigations — thousands of them — were economically ruined as the firms conspired to keep them from being hired at any job-site, and saw to it that if they were ever hired, they were promptly fired.

►http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/03/police-blacklist-link-construction-workers

Unfair cops: it’s not about ‘bad apples’ | Red Pepper
►http://www.redpepper.org.uk/unfair-cops

In recent months the Metropolitan Police has been rocked by allegations of collusion in the phone hacking conspiracy and revelations of the extraordinary level of hospitality enjoyed by the former Met commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson. Even as it cleared Stephenson and three other senior police officers of misconduct, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) was moved to comment that ‘the public will make its own judgements about whether any senior public official should accept hospitality to this extent from anyone.’

...

Political police

The fact that the modern British police constitutes a political force is becoming increasingly self-evident. Through a variety of channels, including direct lobbying of politicians and the involvement of the Association of Chief Police Officers in key policy committees, the police have long been in the business of influencing government policy. They also do a great deal of networking with local government, private industry and, of course, the media.

...

Deaths in custody

According to figures published by the respected pressure group Inquest, there have been 409 deaths in custody since 2000. Inquest has identified numerous deaths that raise issues about standards of care, such as deaths due to self-injury, alleged drunkenness or drug intoxication, or poor medical care, as well as deaths that raise issues of excessive use of force by police officers.

These figures do not include the three deaths that occurred after police restraint at the end of August. Philip Hulmes, aged 53, and Dale Burns, 27, both died after police discharged taser guns. Dale Burns was reportedly shocked three times by a taser. Jacob Michael, aged 25, died after police restrained him using pepper spray. Witnesses to his arrest have described how the police punched and kicked him while he was on the floor, restrained and in handcuffs. Eleven police officers were involved in the arrest. Inquest reacted to these latest deaths by stating that ‘it is imperative that the police are reminded that they cannot act with impunity’.

There have also been 32 fatal shootings by police in the past ten years. The latest was Mark Duggan, whose death at the hands of the police sparked the riots in August (see page 24). The failure of the police to provide prompt and accurate information to the Duggan family has exacerbated problems. In addition, the IPCC has had to apologise for ‘inadvertently misleading the press’, by implying in a telephone conversation to a media contact shortly after the incident that it was Mark Duggan who had opened fire first. As it turned out, the only bullets fired had been fired by the police.

For all the deaths, including the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes as he got on a tube train at Stockwell, there has not been one single successful prosecution of any police officer. The IPCC has claimed that this has been in part due to a reluctance of juries to convict police officers, but campaigners point to an evident lack of will on the part of the police, the IPCC and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to conduct robust investigations and prosecutions.

British police issue warning to Anonymous, Lulzsec and other internet hacktivists ~ THN : The Hacker News
►http://www.thehackernews.com/2011/08/british-police-issue-warning-to.html

warning to Anonymous, Lulzsec and other internet hacktivists

The Metropolitan Police have taken the unusual step of using Twitter to send a message to anyone considering supporting internet attacks against companies and governments.A message posted on the Met Police’s official Twitter account cautioned would-be hacktivists that engaging in denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, defacing websites or breaking into corporate databases is illegal.In the past, hacktivists have compared their activities to legitimate civil disobedience - but such a view is not a defence if suspected hackers are brought to court. Sophos Notice this tweet first.

►http://twitter.com/metpoliceuk/status/98387295962537984
#ACAB #twitter #anonymous