December 30th - Januaruy 12th, 2012
12 | NATIONAL NEWS
National News
Occupy Wall Street Fights Back Against Police Surveillance by Launching “Occucopter” Citizen Drone The police may soon be watching you in your garden picking your vegetables or your bottom. As police plans for increasing unmanned aerial surveillance take shape, there is a new twist. Private citizens can now buy their own surveillance drones to watch the police.
rests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police. But police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and “frozen zones”. This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering.
This week in New York, Occupy Wall Street protesters have a new toy to help them expose potentially dubious actions of the New York police department. In response to constant police surveillance, police violence and thousands of ar-
Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”. It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can
By Noel Sharkey and Sarah Knuckey Alternet.org, December 22, 20111
buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone. It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at. Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds. You can see video clips of his first experiments here. He told us that the reason he is doing this “comes back to giving ordinary people the same tools that these multimillion-dollar news corporations have. It provides a clever loophole around certain restrictions such as when the police block press from taking shots of an incident.”
vice: “We are trying to get a stable live feed so you can have 50 people controlling it in series. If the cops see you controlling it from a computer they can shut you down, but then control could automatically switch to someone else.”
Pool is attempting to police-proof the de-
occupy Pg 13
This is clever stuff and it doesn’t stop there. He is also working on a 3G controller so that “you could even control the occucopter in New York from Sheffield in England”. We asked him if he was concerned about police shooting it down. “No,” he said firmly. “They can’t
Action Aboard Airplane Creates a Reluctant Hero Jabir Hazziez Jr. has been showered with accolades, but he sees his role as reflecting his Muslim faith. By Tony Rizzo
The Kansas City Star, 2011-12-26 A man foaming at the mouth lunged for the airliner’s cabin door, attempting to open it as flight attendants struggled to hold him at bay. Most of the post-Thanksgiving travelers cruising at some 30,000 feet toward Kansas City that day were unaware of the potential disaster looming at the front of the plane. But when a crew member came on the intercom asking if anyone had medical training, passenger Jabir Hazziez Jr. heard the sense of concern in her voice. What happened next came as no surprise to those who know and work with Hazziez, a Kansas City firefighter, reserve Jackson County deputy and
.
member of the U.S. Naval Reserve. As Hazziez walked toward the front of the plane, he saw a man pacing and holding his head in his hands. The man appeared to be in an “altered mental state” and clearly appeared agitated. “He was trying to get to the door of the plane,” Hazziez recalled recently. “I grabbed ahold of him and tried to calm him down.” But the man only became more combative and knocked Hazziez into the cockpit door. Using his law enforcement training, Hazziez put the man in a neck restraint and took him to the floor. The man continued kicking and trying to reach the door with his feet. Another passenger grabbed the man’s legs. Together they held him for about 15 or
20 minutes until the plane, which had taken off in Atlanta, made an emergency landing in Memphis and authorities came on board to deal with the man. Later, Hazziez learned the man had been suffering from an adverse reaction to a vaccine. “I’m glad it was a medical situation and not a criminal incident,” Hazziez said. “It could have been a lot worse.” When the flight resumed, Hazziez was showered with thanks from his fellow passengers and received a standing ovation before leaving the plane after that Nov. 30 flight. Although Hazziez’s religious faith didn’t matter to those grateful passengers, it has become an important aspect
HERO Pg 13
Jabir Hazziez Jr. subdued an unruly passenger on a Nov. 30 AirTran flight to Kansas City. A Kansas City firefighter, reserve Jackson County deputy and member of the U.S. Naval Reserve, Hazziez has been praised for his quick action and level head.