Yesterday, @MassAGO Maura Healey and her team issued a groundbreaking report finding that the Bristol County Sheriff's Office violated the civil rights of immigration detainees.

Let's take look at some key findings (thread

First, some background.

The BCSO is administered by Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. @GlobeAbraham has reported on his close relationship with Trump's White House. He corresponds with Stephen Miller, the notorious architect of Trump's anti-immigrant

Although the BCSO is a state facility, it has also contracted with ICE to hold people detained for federal civil immigration proceedings.

ICE essentially pays a per diem rate for each detainee.

In 2019, the Mass. State Auditor found that BCSO improperly failed to remit more than $300,000 in ICE payments to the

BCSO also has a 287(g) agreement with ICE. It allows BCSO personnel to be deputized to do some of ICE's work. ICE does not pay for their hours. It is essentially a donation of state employee time to federal immigration

The GovLab's Stefaan Verhulst will be testifying on smart city oversight before the NYC Council's Committee on Technology at 1:00 PM. You can watch him and the other witnesses live in Virtual Room 2 at:

Chair Holden opens the meeting. by speaking to the promise and potential that smart city technology offers, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

He notes how big data, the internet of things, and other innovative solutions could help New Yorkers address real challenges.

However, he stresses, these come with privacy and security risks. The chair talks about the need to mitigate these challenges and ensure the benefits provided by smart city technologies outweigh costs.

Following the Chair's opening statement, John Paul Farmer, Chief Technology Officer of New York, offers testimony from the Administration.

He notes his focus will be on the city's work in Internet of Things, where NYC leads nationally and internationally.

"The Mayor's Office of the CTO has focused on improving the connectivity infrastructure needed to operate as a smart city," says Farmer

"Equitable connectivity is a foundation of the smart city. Widespread broadband is needed to connect the tools and sensors that make up IoT."

I really wish someone would call my Dad, a retired Capitol Hill police officer (37yrs), to talk about the difference in preparation. The stories he’s telling me about prep for Farrakhan and others vs why yesterday happened the way it did is mind blowing.

cc @JoyAnnReid

He just told me about a time when Farrakhan was on the Hill with 4 men. Not 40. Not 14. FOUR. They had the SWAT Team in the garage and held the entire department until Farrakhan left.

He said if you even mentioned his name, all days off were canceled due to prep.

When Obama was elected he said they did a surprise background check on all of the police officers on the Hill. He said they had never done it since he was on the force & he was there from Nixon thru Obama.

He said they found out two officials, one Sgt and one Lt, were members of a racist motorcycle club. He said he the conditions are worse than when he was there b/c you don’t have the same voices & advocates on the force. He retired in 2009 & was the #1 senior person when he left.

He said since they got rid of the german shepherds and they got rid of the horses. He said if that was Black Lives Matter they would have called in Park Police horses for crowd control. He said there was NO crowd tools yesterday.

Papers reporting that Neil Ferguson only resigned from Sage after it was revealed he broke lockdown rules to meet his married lover - as minutes now show he stayed on NERVTAG

At the time, the government was clear he had quit *all* government advisory roles, including NERVTAG

In my front ups to Ferguson and the government on May 5, I asked whether he will be resigning from Sage and NERVTAG

Ferguson's apology, received hours later, said Sage. But the government said NERVTAG too

The delay in publishing minutes raise serious gvt transparency questions

Here is the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman in the lobby call on May 6:

Asked if Ferguson will remain on NERVTAG he said:

'NERVTAG is part of Sage, so the answer is no, Professor Ferguson will no longer attend, participate or contribute to SAGE meetings'

PM spokesman 6 May contd:

Q: So that includes all sub-committees? He’s not advising the government in any way?

'Not that I’m aware of, no'

The spokesman went on to say there are other scientists at Imperial, on Ferguson's team, who could contribute to the government so it did not lose access to its research

Now minutes published 7 months later show Ferguson personally has continued to attend NERVTAG

I won't sugar coat this...this is a disaster.

If Nov. was Pearl Harbor...we got hit again and lost all carriers.

Our retaliatory options are limited and better employed as shields than swords

But America has survived worse. Here's how we will survive this

#MAGA #2A

1/MANY

First, just the facts about situation.

1: Very soon, Democrats will have (narrow) unified political control of all 3 branches of government and can wreck US.

2: Our country is in an awful position financially due to the Obama spending during the good times.

2/MANY

3: They will greatly escalate "cancellation," likely creating blacklists of people like us.

4: They will use the full force and power of Gov't against us (look up AFP vs Harris), they've been rationalizing it 4 years.

3/MANY

5: They will try to use their current political advantage to stack the deck in future elections and policy fights.... likely trying to grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico to explicitly help them in future elections.

Court packing is BACK on the agenda.

4/MANY

6: A lot of Republicans and conservatives will try to blame this on their enemies in the party. Populists will blame libertarians and vice versa.

THAT IS A MISTAKE. A civil war would doom us all and we need every hand on deck. YES, THIS MEANS YOU!

5/MANY

To: @senatemajld, @LindseyGrahamSC, et al. I know you and your colleagues have been able to overlook things like:

1. The Central Park Five
2. Birtherism
3. Mocking a disabled reporter
4. Mexicans are rapists
5. Two dozen accusations of sexual assault
6. Lock her up

1/

And the GOP was okay with:

7. Hush payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal
8. No commitment to accept the 2016 election results
9. Grab ‘em by the pussy
10. Trump University fraud
11. Manafort, Steven Bannon, Roger Stone, Stephen Miller
12. The Muslim ban

2/

And you didn't balk at:

13. Separating families and keeping kids in cages
14. Siding with Putin over US intelligence agencies
15. The firing of the FBI director
16. Very fine people on both sides
17. Corruption in (and dissolution of) the Trump foundation
18. Jamal Khashoggi

3/

And you didn't say much about:

19. The free press being labeled the enemy of the people
20. The trans ban in the military
21. The Kim-Jong Un handshake in the DMZ
22. Pressuring the president of Ukraine to interfere in an American election
23. Only $750 paid in income taxes

4/

And you mostly blew off or made excuses for:

24. Coronavirus is a democrat hoax
25. Coronavirus will disappear on its own
26. Injecting bleach
27. Mocking mask wearing
28. Super-spreader rallies in the midst of a pandemic
29. Nearly 400,000 Americans dead from Coronavirus

5/

Anti-deportation campaigners need to get real smart real quick. Patel is now considering deporting people with 6 month convictions. That’s petty theft, cannabis, minor offences like fraud.

In the context of #BlackLivesMatter and #windrush - the government response is to make it easier to deport people whose rights are being violated.

We need to work on this together - we cannot let this take place without a fight. Anyone who works on migrants rights, criminal justice reform, decriminalisation and a fair legal system needs to stand against this.

This is a two tier criminal justice system. Double punishment for people who live here, work here, have family here. One mistake punished twice. A lifetime in the UK overlooked because you smoked a joint or stole a purse. Rehabilitation no longer a consideration.

Patel is doing this a direct response to both successful campaigning and as a response to an incoherent strategy from activists so far. They know it will piss us off, they know they can do it. But the public can stop this if we make the right arguments.

THREAD 1-13

1/ How have we come to this, teetering on the precipice of a political extinction event? The Electoral Certification challenge will certainly fail but immoral political theater is damning. And also a victory. For stupidity, naked greed, personal ambition, raw power.

2/ In which cynical propaganda has superseded campaigning and fund-raising as the most effective political tools. In which endless shit-trains of conspiratorial nonsense cannot be differentiated from policy, from McCain’s bus or RFK entreating crowds on a whistle-stop tour.

3/ Why do we assume we've evolved? The leaders of Babylon similarly ran their society, culture, empire, and the verdant Eden that surrounded them into the ground, sheerly out of greed and willful ignorance. It is now Iraq, a pit of sand and blood and unabated violence.

4/ Sedition. Traitor. Quisling. Apostate. Benedict Arnold. Aldritch Ames. Tokyo Rose. Ezra Pound. Judas Iscariot. Julian Assange. Ted Cruz. Josh Hawley. Tommy Tuberville. Kelly Loeffler. Ron Johnson. Steve Daines. Marsha Blackburn. Mike Braun. James Lankford. John N. Kennedy.

5/ These people, Orwell’s Pigs, flaunting incomprehension and intellectual sterility, are lead weights, the Unbearable Darkness Of Non-Being, want us to knuckle under in exasperation and despair, exhausted from fighting generations of exactly this brand of deceit and moral ruin.

I strongly suspect it is going to be shocking how many people working on the inside of our government and law enforcement were aware of, and helped, the insurrection on Wednesday.

From Congress to the White House to law enforcement and military - this was coordinated and funded.

I am sure the FBI is doing a deep dive into anyone and everyone and I think it is going to be shown that they were trying to kill as many people as possible, leaving Trump as a Designated Survivor who has to remain in office.

It is worse than anyone thought. I am sure.

I am almost positive that there were paramilitary and hired mercenaries blended in with the group who had the floorplans in advance, had tactical teams ready to go.

Hello, zip tie guy? These guys were ready to take hostage and murder on live tv.

We must find out who funded them. Who coordinated. Who sent them Capitol plans.

We must get electronic records, phone records, etc for White House staff that are known to symapthize (Scavino, Miller, Meadows, Kushner, Trump Jr).

There is a "there" there.

We also need to get electronic records from various Congress members AND their staff who may have been assisting from the inside. Too many to list, but there are A LOT.

These folks were too calm. They didn't seem worried about their personal safety. They knew they were fine.

🧵 So today we’ve got the Government’s vision for online harms legislation. It’s a landmark day for all of us who’ve worked for this for years. Some quick early (personal!) thoughts:

This is a systemic Duty of Care, with a requirement to risk assess - regularly - for reasonable foreseeable harms and to act on them. Supported by Codes but that serve as guardrails, not a prescriptive checklist

There’s a broad requirement on all services to tackle illegal content and to take measures to protect children. Worried that age assurance may be expected to do a lot of heavy lifting instead of proper moderation for legal but harmful, but we’ll see

The biggest weakness: enforcement measures. Criminal sanctions & named persons have deference value - that’s why industry pushed back strongly. But not for at least 2 years and even then only covering failure to comply with the regulator. If Govt thinks this is really enough...

Investigatory powers are OK (particularly pleased to see the inclusion of skilled persons reviews 😉). But the balance between investigatory powers and duties isn’t where it needs to be to drive culture change

@realmajordan @gheliason @RichHiggins_DC @tobeycakes @1GigiSims1 Wanna bet the UK govt wants to use the "Base" to smear the Pro Brexit populists in their country? Let's see if they use them as an excuse to persecute them once Boris thorough destroys their economy.

If you’re frustrated by this lockdown it is worth remembering that there is an alternative. Our country has had a year to build an effective system for testing to identify cases & isolate them & those they have exposed. We are all paying the price for the failure to do this.

The deaths that are occurring now were largely preventable. The people dying didn’t simply want a big family bash over the holidays nor have they all been breaking the rules. They are not all old or medically vulnerable.

They are key workers and people’s whose jobs and lives expose them to crowds. The situation is so desperately tragic it’s much easier to blame them. But really important not to blame them. None of us can reduce our risk to zero and all of us rely on people taking risks.

The deaths, suffering & long term problems caused by the repeated lockdowns are an equal tragedy. It is appallingly difficult for many people right now.

It is not beyond a wealthy state like ours to control the spread of the virus without simply shutting everyone at home but at the moment this is the only alternative we have.

Trump acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, allowed the National Guard deployment to be delayed by more than 4 hours, despite desperate please from the head of the Capitol Police and the Gov of Maryland

By the time the NG arrived, four people lay dead. Why did Miller and Lt. Gen. Walter E. Piatt, director of the Army Staff, block the deployment?

Piatt said “I don’t like the visual of the National Guard standing a police line with the Capitol in the background." But officials were pleading. The Capitol mob was inside, attacking...

We don't know what conversations they might have had with Trump et al. But let's look at SecDef Miller's background for a bit

Miller, who took office just a few weeks ago, after the Nov. election, served as a Green Beret in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's no indication that he served with anything other than distinction. But since helming the Pentagon, he gives signs of bring a devoted Trumpist

Good morning KC ☀️ RIGHT NOW we are having our monthly meeting with @QuintonLucasKC. Our goal for this meeting is to flex how much PEOPLE POWER we have built since March 💪 and talk about what co-governance can look like

Our leader Steven is recapping our amazing actions this year:
💥I-70 action calling for our governments to #CancelRent
💥 Marching in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter
💥 Following the leadership of our Black comrades to demand #DefundThePolice

💥 Chaining ourselves to the Jackson County Courthouse doors to end evictions and our virtual disruptions
* Judges pushed their hearings until NEXT YEAR because of our work *

is sharing that we have over 1,500 leaders in our base, and our weekly meetings get around 70 participants each Saturday. Our base has grown across the metro area, and we’re leaders in statewide coalitions across Missouri and Kansas 🌻

How is KC Tenants structured? Basically like this! Read on to learn more about our teams. Interested in joining any of these teams? DM us to plug in so we can build tenant power together 💛