Martin Luther King Jr. might have turned 96 years old this month if he had not been felled by an assassin’s bullet on April 4, 1968. It is, of course, impossible to know what the United States would look like today if he had lived — or what he would think about the political dilemmas of our own time.

Yet there are certain obvious parallels between his time and ours. The country continues to be bitterly divided along political lines. And many activists and scholars argue that the racist power structure that King fought has re-congealed—this time in the guise of the “War on Drugs” and mass incarceration. His legacy, therefore, holds lessons for those now fighting for cannabis legalization.

Cycles of Repression and Revolution  

Foremost among those scholars is Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander takes a long view of the struggle for racial justice in the United States and paints a grim picture. She illustrates how many of the gains that King won in his life are being reversed after his death — this time in a new “race-neutral” guise that only serves to mask continued institutionalized racism.  

Alexander notes that in 1972, there were under 350,000 people in prisons and jails nationwide. Today there are 2 million. In fact, the US has the most people behind bars of any nation on Earth, in both per capita and absolute terms. This is certainly an irony for the country that touts itself as the “land of the free.” 

Among those 2 million people in prison are 40,000 who remain incarcerated in state or federal prisons on cannabis-related convictions— about half of them for marijuana offenses alone. When those waiting to see a judge in local jails are added in, the figure may approach 100,000 on any given day. And the racial disparity could not be more obvious. A 2013 American Civil Liberties Union report, Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, crunched the national data. It found that black people are more than three times as likely as whites to be arrested for cannabis — despite consuming the plant at essentially similar rates.  

And this is not the first time the country has seen significant and hard-won racial progress being in large part (at least) reversed, with the same power structure re-establishing itself in new guise. Slavery was abolished in the aftermath of the Civil War. But, as Alexander quotes historian and early civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, from his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”

In the South under occupation by Union troops after the Civil War, black people for the first time voted, served on juries and held elected office — until the backlash came. In 1877, the federal troops were withdrawn. In subsequent years, without federal interference, Ku Klux Klan terror enforced legal apartheid in the southern states — the system known as Jim Crow. Blacks were often reduced to a state of near-slavery through share-cropping and were barred from the vote by systematic disenfranchisement.  

It wasn’t until nearly a century after the Civil War that this system would be challenged. In his book Why We Can’t Wait, an account of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign to desegregate Alabama’s biggest city, King wrote of “America’s third revolution — the Negro Revolution.” 

By King’s reckoning, the country’s first revolution had been the one we actually call “the Revolution” — the War of Independence, although it left the slave-owning aristocracy of the South thoroughly in place. The second was arguably far more revolutionary — the Civil War, in which the slave system was broken. King’s Civil Rights Movement was avowedly nonviolent, but it was still a revolution — the overturning of a power structure by physical as well as moral opposition.

Despite the violent backlash, both from the police and Ku Klux Klan terrorists, the campaign ultimately swayed the nation, resulting in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other landmark legislation that finally ended legal apartheid in America.

But the year of King’s assassination saw the country’s national political establishment embracing the backlash — exactly as in 1877. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon first adopted the rhetoric of a “War on Drugs” (although he would actually coin that phrase three years later, when the Controlled Substances Act was passed). And, in just barely coded terms, Nixon was promoting the rhetoric of racism.

In her book, Alexander quotes Nixon’s special counsel John Ehrlichman explicitly summing up the campaign strategy in his 1982 memoir, Witness To Power: The Nixon Years: “We’ll go after the racists.” Ehrlichman unabashedly wrote how throughout the 1968 race, “subliminal appeal to the anti-black voter was always present in Nixon’s statements and speeches.” 

Alexander did not mention, however, another quote attributed to Ehrlichman in which he just as explicitly made the connection between this subliminal racism and the anti-drug drumbeat. Journalist Dan Baum in the April 2016 edition of Harper’s recalls a quote he says he got from a 1994 interview with Ehrlichman: “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And the backlash was just beginning.

Birth of the New Jim Crow 

The new order would be consolidated over the next decade. In 1973, the same year the federal Drug Enforcement Administration was created, New York state’s Rockefeller Laws imposed the nation’s first mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. In 1977, New York decriminalized cannabis, overturning the harsh Rockefeller Laws where personal quantities of marijuana were concerned — but the draconian provisions for cocaine and heroin remained intact.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the “drug war” rhetoric was revived with a vengeance, and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 imposed mandatory minimum sentences nationwide. Ten years later, an ACLU report would find that the law “devastated African American and low-income communities.” 

The 1986 law also instated the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine — as crack was flooding black communities and landing people with the far longer sentences. This was also reflected in public perceptions and media portrayals. In the early ’80s, powder cocaine was a status symbol for white yuppies. When crack hit the streets from New York to Los Angeles, it was immediately stigmatized by association with the criminal (read: black) underclass.

This period also saw the rapid militarization of police forces, and the War on Drugs, in Alexander’s words, went “from being a political slogan to an actual war.” The 1981 Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act started to erode the firewall that had existed between the armed forces and police since the end of Reconstruction.

The DEA joined with local police forces to instate Operation Pipeline, a program of traffic stops and vehicle searches that was protested by the ACLU as based on systematic “racial profiling.” 

This was enabled by a series of bad Supreme Court decisions — Terry vs Ohio in 1968, Florida vs. Bostick in 1991, Ohio vs. Robinette in 1996 — that dramatically eroded the Fourth Amendment. Alexander writes that these decisions enabled “consent searches” — in which the motorist (or pedestrian, or home resident) verbally consents to the search, but actually does so under police intimidation.

All-white juries were more likely to convict black people, of course — and prosecutors were still able to strike non-whites from serving as jurors despite the 1986 Supreme Court decision Batson v. Kentucky, which barred discrimination on the basis of race in jury selection. As Alexander writes, “the only thing that has changed is that prosecutors must come up with a race-neutral excuse for the strikes.” 

In a vicious cycle, mass incarceration itself served to entrench the system of mass incarceration. Convicted felons are excluded from juries in many states, and only Maine and Vermont allow prison inmates to vote (as most Western European countries do).

Nor did this system turn around when the Democrats returned to the White House. The Bill Clinton years saw a 60% drop in federal spending on public housing, and a 170% boost in prison spending up to $19 billion. Prison construction would finally begin leveling off in the 2000s, but the actual prison population broke new records in 2008, “with no end in sight.”

Alexander writes: “Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.” 

And this was utterly out of proportion to any real threat posed by illegal drugs. In the 1980s, there were some 22,000 drunk driving deaths per year, among 100,000 alcohol-related deaths. In Alexander’s words: “The number of deaths related to all illegal drugs combined was tiny compared to the number of deaths caused by drunk driving.”

Among the numberless stories of police terror in the name of drug enforcement, one recounted by Alexander is that of Alberta Spruill—a 57-year-old Harlem woman who died of a heart attack in May 2003 after police officers broke down her door and threw a concussion grenade into her apartment. No drugs or any contraband were found in the apartment. The cops were acting on a bad tip from snitches snared on a marijuana rap. 

A Fourth Revolution? 

Thanks in large part to growing public consciousness, there certainly appears to have been some progress in the fight against the War on Drugs over the past decade. In 2009, following a hard-fought activist campaign, the Rockefeller Laws were finally overturned in New York. Eleven states have now legalized cannabis, and nearly all have at least some kind of provision for medical use of cannabis — significantly lifting the pressure on one federally controlled substance.

But even amid the progress, there are clear and frustrating signs that a mere change in the law isn’t enough. From New York City (where cannabis arrests have been de-emphasized by policy) to Colorado (where cannabis is now legal), overall arrests for pot are significantly reduced — but the stark racial disparity persists in those arrests that continue under various loopholes.

Michelle Alexander concludes with a litany of necessary legal reforms and then states that, ultimately, they are insufficient: “Mandatory drug sentencing laws must be rescinded. Marijuana ought to be legalized (and perhaps other drugs as well)… The list could go on, of course, but the point has been made. The central question for racial justice advocates is this: are we serious about ending the system of control, or not?” 

She quotes from Martin Luther King’s book of collected speeches, A Testament of Hope: “White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.”

There are many other quotes from the great civil rights leader that shed equal light on the current impasse, in which the limitations of mere legal progress are becoming clear. In his April 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, King justified his civil disobedience in these words: “An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself.”

This recalls both the relative impunity for white coke-snorters in the ’80s as black communities were militarized in the name of drug enforcement — and the white entrepreneurs now disproportionately getting rich off legal cannabis, while black users remain disproportionately criminalized.  

In Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote of how the country needed a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” — anticipating the current demands for drug war reparations, wedding legal cannabis to addressing the harms caused by prohibition and the related matrix of social injustice.

The notion that cannabis legalization is necessary but not sufficient recalls King’s 1967 report to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the main coordinating body of the civil rights campaign. 

In the “Report to SCLC Staff,” he noted how the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March culminated in passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year — a critical victory. Yet, he wrote: “We have moved from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights, an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We have been in a reform movement… But after Selma and the voting rights bill, we moved into a new era, which must be the era of revolution. We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”

If cannabis legalization is to truly undo the social harms of prohibition, its advocates may be in for a similar reckoning in the coming period.

The post MLK & Marijuana: How the Civil Rights Leader’s Work Informs the Push for Legal Pot appeared first on Cannabis Now.

Today, “equity” is a watchword in the cannabis legalization movement, as state and local governments try to craft models for an adult-use market designed to correct the social harms of prohibition and the War on Drugs. But this public consciousness is due to the work of many who pushed the issue long before doing so was entirely socially acceptable.

Sister Somayah Kambui, a veteran Black Panther turned cannabis advocate, was one of those who brought issues of racial justice to the forefront of the cannabis movement. And before her untimely death, she won a groundbreaking “jury nullification” victory, upholding her right to provide cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia.

Sister Somayah, as she was ubiquitously known (she was born Renee Moore), used cannabis to treat sickle-cell anemia, under the terms of California’s Proposition 215 medical marijuana measure after its passage in 1996. But her vocal advocacy made her a target of the authorities — resulting in her unprecedented legal victory. 

Sickle-cell anemia is a genetic blood anomaly that occurs in one in every 70,000 Americans, particularly those of African descent. It can cause debilitating pain, fatigue and swelling of the hands and feet. It took Kambui a while to figure out that cannabis was the most effective treatment for her.

Kambui was a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, where she served several years during the Vietnam era. At VA and public hospitals, she was given morphine for her pain from the disease. 

“I couldn’t do anything on the morph,” she told High Times reporter Peter Gorman. “And neither can a million other people. That’s why you see so many middle aged and older black folk sitting on stoops looking like junkies. They are junkies. They’re U.S. government junkies.”

After finding that cannabis helped, and after the passage of Prop 215, she founded the Crescent Alliance Self Help for Sickle Cell collective, or “buyers’ club.” With a doctor’s recommendation, she began cultivating in her South Los Angeles backyard.

But the police raided her garden in October 2001 and confiscated, by their estimate, 200 pounds of cannabis plants. 

The LAPD brought in a helicopter for the raid, menacing the block of single-family homes.

“I was sitting having a cup of coffee with a little hemp oil when they broke down the door,” Kambui told the Los Angeles Times. “I said, ‘I’m legal, I have a doctor’s note and I’m compliant with the law.'”

She said the officers told her she had too much for her personal use. “I said ‘OK, why don’t you take what you think I don’t need and leave me the rest?'” she recalled to the LA Times. “They took it all.” 

She also disputed the police estimate of the haul. “That is 200 pounds wet, with dirt and stalks,” she said.

Kambui was arrested, spent 60 days in jail and was charged with multiple felonies including cultivation, sale and shipping marijuana out of state. Worse still, she was facing a life prison term under California’s “Three Strikes” law. Her two prior convictions, involving illegal firearms possession and explosives, stemmed from her work with the Black Panthers in the early 1970s. During her time as a legendary Panther, she was known as “Peaches,” and was a leader of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, alongside Geronimo Pratt.

When she went before the judge at Los Angeles County Court in January 2002, Kambui said the cannabis was not for her use alone, but was to be shared with some dozen sickle-cell sufferers in her club. “They’re all mine,” she said, taking full responsibility for all the uprooted plants. She also admitted shipping to sufferers who were too far away to come see her. 

And she asserted that her advocacy had made her a target, noting that she’d been similarly raided in 1998 — although the charges were dropped after she spent two weeks in jail.  

Making a medical necessity defense, Kambui spoke to the court of the long centuries of medicinal cannabis use in African traditional healing. Using her own idiosyncratic lingo, she referred to the African continent as “Nigretia,” and to her cannabis as “Nigretian Kif.”  

The trial ended in an outcome that The Leaf Online website hailed as a “jury revolt or jury nullification,” in which a defendant is acquitted on moral or ethical grounds, in spite of uncontested evidence that she or he acted as charged. On March 18, 2002, Sister Somayah Kambui was found “not guilty” of all charges.

In addition to being a rare victory for the doctrine of nullification, Kambui’s legal battle also anticipated a change in California law. It was the following year that the “medical marijuana collective defense” was enshrined in the Medical Marijuana Program Act, the notorious Senate Bill 420. 

Pushing Racial Justice in the Cannabis Community 

By the time of her court case, Kambui was already a leading figure in Southern California’s cannabis activist scene. She was the key mover behind the first Los Angeles Global Marijuana March in 1999, and all the subsequent ones until her death. And she was particularly aggressive in calling out the cannabis community one what she saw as its internal racism — for instance, in failing to emphasize sickle-cell anemia in medical marijuana advocacy, and failing to make the link between prohibition and militarized policing of black and brown communities.

But she bridged a cultural divide in 1997, when she teamed up with B.E. Smith, a brazen and police-defying cannabis grower of white redneck roots in the backwoods of Northern California’s Trinity Alps. Smith became “designated caregiver” for Kambui, among a handful of other medical users around the state. Alas, she never got to use B.E.’s bud, as his cultivation site was raided by federal agents that harvest season—resulting in his own landmark legal battle. Smith died earlier this year.

Unfortunately, Kambui’s run-ins with the law were not over after her court victory. In October 2003, her garden was again raided — this time by the DEA. A dozen plants were uprooted, although no charges were filed. 

California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer decried the raid as a “mean-spirited, gratuitous attack on a seriously ill woman who has been judged guiltless by her peers under California law. Like other victims of DEA’s medical marijuana raids, Somayah was targeted because she was a vocal, legal patient activist who was a thorn in the side of the law enforcement establishment.” 

Like many front-line activists who put a commitment to community ahead of personal gain, Kambui received little material reward for her efforts. When she died on Thanksgiving 2008, at the age of 57, the website Time4Hemp wrote that economic hard times likely contributed to her demise: “Many close to her believe she died of a broken heart based on lack of financial support. All those dispensaries in Los Angeles and not one would help her save her home from foreclosure.” 

Twelve years after her passing, Sister Somayah Kambui reminds us of the need to preserve the memory of those who sacrificed for such freedom and consciousness as we have now achieved. And more poignantly, of the need to honor and support our freedom fighters while they still walk among us. 

TELL US, what did you learn from Sister Somayah?

The post Sister Somayah Kambui: An Early Visionary of Cannabis Equity appeared first on Cannabis Now.

Topic :Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime-biggest cyber attack in history 

Introduction of biggest cyber attack in history

The majority of  notorious attacks of Cybercrime are intended to damage the software. In the worst circumstance scenario, the user is presented with an on-screen ransom demand saying that the computer has been encrypted and can be opened after payment. It is ransomware. Or, other times, it is a crippling DDOS attack that puts busy servers down for an extended period.

Often, however, nothing noticeable happens since many forms of malware operate as covertly as possible to achieve maximum information leakage before they can be detected. However, the scope or complexity of inevitable cyberattacks cannot fail to draw the entire world’s notice. In this article, we will discuss Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime of the most vicious and malicious types that occurred in the last twenty years or so. 

1. Google China faced Cyber Attacks in 2009

In 2009, Google’s Chinese headquarters discovered a high-security breach in December. It opened a pandora’s box that linked the Chinese government officials to have direct involvement with the violation. The hackers got access to many Google business server systems, stealing intellectual property. Google stated in a blog post that it had evidence to believe that the attacker’s original objective was to obtain the Gmail accounts of certain people.

These “certain people” happened to be none other than human rights activists from China or of Chinese origin. As the organization investigated more and went deeper, they discovered that multiple Gmail accounts from the United States, China, and Europe had been used without any authorization whatsoever.

All those emails belonged to human rights activists in China. All eyes were drawn to the government of China, which has long been blatantly violating the fundamental human rights of the ordinary Chinese people for years and years.

It was a massive embarrassment for the Chinese government how much they might have tried to deny their hand in it. Responding to this violation of intellectual property rights, Google relocated all its servers from China mainland to Hong Kong in March 2010. Now lets move to next biggest cyber attack in history.

2. The WannaCry Attacks-2nd notorious attacks of Cybercrime 

The WannaCry ransomware outbreak put ransomware and computer malware on everyone’s radar, including individuals who didn’t know about computers. Using Equation Group hacking team exploits available openly to the public, thanks to the Shadow Brokers, the attackers developed a beast — a ransomware encryptor so powerful that it could rapidly spread over the Internet and local networks.

Over 200,000 machines in 150 countries were brought down during the four-day WannaCry ransomware outbreak. This also included essential public infrastructure machines. WannaCry encrypted all devices, including medical equipment in several hospitals, and some firms were forced to shut down work. WannaCry is the most widespread of recent assaults that have taken place during recent years.Next in list of Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime is webbrowser.

3. The 2013 and 2014 attacks on Yahoo- 3rd notorious attacks of Cybercrime 

Yahoo! has been the victim of at least two significant security breaches. Yahoo announced in September 2016 that a 2014 hack had affected the data of at least 500 million consumers. Then, four months later, it again revealed that another hack had occurred in August 2013, compromising the data of over a billion Yahoo! users.

The corporation could not explain why it took such a long time to notify the breaches, which could lead to severe troubles with authorities. In 2011, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission released recommendations that mandated corporations to disclose important information about cyber events if they potentially affect investors. According to reports, the agency looks into the firm and the circumstances. 

4. The ExPetr attacks- 4th  notorious attacks of Cybercrime 

The notorious title of the most expensive outbreak does not belong to WannaCry, which we read about earlier, but it goes to ExPetr, a ransomware encryptor. The worm traveled over the Web, irrevocably encrypting every computer it came across in its path, using the EternalBlue and EtrernalRomance exploits.

Although the overall number of infected devices was lower than that of Wannacry, the NotPetya or Expetr virus mostly targeted businesses because one of the original transmission routes was through the banking program MeDoc. The fraudsters gained control of the MeDoc update server, allowing many clients to get malware disguised as an update, which spread over the network. The NotPetya cyberattack is believed to have caused $10 billion in damage, whereas WannaCry is estimated to have caused $4–$8 billion in damage. 

5. The Stuxnet attack- 5th notorious attacks of Cybercrime 

The most well-known cyber assault was perhaps the complicated, diverse virus that destroyed uranium-enrichment centrifuges in Iran, thereby halting the country’s nuclear program for many years. Stuxnet was the first to spark discussion about using cyberweapons against industries. Nothing at the time could compete with Stuxnet in terms of sophistication or 

being guileful – the virus was able to propagate invisibly through USB flash drives, infiltrating even systems that were not linked to the Internet or any local area network. The worm swiftly grew out of control and infected many thousands of computer systems worldwide.

But it couldn’t harm those machines since it was designed for a specific purpose. The worm only appeared on systems running Siemens programmable controllers and software. Upon arrival on that type of machine, the controllers of the machine were reprogrammed. They set the speed of rotation of the uranium-enrichment centrifuges extremely high. As a result, this destroyed them physically. With this we are coming to conclusion of biggest cyber attack in history. 

Conclusion of Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime-biggest cyber attack in history 

We have discussed the most famous Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime in history . Technology is getting updated to stop hackers from accessing unauthorized data. Anti-virus and firewalls etc., all forms of security are being upgraded.

At the same time, the hackers and crackers are also updating themselves to penetrate any firewall or anti-virus and infect machines to create next Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime. We should leave no stone unturned to ensure that our computers are always protected with the latest software. Hope you like the article Top 5 most notorious attacks of Cybercrime-biggest cyber attack in history 

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