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From the Los Angeles Times

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YouTube is letting users decide on terrorism-related videos

The company has been under fire from lawmakers for refusing to prescreen militant speeches and propaganda videos. Now users can mark such uploads for removal.

by Brian Bennett, Tribune Washington Bureau

December 12, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Nudity. Sexual activity. Animal abuse. All are reasons YouTube users can flag a video for removal from the website. Add a new category: promotes terrorism.

YouTube and its parent company, Google, have been criticized by lawmakers for refusing to prescreen militant speeches and propaganda videos that have been cited in more than a dozen terrorism investigations over the last five years.

But rather than submit to policies that many argue would amount to an erosion of 1st Amendment rights, particularly in an open-access environment such as the Internet, YouTube is taking a decidedly more democratic path — let the customers decide.

The approach puts YouTube in the middle of a debate over whether it is possible to protect free speech and deny militants a powerful recruitment tool — slick videos glorifying jihad that reach into the laptops and minds of disaffected young Americans.

After years of calling on YouTube to take down content produced by Islamic extremists, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called the new flagging protocols a "good first step toward scrubbing mainstream Internet sites of terrorist propaganda."

"But it shouldn't take a letter from Congress — or in the worst possible case, a successful terrorist attack — for YouTube to do the right thing," said Lieberman, whose staff has met with YouTube officials on the issue.

Yet the new category also is "potentially troubling," said George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, because the phrase "promotes terrorism" is more subject to interpretation than the longstanding language in the YouTube guidelines that specifically forbids material that incites others to commit violence.

In November, YouTube removed hundreds of videos that featured the American cleric Anwar Awlaki, whom U.S. officials have designated a "global terrorist," after Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) wrote then-YouTube Chief Executive Chad Hurley a letter detailing Awlaki's appearance in more than 700 videos with 3.5 million page views on the site.

Despite YouTube's action, dozens of Awlaki's speeches are easily found on the site, and users who play the speeches are directed to dozens of other Islamic militant videos under a "suggestions" column.

YouTube has been a favorite tool of Awlaki, who is believed to be hiding in Yemen with other members of the organization Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. law enforcement officials think Awlaki's preaching influenced Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day; Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber; and Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people at Ft. Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

A 21-year-old Baltimore construction worker accused of plotting to blow up a military recruiting station last week called Awlaki a "real inspiration," according to court documents.

U.S. investigators working on domestic terrorism cases during the last five years have repeatedly found Awlaki's English-language speech "Constants on the Path to Jihad" shared among circles of would-be plotters. The speech, which is still on YouTube, is a lengthy interpretation of the religious justifications for fighting against perceived enemies of Islam.

If a father forbids his son to fight, Awlaki says at one point, the son should disobey. "When the command of Allah clashes with the command of the parents," Awlaki says, "he will obey the command of Allah."

After a 21-year-old woman told a British judge that she was inspired to stab a parliamentarian in March after she watched Awlaki's speeches on YouTube, Britain security minister Pauline Neville-Jones called on the U.S. "to take down this hateful material."

"Those websites would categorically not be allowed in [Britain] — they incite cold-blooded murder and, as such, are surely contrary to the public good," Neville-Jones said in an October speech in Washington.

YouTube executives say they are committed to ensuring that the website is not used to "spread terrorist propaganda or incite violence." But given the massive amount of video uploaded to YouTube — more than 24 hours of video every minute — it is "simply not possible" to prescreen the content, YouTube executive Victoria Grand wrote in a Nov. 10 letter to Weiner.

YouTube relies on users to flag inappropriate videos to be reviewed by its employees. YouTube would not disclose how many reviewers it employs or what languages they understand. If the reviewers determine that the videos contain nudity, animal abuse, hate speech or incite violence, they are taken down for violating the site's terms of use.

But when it comes to deciding whether a video is religious free speech or promotes terrorism, YouTube aims "to draw a careful line between enabling free expression and religious speech, while prohibiting content that incites violence."

It is admirable that YouTube devotes resources to consider religious speech on a case-by-case basis, said Rosen, the law professor. "It is precisely the speech of those we hate that needs the most protection if free expression is going to flourish."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-youtube-terror-20101213,0,4471553,print.story

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Hospital patient in custody after allegedly assaulting rehabilitation therapist

The attack in a secluded corner of the grounds at Napa State Hospital, which left the therapist hospitalized with four skull fractures, has staffers concerned anew about safety. The patient is identified as Sean Bouchie, 24.

by Lee Romney, Los Angeles Times

December 13, 2010

Reporting from San Francisco

A Napa State Hospital patient was in custody Sunday after allegedly beating a rehabilitation therapist unconscious in a secluded corner of the psychiatric hospital's grounds, staff members said.

The Saturday morning assault left the longtime staff member, a 60-year-old man, hospitalized with four skull fractures, according to a co-worker. The assault comes less than two months after Napa State Hospital psychiatric technician Donna Gross was strangled. A patient is facing murder charges in connection with her death.

Since 2006, the state's mental hospitals have been under a federal court order to improve conditions for patients. Yet safety for both patients and staff has deteriorated markedly at Napa State Hospital over the last year, data show. The other state hospitals subject to the federal consent judgment have also experienced a rise in violence since the state began implementing changes in care, data show.

Staffers began demanding improved safety measures before Gross' slaying but said they received little response from hospital and state mental health administrators. The killing prompted the hospital to revoke grounds passes for patients, most of whom are confined to the facility after committing crimes connected to their illnesses. The hospital also ordered more personal alarms.

Several staff members said an alarm would not have helped in Saturday's attack because the patient and the staffer were alone in an area where it would have been hard to hear.

A Department of Mental Health spokeswoman said the hospital "immediately added additional measures for escorting patients about the grounds. The incident will continue to be investigated by hospital police."

Staffers, who asked not to be named because they feared retaliation, identified the patient taken into custody after Saturday's assault as Sean Bouchie, 24. A Napa County sheriff's official could not confirm Sunday evening that Bouchie was in custody, but an employee at a bail bonds service confirmed that he had been booked into Napa County Jail on felony battery charges.

According to a staff member familiar with the incident, Bouchie had allegedly assaulted two other people in the last week: a custodian and another patient.

Patients have not been allowed to walk the grounds by themselves since Gross' slaying and are becoming increasingly agitated, several staff members said. On Saturday morning, the rehabilitation therapist decided to take Bouchie for a walk. He was found beaten and in "unrecognizable" condition after Bouchie wandered back inside the hospital alone.

The hospital had left solo escorts up to the "clinical judgment" of staff; now, the staff member said, management is requiring that two staffers escort each patient on the grounds.

The incident has left staffers even more anxious about their safety.

"Violence is starting to increase on the units," the staff member said. "We need hospital police either stationed on the units or doing regular walk-throughs. When do we say enough is enough? These are people's lives. It's not that [management] are not doing anything. But they're just not doing enough."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-napa-assault-20101213,0,6771074,print.story

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From the New York Times

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With New Violence, More Christians Are Fleeing Iraq

QOSH, Iraq — A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country's security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them.

The flight — involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular — followed an Oct. 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshipers and 2 priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians. This new exodus, which is not the first, highlights the continuing displacement of Iraqis despite improved security over all and the near-resolution of the political impasse that gripped the country after elections in March.

It threatens to reduce further what Archdeacon Emanuel Youkhana of the Assyrian Church of the East called “a community whose roots were in Iraq even before Christ.”

Those who fled the latest violence — many of them in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars — warned that the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq's Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

“It's exactly what happened to the Jews,” said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once mixed neighborhood in Baghdad. “They want us all to go.”

Iraq's leaders, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, have pledged to tighten security and appealed for tolerance for minority faiths in what is an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

“The Christian is an Iraqi,” he said after visiting those wounded in the siege of the church, Our Lady of Salvation, the worst single act of violence against Christians since 2003. “He is the son of Iraq and from the depths of a civilization that we are proud of.”

For those who fled, though, such pronouncements have been met with growing skepticism. The daily threats, the uncertainty and palpable terror many face have overwhelmed even the pleas of Christian leaders not to abandon their historic place in a diverse Iraq.

“Their faith in God is strong,” said the Rev. Gabriele Tooma, who heads the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, part of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Qosh, which opened its monastic rooms to 25 families in recent weeks. “It is their faith in the government that has weakened.”

Christians, of course, are not the only victims of the bloodshed that has swept Iraq for more than seven and a half years; Sunni and Shiite Arabs have died on a far greater scale. Only two days after the attack on the church, a dozen bombs tore through Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, killing at least 68 people and wounding hundreds.

The Christians and other smaller minority groups here, however, have been explicitly made targets and have emigrated in disproportionate numbers. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these groups account for 20 percent of the Iraqis who have gone abroad, while they were only 3 percent of the country's prewar population.

More than half of Iraq's Christian community, estimated to number 800,000 to 1.4 million before the American-led invasion in 2003, have already left the country.

The Islamic State of Iraq, an iteration of the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, claimed responsibility for the suicidal siege and said its fighters would kill Christians “wherever they can reach them.”

What followed last month were dozens of shootings and bombings in Baghdad and Mosul, the two cities outside of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. At least a dozen more Christians died, eight of them in Mosul.

Three generations of the Gorgiz family — 15 in all — fled their homes there on the morning of Nov. 23 as the killings spread. Crowded into a single room at the monastery in Qosh, they described living in a state of virtual siege, afraid to wear crosses on the streets, afraid to work or even leave their houses in the end.

The night before they left, Diana Gorgiz, 35, said she heard voices and then screams; someone had set fire to the garden of a neighbor's house. The Iraqi Army arrived and stayed until morning, only to tell them they were not safe there anymore. The Gorgizes took it as a warning — and an indication of complicity, tacit or otherwise, by Iraq's security forces. “When the army comes and says, ‘We cannot protect you,' ” Ms. Gorgiz said, “what else can you believe?”

There is no exact accounting of those who have fled internally or abroad. The United Nations has registered more than 1,100 families. A steady flow of Christians to Turkey spiked in November to 243, an official there said.

The Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq offered itself as a haven and pledged to help refugees with housing and jobs. Many of those who fled are wealthy enough to afford rents in Iraqi Kurdistan; others have moved in with relatives; the worst off have ended up at the monastery here and another nearby, St. Matthew's, one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world.

There have been previous exoduses, especially from Mosul. In October 2008, more than 12,000 Christians left after a wave of assassinations killed 14 Christians. In February of this year, more than 4,000 fled to the Kurdish-controlled region in Nineveh or to Syria after 10 Christians were killed. When violence ebbed after each exodus, many returned to their homes and jobs, though not all, leaving fewer and fewer Christians. By one estimate, only 5,000 of the 100,000 Christians who once lived in Mosul remain.

“I expect that a month from now not a single Christian will be left in Mosul,” Nelson P. Khoshaba, an engineer in the city's waterworks, said in Erbil, where he joined a chaotic scrum of people trying to register with the local authorities there.

The displacement of Christians has continued despite the legal protections that Iraq's Constitution offers religious and ethnic minorities, though Islam is the official state religion and no law can be passed contradicting its basic tenets.

Christians have a quota of 5 seats in the new 325-member Parliament, though little political influence. Christmas was declared a national holiday in 2008, though celebrations are muted, and in Kirkuk, a tensely disputed city north of Baghdad, Christmas Mass was canceled last year.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, appointed by the president and Congress, said that the nominal protections for religious minorities in Iraq — including Christians, Yazidis and Sabean Mandeans, followers of St. John the Baptist — did little to stop violence or official discrimination in employment, housing and other matters. It noted that few of the attacks against minority groups were ever properly investigated or prosecuted, “creating a climate of impunity.”

“The violence, forced displacement, discrimination, marginalization and neglect suffered by members of these groups threaten these ancient communities' very existence in Iraq,” the commission said in its latest annual report in May. Last week security officials announced the arrest of insurgents whom they said planned the attack on Our Lady of Salvation; those who actually carried it out died when Iraqi forces stormed the church. They offered few details, and a spokesman for the American military, which regularly joins Iraqi forces during such arrests, said he had no information on those arrested.

Archdeacon Emanuel said the government needed to do more to preserve a community that has been under siege in Iraq for decades — from the first massacre of Christians in Sumail in 1933 after the creation of the modern Iraqi nation to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein to today's nihilistic extremism that, in his words, has taken Islam hostage.

Invitations by European countries for Christians to emigrate following the attack, he said, would only hasten the departure of more, which “is not a solution.” Instead, the latest violence should give impetus to the creation of an autonomous Christian enclave in the part of Nineveh Province near here that is now under the control of the Kurdish region. That idea, though, has little political support in Iraq in Baghdad or Iraqi Kurdistan.

“What happened has been done repeatedly and systematically,” he said. “We have seen it in Mosul, in Baghdad. The message is very clear: to pluck Iraqi Christians from the roots and force them out of the country.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?_r=1&ref=world&pagewanted=print

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After Attack Hits Sweden, Focus Turns to Suspect

STOCKHOLM — A day after two explosions struck central Stockholm, killing the man suspected of being a suicide bomber and wounding two other people, investigators began to focus on the possibility that the person responsible was a disaffected Iraqi-born Swede who had attended college in Britain.

Reports in British and Swedish newspapers, citing government sources, identified the man as Taimour al-Abdaly, a 28-year-old Sunni Muslim whose family moved to Sweden from Baghdad in 1992. Attempts by The New York Times to confirm the reports independently were not immediately successful, and Swedish officials declined to comment, saying the bomber's identity was part of the investigation.

But the suspect's possible link to Britain was reinforced Sunday night when the Metropolitan Police in London said officers were searching a property at an address in Bedfordshire, the county in which Mr. Abdaly is believed to have attended college. A spokesman said the search was made “in connection with the incidents in Stockholm.”

Sweden's prime minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, told reporters at a news conference that an investigation led by the Swedish intelligence agency Sapo was still working to establish links among the two explosions, the dead man found with blast wounds to his abdomen and the threatening messages sent to the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyra shortly before the explosions.

Mr. Reinfeldt, leader of a center-right coalition, said the police were “treating this as a terrorist action,” but he appealed to Swedes not to jump to “the wrong conclusions” or allow preliminary reports about the explosions to stir fresh tensions over Sweden's growing immigrant population, including about 450,000 Muslims. Sweden's “openness is worth giving ourselves the time to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

“Our democracy functions well,” Mr. Reinfeldt said. “Those who feel frustration or anger have the opportunity to express it without resorting to violence.”

The blasts have caused widespread consternation in Sweden. The country has long prided itself on having created a tolerant and peaceful society at home, and on having avoided involvement in the upheavals that have ravaged much of Europe in modern times, including World War II. Until Saturday, it had escaped the bombings that have hit several other European capitals since the 9/11 attacks.

Although officials withheld the name of the suspected bomber, the director of operations for the security police, Anders Thornberg, told reporters that investigators “now have a clearer idea about him.” Reports in Swedish newspapers said the man's identity had been traced through the license plate of a car used in the blasts, and Mr. Thornberg hinted that he had acted alone.

The first blast came from a car parked near the busy shopping street of Drottninggatan shortly before 5 p.m. on Saturday, and appeared to involve gas canisters found in the wreckage. A second blast came minutes later, about 200 yards away. A man's body, with blast injuries to his abdomen, was discovered after the second explosion.

The newspaper Aftonbladet reported on its Web site that the dead man had been carrying pipe bombs and a backpack full of nails. But the sequence left many unanswered questions. Among them was why the suicide bomber, if that is what he was, had detonated his bomb in an area with relatively few people, when he could have chosen any one of the crowded shops along Drottninggatan, a pedestrian mall hundreds of yards long.

Other questions focused on the messages received by several Swedish news organizations. Dan Skeppe, an editor at Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, said the agency had received recordings attached to an e-mail minutes before the blasts. The recordings, obtained by The New York Times, were in Arabic, Swedish and English. In one, a man, speaking in fluent and scarcely accented English, addressed himself “to Sweden.”

He read from what was apparently a prepared script, and said that Swedes had brought “these actions” on themselves. The message singled out Lars Vilks, an artist threatened repeatedly with death since his drawing of the Prophet Muhammad was published in 2007, and demanded that European nations withdraw their soldiers from Afghanistan.

Then, with the sound of the turn of a page, he addressed his wife and children. The man confessed that trips he had made to the Middle East were not for business, but for “jihad.”

“I love you all. Please forgive me if I lied to you. It wasn't very easy to live the last four years with the secret of being mujahid,” he said, using an Arabic word for holy warrior, “or, as you call it, terrorist.” After a pause, he continued. “Please do know one thing,” he said. “You and the children are the best of what happened to me in this life.”

The final words were directed at “all hidden mujahideen in Europe and especially in Sweden.” Now, the speaker said, is “the time to strike even if you only have a knife to strike with, and I do know that you have more than that.”

The recording's reference to Mr. Vilks, 64, pointed to continued anger in the Muslim world over his drawing, which was deemed blasphemous.

Publication of the drawing in Swedish newspapers drew widespread condemnation in the Muslim world and death threats against Mr. Vilks, who has since lived under police protection. In March, Colleen R. LaRose, an American who converted to Islam and used the pseudonym JihadJane, was charged with trying to recruit Islamic terrorists to kill Mr. Vilks.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric associated with Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula in Yemen, had named Mr. Vilks among those he approved for assassination in a publication this summer.

The family of Mr. Abdaly, the man identified in news accounts as the bomber, told reporters by telephone on Sunday that they had lost contact with their son. The Swedish newspaper Expressen quoted Mr. Abdaly's father as saying that Taimour al-Abdaly had not responded to calls since Saturday. “He did not say where he was going,” he said. “The whole family is in shock, and wants to find out what happened.”

In a recent profile he placed on an Islamic dating Web site, Muslima.com, the younger Mr. Abdaly described himself as an Iraqi who moved with his family to Sweden in 1992. The profile said that he had moved to Britain in 2001 to study for a degree, which was described in Mr. Abdaly's Facebook profile as “sports therapy at the University of Bedfordshire.” The Facebook profile said he graduated in 2004.

The dating Web site profile shows a tall, stern-looking, neatly dressed man standing in front of a white curtain, his dark hair cropped short, with a trimmed black beard. Another picture available online shows him posing in a black jacket and sunglasses, beard trimmed to stubble, against a background of a dry and rocky valley,

“I am married since 2004,” he said on his dating profile, according to a translation of the original Arabic. He described himself as “very religious” and said that he had two daughters, aged three and one. “I want to get married again,” he said, “and would like to have a BIG family. My wife agreed to this. I am looking for a practicing Muslim, Sunni, who loves children and wants to please Allah before me,” he said. “I am looking mostly for religion.”

On his Facebook page he posted videos dedicated to Islamic fighters around the world. Among his listed interests there were both “I love my Apple iPad” and “Islamic caliphate state”, a historical concept that refers to a supreme Islamic nation pure in its religion.

Officials in Sweden have made no mention of any involvement by al-Qaeda or any other extremist Islamic terror organization. But in an interview over the weekend, a former British counter-terrorism official, who did not want to be identified discussing a current operation, said that a number of known Islamic militants have traveled to Sweden in the past two years. The account was confirmed by an American intelligence operative, who spoke of an established al-Qaeda “cell” in Sweden. Both declined to provide further details.

The Swedish military's current deployment in Afghanistan, adding signals intelligence specialists to a NATO-led combat mission under American command, is a rare departure from the country's usual pattern of avoiding participation in military alliances.

But a major change has come with the impact on a historically homogeneous society of heavy immigration in the past three decades, especially of Muslims. Their growing numbers, and the furor surrounding Mr. Vilks, have contributed to a rise in tensions that have led to increased support for a right-wing anti-immigration party, the Sweden Democrats, which won 20 seats this summer in a general election. The party, blaming immigration for increased crime rates, has focused its ire on the Muslim population, which accounts for about 5 percent of Sweden's 9.3 million people.

According to Sweden's TV4 News, a squad of specialist police officers conducted several raids on addresses connected with the bomber Sunday, in the suburbs of Stockholm and an apartment in Tranas. At the latter address, reported TV4, material was confiscated in paper bags.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/world/europe/13sweden.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Los Angeles Seeks to Shed Homelessness Reputation

LOS ANGELES — It was just past dusk in the upscale enclave of Brentwood as a homeless man, wrapped in a tattered gray blanket, stepped into a doorway to escape a light rain, watching the flow of people on their way to the high-end restaurants that lined the street.

Across town in Hollywood the next morning, homeless people were wandering up and down Sunset Boulevard, pushing shopping carts and slumped at bus stops. More homeless men and women could be found shuffling along the boardwalks of Venice and Santa Monica, while a few others were spotted near the heart of Beverly Hills, the very symbol of Los Angeles wealth.

And, as always, San Julian Street, the infamous center of Skid Row on the south edge of downtown Los Angeles, was teeming: a small city of people were making the street their home in a warm December sun, waiting for one of the many missions there to serve a meal.

At a time when cities across the country have made significant progress over the past decade in reducing the number of homeless, in no small part by building permanent housing, the problem seems intractable in the County of Los Angeles.

It has become a subject of acute embarrassment to some civic leaders, upset over the county's faltering efforts, the glaring contrast of street poverty and mansion wealth, and any perception of a hardhearted Los Angeles unmoved by a problem that has motivated action in so many other cities.

For national organizations trying to eradicate homelessness, Los Angeles — with its 48,000 people living on the streets, including 6,000 veterans, according to one count — stands as a stubborn anomaly, an outlier at a time when there has been progress, albeit modest and at times fitful, in so many cities.

Its designation as the homeless capital of America, a title that people here dislike but do not contest, seems increasingly indisputable.

“If we want to end homelessness in this country, we have to do something about L.A.; it is the biggest nut,” said Nan Roman, the president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “It has more homeless people than anyplace else.”

Neil J. Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said he believed that, after years of decline, there had been a slight rise in the number of homeless nationally this year because of the economic downturn, and that Los Angeles had led the way.

“Los Angeles's homeless problem is growing faster than the overall national problem,” he said, “trending upwards in every demographic, dashing every hope of progress anywhere.”

In a reflection of the growing concern here, a task force created by the Chamber of Commerce and the United Way of Greater Los Angeles has stepped in with a plan, called Home for Good, to end homelessness here in five years. The idea is to, among other things, build housing for 12,000 of the chronically unemployed and provide food, maintenance and other services at a cost of $235 million a year.

The proposal, based on the task force's study of what other cities had done, was embraced by political and civic leaders even as it served as a reminder of how many of these plans have failed over the years.

“This is not rocket science,” said Zev Yaroslavsky of the County Board of Supervisors. “It's been done in New York, it's been done in Atlanta, and it's been done in San Francisco.”

Part of the impetus for this most recent flurry of attention is concern in the business and political communities that the epidemic is threatening to tarnish Los Angeles's national image and undercut a campaign to promote tourism, particularly in downtown, which has been in the midst of a transformation of sorts, with a boom of museums, concert halls, restaurants, boutiques, parks and lofts.

The gentrification has pushed many of the homeless people south, but they can still be seen settled on benches and patches of grass in the center of downtown.

“If you have a homeless problem, then your sense of security is diminished, and that makes people not want to come,” said Jerry Neuman, a co-chairman of the task force. “It's a problem that diminishes us in many ways: the way we view ourselves and the way other people view us.”

Fittingly enough, it was even the subject of a movie last year, “The Soloist,” which portrayed the relationship between a Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez, who has written extensively about the homeless, and a musician living on the streets.

The obstacles seem particularly great in this part of the country. The warm climate has always been a draw for homeless people. And the fact that people sleeping outside rarely die of exposure means there is less pressure on civic leaders to act. (In New York City, when a homeless woman known only as “Mama” was found dead at Grand Central Terminal on a frigid Christmas in 1985, it was front-page news that inspired a campaign to deal with the epidemic.)

The governmental structure here, of a county that includes 88 cities and a maze of conflicting jurisdictions, responsibilities and boundaries, has defused responsibility and made it nearly impossible for any one organization or person to take charge.

And Los Angeles is a place where people drive almost everywhere, so there are fewer of the reminders of homelessness — walking around a sleeping person on a sidewalk, responding to requests for money at the corner — that are common in concentrated cities like New York.

“It's easy to get up in the morning, go to work, drive home and never encounter someone who is homeless,” said Wendy Greuel, the Los Angeles city controller. “I don't think it's seeped into the public's consciousness that homelessness is a problem.”

The homelessness task force offered its plan at a conference that attracted some of the top elected officials here, including Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and three of the five members of the Board of Supervisors, a notable show of political support.

“We believe that with the release of this plan, we now have a blueprint to end chronic homelessness and veteran homelessness,” said Christine Marge, director of housing for the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.

Yet in a time of severe budget retrenchment, the five-year goal seems daunting. Even though the drafters of the plan say that no new money will be needed to finance it — Los Angeles is already spending more than $235 million a year on hospital, overnight housing and police costs dealing with the homeless — government financing of all social services has come under assault.

“I don't for a minute think it's not going to require a tremendous amount of political will to make it happen,” said Richard Bloom, the mayor of Santa Monica. “Do I think it can happen? Yes, because I've seen what happens in other cities, like New York City, Denver and Boston.”

Still, Mr. Bloom, who said he regularly attended conferences involving officials from other communities, added: “Our numbers are way out of whack with those numbers I hear elsewhere. It's just so much more enormous and daunting here.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13homeless.html?ref=us

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Inmates in Georgia Prisons Use Contraband Phones to Coordinate Protest

The prison protest has entered the wireless age.

Inmates in at least seven Georgia prisons have used contraband cellphones to coordinate a nonviolent strike this weekend, saying they want better living conditions and to be paid for work they do in the prisons.

Inmates said they would not perform chores, work for the Corrections Department's industrial arm or shop at prison commissaries until a list of demands are addressed, including compensation for their work, more educational opportunities, better food and sentencing rules changes.

The protest began Thursday, but inmates said that organizers had spent months building a web of disparate factions and gangs — groups not known to cooperate — into a unified coalition using text messaging and word of mouth.

Officials at the Georgia Department of Corrections did not respond on Sunday to phone and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Smuggled cellphones have been commonplace in prisons for years; Charles Manson was caught with one in a California penitentiary this month. Officials worry that inmates will use them to issue orders to accomplices on the outside or to plan escape attempts.

But the Georgia protest appears to be the first use of the technology to orchestrate a grass-roots movement behind bars.

Reached on their cellphones inside several prisons, six participants in the strike described a feat of social networking more reminiscent of Capitol Hill vote-whipping than jailhouse rebellion.

Conditions at the state prisons have been in decline, the inmates said. But “they took the cigarettes away in August or September, and a bunch of us just got to talking, and that was a big factor,” said Mike, an inmate at the Smith State Prison in Downing who declined to give his full name.

The organizers set a date for the start and, using contact numbers from time spent at other prisons or connections from the outside, began sending text messages to inmates known to hold sway.

“Anybody that has some sort of dictatorship or leadership amongst the crowds,” said Mike, one of several prisoners who contacted The New York Times to publicize their strike. “We have to come together and set aside all differences, whites, blacks, those of us that are affiliated in gangs.”

Now, Mike said, every dormitory at participating prisons has at least one point man with a phone who can keep the other inmates in the loop.

Miguel, another prisoner at Smith who also declined to give his full name, estimated that about 10 percent of all inmates had phones.

“We text very frequently,” he said. “We try and keep up with what's going on in the news and what's going on at other facilities. Those are our voices.”

They are also a source of profit to the people providing the contraband. Miguel said he paid $400 for a phone that would have cost $20 on the street. Mike said he bought his through a guard. “That's how a lot of us get our phones,” Mike said.

Inmates said guards had started confiscating the phones, and they complained that hot water and heat had been turned off. The Corrections Department placed several of the facilities where inmates planned to strike under indefinite lockdown on Thursday, according to local news reports.

“We're hearing in the news they're putting it down as we're starting a riot, so they locked all the prison down,” said an inmate at Hays State Prison in Trion who refused to give his name. But, he said, “We locked ourselves down.”

The inmates contend that if they have a source of income in the prison and better educational opportunities to prepare them for release, violence and recidivism will go down. But the Department of Corrections has not publicly acknowledged the protest.

Mike said that the leaders were focused on telling inmates to remain patient, and not to consider resorting to violence.

The inmates' closest adviser outside prison walls is Elaine Brown, a longtime advocate for prisoners whose son is incarcerated at Macon State Prison, one of the other major protest sites.

A former Black Panther leader who is based in Oakland, Calif., Ms. Brown helped distill the inmate complaints into a list of demands. She held a conference call on Sunday evening to develop a strategy with various groups, including the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/us/13prison.html?ref=us

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Facebook Wrestles With Free Speech and Civility

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Mark Zuckerberg , the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, likes to say that his Web site brings people together, helping to make the world a better place. But Facebook isn't a utopia, and when it comes up short, Dave Willner tries to clean up.

Dressed in Facebook's quasi-official uniform of jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, the 26-year-old Mr. Willner hardly looks like a cop on the beat. Yet he and his colleagues on Facebook's “hate and harassment team” are part of a virtual police squad charged with taking down content that is illegal or violates Facebook's terms of service. That puts them on the front line of the debate over free speech on the Internet.

That role came into sharp focus last week as the controversy about WikiLeaks boiled over on the Web, with coordinated attacks on major corporate and government sites perceived to be hostile to that group.

Facebook took down a page used by WikiLeaks supporters to organize hacking attacks on the sites of such companies, including PayPal and MasterCard ; it said the page violated the terms of service, which prohibit material that is hateful, threatening, pornographic or incites violence or illegal acts. But it did not remove WikiLeaks's own Facebook pages.

Facebook's decision in the WikiLeaks matter illustrates the complexities that the company grapples with, on issues as diverse as that controversy, verbal bullying among teenagers, gay-baiting and religious intolerance.

With Facebook's prominence on the Web — its more than 500 million members upload more than one billion pieces of content a day — the site's role as an arbiter of free speech is likely to become even more pronounced.

“Facebook has more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president,” said Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University who has written about free speech on the Internet. “It is important that Facebook is exercising its power carefully and protecting more speech rather than less.”

But Facebook rarely pleases everyone. Any piece of content — a photograph, video, page or even a message between two individuals — could offend somebody. Decisions by the company not to remove material related to Holocaust denial or pages critical of Islam and other religions, for example, have annoyed advocacy groups and prompted some foreign governments to temporarily block the site.

Some critics say Facebook does not do enough to prevent certain abuses, like bullying, and may put users at risk with lax privacy policies. They also say the company is often too slow to respond to problems.

For example, a page lampooning and, in some instances, threatening violence against an 11-year-old girl from Orlando, Fla., who had appeared in a music video, was still up last week, months after users reported the page to Facebook. The girl's mother, Christa Etheridge, said she had been in touch with law enforcement authorities and was hoping the offenders would be prosecuted.

“I'm highly upset that Facebook has allowed this to go on repeatedly and to let it get this far,” she said.

A Facebook spokesman said the company had left the page up because it did not violate its terms of service, which allow criticism of a public figure. The spokesman said that by appearing in a band's video, the girl had become a public figure, and that the threatening comments had not been posted until a few days ago. Those comments, and the account of the user who had posted them, were removed after The New York Times inquired about them.

Facebook says it is constantly working to improve its tools to report abuse and trying to educate users about bullying. And it says it responds as fast as it can to the roughly two million reports of potentially abusive content that its users flag every week.

“Our intent is to triage to make sure we get to the high-priority, high-risk and high-visibility items most quickly,” said Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer.

In early October, Mr. Willner and his colleagues spent more than a week dealing with one high-risk, highly visible case; rogue citizens of Facebook's world had posted antigay messages and threats of violence on a page inviting people to remember Tyler Clementi and other gay teenagers who have committed suicide, on so-called Spirit Day, Oct. 20.

Working with colleagues here and in Dublin, they tracked down the accounts of the offenders and shut them down. Then, using an automated technology to tap Facebook's graph of connections between members, they tracked down more profiles for people, who, as it turned out, had also been posting violent messages.

“Most of the hateful content was coming from fake profiles,” said James Mitchell, who is Mr. Willner's supervisor and leads the team. He said that because most of these profiles, created by people he called “trolls,” were connected to those of other trolls, Facebook could track down and block an entire network relatively quickly.

Using the system, Mr. Willner and his colleagues silenced dozens of troll accounts, and the page became usable again. But trolls are repeat offenders, and it took Mr. Willner and his colleagues nearly 10 days of monitoring the page around the clock to take down over 7,000 profiles that kept surfacing to attack the Spirit Day event page.

Most abuse incidents are not nearly as prominent or public as the defacing of the Spirit Day page, which had nearly 1.5 million members. As with schoolyard taunts, they often happen among a small group of people, hidden from casual view.

On a morning in November, Nick Sullivan, a member of the hate and harassment team, watched as reports of bullying incidents scrolled across his screen, full of mind-numbing meanness. “Emily looks like a brother.” (Deleted) “Grady is with Dave.” (Deleted) “Ronald is the biggest loser.” (Deleted) Although the insults are relatively mild, as attacks on specific people who are not public figures, these all violated the terms of service.

“There's definitely some crazy stuff out there,” Mr. Sullivan said. “But you can do thousands of these in a day.”

Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, which advises parents and teachers on Internet safety, said her organization frequently received complaints that Facebook does not quickly remove threats against individuals. Jim Steyer, executive director of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, also said that many instances of abuse seemed to fall through the cracks.

“Self-policing can take some time, and by then a lot of the damage may already be done,” he said.

Facebook maintains it is doing its best.

“In the same way that efforts to combat bullying offline are not 100 percent successful, the efforts to stop people from saying something offensive about another person online are not complete either,” Joe Sullivan said.

Facebook faces even thornier challenges when policing activity that is considered political by some, and illegal by others, like the controversy over WikiLeaks and the secret diplomatic cables it published.

Last spring, for example, the company declined to take down pages related to “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,” an Internetwide protest to defend free speech that surfaced in repudiation of death threats received by two cartoonists who had drawn pictures of Muhammad. A lot of the discussion on Facebook involved people in Islamic countries debating with people in the West about why the images offended.

Facebook's team worked to separate the political discussion from the attacks on specific people or Muslims. “There were people on the page that were crossing the line, but the page itself was not crossing the line,” Mr. Mitchell said.

Facebook's refusal to shut down the debate caused its entire site to be blocked in Pakistan and Bangladesh for several days.

Facebook has also sought to walk a delicate line on Holocaust denial. The company has generally refused to block Holocaust denial material, but has worked with human rights groups to take down some content linked to organizations or groups, like the government of Iran, for which Holocaust denial is part of a larger campaign against Jews.

“Obviously we disagree with them on Holocaust denial,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But Rabbi Cooper said Facebook had done a better job than many other major Web sites in developing a thoughtful policy on hate and harassment.

The soft-spoken Mr. Willner, who on his own Facebook page describes his political views as “turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” makes for an unlikely enforcer. An archaeology and anthropology major in college, he said that while he loved his job, he did not love watching so much of the underbelly of Facebook.

“I handle it by focusing on the fact that what we do matters,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/technology/13facebook.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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EDITORIAL

Judicial Scrutiny Before Death

The Obama administration no longer has to worry about an immediate legal challenge to its policy of targeting terrorists, including American citizens, for assassination. A federal judge threw out a lawsuit brought by the father of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen hiding in Yemen who is on the government's target list. He said the father had no standing to sue.

But the administration should remain very worried about the moral implications of its policy, which were sharply questioned by the judge, John Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, as he dismissed the suit. Among the many unanswered questions raised by the lawsuit, he wrote, is this one: “Can the Executive order the assassination of a U.S. citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organization?”

Judge Bates deftly nailed the most problematic aspect of the government's policy — acting as judge and jury, choosing terrorist threats and killing them with little outside scrutiny. President George W. Bush routinely abused that kind of discretion, and though there is little evidence that President Obama has done so, the potential for serious abuse remains. Though this judge said he felt powerless to impose a solution, other judges may be more aggressive if the administration does not work with Congress to allow some form of judicial review.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, always seemed a little shaky in its legal theory. Mr. Awlaki's father is not directly affected by the targeting policy. Mr. Awlaki, accused of helping plan attacks by Al Qaeda in Yemen, is the only one who could reasonably sue in this case, but to do so would require turning himself in, and then the issue would be moot. That has always been the problem with trying to litigate these matters in open court: formal due process is usually impossible.

But that doesn't mean that there is no place for judicial scrutiny. We have argued for creating a court that operates in secrecy, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorizes wiretaps on foreign agents inside the United States. The government could present its evidence to this court behind closed doors before putting a terror suspect on its target list. Judge Bates made a similar point: How can the government prohibit judicial scrutiny for assassination, he asked, if it is required to get approval for electronic surveillance?

The judge noted that the courts are not necessarily equipped to set standards for who should be targeted, and he is correct. Those standards should be agreed upon by the White House and Congress and made public; the secret court can then determine whether a targeted person meets those standards. Once the government proves its case that a suspect is an active terror threat, the timing and method of killing — which would always have to be a last resort — is still up to the executive branch.

The government may have won this legal battle on technical grounds, but the underlying civil liberties violation is still going on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/opinion/13mon2.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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