Though it has been significantly overshadowed by French president Emanuel Macron’s controversial attempt to raise the retirement age, the legislation was passed in anticipation of the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics, for which the city expects to receive over 9 million visitors from outside the city. The law will allow artificial intelligence programs to sift through video footage collected from public security cameras placed throughout the city, in order to analyze people’s movements in real time and detect suspicious or abnormal behavior.

“That could be, for example, detecting someone running, someone who isn’t moving, who’s static in public space, a face that’s covered up, someone doing graffiti—a lot of different things,” said Alouette, pseudonym for an activist with a French digital rights group that opposes the new law, La Quadrature du Net, and who didn’t want to be named due to privacy concerns.

The law has provoked an outcry from a number of privacy activists, civil society organizations, members of the European Parliament, and lawmakers from France’s left-wing political coalition Nupes. These groups claim that it vastly expands police power, invades individual privacy and civil liberties, and paves the way for further incursions. “We have a lot of evidence that these technologies cause a lot of harm, they lead to misidentification of people and wrongful arrest,” said Mher Hakobyan, Amnesty International’s Advocacy Advisor on AI Regulation. “We have very little evidence that these technologies actually do what authorities say.” 

Organizers in Los Angeles are paying close attention to the developments in Paris, with an eye to what might happen in Los Angeles when the city hosts the 2028 games.

“This kind of surveillance technology is part and parcel of hosting the Olympic Games,” said Eric Sheehan of the group NOlympics LA. “In Tokyo, they tried to pass for years this anti terrorism law and failed because people were not down. As soon as they had the Olympics approved, they passed that law using the Olympics state of exception as their reasoning.”

These concerns around automated video surveillance are the latest in a long list of reasons why NOlympics LA and French counterparts such as Non aux JO 2024 à Paris and Saccage 2024 object to the games. While the massive international events are typically celebrated as an economic boon for host cities, they also come with extraordinary human—and, often, financial—costs, and can give politicians cover to implement policies whose effects will reverberate long after the games end. Local governments around the world are becoming increasingly wary of the impact of the Olympics, with Paris winning the chance to host in 2024 after a number of other major cities withdrew their bids. 

The French government claims that the law does not allow for the collection of biometric data, information about the physical characteristics of individual humans such as fingerprints or DNA, which Alouette, Hakobyan, and others dismiss as semantics. “They say, ‘It doesn’t allow you to identify someone,’” Alouette told Bolts. In fact, she said, AI video surveillance “can automatically recognize someone because of their physical characteristics,” that the only real difference between the recently approved technology and facial recognition is that the algorithm is focused on the body rather than the face. “To us, it is biometric technology,” she said. 

While advocates of AI surveillance technology argue that it is necessary to increase security at major sporting events—a French National Assembly member who belongs to Renaissance, Macron’s party, argued that it could have helped prevent the deadly 2016 terrorist attack in Nice—skeptics worry that it will only serve to amplify the pre-existing biases of law enforcement. Alouette says this newly legalized surveillance would come down hardest on people who spend the most time in public space, who tend to be the poorest members of society—beggars, homeless people, or migrants selling their wares in the street. 

The 2024 Olympic village will be built in Saint-Denis, a working-class area just to the north of Paris that is home to Black and Muslim immigrant populations already subject to heightened scrutiny and aggressive intervention by the French police.

“This technology is being used in a context which is already very hostile to people from certain communities or backgrounds,” said Hakobyan. “How you determine what is abnormal or problematic behavior is, of course, very ingrained and embedded in racist presumptions, but also ableist—because if a person with a certain psychosocial disability can behave in a way which from a normative point of view can be viewed as aggressive.” AI has evinced extraordinarily high rates of misidentification of people of color, for example, in some cases leading to wrongful arrests—something that was already happening long before the existence of AI technology.

“It allows [police] to hide behind an algorithm,” said Alouette, but “an algorithm learns according to the data you feed it.”

As written, Article 7, which contains the law’s video surveillance provisions, is an “experimental” measure that will expire by the end of December 2024, but two lawmakers recently issued a report recommending the use of AI video surveillance be extended beyond the timeframe of the Olympics and add in real-time facial recognition as well—which could be voted on as early as September 2023. 

All of this comes as the European Parliament attempts to significantly restrict the use of algorithmic surveillance technologies via its AI act, which represents the first global attempt to comprehensively regulate the use of artificial intelligence. European law supersedes that of its member states, meaning that France would be out of compliance with regional standards if the AI act passes. But “France is one of the most influential member states in the EU. It has a lot of say in how the act is being developed,” said Hakobyan, noting that France has also used its influence on the European Council, one of the union’s executive bodies, in “trying to water down provisions in the act, so it doesn’t go against what they’re doing nationally.” (The act will become law once the Council and the European Parliament finalize their respective stances on the act and agree on a compromise, which is expected to happen before the end of the year.)

Sheehan of NOlympics LA sees many similarities between the new French law and plans already underway for the 2028 games in Los Angeles. “The LA ‘28 Organizing Committee is excited to announce that they’re going to be using facial recognition for all tickets to the games—meanwhile, French politicians are trying to try to sneak it through,” he told Bolts. 

He also noted that a contingent of LA2028 Olympic Planning Committee officials and LAPD officers, including police chief Michel Moore, had in 2021 traveled to France to discuss both countries’ security preparations for the games with their French equivalents. “The way that it’s policed in every large city around the world is very similar,” he said. 

Sheehan, like many skeptics of the LA 2028 Olympics, foresees a repeat of the 1984 Los Angeles games, which led the LAPD to crack down on street homelessness and rapidly accelerated police militarization in the years after. “In Los Angeles, we’re already seeing evictions, we’re already seeing people being removed—literally for Olympic hotels,” he said. 

Meanwhile, while much of the debate over the law in France has centered on Article 7, Natsuko Sasaki with the anti-Olympics group Saccage 2024 says that there are other concerning aspects as well. Article 12, for example, imposes a 7,500 euro penalty and six months in jail against anyone who enters Olympic premises without a ticket, a move that has been interpreted as an attempt to quell political demonstrations. It could build on existing French laws that are already being used to crack down on public protests against Macron’s recent increase in retirement age and cost of living hikes. “It criminalizes the actions of militants…If we do something at the stadium,” she said. “And so we can’t. We can’t allow ourselves to pay this sort of fine.” 

“Our collective says that we want to cancel the games. That’s the official line. But I’m Japanese and I saw that even Covid didn’t cancel the Olympics,” she said, referencing the 2020 Tokyo games, which were postponed until 2021, then ultimately held without spectators because of the pandemic. For Sasaki, the fight against the Olympics is a marathon, not a sprint. Though Tokyo went ahead, it so soured the Japanese public on the games that the mayor of Sapporo, which had applied to host the 2030 games, recently announced that the city would delay its bid to host. “For us, after Paris, it’s finished,” she said, “but the Olympics continue.”

The post France Enables AI Surveillance Ahead of 2024 Paris Olympics, Alarming Privacy Activists appeared first on Bolts.

Ramon Mejía was in the swamp for less than a day before he was arrested, but that brief experience made clear the enormity of what he had gone there to protect. Mejía, an Iraq War veteran and anti-war activist from Dallas, had traveled to the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland in the country, to try to prevent Energy Transfer Partners’ construction of a conduit that would connect the company’s infamous Dakota Access Pipeline to Louisiana refineries. He and two other water protectors camped in the swamp the night of August 17, 2018, watching as the sun began to illuminate a beautiful but harrowing scene the next morning. “After the sunrise, you’ll see the birds and vegetation more clearly, the plants and the flowers—and also the destruction,” he recalled. “The construction of the pipeline, how it tore through the land.” Then, the police showed up. 

Mejía, his two colleagues, and a journalist who was embedded with the group were arrested under Louisiana’s newly minted ‘critical infrastructure’ law, which makes nonviolent protest near oil, gas, electrical, and other forms of infrastructure a felony and ratchets up the punishment associated with these actions. Such laws have proliferated across the country in the last five years and are now on the books in 19 states due to the efforts of the conservative legislators’ organization known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the meticulous lobbying of powerful oil and gas companies. 

Thus far, states have rarely used critical infrastructure laws against protestors. Until late last year, there was only one other known instance, against Greenpeace protestors in Houston. Nobody has ever been convicted under them. 

But the arrest of more than 40 activists in Georgia between December 2022 and early March may signal a turning point, researchers who track these laws say. The activists were protesting the installation of a training center in the Atlanta forest known as ‘Cop City’ and the destruction of one of Atlanta’s vital green spaces.

The activists, many of whom are still detained, were charged under Georgia’s domestic terrorism and critical infrastructure law. Their arrest warrants, issued by county and local police and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, don’t accuse the vast majority of them of any specific crimes beyond trespassing, but rather for “participating” with others who have allegedly engaged in far more serious offenses such as arson and discharging firearms. “The arrest warrants are broad and generic and certainly don’t have any individualized facts or information tied to them,” said Lauren Regan, the director of the Oregon-based Civil Liberties Defense Center, which has been coordinating legal support on the ground and will be representing a number of the protesters individually. “They’re basically saying, ‘Because you were wearing black or because you had mud on your shoes or because you had a jail support number written on your arm, you’re guilty for any crimes that anyone else potentially committed.’” 

The charges against the Georgia protesters illustrate how anti-protest legislation is wielded to quash both the movement for police accountability and the fight for environmental justice. The goal is not necessarily to win in court but to levy charges of such extreme consequence against protestors that it effectively quells dissent. 

“One of the ways that people have an impact on what’s happening in their communities or in their country outside of voting are things like protesting,” Rico Sisney, one of the Greenpeace protesters arrested in Houston, told Bolts. But when you add the risk of steep penalties and felony charges that accompany critical infrastructure laws, he said, “there’s a lot of people who might have considered participating because it’s like an issue that really matters to them—but they can’t take that additional risk. And that’s 100 percent the goal.”

Critical infrastructure laws represent a backlash to Indigenous-led protest movements, which have stopped or delayed the equivalent of at least a quarter of yearly emissions in the U.S. and Canada, according to a 2021 report by the Indigenous Environmental Network. 

The first critical infrastructure laws were proposed and passed following the success of protesters at Standing Rock in temporarily halting the Dakota Access Pipeline, said Emma Fisher, the deputy director at Climate Cabinet, an advocacy and lobbying organization focused on climate change legislation. Fisher co-authored a report on critical infrastructure laws last year. “[Bill author] Rep. Scott Biggs of Oklahoma directly cited North Dakota’s Dakota Access Pipeline protests, acknowledging that anti-pipeline demonstrations have succeeded and therefore the pipelines haven’t been built,” Fisher told Bolts. “That direct line is clear.” 

When that bill passed in Oklahoma, ALEC took note, drafting a model bill it dubbed the ‘Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.’ Like the Oklahoma law, the model bill had two key components that would become characteristic of nearly all critical infrastructure laws. First, it turned conduct that would have previously been a misdemeanor into a felony—and jacked up the consequences to match. “One of the problems with these really high penalties is, if you’re charged, even if you know you’re innocent, do you really want to risk going to trial on it?” said Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), which maintains a comprehensive anti-protest law tracker. “That trial process will take a long time—but also, let’s say you did lose, you’d face potentially a lot of time in prison. And so some people might feel pressured into just taking a plea.”

“One of the most important takeaways from our research is that these bills are intentionally vague,” Fisher said. “That is causing a chilling effect for protesters and for prospective demonstrators because people are not sure how much danger they might be in.” 

Furthermore, the legislation established the concept of ‘vicarious liability,’ leaving organizations potentially on the hook for the alleged actions of even loose affiliates. “It broadens the net, both in who can be liable but also who law enforcement can investigate and potentially arrest and prosecute—whether or not a court ever finds them liable,” said Robinson. 

Connor Gibson, a Denver-based fossil fuel opposition researcher who has become an expert on critical infrastructure laws, says they have a compound chilling effect. “Not only will they have activists who are aware of the potential felony charges and how that could really screw up their life, even if they don’t get convicted, but they are sending a message to all these organizations like, ‘Hey, if anybody you were ever affiliated with gets charged under one of these laws, we’re going to go after you for $100,000 and we’re going to sue you into the ground.’” 

ALEC may have provided the language, but the country’s biggest oil and gas manufacturers and associations have worked behind the scenes to get state lawmakers across the country on board with critical infrastructure laws. “The tip of the spear is really the AFPM,” Gibson said—the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a powerful trade organization that represents companies such as Koch Industries, Chevron Corporation and ExxonMobil, among others. 

While support for critical infrastructure laws has overwhelmingly fallen along party lines, with Democratic governors vetoing bills in Minnesota and Louisiana, in 2019, Democratic legislators backed them in Illinois and Wisconsin after Koch Industries lobbied to get the trade unions on board. Ultimately, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor signed the bill into law.

Even if these laws have only very rarely been invoked by police, in the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprising, and as the fight for environmental justice continues to intensify, activists and researchers alike fear they could be trotted out and deployed with increasing frequency.  

“The threat is real,” said Gibson. “The most dire consequences have not yet been played out.”

Bill Quigley, a Loyola law professor who represents Mejía and the other protesters charged in Louisiana, warned that “the idea of terrorism… is becoming more and more common against environmental protesters and people who oppose the police.” He added, “I think the idea is to capture the emotion that people felt after 9/11 and to apply it to people sitting in trees, for goodness sake.”

Just before sunrise on September 12, 2019, Rico Sisney and 10 other Greenpeace protestors rappelled down the Fred Hartman Bridge in Baytown, Texas. Suspended hundreds of feet above the Houston Ship Channel, they unfurled a series of brightly-colored banners over the country’s largest fossil fuel thoroughfare, shutting down ship traffic for an entire day. 

Sisney hung there for over 12 hours, reading from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. “Looking at a waterway that has no ship traffic and just has dolphins splashing around, and seeing a literal sunset on oil infrastructure behind me,” he recalled, “counterintuitively, it was really, really peaceful.” 

That sense of tranquility ended abruptly when officers began extracting the protestors one by one as night fell. They were taken to shore, where Sisney said a group of hostile onlookers had gathered and began heckling them, tossing out racial slurs as they passed. The demonstrators were ultimately bundled into police vans and booked into the Harris County Jail.

Soon, the group was informed that they would be charged under Texas’s critical infrastructure law, which had gone into effect on September 1, less than two weeks before the action. The activists had been warned about the new law. “Intellectually, I understood that that was a strong possibility,” Sisney told Bolts.  “But then once it hit, it was like, okay, now I can actually feel this and what potential impacts that could have for me and my family and my community. “ 

For Sisney, a felony conviction would have compounded the racist assumptions and police scrutiny he already faces just for being Black. “I don’t have any criminal convictions on my record,” he said, but “In the many times I’ve been stopped by police, the first assumption is not only do I have charges but I have active warrants. I think it hits differently for Black people in America.” 

The critical infrastructure charges against Sisney and his fellow protestors didn’t stick. Six months after the action, prosecutors downgraded the charges to a misdemeanor count of obstructing a roadway, with a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine. But there have been consequences nonetheless. Sisney said that some of his fellow defendants lost out on job opportunities. They were told that they couldn’t be arrested again—and if anyone was, it would have ramifications for everyone in the group. “For a lot of folks who probably would want to participate in other forms of direct action,” Sisney said, people had to “have an entirely different risk assessment for the years after the charges.” 

“Which is sort of the goal right of critical infrastructure laws in the first place,” he added, “to make the most active people inactive for as long as possible—and the most active organizations inactive.”

Karen Savage, an independent investigative journalist, had been embedded with the L’eau Est La Vie water protectors for months, reporting on their attempt to stop the construction of the Energy Transfer crude oil pipeline in the Louisiana wetlands. She had taken photographs, documented life in the swamp, and published an exposé in The Appeal on the pipeline company’s use of off-duty state law enforcement officers as private security guards. She knew what she was doing was risky, but she and the water protectors had written permission from one of the swamp landowners to be there, while the company had actually gone ahead with pipeline construction in violation of the owners’ wishes. If anyone was trespassing, she figured, it was them. 

On August 18, 2018, around sunrise, Savage joined Mejía, the anti-war veteran who had come there from Dallas, and several other activists in the swamp. Shortly thereafter, they were all arrested. In the holding cell at the county jail, they overheard their charges being read, and realized that police were invoking Louisiana’s new critical infrastructure law. 

Quigley, the lawyer, had noticed an immediate shift after the law went into effect on August 1. “They had probably 50 people that got arrested, and all on misdemeanors,” he recalled. “And then the change in the law, all of a sudden, the exact same conduct, there were people getting arrested for felonies.” 

“It was definitely apparent that these laws were being utilized as a weapon by the state to silence our voices,” said Mejía. 

Later that fall, more water protectors were arrested in the swamp—including herbalist and community organizer Anne White Hat, a member of the Aśke Gluwipi Tiospaye of the Sicangu Lakota, also known as the Rosebud Sioux. White Hat, who is originally from South Dakota, had helped found L’eau Est La Vie; the name—“water is life,” in French—is an intentional call back to the Standing Rock protest to shut down the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. “To me, we’re holding down the continuation of that fight up north,” she told Bolts. “We weren’t gonna let them just continue to build this black snake without any resistance.” 

The state had four years to decide whether to move forward with its case, and Savage and the 16 L’eau Est La Vie protesters arrested under the law lived under the threat of critical infrastructure charges for nearly three years. As a single mother, White Hat was fearful of what would happen to her three children should she go to prison. “It’s a very heavy burden to bear,” she said. “I was just hyper-aware of [the fact that] they could formally charge us any day.” She tried to embrace nake nula waun—a Lakota expression describing a state of constant readiness. One night, U.S. marshals came to arrest someone down the block from her in New Orleans, and she woke up to a reverberating pounding noise. “I shot straight up in bed and I was like, ‘Oh, my god, is this happening right now?’” she recalled. 

“It kind of hit me maybe in November of that year, like, ‘Wow, that’s 10 years in a Louisiana prison,’” Savage said. Fearful of risking another arrest and having her bail revoked, she stayed home during the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and barely covered the 2020 racial justice uprising. “It did impact my reporting,” she said. 

During this time, Mejía, Savage, and White Hat, the co-founder of L’eau Est La Vie, filed a constitutional challenge with the assistance of Quigley and a lawyer from the Center for Constitutional Rights, both of whom also served as their criminal defense lawyers. “Certainly they got much more consideration in state, local and federal courts because the Center for Constitutional Rights took up their cause and put literally thousands of hours into this thing,” said Quigley, who estimates that he worked hundreds of hours pro bono on the case himself. Finally, in July of 2021, two years and 11 months after the first arrests, the St. Martin Parish District Attorney announced that he was dismissing the critical infrastructure charges. White Hat said it took another year, until the statute of limitations passed, before she could really relax. 

It was the 2017 critical infrastructure law in Oklahoma that was seized upon by ALEC and became the template for other such legislation across the country. But Georgia’s Senate Bill 1 was proposed that same session. Legislators at the time said that the bill, which expanded the definition of ‘domestic terrorism,’ was intended to address mass casualty events, citing the massacre of nine Black churchgoers in South Carolina two years prior. The proposal withered on the vine—until legislators copied and pasted the bill’s text into a different one that passed. 

“Fast forward until December of 2022, when the first Atlanta forest defenders were charged with the statute for, in essence, trespassing,” said Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “It was certainly a far cry from what the legislators stated that their intent was in passing the statute.” The statute mandates a prison sentence of at least five years and up to 35 years for people convicted of disabling or destroying “critical infrastructure, a state or government facility, or a public transportation system.”

Regan said applying the law against the Cop City protesters is far-fetched—but again, convictions aren’t necessarily the point. Just being charged brings stark consequences: the activists were initially denied bail and most are currently detained in the DeKalb County Jail, which is notorious for squalid conditions and allegations of mistreatment by staff. According to Regan, a number of activists have complained about being denied medical care and medication while in jail. 

“Even though it’s very unlikely that they’ll ever get a conviction against trespassers for domestic terror, and there are a number of serious faults and failures in the state’s prosecution of land defenders thus far, the most negative consequences are already being forced upon citizens who are normally innocent until proven guilty, ” she told Bolts.

On March 23, the protesters still being held in custody in DeKalb County had their second bond hearing. Nine of the 22 were denied bail again and remain detained as of publication. According to Hannah Riley, an activist in Atlanta, the justifications for denying bail included protesters wearing black, having a jail support number scrawled on their arm, and having mud on their shoes. 

Meanwhile, a new crop of critical infrastructure bills in legislatures across the country could increase punishment for protesters, from Idaho to Minnesota to Illinois to North Carolina. Utah’s governor just signed two new infrastructure bills into law last month. 

Robinson of ICNL noted many of the new bills are somewhat distinct from the previous crop of critical infrastructure laws in that they are allegedly motivated by recent white supremacist attacks on energy substations and are not necessarily based on the language in the ALEC model bill; instead many build off existing law. Nevertheless, he said, “we and others are concerned that even if these bills are being enacted in response to attacks on electric substations, which we do not support in any way—it’s criminal already under the law—that if they’re overly broad or vague, that they could be used in other context against protesters.”

Many state legislatures are also considering broader anti-protest bills at the moment. Cop City is the focal point for that convergence, but there are two bills before the Georgia state legislature that advocates worry could quell protest: a critical infrastructure bill inspired by recent substation attacks, and an anti-riot bill. The punishment for violating either would be up to 20 years in prison. 

For White Hat, looking to the past has helped her steel herself against the uncertainty of this new landscape for protest. When she thought about the importance of the land she was defending, what came to mind was a late mentor of hers from Baton Rouge, a Choctaw woman who would come back to the Atchafalaya each year to go crawfishing. Her father had told her stories about how he had stood up against Dow Chemical’s pollution of the swamp back in the 1950s. “I feel connected to that,” White Hat told Bolts, noting that there has been a long history of Indigenous resistance to environmental degradation. “What is different and what is new is that the oil industry and South Louisiana hasn’t experienced this level of an organized resistance movement,” she said. “Ever.” 

The post “A Weapon by the State to Silence Our Voices” appeared first on Bolts.

The court ruled that an advocate who helped organize a Black Lives Matter rally could be sued for events that took place during that rally, even though he was not involved. The case arose after a police officer was injured during a protest in Baton Rouge in 2016 and filed a lawsuit against DeRay Mckesson, a national advocate who had amplified and joined the demonstration. Mckesson rejected liability, saying his actions were protected by the First Amendment, but the court ruled against him in Friday’s 6-1 opinion. 

The lone dissenter was the court’s only Black judge, Justice Piper Griffin. “The finding of a duty in this case will have a chilling effect on political protests in general as nothing prevents a bad actor from attending an otherwise peaceful protest and committing acts of violence,” wrote Griffin, who is a Democrat elected in a judicial district that contains parts of New Orleans. “The flow of political speech could hinge on which viewpoints had patrons with deeper pockets.” 

Mandie Landry, a Democratic lawmaker who was already vocal against efforts to target protesters in Louisiana, echoed Griffin’s worry that the ruling risks stifling political organizing. “It seems like this is designed to end protesting,” she told Bolts. “It’s designed to chill speech.” 

Landry, who is also a lawyer, says the court has applied an appallingly broad standard of negligence to protesters. “It almost seems like anyone who goes to, or is near, or talks about, or even reshares a graphic about a protest could potentially be sued under this,” she said. Jonathan Miller, chief program officer at the Public Rights Project, calls the ruling the latest example of a broader trend where “states seek to hold all involved in peaceful marches accountable for any violence that might occur, even if they do not start it, control it, or participate in it.” 

“It is an attempt to stop mobilizations in their tracks out of fear of personal liability or responsibility for all who participate in such mobilizations,” Miller told Bolts.

The lawsuit against Mckesson is one in a number of recent cases where cops and courts have ensnared Black Lives Matter supporters. Police investigated a  Utah senator in 2020 for allegedly donating money to a fund that Black Lives Matter protesters used to buy red paint that they spilled in front of the district attorney’s office. Also in 2020, police in Portsmouth, Virginia, filed charges against local Black leaders, including a state senator, who were present at a rally where people toppled a Confederate statue. The police also tried to sideline prosecutor Stephanie Morales, who is Black, though she eventually asserted control and dismissed the charges. 

“If that scares us and bothers us in this instance where it became national news because elected officials are charged, you got to think about the many times where people are being charged and lives are being ruined where nobody’s watching,” Morales told Bolts about the events in Portsmouth. 

Other states have pushed guilt-by-association for demonstrators since the protests of 2020, adopting new statutes that broaden who can be punished for what happens at a protest. In 2021, Florida passed a law championed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis that created new felony charges that can be used against people who are present at a rally that is deemed violent, even if they were not involved in any criminal action. In August 2020, Tennessee lawmakers made it a felony to camp overnight outside the state capitol after sustained protests earlier that summer. (In both states, a felony conviction also means losing the right to vote, sometimes for life, turning the electoral process into another legal minefield.) 

New Republican bills this year in Florida, Georgia, and now Louisiana, where the legislative session just began, could further ramp up the threats of criminal and civil penalties against protesters. 

“It’s an ever-present issue for us,” Chris Kaiser, advocacy director at the ACLU of Louisiana, who is monitoring the 2022 session, told Bolts about efforts to criminalize protests. “There are all these dots in our criminal code that can be connected in a demonstration setting that can land people in serious criminal trouble. That constellation of laws that is continually amended has a chilling effect on assembly and free speech.”

One such amendment in Louisiana is House Bill 150, adopted in 2020, which made it a crime of violence punishable with up to six months in jail to splash water at a police officer.

Landry was the only lawmaker, out of the 122 from both parties who voted on the bill, to oppose the measure. She says the bill had no purpose other than piling on a new criminal statute that risks being abused. “There’s already plenty of laws that say you can’t hurt someone and that you can’t attack a police officer,” she said. “To keep adding on extra penalties, extra situations, seems like it’s just designed to chill behavior, to further scare people, and to broaden the net.”

Louisiana lawmakers could escalate their targeting of protesters this spring with a measure that exposes people around demonstrations to the threat of being killed with impunity.

HB 101, filed by Republican Danny McCormick, would justify homicides committed by people under the guise of protecting property from being damaged “during a riot,” and critics stress that this is a term with a low threshold. “A riot is three people under Louisiana law,” Landry said. “That’s a wide open hole for someone to kill people, like teenagers and children who might be just trespassing or breaking into a car.” McCormick did not reply to a request for comment on the bill, which echoes laws passed in recent years that grant immunity to drivers who run over protesters who were blocking a public street. 

The lawsuit against Mckesson is now likely to return to federal courts; the U.S. Supreme Court had asked Louisiana’s high court to weigh in. 

Mckesson’s liability stands in stark contrast with the extremely limited liability that police face thanks to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that routinely shields them from civil lawsuits. 

In December 2016, just months after the Black Lives Matter protest in Baton Rouge, police officers in Shreveport, Louisiana, on the other side of the state, pulled over a Black man named Gregory Tucker for minor traffic violations and proceeded to violently beat him. When Tucker tried suing the officers, federal courts shielded them by invoking qualified immunity (ultimately over the objections of Justice Sonia Sotomayor).

Louisiana Republicans blocked efforts to narrow qualified immunity in both 2020 and 2021, even after the state House passed a bill championed by Democratic Representative Edmond Jordan last year. Supporters are mounting another effort in this year’s session. Landry is cautiously optimistic that restricting qualified immunity is now drawing more support from Republicans, but she also notes that lawmakers are cracking down on the protesters who put qualified immunity on their legislative agenda in the first place.

“If you don’t have the right to protest something, what change can you make?” she asked. “How do you make change if laws are being passed to restrict voting and you can’t depend on the courts?” 

The post “Designed to End Protesting”: Louisiana Supreme Court Makes Protesters Guilty by Association appeared first on Bolts.