100,000 Thank Yous

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The website you hold in your hands was launched at the end of 2013. Three full years later, on this date of today, it will be visited for the one-hundred thousandth time.

If this was a commercial enterprise, 100,000 views in three years would be an abject failure; there are defunct websites that draw greater traffic. Instead, this website is one person’s production and reflects the things he finds interesting or in need of attention (his own and others’). No more, no less. Nothing abstract about it.
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Lauri Love Banned from Twitter

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Lauri Love, the British hacktivist who the United Kingdom has agreed to send to the United States to face charges despite pleas from over 100 MPs that he not be extradited, was permanently banned from Twitter this week. His account was @LauriLoveX.

The reasons are unclear, as no specific charges were fully explained to Love. It is understood that the reasons are related to an “alleged violent threat.” He wrote a few hours ago, “Being an actual Nazi on twitter: fine and dandy. Advocating punching Nazis on twitter: permanently banned for violent threats. This is why we can’t have nice things… (Only told I will never get my account back for obscure probably made-up reasons after starting a dozen support threads.)”
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ICE Detainees: Working for $1 a Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“When Will We Know?”—an ongoing series

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The federal government established the rate of pay for undocumented workers in detention centers and prisons at $1 per day back in 1979 and this pay rate has not been adjusted since. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not consider $1 for a day’s labor to be pay, anyway; officially, what it pays detained immigrants is referred to in its documentation as an “allowance.”

José Coyote Pérez (seen at top), an immigrant laborer and labor activist in upstate New York, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on February 24 and is prisoner number A#099757267 in the Buffalo Federal Detention Facility in Batavia, New York. He and other new detainees held at the Buffalo facility are working there and they are being paid $1 per day, it has been confirmed by activists.
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