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[SalmonGod]

Otherwise, I cannot agree.  In the U.S., employers will fire you, you might be placed on "potential domestic terrorist" watchlists, marked for harassment and denial of access to rights by authorities, and even targeted for assassination (Link:  The FBI was aware of an assassination plot targeting Occupy organizers.  Didn't bother to warn the targets, and still refuses to release any further details beyond the FOIA revelations that there was one and they knew about it.)

Freedom of expression is not so respected in the U.S. as it's supposed to be, and can be a serious danger to livelihoods.  Removing the ability to do so anonymously is a really easy way to discourage many from doing so at all.

Wearing baclavas/burkas/whatever is not the appropriate way to stop such things from happening: Being put on any list requires them to have your name, which kinda implies you already were stopped by an officer and had your personal info noted, and against employers firing you (the real risk for most demonstrations, methinks) there are the courts (there are laws against that type of thing, right?) and, if nothing else helps, public outrage. One could even argue that being fired because of demonstrating is a good thing, since it gives a chance to expose an employer with an undesirable political agenda to the general public.

And to your last point: Who covers their faces right now anyway? Paranoiacs and the black bloc. It certainly isn't the norm, and so it is absurd to claim that the average protestor would be hindered by such a law.

Face covering is very common at protests in the U.S..  You've seen how prominent the Guy Fawkes masks have become, right?  It may not be something a majority does to protect their identity when they first show up, but it is still quite common among people who are not engaging in any illegal activity (besides the protest itself) or black blocs.  And most everyone dons face coverings when the tear gas starts flying.

You don't need to be stopped by an officer to be identified.  There have been cases of people who weren't even actively involved in any protest being quietly added to watchlists after being caught as a bystander by surveillance and identified by facial recognition software, and they don't have any clue until they find themselves denied the ability to board a plane.

And no... worker protections are practically non-existent.  There are technically anti-discrimination laws in effect to protect workers, but they're more targeted at racial and gender discrimination and made unenforceable by an employer's ability to fire a person for any other reason they can possibly make up anyway.  It varies by state, but in some they don't even have to give you a reason.

Call me a paranoiac, but I don't think it's an absurd concern at all.  Not that I expect anything different.  The nature of protest is indirect conflict with establishment, and it would be strange if both sides don't use every tool at their disposal to engage in that conflict.  Protest is meaningless if not disruptive, and the law will of course be opposed to disruption.  If you go to a protest (a real protest - not a police-authorized march through an assigned path and schedule designed not to bother anybody and stay out of sight of anyone that matters), you are engaging in a conflict and should take appropriate precautions.

[Helgoland]

Eh, Salmon - what you call 'real protest' sounds like actions that are illegal for a good reason, and police action against which I heartily condone: Protests are means of expressing political opinion, and thus have to adhere to some standards. What standards exactly we can talk about, but calling all protest that's been cleared with the police fake sounds very worrying to me.

[Frumple]

Think it's not so much "fake" as "entirely useless". Which, given what tends to happen to protests that are cleared by the local establishment (completely marginalized and often tucked away in some corner so no one has to pay attention to them), it's... a fairly accurate statement.

Note: In the states, in many areas, "illegal protests" can include those that simply aren't limited to a specific, government decided, area. It... should be pretty obvious why that's a problem.

[Helgoland]

Wait, government decided area? On a scale from one to Sasha Grey, how fucked are the US protest laws?

[scriver]

Maybe you should stop assuming you already know everything and start actually listening to what people say, helgoland.

[SalmonGod]

Wait, government decided area? On a scale from one to Sasha Grey, how fucked are the US protest laws?

Let's just start here....

[Frumple]

Not sure who sasha grey is, but while we're not to the point of sasha grey in a spitroast, we're getting close to it. Pretty fucked, really, though a fair amount of it isn't necessarily the laws themselves but how enforcement agencies fuck the laws to fuck with protesters.

FakeE: Looking up who SG is, SG in a spitroast is now mentally noted as an apt descriptor.

[Sheb]

Sasha Grey in her masterwork "Fuck me like you're the NYPD". Seriously, protests are often limited to dystopian-named "Free speech area" far from the main events at stuff like the National Republican Convention (or the Democrat one).

And in Helgoland's defense, he is usually one of the most reasonable guy around.

[Baffler]

About... Sasha Grey - 2. It tends to oscillate between -2 and -2.5, depending on how near we are to a major election.

More seriously, have some links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone Nevermind, SalmonGod (SG, hehe) ninja'd me on this'un.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140402194133/http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy


I've got more, but I don't want this buried. Well I did trawl the old Occupy thread for news stuff but they all came up 404'd.

[Dutchling]

Not sure who sasha grey is

sure

[palsch]

ACLU primer on protest laws. So you do have fairly broad protest rights, even without forward planning or permission. Permits and fees may be required only if it's reasonable; eg, no permit if it's an immediate reaction to current events, no permit required if it's not particularly disruptive, no fees that your organisation can't afford or aren't a reflection on costs incurred by the protest.

Note that a lot of that rests on First Amendment rights rather than immediate local law or policy. The First Amendment may offer relief if you have been prosecuted under such a law, or police have used such a policy to stop your protest, but it doesn't stop that protest being ended.

What Frumple is thinking of may be the Free Speech Zones set up in some cases when wider protests have been banned. This is usually to stop a protest from disrupting some other event substantially. You can somewhat justify some of these, especially with regards to political events (eg, conventions) by preventing protesters from using a heckler's veto to deny other people protected (political) speech. Note that protesting is provided less protection than other types of speech due to it's external costs, so balancing a political protest against a political speech will usually find in favour of the other speech.

So if a small, unpopular political group were holding a rally you might designate an area for protests so that the small group don't get overwhelmed and effectively silenced due to weight of numbers, even if the area they are using would usually be open to everyone. Because the primary rule is that speech must be treated the same (all laws must be viewpoint neutral in how they treat speech) what protects minorities and small groups also protects the G20 and Democratic National Conventions.

Fakedit: Ninjaed.

[wobbly]

Wait, government decided area? On a scale from one to Sasha Grey, how fucked are the US protest laws?

Let's just start here....

They look a lot like cages in the picture on the article which is pretty messed up. Are they generally that bad?

[Helgoland]

Maybe you should stop assuming you already know everything and start actually listening to what people say, helgoland.

Well, reading that ACLU primer, the situation seems to be much less dystopian than what's being described in the thread, so I'll stick by my original point, thankyouverymuch. Any input on the topic itself?

Regarding free speech zones: As far as I can tell, they're used during special events to ensure that no disruptions take place - not a priory a bad thing thing, IMO. And while the practical side may look different, there are legal restrictions on their use.
But as scrriver so accurately remarked, I'm not especially educated on the topic - feel free to correct me.

[Sheb]

Helgo, you reasonable conservative scum ~

[Antsan]

Is it true that Germans were doing an anti-Muslim march?

Are they going Fourth Reich on us?

Yes to the first question, hopefully no to the second.

There is this thing called "Pegida" over here, which stands for "Patriotische Europär gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes" ("Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident"). Their behaviour is somewhere between deeply concerning and ridiculous.

A couple of Ossis, nothing big, really.

Yeah, because that's something that's totally only happening in the former GDR and not all over Europe, so there's actually not a real problem. How convenient to have a former dictatorship at hand which helps explaining away all social unrest!

Otherwise, I cannot agree.  In the U.S., employers will fire you, you might be placed on "potential domestic terrorist" watchlists, marked for harassment and denial of access to rights by authorities, and even targeted for assassination (Link:  The FBI was aware of an assassination plot targeting Occupy organizers.  Didn't bother to warn the targets, and still refuses to release any further details beyond the FOIA revelations that there was one and they knew about it.)

Freedom of expression is not so respected in the U.S. as it's supposed to be, and can be a serious danger to livelihoods.  Removing the ability to do so anonymously is a really easy way to discourage many from doing so at all.

Wearing baclavas/burkas/whatever is not the appropriate way to stop such things from happening: Being put on any list requires them to have your name, which kinda implies you already were stopped by an officer and had your personal info noted

Which can be done for all kinds of reasons.
In Neuruppin there was a counter demonstration against Nazis in… I'd have to ask my mother or one of my brothers when that was. The police made three warnings (as required) against a sit-in. My mother and brothers tried to get out after the second warning, but weren't allowed to leave. Because they still didn't leave after the third warning (which they couldn't do) they were registered. The whole thing might have been a huge scandal afterwards, but that doesn't change that their names were registered.
Fortunately they aren't really politically active. For someone who is, this would have been a huge problem.

I think you underestimate the length our state goes to to make life hard for people who are politically active, even when they make absolutely sure to stick closer to the law than most people (because most people don't even know what they might be doing wrong).