When the above video (staring at the 5:00)—which features a Canadian passport set ablaze by a bearded, four-eyed jihadist who, at first sight, looks like your average college classmate—was uploaded to YouTube in April, Canadian media had a field day, with only some dismissing the threat as theater.

In the video, a young man who identifies himself as Abu Turab—not likely his real name—threatens not only the United States but also its neighbor up north, before burning his passport to symbolize his abandonment of his former identity and his embrace of Islamic extremism. “This is a message to Canada and all the American tawagheet [false idols]. We are coming, and we will destroy you, with permission from Allah the Almighty…”

Over the years, extremists groups and terrorist organizations have mastered the art of psychological operations—DVDs of suicide bombings and attacks edited to appear devastatingly successful have been available at bazaars in Kandahar, and hundreds of those videos can also be found online, notably though their own social network accounts. The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) is among them, active in Syria and one of the groups in which Canadian jihadists join their quest for martyrdom.

Are those propaganda messages hollow threats, or should Canadian authorities gear up and get ready to thwart eventual attacks? Are security agencies well prepared? What would be the proper response?

I asked former Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) senior officer and counter-terrorism expert Michel Juneau-Katsuya whether we should be concerned about the recent extremists' threats to Canada and why he believes that our "front door has four massive locks, but we let the back door open."

VICE: Jihadists have threatened Canada numerous times in the past few years, but never in the context of the war in Syria. Why is Canada now on Syrian extremists’ hit list?
Michel Juneau-Katsuya: It’s particularly interesting. They likely target Canada not necessarily because the country has engaged in direct action against them in Syria but rather because they either come from Canada or know about it. Overall, it’s nothing new. Terrorists have threatened to carry on attacks in Canada ever since we became part of the international coalition in the War on Terror.

There are numerous reports of those extremists combatants coming back to Canada with a vast array of fighting experience, high-level training and new tactics. What kind of actions are they most likely to carry on?
Mostly bombings. We can expect them to strike in areas where we are the weakest and where security isn’t prepared to respond—open-area events, sporting events, public transit systems. These are all “opportunity targets” which are usually favored by terrorists, the best recent example being last year’s edition of the Boston Marathon. That kind of public, open-area event is highly vulnerable to such attacks.

Intelligence sources estimate that approximately 80 extremists from Syria might have already made their way back to Canada. Is that number accurate?
It might be more around 100, but it would be unreasonable not to count all the fighters also coming back from Afghanistan and Maghreb countries—that makes their numbers escalate. And more of them are expected to come back to Canada to try and bring their war over here. They do present a clear and present danger to Canada and its citizens, which implies that the Canadian government is expected to deploy its best and biggest investigative assets to thwart the threat.

Those numbers suggest they would not be likely to carry on suicide bombings. Are they expected to try to recruit and train fighters on Canadian soil?
It already happened. Last year, four young men were recruited in London, Ontario. Others tried to carry out attacks in Victoria, British Columbia. A few years ago, 17 young men were arrested in Toronto with weapons-grade fertilizer. Canada is already on the map: There has been terrorist activity for quite a while now, and there are several trials currently ongoing. So far, no attack has been successful, but we have been lucky.

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There have been temporary installations in remote, isolated areas, which were used as terrorist training-facilities, but no permanent camp has been established so far, because it would be easily traceable.

Canada’s military counterterrorism units such as Joint Task Force 2 are unarguably top-level, but their mandate is mainly international, not domestic. Are civilian authorities ready to respond?
Domestic counterterrorism is an intelligence and law-enforcement issue. In Canada, CSIS is tasked with gathering and analyzing information, then turns it over to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who carry out interventions when necessary.

Arresting and dismantling terror cells is one great achievement, but that only takes care of the symptom and not the cause. It’s about time governments, including Canada, start addressing political and economic issues fueling terrorism.

Photos by Maggie West

The Cat Circus is a one-hour stage show where cats romp around across some stools and cat trees draped in velvet and glitter. If the set design resembles ordinary living room furniture, we're told halfway through the show, it's because it is actually the living room furniture of Samantha Martin, the woman who hosts the show, invented the show, trains the cats, and lives with the cats. She gets reliable laughs when she goes the “Can you believe I’m single?” route—though I hope it’s just part of the act because, damn, that’s a lot of cats to take care of by yourself.

I saw the performance on a Sunday afternoon, the second of three performances for the day, in an intimate but full theater in Santa Monica. The crowd was a mix of children, old people, and young couples in jean jackets—surprisingly light on douchebag hipster types chomping at the bit to blog about their experience there (just me, thankfully).

Nobody was there to be "ironic," at least not in the sense that they were making fun of the show. We were there because we all share a mutual interest in cats humiliating themselves for our enjoyment.

The lights dimmed and the music—"Everybody Wants to Be a Cat," from The Aristocats —swelled. When the lights came back on, our star cat left his carrier cage to reluctantly ride a skateboard down a ramp to center stage, and after some pleading, he clawed at a rope that raised a sign: "Welcome to the Show."

The cat-circus brand is a touring show that has been around for years. It seems to do pretty well. How could this be, I wondered? As the circus progressed, it seemed like a clear outline of every reason why kitschy cats have become such a popular enterprise. 

Cats are assholes.

One of the joys of seeing cats doing stupid things is that it openly mocks how cats want to be seen.

Cats strut arrogantly, displaying their superiority by rejecting most of your ideas on what they should or should not do, but they're also powerless puffballs. They're like old British men, and it’s satisfying to see them get pied in the face.  

The star cat is named Tuna, and she is a big-time diva. The only contribution Tuna makes to the show is pressing her bell, but her attitude is what makes her a star, and that’s why she’s on all of the merchandise. Throughout the show, I find myself alternating between loving Tuna and hating Tuna but never denying that Tuna is one magnetic cat.

Cats are cute.

Duh, a huge part of the fun of seeing a cat do anything is that they’re cute as shit. The eyes, the ears, the fur, the little paws—c’mon! They’re hot little fuckers, and they know it.

There were a few non-cats within the show. A chicken named Cluck Norris competed with Tuna to see who could ring their bell more. On this day, it was the chicken. Tuna gave up after the audience cheered more for the chicken, which I think was honestly only because they liked the name “Cluck Norris,” which was pretty lame. Being a master showcat, Tuna started ringing her bell again only after the contest had been called for Cluck, which was one of the funniest middle fingers I’ve seen from a cat in awhile. “Oh sorry, did I not play your stupid fucking game the way you wanted me to, you cocks?”

There was also a groundhog that came out at the beginning of the show. They’re fun animals too, but they’re no cats. You wouldn’t have this be a chicken and groundhog circus, just like you wouldn’t have a Destiny’s Child stocked with only Kelly and Michelle.

Photo by the author 

Cats have stupid faces.

Cats are such dorks. They’re arrogant, they’re soft and cuddly, and they have the dumbest faces. Cats tend to have one of two faces: They either look pissed off, or they look completely empty mentally. Our most famous cats, Grumpy Cat and Lil Bub, are perfect examples of this.

Tuna is a cat that walks the line of both: She’s equal measures unamused and confused. Her face looks funny blown up on the cardboard cutout, and anytime a trick doesn’t work out, Martin points to it as if to be like, “They’re cats—what can you expect from them?” and it’s good for laughs every time.

Creatures with dumb or empty faces tend to accessorize well, like George Bush in his cowboy hats, and it was pleasing when some of the aristo-cats wore hats. A cat in a hat is never unappreciated (almost never). 

Cats are too cool for school.

Throughout the show, cats wander freely between the stage and the audience. They make their way around getting pet by everyone. It’s cool because there’s ample opportunity to pet cats, but it’s also fun because it is a demonstration that cats plainly do not give a fuck about anything except what they want.

Cats aren’t afraid to cause bidding wars for their attention. Winning the cat over to me instead of the people sitting nearby wasn’t easy, and I’m not proud of some of my tactics (there was a little finger snapping and saying, "Here, kitty” thrown in there), but I was compelled to do it because cats also reward you with being very soft, and they purr.

Can we talk about how pleasing a purr is for a moment? A lady’s climax and a baby’s laughter are the only things that are even in the same conversation, and that’s being a bit considerate, frankly. It’s why we put up with a lot of cats' bullshit, because it is one of the greatest rewards available in everyday life.

The sound that the show ended with was kind of like the equivalent of purring for cat humiliation: It ended with a cat band. The Rock Cats are a five-piece—guitar, keyboard, drums, chimes, and Tuna on cowbell—and their sound is best described as “fuck you.” It was probably the most punk thing a band has done in 20 years. People will be saying years from now, “Man, the Rock Cats had fuckin’ balls, man. They didn’t give a fuck about the audience. Shame they all got too addicted to cat-nip to record another album.”

Hard to believe you just read a full think piece about why cats are fun to mock? You can catch the Cat Circus for yourself—its next stops are San Francisco and Denver. 

Follow Grant Pardee on Twitter.

Golden Dawn supporters protesting in Brisbane. All photos by Pak Yiu

I had never heard of the Australia First Party until they held a rally in support of Greece's neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement in Brisbane last Friday, so if their goal was to get my attention they succeeded, I guess. By any other metric the event was a complete failure: Only about ten supporters of the party, which has about 500 members, showed up to rally outside of South Brisbane's Greek Club (they had documentarian John Safran was in tow, for whatever reason).

The plan was to march across the city to picket the offices of the consul general of Greece, but that idea was scuttled by a counter-rally composed of the typical left-wing mix of socialists, students, antifascists, and about 150 or so union members, all of whom were eager to shout down the "nazi scum."

Unimpressed counter-protesters mock the rally from across the street.

So on one side of the street was a rather forlorn-looking contingent of Golden Dawn sympathizers, plus John Safran, and on the other was a sea of beards and dreadlocks, with police in the middle.

Outnumbered and faced with very vocal opposition, the Golden Dawn opted to take a cab (since there werent't that many of them, after all) to their destination rather than going to all the trouble of marching across town.

There were a few minor verbal skirmishes as the protesters departed, but the police were fairly proactive in keeping the two groups apart.

Counter-protester Mitchel Rodwell, who followed the fascists on foot to the offices of the consul general, said, "Pretty much as soon as [the counter-protesters] arrived we scared them off. There were a good 200 people shouting 'Nazi scum, off our streets!'”

OK, so this was a pretty silly and disorganized event that served mostly to annoy police. But Andy Flemming, a longtime antifascist activist, told me "a successful rally in Australia would send a message to Golden Dawn in Greece that they have support elsewhere" and that it would "help legitimize Golden Dawn's presence in Greek politics."

That obviously did not happen. But what about Australian politics? Is the Australia First Party going to become a force to be reckoned with?

In a word, no. The party has had a limited, almost laughable, electoral impact. In the 2013 federal election it won 7,412 first-preference votes or 0.06 percent of the total. One of its candidates, Maurice Girotto, managed to win a local council seat in Sydney, where most of the Australia Firsters are, but he quit the party a year after being elected.

Though the party is a pathetic failure, its leader, Jim Saleam, certainly has some sinister credentials: In 1991 he was sentenced to prison for helping to organize a 1989 attack on the home of African National Congress representative and anti-Apartheid campaigner Eddie Funde.

The Australia First Party's Aaron Heaps addresses the rally.

Aaron Heaps from the party's Queensland branch concedes the group faces an uphill battle in terms of electoral success, and for that he blames the two major parties.

"They will censor us as much as possible,” he said. "The two parties ganged up to bring down [defunct nationalist party] One Nation—it's the tall poppy syndrome."

The party has a predictably anti-multiculturalism and anti-immigration platform, and the racist notions that underpin their policies are pretty much par for the course. According to Heaps, being Australian means being of European heritage. “We are a European people mostly,” he said. “Our people that have come to Australia out of Europe; that’s who we are.”

He doesn't think of himself or his party as racist, just made up of proud white people of European heritage who want to stop non-European people from coming to Australia.

"We like immigration from Europe, America, or those other countries with a shared cultural heritage, because they're like us. The Chinese say we are proud to be Chinese, and people go, 'Fantastic.' But if we say we are proud to be white Europeans, people say, 'You’re racist.'"

The Australia First Party gets support from Stormfront, the openly racist site that has been dubbed the murder capital of the internet, and the Islamophobic Australian Defense League. Heaps has no objection to this sort of support as long as everyone works towards a “united patriotic front.”

So what is an Australian nationalist party doing supporting a Greek political party? Heaps said there's a degree of solidarity between the Australia First Party and Golden Dawn. But Australia First agreed to support Golden Dawn only so long as the Greek right-wingers don’t try to establish their own political presence in Australia.

“We are not prepared to deal with them coming into Australia and starting their own thing, because this is Australia, not Greece,” said Heaps.

Golden Dawn does have support in areas of Melbourne with high concentrations of Greek-Australians, but Professor James Arvanitakis, from University of Western Sydney, said that the party isn't viable. Golden Dawn is being largely ignored by the Greek community, just as Australia First is being ignored by everyone else.

That doesn't mean everything is fine in Australian politics. Flemming told me he thinks Australia First has performed so poorly because the two major parties are already tapping into xenophobic sentiment by way of their hard-line policies against refugees. He thinks if Australia First poses any threat it comes from community-based activism, not electoral success. “They have potential to influence things on the street,” he said.

At least, if they don't get shouted down every time they make themselves known.

Follow Lauren Gillen on Twitter.

Reject and project protest, via Flickr

In its drive to become an “energy superpower,” Canada is digging up vast swaths of earth and selling them as quickly as possible at the expense of the environment and aboriginal rights all the while calling their effort "responsible resource development." In many unsurrendered First Nations territories across Canada, the constitutionally protected rights of indigenous people—including the right to hunt, fish, trap, and be consulted with and accommodated when new development is planned—are being overstepped by rapid industrial growth. After a frenzy of environmental deregulation, undertaken by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's conservative government at the request of oil lobbyists, indigenous rights remain a last line of legal defense for the environment in Canada.

“This is not an Indian problem anymore. If you breathe air and drink water, it’s about you,” said Crystal Lameman, a member of the Beaver Lake Creem a First Nation community in Alberta. Her band is suing for an injunction in their traditional territories, which, if granted, could prohibit a third of planned oil sands development from moving forward without their consent. Theirs is one of the largest lawsuits of what the Canadian press calls 2014’s “aboriginal legal onslaught” against the exploration and development of Canada's extensive oil-rich tar sands. 

This wave of litigation responds to Canada’s new regulatory climate, in which many major energy projects no longer require environmental assessments, millions of waterways are now unprotected, and those looking to participate in public hearings on energy projects need to endure a prohibitive and time-consuming application process to (maybe) be heard. Most recently, oversight of Alberta’s oil industry was handed over to an industry-funded corporation, and habitat protection requirements for the humpback whale were loosened, likely to permit the construction of the Enbridge Northern Gateway, a proposed twin pipeline, that, like the Keystone XL pipeline, will help move oil extracted from the tar sands to markets across the continent and beyond.

To justify this streamlined regulatory regime, Prime Minister Harper said in 2012 that “we cannot allow valid concerns about environmental protection to be used as an excuse to trap worthwhile projects in reviews without end.” Instead, the government and industry now face lawsuits without end.

“As we’ve seen with bills C-38 and C-45, the problem with environmental assessment tools is that they can essentially be legislated out of existence,” said Robert Janes, a lawyer representing a number of First Nations. “They are created by the legislature or parliament and they can be abolished or limited by the legislature or parliament.” In contrast, Janes said, “What treaty and aboriginal rights have is constitutional protection. So the government can’t wish them away.”

Accordingly, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, with support from Neil Young, has filed four lawsuits that challenge specific Shell projects and allege that entire land-use policies were developed without proper consultation. The Mikisew Cree and Frog Lake First Nation are suing the government over massive changes to the country’s environmental assessment and water-protection laws. The Lubicon Cree, a non-treaty nation lacking a reserve and basic amenities like running water, allege that billions of dollars in minerals, oil, and gas have been removed from their territories without consent. They are suing the government to nullify thousands of current oil and gas extraction permits and pay $700 million in compensation, while also seeking an injunction against a fracking company called Penn West. In British Columbia, the Tsleil-Waututh Nation has just launched a lawsuit against the government over the immense Kinder-Morgan export pipeline, while in Ontario, the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation are suing the government over inadequate consultation regarding Enbridge Line 9.

Outside of the courts, indigenous activists are pledging to keep blockading unwanted fracking projects in New Brunswick, to physically obstruct construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and to blockade major gas and tar sands pipelines through British Columbia. Each of these lawsuits and actions reinforces the others, threatening the fuel supply, extraction sites, and distribution network of the tar sands and amounting to many billions of dollars of risk.

Government officials know about this risk and how their economic policies trample indigenous rights. Leaked reports from Canada's Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, obtained by Martin Lukacs and the Guardian, warn government insiders that the assertion of indigenous rights and new legal precedents set by successful indigenous lawsuits pose “significant risks” to the federal government’s policy agenda and may result in “economic development projects [being] delayed.” One of the documents quoted in Lukacs’s report suggests that “there is a tension between the rights-based agenda of Aboriginal groups and the non-rights based policy approaches” of the federal government.

In pursuing “non-rights based policy,” the government is betting that it can violate its own constitution—so long as it can crush blockades, outspend First Nations in the courts, and authorize projects faster than First Nations can sue. It’s a calculated gamble launched from shaky legal ground, sustained by the ignorance of investors, enforced by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, aided by the poverty of First Nations, and bankrolled by the infinite wallet of the Canadian taxpayer. In 2013 alone, the government spent $106 million defending itself from aboriginal litigation, while the province of New Brunswick spent $9.5 million policing the Elsipogtog blockade.

Neil Young and Crystal Lameman. Photo via Jamie Henn

Anatomy of a Tar Sands Trial: The Beaver Lake Cree Nation

A look at the litigation filed by the Beaver Lake Cree Nation (BLCN), one of the many active aboriginal tar sands lawsuits, reveals the enormity of the government’s policy bluff. With a population of about 900, this First Nation is moving forward with a lawsuit that draws a third of planned tar sands extraction into question. Like Beaver Lake Cree's traditional territories, an area approximately the size of Switzerland, this legal action is gargantuan—or “so large as to be unmanageable” to use the words of Canada’s lawyers.

The defendants, Canada and the province of Alberta, are accused of authorizing over 20,000 permits that collectively threaten the Beaver Lake Cree’s treaty rights. BLCN charges that the governments have failed to adequately monitor the cumulative effects of development, failed to consult with them in good faith, and failed to take measures to protect the abundance, diversity, and habitat of wildlife.

“When industry and development is destroying our right to hunt, trap, and fish, that’s in direct violation of Canadian law. So we have grounds to challenge,” said Crystal Lameman, a member of the band who fundraises for their litigation.

At the center of the trial is Treaty 6, an 1876 agreement between the British Crown and the Beaver Lake Cree. It outlines the territories relinquished by the Cree, but ensures that “the said Indians shall have right to pursue their avocations of hunting and fishing throughout the tract surrendered,” except in “such tracts as may from time to time be required or taken up for settlement, mining, and other purposes.”

“That language allows for development. It anticipates development, it anticipates that there’ll be settlement. But at the same time, it can be read in the context of a promise that in the treaty negotiations, a way of life would be protected,” the BLCN’s lawyer Robert Janes said. Accordingly, “there is some limit to the ‘taking-up’ process that means it is not just an open-ended process of extinguishing the rights by slices. What the courts have said is that at some point you cross a line where there’s a danger that there’ll be no meaningful right to hunt, and at that point there’s a limit to the Crown’s conduct.”

“A right to hunt or a right to fish or a right to carry out a cultural activity is absolutely meaningless without a proper habitat in which there are animals, fish, and land. So what the courts have recognized is that what comes with those rights is some kind of protection for habitat,” Janes clarified.

“My hope is that this litigation will set precedent on the protection of our ecosystem, our water systems, our air, our land—everything. The ecosystem, in its entirety,” said Crystal Lameman. “We have to leave something for our children. It doesn’t matter what color they are—all of our children, the world’s children. And right now, the way this industry is moving about, we’re leaving nothing for our kids but oil they’re going to drink and money they’re going to eat.”

Protesters hold up a map of Treaty 1876 at Reject and Protect in Washington, D.C. via Beaver Lake Cree Facebook

Lameman also hopes that BLCN’s lawsuit will rebalance the relationship between her nation and the Crown, resulting in “true and honest consultation—not before the pen is going to the paper, but consultation from the get-go—defined by us, the citizen members.” When I asked what kinds of efforts industry has made to consult with the Beaver Lake Cree, Lameman clarified that “consultation for me is not a company coming into my community for half an hour, setting up a fancy table, raffling off an iPad, and saying, ‘OK. Consultation? Check.’ That’s their idea of consultation. That’s really what happens.”

The BLCN’s traditional territories already host about 35,000 oil and natural gas wells, a Canadian Forces base, and thousands of kilometres of pipelines, access roads, and seismic lines. These territories are roughly 15,000 square miles and cover large parts of the two largest oil sands deposits. While the Beaver Lake Cree say the ecosystem is rapidly declining, the government has plans to triple the extraction of bitumen, the raw petroleum product, in these territories to 1.64 million barrels per day.

“I want it to be stated clearly that I’m not against development. I’m not against this industry,” Crystal Lameman said. “What we are asking for is to show us there’s such a thing as sustainable development, show us that our treaty rights are not being infringed upon, and show us that you are abiding by your obligation to consult.” Lameman believes that if the Canadian government were confident it could win this case, “we would be in court already.”

“A lot of the old people, they talk about how the fish don’t taste good anymore—they taste different,” Lameman said. “Hunters have been seeing deer with green meat,” and “there’s been evidence of moose with puss bubbles under their skin.” She noted that ducks are increasingly scarce—“we don’t have very many frogs anymore,” blueberries are “becoming harder and harder to find,” and “in about two, three weeks, the Saskatoons are dry. It wasn’t like that when I was a kid.”

Most significantly, caribou herds in the Beaver Lake Cree territories are disappearing fast. “This is an animal that we used to subsist on—thousands and thousands of caribou. As of 2011, we had between 175 and 275 caribou,” said Lameman.

A report by the Cooperative Bank of Manchester, who provided BLCN with funds to launch their case, concluded that “oil and gas exploration and development” and associated roads, pipelines, and seismic lines have resulted in “physical loss of habitat, avoidance of areas by caribou, and increased caribou mortality.” Avoided caribou habitat now covers “51 percent of the Cold Lake herd range” and “66 percent of the East Side Athabasca herd range,” with roads acting as “semi-permeable barriers” to caribou and above-ground pipelines “completely impassible.” Saving local caribou herds, the report argues, means issuing “a moratorium on all new industrial developments.”

Instead of a moratorium, Canada and Alberta have developed widely criticized plans to save the region’s caribou. A federal caribou recovery strategy mandated that 65 percent of threatened caribou habitat must be left undisturbed, though this threshold has already been exceeded and the government keeps handing out industrial permits. Meanwhile, Alberta is considering building gigantic, outdoor caribou pens, and has been poisoning thousands of wolves with strychnine and gunning them down from helicopters to stop them from preying on caribou. A series of reports by Carol Linnitt of DeSmog Blog explores these policies in detail, driving Linnitt to conclude that “according to this strategy, caribou and wolf alike fall prey to another kind of predator: multinational corporations.”

The BLCN’s traditional territories have also been impacted by several oil spills that nobody knows how to stop, with heavy oil and tainted water are oozing up from fissures deep in the earth. This includes the infamous Cold Lake spill, which is ongoing after 11 months with no end in sight. “In the southwest portion of the lake we have ancestors buried,” Lameman said, noting that this burial site is a part of her nation’s litigation. Friends of Lameman’s who were employed to clean up this spill told her they saw deer and moose drinking from the polluted lake, and dead ducks and frogs littering the scene.

“We’ll be pulling together evidence to show just how the land has been disturbed, what land is no longer available for harvesting, how certain kinds of physical disturbances affect wildlife patterns, how certain kinds of physical activities limit hunting,” said lawyer Robert Janes, noting that he will argue that the indigenous “right to hunt carries with it a substantial cultural component.”

“A lot of these things are personal accounts,” Lameman said. “These systems we have placed upon us, they don’t recognize oral history. But that’s our history. We don’t write our history down in books, so that makes it less valuable to this system.”

Caribou herds in Beaver Lake Cree territories are disappearing fast. Photo via Flickr user Rich Durant

With this in mind, BLCN’s legal team is unearthing evidence that will verify, by a court-approved European agency, the oral history of development as told by the Beaver Lake Cree. This amounts to a herculean research project that their lawyer estimates could involve upwards of 250,000 documents—a collection of satellite images and old aerial photographs, ecological and anthropological studies, testimonies from elders, and “getting the government to choke up the information out of individual sources.”

Robert Janes explained that “every farm has a land title deed and has a history, every project has authorizations, every road has a history. And those documents exist inside the government, it’s just that the government never actually tries to establish how those come together.”

“The really hard part is actually establishing the baseline picture of what the environment was like before the disturbances, and that is a very challenging process,” Janes said. “But there is data out there and we do know that at some point in time the land was in fact undeveloped.”

Beaver oil sands lease, via Raven Trust

Time, Money, and the Burden of History                                                              

While the law moves at a snail’s pace, industrial development is ceaseless and rapid. While the government’s coffers are unlimited, indigenous communities face endemic poverty. While First Nations’ rights are now the strongest environmental protections in Canada, the weight of history obstructs aboriginals from easily having these rights recognized in the courts.

Up until 1951, aboriginals in Canada were not permitted to hire lawyers. As a result, while other areas of law have had more time to develop, many basic concepts in aboriginal litigation are not yet clearly defined. First Nations across the country charge that the government or industry have failed to consult with and accommodate them, but the law has only begun to define consultation in the last decade and “the courts have barely started to scratch the surface” of what accommodation means, Robert Janes said.

As a result, Janes said, “It is not uncommon for the Crown to raise very difficult legal issues at very early stages of the process.” Complex preliminary issues “can consume the First Nations’ ability to litigate and can introduce so much delay that often there’s nothing left to fight over.”

“Aboriginal litigation raises some of the most important and complex and difficult and therefore expensive issues to resolve. But at the same time the people who raise these issues are in fact some of the most impoverished people in Canada, in many cases because of the very issues they’re trying to raise,” Janes summarized.

Yet under the growing weight of aboriginal litigation, procedural roadblocks for indigenous plaintiffs are beginning to unravel. As an example, the BLCN’s lawsuit overcame a major legal obstruction faced by indigenous communities impacted by large industries. Theirs is the first case to look at the impacts of development as a whole on their treaty rights, rather than the impact of one particular project.

“When we filed the litigation in May of 2008, we claimed over 17,000 treaty right infringements and violations. [Canada] wanted us to go to court 17,000 times,” Crystal Lameman said, laughing. Instead, the courts ruled that the Beaver Lake Cree “are entitled to access to justice uncircumscribed by limits imposed by the scope of Canada’s alleged misconduct,” and struck down Canada’s appeals.

“This has very significant implications for other First Nations,” said Robert Janes. In many First Nations “it’s not that just one project looked at in isolation is bad; it’s that their lands have been affected by hundreds, in many cases thousands, of impacts. It’s the totality of those impacts, which are supposed to be regulated by the government, which has really changed their life and has interfered with their aboriginal rights, their aboriginal title.”

This precedent was hard won. It took almost four years for the Beaver Lake Cree to be granted a trial and now, almost six years since the case was first filed, BLCN is still a few years away from a court date. As the case has grown to include thousands of new permits, Janes explained, it reflects the reality that “the world doesn’t stop while the case goes on.”

While in court, Janes said, “the practical reality is that Beaver Lake has to continue to fight on other fronts as a part of trying to avoid excessive development.” He offered the example of “an oil sands project that is in progress right now, where Beaver Lake is trying to participate in the regulatory process to have the regulator limit or delay or ultimately not approve the project.” Development might be slowed, too, by the investor uncertainty created by a lack of customers for, and endless litigation against, Canada’s tar sands infrastructure.

Robert Janes noted that another of his clients, Grassy Narrows, has successfully deterred development while fighting their legal battle “for 12, 13 years.” They have done this by being “very involved in the regulatory process, they have had blockades, they have also had a very effective grassroots boycott campaign that a number of organizations have helped them with. When you look around at successful cases, aboriginal people have to fight these cases on a number of fronts—political, legal, regulatory, and it’s a bit of a hearts and minds campaign as well.”

Winning hearts and minds, the BLCN lawsuit has drawn support from lawyers and donors from around the world, as well as charitable organizations, and the Cooperative Bank of Manchester. They’ve also crowd-sourced donations online, gathering more funds than they asked for.

Susan Smitten, the executive director of a charitable organization called RAVEN Trust that fundraises for BLCN, said several lawyers and law-firms have worked on the case at half of their normal rate or “put in hundreds of thousands of dollars pro bono.” A prominent UK lawyer, Michael Mansfield, wanted to represent the Beaver Lake Cree for free, but was not permitted to do so by the Alberta courts—instead he sent lawyers from his firm to work behind the scenes. “Lots of people have put in time in lieu of money,” Smitten summarized.

Smitten noted that in addition to RAVEN’s fundraising, “people in Beaver Lake Cree community are digging as deep as they can. Their resources are so limited, and they have other issues as well, but they all believe in this strongly.” Overall, she said, “the band is putting in hundreds of thousands of dollars themselves… At a recent open band meeting they raised about $4,000 just from the people in the room.”

And still, Smitten told me, as legal challenges like the BLCN’s are increasingly seen as one of the most tangible ways to challenge unchecked tar sands growth, more and more donors seem to be reaching out to help.

“People are starting to really awaken, in the sense of a global awareness, to how indigenous-led strategies based on their treaty rights are really forming one of the key ways that tar sands expansion can be at least limited,” said Susan Smitten. “In everything I read these days, everyone is tuning into the fact that this rate of expansion is unviable. It’s untenable because within less than a decade they want to double the current production.”

“All the voices seem to be saying, ‘Don’t we need to freeze this for a minute? Do we even need this and if we do isn’t there a better way? And shouldn’t we be consulting with First Nations and making sure their rights aren’t completely trampled in the process?’” Smitten said. “As more and more people tune into that and become aware, there are more and more voices saying, ‘How can we help?’ and there are more and more people reaching out to us.”

Follow Michael on Twitter.
 

As the Ukrainian military launches an offensive on the rebel-held town of Sloviansk, members of the self-proclaimed state of Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) are continuing a campaign of government building takeovers.

On Sunday, DPR protesters were able to take the military prosecutor's office and a local council building. VICE News followed the group as members burned the Ukrainian flag and arrested a suspected provocateur. The man was seen being bundled into a car while covered in blood, his destination unknown.

DPR protesters headed to a government debt collection office on Monday and delivered an ultimatum to freeze the discovery of listed debts by PrivatBank—Ukraine's largest bank—in Donetsk. The bank has stopped operating in the Donetsk region, citing alleged intimidation of its staff. This has led to long lines outside branches as people desperately try to withdraw money.

When approached by the protesters, the manager of the office very calmly said he would get back to them in the next few days—at which point the men, some with guns, withdrew.

Seattle activists marching in favor of a $15 minimum wage this January. Photo via Flickr user pnwbot

Wherever there are fresh ideas about how to create balance in our dystopian society and reduce inequality, you can be sure trolls will emerge touting the Iron Laws of Economics and warning reformers to back off and accept the world as it is. We saw this with the Occupy Wall Street protests, during which fancy liberals at national media outlets couldn't help but lampoon a bunch of dirty hippies camping out in a park in lower Manhattan.

This truism has been on display over the past week as a series of columns have come out slamming the $15 minimum wage plan currently being considered by officials in Seattle, Washington—which if enacted would make that city arguably the best place to work on the planet. The authors use a few charts and economic studies to make the case that such a massive bump in the city's income floor could have catastrophic effects on its labor market, reducing employment and even speeding the trend toward automatization of fast-food jobs, which we've seen in high-tax locales in Western Europe. (One writer cites the allegedly terrifying specter of making the hiring of workers in Seattle more expensive than it is in France. Oh God, France! The HORROR.)

But before we start writing the obituary for one of America's largest progressive cities, we should keep in mind that the wage boost is being phased in over a period of three to seven years, a fact glossed over by critics but that is in fact the key detail here—a compromise that the most radical advocates of a generous wage increase like socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant have opposed tooth and nail. Far from being the most aggressive proposal out there, the plan actually on track to clear the city council steers a centrist course between upsetting the local economy and keeping businesses happy.

"What is important is the phase-in period rather than the number," said Dean Baker, an economist and founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It's fair to say if we were going to make it $15 next year I'd be very worried. But if you make it [that] over 7 years, there's 15 percent inflation or somewhere around there, so in today's dollars a $15 minimum wage would be something in the order of $12.75 [by the time it takes effect]. Right off the bat that sounds less worrisome. You're not going to see firms going out of business because of this."

"It's not really a very radical experiment once you have these long phase-ins," agreed Jared Bernstein, former chief economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden. "The thing about these minimum wage increases is that predictions about their impact have historically been wrong."

So please, let's not start panicking about endtimes for Seattle and its utopian ideals of economic fairness. It's necessary to at least pause and consider research that shows minimum wage hikes can have a modest negative affect on overall employment—specifically among teenagers—but as Slate's $15 wage critic Jordan Weissmann himself points out, that side effect is perfectly acceptable so long as most workers are making out better in the long run. What data is there to suggest that will not be the case for Seattle?

Given the structural problems we have with poverty in this country, a movement in one northwestern city to tilt the conversation to the left on wages strikes me as not just a potentially good thing, but an obviously laudable one that might serve to dramatically shake up the conventional wisdom about how to improve the lot of the poor. After all, members of Congress aren't lifting a finger to hike the federal $7.25 minimum wage, which has been in place since 2009, despite President Obama's call for a meager bump up to $10.10. Seattle has the capacity to upset the status quo, boost the quality of life for workers, and make a lot of economists and political elites look stupid in the process.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

Image via Flickr user upupa4me

Southern California is hatching a plan to restructure the way all of America pays taxes for using gas, essentially reframing the whole thing as a tax on use of roads rather than gas. A powerful coalition of county governments in the most populous state is pushing for a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) fee to be imposed across the land by 2025. 

On the face of it, the proposed VMT fee sounds like it’s meant to generate more revenue, be invasive, and make it impossible to hide from taxes by buying a low-mileage vehicle. Essentially, it’s designed to make tea partiers’ heads explode. But maybe there’s enough time in the next 11 years for them to cool off and consider that it might be for the best.

I called Denny Zane of Move LA, a transit-focused nonprofit, for more information. He said a VMT fee is one of many attempts to come up with a way to fund our highways that’s “Both reliable and fair, and increases rather than declines as a revenue stream while the use of the transportation systems increase as population grows. We need revenue streams that can help meet those needs. The VMT fee is better than the gas tax in that respect.”

Together, the six Southern California counties pushing for this make up an entity called the Southern California Association of Governments. Southern California is a car-centric community that spent decades fighting against public transit expansion. There is grave concern here regarding the recent news that the federal Highway Trust Fund is about to be completely drained in July. When that happens, the federal support we count on to keep our crumbling highways and bridges taped together will vanish.

As we see it from our state, we pay the highest taxes in the country for our gas thanks to the cleverly named “excise tax” everyone pays, plus our added 39.5 cent tax. Meanwhile, the rest of America still pays only 18.4 cents a gallon to fund highways at the federal level. That rate has stayed at 18.4 cents for 20 years, and I’m sure Grover Norquist would chain himself to an Arco pump before he would let lawmakers pass a tax hike, or introduce a new sales tax.

But here in "Carland," the existing tax evidently isn’t enough. If Congress can’t figure out a way to inject money into the highway fund from somewhere else, its disappearance means a loss of $46.8 billion for the local highway funds that need it. Mostly us in Carland. We’ll all be crushed to death by falling overpasses. Is that what you want?

Image via Youtube user LukkaVolkov

Meanwhile, not only have the costs of maintaining roads increased with inflation, but some people have switched over to driving hybrids and electric cars. Paying our highway taxes at the gas pump means those who need the highways a lot, but require little or no gas, theoretically aren’t paying their fair share for maintenance. A tax on the number of miles you drive, instead of how much gas you use means Uncle Sam is becoming agnostic about fuel efficiency. 

If there’s one aspect of this trend that might redeem this tax for conservatives, maybe it’s the fact that it will affect all the Tesla drivers currently getting away with murder. But it’s still going to terrorize Glenn Beck for a different reason.

“Most formulations of the VMT fee involve electronic monitoring of vehicle miles traveled, and voters resist any kind of electronic monitoring by government entities, and the NSA fiasco is a good illustration of why,” Zane told me, adding, “It’s become radioactive.”

Denny Zane. Image via Youtube user SmartpillJCD

It’s not clear how this is going to work. Which sounds better: Someone from the government poking their head in and reading your odometer, or a gizmo installed on your car that monitors how much you drive?

All that monitoring is one downside that might mean an old fashioned incremental sales tax could be more tempting than a VMT fee. Another is the anus-clenching moment when you’ll have to suddenly pay the fee every year. “Most likely, the public will pay their share at registration which means one lump sum.” Zane said. “The great advantage of an excise tax or a sales tax is that the public pays a small increment. That’s hugely advantageous for political acceptance.”

So far, all that’s happened is that the Southern California Association of Governments passed a resolution asking Congress to change the gas tax to the VMT fee, plus they’ve made it their agenda to create a pilot program for the fee structure in Southern California. 

It may not happen, but if it does, we here in Carland will experience the carnage first. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter

Christopher (Coop) Cooper, Walter Keane, and Adam Parfrey in front of Keane’s La Jolla bungalow in 1991. Photo by Scott Lindgren

Editor's note: Adam Parfrey runs perhaps our favorite small press, Feral House Books. If you're interested in pills, black metal, and apocalyptic death cults, they're pretty much your one-stop shop. So when Adam sent us a snippet of his new book, Citizen Keane, we jumped at the opportunity to run an excerpt. The subject is Walter and Margaret Keane, 60s pop artists who caused a weird sensation painting kids with big eyes. They're also the subject of Big Eyes, Tim Burton's new biopic, which will see wide release this Christmas.

Nineteen sixty-five was a year of bug-eyed glory for the former real estate salesman turned pop artist Walter Stanley Keane, who bragged to reporters that he “romped through life with the evident enjoyment of a terrier rolling in a clover patch.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Keane art was seemingly everywhere—from the sales bins at Woolworths to the gilded mansions of Hollywood royalty. As his income surged comfortably into seven figures, Keane decided he would keep things simple. “All that really matters to me,” he explained to an admiring Life magazine reporter, “is painting, drinking (which, the way I look at it, includes eating), and loving.” It seemed like the party was just getting started.

Keane’s fortune was made from a style stunning in its simplicity. Weeping waifs. Tearful children. All bearing hypnotic, saucer-size orbs. It was said that if you looked at them long enough, the distressed children seemed to stare at you, even if you moved about the room. “Let’s face it,” he boasted to Life magazine: “Nobody painted eyes like El Greco, and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane.” More discriminating art enthusiasts, critics, and academics didn’t quite agree, finding the paintings formulaic and sickening in their sentimentality. But the rest of America fell in love with Keane’s Big Eyes, and he became a household name.

Meanwhile, lurking in the background, and painting Keanes in a basement studio, was Walter’s long-suffering wife, Margaret, the true artist behind the Big Eyes. But more on that later.

As the Big Eyes grew in popularity throughout the 1960s, dozens of imitators moved to cash in on the Keane style. Big Eye prints sprouted like toadstools; “Gig” painted moony-eyed mongrels and alley cats; “Eden” did corkboard prints of Keane-like waifs dressed as moppets in tattered clothing; “Eve” transformed Keane-like kids into precocious go-go dancers. Even black-velvet iterations of Big Eye kitsch followed in their footsteps.

Walter Keane was quite the operator, a true American type. A “naïf” who seemed to buy into his own sales pitch. Keane hired Tom Wolfe, who used the pseudonym “Eric Schneider,” to write an over-the-top satire that portrayed both Walter and Margaret Keane’s Big Eye kitsch as furthering the work of great masters deserving of great accolades. Keane’s self-inflation later permeated his autobiography, The World of Keane, in which he felt the need to tell readers that in his dreams his grandmother called him a “great master” until he came to understand that, yes, he was deserving of this title.

The gratuitous sentimentality of weepy waifs combined with Keane’s claims of eternal artistic genius make for a particularly American type of salesmanship. Yet Walter Keane’s insistence that he was a rare artistic genius has a desperate quality to it in light of the lawsuits he lost to Margaret Keane concerning the real originator of the Big Eye style. As it turned out, Margaret became a victim of her scoundrel husband, and her despair seemed to actualize in her art in ways the copycat competition failed to achieve.

Early Big Eye art monograph circa 1960

Keane wondered, why sell just a handful of paintings to a few well-heeled collectors? That’s not how real estate moved in new suburban tracts or how TV dinners were sold in supermarkets. Keane thought, why not eliminate the middleman, open a gallery, and sell directly to the public? It wasn’t easy at first. “I never intended to become an artist in the garret existence,” Keane remembered, “but there were lean years when we started.” Paintings went for as little as $20. When money was tight, a picture or sketch was bartered to help pay the bills. “We just about furnished our house by trading canvases for furniture,” Keane later recalled.

Selling paintings was hard work in the early 60s, and Keane’s art enterprise took a few years to get off the ground. Handbills were made, paintings were shown at community art festivals, and some of the earlier works were even hung in a local nightclub. Fortunately for him, Walter had an innate gift for blather that played well with newspapers, magazines, and nightly news programs. Articles about the Keane Gallery began to appear in various Bay Area publications—Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Call Bulletin, Hayward Daily Review, and others. Soon enough, reporters from the major national papers were running profiles of the larger-than-life North Beach artist who painted weeping, saucer-eyed children.

Hardly a week passed without Walter Keane devising a way to get his name and photograph into the newspapers. All he’d have to do was call an old “school chum” at United Press International, and a photographer would hurry to Keane’s home to snap a few pictures of Walter posting in front of a half-completed canvas. Keane had also snagged guest spots on a few television shows like the Jack Paar Show, which helped him gain a few influential celebrity admirers and a direct pipeline into millions of American living rooms. He understood the power of the medium. “We’ve used television more than any other way of getting ourselves known,” Walter explained, “It’s beautiful how many people can be exposed to your work through, say, just one TV show.”

Walter Keane wasn’t your typical brooding artist. He knew how to connect with Cold War conservatives. He wore his windswept light brown hair short, and favored monogrammed shirts. If you saw him on the street, it wouldn’t be hard to mistake him for an insurance salesman on his day off. And Keane had a certain genius when it came to making friends and cultivating business connections.

“We don’t need New York anymore,” he once said. “Our real strength, anyway, is in the interior, in places like Boise. What a reception they gave us when we went to Boise!” If millionaires could buy quality art, why couldn’t kindergarten teachers, housewives, or forklift operators? So Keane mass-marketed waif images like so many coffee mugs. If some art critics called it crass commercialism, he wasn’t going to let them spoil the party. He sold lithographs, miniatures, collectable plates, greeting cards, and wall posters. Big Eye “Little Miss No Name” dolls were mass-marketed, and the only reason they didn’t bear the magic Keane name is that the toy company Hasbro didnt offer Walter enough money.

While Keane originals went for anywhere between $25,000 and $50,000 during the peak years, unframed lithographs were available for $3.50 to $25 for a first edition print. In 1964, Keane grossed $2,000,000 from prints alone. This was popular art in the truest sense of the word, and Walter didn’t just think of himself as an artist. He was introducing millions of people to fine art. “I’ve helped the art world just as Picasso and Modigliani have,” he once bragged. “I’ve made more people aware of paintings, which makes them buy more, just like they go buy more records and books once they’re exposed.”

One of the many weird Big Eye offshoots of Keane art. This one was painted on black velvet and purchased in Tijuana

So why were so many Americans enthralled by Keane paintings? America was a nation in transition when Big Eye art appeared. The GIs were home from the war, the economy was booming, and the country was awash in consumer goods. Disposable incomes were rising, and thousands of new homes were going up as an exodus of families spilled out of the nation’s major cities. The home with the well-manicured lawn and the two-car garage had become the centerpiece of the American dream. By 1960, one third of the population lived in the suburbs—that’s a lot of living room walls.

The US may have been enjoying a remarkable stretch of prosperity, but the world had also become more dangerous and unsettling. The melancholy waifs triggered an instant emotional reaction—and can any art that provokes an emotional reaction be called bad? “They drew you in,” says Bob Miller, a collector and longtime friend of Keane's. “There was just a certain magnetism about the paintings.”

Keane also maintained that the paintings’ children offered an underlying political message. “If mankind would look deep into the soul of the very young,” he once said, “he wouldn’t need a road map.” If Walter’s outspoken concern for the world’s children seems relatively commonplace today, it was uncommon in the early 1960s. The United Nations General Assembly had only recently enacted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, in 1959, and child abuse, once considered a taboo subject, had entered the national conversation with the 1962 Journal of the American Medical Association article “The Battered Child Syndrome.”

Though Keane thought he had a powerful message, he was treated like a joke. As far as the art establishment was concerned, the millions of Keane fans only seemed to reinforce the image of America as a cultural backwater despite the heralded rise of abstract expressionist artists like Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning.

The New York School artists were renowned for their brooding self-absorption. They weren’t just making art—they exposed their raw, naked, tortured souls. Many of them dabbled in Jungian psychology, adopting an air of humorless self-importance. At the time Walter and his wife began selling paintings, the pop art movement was rapidly displacing the action painters. The irreverent pop artists brought a lively sense of mockery to the creative process. It could be argued that the mass-produced Keane paintings were op art in the truest sense of the world. Satirically or not, Andy Warhol praised Big Eye paintings just for being popular.

Walter Keane wasn’t worried in the least what critics thought. A look at the sizeable sum in his bank book provided him with the last laugh. More than that, Keane paintings appeared in art museums in Spain and Belgium, and despite hate from a New York Times critic, during the World’s Fair of 1964, the United Nations itself purchased and hung a Big Eye painting, as did Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. The list of celebrity owners of Keane paintings was growing with each passing day. Natalie Wood, Red Skelton, Joan Crawford, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Eve Arden, Kim Novak—all became proud owners of dearly priced Keane oils. All in all, it was a charmed life for a star-struck native of Lincoln, Nebraska. Even politicos like George Christopher, who served as the last Republican mayor of San Francisco from 1956 to 1964, paid Margaret Keane $4,500 (a fairly large amount at the time) to paint his portrait. According to the Modesto Bee in December 1959, Margaret also painted portraits of members of the super-rich DuPont family as well.

This being the golden age of the cocktail, the three-martini lunch, and the living room tiki bar, Walter Keane was in his gassed-up element. Fifty years ago, alcoholism wasn’t considered a disease like it is today. If you were drinking too much, it just meant that you needed to go on the wagon for a while. Most social activities revolved around a few shared drinks. Once he became a celebrity, Walter’s carousing grew legendary. “He was just always a lot of fun to be around,” Bob Miller remembers. “Wherever Walter went, his persona was like a magnet.”

As Keane later recalled his rock star lifestyle:

“I knew all the big shots. Dalí, Picasso, they were all my friends. One time in Paris, Picasso was throwing a big party, and I was there. I took a canvas and put it up on an easel, and I laid down ten $100 bills. I said, ‘Master, that’s for you and your girlfriends. All I want you to do is X, Y, and Z on there and write ‘Picasso.’ He thought I was making fun of him. Joan Crawford, she introduced me to one of my first great loves, Miss Chivas Regal. And she threw parties for me, introduced all the Hollywood stars to my work. I had this long bar in my Woodside home; it came around the horn. Red Skelton tried to buy it for $4,000 bucks once. Seventeen people could sit around my bar room. The Beach Boys, Maurice Chevalier were guests there. Howard Keel and all those guys. We’d have parties until four in the morning. Dinner, drinks, anything they wanted. Always three or four people swimming nude in the pool. Everybody was screwing everybody. Sometimes I’d be going to bed, and there’d be three girls in the bed. I took a photo once of three of the girls there. Crazy, wild...”

When he wasn’t trading drinks with Hollywood royalty, going to parties, or boozing it up in some exotic locale, Keane could be seen knocking back a Chivas on the rocks at one of his favorite North Beach nightspots, or tooling around San Francisco in a gleaming white Cadillac convertible with a telephone installed in the front seat (a rarity at that time). And the money kept rolling in.

While Walter hit the bars and kept the reporters busy, Mrs. Keane was trying to start a new life in Hawaii. In 1965, Margaret filed for a legal separation after a decade of fulfilling the role of being Walter’s wife. She later claimed that Walter was simply impossible to live with. He constantly criticized her, stayed out late drinking, and at times could be a jealous man. Once a judge approved their legal separation, they each started new lives, telling the press that they’d forever remain friends and business partners.   

A southern blond with a gentle voice and a slender figure, Walter’s ex is an accomplished portraitist. Her paintings of winsome adolescent women, painted in a style akin to Modigliani, have earned her a certain degree of fame alongside Walter’s nationwide notoriety.

In the various media profiles of her husband, Margaret was usually depicted as the perfect wife: raising their two daughters, running the household, and painting in her spare time. If Walter was a gregarious, talkative extrovert, Margaret (who was 12 years his junior) was his opposite—polite, shy, withdrawn, and given to pondering spiritual matters. Walter’s soon-to-be ex-wife also harbored a well-kept secret that in a few short years would effectively destroy Walter’s well-crafted persona.

In the mid 1960s, at the height of Walter’s fame, Margaret was the only one who knew that he had perpetrated a humbug of monumental proportions. The man wasn’t a painter at all. Margaret was the creator of all the Big Eye art. Walter basked in the glory, partied with the celebrities, and reaped the rewards. As she would later relate, the tearful, doe-eyed children she painted had nothing to do with Walter’s supposed belief in children redeeming the world. The weeping waifs reflected her own sorrow.

Margaret played a part in Walter’s deception for over a decade, but after moving to Hawaii, remarrying, and getting her life back in order, she decided to end the charade once and for all. It wouldn’t be a clean break. Walter would not go away quietly. It required an ugly legal battle to finally settle the matter of who painted the popular Big Eye waifs. After all, Walter could display published art books featuring the Big Eye kids and Walter’s signature. Walter could also point to a hundred published news photos featuring him holding a paintbrush and a palette of acrylic paints dabbing at one painting or another. Why did she agree to the lies? “It was easier to agree to the lies than not” was Margaret’s simple answer.

Supported by her new husband, a sports writer named Dan McGuire, Margaret finally took it upon herself to challenge Walter’s lies in a substantial public forum. In a media splash, Margret organized a public “paint-off” in San Francisco Union Square, knowing that Walter wouldn’t be able to draw a circle or a straight line, much less an actual painting of a Big Eye waif. A photographer from Life magazine came to photograph the event, even though Walter stayed far away.

During a divorce court proceeding, a judge ordered both Walter and Margaret to engage in another “paint-off” to determine who was the rightful owner of all past, present, and future Big Eye paintings. Walter begged off, complaining of a hurt shoulder, and watched on as Margaret painted a Big Eye masterpiece in less than an hour. Margaret won back the right to claim to sign and sell her own art.

Margaret emerged from the ordeal relatively unscathed while she gained a new generation of fans, and the Keane Eyes Gallery opened in San Francisco. The gallery’s website claims that, in recent years, Margaret’s work has reflected her happiness and devotion to the Jehovah’s Witness movement.

After Parfrey’s “Citizen Keane” cover story appeared in the San Diego Reader, an angry Walter Keane wrote a letter to the editor, claiming that Parfrey was paid a million-dollar bounty by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to build up Margaret at his expense. Walter died in the year 2000 at the age of 85, while Margaret still paints prolifically, and her story will soon be the subject of a Tim Burton film, Big Eyes.

This article presents an excerpt from the book Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes by Adam Parfrey and Cletus Nelson, published by Feral House, and available on June 1, 2014.

Photo via Creative Commons

While the controversy swirling around wind turbines in Ontario may be a ticking time bomb in the just-begun election campaign, Toronto human-rights lawyer Julian Falconer may have lit the fuse Monday night at a meeting organized by a Plympton-Wyoming community group near Sarnia, a city in southwest Ontario. 

Speaking to around 400 people in a community hall, Falconer challenged all three political parties to declare a moratorium on turbine construction until a comprehensive study is completed by the federal health ministry. “None of these parties has done the right thing. A courageous, responsible political leader would put a halt to any more turbine construction, until the Health Canada study is completed,” he told the approving crowd.  

Falconer was asked to the meeting by the organizers of a local group fighting plans by energy company Suncor to build 46 wind turbines in their area. The group has convinced their local council to fight Suncor by demanding turbines be placed at least two kilometers (1.2 miles) apart, as opposed to only 550 meters (600 yards), as decreed by Ontario’s Green Energy Act. Suncor took the municipality to court last winter to stop the by-law, claiming the provincial legislation trumps local by-laws. A decision is expected soon, the local mayor told the meeting.

Since the Green Energy Act came into force in 2009, wind developments have sprouted around southern Ontario, and local opposition groups have been fighting them tooth and nail. The Act, meant to promote the growth of alternative energy sources, has created a political backlash which has been credited with partially reducing the governing Liberal party to minority status in 2012. With more than 50 citizen action groups across the province listed on the website of Ontario Wind Resistance, an umbrella organization for wind opponents, the protesters are stepping up for an even bigger fight as a new election gets underway. 

Challenging that law on behalf of wind power opponents, even as far as the Supreme Court of Canada, is Falconer’s goal. “It may be ‘a novel argument' to use the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for this purpose, but if people don’t challenge the Liberal government in court, these turbines will be everywhere,” he told the audience. Section seven of the Charter protects Canadians’ rights to security of the person, and “the courts have recognized that health issues can be one means of being protected,” Falconer told VICE in an interview after his speech.



Julian Falconer in the crowd. Photo via the author

To effectively challenge turbine construction in Ontario, one has to prove turbines will cause “serious harm to human health,” according to Falconer. Building turbines without clear understanding of health effects is like the government saying, ”if you want to avoid swallowing this pill we’re giving you, you have to prove it won’t kill you,” he said. He hopes to continue building support for the Charter challenge by appealing to other anti-wind groups across the province to join in the coming months.

Wayne Couture, living just south of the Kincardine province of Ontario, told the audience he has been forced to leave his home every day for a year by the effects of living near turbines: dizziness and ringing in his ears. “You have to shut them [turbines] down. You are the guinea pigs,” he warned the group.

Health effects are at the heart of opposition to wind turbines, believes Carman Krough, co-author of a recent article in the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine that reviewed previous health effects studies. The study found that, if placed too close to residents, industrial wind turbines can negatively affect the physical, mental, and social well-being of people, and that there is sufficient evidence to support the conclusion that noise from turbines is a potential cause of health effects. Formal studies from around the world point to symptoms that repeat, she says—sleep disturbance, feeling of vibrations, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and vertigo.

These studies, along with the personal stories of individuals, leaves Krogh with “no doubt” the effects are real. “You don’t pack up and leave your home lightly,” she says. With a background in “vigilance monitoring” of adverse effects of pharmaceuticals, Krogh found herself applying the same techniques in monitoring people who reported effects from living near turbines, when she experienced headaches after being near the giant towers, she tells VICE.

The effects on children are especially worrying, Krogh says, as they have not been studied very well. There is some evidence that conditions in children such as autism, asthma, migraine, or epilepsy can be affected by turbine noise, and that such effects could possibly by irreversible, she told the audience.

There is “credible scientific support” for a link between noise from turbines and health effects, according to a report commissioned by the Ontario Environment Ministry, Krogh claims—the same ministry that is approving wind projects across the province. 

Joining Falconer’s challenge will not come cheaply for the town of Plympton-Wyoming. The group is hoping to raise $300,000 to count themselves in. With a donation of $20,000 from Lambton County Council, and their municipal council already paying legal bills to defend against Suncor, the group is asking the 7,500 residents to dig deep in their own pockets. 

They’re hoping the money will give them a chance to avoid the noise and breeze of the wind turbines, while at the same time, they also hope the election will force politicians to feel the wind down their own necks.   

Photo via WikiCommons

If one were to choose a poster child for absurd military excesses of the 20th century, the Falklands War of 1982 would probably sit high on the list. The conflict, a dispute over some rocky islands and 400,000 sheep, touched off an overkill mobilization of the whole military apparatus of Argentina and the United Kingdom alike. And in that balls-to-the-wall spirit, the Argentine government decided to throw (by British estimates) about 25,000 land mines on the islands. That’s not much compared to the millions upon millions of mines laid in countries like Afghanistan or Cambodia, but the islands' population at the time was just 1,800 (that’s 13.8 mines per resident), mainly clustered in one town. Yet as the British government began planning a long-term demining project to commence in 2009, not everyone was enthusiastic about eliminating the Falklands' land mines.

Most of those naysayers were penguin lovers. Just three centuries ago, the Falklands were home to about 10 million penguins across five species, but by 1982, whaling, sheep grazing, and human settlement had culled the local population to a million. But then the spiral stopped. Because, as it turns out, penguins are too light to trigger land mines.

The Falklands were lucky. An initial demining sweep after the war took out all of the most dangerous ordnances, and those remaining were on unused pastures and shorelines, well marked and monitored, and avoided by a population incessantly educated on the dangers. So, some environmentalists thought, why not just let the land mines stay rather than wasting gobs of cash on high-risk demining programs? Rather than wasting years and risking lives, the mines could become a super-effective penguin preserve, saving the native ecosystem and maybe even bringing in some tourists.

Despite the halfhearted resistance of a few penguin obsessives, landmine-clearing sweeps did begin in the Falklands in 2009. But occasionally, in other parts of the world, people living next to unexploded ordnances much more dangerous than those in the Falklands will resist efforts to sweep and secure the areas, leaving the mines untouched. Which is a tragedy, because getting rid of things that explode people indiscriminately should be one of the world's more uncontroversial aid projects.

Mines are not PR-friendly weapons. Originally intended as a means of funneling troops into fire lines and denying the enemy access to paths of retreat or advance, the passage of time has revealed that they are enduring weapons with the power to hold land hostage from local peoples and maim and kill innocents in a war of attrition long after a conflict has passed. And they tend to target the most vulnerable, killing 4,300 in 2012 alone, a number of whom were displaced peoples moving across unmarked and unknown minefields. By 1997, the world had become so universally disgusted with them that 161 nations (the US not included) signed a total ban on the use, production, stockpiling, transit, or anything-ing of landmines. Many others (the US included) agreed to more precise and sparing restrictions. Today, only Burma and Syria continue to lay them at a government level on a regular basis.  

With all that in mind, the removal of these ordnances is inherently good, as it eliminates an extreme risk and restores land and security to the people who need both dearly. Yet the process of removing them is not easy. Those who do demining know that even with a mission as mercifully clear-cut as theirs, swooping in from on high and pushing their way through communities might not be appreciated. So organizations like the Danish Demining Group (DDG), a particularly large-scale outfit active in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Burma, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and elsewhere, put a premium on trying to build strong ties with communities before they ever set foot into a minefield, keeping the local residents involved and informed throughout the process.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

“We do preliminary work before a team shows up in the community,” says Tammy Hall, the DDG’s Mine Action Representative. “In Mozambique, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and other places, teams do large-scale, non-technical surveys. They make systematic sweeps of communities, talking with different actors—gender, age groups, key informants like police and local chiefs. Early on we quantified the results of these surveys on a scale to assign value to a minefield. Does it block access to a school, farm, or road? Or a different value if it’s far off, contained, and well-known.” Only after a rapport has been built and the needs and desires of a community established will teams of sweepers start working their way through the fields.

Even with all of that preparatory work and introduction, though, sometimes communities will refuse to allow demining groups in. Sometimes it’s most likely an act of sheer animus to anyone from a certain region. In 2011 Klaus Ljoerrinng Pedersen, working for the DDG in Somalia, reported he’d been having trouble accessing areas because al Shabaab, the dominant militant group, saw him as an arm of the United Nations, whose interference they categorically rejected. “Sometimes there are conflicts due to a lack of awareness of what’s going on," adds Hall. "Simple misunderstandings that can hopefully be corrected.”

Those misunderstandings are occasionally out of the DDG’s hands, though. Take Somalia, for example, where it’s hard to do just about anything at times. But for legitimate and clear-cut aid workers like the DDG, it’s sometimes hard to work there because public sentiment has been poisoned or clouded by the iffy practices of other outside NGOs.

“They just want to come here and do lip service,” says Edna Adan Ismail, a former World Health Organization worker, former foreign minister of Somaliland (the autonomous, de facto independent state in northern Somalia), and current head of an eponymous not-for-profit hospital in Hargeisa, Somaliland, referring to the bulk of the NGOs who land in Somalia. “They find a project to justify their presence, spend thousands of dollars, and leave having done nothing.” Ismail’s not alone in her NGO skepticism. Many Somalis see aid workers as a whole as useless for anything save short-term, ineffective workshops on issues that might not even be a priority for them. According to Ismail, in Somaliland these groups spend most of their money on hotels, manage their projects from Nairobi, and are tolerated because they pump some cash into the economy, including paying $10 or $20 per diems to those who participate in workshops and conferences. “Paying people to participate in projects,” says Ismail, “isn’t right in the long run for a community.”

Hall agrees that the precedent and expectation of paying people to participate in aid programs can be profoundly unhelpful. She adds that, in a place like Somalia, where there’s no consistent national-level security and ordnances are usually held in private stocks, with varied conditions and attitudes from community to community, holder to holder, it can be difficult to act. In each community, they ask locals to raise their concerns, “and ordnances may be a part of that,” says Hall. “If so, we do workshops on handing over stockpiles, or in other cases we try to work with heavy-handed local police or de-escalate conflicts between groups to manage the violence in an area. It depends on the environment and individual structures.” Sometimes that means just leaving ordnances intact and focusing on violence reduction and education.

Photo via WikiCommons

That’s still a victory, and it can bring measurable change to a community. In the similarly inconsistent and varied violent regions of Uganda, the DDG found that between 2010 and 2011 community programs were able to decrease interclan/-tribal violence by almost 9 percent, to improve relations with police and other security actors through regularized contact with local communities, and to nearly halve concerns about small weapons violence and more than double enthusiasm for disarmament.

But the fact remains that some communities—whether because they are controlled by hostile groups, misunderstand the mission at hand, or have an endemic insecurity and mistrust of mostly inefficient aid organizations ambling uselessly throughout the region—refuse to be demined or disarmed. “People are free individuals,” says Hall. “Naturally, if they’re not interested or there’s no opening to move forward, in that case there’s not much you can do... we don’t follow up.” It’s unfortunate to think of something so simple being rejected. But Hall says, “This is their country, their future, their right to be the masters of their own destiny.” So even if the choice seems absurd, it will be respected.

It would be one thing if all the cases where demining was refused were in communities where the fields were far-off and contained, or even providing sanctuary to breeding penguins. But that’s not always the situation. To be sure, it’s not as if the majority of communities are actively rejecting demining aid (unfortunately, the DDG couldn’t provide me with any hard data on exactly how many communities they're unable to reach). But the fact that mistrust and bad experiences with other NGOs can lead to any group—for legitimate and understandable reasons—turning down what should be one of the most universally accepted forms of aid and losing a chance to reclaim their land is a hard thing to swallow.

Thankfully, demining is widespread, effective, well thought-out, and mostly appreciated. Unfortunately, as is the classic tale of the modern world, the regions with a reason to reject it or beyond the pale of its reach may need it just as badly, if not more so, than anyone else.

Check back next Wednesday for another episode of Blobby Boys!

A portrait of Michel Aoun, a candidate for Lebanon's presidency. Photo by Flickr user Thierry Ehrmann

Lebanon is a country with a long and bloody history of political ineptitude. But this year, the country’s politicians have done a surprisingly good job at keeping the fallout from the neighboring civil war in Syria at bay. Security plans implemented in the northern city of Tripoli and Bekaa Valley have curtailed clashes between pro- and anti-Syrian-regime militias and curbed the escalation of suicide bomb attacks that were an almost weekly occurrence this winter.

But the political wheels in Beirut may be beginning to fall off. Lebanon’s current president, Michel Suleiman, is set to step down when his term expires on May 25, and Lebanon’s two main political blocks are at loggerheads over his successor. Members of parliament elect the country’s president, who is constitutionally mandated to be from the country’s Christian community, which makes up roughly 39 percent of Lebanon’s population. The office of the president is largely ceremonial, but it plays a key role in stabilizing the government. The animosity between the Hezbollah-led March 8 Alliance and their rivals, another coalition of parties called the March 14 Alliance, is so high that MPs from the March 8 faction have boycotted the last three rounds of voting in the past fortnight —the latest round of voting was held today. The election is becoming a political proxy war between the Hezbollah-backed pro-Assad politicians and the anti-Assad politicians. And the two leading candidates were warlords from Lebanon's 15-year civil war. With more than a million Syrian refugees now in Lebanon, a country of only 4.5 million, and the concomitant strain on the country’s economy and ever-fragile security situation, the political crisis in Lebanon could have rippling effects across the region. 

Two weeks ago I took a battered 1960s-era Mercedes taxi through the East Beirut district of Ashrafieh. A triangular cedar tree, the symbol of a right-wing Christian political party, was glued to the dashboard. Camille, my taxi driver, supported the party, whose leader, Samir Geagea, is currently the presidential candidate of the Saudi-backed March 14 block. Geagea holds the distinction of being the only civil-war-era warlord to have faced jail time for his crimes. He spent 11 years in solitary confinement in a cell located below the Ministry of Defense in Beirut. In 2012 he narrowly avoided an assassination attempt when a bullet allegedly whizzed past his head as he bent down to smell a rose in his garden. Inside his house, Geagea is said to have a replica of the cell in which he spent 11 years.

In the early 1980s Camille had fought under Geagea’s command against the occupying Syrian army in Koura, a region north of Beirut, and the Chouf mountains. Camille recalled that period with an air of romanticism mixed with PTSD. But he was not confident Geagea would be elected.

“He is a strong leader, a principled man who objects to foreign interference in Lebanon,” said Camille in reference to Geagea’s presidential bid.

“But I don’t think he will be president,” he continued. “The opposition would never agree to his nomination.”

Relatives and allies of political figures Geagea is said to have had killed in the 1980s hold seats in the parliament, and old grudges are hurting his candidacy. Opposition figures wrote their names on blank ballots submitted in the first round of voting held in the Lebanese parliament on April 23. Geagea fell 23 votes short of the 65 required to secure the presidency.

But this is not the only factor against him. Geagea, who served in the country’s top military post, also based his campaign on a promise he can hardly keep: to bring Hezbollah’s extensive illicit arsenal under state control and end the Shia organization’s military participation in Syria alongside the Assad regime. Even if he could rein in Hezbollah, Geagea might start another war in the process.

Camille, my taxi driver weighed in again: “There are many political figures who committed war crimes, but because Geagea went to jail, people don’t forget his past.”

Michel Aoun is Geagea’s opponent. He’s a former army general with a comb-over and a very loud voice. He doesn’t’ actually have the official support of the March 8 Alliance but is their de facto candidate.

Aoun and Geagea fought against each other in intra-Christian wars in East Beirut between 1988 and 1990. Aoun fled Lebanon to Paris in the wake of a US-approved, Syrian-executed siege of the Presidential Palace in 1990. Before leaving Lebanon, he criticized the George Bush administration’s support of Syria and accepted arms from Saddam Hussein. But on returning from exile in 2005, Aoun quickly formed an alliance with his former Syrian enemies and their main representatives in Lebanon: Hezbollah.

In the buildup to election season, the Lebanese press reported that Aoun was America’s preferred man for the job. One US diplomatic source is even alleged to have said: “We are facing a clear equation: either Aoun or chaos.”

It might seem strange that the Obama administration would prefer the election of an ally of the Assad regime and Hezbollah, but potential reasons for a US preference of Aoun are quite simple: As an ally, Aoun is seen as capable of holding dialogue with Hezbollah rather than just alienating the Shia party—something that Geagea would likely do. Given the context of ongoing US-Iranian rapprochement, Hezbollah and their Iranian backers are increasingly viewed as forces capable of playing a role in a potential future settlement to Syria’s civil war. Israeli media has claimed that agents from the CIA fronted by US Ambassador to Lebanon David Hale recently met with Hezbollah operatives in Cyprus. At the same time it is hoped that if Aoun became president, he would be able to express his independence, away from the hegemony of Hezbollah, who in all likelihood would favor a president guaranteed to support their interests. Aoun has, in recent months, been busy making overtures toward the March 14 leadership in order to secure the necessary votes to make him a consensus candidate.

“America will favor the candidate who can serve their interests in Lebanon,” Imad Salamey, a political science professor at the American University in Beirut, told me. “By teasing out incentives for Aoun, America could seek to drive a wedge between him in and Hezbollah.”

In reality, neither Geagea or Aoun is likely to be elected. With both the March 14 and March 8 blocs lacking the seats in parliament required to generate a two-thirds majority vote, chances are a moderate, less polarizing, candidate will eventually win the election. But it could take some time. Then again, political vacuums and delays are pretty common in Lebanon.

In February 2014 a legitimate cabinet was formed in the country after a ten-month absence, right after the postponement of general elections for an unprecedented 18 months in May 2013. International oil companies are currently poised to bid for the right to extract an estimated $40 billion worth of oil and gas reserves located off the Lebanese coast—a potential revenue generator that could greatly help Lebanon confront the ever-growing Syrian refugee crisis and revive its economy. But the bidding process has already been delayed due to political infighting and accusations that certain groups, headed by Aoun’s son-in-law, were trying to monopolize the process. No one will be surprised if the bidding process is further delayed. Similarly, no one will be surprised if there is no president in place by the May 26 deadline.

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This guy is having way too much fun on what is probably not his smartphone. Photo via Flickr user Steve Baker

David Riley was pulled over for driving with expired license plates, in 2009, when he got strapped with the much more serious charge of attempted murder. After finding two guns in his car, police started snooping through his smartphone. Using photos and call records as evidence, Riley was connected to gang activity and suspected of playing a role in a recent drive-by shooting. No witnesses could tie him to the scene of the crime, but the evidence from his phone was enough to land him a conviction.

Riley appealed, and his case is one of two the Supreme Court is currently hearing as it mulls a ruling on the broader question of whether police should be allowed to search the contents of a phone at the time of arrest without first obtaining a warrant.

Those arguing for the legality of these searches point to a 1973 high-court decision that legitimized a search after another petty traffic violation had turned up a pack of cigarettes found to contain heroin. Though smartphones are often no bigger than a pack of cigs, they contain a lot more than it was possible to carry on one’s person when such bodily pat-downs were deemed permissible. A 16-gig iPhone can contain 16 pickup trucks' worth of paper, according to a brief filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The San Francisco–based advocacy organization argues that amount of information stored smartphones is akin to what was once stored in a house or office—and so should require the same sort of warrant needed to search those places.

The issue has got Supreme Court justices debating all sorts of things that generally befuddle people their age, like airplane mode and cloud storage. Any ruling has to both keep up with technology and outlast it. Since it doesn’t look like they’ll be outlawing warrantless phone searches outright, here are a few tips to keep the contents of your phone from indicting you if and when it gets searched by cops.

Passwords

If you don’t have a pin or password on your phone already, set one up and have the thing lock automatically when you’re not using it. A recent study by ConsumerReports found that just over a third of Americans have a lock-screen password. The police can try to pressure you to tell them your password, of course, but if you refuse to give it to them, they’ll need to get a warrant and possibly break into your phone before being able to look through every photo you’ve ever taken of your cat and all the texts your mom recently sent you.

Close Your Apps

Take the extra precaution of logging out of apps when you’re not using them, rather than leaving them on in the background. It’s not just Fitbit that’s tracking your every move. Lots of apps that have nothing to do with your location are constantly tracking it to sell to advertisers. “[M]y phone shows that I arrived at work yesterday at 8:56 AM,” Adam M. Gershowitz, a professor at William & Mary Law School, said after digging into his own iPhone, noting that it also showed where he had lunch. Beyond location information, banking and communication apps are constantly updating with your personal information. One more password might help keep police a step away from knowing everything about you instantaneously.

Keep It in the Cloud

Though it might seem like a fine point to make, courts that have weighed in on the matter seem to agree that a search of your phone shouldn’t include data stored in the netherworld of a cloud. This means cops can’t dig through all the files you have on Google Drive or DropBox just because they have your phone. “So that’s a solution, [but] it’s probably not the best solution,” says Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney with the EFF. That’s because if they have probable cause, police can still obtain a warrant or subpoena a network provider to get access to the contents of all of that stuff too.

Leave It at Home

If you have a good reason to think you might get arrested today, your safest bet to avoid a search of your smartphone is to leave it at home in the first place. “If you’re heading off to an Occupy protest, or it’s May Day and you’re going to riot in the streets or whatever, you’re better off taking a dummy phone that has no information on it,” Fakhoury says. The 20 bucks spent on a cheap flip phone may save you from a prolonged and possibly incriminating search in the event of an arrest.

Destroy the Evidence?

Deleting the contents of your phone after being arrested is a big no-no. According to Fakhoury, trying to remotely wipe your phone or otherwise remove data when you’re in the process of being booked is not a good idea. “It’s really, really legally problematic to do anything after you’ve been arrested to try to delete data on your phone or hide the fact that you have stuff on your phone,” he says. Not only may it be illegal, but it could be woefully ineffective too, since more and more police departments are dropping seized electronics into Faraday bags, which block all electrical signals and would likely prevent you from remotely wiping its contents.

Clear Data Regularly

“I’m not saying its foolproof,” Fakhoury says, and he wouldn’t offer this up as legal advice, but maintaining a regular habit of clearing your phone may serve you well if arrested. Setting a phone up to clear its contents every 30 days, for example, could leave police with less information to search at the time of an arrest. “I think the government would have a harder time to say you were trying to impede its investigation because your argument would be, ‘Nope, this is my traditional security practice. I put this in place long before I knew that I was even suspect to investigation.’ That’s less problematic.” iPhones can be set to automatically delete their contents if the incorrect PIN is entered 10 times in a row, and similar functionality is available for Android phones. Sophisticated police departments are well aware of this feature, and it’s mainly useful for protecting your info from thieves, but doing something like this to clear your phone may be another useful precaution.

There’s no clear prescription yet from the Supreme Court on whether and to what extent police can search cell phones at the time of arrest, but justices have already started debating the merits of allowing warrantless searches based on the cause of an arrest or else allowing for some aspects of a phone to be searched and not others. The decision will replace the various stances taken by individual states, with some banning such warrantless searches entirely and others allowing them for even minor traffic violations. From the extensive debates around these issues, it’s clear that police are eager to use the same technology that makes our lives easier to make their jobs easier. In the end, the limitless connection we have to our phones will make this decision from the Supreme Court—expected in June—that much more critical.

As the youngest Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, pointed out, “Most people now do carry their lives on cell phones.” Sure, it’s convenient to keep track of everything from the miles you run to the money you spend to the random photos you took while raging last night on your phone, but the personal nature of these activities means it’s a good idea to prevent your mobile device from triggering a police investigation the next time you get pulled over for speeding.

Beenish Ahmed is a freelance multimedia journalist and Eric Elder is an attorney and writer.