"News of their arrest quickly began spreading on social media, and the Ferguson police chief was alerted to their arrests by a reporter for the Los Angeles Times."
There are plenty of good people trying to manage a bunch of people who are out of control. People like to find fault with those trying to manage a war zone in the heat of battle rather than focusing on those who are causing the problem in the first place.
The local police seem pretty incompetent here: Bringing in tanks, aiming assault rifles at unarmed protesters, and an injudicious use of tear gas and rubber bullets.
They're treating civilian protesters like enemy soldiers.
The article never claims that the documents are from Snowden. There is likely one or more new whistleblowers leaking documents post-Snowden: this series of articles from The Intercept, the stories in the German press last month, and Jacob Applebaum's TAO Catalog presentation last year.
If stories like this are new to anyone reading this, there is a great book worth checking out. "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces" by Radley Balko, ISBN-13: 9781610392112
I came here to post a link to that exact book - the one thing I will say is that the book is basically divided into two sections. The first section is a history of the militarization of US police that is fascinating, well-researched, and full of 50 years of context that I was totally unaware of. The book is worth reading for that alone.
The second section, really the last 1/3rd of the book, is a series of essays and articles, more op-ed than factual history. This is where Radley Balko's libertarian streak comes out full-bore, and it moves from semi-scholarly work to libertarian polemic. It's fine, of course, it's his book and he's entitled to write what he likes, but there's a lot of anti-government rhetoric and anti-social policy language in there that I found offputting.
In addition, throughout the book, the police are described in aggressive terms, they're always "threatening" or "menacing" or "assaulting" - while the people being arrested are "cowering", "hiding", "pleading".
It seems like it would be hard to know exactly in many cases what everyone was doing, and instead Balko is putting his emotional slant on what was happening. Then, in the second section of the book, he freely admits that he started tracking and writing about when dogs were killed during SWAT raids because it got a much more impassioned response from readers.
None of this removes the value of the book, which as I said was excellent. But I think I would have appreciated a little more nuance in some of the tone.
Is there a suitable material for a lightweight "roof" you could put over your property that would block aerial photography but still allow sunlight and rain to penetrate?
One could even make it shielded against electromagnetic frequencies. No more drones hacking your wifi!
Is there a suitable material for a lightweight "roof" you could put over your property
Yes, well-placed trees, plants, and some lattice material.
I once visited the roof of the Limn building on Townsend in San Francisco. It turns out there was a lush garden, nice eating areas, and an Airstream trailer, all on the roof. Absolutely none of it was visible from the ground, and you'd be lucky to make out much of anything from overhead.
Camouflage netting is perhaps the only surefire way to do this, although I'm sure that will attract far more attention than doing nothing at all. Something that would work kind of OK would be to create a large radiometric difference in your property like having a dark black roof and making your lawn as reflective as possible (white cement or gravel, swimming pool). That way when the imagery is processed in an automated fashion it will render your area badly. It still would be possible to go back to the original images and enhance the area manually but can be quite a chore.
Build your property (partially) underground? Like this http://www.trendir.com/house-design/grass-roofed-home-built-... or similar. You'd need to deal with waste heat somehow for the infrared signature not to look suspicious. And ground-penetrating RADAR would pick you up as well, I expect.
