By Grace Gaskill

Due to the lack of transparency about weaponized drones abroad and the lack of meaningful legislation to regulate surveillance drone use within and along our borders, the Peace & Justice Center is working to pass City Council and Town Hall Resolutions on drone use. This is part of the Cost of War: Focus on Drones program that, for the past two years, has been developing and presenting educational material to people throughout Vermont.

This program acknowledges 

that there are innovative  and useful ways that drones are able to be used. The drones themselves are not the problem. It's the ways they might be used or misused that are of concern. Perhaps the most obvious examples are the extrajudicial use of weaponized drones overseas that cause more harm and are less accurate than they are often reported to be. Fortunately, that usage has been getting more attention and the number of strikes decreased in 2015. Another area of the Focus on Drones program is the use of drones for surveillance. This is of significant concern to us because surveillance technology has been used largely to fight the failed "war on drugs" and has disproportionately affected poor communities of color. [For more information on this please read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Also, as an example of surveillance technology use, Wire Tap Report 2013 from uscourts.gov cited in its summary that "87 percent of all applications for intercepts (3,115 wiretaps) in 2013, cited illegal drugs as the most serious offense under investigation."]

 

The Peace & Justice Center hopes that the passing of local resolutions and even just the continued dialogue throughout the state on a local level will prove effective in supporting a state-wide effort to regulate drone use by government entities. We are asking our members across the state to support this effort by presenting resolutions to your own city councils or select boards in an effort to protect yourselves and your neighbors from the privacy violations that drones and the lack of legislation surrounding them present. Read More

The Greater Burlington Multicultural Resource Center hosted noted civil rights activist and author Ilyasah Shabazz at this year's Martin Luther King Jr. Remembrance Ceremony in Burlington. A winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Literary Work, Shabazz is also the third daughter of civil and human rights champion Malcolm X. In an expansive speech given at the First Unitarian Universalist Society on Pearl St, Ilyasah Shabazz recounted the determination of both her mother and father in the face of adversity and hate during the civil rights movement as well as the many struggles her mother faced following the political assassination of her father.

 

While speaking on the origins