Category: Crimes

Internet Firm Going Public, but Not in a Good Way

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It appears that, Ashley Madison the dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouses, has gone public ……… prematurely, and much like their clients, prematurely is not a word that you want to hear:

Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million users of the hookup service, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”

The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as The Impact Team — includes sensitive internal data stolen from Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men.

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team’s Web links were no longer responding.

………

In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.

According to the hackers, although the “full delete” feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — aren’t actually scrubbed.

“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”

On NPR, a representative of ALM said that they were using DMCA take-down notices to keep the information off the web, but that makes no sense at all, because a data is not copyrightable, though there may be some trade secret protections that apply.

In either case, there was a bit of schadenfreude for me when I heard about this.

I can understand how some people might look for someone to cheat with, you see this in the personal ads of the alternative press regularly, but making a whole site for this is just really creepy.

H/T Yves Smith.

Not Enough Bullets

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I just heard that the head of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein is now a billionaire:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. made hundreds of partners rich when it went public in 1999. Its performance since then has turned Lloyd Blankfein into a billionaire.

The chief executive officer of the Wall Street bank for the past nine years, Blankfein has seen his net worth surge to about $1.1 billion as the firm’s shares quadrupled since the initial public offering, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. As the largest individual owner of Goldman Sachs stock, he has a stake in the company worth almost $500 million. Real estate and an investment portfolio seeded by cash bonuses and distributions from the bank’s private-equity funds add more than $600 million.

All that money is because he was bailed out by the taxpayer.

He should have gone to jail like Depression era NYSE boss Richard Whitney, who was jailed, and after his release, worked on a farm.

This guy should be making license plates for the next few years, and thereafter, he should be banned from the securities industry for life.

These guys should frog marched down Wall Street in handcuffs.

We should make a parade of this, so that for the next few years, the bankster “Whiz Kids” will think twice before adding “innovations” that serve no purpose beyond lining their own pockets.

Deep Thought

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Dylann Storm Roof is a 21 Year Old High School Dropout, he was born on April 3, 1994.

Zimbabwe replaced the apartheid Rhodesia in 1980.

In South Africa, the first elections with universal suffrage were held on April 27, 1994, ending the last vestiges of apartheid, and making the ANC the governing party in South Africa.

How does a 9th grade dropout know about this?

And yet there is the photo of Dylann Storm Roof, a 9th grade dropout who was less than a month old when Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa, wearing the flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia on his jacket.

My guess is that he would not be able to find Rhodesia on a map. 

Hell, it’s likely that he couldn’t find Europe on a map.

But he knows about apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia well enough to have their flags on his jacket in a sort of perverted “lost cause” homage to their systems of racism and brutality.

People taught him this.  Like minded people.

Lone gunman, my ass.

In South Carolina, the Judges Have Sympathy for the Families of Terrorists ……… If They are White

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At a bail bond hearing for Dylann Roof (no bail for murder, but $1 million for weapons charges), the families of the victims gave statements, as is common in South Carolina, the judge, who (unsurprisingly) has a history of racially insensitive comments, took pains to remind everyone that the family that raised a racist terrorists are victims in all this too:

………

The judge began the hearing with a statement of sympathy for those slain — as well as for Roof’s family.

“We have victims, nine of them, but we also have victims on the other side,” Gosnell said. “There are victims on the other side, this young man’s family. No one would ever have thrown them into the whirlwind they have been thrown into.”

In a statement later, the Roof family extended its “deepest sympathies and condolences” to the families of the victims. “Words cannot express our shock, grief, and disbelief as to what happened that night. We are devastated and saddened by what occurred,” they said, asking for privacy.

As Michael Daly pithily observed:

………

Charleston County Magistrate James B. Gosnell began Friday’s bond hearing for mass-murderer Dylann Roof by declaring that the killer’s family members were victims as well.

At least he did not repeat an opinion that he offered in another proceeding a dozen years ago.

“There are four kinds of people in this world—black people, white people, red necks, and n—rs,” Gosnell advised a black defendant in a November 6, 2003 bond reduction hearing.

The comment led to a judicial disciplinary proceeding and a 2005 determination by the state Supreme Court. The court’s written finding reports Gosnell’s lame defense.

………

Ah ……… South Carolina.

Rather unsurprisingly, the accused is completely unrepentant over his acts:

………

More evidence also emerged that Roof, a high school dropout with a criminal record that began this year, may have been motivated by racial hatred. Law enforcement officials said he had confessed, and that during the confession, expressed strong anti-black views. Officials characterized him as unrepentant and unashamed.

Roof told officers that he wanted word of his actions to spread, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Ah ……… South Carolina.

And the cherry on this sh%$ sandwich is the fact that while that state and US flags were flown at half staff, the Confederate flag flying nearby has been kept at full staff, because the law drafted by South Carolina bigots forbids flying the flag at half staff:

After Dylann Storm Roof allegedly shot up an AME church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine people, two flags were lowered more than 100 miles away in Columbia, the state’s capital. Atop the South Carolina State House, the U.S. flag and South Carolina’s palmetto flag flew at half-staff as the manhunt for Roof ended with his capture in North Carolina and prayer vigils were planned. The show of respect would have been appropriate even if one of the state legislature’s own — state senator Clementa C. Pinckney — had not died in the attack.

But a third flag within view of the State House — a Confederate one — flew as high and as proud as ever, flapping in the breeze on a sunny day.

This looked bad.

But, it seemed, no one — particularly not South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) — could do anything about it. This was a matter of law.

“In South Carolina, the governor does not have legal authority to alter the flag,” a Haley spokesman told ABC on Thursday. “Only the General Assembly can do that.”

………

The law that moved the flag was quite detailed: The flag could not fly from the capitol dome, but had to appear at a memorial near the dome and could appear in legislators’ offices. Legislators even specified the type of flag, its placement, and the dimensions of its display.

It ain’t all bad though, a Republican legislator in South Carolina has mooted a bill to take down that symbol of treason and racism:

In the wake of the shooting in Charleston that took the lives of nine African Americans in a historically black church by a shooter with apparent white supremist sympathies, a State Representative from South Carolina announced plans Friday to introduce legislation that would remove the Confederate flag from the state capital.

In an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Norman “Doug” Brannon said the motive behind the planned bill wasn’t politics, but instead the loss of a friend. Specifically, Brannon spoke of Democratic State Senator Clementa Pinckney, a pastor at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the victims of the fatal shooting.

“I had a friend die Wednesday night for no reason other than he was a black man,” Brannon, a Republican who is white, told Hayes.

 Small steps, I guess.

I expect Brannon to be turfed out in the next election, and it is likely that he thinks that this is the case as well.

Domestic Terrorism in Charleston, South Carolina

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Those patches are the Apartheid era Rhodesian and South African Flags, a staple among white supremacists

Last night, a white supremacist opened fire at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, killing people including the pastor:

The Facebook profile picture chosen by Dylann Storm Roof in May is thick with symbolism. It shows Mr. Roof, a scowling young white man, wearing a black jacket adorned with two flags — one from apartheid-era South Africa, the other from white-ruled Rhodesia — that have been adopted as emblems by modern-day white supremacists.

Mr. Roof, 21, was arrested Thursday in North Carolina after law enforcement officers identified him as the suspect in the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday night. The shooting left nine dead, including the pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.

Officials said the shooting was being investigated as a hate crime. Although it was not clear if Mr. Roof had actually joined any organized white supremacist groups, people who knew him said that in recent months, a young man they described as extremely shy had begun to harbor racist views and make increasingly violent statements about attacking black people.

Joseph Meek, 20, a childhood friend who reconnected with Mr. Roof this year, said Mr. Roof had changed, spewing racist ideas and talking about wanting “to hurt a whole bunch of people.”

………

Now Mr. Meek and his girlfriend, Lindsey Fry, both of whom are white, say they feel guilt about the shooting. “I feel we could have done something and prevented this whole thing,” Ms. Fry said.

Asked why Mr. Roof picked that particular church, Mr. Meek replied, “Because it was a black church.”

Another friend, Dalton Tyler, said that Mr. Roof had begun talking about wanting “to start a civil war.” But like Mr. Meek, he did not always take Mr. Roof seriously.

Mr. Tyler said on another occasion, the two were driving to a strip club by the zoo when Mr. Roof saw a black woman, used a racist word and said, “I’ll shoot your ass.”

“I was just like, ‘You’re stupid,’ ” Mr. Tyler said. “He was a racist; but I don’t judge people.”

Fox, of course, is claiming that it’s a war on Christianity, but the gunman’s own words put the lie to that:

………

They said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman suddenly stood and pulled a gun, and Ms. Washington’s cousin Tywanza Sanders, 26, known as the peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of violence.

“You don’t have to do this,” he told the gunman, Ms. Washington recounted.

The gunman replied, “Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”

The gunman took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, Ms. Washington said. Mr. Sanders told the man to point the gun at him instead, she said, but the man said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to shoot all of you.”

………

In a photo on his Facebook page, a glowering Mr. Roof wears symbols of two former white supremacist governments — the flags of apartheid-era South Africa, and of Rhodesia, the nation that became Zimbabwe. Other photos, posted by a Facebook friend of his and widely circulated online, show Mr. Roof leaning against a car with a license plate that reads, Confederate States of America.

BTW, not only the is characterization of this as accurate, the characterization of this as terrorism is literally in accordance with the oldest anti-terrorism laws in the United States:

………

Making the choice to call this a terrorist act is a way of recognizing the long history of anti-black terrorism in America. For most of American history, the word “terrorism” has referred to acts committed by white people against black people.

In fact, anti-black terrorism perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan was the reason for the first federal anti-terrorism law the US ever passed.

Making the choice to call this a terrorist act is a way of recognizing the long history of anti-black terrorism in America. For most of American history, the word “terrorism” has referred to acts committed by white people against black people.

In fact, anti-black terrorism perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan was the reason for the first federal anti-terrorism law the US ever passed. From a report in the Journal of Negro History based on testimony about the Klan:

The Reverend A. W. Cummings, a Northerner who had been president of the Spartanburg Female College, compiled a list of 227 persons whom he claimed were abused by masked men in that country between the October election of 1870 and the following July 15. He asserted that some two hundred of this number had been beaten, seven wounded by gun fire and four killed. Squire P. Quinn Camp, a white office-holder, claimed that between September 2 and July 15 in the township of Limestone no less than 118 had been abused by the Klan in some fashion, of which four were shot, sixty-seven whipped and six had their ears cropped…So extensive was the fear engendered that whole sections of the rural Negro population slept in the woods for several months during the winter.

The federal government, led by President Ulysses S. Grant, decided it needed to step in to protect order in the South — and keep the political system from being overwhelmed by terrorist intimidation. So it passed a series of laws, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made it a federal offense to conspire to threaten elected officials and voters to deprive them of equal protection.

The Grant administration enforced the Klan Act aggressively, using federal militias and charging Klan members in federal court. The law is generally given credit for destroying the Klan in its first iteration as a national terrorist group (it resurfaced during the 20th century).

In the 21st century, terrorism is typically associated with Muslim extremism; when white people commit mass shootings, their ideology isn’t as often brought to the fore. But because of the history of terrorism in the South, for many, labeling the Charleston church shooting terrorism is a way to recognize that black lives matter.

This is terrorism, and it should be prosecuted as such, and it should be called as such.

He intentionally went to a black church to kill black people. He assassinated a state senator. He intended to terrorize the black community.

Prosecute this as terrorism.

As an aside, in a bit or journalistic irony, 1day before the shootings, the New York Times reported on the growing threat of right wing terrorism:

This month, the headlines were about a Muslim man in Boston who was accused of threatening police officers with a knife. Last month, two Muslims attacked an anti-Islamic conference in Garland, Tex. The month before, a Muslim man was charged with plotting to drive a truck bomb onto a military installation in Kansas. If you keep up with the news, you know that a small but steady stream of American Muslims, radicalized by overseas extremists, are engaging in violence here in the United States.

But headlines can mislead. The main terrorist threat in the United States is not from violent Muslim extremists, but from right-wing extremists. Just ask the police.

In a survey we conducted with the Police Executive Research Forum last year of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism.

The FBI recognized this over 6 years ago, but withdrew a report about the problem under pressure from right wing Republicans.

We need to treat right wing militias, the Klan, Operation Rescue, and their ilk as terrorist organizations, and to subject them to the full scrutiny of the law.

Your Not so Liberal Media

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It turns out that the revelations about Denny Hastert raping a child has been told to many media sources for years, but they chose to ignore credible reports:

As an enthusiastic young teacher and wrestling coach at the high school here, former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert reliably had one student at his side, former classmates say. Stephen Reinboldt, a smart, slender, likable student who rose to become class president, was the wrestling team’s equipment manager. For four years, he arrived at practice early and stayed late, traveled with Mr. Hastert to overnight tournaments, even when only one wrestler was competing, and went for long rides in the coach’s sports car, sometimes driving it.

On Friday, Mr. Reinboldt’s younger sister, Jolene Burdge, said her brother, who died in 1995, was also sexually abused by Mr. Hastert, but hid the fact for years because he thought no one would believe him.

………

In the interview on ABC, Ms. Burdge called Mr. Hastert, who taught and coached at Yorkville high school from 1966 until 1981, a father figure to her brother. She said she learned of the years of abuse when her brother revealed to her that he was gay eight years after he left high school.

“I asked him, ‘When was your first same-sex experience?’ ” she said. “He looked at me and said, ‘It was with Dennis Hastert.’ I was stunned.”

She continued, “And he just turned around and kind of looked at me and said, ‘Who is ever going to believe me?’ ”

………

She also said she confronted Mr. Hastert when he unexpectedly came to her brother’s funeral, telling him, “I want you to know that your secret didn’t die here with my brother.”

Ms. Burdge said she tried for years to get news organizations, including ABC News, and advocacy groups to pursue the story. She began in 2006 after it was revealed that Mr. Hastert had covered up claims that Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, had sent sexually explicit emails to congressional pages.

She said she had given up on exposing Mr. Hastert. Then, two weeks ago, just before Mr. Hastert was indicted, she was contacted by the F.B.I.

………

In interviews, former students say Mr. Hastert was popular, partly because his classes often consisted of little more than watching movies, and because his teams kept winning. He also seemed to have a new Porsche almost every year, each a different color, and would let certain boys drive it — not just around the parking lot, but on long rides.

“Some guys got to drive the Porsche and some didn’t,” said Jeff Nix, who was a student at the time. “We always wondered what you had to do to get to drive the Porche. Steve got to drive the Porsche.”

(emphasis mine)

There appears to have been noothing even remotely close to what could be called journalistic due diligence in response to Ms. Burges reports.

It appears that her brother was right about being ignored.

But until Hastert had his, “They got Al Capone on tax evasion,” moment, no one wanted to hear this.

H/t Atrios.

This is So Unsurprising

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So, the other shoe has dropped on the former speaker, and we learn that Denny Hastert sexually abused a student:

J. Dennis Hastert stumbled into political power amid a Republican sex scandal in 1998 that unexpectedly elevated the husky Illinoisan to a position just two heartbeats away from the presidency.

He became the longest-serving Republican House speaker in U.S. history, but remained so proud of his days as a small-town high school teacher and wrestling coach that he relished the Capitol Hill nickname “Coach.”

But this week those once-idolized small-town roots caught up with the 73-year-old Hastert, who in recent years has worked behind the scenes as a Washington power broker.
Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert indicted

Federal prosecutors have announced bank-related charges against former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

On Friday, federal law enforcement officials said Hastert had paid $1.7 million over the last four years to conceal sexual abuse against a former male student he knew during his days as a teacher in Yorkville, Ill., where Hastert worked until 1981.

A top federal law enforcement official, who would not be identified speaking about the ongoing federal case, said investigators also spoke with a second man who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the former student said. The second person was not being paid by Hastert, the official said.

The disclosures followed Thursday’s federal indictment against Hastert on charges of lying to the FBI about the reasons for large cash withdrawals he is accused of making to buy the man’s silence.

Currently, the age of consent in Illinois 17, but it is 18 if the person is in a position of authority, for example, being a teacher and coach. (Link)

This law appears to me to be something relatively recent, the whole “position of authority” thing really started in the 1990s, and I know that the age of consent in the 1920s was 16, so it is entirely likely that this did not constitute statutory rape.

Still, it is remarkable that the best Republicans could find for Speaker after Gingrich and Livingston had been driven from office at least in part for adultery.

I’m hoping that Larry Flynt offers another bounty on wandering Republican penises running for President..

Francis Fixing What John Paul II Broke

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Over 30 years ago, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated at the orders of right wing politician Roberto D’Aubuisson.

It is almost certain that this was done with the active agreement of elements within the Reagan administration, and the passive acquiescence of the Holy See in Rome.

John Paul II was determined to extirpate what saw as left wing elements in the Church, and making noise about Romero’s murder was inconvenient when viewed through the lens of this agenda, (on edit) and so the silence on the assassination.

Well, Pope Francis just Beatified Archbishop Romero:

The Salvadorean archbishop Óscar Romero was beatified on Saturday, the final step before sainthood, 35 years after he was shot dead at the altar by a rightwing death squad for denouncing the oppression of the poor by the military dictatorship.

Roman Catholics from around the world mixed with former Marxist rebels from El Salvador’s brutal civil war as more than 250,000 people gathered in the capital to celebrate the country priest who confronted a US-backed government.

Cardinal Angelo Amato, sent by Pope Francis, officiated the ceremony that followed decades of debate over whether Romero had rejected Church doctrine by embracing radical, leftwing rebels.  [Actually the record shows that he was no fan of the rebels either, he opposed violence on both sides]

………

Born in 1917 in a mountain town near Honduras, Romero apprenticed as a carpenter as a boy before entering the church, where he rose through the ranks, appearing to be a quiet conservative.

But soon after being appointed archbishop in 1977, he became a staunch critic of the military government after it began killing, kidnapping and arresting priests who had been organising peasants and supporting workers’ rights.

His sermons, often broadcast on radio, riled rightwing extremists. But he ignored multiple death threats, remaining defiant up to his murder while giving mass in the chapel of a San Salvador hospital.

“In the name of this suffering people, whose cries to heaven become more deafening each day, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression,” he said in a speech to government soldiers the day before his death.

This, along with the sainthood for John XXIII, show a clean break for this Pontiff with his reactionary predecessors, though his longest term impact might be on cleaning up more mundane corruption in the finances of the Papal bureaucracy and the Vatican bank.

Time will tell.

Well, it was Only a Matter of Time Until we Killed a White Guy………

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And now the Obama administration has been forced to admit that they killed two white hostages in drone strikes:

An American aid worker and another man held hostage by Al Qaeda were killed in an American drone strike in Pakistan in January, government officials disclosed on Thursday, underscoring the perils of a largely invisible, long-distance war waged through video screens, joysticks and sometimes incomplete intelligence.

 Intending to wipe out a compound linked to the terrorist group, the Central Intelligence Agency authorized the attack with no idea that the hostages were being held there despite hundreds of hours of surveillance, the officials said. Even afterward, they said, the agency did not realize at first that it had killed an American it had long sought to rescue, with the wrenching news becoming clear over time.

 The violent death of an American at the hands of his own government proved a searing moment in a drone war that has come to define the nation’s battle with Al Qaeda, especially since President Obama took office. Visibly upset, Mr. Obama came to the White House briefing room shortly after his staff issued a written statement announcing the deaths to make a rare personal apology.

But no one gave a sh%$ when a 16 year old American kid, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed by drones “accidentally”, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

His dad was a jihadi, so it was all cool.

One of the important thing to note is that the White House had no idea who was in the al-Qaeda compound:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that the January deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto might prompt the tightening of targeting standards ahead of lethal drone and other counter-terrorism strikes. A White House review is under way.

“In the aftermath of a situation like this, it raises legitimate questions about whether additional changes need to be made to these protocols,” Earnest said.

………

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the accidental killings revealed on Thursday raise “questions about the reliability and the depth of the intelligence that the government is relying on to conduct drone strikes”.

“In neither of these two cases did the government actually know beforehand who it was killing. It does raise questions about how much the government knows – or how little the government knows – before it pulls the trigger,” Jaffer said.

“Perhaps that doesn’t in itself suggest that the strikes were unlawful, but it certainly raises some questions.”

It appears that the CIA thought that something might be wrong when there were two extra bodies found at the strike sites.

Oops!

I will note two things, said by the inimitable Charlie Pierce:

Am I being unpatriotic if I mention that, at this point, I wouldn’t trust the CIA to give me directions to the mall?

There has been a lot of “collateral damage” (Dead innocents) from drone strikes, but it is clear that the CIA is FAR more reckless than the Pentagon over this, though it has improved from the excesses of Petraeus’ disastrous stint as DCIA.

His second point is more important:

I’ve always thought of the drone war in terms of the melon vendor and the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. There’s an al Qaeda operative buying a melon from a vendor. Meanwhile, a guy with a goat cart comes up the other side of the road. Suddenly, here comes death from above. The terrorist is dead. So is the melon vendor. So is the guy in the goat cart on the other side of the road. They’re all blown into equally tiny bits. How do we think the families of the melon vendor and the guy with the goat cart are going to take this? We create a desire for retribution with which our grandchildren may have to cope. And we may never know the names of the melon dealer or the guy with the goat cart, the way we now know the names of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto. We may never know the name of the melon dealer until his grandchild blows up an airplane. And none of that should be surprising because that’s also what happens when you make war, any kind of war, in a place.

The drone campaign is clearly excessive, and as a result, we are destabilizing the region, and creating a generation of people who want to make war on America.

Anyone who thinks that our drone campaign makes us safer is insane.

New Jersey Lawmaker Proposes Upping Penalties for Swatting ……… Is Promptly Swatted

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This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

No, I am not kidding here.

It just happened to State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty:

A New Jersey lawmaker who is pushing legislation to combat the trend of swatting — a prank in which anonymous callers phone-in false emergency reports to provoke a large police response — was a victim of the practice himself this weekend.

 State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty (D-Gloucester) said he was watching the Masters golf tournament and doing his taxes at home on Saturday afternoon in Washington Township when he got a call from the police.

 “The person on the phone says they were calling from police dispatch and wanted to know if everything is OK at my house,” Moriarty said. “I said ‘Yeah, why? They said ‘we have a report of a shooting at your home.'”

 The dispatcher then asked Moriarty to describe what he was wearing and step outside.

 “I look out my front door. There’s six cop cars. They have the street closed off. They have helmets, flak jackets and rifles,” Moriarty said. “I walk out and walk towards them. They motion me to keep walking towards them. The minute I walked out the door, I was still on the phone with the dispatch person, I said ‘I think I’ve just been swatted.’ It just then occurred to me what happened.”

 ………

 Swatting has its roots in online video game culture. Callers anonymously phone in emergencies to authorities to send them to an unsuspecting gamer’s house — often while the gamer is streaming video of himself playing online.

………

 Moriarty’s bill (A3877), introduced in November, would increase penalties for “false public alarm,” upgrading the crime from third degree to second degree, punishable by five to ten year in prison and a fine of up to $150,000.

 “I’m thinking someone read about the bill and some sick, evil person thought it would be funny to send the police to my house on one of these false reports,” Moriarty said.

 Moriarty is the former mayor of Washington Township and said he knew most of the police at the scene, including the chief. It turned out the department had dealt with at least one similar call in the previous 24 hours, Moriarty said.

 “If this is a practical joke, it’s not funny because someone is going to get seriously hurt or perhaps killed in one of these engagements that can go very, very wrong,” Moriarty said. “It’s never fun to walk out your front door and have shotguns aimed at your house.”

 Moriarty said it could have gone a lot worse because while doing his taxes he “wasn’t in a good mood to begin with.”

 “If the phone wasn’t ringing next to me, I might not have answered it. … And had I not, they probably would have beat down the front door,” he said.

I will note that what Moriarty has proposed is a half measure.

The real problem here is that local law enforcement has become increasingly militarized, and so they tend to respond to this excessively.

Additionally, if “false alarm” gets upgraded, you can be sure that prosecutors will go Aaron Swartz on defendants with this law, in an attempt to extort guilty pleas.

Any time you ad a tool like this to a DA’s arsenal, you can be sure that it will be abused in ways that were never intended.

Things are Getting Very Interesting in New York State Politics

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As you may recall, the Speaker of the New York Assembly, Sheldon “Shelly” Silver was indicted for corruption, and it looks like the prosecutors have a pretty good case. (See here)

Basically, Sheldon Silver has been one of the “3 Guys in a Room,” (Governor, the State Assembly speaker and the State Senate majority leader) who have made pretty much all the decisions in Albany for a very long time, over 20 years, and it is pretty clear that he knows where the bodies are buried.

What’s more, it appears that the prosecutor, US Attorney Preet Bharara, is upping the pressure, specifically by indicting his son-in-law for financial fraud:

A son-in-law of the former State Assembly speaker was arrested on Monday and accused of defrauding investors out of $7 million, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court.

The defendant, Marcello Trebitsch, 37, of Brooklyn, told investors that he would use their money to trade in securities through his investment fund, and promised them double-digit returns with very low risk, according to a statement from the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Trebitsch’s wife, Michelle Trebitsch, is the daughter of Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, the former speaker who has been indicted on corruption charges.

Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mr. Trebitsch, and he appeared before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan. He was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of securities fraud.

The complaint said that Ms. Trebitsch, a certified public accountant, was a co-owner and managing partner of the investment fund, Allese Capital. She has not been charged.

They don’t need to charge her. (Yet)

The US Attorney can seize Silver’s daughter’s family assets under RICO, and that would have the effect of impoverishing his daughter and his grandchildren.

Also note that Michelle Trebitsch was not just the “Co-Owner” of the firm, she is a CPA, and she did the books, so you can be sure that Shelly is under a lot of pressure to roll over right now.

If Silver rolls on someone to protect himself, his daughter, and his grandchildren, it has to be someone big, i.e. one of the two other “Gusy in a room”, the Senate Majority Leader or the Governor.

We are now getting reports that evidence against Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos is being presented to a federal grand jury.

What’s more, it appears that Skelos’ son is being targeted as well.

So, it appears that the Feds are trying to turn Skelos into a cooperating witness as well.

This would imply that they are after Cuomo as well, and that he may be their ultimate goal.

This is what makes the reports that Andrew Cuomo made a tidy $180 for every copy of his memoir that was sold, interesting:

In the first week after its release in October, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s memoir, “All Things Possible,” sold almost impossibly poorly. According to Nielsen Bookscan, fewer than 1,000 people picked up a copy that week. And as of last month, the grand total of all sales was at 3,008. (Plus 13 audiobooks.)

But before you go complaining that being a writer is unrewarding work, know that Cuomo’s time and effort was worth it — financially, at least.

According to his tax release, made public on Wednesday, Cuomo reported earning $377,000 in income on the book in 2014. That’s apparently on top of the $188,333 he got as an advance that was reported in his 2013 filing, meaning that Cuomo seems to have made north of $565,000 for his book though last month.

Or: Nearly $188 per hardcover book.

While I have no doubt that reporter Philip Bump did his homework on the above story, I have a feeling that someone pointed him in the general direction.

I strongly suspect that whoever it was, they had a close relationship to US Attorney Preet Bharara.

If Cuomo gets indicted, it would amuse me no end.

Someone Finally Found a Way to Beat the Lottery

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Las Vegas makes billions in its casinos with the house have a house edge of 3% to 5%.

State lotteries typically have a house edge of 40% to 50%, so it is a sucker bet, and, as I have told Sharon*, only a fool plays the lottery.†

Well my hats off to Eddie Ray Tipton, who has devised a winning strategy for the lottery:


Prosecutors say they have evidence indicating the former head of computer security for a state lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to him buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot, according to a media report.

Eddie Raymond Tipton, 51, may have inserted a thumbdrive into a highly locked-down computer that’s supposed to generate the random numbers used to determine lottery winners, The Des Moines Register reported, citing court documents filed by prosecutors. At the time, Tipton was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, and he was later videotaped purchasing a Hot Lotto ticket that went on to fetch the winning $14.3 million payout.

In court documents filed last week, prosecutors said there is evidence to support the theory Tipton used his privileged position inside the lottery association to enter a locked room that housed the random number generating computers and infect them with software that allowed him to control the winning numbers. The room was enclosed in glass, could only be entered by two people at a time, and was monitored by a video camera. To prevent outside attacks, the computers aren’t connected to the Internet. Prosecutors said Tipton entered the so-called draw room on November 20, 2010, ostensibly to change the time on the computers. The cameras on that date recorded only one second per minute rather than running continuously like normal.

“Four of the five individuals who have access to control the camera’s settings will testify they did not change the cameras’ recording instructions,” prosecutors wrote. “The fifth person is defendant. It is a reasonable deduction to infer that defendant tampered with the camera equipment to have an opportunity to insert a thumbdrive into the RNG tower without detection.”

Tipton has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his attorney has said the theory about computer tampering isn’t “factually viable.”

On December 23, a little more than a month after Tipton allegedly tampered with the computers, a man at a convenience store was video taped buying a Hot Lotto ticket that later won the $14.3 million payout. Authorities identified the man as Tipton, but as an employee of the association that administered the lottery, he was barred by law from buying lotto tickets or claiming lottery prizes. The winning ticket went unclaimed for almost a year. Hours before it was scheduled to expire, a company incorporated in Belize tried to claim the prize through a New York attorney. In January, Tipton was charged with two counts of fraud. The allegations that he used his insider access to tamper with the RNG were first made in the court documents filed last week.

Seriously, absent a TARDIS, this is about the only way to beat the lottery.

Like I said, it is a sucker bet.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†To paraphrase Bret Maverick, I do not approve of gambling, I prefer poker.

Republican Family Values………

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New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte’s state director (her 2nd most senior staffer) just got busted for prostitution and has resigned:

A senior aide to New Hampshire US Senator Kelly Ayotte resigned his position after he was arrested and charged with soliciting a prostitute, Ayotte’s office announced late Saturday night.

 David Wihby, 61, served for the past year as Ayotte’s state director, the number two staffer behind her chief of staff. Wihby is also an elected member of the Manchester (N.H.) school board. He is a former longtime Manchester city alderman and the former deputy commissioner and interim commissioner of the state Department of Labor.

 Wihby was arrested Friday evening in Nashua on a misdemeanor charge for solicitation of prostitution, Ayotte’s office confirmed.

This isn’t the auto-asphyxia death of a Jerry Falwell confidant in 2 wet suits with a dildo up his butt, but  I notice a pattern here.

The Scandal is that this is Normal for Prosecutors and Courts

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In one of the more prominent cyber crime trials of the year, it has been revealed that
some of the government agents who infiltrated the Silk Road underground site stole from the Site:

After a jury in February found Ross Ulbricht guilty of narcotics and money laundering conspiracies among other charges, in conjunction with his role as the mastermind behind the Silk Road online drug marketplace, even most long-time Ulbricht supporters looked at the preponderance of evidence against him and assumed the case was resoundingly closed. Yesterday, the door to that conviction may have cracked open a tiny bit.

 The US Department of Justice has charged US Secret Service (USSS) special agent Shaun Bridges and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Carl Mark Force IV with money laundering and wire fraud in conjunction with their roles leading the Silk Road investigation. (Force was also charged with theft of government property). The pair of federal officers stand accused of diverting $800,000 in bitcoin from Silk Road to their own personal wallet accounts.

 [Aside: Is it just me or aren’t Bridges and Force the two most perfect Hollywood cop names you could ever think of?]

 Even crazier, the two are accused of posing as hitmen on the darknet website and subsequently ensnaring Ulbricht in a murder-for-hire plot against one of his Silk Road employees, whose death they later faked while collecting $80,000 for their services. Later Bridges and Force allegedly extorted 770 bitcoins – then worth approximately $100,000 – and had sought even more, by threatening to reveal his role in the employee’s disappearance.

 ………

 Judging by a tweet from Ublricht counsel Joshua Dratel yesterday, this is not the first time the defense had heard of these accusations:

Major Silk Road govt corruption scandal revelation today that we’ve had to sit on for four months and were not permitted to use at trial.
— Joshua Dratel (@JDratel) March 30, 2015


 The question is, why was this information inadmissible at trial and what, if any impact, did that have on Ulbricht’s conviction? If the defense can prove to an appellate judge that the defense was wrongly handicapped by this decision – a fact that may be more likely given the new information brought to light by the DOJ indictment – then it could be enough to merit a new trial. In such an event, it’s certainly conceivable that some of the evidence collected by Bridges and Force could be thrown out as a result. A report by Wired suggests that the most crucial evidence related to Ulbricht’s conviction was collected by the New York division of the FBI and the Chicago Department of Homeland Security, meaning it still may be enough to put him away.

It turns out that these revelations will figure prominently in an appeal of his conviction:

………

Late yesterday, Ulbricht’s attorney Joshua Dratel posted a statement to Tumblr answering many of these questions and clarifying that the defense is in fact seeking a new trial. Dratel also notes that the defense was aware of the ongoing investigation against US Secret Service (USSS) special agent Shaun Bridges and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Carl Mark Force IV during the Ulbricht trial, but was denied the ability to enter this information into evidence.

According to Dratel, the defense has already filed a post-trial motion seeking a new trial, to which the government’s response is due by this Friday, April 3 – with a subsequent defense response scheduled to be filed April 15. Dratel adds that should these motions fail to obtain a new trial, Ulbricht will appeal the existing verdict, citing the Bridges-Force indictment among its arguments.

………

Below is the full statement posted to Dratel’s Tumblr. (Note: Dratel’s original post was entirely devoid of paragraphing. Pando has added the below paragraphing to aid in readability. The content remains otherwise unchanged.)

The government’s considerable efforts at keeping this monumental scandal from being aired at Ross Ulbricht’s trial is itself scandalous. In addition to keeping any information about the investigation from the defense for nearly nine months, then revealing it only five weeks prior to trial, and then moving to keep sealed and secret the general underlying information so that Mr. Ulbricht could not use it in his defense at trial, and then stymying the defense at every turn during trial when the defense tried to introduce favorable evidence, the government had also refused to agree to the defense’s request to adjourn the trial until after the indictment was returned and made public – a modest adjournment of a couple of months, since it was apparent that the investigation was nearing a conclusion.

Throughout Mr. Ulbricht’s trial the government repeatedly used the secret nature of the grand jury investigation as an excuse to preclude valuable defense evidence that was not only produced in discovery, independent of the investigation of Mr. Force, but also which was only at best tenuously related to that investigation. In that manner the government deprived the jury of essential facts, and Mr. Ulbricht of due process. In addition, the government failed to disclose previously much of what is in the Complaint, including that two federal law enforcement agents involved in the Silk Road investigation were corrupt.

It is clear from this Complaint that fundamentally the government’s investigation of Mr. Ulbricht lacked any integrity, and was wholly and fatally compromised from the inside. Also, it is clear that Mr. Force and others within the government obtained access to the administrative platforms of the Silk Road site, where they were able to commandeer accounts and had the capacity to change PIN numbers and other aspects of the site – all without the government’s knowledge of what precisely they did with that access.

In light of the information provided in the Complaint, it is now apparent to all just how relevant some of the issues raised by the defense at trial were, including the payment by Dread Pirate Roberts to a law enforcement agent for information about the investigation, the ramping up of the investigation of Mr. Ulbricht in mid-2013, soon after that paid information began flowing, and the creation of certain evidence at trial, such as the 2013 journal that conveniently begins – again – in Spring 2013, after the corruption alleged in this Complaint ripened. As the evidence at trial – particularly from the government’s law enforcement witnesses – demonstrated, the Baltimore investigation and agents were inextricably involved in the evolution of the case and the evidence, as well as with alerting Mark Karpeles that he was under investigation, and meeting with his lawyers and exchanging information.

At Mr. Ulbricht’s trial, knowing full well the corruption alleged in the Complaint made public today, the government still aggressively precluded much of that evidence, and kept it from the jury (and had other similar evidence stricken from the record). Consequently, the government improperly used the ongoing grand jury process in San Francisco as both a sword and a shield to deny Mr. Ulbricht access to and use of important evidence, and a fair trial. In addition, the government not only precluded use of the information at trial, even if it emanated from independent sources, such as discovery, but the government also prevented the defense from conducting any independent investigation, including subpoenaing Mr. Force to testify at trial. The defense also filed numerous discovery requests, to which the government refused to respond.

Regarding the government’s claim that the information was not relevant, the government notified the defense of the investigation of Mr. Force December 1, 2014. Two days later, the government provided its trial exhibits. Among those exhibits were several that referred to Mr. Force in his various internet personas, including “Nob” (his authorized undercover alias), as well as his rogue identities on Silk Road, including alpacino, french maid, and Death From Above (all of which were providing, or attempting to provide, Dread Pirate Roberts with confidential information about the government’s investigation of Silk Road). Thus, according to the government, even after it disclosed the fact of the investigation, it believed Mr. Force was indeed quite relevant. However, in the course of the ensuing litigation regarding whether the defense would be allowed to use the information about the investigation of Mr. Force at Mr. Ulbricht’s trial, by the time trial began the government either eliminated those exhibits or redacted them. During trial, the government successfully objected to the defense’s attempts to introduce the unredacted documents the government had initially designated as its exhibits.

While I will not claim that it is normal for investigators to be this larcenous, this sort of behavior by the prosecutors is normal.

It’s clear to my non-lawyer mind that the fact that a significant portion of the investigation of Ross Ulbricht (allegedly the Dread Pirate Roberts) was being conducted by corrupt agents is a material fact for the jury to evaluate, but the prosecutors managed to wave the secrecy magic wand, and to hide this information from the jury.

This is why you should never talk to a prosecutor of cop without a lawyer in the room.

About F%$#ing Time………

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Swedish prosecutors have agreed to interrogate Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy:

In an abrupt reversal, the Swedish prosecutor leading the investigation against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has finally agreed to question him inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange, who has been holed up in the building for nearly three years, has been accused of but not formally charged with committing sex crimes in Sweden.

In an English-language statement Friday, the Swedish Prosecution Authority wrote that Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny “has made a request to Julian Assange’s legal representatives whether Assange would consent to being interviewed in London and have his DNA taken via a swab.”

Why the sudden change of heart?


“The reason the prosecutor now decides to request permission to interview Julian Assange in London is chiefly that a number of the crimes Julian Assange is suspected of will be subject to statute of limitation in August 2015 i.e. in less than six months’ time,” the statement says.

Previously, the Swedish Prosecution Authority was on record as saying that “the prosecutor’s assessment is that a request for legal assistance involving the questioning of Julian Assange in London would not take the case forward in a significant manner.”

It’s clear that a part of this is the fact that the prosecutor is facing the statute of limitations, but I think that another part is that, with Edward Snowden’s revelations, it’s pretty clear that the various attempts by the Obama administration to intimidate potential whistle blowers has clearly failed, so the Swedes are no longer being pressured by the US.

My guess is that the charges will expire without the prosecutor filing anything.

More Evidence on Lead and Crime

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Remember the red barns?

Do you know why they were red?

Because iron oxide (rust) was the only pigment readily available in many rural areas.

It was mixed with locally produced linseed oil, and then applied.

In the late 1800s, this changed with the building of the railroads, and changes in in both transportation and paints, allowed the use of white paint.

It allowed other pigments to be distributed, and the red barn became the white barn through the use of white lead (Lead oxide, these days white pigment is most commonly titanium dioxide) which appears to have created a surge in murders in rural areas:

Here’s a fascinating little anecdote about lead and crime from a recent paper by Rick Nevin. It shouldn’t be taken as proof of anything, but it’s certainly an intriguing little historical tidbit about the association between lead exposure and increases in crime rates.

Here’s the background. Homicides increased dramatically between 1900-11, but most of that appears to be the result of increased rural homicides, not urban homicides. If lead exposure is part of the reason, it would mean that rural areas were exposed to increasing levels of lead about 20 years earlier, around 1880 or so. But why? Nevin suggests that the answer to this question starts with another question: Why are barns red?

Professional painters in the 1800s prepared house paint by mixing linseed oil with white lead paste. About 90% of Americans lived in rural areas in the mid-1800s, and subsistence farmers could make linseed (flaxseed) oil, but few had access to white lead, so they mixed linseed oil with red rust to kill fungi that trapped moisture and increased wood decay. Red barns are still a tradition in most USA farming regions but white barns are the norm along the path of the old National Road. Why?

….The reason the red barn tradition never took root along that path is likely because the National Road made freight, including white lead, accessible to nearby farmers. USA lead output was a relatively stable 1000 to 2000 tons per year from 1801-1825, but lead output was 15,000 to 30,000 tons per year from the mid-1830s through the mid-1860s after the completion of the National Road.

….The first American patent for “ready-mixed” paint was filed in 1867; railroads built almost 120,000 track miles from 1850 to 1900; and Sears Roebuck and other mail-order catalogs combined volume buying, railroad transport, and rural free parcel post delivery to provide economical rural access to a wide variety of products in the 1890s.

The murder arrest rate in large cities was more than seven times the national homicide rate from 1900-1904 because lead paint in the 1870s was available in large cities but unavailable in most rural areas. The early-1900s convergence in rural and urban murder rates was presaged by a late-1800s convergence in rural and urban lead paint exposure.

In short, lead paint simply wasn’t available in most rural areas before the 1880s except in very narrow corridors with good transportation. You can see this in the prevalence of white barns along the National Road. Then, starting in the 1880s, revolutions in both rail transport and mail order distribution made economical lead paint available almost everywhere—including rural areas. A couple of decades later, homicide rates had skyrocketed in rural areas and had nearly caught up to urban murder rates.

(Emphasis original)

I live in a white barn area, Maryland.  In fact, there is a lot of a lot of painted white brick here too.

It would explain why different police and law enforcement policies all achieved similar success in crime reduction in the 1990s.

Lead became a mainstream additive to commercial gasoline in the mid 1930s, and 25 years later we saw a spike in violent crime.

Lead became widely used in rural communities in paint in the 1870s, and 25 years later, we saw a spike in violent crime.

Lead was reduced in gasoline in the early 1970s, and banned in paint, and 25 years later, we see a drop in violent crime across the country, and different tactics used by law enforcement agencies appear to have (at best) minimal effects on this.

I think that the ink spilled over things like broken windows policing and community policing are more an attempt to take credit where none is due than anything else.

Another Day, Another Uber Related Assault

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In this case, the Uber driver was off duty, and poached a fare from an on duty driver, and raped her:

When your business involves connecting real people in the offline world, there’s a lot more opportunity for things to get messy than in an online-only business. It’s a painful lesson that sharing (or on-demand) economy companies like Uber, AirBnB, and others have been forced to learn repeatedly in recent months and years.

Thanks to the sheer size, ubiquity, and frequency of usage of its platform, Uber has emerged as the poster boy for such atoms-versus-bits reality checks. In what is becoming a recurring theme for the company, yet another of its driver-partners has been accused of sexual assault.

This time, a Los Angeles driver, who was off duty at the time of the incident, is accused of picking up a female passenger in her 20s who was waiting for another of the company’s drivers in LA’s Mar Vista neighborhood late on Saturday night and assaulting her before dropping her off at her destination.

“He said, ‘I’m actually not working as an Uber driver right now, but I am an Uber driver,’” LAPD Det. Kimberly Porter tells ABC7. “She got in the front seat. He then took her to a location where he did sexually assault her.”

Police have identified the suspect, who they describe as cooperating, but have not yet made any arrests. An Uber spokesperson said in a statement, “The driver in question has been removed from the platform while we gather the facts.”

There remain far more questions than answers when it comes to Uber’s culpability in this situation. For example, did the suspect have a history of this type of behavior or other criminal activity that should have precluded him from passing Uber’s (often-suspect) background checks? If so, then the company has some explaining to do, but if not, then there’s seemingly little the company could have done to prevent such an attack. Also, did the visibility of passengers on the company’s in-app map play a role in the suspect targeting the alleged victim, or was this an unfortunate coincidence of a roving driver offering a waiting pedestrian a ride? We’ve seen the company’s maps used in the past by police and auto-thieves to locate and target drivers; could it be that in this case they were used to target a waiting passenger? It’s too early to say, but the possibility is troubling.

Uber’s business model is not about improving the cab hailing experience.

It is about creating a platform, and structuring the business such that all of the liability and risk fall on someone else.

It’s a fundamentally abusive model. It abuses the drivers, and it abuses the passengers, and it is meticulously structured so that the millionaire founders of the firm can wash their hands of any and a liability.

For conventional cab companies, at the very least, they know if they employ criminals, their insurance will become unaffordable, but for Uber, it’s all on the induhividual drivers.

Nice racket there.

I Want to Move to Canada, and Not for the Healthcare This Time

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Canada has just passed a law making illegal for software to update without the specific consent of the user. It’s an anti spyware/malware law:

Installing computer programs without consent became a civil offence punishable by fines in Canada this week.

Under the new regulations that form part of Canada’s anti-spam legislation, it is now illegal for a website to automatically install software on a visitor’s computer or for an app on your phone to be updated without first obtaining express consent from the owner or another authorised party. The updated rules are designed to protect Canadians from the “most damaging and deceptive forms of spam and online threats” without interfering with legitimate business.

The revised rules are targeting nuisances and worse such as adware on PCs and rogue apps on smartphones. False or misleading representations of products or services are also prohibited under the new regulations.

I will note that that this also has the effect of making Apple’s automatic, “Break your competitor’s software,” illegal.

I would like to see a similar law in the US.

While I am at it, I would also like to see an uninstaller as being mandatory under law.

The number of times that I’ve had to tediously uninstall a buggy update that installed itself (Adobe Acrobat comes to mind) pisses me off.

While I am at it, I want a pony.

Quote of the Day

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Lee Hamilton (former Congressman and former 911 commission co-chairman) calls for a complete end of torture, driven by improved Congressional oversight.

He believes that the reputational and social damage is such that it cannot be justified.

Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism, while lauding Hamilton’s call for and end to torture, notes that the fact that the former congressman is suggesting weak tea when specifically eschews prosecutions:

Kudos, but who would be stupid enough to believe us if we said we had? There is only one way to do that, and that’s to put the torturers on trial, and convict them.

He’s right.

Until we prosecute the worst of the torturers, and pull the security clearances of the rest, the senior staff of our state security apparatus will be populated by those torturers, any promise of better behavior is simply not credible.

So, Now I’m Thanking Richard Nixon and Pierre Elliot Trudeau ……… Odd History

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It turns out that the surge, and subsequent drop, in crime in Canada also appears to be an artifact of lead exposure:

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

It is almost certain that lead exposure is a significant factor the rise and fall of crime world wide, and given the wide variations in techniques used by law enforcement, it is likely the most significant factor in the rise and fall of crime worldwide.

Given the clearly racist assumptions of broken windows policing, and the even more clearly racist subtext of America’s fascination with incarceration, it’s not surprising that the law enforcement establishment has studiously avoided looking at lead’s effects on crime.

Racially biased law enforcement philosophies, particularly when it generates more money for law enforcement and incarceration is a feature of, and not a bug in, our society.