Category: Justice

Limited Disclosure of FISA Warrants to Internet Firms Approved

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Facebook and Microsoft have gotten permission to release total numbers of government requests for data, which both Facebook and Twitter have lambasted as inadequate.

It’s clear to me that this permission is intended more to conceal than reveal:

Facebook and Microsoft announced Friday that the U.S. government is allowing them to disclose U.S. national security-related requests they received, but lumped together with other law enforcement requests. Google pushed back against those conditions.

“Since this story was first reported, we’ve been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders we are required to comply with,” Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post.

“We’re pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) — which until now no company has been permitted to do.”

The social-networking company reported that for the six months ending December 31, it had received between 9,000 and 10,000 user data requests from U.S. local, state and federal governments, including national security-related requests, Ullyot said. Between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook user accounts were affected by the requests, he said.

This is quite literally the least the state security apparatus could approve, something which Google notes:

We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.

It’s clear that this is an attempt to forestall transparency, and instead create the appearance of transparency, by the intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice.

It’s good news, because it’s clear that they, and the Obama administration, is in damage control mode, which would indicate that Google and Twitter will eventually be allowed greater disclosure.

At least, that is what I hope.

When the Spys Have Lost John le Carré………

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He actually makes a point that has been missed in the whole NSA revelations controversy,

Carré gets to the heart of the matter when he notes that much of the problem is that our government is increasingly serving the state security apparatus when it should be the other way around:

In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.

Never mind the credibility and integrity of parliament and centuries of British justice: our spies come first. And remember, these aren’t criminal courts. These are civil courts where anyone attempting to obtain redress for a real or perceived injustice perpetrated against him by British or American secret agencies must have his claims heard and dealt with in secret.

This is the core of the problem.

Our intelligence agencies are driving national policy on the basis of their own self interests, and the interests of the rest of society suffer as a result.

It’s a Week for Good Court Rulings

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This one is a ruling that an unpaid internship must be an educational experience for the benefit of the intern, not an unpaid job:

Yesterday, a federal judge issued the first major ruling on the illegality of unpaid internships in recent years, challenging a rise in corporate reliance on uncompensated workers.

Judge William H. Pauley III ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures violated U.S. and New York minimum wage laws by not paying two production interns for work done on the set of the movie “Black Swan.”

Pauley ruled that the interns had essentially completed the work of paid employees – organizing filing cabinets, making photocopies, taking lunch orders, answering phones – and derived little educational benefit from the program, one of the criteria for unpaid internships under federal law. Pauley also ruled that the plaintiffs were employees and thus protected by minimum wage laws.

“I hope this sends a shockwave through employers who think, ‘If I call someone an intern, I don’t have to pay them,’” Eric Glatt, one of the plaintiffs, told ProPublica. “Secondarily, it should send a signal to colleges and universities who are rubber-stamping this flow of free labor into the marketplace.”

It should also be noted that unpaid internships serve to keep poor people out numerous professions, because they cannot afford to work for free.

SCOTUS Strikes Down Human Gene Patents

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In yet another smack down to the increasingly patent crazy United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Patent Court), the Supreme Court has ruled that the contents of the human genome are a discovery, not an invention, and so they cannot be patented:

Pronouncing what may seem like a patent truism, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that biotech researchers have to create something to get monopoly protection to study and apply the phenomenon. Because Myriad Genetics, Inc., “did not create anything,” the Court struck down its patent on isolating human genes from the bloodstream, unchanged from their natural form. Because Myriad did create a synthetic form of the genes, however, that could be eligible for a patent, the Court concluded.

The decision was a major blow to a company that believed it had a right to be the sole user and analyst of two human genes, mutations in which show a high risk, for women found to have them in their blood, of breast and ovarian cancer. But the ruling will give medical and scientific researchers, and family doctors, greater opportunity to help women patients discover their potential vulnerability to those types of cancer.

………

The scientific and legal key to the Court’s denial of patent protection to isolated, natural forms of DNA were these sentences: “It is undisputed that Myriad did not create or alter any of the genetic information encoded in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The location and order of the nucleotides existed in nature before Myriad found them. Nor did Myriad create or alter the genetic structure of DNA.”

While that was not disputed, because the legal controversy focused rather on what Myriad claimed it did to locate and then isolate the forms of genetic DNA, those agreed-upon factors were enough to convince the Court that “Myriad did not create anything.” As Justice Thomas commented further: “To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention. Groundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself satisfy the [patent law] inquiry.”

I think that one of the reasons that this was a unanimous ruling was that it was a very narrow ruling, hence the caveats about their explicitly saying nothing about synthesized genetic material.

Still, it is a good ruling, and yet another much needed bitch slap to the Patent Court.

Paul Ryan Calls the NSA Surveillance “Creepy”, and He is Right

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Look at those dead eyes, he knows creepy

Seriously, makeing Paul f%$3ing Ryan right on ANYTHING is the epitome of fail:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) expressed misgivings with the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs, suggesting on Monday that the activities “go way beyond the scope” of what the federal government has been authorized to do by laws like the Patriot Act.

 “It comes across as creepy,” the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said in an interview with the Wisconsin radio station WJRN. “I understand FISA court orders to go after some known person, and their phone records and whoever they’re communicating with. But to do a blanket dragnet nationwide, that seems to go way beyond the scope of the law that I’m familiar with called the Patriot Act.”

The fail is strong with the Obama administration.

More than any sitting president I have ever seen, Obama seems to obsess over his legacy.

Well, this is your legacy.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Hurray for the ACLU

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They have filed suit to get access to the FISA court orders authorizing the NSA drift netting of Americans’ communications data:

The ACLU and Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion today with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), seeking the release of secret court opinions that permit the government to acquire Americans’ phone records en masse. The public has a right to know the legal justification for the government’s sweeping surveillance—but, until now, those judicial opinions have remained a heavily guarded secret.

 The ACLU filed its motion on the heels of last week’s disclosure of an order, issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call details for every domestic and international phone call placed on its network during a three-month period. Since then, media reports and statements by members of the congressional intelligence committees have made clear that this order belongs to a much larger surveillance program—covering all the major telephone companies—that has been in existence for the past seven years. When pressed about the program, members of Congress as well as executive officials have emphasized that this mass acquisition of Americans’ phone records was reviewed and approved by judges on the FISC.

 ………

 The release of these FISC opinions is the first step to an informed public discussion of the surveillance powers asserted by the government. It should not be able to shield such a radical and unprecedented intrusion on Americans’ privacy behind a secret court issuing secret legal interpretations of our laws.

I have a sense that they are going to have to fight like hell to get access to the legal opinions, because the filings will almost certainly reveal the low bar presented by the administration, and the low bar accepted by the judiciary, will make a travesty of their protestations of due process.

As Juan Cole pithily notes, “We Misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the Domestic Surveillance to be Made Legal, not to End It.

The idea that you take a blatantly lawless program of nearly unlimited surveillance powers (Bush/Yoo unitary executive), and slap on some due process and retain the same nearly unlimited power, and it’s OK, because the Obama administration is a bunch of good people*, normal checks and balances do not need to apply.

It can all be done in secret, with the approval of a secret court that you have to keep away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything, and the public will never know, and it’s all good.

It’s why I call him, “the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™.”

*Now that Rahm Emanuel is afflicting the people of Chicago, anyway.

I Guess the Obama Administration Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

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In the middle of a rather busy past few days for news, the Obama administration has quietly dropped restricting women’s access to birth control:

The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls, a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama.

The government’s decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription.

The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge’s order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands.

The Justice Department appears to have concluded that it might lose its case with the appeals court and would have to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would drastically elevate the debate over the politically delicate issue for Mr. Obama.

Women’s reproductive rights groups, who had sued the government to clear the way for broader distribution of the drug, cautiously hailed the decision as a significant moment in the battle over reproductive rights but said they remained skeptical until they saw details about how the change will be put into practice.

They should worry about how it is put in practice.  Barack Obama has a long history of tepid (at best) support for reproductive rights, and his comment that he supported the blatantly political and craven restriction, because, “as the father of two daughters, the government should apply some common sense,” shows that he does not get women as independent people in control of their bodies.

Thankfully though, he does realize that further appeals will be a political loser, so he’s throwing in the towel.

What Matt Taibbi Says

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He observes that the press covering the Bradley Manning trial are missing the big point:

Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn’t have scripted the headlines any better.

In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there’s a reporter character named “Sam Miller” played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you’re doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you’re probably eating Chumpbait.

………

All of this sh%$ [Stories focused on the security issues] is disgraceful. It’s Chumpbait.

If I was working for the Pentagon’s PR department as a hired press Svengali, with my salary eating up some of the nearly five billion dollars the armed services spends annually on advertising and public relations, I would be telling my team to pump reporters over and over again with the same angle.
I would beat it into the head of every hack on this beat that the court-martial is about a troubled young man with gender identity problems, that the key issue of law here rests inside the mind of young PFC Manning, that the only important issue of fact for both a jury and the American people to decide is exactly the question in these headlines.

Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give thousands of files to Wikileaks out of a sense of justice and moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal problems, because he couldn’t keep his job, because he was a woman trapped in a man’s body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he was lonely?

You get the press and the rest of America following that bouncing ball, and the game’s over. Almost no matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the American people that this case is about mental state of a single troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has been won already.

Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the “classified” materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.

He’s right.

Read the rest.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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The leader of the Anonymous group that acquired (pinched) much of the data used to prosecute the Steubenville football player rapists, has been raided by the FBI:

In April, the FBI quietly [His description is, “12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to “Get The F%$# Down” with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed safety off, pointed directly at my head.” This is a definition of “quietly” I was previously unaware of] raided the home of the hacker known as KYAnonymous in connection with his role in the Steubenville rape case. Today he spoke out for the first time about the raid, his true identity, and his motivations for pursuing the Steubenville rapists, in an extensive interview with Mother Jones.

 “The goal of the media interviews is to get the entire nation to say ‘fuck you’ to these guys,” said KYAnonymous, whose real name is Deric Lostutter. He was referring to the federal agents who raided his home in Winchester, Kentucky, and carted off his computers and XBox.

 Lostutter may deserve more credit than anyone for turning Steubenville into a national outrage. After a 16-year-old girl was raped by two members of the Steubenville High football team last year, he obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about the incident and belittled the victim. He now admits to being the man behind the mask in a video posted by another hacker on the team’s fan page, RollRedRoll.com, where he threatened action against the players unless they apologized to the girl. (The rapists were convicted in March.)

He is facing more jail time than the rapists.

This is nuts, between the SWAT style raid, and the excessive nature of the possible sentences.

This lack of proportionality is a feature, and not a bug. Hyper-aggressive policing and sentencing has intimidation (and guilty pleas) as a goal.

Appeals Court Slaps Down Obama on Contraception Restrictions

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They sided with the lower court, and ordered the Obama administration to make emergency contraception (AKA Plan B) over the counter:

The Obama administration has in part lost its push to sustain age limits on over-the-counter sale of Plan B One-Step, commonly known as the morning-after pill.

After a lower court recently slapped down all age limits, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted the Justice Department’s request for a stay on one-pill variants of emergency contraceptives but denied it for two-pill variants, declaring that the appellants have “failed to meet the requisite standard.”

This is a very well deserved smackdown.

The Obama administration’s behavior in this mater has been craven, dishonest, and hypocritical. They have taken what should be a core value, and used it as a political football.

I Was Not Expecting This

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After she quickly signed onto the mortgage deal, I had pretty much written off California AG Kamala Harris as doing anything useful in consumer protection.

I may have been premature in my judgement:

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is on a roll. There’s been a fair bit of media coverage about abusive debt collection practices, particularly in credit cards, but at least until Harris filed a suit on Thursday against bank miscreant JP Morgan (hat tip Deontos), surprisingly little action.

 Because the amounts are usually much smaller than in mortgages, banks have incentives to play fast and loose if they think they can wring some extra blood out of the turnip of an overextended consumer. But the result often goes well beyond just improperly submitting information to the court. JP Morgan and other banks have been accused of trying to collect on debt where they have the amounts wrong, where the debt was discharged in bankruptcy, or where the consumer was never notified an action was underway. And when the debt is sold to debt collectors, the same problems with inaccuracy of information, invalidity of the debt, and abuse of the legal system multiply.

………

Harris mentions over 100,000 dubious lawsuits filed between January 2008 and April 2011 and contends that the illegal conduct extends from “pre-lawsuit correspondence” to the validation and papering up of debt sold to third parties.

 The interesting bit is how the suit is framed. The defendants are the JP Morgan holding company plus two business units, as well as an unnamed “DOES 1 through 100, inclusive” where the AG intends to obtain their names and capacities. This raises the specter that she intends not only to sue other firms (such as the law firms that were Chase’s arms and legs) but individuals at Chase and its agents. And this is where it gets fun (click to enlarge):

Each defendant for each violation. We have 100,000+ violations at Chase, with at least three entities involved, each a separate defendant. And if she can get the individuals who were supervising the robosigning operations (better yet, the C level execs ultimately responsible) and the complicit law firms, she might bankrupt some well placed people. This could be extremely entertaining.

Well, it could be entertaining for a few months, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Still, this is more than I expected from Harris when she rushed to sign onto the mortgage sellout.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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It turns out that the interrogation of  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not merely involve not notifying him of his Miranda rights.  It may also have involved ignoring specific requests for a lawyer:

Since Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was taken into custody just over a week ago, the hue and cry in the public and media discussion has centered on “Miranda” rights and to what extent the “public safety exception” thereto should come into play. That discussion has been almost uniformly wrongheaded. I will return to this shortly, but for now wish to point out something that appears to have mostly escaped notice of the media and legal commentariat – Tsarnaev repeatedly tried to invoke his right to counsel.

 Tucked in the body of this Los Angeles Times report is the startling revelation of Tsarnaev’s attempt to invoke:

A senior congressional aide said Tsarnaev had asked several times for a lawyer, but that request was ignored since he was being questioned under the public safety exemption to the Miranda rule. The exemption allows defendants to be questioned about imminent threats, such as whether other plots are in the works or other plotters are on the loose.

Assuming the accuracy of this report, the news of Tsarnaev repeatedly attempting to invoke right to counsel is critically important because now not only is the 5th Amendment right to silence in play, but so too is the right to counsel under both the 5th and 6th Amendments. While the two rights are commonly, and mistakenly, thought of as one in the same due to the conflation in the language of the Miranda warnings, they are actually somewhat distinct rights and principles. In fact, there is no explicit right to counsel set out in the Fifth at all, it is a creature of implication manufactured by the Supreme Court, while the Sixth Amendment does have an explicit right to counsel, but it putatively only attaches after charging, and is charge specific. Both are critical to consideration of the Tsarnaev case; what follows is a long, but necessary, discussion of why.

………

The primacy, and fundamental nature of the right to custodial interrogation counsel, however, was confirmed in the 1981 decision of Edwards v. Arizona, where the court held suspects have the right under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to have counsel present during custodial interrogation, as declared in Miranda, and that right cannot be invaded absent a clear and valid waiver. While it is true, under Berghuis v. Thompkins, a suspect must affirmatively invoke his right to counsel as opposed to simply standing silent, there is no authority for interrogators to simply ignore and frustrate, over an extended period, a suspect’s express request for counsel as appears to have occurred in Tsarnaev’s case.

You can be pretty sure that if the reports are accurate that Holder, and probably Obama, were aware of his request for counsel within minutes of his first request.

This is repulsive. 

These sorts of tactics are reminiscent of a police state.

So Not Surprised

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After well documented aggravated assaults against Occupy protesters, the DA has decided not to prosecute the thug cops who got caught on tape:

Two New York City police officials involved in separate incidents during the Occupy Wall Street protests won’t face criminal charges, according to a report from NBC News New York.

Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna (“Tony Baloney,” as he became known to Occupiers) and Deputy Inspector Johnny Cardona were investigated by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Bologna, who was immortalized in a hilarious Daily Show segment called The Vigilogna, was disciplined by the NYPD for pepper spraying two women who were caught behind mesh police netting during a demonstration in 2011. The department docked him 10 vacation days and reassigned him to Staten Island, but the DA has decided there’s not enough evidence to prosecute him on criminal charges.

Kaylee Dedrick — one of the pepper-sprayed women — filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD and the officer.

The other incident, involving Cardona, was a few weeks later during an altercation with Occupy protester Felix Rivera-Pitre. The NYPD said that Cardona was sprayed in the face with an unknown liquid by a group of demonstrators and that Rivera-Pitre attempted to elbow Cardona in the face. Cardona is seen in the video below lunging at Rivera-Pitre. The protester said the attack was unprovoked and that Cardona punched him in the face, and tore an earring from his ear.

What a surprise.  Cops break the law in the service of the banksters, and the prosecutors no-bill.

You can see the videos at the link.

Good

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The Boston Marathon bombing suspect has been formally arraigned in front of a Federal Judge:

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings was charged Monday with “using a weapon of mass destruction” that resulted in three deaths, according to documents filed in federal court.

The suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was charged by federal prosectors as he lay in a bed at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, officials said.

In a criminal complaint unsealed Monday in United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, Mr. Tsarnaev was charged with one count of “using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction” against persons and property within the United States resulting in death, and one count of “malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death.”

If he is convicted, the charges could carry the death penalty.

During the bedside arraignment, a magistrate judge advised Mr. Tsarnaev of his rights and the charges against him, according to court papers.

(emphasis mine)

Credit where credit is due, Eric Holder and Barack Obama decided not to try and put this guy before a military tribunal.

I’m sure that Senator Lindsey Graham is having a bitchy hissy fit right now, and that makes me smile.

It’s Official: the SCOTUS’ Resident Troll Does Not Give a Sh%$!

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There really are not a whole bunch of formal rules for a sitting Supreme Court justice.

They are famously exempt from the ethics regulations that apply to other Federal judges.

That being said, there are a number of customs that have always been scrupulously observed.

One of them is not to make statements that appear to prejudge something that might come come before the court.

Well, Fat Tony just pissed on that one, and went one further, and made public statements on a case that is currently being decided by the court:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told university students that key provisions of the Voting Rights Act had evolved from an emergency response to racial discrimination in 1965 to an “embedded” form of “racial preferment” that would likely continue indefinitely unless the court acts to end them.

Justice Scalia, speaking Monday night at the University of California Washington Center, elaborated on remarks he made in February during Supreme Court arguments over the act’s Section 5, which requires states and localities that historically discriminated against minority voters to obtain federal approval to change election procedures.

Section 5 functions as a racial entitlement because the federal government doesn’t take a similar interest in protecting the voting rights of white people from racial discrimination, Justice Scalia said.

Congress repeatedly has reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, most recently in 2006, when President George W. Bush signed a 25-year extension. At February arguments, Justice Scalia dismissed overwhelming congressional support for Section 5 as “very likely attributable to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

Seriously. They heard the arguments, and they haven’t made a decision yet, and he is making public statements on this?

Is he nuts? Is it Alzheimer’s? Or maybe he realizes that he will never be Chief Justice, and he no longer gives a sh%$.

I do not know why he did this, nor do I care, but it is clear that he is no longer (if he ever was) fit to be a Supreme Court justice.

Why Big Pharma is the Problem, not the Solution

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In their never ending quest to extort rents from the rest of us, big pharma has a new tactic, it has established bogus “safety programs” that prohibit the sales of their drugs to generic manufacturers:

For decades, pharmaceutical companies have deployed an array of tactics aimed at preventing low-cost copies of their drugs from entering the marketplace.

But federal regulators contend the latest strategy — which relies on a creative interpretation of drug safety laws — is illegal.

The Federal Trade Commission recently weighed in on a legal case over the tactic involving the drug maker Actelion, and earlier this month a federal suit was filed in another case in Florida.

“We definitely see this as a significant threat to competition,” said Markus Meier, who oversees the commission’s health care competition team.

The new approach is almost elegant in its simplicity: brand-name drug makers are refusing to sell their products to generic companies, which need to analyze them so they can create the copycat versions. Traditionally, the generic drug makers purchased samples from wholesalers. But because of safety concerns, an increasing number of drugs are sold with restrictions on who can buy them, forcing the generic manufacturers to ask the brand-name companies for samples. When they do, the brand-name firms say no.

Brand-name companies say they are protecting themselves — and patients — in case the drugs are somehow used improperly. They say no law requires one company to do business with another.

Advocates for generic drugs say the practice could limit access to the low-cost drugs, which they say have saved more than a trillion dollars over the last decade. They say the companies that have most aggressively pursued the tactic tend to be those with drugs that are nearing the end of their patent life.

The problem is that Pharma can use its monopoly rents to continue to game the political system to f%$# the rest of us.

It needs to stop.

We Tortured

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A bipartisan panel convened by the Constitution Project has concluded that torture was practiced, and was approved by our most senior leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, actually use the word torture:

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

………

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

………

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

Unfortunately, they do not take a position on prosecutions, which means that their warnings on the US returning to torture are pretty toothless.

The people who conducted, and ordered, torture should be sent to a Federal “Pound Me in the Ass” prison for a very long time.

I Hope So

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Ars Technica asks, “Will the Supreme Court end human gene patents after three decades?“

I think that it likely that they role back patent protections.

These days, they only seem to take patent cases when the United States Court of Customs and Patent Appeals goes too far with patents.  (Which it does with mind-numbing regularity):

Since the 1980s, patent lawyers have been claiming pieces of humanity’s genetic code. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted thousands of gene patents. The Federal Circuit, the court that hears all patent appeals, has consistently ruled such patents are legal.

But the judicial winds have been shifting. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the legality of gene patents. And recently, the Supreme Court has grown increasingly skeptical of the Federal Circuit’s patent-friendly jurisprudence.

Meanwhile, a growing number of researchers, health care providers, and public interest groups have raised concerns about the harms of gene patents. The American Civil Liberties Union estimates that more than 40 percent of genes are now patented. Those patents have created “patent thickets” that make it difficult for scientists to do genetic research and commercialize their results. Monopolies on genetic testing have raised prices and reduced patient options.

On Monday, the high court will hear arguments about whether to invalidate a Utah company’s patents on two genes associated with breast cancer. But the legal challenge, spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation, could have much broader implications. A decision could invalidate thousands of patents and free medical researchers and clinicians to practice medicine without interference from the patent system.

It’s very clear that a gene is a discovery, not an invention, but the patent court believes that you can patent a rainy day (I mean this literally: They approved a patent on weather derivatives in Bilski v. Kappos, which was later overturned by the Supreme Court. This court also allowed for patenting of tax deductions)

It is Called Fraud

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When lenders lose original loan documentation, and their response is to fabricate documents that have nothing to do with reality, it is not a business plan, it is criminal fraud:

It is hard to credit, but lenders routinely mislay the card and loan agreements their customers originally sign. But even more astonishingly, if there has been a dispute later on, the lenders have used computer software to ‘ recreate’ the original documents, sometimes with less than accurate results.

Being able to recreate agreements in this way helps banks pursue borrowers over debts, but there is growing evidence that when lenders ‘recreate’ contracts they often do not stick to the original terms.

The result is that borrowers who are often already in financial trouble are left in worse difficulties.

Document ‘recreation’ is in the spotlight after a court case last month involving a number of borrowers with credit cards issued by HBOS, Barclaycard, MBNA and HSBC. Part of the case, heard in the High Court in Manchester, was to assess the circumstances in which banks could ‘ reconstitute’ lost agreements.

Judge David Waksman concluded that in future, lenders would have to explain why they did not have the original agreements. He said they would have to prove that the recreated document was a true copy of the original contract.

This is in the UK, not the US, that this is happening in right now.

There should be arrests and criminal charges, but all they are getting is a slap on the wrist from the Office of Fair Trading guidelines.

The UK is like us in this way, and it is a pity.