Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

This is a Classic Case of Regulatory Capture

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After the public outrage over the NYPD choking a man to death for allegedly selling single cigarettes, the Civilian Complaint Review Board wants to have fewer investigations:

With New York in an uproar over the death of Eric Garner after police put him in a chokehold, the new chairman of the group that handles public grievances about the NYPD floated the idea yesterday that his agency should stop listening to people who complain about police stops.

“I’m not sure stop-and-frisk is still appropriate for this agency,” Richard Emery, the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board said at his first board meeting. “So many other people are working on it.”
NYCLU Associate Legal Director Chris Dunn—who last month accused the board, then in its sixth month without a chairman, of being “on life support”—strongly disagreed.

“There’s no way this agency can walk away from stop-and-frisk,” Dunn said. “There are more interactions around stop-and-frisk than any other interaction in the police department….I’m just telling you: When you as the incoming chair of the CCRB say something like ‘We should get out of the business of stop-and-frisk,’ that is sending the wrong signal.

This isn’t the first time the CCRB has appeared to try to back away from stop-and-frisk issues. In May, Dunn confronted board members about a leaked memo that seemed to suggest that frisks conducted when cops issue a summons can’t be subject to review by the board.

Any civilian police review board must have not just an adversarial role with the police department, but it must have an adversarial mindset, because no organization can be trusted to police itself.

If the Police do not hate a civilian review board, then that civilian review board is simply not doing its job.

The sentiments expressed by Richard Emery are literally those of a petty bureaucrat in a police state.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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You know all those terrorism plots that the FBI uncovered?

A study has revealed that the FBI manufactured most of the terror plots that it broke up:

Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, a new report says.

Some of the controversial “sting” operations “were proposed or led by informants”, bordering on entrapment by law enforcement. Yet the courtroom obstacles to proving entrapment are significant, one of the reasons the stings persist.

The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.

“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.

Which ones weren’t? Those ones:

The four high-profile domestic plots it found free of government involvement were the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Najibullah Zazi’s 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway; the attempted Times Square carbombing of 2010; and the 2002 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport’s El Al counter.

So, while the FBI has been finding random idiots (read the case files, they are really stupid, while missing all of of the plots that actually went through to fruition.

But they did catch one potential terrorist that they did not sponsor ……… They just missed the other ¾ of them.

It’s an adequate batting average, for a pitcher, I guess.

You know, maybe the FBI should stop manufacturing terrorist plots, and start looking at real terror plots.

And while they are at it, how about going after the f%$#ing banksters?  They are still defrauding the rest of us.

And while we are at it, how about a pony.

I’m not gonna get that either.

Why Not to Trust the Good Inteition of the US State Security Apparatus, Part Gajillion

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It turns out tha the FBI monitored Nelson Mandela as a potential communist threat in the 1990s:

The FBI monitored the interactions between Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress and leftwing groups in the US through the 1980s and 1990s as part of its ongoing investigations into what the bureau deemed to be the communist threat to US national security, new documents reveal.

The batch of 36 pages of previously classified documents, extracted from the FBI under freedom of information laws, show that federal agents continued to monitor Mandela’s and the ANC’s connections within the US even after the legendary South African leader was released from prison in February 1990. The bureau monitored meetings between Mandela and other world leaders, tracked the movements of senior ANC officials as they travelled across the US, and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA (CP-USA).

The declassified documents are marked “secret” under recognised codes for domestic and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. They include a record kept by federal agents of a meeting in Namibia just a month after Mandela’s release from jail between him and the then president of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovsek. The record notes that a transcript of the proceedings was sent in Serbo-Croat to the FBI’s Cleveland office.

Another document records the FBI’s decision in June 1990, four months after Mandela was set free, to send an informant from Philadelphia to New York to snoop on a meeting that the bureau thought was about to take place between Mandela and Puerto Rican independence activists. “Information contained in this communication is extremely singular in nature and must not be disseminated outside the FBI or existing terrorism task forces,” it stated.

Note that this is after Mandela was released, but pretty much, by force of habit, the FBI continued to stalk him, because ……… Communism!1!1!

We cannot trust any of these guys to control themselves.  That’s why we need aggressive civilian authority and oversight.

Pusillanimous Police, Prosecutors, Punt Penis Pix

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Well, it looks like DA and the Cops in Manassas have backed down on their demand to a photograph of a teens genitalia in a sexting case:

Manassas City police said Thursday they would not serve a search warrant seeking to take photos of a 17-year-old boy charged with “sexting” an explicit video to his 15-year-old girlfriend earlier this year.

The teen is facing felony counts of manufacturing and distributing child pornography. As the case was headed to trial last week, Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors said in juvenile court that they had obtained a warrant to photograph the teen’s erect penis, in order to compare with the video he allegedly sent in January, according to the teen’s lawyers. When defense lawyer Jessica Harbeson Foster asked how they would obtain a photo of her client while aroused, she said police told her they would take him to a hospital and inject him with a drug to force an erection.

On Thursday, Prince William authorities decided to drop that plan. Lt. Brian Larkin of the Manassas City police said, “We are not going to pursue it.” He said the police planned to allow the search warrant, obtained last week, to expire. He would not say why the decision had been made to abandon the warrant or discuss the reasons for the search.

They would still be going for this, except for the fact that it got ink.

Sunlight is a disinfectant to this sort of vile behavior, and here’s hoping that this destroys a few careers in law enforcement.

In This Case, it is Appropriate to Use Porcine Metaphors to Refer to Law Enforcement

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You know the story, girl sexts boy, boy sexts girl back, and the police and district attorney demand a photo of boys erect penis:

A Manassas City teenager accused of “sexting” a video to his girlfriend is now facing a search warrant in which Manassas City police and Prince William County prosecutors want to take a photo of his erect penis, possibly forcing the teen to become erect by taking him to a hospital and giving him an injection, the teen’s lawyers said. A Prince William County judge allowed the 17-year-old to leave the area without the warrant being served or the pictures being taken — yet.

 The teen is facing two felony charges, for possession of child pornography and manufacturing child pornography, which could lead not only to incarceration until he’s 21, but inclusion on the state sex offender data base for, possibly, the rest of his life. David Culver of NBC Washington first reported the story and interviewed the teen’s guardian, his aunt, who was shocked at the lengths Prince William authorities were willing to go to make a sexting case in juvenile court.

 ………

 Foster said the case began when the teen’s 15-year-old girlfriend sent photos of herself to the 17-year-old, who in turn sent her the video in question. The girl has not been charged, and her mother filed a complaint about the boy’s video, Foster said. The male teen was served with petitions from juvenile court in early February, and not arrested, but when the case went to trial in juvenile court in June, Foster said prosecutors forgot to certify that the teen was a juvenile. The case was dismissed, but police immediately obtained new charges and also a search warrant for his home. Police also arrested the teen and took him to juvenile jail, where Foster said they took photos of the teen’s genitals against his will.

 The case was set for trial on July 1, where Foster said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Claiborne Richardson told her that her client must either plead guilty or police would obtain another search warrant “for pictures of his erect penis,” for comparison to the evidence from the teen’s cell phone. Foster asked how that would be accomplished and was told that “we just take him down to the hospital, give him a shot and then take the pictures that we need.”

(emphasis mine)

This is beyond contemptible.

This is a profound abuse of prosecutorial discretion.  In fact, I would argue that this is a credible threat of torture, as well as conspiracy to produce child pornography.

This is profoundly and deeply unethical, and the local bar should be apprised of this behavior.

If there were justice in the world, that evil ratf%$# attorney would be flipping burgers for a living.

Another Reason to Shut Down the Fusion Centers

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Because they treated a consumer boycott for “Black Friday” 2011 as a terrorist event:

The documents reveal that Fusion Centers and their personnel even conflate their anti-terrorism mission with a need for intelligence gathering on a possible consumer boycott during the holiday season. There are multiple documents from across the country referencing concerns about negative impacts on retail sales.

The Executive Director of the Intelligence Fusion Division, also the Joint Terrorism Task Force Director, for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department circulated a 30-page report tracking the Occupy Movement in towns and cities across the country created by the trade association the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).

He directed that the recipients of the document, who included top staff at the Washington, D.C. Fusion Center, “develop a one page product that we can send to our District Commanders to make them aware of the potential threat.”

(emphasis original)

Can you say out of control totalitarian organization?

Good, I knew that you could.

New York City Racial Profiling Police Unit Shuttered

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Yes, Bill de Blasio being the Mayor of New York City makes a difference:

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the controversial surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

To many Muslims, the squad, known as the Demographics Unit, was a sign that the police viewed their every action with suspicion. The police mapped communities inside and outside the city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch-counter conversations.

The program was evil and un-American, and played right into the hands of people who might actually be intending to do harm to the United States, because it alienated people from our law enforcement.

I am Happy to be Wrong

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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have entered the United States, and they were not detained:

Despite fear over detention by the authorities, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — the first reporters to meet with Edward Snowden and receive access to his trove of leaked NSA documents — reentered the U.S. without trouble.

Both journalists feared detention or at the very least questioning on returning to U.S. soil. The Justice Department had refused to give any information about whether Greenwald and Poitras might be subject to a grand jury investigation. Furthermore, last year Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow airport for nine hours, his electronic devices confiscated, under a U.K. counterterror act. In this age, when journalism is all too often aligned with terrorism, Greenwald and Poitras were understandably concerned. Indeed, Poitras has been questioned for hours on end at U.S. airports in the past over her journalistic work pre-dating the Snowden leaks.

But, as Greenwald told reporters Friday, he “expected that they wouldn’t be that incredibly stupid and self-destructive to try and do something that in the eyes of the world would be viewed as incredibly authoritarian. … That would forever undermine their ability to criticize other governments for imprisoning journalists and for having a constitutional fight over the First Amendment that successive administrations have wanted to avoid.”

And indeed, the U.S. authorities were not so stupid, and Poitras and Greenwald entered the U.S. safely. That the two journalists feared detention at all remains grimly reflective of what whistle-blower attorney Jesselyn Raddack calls the current “war on information.” Lest we forget, Barrett Brown and Chelsea Manning sit behind bars; Edward Snowden faces hefty charges under the Espionage Act; AP journalists’ phone logs were surveilled by the DOJ; Fox News correspondent James Rosen was once named by the FBI as a possible “co-conspirator” in a crime for the journalistic act of obtaining leaked information. The NSA revelations, shedding light on a vast and unbounded corporate-government surveillance nexus, have unquestionably been in the public interest. The whistle-blower behind them should not fear persecution, nor should the journalists reporting the story. But where Poitras and Greenwald can point to the First Amendment (or whatever meek vestiges of it that the U.S. cares to recognize), Snowden has no such recourse and no such protection.

I would anticipate that they are being intensely watched, and that all their communications are monitored, but the fact there has been no official harassment yet is heartening.

Then again, the fact that I, and many others, expected official misconduct on the part of the US state security apparatus speaks volumes about the state of our society.

What Do the FBI, and Joe DiMaggio Have in Common?

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An unprecedented streak.

The FBI has now found that all the shootings since 1993, all 150 151, investigated by the FBI, have found the FBI blameless.

Hoocoodanode:

Ending an interrogation in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing with a dead body and a host of new questions was not the sort of thing the FBI wanted.

But on May 22, an FBI agent shot Ibragim Todashev – a 27-year old former mixed-martial arts fighter and associate of one of the suspected bombers – seven times, killing him. The agent had just completed a lengthy interrogation of Todashev in his Orlando apartment, part of an inquiry into the already-dead bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One of the bullets appears to have entered through the top of Todashev’s head.

The FBI’s story, doled out through anonymous leaks, changed several times in the weeks that followed. First, Todashev, who had voluntarily endured hours of questioning, lunged at the FBI agent with a knife, or even a sword. Then it was a length of pipe. Other accounts had him knocking over a table. At least one account held that Todashev was unarmed. The version that currently stands is that Todashev wielded a metal pole – or, perhaps, a broomstick.

Little is known about that mysterious pole-slash-broomstick: its heft, its dimensions, its use. Yet it is likely to be a major difference between vindication and damnation of the FBI’s handling of the case. A Florida prosecutor examining the case is expected to publish the results of an long-awaited investigation into Todashev’s death on Tuesday morning.

Unknowns accumulate in the Todashev shooting. Two Florida detectives reportedly aided the FBI interrogation, and their role during the shooting remains unclear. Florida’s autopsy report, available since July, was barred from release by the FBI. The bureau’s months of silence over the case have compounded the questions it faces.

But the FBI has already reached its conclusion. An internal FBI inquiry vindicated the agent, whose name is not public, months ago. That’s typical for the FBI – between 1993 and 2011, its agents fatally shot 70 people and wounded another 80, and the bureau found no major improprieties in any of those cases, according to records obtained by the New York Times last year.

………

The Florida prosecutor conducting that independent investigation, Jeffrey Ashton, batted away reports on Friday that he has already exonerated the special agent who shot Todashev. He still may, and the bureau has to be hoping he will. The worst outcome for the bureau in the Todashev shooting would be for Ashton to contradict its findings and effectively indict its integrity.

So, the FBI says that everything in hunky dory, and the subtext of this article is that they are leaning on the local prosecutor who is investigating locally.

Just lovely.

That’s Mighty White of You

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After much consideration, the CIA has admitted that it is supposed to follow the law:

The CIA has confirmed that it is obliged to follow a federal law barring the collection of financial information and hacking into government data networks.

 But neither the agency nor its Senate overseers will say what, if any, current, recent or desired activities the law prohibits the CIA from performing – particularly since a section of the law explicitly carves out an exception for “lawfully authorized” intelligence activities.

 The murky episode, arising from a public Senate hearing on intelligence last week, illustrates what observers call the frustrations inherent in getting even basic information about secret agencies into public view, a difficulty recently to the fore over whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and its surveillance partners.

 Last Wednesday, in a brief exchange at the hearing, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, asked CIA director John Brennan if the agency is subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a three-decade-old law intended to protect computer systems, like those of financial and government networks, from unauthorized access.

 Brennan demurred, citing the need to check on the legal complexities posed by Wyden’s question, and pledged to give the senator an answer within a week.

 The answer, agency spokesman Dean Boyd told the Guardian, is: “Yes, the statute applies to CIA.”

That was about a month ago.

Well, today, we discovered what this was all about.

It turns out that the CIA was spying on the Congressional investigation of ……… wait for it ……… the CIA:

The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.

 The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.

 The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

 ………

 The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers – in possible violation of an agreement against doing so – that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other documents, according to people with knowledge.

 Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, a panel member, apparently was referring to the monitoring when he asked CIA Director John Brennan at a Jan. 29 hearing if provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “apply to the CIA? Seems to me that’s a yes or no answer.”

 Brennan replied that he’d have to get back to Wyden after looking into “what the act actually calls for and it’s applicability to CIA’s authorities.”

 The law makes it a criminal act for someone to intentionally access a computer without authorization or to go beyond what they’re allowed to access.

You know, even if they did not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, this was a conspiracy to obstruct a Congressional investigation, so go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

What’s more, it appears that Barack Obama knew of, and thus at least tacitly approved the CIA spying on Congress:

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.

 ………

Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.

 “As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

 Independent observers were unaware of a precedent for the CIA spying on the congressional committees established in the 1970s to check abuses by the intelligence agencies.

 “In the worst case, it would be a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s potentially very serious.”

(emphasis mine)

Not even Richard Nixon had the stones to use government agencies spy on the Congressional committees that were investigate him.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor ever.™

John Adams is Spinning in His Grave

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The Senate has defeated the appointment of Debo Adegbile’s appointment as head of the DoJ’s Civil Rights division because he defended a black man accused of murdering a cop:

Senate Democrats on Wednesday rejected President Obama’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in an embarrassing rebuke of the president on the choice of a key legal adviser and one that left senior White House officials “furious” with members of their own party.

The nominee, Debo P. Adegbile, was litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund when it represented Mumia Abu-Jamal on an appeal of his death sentence for killing a Philadelphia police officer decades ago. He could not overcome a campaign by Republicans, conservative activists and law enforcement organizations still infuriated by the murder of the officer, Daniel Faulkner.

But it was the votes of seven Democratic senators to reject Mr. Adegbile that doomed the nomination despite what White House officials described as a sustained closed-door effort by Mr. Obama and his top aides to save the nomination. The president personally appealed to Senate Democrats at a recent caucus meeting and made several calls to Democratic senators in the last week, officials said. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, continued making calls Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

I’m not blaming the Republicans here. They would oppose the appointment of Pope Francis to head the Office of Faith Based outreach.

Additionally, I can understand why they oppose Adegbile’s record of strong protection of civil rights, particularly voting rights.

After all, if there is a defining characteristic of the Republican party in the ‘Teens, it is that they want to stop n***ers from voting.

I do blame the 7 Democrats, who seem to find that the idea of a black man getting competent counsel is somehow a bad thing, and I do blame the various elements in law enforcement who seem to think that being a good lawyer should be a crime.

This is is evil, runs counter to the constitution, and hundreds of years of British jurisprudence before that.

It is a sacred duty for the defendant to have competent legal counsel. That is why John Adams defended the British soldiers who shot the demonstrators at the Boston Massacre.

If you have a problem with this, you should not be a lawyer, a legislator, or a cop.

Anyone involved in this effort, and the cowards who folded to it, are unAmerican, and need to have no further role in our public discourse.

Somewhere Out There, J. Edgar Hoover is Laughing

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Last night, Rachel Maddow had an update on the suspicious shooting of unarmed Ibragim Todashev in his own apartment while questioning him about his relationship with alleged Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The FBI is still sitting on their report.

They are still forbidding the coroner from releasing his report.

They have detained, deported, or otherwise excluded everyone who knew Todashev, as Maddow details below.

The FBI is clearly engaged in an aggressive coverup, and the only thing that I can think of that they would feel necessary to cover up was that the Tsarnaev brothers were a part of a botched anti-terrorism sting that went very, very bad.

I guess that I am wearing my tinfoil hat today.

The War on Drugs Goes from Dishonesty to Parody in Annapolis

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The Annapolis police chief testified about the 37 people who died of marijuana overdoses on the first day of legalization in Colorado.

There is a small problem with this testimony, it never happened.  In fact the source of the story was the satirical website the Daily Current:

Testifying against bills proposed in Maryland to legalize and decriminalize marijuana, Annapolis Police Chief Michael Pristoop cited a hoax story that claimed 37 people died the first day marijuana was legalized in Colorado.

“The first day of legalization, that’s when Colorado experienced 37 deaths that day from overdose on marijuana,” Pristoop said in testimony at Tuesday’s Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing. “I remember the first day it was decriminalized there were 37 deaths.”

But Sen. Jamie Raskin, D-Montgomery, who has proposed a bill that would legalize, regulate and tax the drug, immediately fact-checked Pristoop.

“Unless you have some other source for this, I’m afraid I’ve got to spoil the party here,” Raskin said. “Your assertion that 37 people died of a marijuana overdose in Colorado was a hoax on the DailyCurrant and the Comedy Central website.”

Our drug penal/enforcement industry is a waste of resources, and people like Michael Pristoop should find honest productive work.

Why Do I See the NSA Behind This Sh%$?

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The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed a way to speed up encrypted connections that works by removing the encryption for part of the journey. Rather unsurprisingly it looks like a way allow the NSA, FBI, etc. to crawl up your ass into your encrypted data:

A draft put forward at the Internet Engineering Task Force has drawn the ire of prominent privacy activist Lauren Weinstein as “one of the most alarming Internet proposals” he’s ever seen.

The document that’s upset Weinstein is this one, out of the HTTPBis Working Group and posted as an Internet Draft on 14 February 2014.

 Entitled Explicit Trusted Proxy in HTTP/2.0, the standard proposes a mechanism by which an upstream provider – say an ISP – could get permission to snoop on decrypt user traffic for the purposes of caching.

 Using proxies to cache traffic in the service provider network is unremarkable and uncontroversial: it’s been normal practice for a long time. The end user benefit is better performance; the service provider benefit is a reduction in traffic over their upstream transit network links.

 From that point of view, encryption is a pain in the neck: the service provider can’t see into the encrypted traffic, which reduces the effectiveness of its caching strategy.

 The Internet Draft has this to say:

“To distinguish between an HTTP2 connection meant to transport “https” URIs resources and an HTTP2 connection meant to transport “http” URIs resource, the draft proposes to ‘register a new value in the Application Layer Protocol negotiation (ALPN) Protocol IDs registry specific to signal the usage of HTTP2 to transport “http” URIs resources: h2clr.’”

In essence, to try and protect their ability to cache, the authors of the standard propose that providers seek their customers’ permission to decrypt their traffic (solely for the purposes of offering a better customer experience, naturally).

 For some reason, Weinstein finds this proposal outrageous: “The proposal expects Internet users to provide ‘informed consent’ that they ‘trust’ intermediate sites (e.g. Verizon, AT&T, etc.) to decode their encrypted data, process it in some manner for ‘presumably’ innocent purposes, re-encrypt it, then pass the re-encrypted data along to its original destination,” he writes.

Considering that AT&T proposed this, and that AT&T’s record vis a vis illegal surveillance is pretty horrific, I do not see this as a positive proposal.

It Appears that This Guy Got His Law Degree from Bob Jones University

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In a world of right wing hack judges issuing morally indefensible options, Federal District Judge William Martini has set a contemptible new standard:

The first legal challenge to the New York police department’s blanket surveillance of Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has been dismissed by a federal judge in New Jersey in a ruling that lawyers acting for the plaintiffs have described as preposterous and dangerous.

Judge William Martini, sitting in the US district court for the district of New Jersey, threw out a lawsuit brought by eight Muslim individuals and local businesses who alleged their constitutional rights were violated when the NYPD’s mass surveillance was based on religious affiliation alone. The legal action was the first of its type flowing from the secret NYPD project to map and monitor Muslim communities across the east coast that was exposed by a Pulitzer prize-winning series of articles in 2011 by the Associated Press.

In his judgment, released on Thursday, Martini dismisses the complaint made by the plaintiffs that they had been targeted for police monitoring solely because of their religion. He writes: “The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies. The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself.”

………

The Martini decision absolves the NYPD of having caused distress or damage to Muslims caught by its mass surveillance on the unusual grounds that were it not for the Associated Press disclosure of the secret programme, those targeted by the monitoring would have been unaware that it was happening.

“The Associated Press covertly obtained the materials and published them without authorization. Thus the injury, if any existed, is not fairly traceable to the City,” Martini writes.

Later in the judgment, he adds: “Nowhere in the complaint do plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents. The harms are not ‘fairly traceable’ to any act of surveillance.”

So, it’s OK to profile Muslims, and possibly entrap them, so long as you do not about it?

This judge seems to think that it makes sense to send spies into girls schools.

This is f%$#ing insane, and I hope that this Bush appointee’s ruling is overruled before the ink is dry.

You Sure Picked the Wrong Guy to go All ‘Roid Rage On, Representative Grimm………

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After the State of the Union Address, a NY1reporter Michael Scotto asked Congressman Michael Grimm about his fundraising scandal.

Grimm, expecting questions about the SOTU address, was upset and walked off.

Then he walked back, and threatened to break reporter Scotto in half and throw him off of the Congressional Balcony.

This does make the persisistent rumors of anabolic steroid abuse more credible.

But he picked the wrong reporter to threaten.

You see Michael Scotto is the nephew of Anthony Scotto, a former head of the Brooklyn longshoremen’s union and a former boss in the Gambino crime family.

Grim went postal, and, to my non-lawyer eyes, it was technically assault, on the nephew of a Gambino crime bus.

Sucks to be you.

BTW, before he was a Congressman, he was an FBI agent, and I have to agree with Alex Pareene when he says, “We shouldn’t let people like him have badges and guns.”

The only thing worse than a goon is a goon with a gun and a badge.

Making Sense of Chris Christie………

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Joe Patrice, at Above the Law, observes that Chris Cristie’s pattern of abusing power is typical for a former prosecutor:

Unless you’re living under a rock or stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge, you know that N.J. Governor Chris Christie spent yesterday digging himself out of the Fort Lee traffic scandal in the most Jersey of manner — by placing a proverbial bullet in the back of the neck of one of his most trusted allies Tony Soprano-style. He even invited the media over to the Bada-Bing for a couple of hours after he did it.

………

But whether Christie was directly involved in this scandal or not — and so far the digital paper trail seems to begin with his mild-mannered aide showing uncharacteristic initiative and ends with a high school crony whom Christie put in charge of the bridge — this scandal falls somewhere between unsurprising and utterly inevitable.

Christie is a former prosecutor, serving as a U.S. Attorney from 2002 until 2008. The modern prosecutor is armed with the luxury to exact petty, brutal revenge on any and all who cross him or her, and this is the mentality that Christie brought into the Governor’s Mansion. Indeed, he made this mentality his political calling card.

………

And that atmosphere flows directly from the arrogance of a prosecutorial office.

………

Prosecutors are incentivized to use all of their vast power to get more people convicted, and they’re willing to use a bazooka to kill a cockroach if it advances that ball. Listen, I spent a lot of time working with current and former prosecutors. And whether I represented a cooperator working with the government or I was sitting on the same side as a defense lawyer freshly out of the prosecutor’s office, it always disturbed me how quickly they would leap to asking “how do we screw them?” over the most minor of slights.

When this is the model of success that propels you into office, how does one reset? In Christie’s case, he never eschewed this model of leadership. He may well have directly ordered these lane closures, but even if he didn’t, the mentality he has championed in his meteoric rise to prominence invited this sort of behavior. And now we’re supposed to be forgiving when he says his deputy acted alone when plotting to make life hell for someone unwilling to kowtow to the Governor’s overtures?

It makes a lot of sense, and it also frightens the hell out of me about our criminal justice system.

BTW, if you want to read a less charitable assessment of Jabba the Governor, you can read Chris Hedges‘ takedown.

I don’t think that it is as informative, but it’s a jolly good read. 

In Unity, There is Strength

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It appears that police are going zero tolerance on politicians who want to cut their pensions.

They did nothing, and in some cases aggressively supported politicians, (I’m talking to you, Wisconsin Police unions) when this was done to other public servants, they would not be facing this problem now.

If you want to protect your own union rights, you have to do so for your coworkers as well.  It was clear to anyone with half a brain that once they hit clerks, street cleaners, and teachers, it was public safety next.

A drive by some American cities to cut costly police retirement benefits has led to an extraordinary face-off between local politicians and the law enforcement officers who work for them.

In Costa Mesa, California, lawmaker Jim Righeimer says he was a target of intimidation because he sought to curb police pensions. In a lawsuit in November, Righeimer accused the Costa Mesa police union and a law firm that once represented them, of forcing him to undergo a sobriety test (he passed) after driving home from a bar in August 2012.

That followed a call to 911 by private detective Chris Lanzillo, who worked for the police union and the law firm that represented it, according to the suit. Lanzillo is also named as a defendant, accused of following Righeimer home from the bar.

Disputes such as these have intensified as Detroit and two California cities, Stockton and San Bernardino, have gone bankrupt in the past two years. Police pension costs were a major factor in the financial troubles facing all three. Now large cities, including San Jose and San Diego, say they have no choice but to alter pension agreements lest they end up in bankruptcy too.

The suit by lawmaker Righeimer also said that an FBI raid of the law firm last October uncovered evidence that an electronic tracking device had been attached to the underside of the car driven by another lawmaker, Steve Mensinger, one of Righeimer’s allies in the pension fight.

“What we are alleging is a conspiracy to gather information against political opponents”, said John Manly, a lawyer representing Righeimer and Mensinger.

………

There also have been allegations of intimidation by police in Cranston, Rhode Island.

On January 9, Cranston Mayor Allan Fung announced that state police will take over an investigation into a flurry of parking tickets issued in the wards of two council members. The pair claim the tickets were issued as retribution after they voted against a new contract for police that would have given them a pay raise.

Fung announced that Police Chief Marco Palombo Jr. had been placed on administrative leave while the Rhode Island state police investigate the parking ticket allegations.

………

In 2008 DeLord told officers in American Police Beat Magazine to “get dirty and fight to win,” by getting personal with reformist council members and to “bloody their noses.”

DeLord told Reuters last month that he had learnt to be more collaborative since 2008, but said of the “get dirty” message: “I wrote it. I believe it.”

F%$#ing Civil Liberties, How Do They Work?

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Insane Clown Posse – Miracles, (Completely NSFW) it explains the reference in the post title

It’s not odd that a group would object to being characterized as a criminal gang by the FBI.

What is odd when a the group in question are fans of music group.

Here’s a hint to the FBI, if you are being accused of being over the top by a a group called Insane Clown Posse, and they are making cogent arguments that the response is excessive and an unconstitutional violation of the constitutional right to free assembly, perhaps it is time for some self examination:

The Michigan rap group Insane Clown Posse filed suit on Wednesday against the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying that the United States government had made the “unwarranted and unlawful decision” to classify fans of the band as criminal gang members, leading to their harassment by law enforcement and causing them “significant harm.”

The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Detroit by lawyers for the band and for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. Plaintiffs include the Insane Clown Posse founders Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform as Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, and whose fans call themselves Juggalos.

Also listed as plaintiffs are four Juggalos from Nevada, California, North Carolina and Iowa, who offered details of incidents in which they said they had been subjected to police harassment or other punishments for identifying with Insane Clown Posse.

………

The seeds of this lawsuit were sown in 2011, when the F.B.I.’s National Gang Intelligence Center published a report that described Juggalos as “a loosely organized hybrid gang” whose members were “expanding into many U.S. communities.”

The report, titled “National Gang Threat Assessment: Emerging Trends,” cited a 2011 incident in which “two suspected Juggalo associates were charged with beating and robbing an elderly homeless man,” and another in 2010 in which “a suspected Juggalo member” shot and wounded two other people.

The report also included a photograph of a woman described as a “Juggalo member,” wearing face paint similar to the kind used by Insane Clown Posse and pointing a gun at the camera.

………

The lawsuit asks the court to set aside the findings of the 2011 F.B.I. gang assessment, order the elimination of “criminal intelligence information” on Juggalos from government and law-enforcement databases and prohibit the gathering of further information without “sufficient facts” of a “definable criminal activity or enterprise.”

Mark Parsons, a Juggalo from Las Vegas and one of the plaintiffs listed in the suit, said in the complaint that he had been detained in July by state troopers outside Knoxville, Tenn., for displaying Insane Clown Posse’s insignia, known as “the hatchet man,” on his semi truck.

………

Jeff Engstrom, a lawyer and blogger who writes at Abovethelaw.com under the pseudonym Juggalo Law, said in an email that the government’s actions were “laughably off base” and “the equivalent of placing Phish fans on a terrorist watch list.” He added, “It elevates an Internet punch line into something even more absurd.”

You’ve seen this FBI report used to cancel concerts, refuse enlistments in the military, and deny custody in divorces.

This is not just a bit of silliness. This is a McCarthyesque abuse of power, and I hope that ICP, and the ACLU get their case to court, get the full story, and discover which nut job did this.

Whoever did this should not be in law enforcement.

Winner of This Week’s Award for Stupid Motherf%$#er With a Gun Is………

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 Jerome M. Hauer, commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services,  who pulled his loaded Glock in a state office building and used the laser sight to point at locations on a map:

Jerome M. Hauer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s director of homeland security, took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation, according to public officials. It happened Oct. 24 in Albany at the highly secure state emergency operations center below State Police headquarters.

These officials, one of whom claimed to be an eyewitness, said that three Swedish emergency managers in the delegation were rattled when the gun’s laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point.

Hauer, commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, was disabled by a stroke a few years ago and can be unsteady. He isn’t a law enforcement official. He carries the loaded 9-millimeter Glock in a holster into state buildings, an apparent violation of state law barring state employees from bringing weapons to the workplace, several witnesses say.

So, you have a guy who, “can be unsteady” from a stroke waving a gun around in a meeting in order to use it as a laser pointer.

Am I the only one to think that maybe this guy not only should not have a gun permit, but that he should not cut his own steak, because he is too out of it to use a sharp knife?

H/T Talking Points Memo.