Category: Law Enforcement Misconduct

Factoid of the Day

No Comments

I always knew the people who you know are the ones most likely to kill you.

I did not know this: (BTW, kickass discussion of statistics of incomplete data here)

Americans are afraid of many threats to their lives – serial killers, crazed gunmen, gang bangers, and above all terrorists – but these threats are surprisingly unlikely. Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.

Our law enforcement system is broken.

OK, that bit I knew.

The Report on the Baltimore Police is Out

No Comments

And in news that surprise no one, the Baltimore PD is revealed to be a thoroughly racist organization:

As a black man and a lifelong resident of this city, Ray Kelly has been stopped by the police more times than he can count. And as a community organizer who tried to document police bias after the death of Freddie Gray, Mr. Kelly, 45, had always expected that a federal investigation would uncover a pattern of racial discrimination.

Even so, the scathing report that the Justice Department unveiled here on Wednesday — a data-rich indictment of how Baltimore police officers have for years violated the Constitution and federal law by systematically stopping, searching (in some cases strip-searching) and harassing black residents — gave him a jolt.

“Hearing the actual numbers, like on the traffic stops, is blowing my mind,” Mr. Kelly said.

Release of the 163-page report, at a packed City Hall news conference here, was another wrenching moment of self-examination in this majority black city. Even as Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and the police commissioner, Kevin Davis, accepted the findings — both vowed to turn the Baltimore Police Department into a ‘‘model for the nation’’ — there was relief, but also rage and skepticism among black residents here who wondered if anything would change.

………

In one stark statistic after another, the department’s report helped validate the experiences of Mr. Brown, Mr. Kelly and countless others in poor African-American neighborhoods who regard the police as an occupying force. Many wanted to know what took so long.

………

In Baltimore, a city that is 63 percent black, the Justice Department found that 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses like “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were African-American. Blacks make up 60 percent of Baltimore’s drivers but account for 82 percent of traffic stops. Of the 410 pedestrians who were stopped at least 10 times in the five and a half years of data reviewed, 95 percent were black.

You can read the full report here.

It’s a Self Licking Ice Cream Cone

No Comments

The DEA has decided to keep classifying Marijuana as a Schedule 1 Drug, which means that they claim that it has no therapeutic value.

It also means that a large portion of the DEA’s budget, the part that is driven by its anti-pot activities, remains safe.

How convenient:

For the fourth consecutive time, the Drug Enforcement Administration has denied a petition to lessen federal restrictions on the use of marijuana.

While recreational marijuana use is legal in four states and D.C., and medical applications of the drug have been approved in many more, under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance, which means it’s considered to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse.”

The gap between permissive state laws and a restrictive federal policy has become increasingly untenable in the minds of many doctors, patients, researchers, business owners and legislators.

For instance, last fall, a Brookings Institution report slammed the federal government for “stifling medical research” in the area of marijuana policy. As a Schedule 1 drug, it’s much harder for researchers to work with marijuana than with many other controlled substances. The American Academy of Pediatrics has called on the government to move marijuana into Schedule 2 to facilitate more research into medical uses.

Perhaps this determination should be made by an organization whose budget is not contingent on it remaining illegal.

When You Manufacture Terrorism, You Create Terrorism

No Comments

In 2015, at a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in (where else) Texas, 2 gunman opened fire, and were shot to death by police.

If you are wondering how they managed to plan this, wonder no more. Not only did the FBI know about it, the TBI was actively encouraging them so as to create a more media friendly arrest:

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent.

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Daily Beast. “I could imagine an undercover agent thinking it was just the hyperbolic rhetoric they are participating in, and it wasn’t an intent to go to Texas and do harm.

………

Press officers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, the Cleveland FBI Office, and the Department of Justice declined to comment beyond the affidavit. FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty hung up on The Daily Beast after being asked about the “tear up Texas” text.

But shortly after that exchange, Simpson and his accomplice, Nadir Soofi, drove up to the contest and opened fire on police officers, injuring one of them slightly. Both men were killed in the altercation, but Hendricks would remain free for another year.

Hendricks’s arrest means that every major U.S. attack was linked to FBI investigation before it happened, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told The Daily Beast.

This is not just an organization doing its job well, this is an organization actively sabotaging its own efforts in an attempt to generate bogus statistics.

The FBI truly is the misbegotten child of J. Edgar Hoover, and it is completely broken.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

No Comments

In a fit of political pandering, Governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order banning sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go while declining a law intended to facilitate prosecution of child rape into law:

Governor Anthony Cuomo, never afraid to take quick and decisive action on the issues facing New York, announced today that all 3,000 of New York’s sex offenders will be prohibited from “downloading, accessing, or otherwise engaging in any internet-enabled gaming activities, including Pokémon Go.”

 “Protecting New York’s children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don’t become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims,” said Cuomo in a statement. “These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children.”

 To that end, Cuomo will have the Division of Criminal Justice Services provide a current list of sexual offenders to Niantic Inc., the creator of Pokémon Go, as well providing the same list to Apple and Google. Parole officers will also be trained in how to check and see whether their parolees have been playing any internet-enabled games.

 ………

 Meanwhile, left sitting on Cuomo’s desk at the end of this year’s legislative session was a bill that would have lengthened the statute of limitations on sexual-abuse cases by five years; given officials a six-month window to revisit old cases; and eliminated the difference in how public and private organizations (i.e., the Catholic Church) would be treated when it comes to child-sexual-abuse cases.

The cause of this?  A grandstanding state senator who found that some Pokeman were located within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.

You can find anything within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.

The stupid,  it burns.

And No One Goes to Jail for Killing Freddie Gray

No Comments

I am so voting for Marilyn Mosby next time she runs

Following repeated setbacks in court, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby dropped charges against the remaining Freddie Gray defendants:

The criminal case in the death of Freddie Gray has ended with the top prosecutor failing to convict any of the six police officers involved in the arrest last year that sparked riots in the city and fueled nationwide debate over fatal police encounters involving black men.

Facing a judge who repeatedly said there was insufficient evidence in the cases, the Baltimore state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, on Wednesday dropped criminal charges against three officers still awaiting trial. A judge found three other officers not guilty after separate trials in May, June and July.

After a brief court hearing, Mosby spoke in the West Baltimore neighborhood where Gray had been arrested and described her decision to drop the charges as “agonizing.”

The prosecutor conceded that Baltimore Circuit Court Judge Barry G. Williams “does not agree” with the state’s argument that officers committed crimes by failing to buckle Gray in the back of a police van in which he later fell and broke his neck. If the government continued with more trials, she said, prosecutors faced a “dismal likelihood of conviction.”

On the way out, she explicitly accused elements of the Baltimore PD of conspiring to sabotage the investigation, which they clearly did:

Mosby also accused police of undermining — and in some cases impeding — the investigation by refusing to serve search warrants against fellow officers and making up memos to impugn key witnesses. The city’s police commissioner issued a statement defending the integrity of the investigation, saying 30 seasoned detectives “worked the case tirelessly to uncover facts.”

Attorneys and other advocates for the officers have defended the pursuit of Gray, a frequent target of arrests who ran from a high-crime area when he saw an officer.

One of the lessons here is that you cannot allow a police department to investigate its own members ……… ever.

More of This

No Comments
I support Black Lives Matter and related groups, but this does not mean that I necessarily approve of some of their tactics.

That being said, I wholeheartedly approve of BLM activists blockading the Chicago Police’s secret torture site:

Activists on Wednesday night marched in North Lawndale and also blocked the entrance to the Chicago Police Department’s notorious Homan Square site.

The Homan Square building has been a source of controversy ever since the Guardian exposed the “off-the-books interrogation compound” in February of 2015. The profile documents claims that detainees were routinely kept from contacting family or legal representation.
The protest was organized by the Let Us Breathe Collective and Black Youth Project 100 to demand a transition in how tax dollars are allocated, namely an “investment into new alternatives to keep Black communities safe and a divestment from police and legislative systems that are violent towards Black communities,” according to a statement.

Activists used chains, tubes, bike locks and ladders to bind themselves together, blocking the entrance path. Other nearby protesters set up tents and a “Free Store” that offered provisions.

 Well done.

Not Again

No Comments

We just had an another cop shooting, this one in Baton Rouge, where police recently shot Alton Sterling and then went postal on protestors:

Three police officers were killed after a gunfight in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Sunday and three injured, one critically. The gunman was also killed, and police said they do not believe any other suspects currently threaten the city.

President Obama condemned the shooting and said attacks on police were “attacks against all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible”.
At about 8.40am officers responded to a report of a man with a rifle and wearing black by a convenience store, state police colonel Mike Edmonson told reporters late on Sunday. Two minutes later, shots were reported over police radio, a recording of which was posted online.

You just have to love American gun culture and American Law enforcement culture.

Enough is f%$#ing enough.

I Really Don’t Have Much to Say About This

No Comments

The killings of black men by police early last week, and the shootings of officers in Dallas are clearly both awful things.

It’s ironic that this happened in Dallas, because the DPD has been at the forefront of reforms in policing:

………

In the aftermath of the chaotic and deadly scene that unfolded in Dallas on Thursday night, where five law enforcement officers were killed and at least seven others were wounded, government officials and law enforcement experts have noted that the Dallas Police Department has distinguished itself as a model of police reform. As Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings put it in a somber press conference Friday morning, “This police department trained in de-escalation far before cities across America did it. We’re one of the premier community policing cities in the country and this year we have the fewest police officer-related shootings than any large city in America.”

Among the changes the Dallas police have made since 2012: a new foot chase policy aimed at discouraging officers from making risky decisions while pursuing suspects, new guidelines for reporting encounters involving the use of force, and a policy of bringing in the FBI Civil Rights Division to review all police-involved shootings. Since 2014, the department has maintained one website containing a trove of data on more than a decade of police-involved shootings in the city, and another that catalogues all police encounters that result in an officer drawing a weapon, using a baton, or physically restraining a suspect. In 2015, the department received $3.7 million in funding from the Dallas City Council so it could buy 1,000 body cameras over the course of the next five years.

Perhaps the most significant reforms, as suggested by the mayor’s comments, have centered on training. In 2014, Brown introduced a plan to sharply increase the amount of deadly force training required of patrol officers and began to emphasize de-escalation techniques at the Dallas Police Academy.

Brown’s efforts have coincided with a dramatic drop in excessive force complaints. In 2009, the year before he took over the department, there were 147 such complaints filed; as of November 2015, there had been just 13 for the year. Brown told the Morning News in 2015 that he credited the new training methods with a 40 percent year-on-year drop in police shootings and a 30 percent drop in assaults on officers. BuzzFeed’s Albert Samaha points out that, in the years since 2012 (when Dallas police shot 23 people), the frequency of officer-involved shootings has consistently fallen; according to the department’s data, there were 11 last year, and before Thursday, there had been just one in 2016. The fact that Dallas’ murder rate continues to decline, the Washington Post’s Radley Balko has noted, is evidence that a department “can embrace policing policies that are community-friendly, open and transparent, and dedicated to minimizing the use of force and violence … and still enjoy the same or greater drops in crime we’re seeing elsewhere.”

Modern police training in the US, and the associated legal regime, have institutionalized cowardice as both a strategy used by the police as a justifications for dubious use of force, and as an alibi used by police in the aftermath these actions.

Second, I would suggest that anyone who suggests that Micah Xavier Johnson is somehow the responsibility of the Black Lives Matter movement, or of the greater Black community, (I’m looking at you, Fox News) is an idiot and a bigot.

Marilyn Mosby, Your ADA is Trying to Lose These Cases

No Comments

The officer most responsible for the death of Freddie Gray, Caesar Goodson has been acquitted after a mindbogglingly inept attempt at prosecution:

A Baltimore judge acquitted the police officer facing the most serious charges in the death of Freddie Gray on Thursday, delivering a broad rebuke of a case that he said lacked evidence.

Officer Caesar Goodson Jr., 46, drove the transport van in which Gray sustained fatal injuries. He is the second officer cleared in the high-profile case. Four other officers could still face trial.

After an eight-day bench trial, Circuit Judge Barry Williams found Goodson not guilty on charges that included second-degree depraved-heart murder and three counts of manslaughter.

The acquittal cast doubt on the remaining criminal cases in which the other officers face similar but lesser charges. Legal observers said Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who drew widespread praise and also condemnation after charging the officers in May 2015, must now re-evaluate the remaining cases.

My guess is that this guy was looking at getting a PBA endorsement when he runs against Mosby for DA.

This is disgraceful.

This is Even More Offensive if You are Jewish

No Comments

Rudolph Giuliani just said that if Moslems have nothing to hide, they should be fine with police stationed in their mosques:

Appearing on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning, former Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani argued that if mosques have nothing to hide, they wouldn’t be opposing government surveillance.

“There’s no minister, there’s no rabbi in this city — nor are there some imams — that object to having police officers in their congregation,” he argued. “In fact, they want them there, they want them to learn the message. It’s enlightening for them.”

“So if you’ve got nothing going on there but a beautiful religious service, why in His name would you not want to have police officers there?” he asked.

here is a bit of Jewish History:

The fifth-century Persian king Yezdegerd forbade the recitation of Shema. They had to comply during the morning when guards were present, but the Jews partially circumvented the decree by incorporating Shema into the Mussaf Kedushah.”

According to commentaries, Yezdegerd subsequently died after a crocodile appeared in his bedroom and devoured him, which was attributed to the prayers of the Jewish people for his death.  (No, he didn’t die that way)

Still, it is remarkable how easily Rudy Giuliani slides into the role of biblical villain.

A Start, But Not Enough

No Comments

Yesterday, the Supreme Court made what was a very important ruling.

It said that judges have a constitutional requirement to recuse themselves from cases where they have a significant personal stake:

………

On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court decided an actual case of judicial bias, voting 5-to-3 that a judge may not rule on a case in which he previously played a significant and personal role as a prosecutor.

The case before the justices was an appeal by a Pennsylvania man named Terrance Williams, who was convicted of a brutal murder committed in 1984, when he was 18, and sentenced to death.

There was never any question that Mr. Williams committed the crime. But at his trial, he denied knowing his victim, a man named Amos Norwood, and the prosecution’s case was that he had killed Mr. Norwood in the course of robbing him. It later came to light that Mr. Norwood had been sexually assaulting Mr. Williams and other underage boys, and that the prosecutors had known this fact but kept it from the jury.

A trial court agreed that this was prosecutorial misconduct and overturned Mr. Williams’s sentence, but the state supreme court unanimously reversed that decision. And that was where things went wrong, according to the United States Supreme Court. The chief justice of the Pennsylvania supreme court, Ronald Castille — who wrote separately to denounce the trial court’s decision and defend the prosecutors — had been the district attorney who personally approved seeking the death penalty in Mr. Williams’s case.

In 2012, Mr. Williams asked Justice Castille to recuse himself, and the justice refused.

In an opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court ruled that this violated Mr. Williams’s right to due process, and tossed out his sentence. “Where a judge has had an earlier significant, personal involvement as a prosecutor in a critical decision in the defendant’s case, the risk of actual bias in the judicial proceeding rises to an unconstitutional level,” Justice Kennedy wrote.

………

As the majority noted, this ignores not only the significance of the decision Mr. Castille made as a prosecutor, but also the fact that he did not simply sign off on the decision to seek death for Mr. Williams and then forget about it. To the contrary, he was deeply invested in his tough-on-crime reputation as a prosecutor. In his campaign for the state supreme court seat, he boasted about the 45 men, Mr. Williams included, he had sent to death row.

This is a big deal, and Judge Castille should not be allowed to judge a dog show.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

No Comments

It looks like the FBI managed to sneak language into the intelligence authorization bill allowing the FBI to demand email and logs from an ISP without a warrant:

A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transactional records,” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in it. The lone no vote came from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote in a statement that one of the bill’s provisions “would allow any FBI field office to demand email records without a court order, a major expansion of federal surveillance powers.”

Wyden did not disclose exactly what the provision would allow, but his spokesperson suggested it might go beyond email records to things like web-surfing histories and other information about online behavior. “Senator Wyden is concerned it could be read that way,” Keith Chu said.

I know what you’re thinking:  That the FBI would never abuse its power to go after people they disagreed with politically and abuse their powers.

That’s why their headquarters is named after J. Edgar Hoover, because they would never function as a private army for a rogue director.

This Sucks………

1 Comment

2 trials, and no convictions against the cops who killed Freddie Gray:

Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams rejected the state’s case Monday against Officer Edward Nero, acquitting him on all counts for his role in the arrest of Freddie Gray.

The verdict, which followed a five-day bench trial, is the first in the closely watched case. Nero, 30, had faced misdemeanor charges of second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and two counts of misconduct in office. The 25-year-old Gray died last year of injuries sustained while riding in the back of a police transport van.

I’m beginning to think that all these cops are going to walk.

To Protect and Serve

No Comments
It’s confirmed.

The Baltimore PD is nothing at all like the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street.

First we learn that for many years, the company doing psyche evals for would be BPD cadettes was phoning it in, which explains a lot:

Baltimore’s spending panel has cut ties with two contractors.

 Baltimore’s spending panel voted unanimously Wednesday to take action against two companies accused of violating contracts with the city.

 The Board of Estimates, which is controlled by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, voted to immediately end a contract with a psychology firm that conducted mental health screenings for many prospective Baltimore police officers. The screenings were far shorter than required.

 The $730,000 contact for Psychology Consultants Associated of Lutherville had been on suspension since last year, pending the results of a city investigation. The city’s inspector general reported this week that its investigation found that nearly three-quarters of officers and trainees said that their pre-employment screenings with the firm lasted 30 minutes or less.

 The contract required at least an hourlong interview for each job candidate.

 In a letter to the inspector general, Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis accused the firm of “cutting corners” and putting the public and the department “at risk.”

This might explain a lot, including the fact that Baltimore cops were caught looting during the Freddie Gray unrest:

Three Baltimore police officers were accused of theft in two separate investigations — including two charged after being caught on video looting a store during the unrest that followed the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray.

According to the Baltimore Sun, correction officers Tamika Cobb and Kendra Richard were suspended without pay after footage showed them exiting a local convenience store holding Slim Jims and Tostitos chips on April 25.

That same day, riots broke out in the city after six hours of peaceful protests calling for charges to be filed against the officers who arrested Gray earlier that month. Six officers were later charged in connection wih Gray’s death.

Both Cobb and Richard were assigned to corrections facilities downtown, near the site of the unrest. They face charges of burglary and theft, and bail was set for each of them at $35,000.

Yes, I know that the 2nd story is from a year ago, but I came across both of them today, so I just had to comment.

They seemed to segue nicely one into the other, or as Zathras would say, “At least there is symmetry.”

Quote of the Day

No Comments

“We thought America was the best in the world,” he said. “But unfortunately this happened, and it made us [think] like American police are the same as our police in Burma.”

—Eh Wah the manager of Klo & Kweh Music Team, a Burmese/Karen band after Oklahoma cops stole $53,000 from him using asset forfeiture,

There is a happy ending here:  After the Washington Post wrote a story about this (link above), the cops and the prosecutors have done the right thing, and dropped the bogus charges, and sent him his money back.

Who Says that Irony is Dead

No Comments

Police in Pittsburgh are fighting mandatory drug tests because they claim that it is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy:

In an unprecedented protest against the routine offenses against due process and bodily integrity carried out in the name of the “war on drugs,” the union representing Pittsburgh police officers has condemned workplace drug and alcohol testing as a violation of the Constitution. Their zeal for the right to privacy only applies to themselves, however, not to the public they supposedly serve.

NBC affiliate WPXI reports that the Pittsburgh Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police “has filed a civil rights grievance against the city, claiming officers have been order to undergo drug and alcohol testing that is in violation of their contract.” Union attorney Bryan Campbell describes the policy as “an illegal search and seizure.”

To which those not protected by Blue Privilege might respond: Welcome to our world, FOP.

………

Another blatantly obvious reason for police opposing public scrutiny of their urine is that it could reveal the usage of such things as anabolic steroids. Police officers are no stranger to ‘Vitamin S’ as many of them have not only been caught using the rage-inducing hormones, but selling them as well.

Gee, you think?

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

No Comments

In Seattle, police raided the apartment of a privacy activist.

They got a warrant by noting that the IP address of the activist was tied to child porn, but they did not tell the judge that the activist was running a Tor node, which meant that he was not the origin point, and had no way to know the content of the material:

One week after Seattle police searched the home of two well-known privacy activists for child porn and found nothing, critics are questioning why the department failed to include a key piece of information in its application for a warrant—the fact that the activists operated a Tor node out of their apartment, in order to help internet users all over the world surf the web anonymously.

 “You knew about the Tor node,” said Eric Rachner, a cybersecurity counsultant and co-founder of Seattle’s Center for Open Policing, addressing the police department on Twitter, “but didn’t mention it in warrant application. Y’all pulled a fast one on the judge… you knew the uploader could have been literally anyone in the world.”

 At 6 a.m. on March 30, Seattle police showed up at the Queen Anne apartment of Jan Bultmann and David Robinson with a search warrant to look for child porn, based on a tip that traced an illicit video to their IP address. Six officers arrived with two vans and spent over an hour doing forensic searches on the computers in the home. One officer stood in the bedroom and watched as Robinson got dressed.

 They didn’t find anything. Bultmann and Robinson, both board members of the Seattle Privacy Coalition, were released after being detained in a van, but they were left shaken and upset.

 ………

 Bultmann and Robinson had publicly advertised that they operated a Tor exit relay node—a node in the global Tor network, whose purpose is to give users the ability to browse the web anonymously. They said they operated the node as a service to dissidents in repressive countries, knowing full well that criminals might use it as well, much like any other communication tool. Tor stands for “the onion router,” a mechanism by which information is encrypted in layers as it passes through multiple, randomized nodes in the network.

In the aftermath of the search, the question was whether Seattle police had done their technical due diligence: Did they recognize that Bultmann and David were operating a Tor node? If so, did they realize that a tip about child porn coming from that IP address, absent any other evidence, likely meant someone else in another part of the world had uploaded the material and it had been randomly routed through their node?

 ………

 “It’s like raiding the mailman’s house for delivering an illegal letter with no return address,” said one commenter on the tech website YCombinator. “Sure, it could have been sent by the mailman, but it could have been sent by anyone. There isn’t any more reason to suspect the exit node operators than anyone else in the whole world who could also have used the exit node.”

 The warrant application (PDF), signed by King County Superior Court Judge Bill Bowman, makes no mention of the Tor node, much less Bultmann and Robinson’s public roles as privacy activists. Nor does a warrant application dated February 24 to obtain subscriber records related to the address from Wave G, the Internet service provider. Both documents suggest that Bultmann and Robinson are ordinary web users with a private home connection.

 ………

 SPD spokesperson Sean Whitcomb said the department understands how Tor works and that before executing the search, officers knew that Bultmann and Robinson operated the Tor node out of their apartment. “Knowing that, moving in, it doesn’t automatically preclude the idea that the people running Tor are not also involved in child porn,” Whitcomb told NPR. “It does offer a plausible alibi, but it’s still something that we need to check out.”

 But in a statement today, the department said its detectives didn’t know about the Tor node when they filed the warrant application on March 28. If true, this means detectives took notice of the Tor node after the judge approved the warrant, then carried out the exhaustive early-morning search two days later anyway.

 Robinson questions whether police deliberately delayed checking the IP address against the public list of Tor nodes in order to avoid sharing exculpatory information with the judge. He believes a sound investigation would have checked the IP address as soon as the tip came in. “Why spoil a perfectly good warrant with facts?” he asked.

Of course, there will be on consequences for the police who deceived the judge.

There never is.