Tag: Civil Rights

This Was a Foreseeable Consequence

In response to China’s new security laws imposed by Beijing, the there have been calls for the UK to suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

This makes sense.

Given that the law makes protests against China illegal anywhere in the world that they occur, it’s a reasonable step.

China throwing a hissy fit over this is akin to a soccer player pretending that a foul occurred:

Conservative MPs and Labour are calling for the wholesale overhaul of relations with China after the government suspended extradition with Hong Kong and banned the export of riot control equipment following Beijing’s imposition of a sweeping national security law on the territory.

Announcing the measures to the Commons, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, stressed the desire for continued cooperation with China, but said the actions were “a reasonable and proportionate response” to the law, which effectively criminalises most political dissent.

………

Speaking before Raab’s announcement, China’s foreign ministry said it would be a mistake to suspend the extradition treaty and urged the UK “to take no more steps down the wrong path”.

While Raab’s decisions were welcomed by both Labour and Conservative MPs, the foreign secretary faced calls to take more robust action, particularly over the mass repression of the Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang province which rights groups warn amounts to cultural genocide.

………

Saying this was a serious violation of the agreement that set out Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status after the handover to China in 1997, Raab said extradition would be stopped unless Beijing gave “clear and robust safeguards” about how the law would be used. The UK does not have an extradition agreement with mainland China.

The UK is also extending to Hong Kong an arms embargo that has covered mainland China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, including a bar on equipment that could be used for crowd control, such as shackles and smoke grenades.

………

Britain has already promised that up to 3 million Hong Kong residents will be offered the chance to settle in the UK and a path to permanent citizenship.

These are foreseeable consequences to the Chinese security laws, and the Chinese government must have anticipated these actions.

Chill the f%$# out.

Yes, There Is a Historical Precedent

Hmm, Police Officers hiding their names and only obliged to identify themselves with a generic tag as a member of their organisation? Im sure I’ve heard of that approach used somewhere before… pic.twitter.com/LJ1sfeEJbV

— Sam White (@Whitesv2128) July 18, 2020

For those of you who do not understand the meaning of “Geheime Staatspolizei”, which translates to secret state police, which is generally referred to its contraction, Gestapo.

The insistence of CBP that its agents will not carry any sort of external identification beyond a label saying, “Police” on the back of their uniforms has some profoundly ominous historical echoes.

Handmaiden’s Tale, SCOTUS Edition

Two rulings today.

In the first, the Supreme Court ruled that teachers at religious schools are “Ministers” and as such can never sue their employer for discrimination:


In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that a doctrine known as the “ministerial exception,” which bars ministers from suing churches and other religious institutions for employment discrimination, prohibited a lawsuit filed by a teacher at a Lutheran school who was also an ordained minister. Today, by a vote of 7-2, the court held in Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru that the exception also forecloses lawsuits by two teachers at Catholic elementary schools in southern California. Although the teachers were not ordained ministers, the schools had argued that the exception nonetheless applied because they played a key role in teaching religion to their students, and the court – in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito – agreed.

Today’s decision came in a pair of cases, both filed by fifth-grade teachers against parish schools in the Los Angeles area. Agnes Morrissey-Berru taught at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach for nearly two decades before she was told that her contract would not be renewed. Morrissey-Berru went to federal court, where she claimed that she had been the victim of age discrimination. The district court threw out the lawsuit, agreeing with the school that the ministerial exception applied.

The second plaintiff, Kristen Biel, sued St. James School in Torrance when – not long after she disclosed that she was being treated for breast cancer – the school failed to renew her contract. Biel claimed that the school had discriminated against her because she had cancer, but the district court agreed with the school that Biel’s lawsuit was barred by the ministerial exception.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reinstated both teachers’ lawsuits. It reasoned that the ministerial exception normally applies when an employee plays a “religious leadership” role, but that Biel and Morrissey-Berru played a more limited role, mostly “teaching religion from a book.” The schools went to the Supreme Court, which today reversed.

This is a horrible ruling, and when juxtaposed with the court’s recent ruling in in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue,it means that taxpayers are going to be forced to pay for discrimination.

I agree with Sotamayor’s dissent that this is a, “Simplistic approach has no basis in law and strips thousands of schoolteachers of their legal protection.”

I expect to see a return to the segregation academies of the bad old days, and I am inclined to believe that for at least some of the justices, this was an unstated goal.

The other opinion is that the Trump administration’s moves to make it possible for pretty much any employer to claim a religious exemption and not provide birth control coverage:

The Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate requires most employers to provide their female employees with health insurance that includes access to certain forms of contraceptives. In 2017, the Trump administration issued new rules that expanded an exemption from the mandate to allow private employers with religious or moral objections to opt out of providing coverage without any notice. Today, by a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania rejected a challenge from two states that had argued that the new rules violate both the ACA itself and the federal laws governing administrative agencies. The ruling was an important victory for the Trump administration, but the battle over the exemptions and the mandate is likely not over yet.

Margaret Atwood weeps.

Well, That Went Well

Two years ago, Facebook commissioned an independent audit of the civil rights impact of the platform.

The report is in, and the 89 page report can be boiled down to 2 words ,”YOU SUCK.

This is not a surprise. First, Facebook has always had an extremely self-serving attitude towards its most abusive users and posts, which is that if it generates engagement, they don’t care:

Auditors handpicked by Facebook to examine its policies said that the company had not done enough to protect people on the platform from discriminatory posts and ads and that its decisions to leave up President Trump’s inflammatory posts were “significant setbacks for civil rights.”

The 89-page audit put Facebook in an awkward position as the presidential campaign heats up. The report gave fuel to the company’s detractors, who said the site had allowed hate speech and misinformation to flourish. The audit also placed the social network in the spotlight for an issue it had worked hard to avoid since the 2016 election: That it may once again be negatively influencing American voters.

………

“Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression,” wrote the auditors, Laura W. Murphy and Megan Cacace, who are civil rights experts and lawyers.

………

But the report was especially devastating for Facebook, because its executives had pointed to it as a sign that the company was seriously grappling with the content of its site.

………

The auditors pointed to extremist and white nationalist content, as well as to hate organizations, saying Facebook needed to do more to identify and remove them from its site. The company’s algorithms also continued to push people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers, they said, potentially deepening polarization.

………

On Tuesday, civil rights leaders met with Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg with 10 demands, including appointing a civil rights executive. But attendees said the Facebook executives did not agree to many of their requests and instead spouted “spin.” Mr. Zuckerberg said that while the company would make some changes to its processes, it would not do so because of external pressure or threat of financial loss, said one person who attended the meeting.

There have been promises of improved behavior, but there are ALWAYS promises of improved behavior, and they go back to doing the same sh%$ over and over again.

American Exceptionalism, Huh?

Considering the origins of policing in the US, slave patrols and suppressing labor unrest, this is not a surprise:

Police in America’s biggest cities are failing to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing the use of lethal force, a new study from the University of Chicago has found.

Researchers in the university’s law school put the lethal use-of-force policies of police in the 20 largest US cities under the microscope. They found not a single police department was operating under guidelines that are compliant with the minimum standards laid out under international human rights laws.

Among the failings identified by the law scholars, some police forces violate the requirement that lethal force should only be wielded when facing an immediate threat and as a last resort. Some departments allow deadly responses in cases of “escaping suspects”, “fugitives”, or “prevention of crime” – all scenarios that would be deemed to fall well outside the boundaries set by international law.

In other cities, police guidelines failed to constrain officers to use only as much force as is proportionate to the threat confronting them.

Remarkably, the researchers from the law school’s international human rights clinic discovered that none of the 20 police departments were operating under state laws that were in accord with human rights standards.

This is a feature, not a bug.

The role of the police in the United States has never been to, “Protect and Serve,” it has been to keep “them” down and generate revenue through fines.

Not a Surprise

Former deputy CIA Director Avril Haines is a major security advisor to the Biden campaign.

She has scrubbed her bio to remove any reference to Palantir, Peter Thiel’s surveillance contractor.

To say that Palantir is controversial, given Thiel’s prominent position with the right wing, and the firm’s function as a cut-out to enable surveillance by the US State Security Apparatus would be an understatement:

In the run-up to the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is putting together a foreign policy team for a potential future administration. Among those described as being part of the team is Avril Haines, former deputy director of the CIA during the Obama administration. According to an NBC News report from last week, Haines has been tapped to work advising on policy, as well as lead the national security and foreign policy team.

In addition to her past national security work and impressive presence in the D.C. think tank world, Haines has in the past described herself as a former consultant for the controversial data-mining firm Palantir. Haines’s biography page at the Brookings Institute, where she is listed as a nonresident senior fellow, boasted of this affiliation until at least last week, when it suddenly no longer appeared on the page.

The nature of the consulting work that Haines did for Palantir is not clear. As of press time, requests for comment to her, the Biden campaign, Palantir, and Brookings were not answered. Prior to being removed from the Brookings page, the connection to the data-mining company was listed alongside a long list of other affiliations that were similarly pared down.

The affiliation — and its apparent disappearance — raises questions for a campaign that has posed itself as the antithesis to President Donald Trump’s far-right governance. Co-founded by a far-right, Trump-supporting tech billionaire, Palantir, whose business has benefited from a slew of government contracts, has been accused of aiding in the Trump administration’s immigration detention programs in the U.S. and helping the Trump administration build out its surveillance state.

Palantir has been profiting off of invading people’s privacy for the state since the Bush administration, and anyone having an involvement with the organization should be viewed with a lot of suspicion.

The ties to the Trump administration aren’t the only aspect of Palantir’s history that raises questions. The company has also been accused in the past of plotting to intimidate journalists involved in reporting documents released by WikiLeaks. And Palantir has also provided services to police — another move that appears to put the company out of step with the current political moment. The company also aided the National Security Agency by creating the tools to facilitate worldwide spying.

Haines’ involvement with Palantir is problematic when juxtaposed with her prominent position in the Biden campaign.

The decision to scrub her record is even more concerning.

46 Years of Anti-Union Politics Will Do That


This is an Embarrassment

The United States hasn’t had a President who was not hostile to Organized labor since at least the Ford administration, so it is no surprise that America has been ranked as having the worst worker’s rights environment among all the developed nations:

The U.S. has the worst record among major developed countries when it comes to workers’ rights, according to a survey of labor unions.

The world’s largest economy is ranked a 4 in a scale by the International Trade Union Congress, meaning there are “systematic violations of rights.” Every other Group of Seven country ranks 3 or better.

How about card check and repealing Taft-Hartley the next time the Democrats controll the White House, House of Representatives, and the Senate?

I Am Seasoning My Stew Tonight with Their Tears

In a 6-3 decision the US Supreme Court has ruled that the 1964 Civil Rights act prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ employees.

The bigots were claiming that this was never the original intend of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is true, but it is also true that the sections on sex discrimination were inserted by an ardent segregationist, Howard W. Smith, to kill the bill, so the claim of original intent is rather specious.

I’m just enjoying the butt-hurt of the bigots and the haters right now:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination “because of sex.”

Today the Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-3, ruled that even if Congress may not have had discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status in mind when it enacted the landmark law over a half century ago, Title VII’s ban on discrimination protects gay, lesbian and transgender employees. Because fewer than half of the 50 states currently ban employment discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, today’s decision is a major victory for LGBT employees.

………

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed the third lawsuit, involving the rights of transgender employees, in federal district court in Michigan against R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes after the funeral home fired Aimee Stephens, a funeral director and embalmer who announced that she would begin living as a woman. (Stephens died on May 12 from complications from kidney failure, but her wife, Donna, took her place in the lawsuit.) The district court agreed with the funeral home that Title VII does not protect transgender employees from discrimination, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit reversed. The justices agreed to hear the cases last spring. Although the two cases involving discrimination based on sexual orientation were argued separately from the case involving discrimination based on gender identity, the court issued one ruling this morning that covered all three cases. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority, in an opinion that was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Gorsuch framed the question before the court as a straightforward one: “Today,” he wrote, “we must decide whether an employer can fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender.” The answer to that question, he continued, “is clear.” When an employer fires an employee “for being homosexual or transgender,” that employer “fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

It is particularly delicious that this has been authored that the right’s golden boy Gorsuch.

Only the Moderate Democrats Want the Surveillance State

My guess is that so-called “Moderate Democrats” are the only ones who want an expansive FISA renewal because they are the ones who get the big bucks from members of the US state security apparatus and and their corporate profiteers.

We now have Donald Trump, the most right Republicans in the House, and progressive Democrats are cooperating to shut down the FISA renewal, while the Democratic leadership is determined to make sure that there the intelligence-industrial complex gets what they want.

What can I say, but “Puck Felosi”.  This needs to stop:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and top Democrats postponed a vote on Wednesday to reauthorize key parts of the federal surveillance program known as FISA, after an 11th hour revolt by Republicans and progressive Democrats.

Democrats have not decided when or if they will take up the bill. The legislation had broad bipartisan support in the Senate, but lost support from GOP lawmakers after sudden resistance from President Donald Trump and the Justice Department.

“We haven’t made that decision,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in an interview late Wednesday as he left Pelosi’s office.

It was clear for much of Wednesday that Democrats lacked the votes, with few, if any, Republicans willing to buck Trump and his veto threat. Without them, the House’s delicate coalition fractured and Democrats found themselves without the support to pass it on their own. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has roughly 100 members, formally opposed the bill, virtually guaranteeing that Democrats would need GOP votes.

………

The latest rupture began over a proposal by Wyden to block the FBI from collecting the web browsing data of Americans. Wyden’s plan failed by a single vote in the Senate, but Lofgren negotiated with House leaders to bring it up for a House vote when the chamber considered the broader bill.

But Lofgren also negotiated a deal with House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff to tweak the language to narrow the restrictions on the FBI, a deal that infuriated Wyden and left him and other progressives calling for the defeat of the measure.

By, “Narrow the restrictions,” they mean, “Emasculate.”

The FBI, and the CIA, and the rest of these three letter organizations have no interest in protecting your civil rights, and they will go to whatever line we set, and cross that line if they think that they can get away with it, but folks like Pelosi and Hoyer don’t care, they just want their money for their PACs.

I Expect the Supreme Court to Reverse

A judge for the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida has ruled that the Florida law requiring that all fines and legal fees be paid off before regaining voting rights is an illegal poll tax.

Of course, it is, that was the explicit intent of Republicans when they voted to gut the constitutional amendment passed by Florida voters.

I’m pretty sure that the Supreme Court is going to reverse when it gets there, because 5 of the 9 are partisan Federalist Society hacks who thinks that it’s fine to use pretty much any pretext to prevent n*****s from voting:

A law in Florida requiring felons to pay legal fees as part of their sentences before regaining the vote is unconstitutional for those unable to pay, or unable to find out how much they owe, a federal judge has ruled.

The 125-page ruling, issued by US district court Judge Robert Hinkle in Tallahassee on Sunday, involves a state law to implement a 2016 ballot measure approved by voters to automatically restore the right to vote for many felons who have completed their sentence.

The Republican-led legislature stipulated that fines and legal fees must be paid as part of the sentence, in addition to serving any prison time.

Hinkle has acknowledged he is unlikely to have the last word in the case, expecting the administration of Republican governor Ron DeSantis to launch an appeal.

………

The judge called the Florida rules a “pay-to-vote system” that were unconstitutional when applied to felons who were otherwise eligible to vote but genuinely unable to pay the required amount.

A further complication was how to set the exact amount in fines and other kinds of legal fees owed by felons seeking the vote. Hinkle said it was unconstitutional to bar any voter whose amount owed “could not be determined with diligence”.

Hinkle ordered the state to require election officials to allow felons to request an advisory opinion on how much they owe, essentially placing the burden on election officials to seek that information from court systems. If there was no response within three weeks, then the applicant should not be barred from registering to vote, the ruling said.

Hinkle said the requirement to pay fines and restitution as ordered in a sentence is constitutional for those who are able to pay if the amount can be determined.

This is a good decision, and it is the right decision, but I do not believe that a profoundly corrupt Supreme Court will support it.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizens

The Senate has voted to allow warrantless collection of your web browsing history.

The US Senate has voted to give law enforcement agencies access to web browsing data without a warrant, dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance powers in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The power grab was led by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell as part of a reauthorization of the Patriot Act, which gives federal agencies broad domestic surveillance powers. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Steve Daines (R-MT) attempted to remove the expanded powers from the bill with a bipartisan amendment.

But in a shock upset, the privacy-preserving amendment fell short by a single vote after several senators who would have voted “Yes” failed to show up to the session, including Bernie Sanders. Nine Democratic senators also voted “No,” causing the amendment to fall short of the 60-vote threshold it needed to pass.

Yes, I am very disappointed that Sanders was not there to support the amendment, and mad as hell at the Democrats who voted against the the amendment to strip this from the bill.

Hopefully, Nancy Pelosi won’t ram it through the House.

Who am I kidding, OF COURSE Nancy Pelosi will ram it through the house.

Clever Hans Speaks*

For as long as people have been driving, cops have been imagining reasons to pull them over and coerce them into “voluntary” searches. The Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision (sort of) put an end to extended stops — the ones that start with a perceived violation that’s dragged out until a drug dog arrives. Unfortunately, that decision only removed part of the equation. The Supreme Court’s Heien decision made it possible for cops to rely entirely on pretext to engage in fishing expeditions by saying cops only had to think they witnessed a traffic violation, rather than actually be accurate about the laws they’re tasked with enforcing.

Cops are still trying to bring drug dogs to routine traffic stops. The Rodriguez decision is generally taken to mean cops just need to be quicker about rustling up a K-9 unit. Cops love drug dogs because they allow cops to perform the warrantless searches they want to perform. The drug dog’s handler can call literally any movement by the dog an “alert,” turning normal dog behavior into “probable cause” for a search. It doesn’t help that the dogs are rewarded for every alert and given no positive reinforcement for failing to find anything interesting.

Courts have historically been willing to cut drug dogs as much slack as they cut their law enforcement officer handlers. Subjective interpretations of anything an animal does to please its master is considered close enough to Fourth Amendment compliance to justify warrantless searches. Every so often, a court will question the reliability of the dog or the intent of its handler, but those are anomalies.

This case, via FourthAmendment.com, is an amazing anomaly. Not only did the court choose to hear from experts on drug dog training and handling, it actually went so far as to call into question the reliability of every drug dog in the state.

………

The defense brought in an expert witness, Dr. Mary Cablik, who has two decades of drug dog training experience working with POST units in Nevada and California. Cablik said the absence of “blind” training is a real problem. If the dog is only tested in areas where the handler knows drugs will be found, the dog carries this knowledge on to the real world and will continue to search for nonexistent drugs until it gives its handler what they want: an “alert.”

………

Utah’s training does not produce reliable drug dogs. Officer Moore’s drug dog is possibly more unreliable than most, but this order makes it clear everyone who’s been subjected to a drug dog sniff should challenge it. The state POST training has produced little more than handy Fourth Amendment circumvention tools for officers to use at will. This court is having none of this and refuses to condone the deployment of dogs that are basically trained to please their handlers, rather than actually detect narcotics.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Dogs, in traffic stops at least, are not intended to detect drugs, they are intended to provide a corrupt pretext for a search.

Dogs are eager to please their handlers, and when the only training that a dog receives, as was the case here, was where the trainer knows what they have to find, it does not train a dog as an impartial detector, it makes the dog into a fraud routine.

This continues, because this is what the police want.

*The Clever Hans Effect, named after a horse that cued into its handler’s subconscious body to create the illusion that it could do complex math.

Today in Evil

Trump and the Republicans want to prevent any sort of accountability for employers who kill their employees through recklessness:

Congressional leaders are girding for a huge fight over the reentry of millions of Americans to the workplace, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) insisting that employers be shielded from liability if their workers contract the coronavirus. He appears to have the backing of top White House officials.

Democratic leaders have declared they will oppose such blanket protections, putting Washington’s power brokers on opposite sides of a major issue that could have sweeping implications for health care and the economy in the coming months. The battle has unleashed a frenzy of lobbying, with major industry groups, technology firms, insurers, manufacturers, labor unions, and plaintiffs lawyers all squaring off.

The Trump administration and Moscow Mitch want to take basic due process rights from regular Americans, and this is exactly how the Democrats should frame this.

Instead, McConnell will steamroll the hapless Chuck Schumer, and incorporate something minor that the Republicans wanted anyway, and Schumer will declare it a victory, because that is how the Democrats work.

More accurately this is how the Democrats play to lose.

Five Down, 45 States to Go

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam just signed a law making election day a holiday and creating an easy path to vote by mail.

Needless to say, making voting easier and more convenient is something that Republicans hate with a passion, they have been practicing aggressive voter suppression since before Reagan was President, but this is a good thing:

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Sunday that he signed a series of new measures into law aimed at expanding access to voting in the commonwealth.

The new legislation will establish Election Day as a holiday, remove the requirement that voters show a photo ID prior to casting a ballot and, expand early voting to be allowed 45 days before an election without a stated reason.

“Voting is a fundamental right, and these new laws strengthen our democracy by making it easier to cast a ballot, not harder,” Northam said in a statement. “No matter who you are or where you live in Virginia, your voice deserves to be heard. I’m proud to sign these bills into law.”

Several states and cities have already made Election Day a civic holiday, including Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky and New York. State offices typically close, though it depends on the state whether employees are entitled to paid time off to vote.

Proponents say making Election Day a holiday could improve voter turnout. But Election Day may not become a federal holiday anytime soon — it’s drawn deep division along party lines.

………

The new legislation also repeals the current Lee-Jackson day holiday which honored Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson as “defenders of causes.” Both men owned slaves and fought to preserve slavery in the US.

Making voting easier AND offering a big f%$# you to the folks who want to lionize Civil War traitors.

Two snaps up.

Well, This is a Relief

The US District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that violating a site’s terms of service is not criminal hacking.

This was a pre-enforcement challenge to the CFAA by researchers who were looking into racial discrimination by websites, but were concerned that these sites would manage to convince a prosecutor to charge them with a felony in response to their discovering embarrassing information.

Given that the general vagueness of the CFAA is a petri dish for prosecutorial abuse, this is a good thing:

A federal court in Washington, DC, has ruled that violating a website’s terms of service isn’t a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America’s primary anti-hacking law. The lawsuit was initiated by a group of academics and journalists with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The plaintiffs wanted to investigate possible racial discrimination in online job markets by creating accounts for fake employers and job seekers. Leading job sites have terms of service prohibiting users from supplying fake information, and the researchers worried that their research could expose them to criminal liability under the CFAA, which makes it a crime to “access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access.”

So in 2016 they sued the federal government, seeking a declaration that this part of the CFAA violated the First Amendment.

But rather than addressing that constitutional issue, Judge John Bates ruled on Friday that the plaintiffs’ proposed research wouldn’t violate the CFAA’s criminal provisions at all. Someone violates the CFAA when they bypass an access restriction like a password. But someone who logs into a website with a valid password doesn’t become a hacker simply by doing something prohibited by a website’s terms of service, the judge concluded.

“Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature,” Bates wrote.

Not Enough Bullets

People being detained at a privately run detention center were told that they would not be given masks unless they signed away all rights to sue.

This is despicable:

Detainees at Otay Mesa Detention Center had been asking for more protection from the COVID-19 pandemic all week, when a shipment of surgical masks arrived at the facility on Friday.

The women of “A pod” would finally be able to ditch their own constructions made from rubber bands, panty liners and cut up shirts for proper masks.

But by that afternoon, the mood quickly changed from excitement to anger, according to Briseida Salazar, a 23-year-old in the unit, which houses immigration detainees.

………

The new surgical masks arrived Friday, but they initially came with conditions, according to Salazar.

Salazar’s account of what happened when the masks arrived is corroborated by a signed declaration from San Diego attorney Anna Hysell, whose client called her immediately after it happened, as well as messages from other attorneys who heard similar stories from their clients.

Before the masks were to be distributed, the unit manager handed the women contracts written in English, telling them they would have to sign in order to get masks.

Most of the women in the unit do not speak English, Salazar said. Having grown up in the United States, she is one of the few who do.

The document, as read over the phone to the Union-Tribune, included a section saying that detainees agree to “hold harmless” CoreCivic and its agents and employees “from any and all claims that I may have related directly to my wearing the face mask.”

When the unit manager began to verbally translate the document into Spanish, one of the bilingual detainees noticed that she skipped the “hold harmless” section in her translation. She pointed that out to the other detainees, and they became angry.

………

The unit manager reiterated that they would not be given masks without signing, Salazar said.

Every person behind this should have been drowned at birth.

The FBI Does Not Care About Your Civil Rights

There is good news and bad news in response to accusations that the FBI abused its authority in getting a FISA warrant in the Carter Page investigation.

The good news is that the FBI engaged in a completely routine investigation in this case.

The bad news is that this every one of the 29 investigation was defective:

A Justice Department audit of the FBI’s use of secret surveillance warrants has found widespread problems with the law enforcement agency’s process for ensuring that facts are backing up the claims made to judges when seeking a warrant.

The finding of broader failings in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program came in a review launched by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz after an earlier inquiry found numerous errors in applications to monitor former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page. In a bid to assess whether the faults in the Page’s surveillance process were an aberration or a chronic problem, Horowitz’s audit team zeroed in on 29 applications for surveillance of U.S. citizens or green-card holders over a five-year period.

Horowitz found an average of 20 errors in each of the applications.

The systemic failures in the FBI’s FISA process are sure to animate allies of President Donald Trump who have claimed that the surveillance tool was weaponized against the president’s campaign in 2016. But the findings also bolster arguments by critics of that claim who have suggested that errors in the Page application were likelier attributable to systemic sloppiness than sinister intentions.

For each of the 29 applications, Horowitz’s team reviewed whether the “Woods procedures” for justifying an application were properly followed.

“We do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy, or that the process is working as it was intended to help achieve the ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications,” Horowitz wrote in “a management advisory” addressed to FBI Director Chris Wray.

It should be noted that I am pretty sure that the FBI considers this is a feature, and not a bug.

Having a compliant court that allows the FBI to get bullsh%$ warrant requests approved was always the goal of the FISA program.

Of Course They Are

Never underestimate the desire of law enforcement to use a crisis to subvert our constitutional rights.

Now they are trying to use the Covid-19 Pandemic to allow for infinite detention without charge:

The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally-protected rights during coronavirus and other emergencies, according to a report by Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan.

………

The DOJ has requested Congress allow any chief judge of a district court to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation,” according to draft language obtained by Politico. This would be applicable to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil processes and proceedings.” They justify this by saying currently judges can pause judicial proceedings in an emergency but that new legislation would allow them to apply it “in a consistent manner.”

But the Constitution grants citizens habeas corpus which gives arrestees the right to appear in front of a judge and ask to be released before trial. Enacting legislation like the DOJ wants would essentially suspend habeas corpus indefinitely until the emergency ended. Further, DOJ asked Congress to suspend the statute of limitations on criminal investigations and civil proceedings during the emergency until a year after it ended.

Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told Politico the measure was “terrifying,” saying, “Not only would it be a violation of [habeas corpus], but it says ‘affecting pre-arrest.’ So that means you could be arrested and never brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. I find it absolutely terrifying. Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government.”

While it’s natural to blame Trump and his Evil Minions for this, the blame needs to be laid at the feet of the existing US State Security Apparatus.

They did the same thing following 911, because they have a wish list of Constitutional atrocities that they have in their back pockets for whatever emergency pops up.

Justice and Transparency

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that police and judges do not have the right to suppress the records of their arrests, which are public information for us mere mortals:

Booking photographs of judges and law enforcement officers who are arrested and any police reports connected with their cases are public records, even if the officials are never arraigned in court, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled Thursday.

In one of two major rulings on the intersection between the public’s right to know and the privacy protections in the state’s Criminal Offender Record and Information Act, the court ruled unanimously that The Boston Globe was entitled to booking photos and reports on police officers arrested on drunken driving charges and the booking photo and report on the arrest of a judge for theft.

“The public has a vital interest in ensuring transparency where the behavior of these public officials allegedly fails to comport with the heightened standards attendant to their office,” Chief Justice Ralph Gants wrote in the 6-0 ruling.

The SJC also, for the first time, made it clear that government agencies must extract data from their electronic records to comply with requests under the state’s public records law. The law allows the government to deny requests if the information sought would force them to create a “new record.”

………

In the court’s decision ordering the release of booking photos and reports, Gants wrote that “where police officers and judges allegedly engage in criminal conduct that does not result in an arraignment … the public has a substantial interest in ascertaining whether the case was not prosecuted because it lacked merit or because these public officials received favorable treatment arising from their position or relationships.”

(emphasis mine)

I wholeheartedly agree.

When the law is structured to grant special rights to members of law enforcement, particularly as it applies to corruption and malfeasance, we are taking a step toward creating a police state.

Closer to home, Maryland should repeal the so called “Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights,” which has exacerbated a culture of corrupt impunity among Maryland law enforcement.