St. Paul cops tase and arrest man attempting to pick up his children from school. They charged him with a variety of bullshit offenses, all of which were related to their absurdly confrontational manner, and all of which were dropped.
This will keep happening until we significantly change how cops are recruited, trained, and disciplined.
Cops generally operate with impunity because they’re almost never indicted, and even if civil actiosn ensue they’re insulated by qualified immunity, but one court has ruled that overly aggressive and reckless tactics invalidate that protection.
A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that Connecticut police cannot claim immunity to quash lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in damages from a botched 2008 raid by a SWAT team that severely injured a homeowner and killed his friend.
The decision by the U.S. 2nd Court of Appeals in New York clears the way for a judge to decide whether five suburban Connecticut police departments violated the constitutional rights of homeowner Ronald Terebesi by using excessive force.
On May 18, 2008, a heavily armed SWAT – or special weapons and tactics – team unit knocked down Terebesi’s door, threw stun flash grenades into his Easton home and fatally shot 33-year-old Gonzalo Guizan of Norfolk as the two men watched television.
There’s more. Click through. As I’ve said a thousand times, shit like this won’t quit happening until there’s real accountability. This is a step in the right direction.
Bigots are losing their fight against same-sex marriage in nearly every court they visit, so that part isn’t news. What’s fun is that in this case, in the 7th Circuit, the jurist is Richard Posner, a brilliant man (and Reagan appointee), and there’s audio you can listen to of him dismantling the attempts by Wisconsin and Indiana to defend their anti-SSM measures.
Enjoy.
Two cops from Bloomfield, NJ’s police department have been indicted, and another plead guilty after a suppressed dashcam video showed them beating a man who was facing years in prison for “resisting arrest” (the DA dropped his charges right away).
The video — shot from a second police car that crossed the highway median and rammed the victim’s vehicle — shows the cops screaming “stop resisting” and “stop going for my gun” while the victim, Marcus Jeter, held his hands in the air and one cop aimed a pistol and another aimed a shotgun at him. The Bloomfield PD’s internal investigations department found no evidence of any wrongdoing by the cops.
How many times does this happen without dashcam footage? How many people are in jail because of it?
Former LA PD: “If y’all would just do what we tell you, we wouldn’t have to beat you, tase you, and shoot you! Easy!”
Obviously, this approach is rife with problems, as has been amply pointed out elsewhere, but the whole pissy little article reminds us of nothing so much as this:
That’s funny and all, but the attitude embodied by this shitstain from LA is clearly the one that governs policing at this level. They operate with impunity, secure in the knowledge that they will never be called to account for their actions. Why else would the cops in Ferguson be removing their badges and nameplates — with the tacit approval of their superiors?
The Toast kind of kills it here.
Someone has caught a 15-foot, 1,000+ alligator in rural Alabama; it may prove to be the biggest one ever caught.
For an American, the answer is simple and obvious: You are EIGHT TIMES more likely to be killed by a law enforcement officer than by a terrorist.
The stats CATO cites are from here, and are themselves issued by the National Safety Council, the National Center for Health Statistics, the Census Bureau, and mortality data from the CDC.
The point of the original post was to point out how fantastically rare acts of terror are, and to helpfully keep people from making stupid choices based on their fear of a very unlikely event.
That doesn’t take away from the stark reality, though, that Officer Friendly is, statistically speaking, much more likely to kill you than Al Qaeda.
Note that these stats are for all Americans, and do not reflect the new rules that apparently allow cops, or people who wish they were cops, to kill unarmed black men with impunity.
Say, you know how international humanitarian efforts, like polio eradication, are generally welcomed anywhere because they’re free of hidden agendas?
Yeah, well, so did the CIA, so they decided to fuck that up for everybody.
Christ.
Columbia is plagued by a herd of feral hippopotamuses descended from the survivors of Pablo Escobar’s private zoo.
A Federal court has ruled that the Kafkaesque No-Fly list is unconstitutional.
More at TechDirt.
…where heavily armed cops could barge into your home and nearly kill your child trying to serve a no-knock search warrent.
Oh. Wait.
The Swat team that burst into the Phonesavanh’s room looking for a drug dealer had deployed a tactic commonly used by the US military in warzones, and increasingly by domestic police forces across the US. They threw an explosive device called a flashbang that is designed to distract and temporarily blind suspects to allow officers to overpower and detain them. The device had landed in Bou Bou’s cot and detonated in the baby’s face.
Stop letting police get away with behaving like military units. Policing is not a war. Cops who do things like this should be vulnerable to severe civil and criminal penalties. Only then will this stop.
(This coverage is, of course, at the Guardian. That’s shameful.)
You know they laugh in the newsroom when they get to start a story like this with “A Florida man…”:
Apparently seeking to exceed my home state in sheer pigheaded ignorance, the state school board in Wyoming has rejected the Next Generation Science Standards:
The science guidelines in question are the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), adopted so far by 11 states and the District of Columbia. The National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science—working with 26 state governments—developed the NGSS to update K-12 science education in schools for the first time since 1998. Essentially the NGSS provides benchmarks for what students should learn in each grade, but leaves decisions about specific textbooks and how to teach the curriculum up to individual districts, schools and educators.
In Wyoming, a committee comprised of 30 science educators spent 18 months studying and comparing the NGSS with existing guidelines in other states, and then unanimously recommended that it be adopted by the State Board of Education. However, in March, the legislature added a footnote to the state budget that prohibited any public spending to implement the NGSS—effectively killing it. Then, a month later, the State Board of Education told the committee of science educators to develop a new set of standards, which would better reflect the values and economic interests of Wyoming.
The chair of the state board opined that he doesn’t accept climate change as a fact, and frets that the standards are biased against fossil fuel development.
Unpack that for a minute: the standards suggest children lean settled science. The science shows that fossil fuels are causing no small amount of harm. They are concerned that learning this information will hurt an industry.
I mean: Damn.
Last night, Mrs Heathen and I watched the episode of Cosmos about Clair Patterson’s work exposing the dangers of lead emissions from gasoline, and how vigorously opposed he was by the oil industry at the time.
The oil goons even had a so-called expert on their payroll who insisted that the levels of lead in the environmental background at the time were completely normal. (Eventually, Patterson prevailed, and lead has been phased out — and, wouldn’t you know it, lead levels have dropped dramatically.)
You’d think they’d learn, but apparently not. You’d think we as a culture would learn, too, not to listen to people who say pollution is no big deal when they stand to make money doing so.
How Corporations became people you can’t sue:
Following the 2011 and 2013 Supreme Court rulings, dozens of other giant corporations—from Comcast and Wells Fargo to Ticketmaster and Dropbox—have secured the same legal immunity. So have companies ranging from airlines, gyms, payday lenders, and nursing homes, which have quietly rewritten the fine print of their contracts with consumers to include a shield from lawsuits and class actions. Meanwhile, businesses including Goldman Sachs, Northrop Grumman, P. F. Chang’s, and Uber have tucked similar clauses into their contracts with workers.
Hastily clicking through terms of service is now all it can take to surrender your rights to these companies. Once you do, your only path for recourse if you’re harmed by any one of them is “mandatory arbitration,” where the arbitrator is often chosen by the corporation you’re challenging, and any revelations about the company’s wrongdoing tend to be kept secret. Rather than band together under the light of the public courtroom, each individual has to work through the darkness of a private tribunal, alone, where arbitrators can interpret laws however they wish. Certain inalienable rights, the Court has ruled, are actually kind of alienable.
WORST SURPRISE EVAR
Writing in The Guardian — which is, apparently, the only newspaper left with any balls — Ladar Levison explains the horrifying and Kafkaesque process by which the greedy, powermad, overreaching Feds forced him to destroy his business.
He was given no real chance to fight the orders, and when he tried to muster a defense the Feds became vindictive. This isn’t justice, or national security. This is abuse of power. It should result in long prison terms, but of course nothing of the sort will happen. The government still wants Snowden to come home and face trial for the “crime” of telling us all what our government is doing in our name; those responsible for the criminally invasive universal surveillance will never face accountability of any kind.
In order to prevent the records from being turned over to the ACLU, it appears US Marshalls have “seized” documents regarding the use of a surveillance tool called Stingray by the Sarasota Police Department.
ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.
“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”
Some judge needs to remind these chuckleheads who they work for.
Still confused? Go watch.
Oh, and, at the end, when he calls folks to action? He had some success.
Michael Kinsley, whom I thought was at one point a journalist, had this to say in his snarky, crappy review of Glenn Greenwald’s book about the Snowden affair:
The question is who decides [what to publish]. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government.
This is a shockingly full-throated endorsement of prior restraint. The government tried this tactic with the Pentagon Papers, and got slapped down pretty hard. More’s the pity, at least according to Kinsley.
There’s no shame in it. Here’s a really great article explaining the whole situation. Make time; the net you save may be your own.
It turns out that, when Britain’s GHCQ went to smash the Guardian’s computers over the Snowden leaks, they targeted specific cards and chips in those machines, and experts are really unsure as to why those components were chosen.
They’d like to deny you unemployment benefits if you’re fired for breaking “behavioral norms” unrelated to work performance or ethics.
On two separate occasions in the 1950s, New Yorker Thomas Fitzpatrick departed from a bar whose hospitality he was enjoying, drove out to New Jersey, “obtained” a small plane, flew it back to Manhattan, and landed it in front of the bar in question.
The first time, it was to win a bet. The second time, two years later, was because someone didn’t believe he’d done it the first time.
This man is a truly an American hero.
We’re totally screwed now. The free, open web will die, first because the FCC has no balls, and then because bullshit like proprietary, legally protected DRM will be on everyone’s desktop.
Recall what Cory Doctorow has said before: DRM is the leading edge of a war on general computing, which won’t end well for anyone.
Find out what happens when some New York-based Satanists head down to the Magnolia state to posthumously convert Fred Phelps’ dead mother to lesbianism!
Hey, if it “works” for Mormons…
(H/T: R.W.S.)
His interview with former NSA head Keith Alexander is completely fucking spot on, and nails that slippery bastard in a sly but devastating way.
The milquetoast, lapdog FCC has decided against network neutrality, and we’re all going to suffer for it. Read Tim Wu’s excellent analysis for more, but do NOT overlook that the person doing a big chunk of the fucking us right now lives at 1600 Pennsylvania; Obama campaigned on neutrality, and has completely failed to deliver.
From Wu’s piece in the New Yorker:
In 2007, at a public forum at Coe College, in Iowa, Presidential candidate Barack Obama was asked about net neutrality. Specifically, “Would you make it a priority in your first year of office to reinstate net neutrality as the law of the land? And would you pledge to only appoint F.C.C. commissioners that support open Internet principles like net neutrality?”
“The answer is yes,” Obama replied. “I am a strong supporter of net neutrality.” Explaining, he said, “What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says that the servers and the various portals through which you’re getting information over the Internet should be able to be gatekeepers and to charge different rates to different Web sites…. And that I think destroys one of the best things about the Internet—which is that there is this incredible equality there.”
If reports in the Wall Street Journal are correct, Obama’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Thomas Wheeler, has proposed a new rule that is an explicit and blatant violation of this promise. In fact, it permits and encourages exactly what Obama warned against: broadband carriers acting as gatekeepers and charging Web sites a payola payment to reach customers through a “fast lane.”
Also, don’t get taken in by the language being used. As Marco points out, the whole discussion of “fast lanes” frames the issue incorrectly. They’re not going to build anything new, and haven’t for years (US customers pay more for broadband, and get lower speeds, than virtually anywhere else in the industrialized world). Your connection isn’t going to get better. This is all about carriers being able to charge providers again for traffic that’s already been paid for — and you can bet your ass it’ll also eventually include blocking or slowing traffic that competes with offerings of their own. This is why we hear so much about NetFlix in these conversations: it’s a direct competitor to Comcast and AT&T and Verizon, all of which would prefer you continue to pay through the nose for traditional cable packages and avoid these newfangled “Internet shows.”
This is what happens, too, in a political environment where any regulation is treated as creeping socialism by the know-nothing right. The noise chamber effect prevents just and proper things from taking hold.
Instead of working with firms like Lyft and Uber to complement the existing transit infrastructure, some cities — including Houston, goddammit — are running sting operations designed to fine and punish them, much to the general pleasure of incumbent suck-ass operators like YellowCab.
Turns out, if you’re a US citizen, and you get murdered in a drone strike, the courts will not give your surviving family any relief.
So much for checks and balances.
I supposed it’s at least nominally good news that another judge has insisted that the Administration actually disclose the legal doctrine they’re using to justify this behavior, which up to now had been “classified,” which is a position best described as Orwellian.
The TurboTax maker has actively lobbied to keep tax rules from getting any simpler.
So a dude peed in a reservoir in Portland, and in response they’re going to drain 38 million gallons of water and refill it.
It’s an outdoor reservoir. There are obviously purification steps between it and the taps of the good people of Portlandia. How much bird shit do you think goes in it on any given day?
(Via Schneier, whom you oughta be reading every day anyway.)
Corporations are becoming increasingly aggressive about forcing anyone dealing with them in even the slightest way to agree, even accidentally, to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute instead of the court system. This is because arbitration almost always finds in favor of corporations, naturally.
Apparently, you can now get trapped in such a clause by simply “liking” something on Facebook.
If they did, as has been pointed out, they would’ve reported the Heartbleed bug instead of ruthlessly exploiting it.
An Idaho man was pulled over, searched, and illegally detained for the crime of “driving while having a Colorado license plate.”
There is, thank goodness, a lawsuit. The Idaho trooper should be held personally liable, but there’s no way that will happen. Should the plaintiff prevail, the people of Idaho will pay for this jackhole’s behavior, and he’ll probably get a medal.
Ars Technica has a great retrospective of the 7+ year odysessy of Rahinah Ibrahim and the super-sekrit government no-fly list.
Go read it. Here’s a summary, in case you forgot:
Rahinah Ibrahim was admitted to the US on a student visa to study at Stanford’s graduate school in 2000. Five years later, when attempting to fly from San Francisco to Hawaii, she was denied entry onto the plane, was handcuffed—despite being wheelchair-bound at the time—and was placed in a holding cell, detained for two hours, and then questioned. During questioning, a police officer attempted to remove her hijab. Eventually, she was released and told that her name had been stricken from the no-fly list.
After flying back to Hawaii and then to Malaysia a few days later, her student visa was revoked, and she was denied reentry into the US. That was the beginning of a nine-year fight over whether she could travel back to the US, which Ibrahim said she considered her “second home.”
As explained in Alsup’s opinion, **the whole dispute stemmed from an errant check placed on a form filled out by FBI agent Kevin Kelly. At trial, Agent Kelly admitted his mistake, and government lawyers actually conceded that Ibrahim doesn’t pose a threat to national security and never has. ** The mistake was not a small thing, Alsup wrote.
At long last, the government has conceded that plaintiff poses no threat to air safety or national security and should never have been placed on the no-fly list. She got there by human error within the FBI… the FBI agent filled out the nomination form in a way exactly opposite from the instructions on the form, a bureaucratic analogy to a surgeon amputating the wrong digit—human error, yes, but of considerable consequence. Much of the litigation took place even while Ibrahim was unable to get much information about the government’s case against her. In December, Alsup denied Ibrahim’s request to see the classified evidence submitted by the government in its defense against her lawsuit.
That they went to war over this case, and fought for 7 years, when they knew Ibrahim was not a threat means that someone deserves to lose their job or worse. That’s absurd, ridiculous, and borderline criminal. These people are the enemy of anyone who values the principles which we usually insist form the foundation of our country.
“U. of Alabama Greeks Win Fight For Their Right To Be Racist Dicks.”
It was ever thus.
I am not surprised that it’s still this way; it certainly was when I was in school there. But — and this is important — I didn’t really parse the University itself as a particularly racist place outside of the Greeks when I was there.
For years I would’ve assumed that this meant it wasn’t, at least by my own baselines (which I willingly admit are probably warped by my Magnolia State origins). But with a few more years under my belt I realize that I have no fucking idea if the University was a particularly racist place, at least vs its surroundings, because I have always been an upper-middle-class white guy with traditional upper-middle-class white guy obliviousness about my own privilege.
So I don’t really know. I’d like to think it’s just the greeks, and in particular those unreconstructed motherfuckers in KA, who used to throw a party every year commemorating the Lost Cause wherein they’d all dress in antebellum clothes and Confederate uniforms, I shit you not. (Lest you think this was just something back when I was in school, the practice continued until 2009.) But I don’t. My bullshit alert, though, chimes loud at attempts to make this just a Greek problem. And the fact that the Greek system enjoys institutional sanction at the University makes it a University problem.
It sure would be interesting, though, to have some more information — in particular about the racial diversity of greek systems (esp. in the older, traditionally white greek organizations) at other major universities. How diverse is Sigma Alpha Epsilon at Ohio State? How about Chi Omega at USC?
Last week, IBM released a statement intended to quell any complaints about how they may have been sharing customer data with the NSA.
The statement, at first pass, seems reasonable — until someone like Schneier with a security mindset reads it.
In Turkey, they’ve blocked Twitter.
So people are spray-painting alternate DNS servers on buildings to help others get around the block.
Time’s obit for Fred Phelps begins:
Fred Phelps, a colossal jerk, died Thursday in Topeka, Kansas, at 84, after a long life in which even his few admirable achievements (a series of civil rights cases that he filed as an attorney) stemmed from a deeply disagreeable personality (he loved to pick fights with his neighbors). He was the kind of person no one wanted to be around: a lawyer disbarred by his colleagues, a preacher disowned by every denomination he ever espoused, a father rejected by his children—even, in the end, the children who emulate his worst characteristics.
The Border Patrol got so brazen about deliberately creating dangerous situations to justify shooting at people that it has been given new guidelines on the use of force.
Without network neutrality, it may well be. N.B. that Netflix is already paying Comcast for the privilege of not being throttled. This should alarm you.
The communications networks have been built largely by government-protected monopolies, but those monopolies are now trying to extract every single dime from their customers they can. We have to stop this. The FCC needs to treat them as common carriers, and we need to realize that the net is a basic utility, like water or power.
If we don’t fix this, then the net as we’ve enjoyed it for the last 15 years is going to die.
The NSA is a threat to our national security.
Go. Read. Schneier knows what he’s talking about.
TechDirt gives the Feds both barrels over the appalling case of Rahinah Ibrahim:
Our government lies.
This is an obvious statement but it needs to be put out there in black and white. We, the people, are represented and “protected” by a government that actively lies to its constituents to cover up its mistakes. The recent case of Rahinah Ibrahim, who was accidentally placed on the government’s “no fly” list and only removed after a long legal battle, illustrates this truth about our government to a sickening degree.
Instead of owning up to the mistake, our government argued for the better part of a decade that to even acknowledge that a no-fly list existed would expose “state secrets” and that they therefore couldn’t possibly even confirm or deny any such list, so obviously discussing this person’s status, or trying to ensure that the status was correctly determined, was impossible.
For example, from James Clapper this year, quoted in the TechDirt article:
“My assertion of the state secret and statutory privileges in this case precludes defendant or any other agency from making any response, including through document production or deposition testimony, that would serve to disclose classified information regarding plaintiff or any other individual; the sources, methods, and means by which classified information is collected; and information which would confirm or deny whether information regarding plaintiff or any other individual is in NCTC’s TIDE database.” — James Clapper, director of national intelligence, April 23, 2013.
What. The. Fuck. Techdirt again:
Eric Holder’s deferral to “state secrets” in 2013 was based on the belief that a single disclosure, especially if it prompted more, would lead to terrorists gaming the no-fly list. John Tyler, then-attorney for the DOJ, claimed in 2006 that Ibrahim’s complaint was so inextricably intertwined with the utility of the “no fly” list that her case should be dismissed.
According to these statements, being mistakenly placed on the “no fly” list is just something those wrongly blacklisted will have to deal with. These citizens (and other foreigners) just need to resign themselves to the fact that they won’t be boarding planes, possibly for the rest of their lives. Once you’re on the list, you’re on it. The list is apparently so crucial to national security that even admitting it may have blacklisted someone accidentally would turn the nation’s airports into terrorist playgrounds.
A mistake was made made, but rather than looking for a solution, the government grabbed its “state secret” broom and swept it under the “neither confirm nor deny” rug.
The government cannot be so beholden to its own inflated terrorism fears that it willingly punishes a person for nearly a decade because of a paperwork error. There’s plenty of middle ground between keeping the country safe and screwing someone over because an agent couldn’t follow a form’s instructions.
Go read the whole thing.
Remember when the FBI claimed it didn’t have to answer Ryan Shapiro’s FOIA requests because he might learn something as a consequence of their hilariously inconsistent and irrational redaction?
Yeah, they’re doing it again. This time, they heavily redacted a letter released to some privacy hawks in Congress despite the fact that one of them had already been released in full previously. But go read the whole link; it’d be hilarious if it weren’t, you know, the top law enforcement body in the country.
You’d think with a headline like that, I must be taking stuff out of context just for amusement’s sake, right?
Yeah, not so much.
“How mass surveillance, secret courts, confirmation bias, and the FBI can ruin your life.”
You know what fixes this? Transparency, oversight, and personal liability for those who overstep.