Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on March 23, 2008, 06:18:08 PM
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...7/nasbo217.xml
Quote:
DNA database plans for children who 'could become criminals'
By Simon Johnson
Last Updated: 2:36am GMT 18/03/2008
Primary school children should be put on the national DNA database if their
behaviour suggests they will become criminals, a senior Scotland Yard
expert said yesterday.
Ed Balls plans 'baby Asbos' for 10-year olds
Gary Pugh, the director of forensic science and the new DNA spokesman
for the Association of Chief Police Officers, called for a debate on the
measures required to identify future offenders.
He said: "If we have a primary means of identifying people before they
offend, then in the long term the benefits of targeting younger people are
extremely large.
"We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to
society."
But critics said this was a step towards a police state that would risk
stigmatising youngsters who had yet to commit a criminal act.
The details of more than 4.5 million people, including about 150,000
children under the age of 16, are held on the Government's database,
making it the largest system of its kind in the world.
Last week it emerged that the number of 10 to 18-year-olds placed on the
database after being arrested will have reached about 1.5 million this time
next year.
Police in England and Wales need parental consent to take a DNA sample
from children under 10, the age of criminal responsibility.
Children in Scotland can be charged with an offence at eight, but police
cannot take DNA if they are younger.
Julia Margo, from the Institute for Public Policy Research who wrote a
recent report on the issue, agreed that it was possible to identify risk
factors in children aged five to seven. But she said that placing young
children on a database risked stigmatising them.
Chris Davis, of the National Primary Headteachers' Association, said Mr
Pugh's suggestion could be viewed "as a step towards a police state."
He added: "It is condemning them at a very young age to something they
have not yet done. To label children at that stage and put them on a
register is going too far."
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Government spies could scan every call, text and email
Ministers are considering a £12 billion plan to monitor the e-mail, telephone and internet browsing records of every person in Britain.
By Nick Allen
Last Updated: 11:47PM BST 05 Oct 2008
Comments 122 | Comment on this article
The huge eavesdropping programme would involve the creation of a mammoth central computer database to store hundreds of billions of individual pieces of communications traffic.
Supporters say it would become one of the security services' most comprehensive tools in the fight against terrorism but critics described it as "sinister".
MI5 currently has to apply to the Home Secretary for warrants to intercept specific email and website traffic but, under the new plan, internet and mobile phone networks could be monitored live by GCHQ, the Government listening post.
The Home Office said no decision had been taken but security officials claim live monitoring is necessary to pick up terrorist plots.
It would allow them to capture records like chat room discussions on password-protected Islamic extremist websites.
The annual number of phone calls and other electronic communications in the UK is predicted to nearly double from 230 billion in 2006 to 450 billion by 2016.
Last year 57 billion text messages, or 1,800 a second, were sent. That rose from one billion in 1999.
The number of broadband internet connections rose from 330,000 in 2001 to 18 million last year. Three billion e-mails are sent every day, or 35,000 every second.
One of the spurs for a central database is a concern over how that electronic communications data is currently stored by hundreds of different internet service providers and private telephone companies.
Records may only be held for limited periods of time and are then lost which makes it impossible for police and the security services to establishing historical links, or so-called "friendship trees", between terrorists.
If all communications information was centrally stored then links could be made between terrorist cells and other sympathisers could be identified.
The telephone and internet companies are currently required to give records of calls or internet use to law enforcement agencies if a senior officer authorises that it is needed for an inquiry.
Last year there were more than half a million such requests.
The cost of monitoring everything, and keeping it on a central database, has been estimated at £12 billion and would dwarf the proposed cost of the identity cards programme.
Critics also claim it would be virtually impossible to keep such a vast system secure and free from abuse by law enforcement agencies.
Shadow home secretary Dominic Grieve said: "It would mark a substantial shift in the powers of the state to obtain information on individuals.
"Given the Government's poor record on protecting data, and seeing how significant an increase in power this would be, we need to have a national debate and the Government would have to justify its need."
The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, has already called for a public debate about Government proposals for the state to retain people's internet and phone records.
A spokesman for the commissioner said: "He warned that it is likely that such a scheme would be a step too far for the British way of life. Proposals that threaten such intrusion into people's lives must be properly debated."
Richard Clayton, a security expert at Cambridge University, said the proposal would mean installing thousands of probes in telephone and computer networks which would re-route data to the central database.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/3140207/Government-spies-could-scan-every-call-text-and-email.html
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Isn't there already a thread established?
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I dunno, just grabbed what popped up first in search.
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There may be a privacy thread where this could have fit, but this thread seems fine to me so lets carry on here.
What do we think of this gentlemen?
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Well, these are both taking place in the UK. Creating a DNA registry for children that haven't committed a criminal offense seems Orwellian and probably unproductive. As far as the datamining, I find it less bothersome.
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I'd be surprised if the NSA didn't have similar capabilities, albeit one that are supposed to be focused outside our shores, and I'd guess that all this data creates such a cacophony that most "mining" ends up in the sluice chute. With that said, the thing that scares the bejesus out of me is that the infrastructure is likely being assembled that will allow everyone's electronic and even biometric traces to be collated and analyzed. Think a government could get into quite a bit of mischief with that kind of power.
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The vast majority of data collection/mining in the US takes place in the private sector, not the public. Unless you are the target of a serious criminal investigation, private industry knows much more about you than Uncle Sam.
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I think BBG is right to raise the question of where this may well be headed.
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October 7, 2008 9:30 AM PDT
Government report: Data mining doesn't work well
Posted by Declan McCullagh 14 comments
The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn't really work.
A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism "is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts." Inevitable false positives will result in "ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses" being incorrectly flagged as suspects.
The whopping 352-page report, called "Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists," amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.
But the ambition of the report's authors is far broader than just revisiting the problems of the TIA program and its successors. Instead, they aim to produce a scholarly evaluation of the current technologies that exist for data mining, their effectiveness, and how government agencies should use them to limit false positives--of the sort that can result in situations like heavily-armed SWAT teams raiding someone's home and shooting their dogs based on the false belief that they were part of a drug ring.
The report was written by a committee whose members include William Perry, a professor at Stanford University; Charles Vest, the former president of MIT; W. Earl Boebert, a retired senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories; Cynthia Dwork of Microsoft Research; R. Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle's police chief; and Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google.
They admit that far more Americans live their lives online, using everything from VoIP phones to Facebook to RFID tags in automobiles, than a decade ago, and the databases created by those activities are tempting targets for federal agencies. And they draw a distinction between subject-based data mining (starting with one individual and looking for connections) compared with pattern-based data mining (looking for anomalous activities that could show illegal activities).
But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do--perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24--can't work. "If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so."
A summary of the recommendations:
* U.S. government agencies should be required to follow a systematic process to evaluate the effectiveness, lawfulness, and consistency with U.S. values of every information-based program, whether classified or unclassified, for detecting and countering terrorists before it can be deployed, and periodically thereafter.
* Periodically after a program has been operationally deployed, and in particular before a program enters a new phase in its life cycle, policy makers should (carefully review) the program before allowing it to continue operations or to proceed to the next phase.
* To protect the privacy of innocent people, the research and development of any information-based counterterrorism program should be conducted with synthetic population data... At all stages of a phased deployment, data about individuals should be rigorously subjected to the full safeguards of the framework.
* Any information-based counterterrorism program of the U.S. government should be subjected to robust, independent oversight of the operations of that program, a part of which would entail a practice of using the same data mining technologies to "mine the miners and track the trackers."
* Counterterrorism programs should provide meaningful redress to any individuals inappropriately harmed by their operation.
* The U.S. government should periodically review the nation's laws, policies, and procedures that protect individuals' private information for relevance and effectiveness in light of changing technologies and circumstances. In particular, Congress should re-examine existing law to consider how privacy should be protected in the context of information-based programs (e.g., data mining) for counterterrorism.
By itself, of course, this is merely a report with non-binding recommendations that Congress and the executive branch could ignore. But NRC reports are not radical treatises written by an advocacy group; they tend to represent a working consensus of technologists and lawyers.
The great encryption debate of the 1990s was one example. The NRC's so-called CRISIS report on encryption in 1996 concluded export controls--that treated software like Web browsers and PGP as munitions--were a failure and should be relaxed. That eventually happened two years later.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10059987-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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This is a perfect example of an editorial pretending to be a news article. The bias is obvious.
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Short of datamining, give me a better way of detecting individual terrorists, cells within the US BEFORE they strike..
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I dunno, I haven't read the entire 352 page report so I can't state categorically that the shorter piece is accurate, but assuming it is, any embedded editorial lies in the long piece and not the synopsis.
As to your second point, I have no problem with the government narrowly collating information about suspected terrorists so long as they abide by the laws and principles that make this country worth living in in the first place. Unfortunately I suspect the ability to collect and collate data is growing far more quickly than is the case law that would help make sure it's applied in a constitutional matter. I don't think there is any reason to assume the federal government would handle vast amounts of personal data any better than it's handled the banking crisis, ethanol and other farm subsidies, second amendment interpretation, or any number of other items on an endless list.
Banging on peoples feet with a ballpeen hammer may be a really swell way of eliciting information, but I think doing so would turn us into what we are fighting. I expect some mullahs dream of a system that lets them track in minute detail a person's adherence to the one true faith; it scares me that we appear to be developing such a system as it has the potential of turning us into the thing we like least.
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I dunno, I haven't read the entire 352 page report so I can't state categorically that the shorter piece is accurate, but assuming it is, any embedded editorial lies in the long piece and not the synopsis.
**Here is the first clue: "Datamining doesn't work well" Work well as compared to what? Here is your task, find the terrorists hidden amongst 300 million people in the US before they kill innocents your are sworn to protect.**
As to your second point, I have no problem with the government narrowly collating information about suspected terrorists so long as they abide by the laws and principles that make this country worth living in in the first place.
**What laws and principles are you alleging that have been violated? How many mass casualty attacks need to take place before you factor that into your quality of life estimates?**
Unfortunately I suspect the ability to collect and collate data is growing far more quickly than is the case law that would help make sure it's applied in a constitutional matter. I don't think there is any reason to assume the federal government would handle vast amounts of personal data any better than it's handled the banking crisis, ethanol and other farm subsidies, second amendment interpretation, or any number of other items on an endless list.
**Give me a better option.**
Banging on peoples feet with a ballpeen hammer may be a really swell way of eliciting information, but I think doing so would turn us into what we are fighting. I expect some mullahs dream of a system that lets them track in minute detail a person's adherence to the one true faith; it scares me that we appear to be developing such a system as it has the potential of turning us into the thing we like least.
**Why do the same emotional arguments that are scoffed at when applied to guns are then embraced wholeheartedly when applied to government? Information technology, like firearms are just tools. It's the user of the tool that brings the element of morality to the equation. A scalpel is just a tool, it can save lives in the hands of medical professionals or be used by killers and rapists to commit crimes. Bemoaning newer, sharper scalpels because the potential for misuse doesn't allow for a realistic examination of violent crime and potential solutions to the problem.**
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Geez, dude, chill.
I dunno, I haven't read the entire 352 page report so I can't state categorically that the shorter piece is accurate, but assuming it is, any embedded editorial lies in the long piece and not the synopsis.
**Here is the first clue: "Datamining doesn't work well" Work well as compared to what? Here is your task, find the terrorists hidden amongst 300 million people in the US before they kill innocents your are sworn to protect.**
Your original point was that the the original piece was an editorial. I replied that it appeared to be an accurate synopsis of a much longer report. Rather than responding to the distinction, you are demanding that I defend the 352 pages I've already stated I didn't read. If you think there are false statements in the synopsis or the report, by all means point them out; I'm certainly not claiming it's truth brought down from on high. But, before this piece, I've seen very little empirical study regarding the efficacy of data-mining, and hence when a comprehensive report is published I feel it's worth sharing.
As to your second point, I have no problem with the government narrowly collating information about suspected terrorists so long as they abide by the laws and principles that make this country worth living in in the first place.
**What laws and principles are you alleging that have been violated? How many mass casualty attacks need to take place before you factor that into your quality of life estimates?**
Dude, I merely posted an interesting piece. If you need a list of laws sundry governmental organizations have violated, get on google and have at it. "Ruby Ridge" might be a good initial search term. If our esteemed global moderator doesn't want pieces posted unless all tangents are also fully addressed he can say so. It appears your argument is that we must behave like autocrats lest lotsa people die. My response, to which you didn't speak, is that doing so makes us what we battle.
Unfortunately I suspect the ability to collect and collate data is growing far more quickly than is the case law that would help make sure it's applied in a constitutional matter. I don't think there is any reason to assume the federal government would handle vast amounts of personal data any better than it's handled the banking crisis, ethanol and other farm subsidies, second amendment interpretation, or any number of other items on an endless list.
**Give me a better option.**
I get a lot of grief from members of political parties because I refuse to claim an affiliation. "You can't effect change without belonging to a party within which you can work to achieve that change," seems to be the headset. Balderdash say I. There are principles that can be fought for without affiliation, and indeed I think both major parties have so prostituted themselves that there is value in sitting on the side and yelling at both to pay attention to the founding principles of this country.
Similarly, I'm not much swayed by arguments that say "provide a technique better than the ballpeen hammer or STFU." Even if the hammer is the only tool, I think there is value in making sure it is used as little as possible, stowed sooner rather than later, and that the principles that make us different from our enemy are kept in mind as any tool is wielded.
BTW, if dousing rods were the best means known for finding water, would you be arguing that we should all be walking around with forked sticks?
Banging on peoples feet with a ballpeen hammer may be a really swell way of eliciting information, but I think doing so would turn us into what we are fighting. I expect some mullahs dream of a system that lets them track in minute detail a person's adherence to the one true faith; it scares me that we appear to be developing such a system as it has the potential of turning us into the thing we like least.
**Why do the same emotional arguments that are scoffed at when applied to guns are then embraced wholeheartedly when applied to government? Information technology, like firearms are just tools. It's the user of the tool that brings the element of morality to the equation. A scalpel is just a tool, it can save lives in the hands of medical professionals or be used by killers and rapists to commit crimes. Bemoaning newer, sharper scalpels because the potential for misuse doesn't allow for a realistic examination of violent crime and potential solutions to the problem.**
Exactly. And here arrives an empiric examination of a new tool's utility, and we are supposed to dismiss it out of hand because it doesn't concur with your conclusions. If the tool works without rending asunder our founding principles, by all means use it. But not even being allowed to measure and discuss a tool's appropriate use because it offends your sensibilities is silly. Our government is predicated on principles of checks and balances. My guess is that data mining capabilities are progressing at a faster rate than the checks against misuse are. You don't have to be a flaming ACLU member to express the hope that our shiny new tools don't do more harm than good.
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I think both major parties have so prostituted themselves that there is value in sitting on the side and yelling at both to pay attention to the founding principles of this country
Makes me happy to know I'm not the only one to think this way.
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This is a perfect example of an editorial pretending to be a news article. The bias is obvious.
GM isn't this sort of like calling the kettle black?
You quote editorials all the same that are pretending (and not very well) to be news articles.
And most of them are terribly biased. This one seems to have some basis of fact and truth.
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This is a perfect example of an editorial pretending to be a news article. The bias is obvious.
GM isn't this sort of like calling the kettle black?
You quote editorials all the same that are pretending (and not very well) to be news articles.
And most of them are terribly biased. This one seems to have some basis of fact and truth.
I think my positions are very clear. I have positions and I advocate those and don't pretend to be impartial.
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Geez, dude, chill.
I dunno, I haven't read the entire 352 page report so I can't state categorically that the shorter piece is accurate, but assuming it is, any embedded editorial lies in the long piece and not the synopsis.
**Here is the first clue: "Datamining doesn't work well" Work well as compared to what? Here is your task, find the terrorists hidden amongst 300 million people in the US before they kill innocents your are sworn to protect.**
Your original point was that the the original piece was an editorial. I replied that it appeared to be an accurate synopsis of a much longer report. Rather than responding to the distinction, you are demanding that I defend the 352 pages I've already stated I didn't read. If you think there are false statements in the synopsis or the report, by all means point them out; I'm certainly not claiming it's truth brought down from on high. But, before this piece, I've seen very little empirical study regarding the efficacy of data-mining, and hence when a comprehensive report is published I feel it's worth sharing.
****Again, efficacy as compared to what? Datamining isn't a silver bullet. There is no magical software that will give you a neat list of al qaeda operatives, but again it's something rather than just waiting to process massive crime scenes.*****
As to your second point, I have no problem with the government narrowly collating information about suspected terrorists so long as they abide by the laws and principles that make this country worth living in in the first place.
**What laws and principles are you alleging that have been violated? How many mass casualty attacks need to take place before you factor that into your quality of life estimates?**
Dude, I merely posted an interesting piece. If you need a list of laws sundry governmental organizations have violated, get on google and have at it. "Ruby Ridge" might be a good initial search term. If our esteemed global moderator doesn't want pieces posted unless all tangents are also fully addressed he can say so. It appears your argument is that we must behave like autocrats lest lotsa people die. My response, to which you didn't speak, is that doing so makes us what we battle.
****Really? Preventing terrorist attacks makes us just as bad as al qaeda? Ya think so?****
Unfortunately I suspect the ability to collect and collate data is growing far more quickly than is the case law that would help make sure it's applied in a constitutional matter. I don't think there is any reason to assume the federal government would handle vast amounts of personal data any better than it's handled the banking crisis, ethanol and other farm subsidies, second amendment interpretation, or any number of other items on an endless list.
**Give me a better option.**
I get a lot of grief from members of political parties because I refuse to claim an affiliation. "You can't effect change without belonging to a party within which you can work to achieve that change," seems to be the headset. Balderdash say I. There are principles that can be fought for without affiliation, and indeed I think both major parties have so prostituted themselves that there is value in sitting on the side and yelling at both to pay attention to the founding principles of this country.
Similarly, I'm not much swayed by arguments that say "provide a technique better than the ballpeen hammer or STFU." Even if the hammer is the only tool, I think there is value in making sure it is used as little as possible, stowed sooner rather than later, and that the principles that make us different from our enemy are kept in mind as any tool is wielded.
BTW, if dousing rods were the best means known for finding water, would you be arguing that we should all be walking around with forked sticks?
****Rather than dying of thirst, sure.****
Banging on peoples feet with a ballpeen hammer may be a really swell way of eliciting information, but I think doing so would turn us into what we are fighting. I expect some mullahs dream of a system that lets them track in minute detail a person's adherence to the one true faith; it scares me that we appear to be developing such a system as it has the potential of turning us into the thing we like least.
**Why do the same emotional arguments that are scoffed at when applied to guns are then embraced wholeheartedly when applied to government? Information technology, like firearms are just tools. It's the user of the tool that brings the element of morality to the equation. A scalpel is just a tool, it can save lives in the hands of medical professionals or be used by killers and rapists to commit crimes. Bemoaning newer, sharper scalpels because the potential for misuse doesn't allow for a realistic examination of violent crime and potential solutions to the problem.**
Exactly. And here arrives an empiric examination of a new tool's utility, and we are supposed to dismiss it out of hand because it doesn't concur with your conclusions. If the tool works without rending asunder our founding principles, by all means use it. But not even being allowed to measure and discuss a tool's appropriate use because it offends your sensibilities is silly. Our government is predicated on principles of checks and balances. My guess is that data mining capabilities are progressing at a faster rate than the checks against misuse are. You don't have to be a flaming ACLU member to express the hope that our shiny new tools don't do more harm than good.
****Datamining is nothing more than sorting through data, most of which was voluntarily submitted to private entities, looking for patterns that might be investigative leads. Unless you have very interesting associations with people doing bad things, Experian, Transunion and Equifax know much more about you than any local, state or federal entity does. It's marketers, not law enforcement that tracks your purchases, likes and dislikes. I subscribe to gun magazines, bingo I get junk mail from gun related business. I subscribed to the Atlantic and got marketing from the ACLU. Does that make me some sort of oppressed victim because my information was sold?
Law enforcement can do as little or as much as the public wants. Want policing to be purely reactive, fine. The next time there is a giant smoking hole in the midst of an American city, just take comfort knowing that no governmental entity looked through anyone's marketing data.****
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http://www.rgrossman.com/dm.htm
Data Mining FAQ
Question: What is data mining?
Data mining is the semi-automatic extraction of patterns, changes, associations, anomalies, and other statistically significant structures from large data sets.
Question: Why is data mining important?
There is more and more digital data being collected, processed, managed and archived every day. Algorithms, software tools, and systems to mine it are critical to a wide variety of problems in business, science, national defense, engineering, and health care.
Question: What are some commerical success stories in data mining?
Data mining has been applied successfully in a number of different fields, including: a) for detecting credit card fraud by HNC, which was recently acquired by FICO; b) in credit card acquisition and risk management by American Express; and c) for product recommendations by Amazon.
Question: What are the historical roots of data mining?
From a business perspective, data mining's roots are in direct marketing and financial services which have used statistical modeling for at least the past two decades. From a technical perspective, data mining is beginning to emerge as a separate discipline with roots in a) statistics, b) machine learning, c) databases, and d) high performance computing.
Q. What are some of the different techniques used in data mining?
There are several different types of data mining, including:
Predictive models. These types of models predict how likely an event is. Usually, the higher a score, the more likely the event is. For example, how likely a credit card transaction is to be fraudulent, or how likely an airline passenger is to be a terrorist, or how likely a company is to go bankrupt.
Summary models. These models summarize data. For example, a cluster model can be used to divide credit card transactions or airline passengers into different groups depending upon their characteristics.
Network models. These types of models uncover certain structures in data represented by nodes and links. For example, a credit card fraud ring may surreptitiously collect credit card numbers at a pawn shop and then use them for online computer purchases. Here the nodes are consumers and merchants and the links are credit card transactions. Similarly a network model for a terrorist cell might use nodes representing individuals and links representing meetings.
Association models. Sometimes certain events occur frequently together. For example, purchases of certain items, such as beer and pretzels, or a sequence of events associated with component failure. Association models are used to find and characterize these co-occurrences.
Q. What are the major steps in data mining?
Data cleaning. The first and most challenging step is to clean and to prepare the data for data mining and statistical modeling. This is usually the most challenging step.
Data mart. The next step is to create a data mart containing the cleaned and prepared data.
Derived attributes. It is rare for a model to built using only the attributes present in the cleaned data; rather, additional attributes called derived attributes are usually defined. As a single example, a stock on the S&P 500 has a price and an earnings associated with it, but the ratio of the price divided by the earnings is more important for many applications than either single attribute considered by itself. The construction of the derived and data attributes from the raw data is sometimes called shaping the data. Standards, such as the Data Extraction and Transformation Markup Language (DXML), are beginning to emerge for defining the common data shaping operations needed in data mining.
Modeling. Once the data is prepared and data mart is created, one or more statistical or data mining models are built. Today, statistical and data mining models can be described in an application and platform independent XML interchange format called the Predictive Model Markup Language or PMML.
Post-processing. It is common to normalize the outputs of data mining models and to apply business rules to the inputs and the outputs of the models. This is to ensure that the scores and other outputs of the models are consistent with the over all business processes the models are supporting.
Deployment. Once a statistical or data mining model has been produced by the steps above, the next phase begins of deploying the model in operational systems. Deployment usually consists of three different activities. First, data is scored using the statistical or data mining model produced on a periodic basis, either daily, weekly or monthly, or perhaps on a real time, or event driven basis. Second, these scores are deployed into operational systems and also used as the basis for various reports. Third, on a periodic basis, say monthly, a new model is built and compared to the existing model. If required, the old model is replaced by the new model.
Q. What are the differences between predictive models, business rules, and score cards?
Predictive models use historical data to predict future events, for example the likelihood that a credit card transaction is fraudulent or that an airline passenger is likely to commit a terrorist act. Business rules ensure that business processes follow agreed upon procedures. For example, business procedures may dictate that a predictive model can use only the first three digits of a zip code not all five digits. Score cards check certain conditions, and for example, and if these conditions are met, points are added to an overall score. For example, a score card for a credit card fraud model, might add 28 points if a $1 transaction occurs at a gas station. The higher the score, the more likely the credit card transaction is fraudulent. The best practice is to use both rules and scores. Rules ensure that business processes are being followed and predictive models ensure that historical data is being used most effectively.
Score cards are typically used for very basic systems which use just a few simple rules or for historical reasons. For example, the credit scoring reason has used score cards for many years - these score cards though use statistical models to determine the conditions and corresponding scores.
Q. What determines the accuracy of predictive models?
The accuracy of a predictive model is influenced most strongly by the quality of the data and the freshness of the model. Without good data, it is simply wishful thinking to expect a good model. Without updating the model frequently, the model's performance will decay over time.
Accuracy is measured in two basic ways. Models have false positive rates and false negative rates. For example, consider a model predicting credit card fraud. A false positive means that the model predicted fraud when no fraud was present. A false negative means that the model predicted that the transaction was ok when in fact it was fraudulent. In practice, false positive and false negative rates can be relatively high. The role of a good model is to improve a business process by a significant degree not to make flawless predictions. Only journalists and pundits make flawless predictions.
Best practice uses separate, specialized software applications for building models (the model producer) and for scoring models (the model consumer). The Predictive Model Markup Language or PMML is the industry standard for describing a model in XML so that it can be moved easily between a model producer and a model consumer. Good accuracy require fresh models on fresh data, which means updating the model consumer as frequently as the data demands.
Q. What are the major types of predictive models?
Although there are quite a large number of different types of predictive models, the majority of applications use one of the following types of models.
Linear models. For many years, especially before the advent of personal computers, these were the most common types of models due to their simplicity. They divide data into two different cells using a line in two dimensions and a plane in higher dimensions. Quadratic models are similar but use a curve instead of a line to divide the data.
Logistic models. Logistic models are used when the predicted variable is zero or one, for example predicting that a credit card transaction is fraudulent or not. Logistic models assume that one of the internal components of the model is linear. Computing the weights that characterize a logistic model is difficult by hand, but simple with a computer.
Neural Networks. Neural networks are a type of nonlinear model broadly motivated ("inspired by" is the phrase Hollywood uses) by neurons in brains.
Trees. Trees are a type of nonlinear model which uses a series of lines or planes to divide the data into different cells. Trees consist of a sequence of if...then.. rules. Because of this, it is easier to interpret trees than other types of nonlinear models such as neural networks.
Hybrid Models. It is common to combine one or more of the four models above to produce a more powerful model.
Q. What is the difference between a linear and nonlinear model?
Models can be thought of as a function, which takes inputs, performs a computation, and produces an output. The output is often a score, say from 1 to 1000, or a label, such such as high, medium, or low. A very simple type of model, called a linear model, uses the n input features to split the space of features into two parts. This is done using an (n-1)-dimensional plane. For example, 2 features can be separated with a line, 3 features with a plane, etc. Most data is not so simple. Any model which is not linear is called a nonlinear model. Logistic models, tree based models and neural networks are common examples of nonlinear models.
Q. What are the some of the differences between the various types of predictive models?
First, there is no one best model. Different data requires different types of models. The accuracy of a model depends more on the quality of the data, how well it is prepared, and how fresh the model is than on the type of model used. On the other hand, there are some important differences between different types of models. Nonlinear models are generally more accurate than linear models. Linear models were more common in the past because they were easier to compute. Today this is no longer relevant given the proliferation of computers and good quality statistical and data mining software. Neural networks were very popular in the 80's and early 90's because they were quite successful for several different types of applications and because they had a cool name. Today, they are being replaced by tree-based methods, which are generally considered easier to build, easier to interpret, and more scalable.
Q. I hear the phrase "empirically derived and statistically valid" applied to models. What does that mean?
Decisions based upon models derived from data are usually expected to be empirically derived and statistically sound. That is, first, they must be derived from the data itself, and not the biases of the person building the model. Second, they must be based upon generally acceptable statistical procedures. For example, the arbitrary exclusion of data can result in models that are biased in some fashion.
Q. What are some of the major components in a data mining system?
Assume that the function of the data mining system is to assign scores to various profiles. For example, profiles may be maintained about companies and the scores used to indicate the likelihood that the company will go bankrupt. Alternatively, the profiles may be maintained for customer accounts and the scores indiciate the likelihood that the account is being used fradulently. A typical data mining system processes raw transactional data, consisting of what are called events, to produce the profiles. To continue the examples above, the events may consist of survey data about the companies, or purchases by the customer.
First, a data mart is used to store the event and profile data which is used to build the predictive models. For large data sets, the data mart must be designed for efficient statistics on columns rather than simple counting and summaries like a conventional data warehouse, or safe updating of rows, like a conventional database.
Second, a data mining system takes data from the data mart and applies statistical or data mining algorithms to produce a model. More precisely, the data mining system takes a learning set of profiles and produces a statistical model.
Third, an operational data store or operational database is used to store profiles. A profile is a statistical summary of the entity being model and typically contains dozens to hundreds of features. A relational database is generally used for the operational data store.
Fourth, the scoring software takes a model produced by the data mining system, and a profile from the operational data store and produce one or more scores. These scores can either be used to produce reports or deployed into operation systems.
Fifth, the reports generated are generally made available through a reporting system.
For smaller applications, a database can be used for the data mart and operational data store, and the reports can be produced in HTML and made available through a web server.
Q. Who is the author of this FAQ?
This FAQ is maintained by Robert L. Grossman.
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http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2003/june2003/june03leb.htm
The New ViCAP
More User-Friendly and
Used by More Agencies
By ERIC W. WITZIG, M.S.
Where should officers go to obtain information about unsolved violent crime cases? Where do they direct their inquiries? Who do they ask? Officers in small departments might ask their colleagues during morning roll call. Those in mid-sized agencies might question investigators working other shifts. Personnel in large departments might ask officers in the next jurisdiction by sending a teletype or similar communication.
Yet, the communication might not reach the employees who have the necessary information. Generally, personnel who need information about violent crime cases do not connect with the investigators who have that knowledge. Information technology (IT) has enhanced communication for law enforcement, allowing departments to close violent crime cases with the arrest of an offender.
Mr. Witzig, a former detective in the Homicide Branch of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and agent of the chief medical examiner for Washington, D.C., is a major case specialist with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.
ORIGIN OF VICAP
The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP)1 originated from an idea by local law enforcement and the late Pierce Brooks.2 In 1956, Mr. Brooks investigated the murders of two Los Angeles women who had replied to an advertisement for photographic models. Their bodies, tied with rope in such a fashion as to suggest that the killer might practice bondage, subsequently were found in the desert.
Mr. Brooks, convinced that these were not the killer’s first murders and that the offender would kill again, devised an early form of ViCAP. For 18 months, he used his off-duty time to visit the Los Angeles central library and read out-of-town newspapers to look for information on murders that exhibited characteristics similar to those he was investigating. He found such an article in a newspaper and, using pieces from that case coupled with evidence from his own cases, arrested an individual who subsequently was tried, convicted, and executed for the murders.
Mr. Brooks refined his idea and concluded that a computer could capture relevant information about murders. If open and closed cases were stored in the computer, investigators easily could query the database for similar ones when they first confront new, “mystery” cases. They could use clues from other cases that exhibit similar characteristics to solve more cases. Moreover, when officers identify offenders, a search of the computer using their modus operandi (MO) would reveal other open cases for which they might be responsible.3 In 1983, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the National Institute of Justice gave a planning grant, the “National Missing/Abducted Children and Serial Murder Tracking and Prevention Program,” to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. After three workshops, with the last held in November 1983, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) emerged. The U.S. Department of Justice provided the initial funding for the NCAVC and stipulated that it would be “...under the direction and control of the FBI training center at Quantico, Virginia.”4 ViCAP became a part of the NCAVC with its goal to “...collect, collate, and analyze all aspects of the investigation of similar-pattern, multiple murders, on a nationwide basis, regardless of the location or number of police agencies involved.”5 Mr. Brooks envisioned ViCAP as a “nationwide clearing-house...to provide all law enforcement agencies reporting similar-pattern violent crimes with the information necessary to initiate a coordinated multiagency investigation.”6 ViCAP attempts to identify similar characteristics that may exist in a series of unsolved murders and provide all police agencies reporting similar patterns with information necessary to initiate a coordinated multiagency investigation.7
REDESIGN OF VICAP
Since ViCAP’s beginning at the FBI Academy in July 1985, its goal of identifying cases exhibiting similar characteristics and providing that information to law enforcement agencies for a coordinated, case-closing investigation has remained constant. But, a tremendous change has occurred in the way ViCAP now provides services to state and local law enforcement. In 1996, a business analysis revealed several details about ViCAP.8
Only 3 to 7 percent of the total cases were reported each year. Of the 21,000 homicides (average) reported per year in the 1990s,9 only about 1,500 to 1,800 were submitted to the nationwide database.
An urban void existed. While most murders occurred in large cities, the cities were not contributing their homicides to the nationwide database.
ViCAP users reported that the 189-question ViCAP form was cumbersome and difficult.
Users perceived that ViCAP case submissions entered a bureaucratic “black hole” never to emerge or be seen again.
Chronic understaffing caused a failure to address incoming case work on a timely basis.
The beginning of the ViCAP change originated with the 1994 crime bill. Legislation in this bill directed the attorney general to “...develop and implement, on a pilot basis with no more than 10 participating cities, an intelligent information system that gathers, integrates, organizes, and analyzes information in active support of investigations by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies of violent serial crimes.”10 From the business analysis, ViCAP learned that the program had to be placed in the hands of state and local law enforcement. This concept of program delivery required two conditions of ViCAP software: 1) migration of the application from a mainframe computing environment to a platform more affordable by state and local law enforcement and 2) a choice of software that eliminated the need for a computer programmer to extract information from a database. To accomplish these objectives, ViCAP had to create a powerful, object-oriented, user-friendly, software seamlessly integrating data, mapping, reporting, and image-capturing tools. This high-end software would have to operate on a modestly priced desktop computer. Crime bill monies provided the initial funding to create completely new software for ViCAP and to move it as an application from a mainframe to a client-server environment.
ViCAP decided that users of the new ViCAP software would receive the service free of charge. Moreover, ViCAP loaned high-end computers loaded with the new software to more than 50 law enforcement entities. These computers had a modem that enabled users to exchange information with each other and forward case information to state hubs where it was downloaded to the national database. A memorandum of understanding (MOU) formalized the conveyance of new ViCAP software, the loan of a desktop computer to participating agencies, and these agencies’ relationship with ViCAP.
Additionally, the 189-question ViCAP form was completely redesigned, streamlined to only 95 questions, and became more appealing to the eye. The paper form both looked and became more user-friendly.
In 1998, Congress provided additional funding for ViCAP crime analysts. Today, 19 well-trained and experienced crime analysts serve with ViCAP, and they address incoming work and requests on a more timely basis. They handle high-profile or immediate case requests rapidly, frequently within the same hour or day. In a symbolic, but important, perceptual break with the old ways of doing business, ViCAP reflected its new software and energy with a new name—the New ViCAP.
Case Example: Victim by the Lake
In 1996, a suspect in a drug case in a northeastern state made an offer to the authorities—in exchange for leniency in his prosecution or at the time of his sentencing, he would give information linking his brother to a murder. He advised that a white male in a southeastern state died from repeated strikes with a blunt object. The investigators questioned the suspect about where the crime occurred, and the suspect advised that he did not know the exact location, but that he thought it happened near a body of water. Further, the suspect advised that his brother ran over the victim with an automobile.
Investigators from the northeastern state contacted ViCAP and related the details of the case as told to them by the suspect. A crime analyst searched the ViCAP database and found a case from 1986 in a southeastern state that matched the details offered by the suspect in the drug case. The victim’s cause of death was blunt force trauma, and he was run over by an automobile. Further, the murder occurred near a small lake. Authorities in the northeast with the information contacted investigators in the southeast with the open homicide case. The southeastern case successfully was closed with the identification and arrest of the offender.11
Case Example: Texas Railroads
In 1999, a series of homicides occurred in Texas. Early in the series, the cases were presented as murders in the victims’ homes. Female victims were sexually assaulted, blunt force trauma was the cause of death,12 and items of value were stolen from the homes.13 The murder scenes were close to railroad tracks, sometimes only a few feet away.
In May 1999, personnel from the command post in Texas called ViCAP with information about three of the murders. One of the ViCAP crime analysts remembered a case from Kentucky where railroad tracks were prominently mentioned. The analyst searched the database and quickly found the case in Kentucky where a male was killed along a pair of railroad tracks. The cause of death was blunt force trauma.14 His female companion was sexually assaulted and left for dead. ViCAP relayed information concerning the Kentucky rape/homicide to the command post in Texas. Subsequent DNA examinations linked the Texas cases with the Kentucky case.
An itinerant freight train rider was identified as the suspect in the series of cases.15 He was apprehended by authorities on July 13, 1999, when he surrendered at the border in El Paso, Texas. Charged with nine murders, two in Illinois, one in Kentucky, and six in Texas,16 the subject was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.
In July 2000, he confessed to the 1997 murders of two teenagers on a railroad track near Oxford, Florida.17 The male victim’s body was found on March 23, 1997; the female victim’s body was not found until July 2000, when authorities, following the killer’s directions, found her skeletal remains wrapped in a blanket and jacket.18 While confessing to the two murders in Florida, the subject said that he once killed a woman in a southeastern state, somewhere along railroad tracks. She was an old woman, hanging her wash on the line, and he killed her inside her house. He did not provide more details.
A check of the ViCAP database revealed a 1998 case from a southeastern state where an elderly woman was hanging laundry in her backyard just a few feet from a pair of railroad tracks that ran by her property. The command post in Texas and the investigator in the southeastern state were notified of the case match. When interviewed by the investigator, the subject confessed in detail and drew a diagram of the inside of the victim’s house. In this case, no fingerprint or DNA evidence matched the defendant to the murder.
THE NEW VICAP
Some agencies run the New ViCAP system in their own departments, others prefer to run the software on a stand-alone desktop, and several put the software on their internal networks. Agency networks support as few as three users, through the entire investigative staff, and up to five different boroughs and the precincts therein. New ViCAP software operating in participating agencies allows direct access to all of the information that they enter and the ability to perform their own crime analysis.
Cold case squads can store their cases without resorting to wall-filling filing cabinets. With just a piece of information, a nickname, an address, or the name of a bar or other business, investigators can retrieve decade-old cases for additional investigation. Conversely, cold case squads looking for cases exhibiting an MO used by a suspect, or a series of cases matching a particular MO, can make those searches as well.
Research has shown that administrators like the reports package in New ViCAP. Standard reports include—
cases by day of the week, month, or district;
case status (open or closed);
causative factors;
offender age or ethnicity;
victim age or ethnicity;
victim-offender relationship; and
all weapons used or firearms used by caliber or type.
Perhaps most useful to administrators and investigators is the one-page New ViCAP summary report, which collects the main facts from a violent crime and prints them to the screen or, typically, two sheets of paper. The summary report proves an excellent briefing tool for administrators, managers, or elected officials.
Some investigators and prosecutors like to have all of the information about a case in one place, but the concept of electronic storage of case information proves unsettling to some people. To overcome this problem, New ViCAP provided a hard copy. This multi-page report prints on screen or on paper and includes all of the information entered into the database. The printed document can be placed in the case folder or jacket and preserved indefinitely.
New ViCAP understands that unique cases require distinctive database queries. To provide for discrete, particular questions of the database, the program has a powerful ad hoc query tool, whereby any combination of New ViCAP variables and attributes can be strung together to produce a set of possibly related cases. Refinement of the ad hoc query produces more, or fewer, cases delivered to the crime analyst through the possibilities set. When the listing of cases is returned, the crime analyst can contrast and compare them in a matrix of variables specified by the analyst. Particularly valuable case matrixes can be titled and printed for more formal presentations, such as
multiagency case meetings. The ad hoc query and resulting matrix analysis prove a very powerful combination of tools for any analyst examining violent crime.
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Sexual Assault Data Collection
Many New ViCAP users have reported that the homicide-oriented version was a helpful crime analysis tool. But, what the users really needed was a crime analysis tool for sexual assaults. ViCAP currently is working on that product by determining data elements for the paper form and the electronic version and designing the paper form for sexual assault data collection to mirror the existing homicide-oriented form. ViCAP is developing the electronic portion of the system in a Web-enabled fashion. This will permit users to exchange information more easily and potentially will provide limited access to the nationwide database.
More Developments
A recent development in New ViCAP is the ability to store one or more images and associate them with a particular case. The images can be photographs scanned into the system or maps or other graphics imported into the system. This tool has important implications for training new investigators, refreshing case-specific recollections of experienced investigators, or exchanging precise information to identify unknown victims.
An envisioned tool, not yet a part of the software, is a mapping capability. New ViCAP already captures graphic information system (GIS) data. This information could be used for traditional pin maps. Alternatively, investigators could use GIS data to store and search offender time lines like those prepared for suspected or known serial killers. Once offender time lines are stored, GIS data for each newly entered case could be automatically compared with the time lines. For example, an automated hit system could report to the analyst that plus or minus 3 days, a killer was in the town where the murder occurred.19
A Communication Tool
Police agencies across the country recognize New ViCAP as a valuable violent crime communication tool. The first pair of cities to use New ViCAP were Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas. Now, police and sheriff departments in the largest metropolitan areas are using New ViCAP, including Baltimore, Maryland; Chi-cago, Illinois; Los Angeles, Califor-nia; Miami, Florida; New York, New York; and Washington, D.C. Further, MOUs and the New ViCAP system are in place with 40 states. More than 400 state and local law enforcement entities use the New ViCAP software.
The architecture of the New ViCAP network is as varied as the needs of its users. For some states, such as Colorado, a “hub and spoke” design works well. MOUs are created between the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and cities and counties in the state. Cases can be entered at the local level and uploaded to the state. In addition to its networking arrangements, CBI selected New ViCAP as the statewide tool for sex offender registry.
Other states have implemented a regional model. For example, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Los Angeles Police Departments provide an excellent example of regional concept application. The sheriff’s department serves as the collection point and analysis hub for cases in the county. MOUs are in place between the sheriff’s department and 45 of the 46 police agencies in the county, thus providing a web of case-sharing information for participating law enforcement entities, including the two largest, the police and sheriff’s departments.
Case Example: Bag of Bones
In 2001, a ViCAP crime analyst reviewed a state police publication that mentioned a bag of human bones found by hunters in a seaboard forest of an eastern state. The victim was a white male, about 40 to 60 years old, and between 5' 7" and 5' 9" in height. His cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head. Recovered with the remains was a 14-carat gold ring with engraved letters. Authorities had no leads for identification of the remains.
A ViCAP crime analyst searched the database using the physical description of the victim and then made an additional search, thinking that the letters engraved in the ring might be the initials of a name. A possible match was made with a July 1998 case where three people were reported missing from a midwestern state. The report was made by a fourth member of the family, a son, who waited a week before reporting his mother, father, and sibling as missing persons. Personnel had exhausted all investigative leads.
Authorities in the eastern and midwestern states contacted each other. In January 2001, ViCAP learned that forensic odontology had identified the bones in the bag as those of the father missing from the midwestern state. The letters in the recovered ring represented the maiden name of the missing mother and the name of the missing father.
ViCAP learned later that a suspect was identified and charged with the murder—the oldest son who made the report in the midwest. The remains of his mother and his sibling have not been located.
Data Security
New ViCAP created a standard of information for exchange between law enforcement agencies. Naturally, a law enforcement entity would express concern for violent crime data sent to a national database with information no longer under an agency’s direct control. ViCAP recognizes its responsibility to provide security for violent crime case data and has provided that security for more than 16 years. New ViCAP continues to recognize the sensitive nature of violent crime data and provides appropriate security.
CONCLUSION
The FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program Unit has helped local and state law enforcement agencies solve violent crimes for almost 20 years. As technology has improved, ViCAP has ensured that its objectives change to support such advancements. New ViCAP represents an instructional and technological violent crime analysis tool suitable for use in a law enforcement agency of any size. It provides a standard method for the communication of violent crime information between and among agencies.
New ViCAP software is free to agencies that formalize their relationship with a state hub or ViCAP. The software is case-management and case-matching capable with an easy-to-use data retrieval scheme and a package of reports that serves the needs of administrators and commanders. Initially designed for homicide-oriented violent crime, New ViCAP soon will provide an information technology system to capture and analyze sex offenses as well. Forty years after Mr. Brooks’ idea of putting all homicides into a computer, law enforcement is on the cusp of making his thinking a practical reality.
Endnotes
1 ViCAP has been distinguished by several acronyms since its inception. To ensure consistency in this article, the author used the current acronym for the program.
2 Mr. Brooks was a former commander of the Los Angeles, California, Police Department’s Robbery-Homicide Division. See, Bob Keefer, “Distinguished Homicide Detective Dies at 75,” The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, March 1, 1998, p. 1, in which he wrote that Mr. Brooks investigated the murder of a Los Angeles officer in an onion field outside of Bakersfield, California. Joseph Wambaugh wrote the book The Onion Field based on this crime. Subsequently, Mr. Brooks served as a technical consultant to Jack Webb and the television show “Dragnet,” as well as “Dragnet 1969,” the made-for-television production of the case outlined here.
3 Author interviews with Pierce R. Brooks, Quantico, Virginia, 1985 and Vida, Oregon, April 1992.
4 Steven A. Egger, Serial Murder—An Elusive Phenomenon (New York, NY: Prager Publishers, 1990), 192-193.
5 Ibid.
6 Pierce Brooks, “The Investigative Consultant Team: A New Approach for Law Enforcement Cooperation,” (Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 1981), unpublished report, in Steven A. Egger, Serial Murder—An Elusive Phenomenon (New York, NY: Prager Publishers, 1990), 193.
7 Supra note 4, 193.
8 Arthur Meister, ViCAP lectures at Quantico, Virginia, 1999-2000.
9 U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991-2000), 8, 13, 14, or 15. In 1991, a high of 24,526 homicides were reported, contrasted with a low of 15,533 reported in 1999.
10 U.S. Congress, Senate, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1993, H.R. 3355 Amendment, 103rd Cong., 1st sess., 1993, 267-268.
11Arthur Meister, ViCAP lectures at Quantico, VA, 1999-2000.
12 David McLemore, “Aliases, Trainhopping Obscure Suspect’s Trail,” Dallas Morning News, June 17, 1999, sec. A., p. 16.
13 Pauline Arrillaga, “Town Copes After Slayings by Suspected Rail Rider,” Dallas Morning News, June 11, 1999, sec. A., p. 29.
14 Supra note 12, sec. A., p. 17.
15 Michael Pearson, “Railroad Killer,” Associated Press, June 22, 1999.
16 Mark Babineck, “Railroad Killer,” Associated Press, 2000.
17 “Railroad Killer,” Associated Press, July 2000.
18 Ibid.
19 This represents an arbitrary number; analysts could select any number of days.
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So, is ViCAP ok, or do we get rid of this too?
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GM:
As usual you make good points, but for me you seem to have a blind spot for what it is that concerns, BBG, JDN, and me. Please allow me to take another try at communicating one aspect of it (of course I do not speak for BBG or JDN, but I suspect there is overlap with their positions and mine):
Yes the private sector data mines, but the private sector does not have the ability to get violent with or oppress me. The State does. For example, Amazon knows a lot about my reading habits, but I would much rather that the government not keep track of what I read. This is not because I am a nefarious individual, it is because the State might decide to harass me (e.g. an IRS investigation not because of anything I've done or not done, but in order to drag me down). We have already seen the Hilbillary Clintons do this IMHO. I would rather that the coming minions of His Glibness not be keeping track of me and my thoughts.
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Going through all the above point by point is gonna get in the way of painting the house today, and though the wife doesn't do data dumps, she does have methods of expressing her displeasure that are more immediate, so excuse me for not wading through all the above.
A couple points, however. The synopsis and original piece point out problems with data mining that remain undiscussed. We do get to point out problems with law enforcement techniques and discuss them, right? Examination of issues and intelligent discussion thereof is more likely to lead to a resolution than blind adherence to the party line, so pardon me if I don't stand mute lest I be blamed for the next smoking hole.
Speaking of which, the smoking hole or unfettered access damn the constitutional issues dichotomy strikes me as a false one. I've little doubt that there is an intersection at which security imperatives and founding principles can both be serviced. Citing one extreme to excuse the other does a great job of representing the margins, but does little to find the ground where the hole is avoided and the Constitution isn't shredded.
Finally, as I've pointed out several times, the powers we're discussing are ones mullahs can only dream about. You can't imagine these capabilities being misused? You can't imagine someone with autocratic leanings winning an election, defining people who own guns and discuss politics on a militant martial arts web site to be security threats, and using the power of collection and collation to build a case against those who, quite coincidently, of course, don't agree with his politics? The potential for misuse here is enormous, and there have been enough utterly unprincipled politicians in Washington over the years to make examination of the implications of this growing ability prudent.
Off to the roller. Anyone want to learn how to paint cedar siding?
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GM:
As usual you make good points, but for me you seem to have a blind spot for what it is that concerns, BBG, JDN, and me. Please allow me to take another try at communicating one aspect of it (of course I do not speak for BBG or JDN, but I suspect there is overlap with their positions and mine):
Yes the private sector data mines, but the private sector does not have the ability to get violent with or oppress me. The State does. For example, Amazon knows a lot about my reading habits, but I would much rather that the government not keep track of what I read.
**Why would the gov't keep track of what you read?**
This is not because I am a nefarious individual, it is because the State might decide to harass me (e.g. an IRS investigation not because of anything I've done or not done, but in order to drag me down). We have already seen the Hilbillary Clintons do this IMHO. I would rather that the coming minions of His Glibness not be keeping track of me and my thoughts.
**Even if we are unfortunate enough to have his glibness become president, I doubt very much you or I will end up on the wrong end of an audit due to our opinions. If you are really concerned about it, i'd suggest that you go "off the grid" as much as possible. Not something i'd recommend, but if you really are that concerned.....**
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Going through all the above point by point is gonna get in the way of painting the house today, and though the wife doesn't do data dumps, she does have methods of expressing her displeasure that are more immediate, so excuse me for not wading through all the above.
A couple points, however. The synopsis and original piece point out problems with data mining that remain undiscussed. We do get to point out problems with law enforcement techniques and discuss them, right? Examination of issues and intelligent discussion thereof is more likely to lead to a resolution than blind adherence to the party line, so pardon me if I don't stand mute lest I be blamed for the next smoking hole.
**An informed discussion would be nice, however what usually happens is that any use of technology for law enforcement purposes means we are but minutes away from a dystopian police state.**
Speaking of which, the smoking hole or unfettered access damn the constitutional issues dichotomy strikes me as a false one. I've little doubt that there is an intersection at which security imperatives and founding principles can both be serviced. Citing one extreme to excuse the other does a great job of representing the margins, but does little to find the ground where the hole is avoided and the Constitution isn't shredded.
**How exactly does datamining shred the constitution?**
Finally, as I've pointed out several times, the powers we're discussing are ones mullahs can only dream about. You can't imagine these capabilities being misused?
**Anything can be misused. There have been bad police shootings, and there will be more in the future. Is the answer to then disarm the police? Iatrogenic disease is a concern, but the answer isn't banning medical science, right?**
You can't imagine someone with autocratic leanings winning an election, defining people who own guns and discuss politics on a militant martial arts web site to be security threats, and using the power of collection and collation to build a case against those who, quite coincidently, of course, don't agree with his politics?
**What laws are violated? Who brings this before what court? What jury would find that a crime was committed?**
The potential for misuse here is enormous, and there have been enough utterly unprincipled politicians in Washington over the years to make examination of the implications of this growing ability prudent.
**That's why we have lots of checks and balances in our system of government.**
Off to the roller. Anyone want to learn how to paint cedar siding?
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"If you are really concerned about it, i'd suggest that you go "off the grid" as much as possible."
Mmmm, , , No thank you. I am American and I don't shut up for fear of the government. I simply would rather not to have to have courage to speak out or read about odd things. Nor should people who wish to get involved a lot more than me have to worry about a State capable of playing a level of the politics of personal destruction for beyond anything we've seen.
PS: I would like to offer for your consideration that overal I think Buz and I have a pretty good track record around here of lucid reasoning, so I am left wondering at the relevance of general references to wooly headed liberal thinking.
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A couple points, however. The synopsis and original piece point out problems with data mining that remain undiscussed. We do get to point out problems with law enforcement techniques and discuss them, right? Examination of issues and intelligent discussion thereof is more likely to lead to a resolution than blind adherence to the party line, so pardon me if I don't stand mute lest I be blamed for the next smoking hole.
**An informed discussion would be nice, however what usually happens is that any use of technology for law enforcement purposes means we are but minutes away from a dystopian police state.**
I suppose. It also appears you can’t post empiric data about the problems associated with data mining without being minutes away from other sorts of circular discussions, too.
Speaking of which, the smoking hole or unfettered access damn the constitutional issues dichotomy strikes me as a false one. I've little doubt that there is an intersection at which security imperatives and founding principles can both be serviced. Citing one extreme to excuse the other does a great job of representing the margins, but does little to find the ground where the hole is avoided and the Constitution isn't shredded.
**How exactly does datamining shred the constitution?**
I expect any shredding that is currently being done is pretty well concealed, and hence can’t speak to it. I do recall the hubbub when Judge Bork’s video rental records were obtained by the press. As someone who’s had his internet postings come back to bite him on other fronts, I am concerned about misuse of mined information. If you’re unable to see how, say, protections against illegal search and seizure may be subverted by data mining, I’m not sure anything I say can drive the point home.
Finally, as I've pointed out several times, the powers we're discussing are ones mullahs can only dream about. You can't imagine these capabilities being misused?
**Anything can be misused. There have been bad police shootings, and there will be more in the future. Is the answer to then disarm the police? Iatrogenic disease is a concern, but the answer isn't banning medical science, right?**
Not seeking to ban police work or medical research. Have no problem creating checks against bad police work and bad medical research, however. I can identify checks meant to prevent bad meds and bad shootings; I can’t ID checks against extra-legal use of mined data. Perhaps you know of some?
You can't imagine someone with autocratic leanings winning an election, defining people who own guns and discuss politics on a militant martial arts web site to be security threats, and using the power of collection and collation to build a case against those who, quite coincidently, of course, don't agree with his politics?
**What laws are violated? Who brings this before what court? What jury would find that a crime was committed?**
I expect those were the sorts of questions that went through Randy Weaver’s mind. . . .
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Spying on Innocents Abroad
Jacob Sullum | October 10, 2008, 7:42pm
Two former military intercept operators, both Arab linguists, have independently told ABC News that the National Security Agency routinely listens to the telephone conversations of innocent Americans in the Middle East, including soldiers, aid workers, and journalists, when they call people in the United States. "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," one said. She described the conversations as "personal, private things [involving] Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism." The other whistleblower said intercept operators would often share especially risqué or amusing conversations, including calls to spouses and girlfriends, with each other. "Hey, check this out," he said colleagues at the NSA center in Fort Gordon, Georgia, would tell him, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk." As ABC notes, this sort of idle snooping is rather different from the sort of by-the-book professionalism that Bush administration officials have repeatedly insisted characterizes the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program:
"There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens are treated with respect," said President Bush at a news conference this past February....
In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.
"It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organizations who are affiliated with it," Gen. Hayden testified.
He was asked by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), "Are you just doing this because you just want to pry into people's lives?"
"No, sir," General Hayden replied.
In June I noted that Barack Obama supported the legislation that gave the executive branch permission to monitor Americans' international communications at will, while John McCain seems to think the president did not need Congress' permission.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/129410.html
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"If you are really concerned about it, i'd suggest that you go "off the grid" as much as possible."
Mmmm, , , No thank you. I am American and I don't shut up for fear of the government. I simply would rather not to have to have courage to speak out or read about odd things. Nor should people who wish to get involved a lot more than me have to worry about a State capable of playing a level of the politics of personal destruction for beyond anything we've seen.
PS: I would like to offer for your consideration that overal I think Buz and I have a pretty good track record around here of lucid reasoning, so I am left wondering at the relevance of general references to wooly headed liberal thinking.
So then what policy or law do you want that will address your concerns?
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A couple points, however. The synopsis and original piece point out problems with data mining that remain undiscussed. We do get to point out problems with law enforcement techniques and discuss them, right? Examination of issues and intelligent discussion thereof is more likely to lead to a resolution than blind adherence to the party line, so pardon me if I don't stand mute lest I be blamed for the next smoking hole.
**An informed discussion would be nice, however what usually happens is that any use of technology for law enforcement purposes means we are but minutes away from a dystopian police state.**
I suppose. It also appears you can’t post empiric data about the problems associated with data mining without being minutes away from other sorts of circular discussions, too.
****Again, what are the problems? It's not a silver bullet for finding terrorists? It's just kind of scary in an undefined way?****
Speaking of which, the smoking hole or unfettered access damn the constitutional issues dichotomy strikes me as a false one. I've little doubt that there is an intersection at which security imperatives and founding principles can both be serviced. Citing one extreme to excuse the other does a great job of representing the margins, but does little to find the ground where the hole is avoided and the Constitution isn't shredded.
**How exactly does datamining shred the constitution?**
I expect any shredding that is currently being done is pretty well concealed, and hence can’t speak to it.
****So it's bad, just in a way you can't quite describe?****
I do recall the hubbub when Judge Bork’s video rental records were obtained by the press.
****The press, not the police.****
As someone who’s had his internet postings come back to bite him on other fronts, I am concerned about misuse of mined information.
****If you put things out into the public forums, it becomes PUBLIC.****
If you’re unable to see how, say, protections against illegal search and seizure may be subverted by data mining, I’m not sure anything I say can drive the point home.
****Yeah, I don't see how sorting through voluntarily supplied information violates any constitutional protection. I have yet to see anyone here explain how it does.****
Finally, as I've pointed out several times, the powers we're discussing are ones mullahs can only dream about. You can't imagine these capabilities being misused?
**Anything can be misused. There have been bad police shootings, and there will be more in the future. Is the answer to then disarm the police? Iatrogenic disease is a concern, but the answer isn't banning medical science, right?**
Not seeking to ban police work or medical research. Have no problem creating checks against bad police work and bad medical research, however. I can identify checks meant to prevent bad meds and bad shootings; I can’t ID checks against extra-legal use of mined data. Perhaps you know of some?
****Again, how does datamining violate any constitutional protections?****
You can't imagine someone with autocratic leanings winning an election, defining people who own guns and discuss politics on a militant martial arts web site to be security threats, and using the power of collection and collation to build a case against those who, quite coincidently, of course, don't agree with his politics?
**What laws are violated? Who brings this before what court? What jury would find that a crime was committed?**
I expect those were the sorts of questions that went through Randy Weaver’s mind. . . .
****I don't see how Randy Weaver applies to this. He was a fringe associate of the Aryan Nations that was charged with violations of federal firearms laws and rather to going to court he hid behind his family, forcing a confrontation with federal law enforcement. No datamining was involved.****
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"Yeah, I don't see how sorting through voluntarily supplied information violates any constitutional protection. I have yet to see anyone here explain how it does.****"
OK, let me take a stab at it. The collection and sorting into patterns of tremendous amounts of data, as is increasingly being enabled by the geometric progressions in technological capabilities, gives a far clearer picture of a person's private life than if these various fragments of data are not mined. There may be very rare examples, but for general purposes it seems to me that NO ONE lives a life wherein they wouldn't be embarrassed by something coming to light. The inchoate concerns triggered when the private sector does it reify when it is The State (or nefarious actors within the State) who can purposely destroy the reputation of those who are perceived as posing a political risk.
Example: If I were to run for US Congress again (I've run 3x for the Libertarian Party 1984,1988, 1992) there are youtube clips I've watched that I would not want to have to explain to my son or daughter.
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So aside from un-inventing the computer, the internet and youtube, what are your policy solutions?
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Smart ass :lol:
I'm on the road and do not have the time at this moment. I fly to LA starting at 0600 tomorrow.
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Be safe. I'll expect something really well thought out when you get a chance to post. :-D
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I suppose. It also appears you can’t post empiric data about the problems associated with data mining without being minutes away from other sorts of circular discussions, too.
****Again, what are the problems? It's not a silver bullet for finding terrorists? It's just kind of scary in an undefined way?****
And again, the piece that started, that remains undiscussed, pointed out problems arising from data mining. In short it had little to do with nebulous fear, and a lot to do with efficacy.
I expect any shredding that is currently being done is pretty well concealed, and hence can’t speak to it.
****So it's bad, just in a way you can't quite describe?****
There are plenty of examples where government entities used unlawful means of gathering information. The misuse of new tools is not all that difficult to extrapolate.
I do recall the hubbub when Judge Bork’s video rental records were obtained by the press.
****The press, not the police.****
We are discussing the misuse of data mining, of which this is a clear case. I’m willing to cede that police behave more honorably than journalists; I would not be surprised at all if they use similar investigative techniques, however.
As someone who’s had his internet postings come back to bite him on other fronts, I am concerned about misuse of mined information.
****If you put things out into the public forums, it becomes PUBLIC.****
And then can be misused, which was the point of the original piece. Postings of mine lead to the claim that I’m an “ultra-right wing martial arts expert.” I'm neither an expert or ultra-right wing, as this exchange demonstrates.
If you’re unable to see how, say, protections against illegal search and seizure may be subverted by data mining, I’m not sure anything I say can drive the point home.
****Yeah, I don't see how sorting through voluntarily supplied information violates any constitutional protection. I have yet to see anyone here explain how it does.****
I guess you could claim that my ex-wife’s current address is “voluntarily supplied information.” And I guess the fact that a failed business formerly used the same address is voluntarily supplied, also. But having that address and failed business show up on my credit report has no voluntary component that I can discern.
The so far unsuccessful effort to purge that information certainly informs my feelings on the matter, and supports the conclusions of the piece that started this thread.
Not seeking to ban police work or medical research. Have no problem creating checks against bad police work and bad medical research, however. I can identify checks meant to prevent bad meds and bad shootings; I can’t ID checks against extra-legal use of mined data. Perhaps you know of some?
****Again, how does datamining violate any constitutional protections?****
Data mining itself may not violate constitutional protections—I’ve yet to encounter case law short of some of the Guantanamo litigation seeking to ID sources—but concerns about it’s efficacy and misuse are what the original piece spoke to. I’ve already given examples where it’s impacted my professional and financial life, stories abound about how travelers get on no-fly lists due to errors that can be called data mining anomalies, so it’s not like these problems are unknown.
Data mining involves the collation of vast amount of information from numerous sources; with all those 1s and 0s flying about you can’t imagine errors creeping in? Call it 300,000,000 people in this country; an error rate of 1/10 of 1 percent means 300,000 citizens get errata stapled to their name. Is that a consequence you can live with?
**What laws are violated? Who brings this before what court? What jury would find that a crime was committed?**
I expect those were the sorts of questions that went through Randy Weaver’s mind. . . .
****I don't see how Randy Weaver applies to this. He was a fringe associate of the Aryan Nations that was charged with violations of federal firearms laws and rather to going to court he hid behind his family, forcing a confrontation with federal law enforcement. No datamining was involved.****
Though no fan of the Aryan foolishness he was associated with, Randy Weaver was well and truly hosed by run amok law enforcement efforts, and that conclusion has been confirmed by the various courts who have heard his case and the judgments that resulted. That hosing occurred at the point of a .308 and with the press gathered a ways down the hill. You don’t have to be a white supremacist to wonder how mined data might be misused at the point of a keyboard in a quiet datacenter far from the antiseptic gaze of the press or courts.
Indeed, the whole concept of data mining means somewhere in some very large database lives a lot of names with a lot of data associated with them. Where is that matrix? Who has access to it? How is it expunged? How do the people affected by its contents review the information contained therein? If medical or pay-per-view viewing habits data is encountered, do you think it gets added to the matrix, or is it considered off-limits and tossed in the bit bucket? The President has the Secret Service collecting his sh!t and p!ss to keep medical information out of the wrong hands; are the other 299,999,999 of us in need of similar services?
As that may be, unless something really gets my goat in this topic, this is likely my last response. You can hit the asterisk key and type stark questions quicker that I can provide reasoned responses. Think there’s plenty in this thread and in the original piece to justify nervous feelings where data mining is involved, and my limited dealings with the results certainly confirms these feelings are justified. It doesn’t appear that any amount of argumentation or evidence will sway your opinion, so there not much of a percentage in engaging further.
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http://www.officer.com/print/Law-Enforcement-Technology/Dig-Into-Data-Mining/1$35698
Dig Into Data Mining
Enhanced analysis can help law enforcement be more proactive
From the March 2007 Issue
By Rebecca Kanable
What's your favorite brand of toilet paper? How about deodorant?
Some stores, especially online retailers, don't have to ask. They already have the answers they're looking for, helping them sell more products. They know what you buy, in what amount, at what price, how you pay, and when you are most likely to come back to restock your supplies.
Moreover, they know who you are, the best ways to deliver advertising to you, and they know what else you are likely to buy at the same time you buy toilet paper or deodorant.
While the specific examples above may not cause envy among law enforcement, the fact that retailers have better analytical capacities than most law enforcement agencies should.
This fact frustrates Colleen "Kelly" McCue, a senior research scientist at RTI International, a non-profit research institute.
"In law enforcement, if you do your analysis wrong, you can compromise public safety," she says.
Before joining RTI International, McCue was program manager for the Richmond (Virginia) Police Department Crime Analysis Unit, where she pioneered the use of data mining and predictive analysis.
Data mining, also referred to as predictive analytics (or analysis), sense making or knowledge discovery, involves the systematic analysis of large data sets using automated methods, she explains. Wanting to help the enforcement community learn more about data mining, she wrote "Data Mining and Predictive Analysis."
McCue is hopeful data mining will become more widespread in law enforcement, because she says it is within the grasp of agencies of all sizes and at all levels. In fact, she says agencies are already data mining to some extent in investigations (determining motive is one example), but they also can use data mining to predict and prevent criminal acts.
A big emphasis today is being placed on counting crime, counting what happened, she says.
"One of the things data mining and predictive analytics allows us to do is move from counting crime to anticipating, preventing and perhaps responding more effectively to it," she says. "We can focus on what we consider to be an effective use of our information and how we want to manage our resources and fight crime. If it is counting crime, that's great. But we know criminal behavior tends to be relatively predictable. By exploiting the data, we can be much more proactive in anticipating and preventing crime than we are now."
The importance of analysis
Data which means nothing to one case could solve another.
"All law enforcement data is very important," says Steve McCraw, director of homeland security in Texas. "A parking ticket, for example, could be a valuable lead in a conspiracy investigation being worked on a series of robberies."
Overall, law enforcement has become very good at collecting and compiling data, especially since the advent of computerized records management systems. Regional sharing initiatives and state-level fusion centers add to the data that individual agencies can tap into. And, national law enforcement data sharing standards help make this possible.
While information sharing initiatives certainly are beneficial, McCue says "don't stop there." Once data is collected in a meaningful fashion, the next step is analysis, she notes.
Unfortunately, McCue adds, the importance of analysis is not a universal understanding today.
Yet, she says the process of analyzing the data is important to:
confirm what you already know and,
discover new information or relationships in data (knowledge discovery).
Jay Albanese, graduate director of criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University, says police need information more than ever before and it is increasingly difficult to obtain.
The point at which police solve major crimes has been dropping nationwide over the past 10 to 15 years, he says. One reason is there are more complicated crimes, affiliated with terrorists, organized crime or ethnic minorities, where language can be a barrier.
Data mining technology
Once the value of analysis is understood, McCraw says the question is "How do you sift through the data and find the key elements that can help prevent an act of terrorism or crime?"
Law enforcement chiefs, sheriffs and other managers want to work smarter, cheaper and faster, says McCraw, former FBI assistant director of The Office of Intelligence.
"The way to do that is to do what the private industry has done and take advantage of the tremendous gains in information technology," he says, noting law enforcement should adopt the National Information Exchange Model for its records management systems.
"You want to be able to empower your personnel with the ability to find points of information they previously couldn't — and to find the links, the associations between data sets. That's very powerful."
Timely information also is key.
"You want to be able to exploit the data in your files as quickly as possible," he adds.
If it takes a week to show a supervisor the crimes that took place in one night, it's dated; it's not as useful as showing a supervisor last night's crimes, says Albanese, former chief of The International Center for the National Institute of Justice.
"The longer the time lag between the incident and being able to get it into a useable form, the less useful it is," he says, noting reports should be electronically entered (not handwritten) so data can be included in analysis and acted on quickly.
Using an analytical overlay or filter with remote data entry, an investigator could enter relevant information while at a crime scene and receive a rapid analytical response, McCue says.
Specialized databases can be created for crime or intelligence analysis. These databases might be offense-specific, such as a homicide or robbery database, or associated with a pattern of crimes. Records management databases generally were not made for analysis. Rather, McCue says they were created for case management and general crime counting.
Unfortunately, analytical software is not inexpensive and software specifically for data mining and predictive analytics falls into the high end of the price range, McCue points out. Agencies sharing information could benefit from pooling their financial resources for data analysis. Predictive analytics requires specialized software. Other data mining can be done without sophisticated software, but, she adds, "the software really helps."
Link analysis tools, used to identify relationships in data, such as telephone calls, can be an economical point of entry into data mining, she suggests.
Natural data miners
With today's friendly, commercial-off-the-shelf software packages, McCue believes most agencies are capable of analyzing their own data.
In fact, she says investigators and crime analysts are natural data miners. Based on her experience, she says it's far easier to teach them how to use data mining tools and apply them to law enforcement than it is to teach statisticians how to work in law enforcement.
For those somewhat afraid of numbers and run an incalculable distance at the mention of "statistics," McCue offers comfort: "Data mining is an intuitive process. It's not statistics."
What is important is knowing:
what questions you want to answer,
what you need to analyze the data and
what you need the output to look like.
There also are rules of the road to avoid errors in analysis, but McCue reassures they're not very difficult.
"I think it's incredibly important that law enforcement agencies get over the fear and trepidation and technophobia or whatever they might have, and analyze their own data," McCue says. "Particularly in a specific department or region, agencies are going to have the tacit knowledge and domain expertise, and understand their data better than anyone else. I can't go in and learn a community to the depth they already know. They are going to have that domain or subject matter expertise on their community and department that's going to be necessary to evaluate the results and operationalize them effectively."
Albanese points out the New York City Police Department's CompStat, now used by a number of other agencies, is essentially an exercise in data mining. "It's looking more carefully, more systematically at the information police are already collecting," he says. "It's looking at reported crimes and different areas of the city, plotting them on maps, looking at trends, looking at the allocation of police around the city, looking for hotspots."
Law enforcement also can use data mining to marshal support of the community to assist in crime prevention. Armed with data about trends and patterns, police can turn to businesses, school groups and others, and show where help is needed.
"If a lot of theft activity is taking place near a mall, it only makes sense the shopping mall share responsibility for the efforts to prevent crime there," he says.
Long-term, he says, "We want to prevent crime, and crime prevention is really everybody's responsibility."
Addressing critics
Police managers who understand data mining can in turn educate the public about data mining and its benefits, as well as address critics.
"Police managers, command staff and public officials always need to be sensitive to public perceptions about how they do business," McCue says. "There's a move toward transparent government. People want to know how we do things, how we analyze data, what data we're looking at."
Working with the city council, legislators or an agency's oversight group is important when technology is upgraded, McCraw says, because it helps alleviate presumptions and misinformation.
Data mining is not an abusive technique to spy on citizens, says McCraw, who testified before Congress on the subject during his tenure with the FBI.
"It's using information technology to locate the information that you need among data you already have," he emphasizes.
Data mining is an analytical process. "The same rules that have always applied to legally permissible means of accessing data are always going to apply," McCue says.
Other criticisms of data mining are that it doesn't work and wastes resources.
"I think they are absolutely wrong," she adds. "We found it does work. When data mining is done by someone who knows data mining, and understands the limitations of law enforcement data and the analytical outcomes sought — or works with someone who does — data mining reduces errors."
While with the Richmond PD, McCue used data mining to reduce gunfire complaints by almost 50 percent on New Year's Eve 2003 and increase the number of illegal weapons seized by 246 percent from the previous year, while using fewer officers.
Some data mining is more difficult than others. Very infrequent events are difficult to model.
"That is where I think it becomes really important law enforcement personnel do the analysis themselves or participate very actively in the analysis," she says.
Despite the fact that measures are taken to reduce errors, errors happen, as they do with anything.
McCue uses a medical analogy to remind that not all errors in law enforcement are equal.
As long as a disease is identified effectively, screening tools are allowed a certain number of errors, or false positives. Yet, there are other situations in which there is no room for error. If someone who is ill is given a wrong antibiotic, an illness might not only not be cured, it could worsen.
Again, people doing data mining must work closely with people who understand law enforcement and criminal behavior so they can make informed decisions about the nature of the errors, which errors are acceptable and which are not, she says.
"Maybe if you put officers in the wrong location, they spend a night in the cold," she says. "That's not necessarily a big deal."
But, she says if you're using data mining to determine motive and you make an error, the danger associated with misdirecting resources can cause a crime to remain unsolved.
In her book, McCue gives the example of creating a model that's 97-percent accurate by always predicting crime will not take place in a certain low crime area. That is unacceptable, she says.
"Getting inside the nature of the errors and making informed decisions is key," she says.
Predicting the need for predictive analysis
Once law enforcement starts looking at data mining, they realize in many ways, they're already doing it, she says.
Determining motive in violent crimes is one example she gives: "It's setting up decision trees: Was the victim at high risk or was the victim not at high risk? Was the victim killed in the location she or he was found, or was the victim moved? Was it a crime of opportunity?"
McCue encourages capturing and extending some of the natural data mining that's already occurring and then bringing in additional law enforcement-specific tools. While more can be done today, even more will be needed tomorrow.
"The population of the United States is at an all-time high, so the volume of crime is going to rise as population increases," Albanese says. "As the population gets more diverse, solving crimes is going to get more and more difficult. Police need all the potential tools they can find, and I think data mining is a very useful tool."
McCraw asks, "How can you not be excited about being able to identify seemingly unidentifiable points that will enable you to prevent acts of terrorism or crime or even solve crimes?"
Considerations for educated law enforcement consumers
When given the go-ahead to invest dollars in data mining, author Colleen McCue warns command staff and analysts not to get caught up in marketing messages, but to evaluate products and services, and select only those that are truly helpful.
"Repeatedly, I've seen people go out and purchase very expensive tools or services, and get half-way through and realize they've bought a marketing slogan," she says. "They didn't really buy anything with substance that's going to help them.
"They end up with products that they either need to replace or they can't use; or services that have them make costly mistakes. In public safety analysis, if we make an error, people can die because of it."
She says informed law enforcement consumers must ask vendors questions, such as:
How do you evaluate accuracy?
How do you evaluate your models?
How are you going to aggregate my data?
How do you handle duplication?
"There are some incredibly powerful tools which can create incredibly complex and accurate models," she says. "That's not necessarily the best fit for every agency. There are things that you can do just by making a decision to exploit your data in a different way and look at it differently. With education, you can go in and start probing the data and exploring it."
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http://www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2003/nov2003/nov03leb.htm
Data Mining and Value-Added Analysis
By COLLEEN McCUE, Ph.D., EMILY S. STONE, M.S.W., and TERESA P. GOOCH, M.S.
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
—John Naisbitt
Law enforcement agencies, particularly in view of the current emphasis on terrorism, increasingly face the challenge of sorting through large amounts of information needed to help them make informed decisions and successfully fulfill their missions. At the same time, resources, particularly personnel, often dwindle. Described by one agency as the “volume challenge,”1 local, state, and federal agencies alike all struggle with an ever-increasing amount of information that far exceeds their ability to effectively analyze it in a timely fashion.
However, while these issues have surfaced, an extremely powerful tool has emerged from the business community. This tool, used by mortgage brokers to determine credit risk, local supermarkets to ascertain how to strategically stock their shelves, and Internet retailers to facilitate sales, also can benefit law enforcement personnel. Commonly known as data mining, this powerful tool can help investigators to effectively and efficiently perform such tasks as the analysis of crime and intelligence data.2 Fortunately, because of recent developments in data mining, they do not have to possess technical proficiency to use this tool, only expertise in their respective subject matter.
Dr. McCue is the program manager for the Crime Analysis Unit of the Richmond, Virginia, Police Department and holds faculty appointments at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Lieutenant Colonel Gooch serves as assistant chief of the Richmond, Virginia, Police Department.
Ms. Stone served as a crime analyst with the Richmond, Virginia, Police Department.
WHAT IS DATA MINING?
Data mining serves as an automated tool that uses multiple advanced computational techniques, including artificial intelligence (the use of computers to perform logical functions), to fully explore and characterize large data sets involving one or more data sources, identifying significant, recognizable patterns, trends, and relationships not easily detected through traditional analytical techniques alone.3 This information then may help with various purposes, such as the prediction of future events or behaviors.
Domain experts, or those with expertise in their respective fields, must determine if information obtained through data mining holds value. For example, a strong relationship between the time of day and a series of robberies would prove valuable to a law enforcement officer with expertise in the investigation pertaining to this information. On the other hand, if investigators, while reviewing historical homicide data, noticed that victims normally possessed lip balm, they would not, of course, associate lip balm or chapped lips with an increased risk for death.
WHY USE DATA MINING IN LAW ENFORCEMENT?
The staggering increase in the volume of information now flooding into the law enforcement community requires the use of more advanced analytical methods. Because data-mining software now proves user-friendly, personal-computer based, and, thus, affordable, law enforcement agencies at all levels can use it to help effectively handle this increased flow of data.
The law enforcement community can use data mining to effectively analyze information contained in many large data sets, even those involving written narratives (which represent a great deal of valuable law enforcement information). These may include calls for service data, crime or incident reports, witness statements, suspect interviews, tip information, telephone toll analysis, or Internet activity—almost any information that law enforcement professionals encounter in the course of their work.4
Not only can these data sets differ by type but they can originate from different sources,5 potentially giving law enforcement agencies both a more complete informational base from which to draw conclusions and the ability to identify related information in separate databases or investigations. For example, this may prove valuable in the area of illegal narcotics enforcement. The law enforcement community frequently gathers information regarding markets, trends, and patterns, while medical and social services personnel store information concerning substance use and abuse on the individual level. In instances where appropriate, the opportunity to combine these data resources can give investigators a more complete picture and can help address various narcotics problems more rapidly, potentially saving both lives and resources.
Law enforcement agencies can consider exploring the use of data-mining applications to assist them in a variety of areas. Some examples include tactical crime analysis, deployment, risk assessment, behavioral analysis, DNA analysis, homeland security, and Internet/infrastructure protection.
Tactical Crime Analysis
Data mining offers law enforcement agencies potential benefits in the area of tactical crime analysis. For example, because agencies can use data mining for such purposes as to more quickly and effectively identify relationships and similarities between crimes and to forecast future events based on historical behavioral patterns, they can develop investigative leads and effective action plans more rapidly.6 Major case investigations, which frequently present not only large volumes of information but also demands for rapid case resolution, serve as good examples of how law enforcement agencies can benefit from data mining in this regard.
Deployment
Law enforcement agencies can use data-mining technology to help them deploy their resources, including personnel, more effectively and proactively. For instance, data mining can help them identify such key elements in a case or series of events as patterns of time and location—by forecasting future events based on this historical data, agencies potentially could anticipate strategic locations for deployment.
Data mining also allows agencies to consider multiple variables at one time and to add more weight to those considered most important to the decision at hand. For example, patrol officers, who generally respond to incidents with quick turnaround rates, may answer to numerous calls for service and effect many arrests in a relatively short amount of time. On the other hand, death investigations can require multiple officers’ entire shifts just to maintain the crime scene perimeter; as a result, homicide investigators generally may handle considerably fewer incidents and arrests. To this end, by weighing heavily such factors as the type and duration of these incidents, law enforcement agencies can develop effective deployment strategies.
By using data mining, law enforcement personnel, for purposes of analysis, also can link incidents, crimes, or changes in crime trends to other types of events in making deployment decisions. For example, an agency historically may have noticed relationships between major weather events, such as snowstorms or hurricanes, and decreases in street crimes. Also, they may have seen how the arrests of key players in organized crime or drug distribution rings seem to result in increased violence as informants are sought and identified and as new leaders emerge during reorganization. As another example, they may associate increased apprehension rates and a strong economy with decreases in property crimes.7 By using data mining to consider such relationships, law enforcement agencies then can deploy their personnel as they deem necessary.
Risk Assessment
Much like lenders and credit companies use data mining to great effect in assessing the financial gamble involved with lending money or extending credit to individuals or groups, law enforcement agencies can use it to characterize the risk involved in various incidents. For example, agency personnel can explore the use of data mining to identify common characteristics of armed robberies that ended in assaults; doing so then can help identify those that may escalate into assaults in the future. Similarly, in the past, certain types of property crimes have proven related to subsequent stranger rapes.8 The ability to characterize property crimes as similar to those previously associated with subsequent sexual assaults can alert investigators to focus on certain cases and develop effective action plans, perhaps preventing many similar situations from occurring in the future.
Behavioral Analysis
The behavioral analysis of violent crime represents another area with significant potential for data mining. For instance, law enforcement agencies can use data mining to identify common behavioral characteristics in different cases. Even when not identifying a specific offender, investigators may find it possible to gain some insight into what type of offender may prove related to a particular incident. Research in this area, for example, has resulted in the use of data mining to efficiently link serious cases based on behaviors.9
DNA Analysis
Law enforcement agencies also can benefit from the use of data mining when examining DNA evidence. For example, when DNA links a new suspect to an old case, investigators logically may wonder what other cases the suspect may be linked to. Given the amount of information involved, law enforcement personnel can find it virtually impossible to efficiently and completely search old case files each time they identify a new suspect. To this end, compiling DNA information into a searchable database gives law enforcement agencies a powerful tool to help identify, and potentially close, additional linked cases.
Homeland Security
Processing and gaining meaningful insight from the staggering amount of data critical to homeland security has proven difficult.10 Law enforcement agencies can use data mining to help them face this challenge.
For instance, investigators would like to anticipate, and thereby prevent, acts of terrorism. By using data mining to identify relevant historical patterns, trends, and relationships involving terrorists, they could accomplish this objective more effectively.
Also, because data mining allows law enforcement agencies to evaluate information in varied formats and from various databases and agencies, it can enable them to effectively and efficiently analyze a wide range of information that potentially could shed light on terrorist activity. For example, by analyzing information from multiple health-related data sources, law enforcement agencies could recognize significant patterns of illness that may indicate bioterrorism activity or the use of other weapons of mass destruction.11 Agencies also can use this capability to associate general crimes with terrorist activity by linking them with additional intelligence—recent information suggesting links between cigarette smuggling and terrorist financing12 serves as a valid example.
Internet/Infrastructure Protection
The law enforcement community may find that the capability of data mining in characterizing and monitoring normal activity, as well as identifying irregular or suspicious activity, proves applicable in the area of Internet and infrastructure protection. For example, the recognition of suspicious patterns of Web site activity not only can help in the area of traditional intrusion protection but also can serve as an important warning about the release of information. The FBI’s National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) recently underscored the importance of reviewing all Internet materials currently available, as well as those considered for release, for potential threats to critical infrastructure and homeland security.13 This warning comes as many municipal Web sites are receiving suspicious activity and interest.14 This information particularly includes that which, either on its own merits or in combination with other open-source materials, may prove useful to entities with malicious intent.
CONCLUSION
Law enforcement agencies face an ever-increasing flood of information that threatens to overwhelm them; this will require a change in how they process and analyze data. Data-mining technology represents a powerful, user-friendly, and accessible new tool that agencies can use to help them in facing this challenge as they seek to fulfill their missions—ultimately, to ensure the safety and welfare of the public.
Endnotes
1 Tabassum Zakaria, “CIA Turns to Data Mining”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.parallaxresearch.com/ news/2001/0309/cia_turns_to.html.
2 The authors based this article largely on their experience with and research on the subject of data mining.
3 Bruce Moxon, “Defining Data Mining”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.dbmsmag.com/9608d53.html.
4 Law enforcement agencies must address appropriate constitutional and legal concerns if using public source data for law enforcement purposes.
5 Law enforcement agencies, when collecting information from different sources, must decide how they will address the issue of cleaning the data, or preparing data for data-mining activities.
6 Donald Brown, “The Regional Crime Analysis Program (RECAP): A Framework for Mining Data to Catch Criminals”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http:// vijis.sys.virginia.edu/publication/ RECAP.pdf.
7 Ayse Imrohoroglu, Anthony Merlo, and Peter Rupert, “What Accounts for the Decline in Crime?”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.clev.frb.org/Research/workpaper/2000/wp0008.pdf.
8 Colleen McCue, Georgia Smith, Robyn Diehl, Deanne Dabbs, James McDonough, and Paul Ferrara, “Why DNA Databases Should Include All Felons,” Police Chief, October 2001, 94-100.
9 Richard Adderley and Peter Musgrove, “Data Mining Case Study: Modelling the Behaviour of Offenders Who Commit Serious Sexual Assaults,” in Proceedings of the Seventh Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery in Data (SIGKDD) International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Held in San Francisco 26-29 August 2001, (New York NY: ACM Press, 2001), 215-220.
10 Supra note 1; and Eric Chabrow, “The FBI Must Overhaul Its IT Infrastructure to Fulfill a New Mandate of Fighting Terrorism, Cyberattacks”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www. informationweek.com/story/ IWK20020602S0004; and Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, “NSA Intercepts on Eve of 9/11 Sent Warning”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.secretpolicy. com/archives/00000073.html.
11 Steve Bunk, “Early Warning: U.S. Scientists Counter Bioterrorism with New Electronic Sentinel Systems”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.scenpro. com/press%2009%20leaders.html.
12 Paul Nowell, “Hezbollah in North Carolina?”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/ us/dailynews/hezbollah010328.html.
13 National Center for Infrastructure Protection (NIPC), Highlights, Issue 11- 01, December 7, 2001; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.nipc.gov/ publications/highlights/2001/highlight-01-11.htm.
14 Barton Gellman, “Cyber-Attacks by Al Qaeda Feared”; retrieved on April 10, 2003, from http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/articles/A50765-2002 Jun26.html.
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GM:
As always you paste interesting and pertinent pieces , , , without personal commentary. Would you care to personally answer BBG's reasoned personal response to you?
Marc
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Well, the problem is with both BBG's and your objections is they seem to consist of "datamining is bad because it could be abused". This seems to fall under a general umbrella of "technology is bad, because it can be abused."
Datamining, is an essential part of what is known as "intelligence driven policing". It's not just counterterrorism, it's addressing the problems that impact the community served, by tracking crimes and responding with the appropriate allocation of resources. It's a matter of trying to make government more efficient and more effective.
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GOOD POST!
It leads me to reflect a moment , , , perhaps at it core this IS the problem-- I don't WANT government to be TOO efficient. There's a lot of foolishness that literally is on the books but as a practical matter, AT LEAST BEFORE TECHNOLOGIES SUCH AS THOSE WE SEE HERE, wasn't really enforced.
Also, there were a lot of liberal fascist nanny do-gooder ideas that simply weren't practical that might become practical now or in the not-so-distant future.
Does this help?
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I doubt very much anywhere in the US, you'll find any law enforcement agency trying to figure out what to do with an abundance of funds and personnel. The priority is targeting crimes that affect "quality of life". This means keeping gangs out of your neighborhood and your car in front of your house in the A.M. It also means keeping the next smoking hole from appearing in the midst of American cities.
Budgets are shrinking, police forces are shrinking, we're trying to use technology as a "force multiplier" to keep the public safe as we do more with less.
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http://www.city-journal.org/printable.php?id=2694
Heather Mac Donald
The NYPD Diaspora
Former New York cops bring cutting-edge, effective policing to beleaguered communities.
Summer 2008
Since the late 1990s, more than 18 police commanders have left the New York City police department to run their own agencies elsewhere. This unprecedented migration has spread the Compstat revolution—the data-driven transformation of policing begun under New York police commissioner William Bratton in 1994—across the nation. Some of the transplants are well-known: Bratton himself now heads the Los Angeles Police Department; and his former first deputy, John Timoney, has led both the Miami and the Philadelphia forces. But the diaspora also includes lesser-known young Turks who rose quickly through the NYPD’s ranks during the paradigm-shattering 1990s. Now, as chiefs in their own right, they’re proving the efficacy of analytic, accountable policing in agencies wholly dissimilar from New York’s—in one case, achieving success beyond anything seen in Gotham or elsewhere.
José Cordero once led precincts in the Bronx and in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, and eventually he served as New York’s first citywide gang strategist. Like other members of the diaspora, he describes the 1990s NYPD as a life-changing experience: “It was an incredibly resourceful, competitive environment. The wave of captains I was privileged to serve with fed off of each other’s experiments.” In 2002, he took the helm of the Newton, Massachusetts, police department, bringing crime in that already safe city down to its lowest point in over 30 years.
Then he moved to a very different city. East Orange, New Jersey, has 70,000 citizens by official counts, about 95 percent of them black, and deep pockets of poverty. Crime there—much of it violent—had started skyrocketing in 1999, reaching a per-capita rate in 2003 that was 14 times that of New York City and five times that of Detroit. East Orange’s mayor recruited Cordero to quell the violence; Cordero started work in 2004. The results were astonishing. By the end of 2007, major felonies had dropped 68 percent, and homicides 67 percent, from their 2003 high—possibly a national record. (By comparison, from 1993, the year before Bratton arrived in New York City, through 1997, major felonies in New York dropped 41 percent and homicides 60 percent.) East Orange’s remarkable experience should give pause to criminologists, who too often ascribe crime drops to anything but policing reforms.
If the true test of a leader is his ability to imbue an organization with his vision, Cordero has leadership skills in spades. Intelligence-driven policing, as he calls the Compstat principles, is now in the department’s bloodstream, as is the still-iconoclastic belief that the police can actually lower crime. Compstat refers both to the weekly crime-analysis meetings that Bratton pioneered in 1994 to grill precinct leaders about crime on their watch and, more broadly, to the crime-fighting principles that underlay those meetings: relentless gathering of information, constant evaluation of tactics, and a mechanism for holding commanders accountable for public safety. East Orange commanders now focus obsessively on their mission and revel in coming up with new ways to make the city inhospitable to criminals.
The transformation that Cordero effected in the East Orange department mirrored the one he had lived through as a young NYPD captain at the dawn of Compstat. “All we had done up to that point was put people in jail, and it hadn’t made a difference,” recalls the 52-year-old Bronx native. “The new concept was, know everything you possibly can about crime. What I took away from that period was that by challenging yourself continually to know what you don’t know, you can produce big results.”
So Cordero tasked his new team to find out everything it could about who was shooting whom. He combined East Orange’s gang and narcotics squads to maximize information-sharing between drug and gang detectives, since the narcotics trade and gang violence entwine so closely. Eventually, the department targeted the most violent drug dealers and drove them out of business. Word got out on the street that if you engaged in a shooting, not only were you going to do time—possibly in the federal slammer—but your whole criminal enterprise would be shut down.
Weekly Compstat meetings are at the core of the East Orange crime rout, but Cordero, like his expatriate peers, borrows freely from the entire gamut of crime-busting techniques developed in New York. He put East Orange’s two most dangerous streets under 24-hour lockdown for six months while the police bore down on the dealers, a strategy that his NYPD colleague (and now Newark top cop) Garry McCarthy had successfully pioneered in Washington Heights. Today, those two streets are clean and orderly.
Ronald Borgo exemplifies the East Orange Police Department’s transformation. He exudes enthusiasm as he sits at a computer terminal, putting the turbocharged crime-analysis computer program that Cordero designed through its paces. “I was ready to move on until I saw what Director Cordero brought on board,” says the barrel-chested 27-year veteran of the department, who is soon to be confirmed as chief (a position underneath director). “I’m embarrassed to say that in 2000, we didn’t know how to connect the dots. We were just reacting to crime. The director gave us the knowledge and the confidence to actually fight it.”
However much Cordero and Borgo stress that it is managerial and philosophical change, not fancy gadgets, that has driven crime down, it’s hard not to be wonderstruck by that computer program—“Compstat on steroids,” as Cordero calls it. Its “crime dashboard” graphically presents layer upon layer of real-time crime and policing information, updated every 30 seconds. Commanders can check whether any sector of the city is meeting its daily, weekly, and monthly crime-reduction targets, and how the sector’s record stacks up against last year’s numbers. They can instantly pull up a history of the crimes committed at any location, along with every police response to those crimes, in order to evaluate what strategies have or have not succeeded there in the past. Users can activate the city’s public cameras to display crime hot spots.
Illustration by Alberto Mena
. . . producing what may be the greatest crime turnaround in American history.
And most unusually, users can observe how every patrol car is deployed at that moment and what it is doing to prevent crime, in what the department calls “directed patrol.” Directed patrol is really nothing more than what good beat cops used to do as a matter of course, before the 911 radio car swallowed their jobs: rather than simply cruising around town waiting for trouble to happen, an officer is supposed to use his time to preempt crimes, ideally by getting out of his car. Cops might walk up a housing project’s stairwell to check for drug dealers, say, or pass out flyers about a robbery spree at a mini-mall. “You’d be surprised what people will tell you when you’re out of your car that they won’t call the department about,” says Borgo—such as that a neighboring apartment is likely dealing drugs. Institutionalizing the concept of directed patrol represents a “huge organizational change in how officers work on the street,” says Lieutenant Chris Anagnostis. “The new model is: when a cop is not answering a radio call, he should be back in his zone engaged in proactive policing.”
The real-time display of patrol activity allows managers to monitor deployment patterns as well as officer initiative. “If a citizen reports a problem, and an officer doesn’t see and act on it, then it becomes clear to me that he is not enthusiastic about his job,” says Cordero, who dismisses the suggestion that the oversight may feel Orwellian to a street cop. “We’re not looking to see if an officer is having a cup of coffee. We’re in the business of protecting people; any good cop will see the value of that. For those that don’t, I have a word for them: ‘Tough. Find another line of work.’ ”
The patrol-car locator system did produce a backlash. Some officers broke their cars’ antennae or yanked out the requisite communication wires. Cordero remained unfazed: “There’s 70,000 people I care about; I don’t fear disgruntled cops.” He seems to have won the battle—officers now treat the vehicle locators as a matter of course. And self-initiated activity has gone way up, reports Borgo. “In 2004, we did 6,389 directed patrols and we thought we were working. In 2007, we did almost half a million,” he says. “The technology is one thing, but these cops, my cops, are working. I’m so proud of these cops.”
After the department introduced the crime dashboard in 2005, crime plummeted 26 percent in one year. Currently, only supervisors at headquarters and in the field have access to the dashboard, but eventually, every officer on the beat will have a simplified version in his car, so that he can monitor crime in the city in real time and see how his colleagues are responding.
The crime dashboard was just the start of East Orange’s technology boom, which has cost about $1.5 million, paid for with federal and state grants and criminal forfeiture money. On the two streets that had been locked down, the department gave residents computer programs enabling them to report suspicious conditions by pointing their mouses at street photos. Community patrol officers have “virtual directed patrol” screens in their cars that let them watch two places simultaneously: they can park at a drug corner to deter dealing, for instance, while calling up camera shots of other high-crime locales throughout the city. Back at the station house, a detective rides the same public camera system, zooming in on a license plate, say, to see if a car is stolen or if its driver is wanted on an outstanding warrant. Borgo is even building a room in the reception area with 42 large screens that will display live shots from all over the city—a public display of the department’s surveillance capacities, which criminals already falsely believe are all-encompassing. “And I’m going to get civilians to monitor them: they see as well as people in uniform,” he adds slyly.
Gunshot-detection sensors at various locations alert headquarters immediately when a gun gets discharged outdoors. Cameras then take pictures around the source of the shot, with an emphasis on roads and nearby arteries leaving the city, since in 70 percent of East Orange shootings, someone zooms off afterward in a car. The department also plans to introduce license-recognition technology that will automatically tell the police when a stolen car has entered the city.
Bratton famously drew on business principles to transform the NYPD bureaucracy into a crime-fighting machine—a bottom-line orientation that Cordero has absorbed as well. “You have to treat this business as if it were your own,” he says. “A Fortune 500 company is in the business of making money; we’re in the business of saving lives. Can I survive a year without a return on my investment? Maybe. Five years? No.” Cordero regards the public as the consumers of policing services. “We don’t accept excuses when we’re shopping if any item is not available; we expect supply to be consistent with demand,” he points out. “The public should not accept excuses from the police.”
Moreover, Cordero argues, a police department must respond to what consumers actually want from it, not to what it thinks they should want. The two things are not necessarily identical, as Broken Windows theorists point out and police departments discover time and again. “In the South Bronx, we took out the gangs; violence plummeted,” he recalls. “I expected kudos, but instead people asked what we were doing about stolen cars, prostitution, and Saturday night boom boxes.” Consistent with his business-service model, Cordero started sending civilian inspectors to East Orange households where officers had answered 911 calls, to poll residents about the officers’ performances. These audits, like the directed patrols, were initially unpopular among some members of the rank and file but are also now regarded as routine.
Crime continues to fall in East Orange, half a year after Cordero left the department to become New Jersey’s first gang-violence czar and bring intelligence-driven policing to the entire state. As of mid-June 2008, crime in East Orange was down another 15 percent over the same period in 2007, even as violence remains high in perennially murder-torn cities like Camden.
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And the sense of urgency about crime-fighting, which it is the Compstat mechanism’s supreme accomplishment to institutionalize, has not abated. Early one Wednesday morning in May, a fatal shooting took place in an East Orange apartment—an apparent drug assassination. Borgo had been working on the case since 4 am. The crime dashboard showed that except for the homicide, no crimes had been reported in the city through mid-morning. “It’s a good day in one sense,” Borgo says, “but you can’t have a good day when your one crime is the ugliest one of all. I’m not having a good day; I’m having a terrible day.” He tried to take heart from the overall statistics. The night shift was down 73 percent in crimes that week, compared with the same week last year; the day shift was down 81 percent. And over the last five months, the department was still down one murder from the previous year, even after that morning’s shooting. “We’re going to keep it going by being proactive, but this homicide is a major concern to me,” he agonizes.
Cordero is amazed that the most radical premise of Compstat policing—that the police can lower crime—is still not universally held among top managers. “When I hear from chiefs, ‘Crime results from the economy,’ my response is: ‘And you haven’t retired . . . why?’ ” As for Borgo, he keeps a large graph of the city’s historic crime drop on a wall in the police station to imbue his beat officers with the urgency of their mission. “People were being victimized at an unbelievable rate before,” he says. “If crime was still at 2003 levels, we’d have 14,000 more victims today.”
Other NYPD grads have also had a significant effect on their new cities through the application of Compstat principles, easily outstripping national crime averages. For example, Jane Perlov, a former NYPD deputy chief, brought violence in Raleigh, North Carolina, down 33 percent between 2001 and 2007 by breaking the city up into six police districts and making the district leaders responsible for crime on their watches. John Romero, an NYPD deputy inspector, lowered crime in Lawrence, Massachusetts, over 50 percent from 1999 to 2005 by demanding performance from his commanders and basing strategies on the most up-to-date, accurate information. Timoney, the first NYPD Compstat-era commander to take the reins of another department, reduced homicides in Philadelphia over 25 percent in two years—the first homicide decrease that violent city had seen in 15 years. And Bratton has slashed crime by 34 percent since becoming chief of the LAPD.
An NYPD hire can produce these effects because, as Cordero discovered, Compstat crime analysis and accountability are far from ubiquitous, despite their proven track record. “These were new principles to people here,” says Thomas Belfiore, who took over the Westchester County Department of Public Safety in 2003. “I asked for monthly reports; they were all verbiage. Very little was actually measured.”
Even if some version of Compstat has preceded an NYPD grad, it likely lacks the requisite oomph. “There was a Compstat here before,” observes Edmund Hartnett, the feisty chief of the Yonkers Police Department, “but—how to say this diplomatically?—it was city hall–driven; there was little interaction over strategies and tactics.” Hartnett has posted the funeral card of Compstat’s primary architect, the late Jack Maple, on his wall, so that “the Jackster” will always be watching over him. Maple would presumably be pleased that Hartnett brought crime to a ten-year low in Yonkers during his first year leading the department in 2007. “We weren’t getting crime updates before,” says Sergeant Mike Papaleo, head of Yonkers’s newly energized Street Crimes Unit, which targets guns and violent crime. It could take a couple of weeks for data to trickle down to the field. “Now, because of the information out of Compstat, I can assign my guys to immediately tackle patterns as they emerge.” Commanders like Papaleo also receive news of individual crimes on their BlackBerrys every three hours.
New York City is ringed to its north by Compstat graduates. Nearly all the major jurisdictions in Westchester County—Yonkers, White Plains, Mount Vernon, Rye, and the county itself—are now led by a crime-analysis disciple. In some quarters, this has produced—along with crime drops—an even greater level of the usual resentment against outsiders. One Westchester County chief asked another, who had been brought in from New York: “Why is the NYPD always getting these jobs? They should be our jobs.” Keeping NYPD memorabilia in one’s office to a minimum is advisable, the NYPD veteran suggests. Cordero studied management manuals to prepare himself for shaking up the East Orange force. He overcame the inevitable resistance to change “by quick victories and a vision of where we wanted to go,” he says. “It’s a huge challenge, telling a deputy chief with 30 years’ experience: ‘We’re doing things differently now.’ ”
NYPD recruits also have to be careful not to bring NYPD-scale demands to their new departments. After all, no other police department in the country has the resources available to New York commanders. “Your education in the NYPD is invaluable, but [it makes] you think that’s how the rest of the world is,” Westchester County chief Belfiore warns other new bosses. “You’re used to pressing a button and saying: ‘I need a communication unit that speaks Spanish to help me find a missing five-year-old.’ Get ready: you’ll have a girl on the emergency services team who lives in [remote] Dutchess County, and you’ll have to wait an hour for her to get dressed and show up. You really have to temper your impatience. You can beat them down and take the heart out of them.”
David Chong, the affable commissioner of the greatly overstretched Mount Vernon agency, outlines the triage decisions that commanders in less lavishly funded departments face: “In the NYPD, to move 20 to 30 officers in response to a problem is nothing; here, it’s an entire shift. If I want to do a weekend sweep to take back a corner, I have to pay half the force overtime to come in, and that means I’m taking from the budget of other city services. You have to learn that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Chong has compensated for thin staffing by pressing his detectives to get as much intelligence as they can from victims as well as their assailants, since in his jurisdiction, today’s robbery victim may well be tomorrow’s perpetrator. He lowered violent crime 18 percent in 2007, but he longs for more manpower: “I could drive crime completely down in the central city if I had the resources,” he says wistfully.
But perhaps the biggest challenge that an NYPD transplant faces is not local resentment or a drastically reduced force but rather the clout that police unions possess elsewhere. “In the NYPD, no one sees the union contract,” says Pat Harnett, a major player in the Compstat revolution who ran the Hartford Police Department from 2004 to 2006. “In smaller departments, it’s the first thing they’ll show you: ‘This is the contract; you can’t do anything outside it.’ ” Labor-management relations were Cordero’s biggest challenge in Newton. “It’s a different culture up there,” he reports. “If you say, ‘Officer, you need to get out of your car,’ you get back: ‘It’s not in my contract, we need additional pay for that.’ ” In strong civil service systems, officers, not their commanders, in essence decide in which posts they will serve, based on seniority. In small towns, too, the union chief may live next door to the mayor and talk to him every day about the unreasonable demands that the new chief is placing on the department.
Union recalcitrance has driven some New York stars away from new jobs. John Timoney left the Philadelphia department, where he had little ability to put his top picks into leadership positions, “fed up with banging my head against the wall” with the unions over officer discipline and personnel decisions, he says. Former NYPD intelligence commander Dan Oates left the Ann Arbor department, he reports, frustrated with the power of Michigan’s labor law to “crush positive change.”
And a Newark police union has mounted an audacious challenge to Garry McCarthy, Newark’s only hope for escaping its decades-long stranglehold of violence. McCarthy, a Maple protégé and battle-hardened street cop, served as the NYPD’s chief crime strategist from 1999 to 2006. Since taking over the civilian position of police director in Newark in late 2006, McCarthy has moved accountability for crime to his precinct commanders, required 150 officers to leave their desks to fight crime on the streets—including, most controversially, on nights and weekends—and beefed up the department’s analytic abilities. He has also uncovered gross mismanagement of the department’s overtime budget. For his labors, the union representing Newark’s sergeants, lieutenants, and captains is suing to strip him of his powers, alleging that he is encroaching on those of the uniformed police chief. McCarthy is undaunted: “These people are gnats to me,” he told the Newark Star-Ledger. “I’m here with a mission.” If he wins the suit, McCarthy is confident of his future success. Homicides were down 44 percent in the first half of 2008 compared with the previous year. “We’re only scratching the surface here in Newark,” he says. “Wait till we start getting complicated.”
The absence of a regressive union culture in Gotham may help explain why the caliber of NYPD top brass is so high. Its executives stand “head and shoulders above the competition,” one ex-NYPD leader observes, perhaps because they actually have the authority to lead and innovate. New York City should reward its police unions, Oates says, for their unacknowledged flexibility.
For all the adjustments that smaller departments require of their new chiefs, they do offer ambitious crime-fighters an unparalleled intimacy with the communities that they serve. This April, Mount Vernon commissioner Chong was popping across to City Hall to snag a reporter an impromptu meeting with the mayor when a large man in a dented SUV politely accosted him. The driver had recently opened a bakery on a commercial thoroughfare and had noticed people streaming into and out of a nearby store without buying anything. There had already been a drug bust at the store, but it looked as though the activity had started up again. “Now I’m scared for my wife, who sometimes works alone” at the bakery, the businessman told Chong. Chong promised to follow up on the matter; he has since visited the bakery twice on his ubiquitous bike. The drug investigation is ongoing, but the couple is satisfied with the department’s response. “Chong’s a great guy,” the baker, Michael, enthused. “He’s approachable and makes you feel like he’s paying attention.”
With limited resources, Mount Vernon police commissioner David Chong reduced violent crime by nearly 20 percent in 2007.
Michael is just the sort of asset that long-struggling Mount Vernon needs. Forward-looking and optimistic, he has decided to invest in the city in the hope that it will experience the same turnaround that he witnessed in the Bronx and White Plains on his bread routes. “I see more foot traffic and stores coming my way,” he says. Owners are trying to organize a business improvement district, despite the difficult economy. “Everyone’s taking pride in their buildings and fixing up storefronts. It’s just a matter of time before everything is built up.”
Chong and his NYPD peers are acutely aware of the value of entrepreneurs like Michael, and they know how crucial policing is to their success. “If I can remove the fear of crime from this area,” Chong asserts, “people will come, developers will come. If it can be done in Harlem and on 42nd Street, it can be done here.” The redevelopment of Yonkers’s leafy waterfront, a short water-taxi ride away from Wall Street, began before Ed Hartnett took over the police department, but its continuing viability rests on keeping crime down. And East Orange has added yet more proof to the assertion that Cordero made at his 2004 swearing-in: “It’s been proven, time and again, that safety is vital to the rebirth of great American cities.” Standing-room-only crowds engage in bidding wars at auctions of commercial and residential properties; the city’s stately old homes are getting long-overdue makeovers; and neighboring Orange, still mired in corruption and crime, looks on enviously at East Orange’s policing revolution.
Cordero, Hartnett, and other members of the NYPD diaspora have been hit with the usual racial-profiling charges as they try to rid their cities of criminals; Yonkers has even had a visit from Al Sharpton himself. The race-baiters are oblivious to the fact that the greatest beneficiaries of proactive policing are blacks, who make up the overwhelming share of urban crime victims. The sixties-era excuse for crime has it exactly backward: crime is not the result of a bad urban economy, but it will certainly contribute to one. When crime declines, not only are black lives saved, but urban economies can rebound and provide jobs to people with the drive to get ahead.
The anti-cop agitators may be indifferent to the toll of crime on the people they claim to care about, but the black mayors whom several members of the NYPD diaspora work for are not. “We make it no secret that public safety is paramount,” says Mount Vernon mayor Clinton Young. “As long as the kids are safe, and the elderly safe, we are doing our job.” And as long as Compstat policing, the motor of New York City’s unanticipated turnaround in the 1990s, continues to spread throughout the United States, more of America’s great cities can look forward to futures of safety—and of opportunity, wealth, and creativity.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.
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Woof GM:
I'm noticing the shellacking Joe the Plumber is taking as a result of his having successfully taken on His Glibness. Like many, many people he didn't have the T's crossed and the I's dotted in his personal life and now look at the price he is paying for speaking Truth to Power.
I submit that with the vast, uncountable, and often undecipherable laws and regulations of our Feds, State, and local government that a lot of people a lot of people are filing a "note to self-- don't speak up". If it weren't so easy to look Joe the Plumber up, , ,
TAC,
Marc
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And who is doing it? No one with a badge and a gun.
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Yo! Woof! Attention Mr. Spock!
Some of the people who worry me most in the government have neither badges or guns.
More to the point, methinks you are missing the point :-*
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The character assassination of Joe the Plumber is being done by our corrupt MSM, who is protected by the first amendment. Do you wish to alter constitutional freedoms of the press or eliminate open records laws?
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Hello? Is this thing on?
Tap-tap-tap
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Smart *ss :lol:
What about the politics of personal destruction, as practiced by the Hillbillary Clintons for example? Do we really want government officials being able to climb up the butt of any citizen?
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What is your policy solution?
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Having a notion of the 9th Amendment Right of Privacy and not climbing up the butt of citizens without some sort of specific reasonable basis.
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Do you have some caselaw that would indicate how your interpretation of the 9th would prevent Hillary, or now potentially Michelle Obama from engaging in the politics of personal destruction? How would this protect Joe the Plumber from our corrupt MSM?
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Well, looky, looky, look what we have here:
Government computers used to find information on Joe the Plumber
Investigators trying to determine whether access was illegal
Friday, October 24, 2008 8:57 PM
By Randy Ludlow
The Columbus Dispatch
"State and local officials are investigating if state and law-enforcement computer systems were illegally accessed when they were tapped for personal information about "Joe the Plumber."
Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher became part of the national political lexicon Oct. 15 when Republican presidential candidate John McCain mentioned him frequently during his final debate with Democrat Barack Obama.
The 34-year-old from the Toledo suburb of Holland is held out by McCain as an example of an American who would be harmed by Obama's tax proposals.
Public records requested by The Dispatch disclose that information on Wurzelbacher's driver's license or his sport-utility vehicle was pulled from the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles database three times shortly after the debate.
Information on Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.
It has not been determined who checked on Wurzelbacher, or why. Direct access to driver's license and vehicle registration information from BMV computers is restricted to legitimate law enforcement and government business.
Paul Lindsay, Ohio spokesman for the McCain campaign, attempted to portray the inquiries as politically motivated. "It's outrageous to see how quickly Barack Obama's allies would abuse government power in an attempt to smear a private citizen who dared to ask a legitimate question," he said.
Isaac Baker, Obama's Ohio spokesman, denounced Lindsay's statement as charges of desperation from a campaign running out of time. "Invasions of privacy should not be tolerated. If these records were accessed inappropriately, it had nothing to do with our campaign and should be investigated fully," he said.
The attorney general's office is investigating if the access of Wuzelbacher's BMV information through the office's Ohio Law Enforcement Gateway computer system was unauthorized, said spokeswoman Jennifer Brindisi.
"We're trying to pinpoint where it came from," she said. The investigation could become "criminal in nature," she said. Brindisi would not identify the account that pulled the information on Oct. 16.
Records show it was a "test account" assigned to the information technology section of the attorney general's office, said Department of Public Safety spokesman Thomas Hunter.
Brindisi later said investigators have confirmed that Wurzelbacher's information was not accessed within the attorney general's office. She declined to provide details. The office's test accounts are shared with and used by other law enforcement-related agencies, she said.
On Oct. 17, BMV information on Wurzelbacher was obtained through an account used by the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency in Cleveland, records show.
Mary Denihan, spokeswoman for the county agency, said the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services contacted the agency today and requested an investigation of the access to Wurzelbacher's information. Cuyahoga County court records do not show any child-support cases involving Wurzelbacher.
The State Highway Patrol, which administers the Law Enforcement Automated Data System in Ohio, asked Toledo police to explain why it pulled BMV information on Wurzelbacher within 48 hours of the debate, Hunter said.
The LEADS system also can be used to check for warrants and criminal histories, but such checks would not be reflected on the records obtained by The Dispatch.
Sgt. Tim Campbell, a Toledo police spokesman, said he could not provide any information because the department only had learned of the State Highway Patrol inquiry today.
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A couple key points from the article:
Direct access to driver's license and vehicle registration information from BMV computers is restricted to legitimate law enforcement and government business.
The investigation could become "criminal in nature,"
The State Highway Patrol, which administers the Law Enforcement Automated Data System in Ohio, asked Toledo police to explain why it pulled BMV information on Wurzelbacher within 48 hours of the debate, Hunter said.
**Accessing law enforcement databases like NCIC without legitimate law enforcement purposes is illegal and the system is designed to leave an audit trail for tracking it's use as part of it's checks and balances.**
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National Crime Information Center (NCIC)
National Crime Information Center
Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division
1000 Custer Hollow Road
Clarksburg, West Virginia 26306
Hours of Service: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Telephone: (304) 625-2000
NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice information (i.e.- criminal record history information, fugitives, stolen properties, missing persons). It is available to Federal, state, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies and is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
PURPOSE: The purpose for maintaining the NCIC system is to provide a computerized database for ready access by a criminal justice agency making an inquiry and for prompt disclosure of information in the system from other criminal justice agencies about crimes and criminals. This information assists authorized agencies in criminal justice and related law enforcement objectives, such as apprehending fugitives, locating missing persons, locating and returning stolen property, as well as in the protection of the law enforcement officers encountering the individuals described in the system.
ACCESS CONSTRAINTS: All records in NCIC are protected from unauthorized access through appropriate administrative, physical, and technical safeguards. These safeguards include restricting access to those with a need to know to perform their official duties, and using locks, alarm devices, passwords, and/or encrypting data communications.
USE CONSTRAINTS: Users of the NCIC system will be restricted to only those privileges necessary to perform an authorized task(s).
AGENCY PROGRAM: The FBI is authorized to acquire, collect, classify and preserve identification, criminal identification, crime, and other records and to exchange such information with authorized entities.
SOURCES OF DATA: Data contained in NCIC is provided by the FBI, federal, state, local and foreign criminal justice agencies, and authorized courts.
The most recent iteration of NCIC became operational on July 11, 1999 at the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg, West Virginia. A recent hardware upgrade to the NCIC system is responsible for this significant improvement in performance.
Categories of individuals covered by the system:
A. Wanted Persons: 1. Individuals for whom Federal warrants are
outstanding.
2. Individuals who have committed or have been identified with an
offense which is classified as a felony or serious misdemeanor under
the existing penal statutes of the jurisdiction originating the entry
and for whom a felony or misdemeanor warrant has been issued with
respect to the offense which was the basis of the entry. Probation and
parole violators meeting the foregoing criteria.
3. A "Temporary Felony Want" may be entered when a law enforcement
agency has need to take prompt action to establish a "want" entry
for the apprehension of a person who has committed or the officer has
reasonable grounds to believe has committed, a felony and who may seek
refuge by fleeing across jurisdictional boundaries and circumstances
preclude the immediate procurement of a felony warrant. A "Temporary
Felony Want" shall be specifically identified as such and subject to
verification and support by a proper warrant within 48 hours following
the entry of a temporary want. The agency originating the "Temporary
Felony Want" shall be responsible for subsequent verification or re-
entry of a permanent want.
4. Juveniles who have been adjudicated delinquent and who have escaped
or absconded from custody, even though no arrest warrants were issued.
Juveniles who have been charged with the commission of a delinquent
act that would be a crime if committed by an adult, and who have fled
from the state where the act was committed.
5. Individuals who have committed or have been identified with an
offense committed in a foreign country, which would be a felony if
committed in the United States, and for whom a warrant of arrest is
outstanding and for which act an extradition treaty exists between the
United States and that country.
6. Individuals who have committed or have been identified with an
offense committed in Canada and for whom a Canada-Wide Warrant has
been issued which meets the requirements of the Canada-U.S.
Extradition Treaty, 18 U.S.C. 3184.
B. Individuals who have been charged with serious and/or significant
offenses:
1. Individuals who have been fingerprinted and whose criminal history
record information has been obtained.
2. Violent Felons: Persons with three or more convictions for a
violent felony or serious drug offense as defined by 18 U.S.C.
Sec. 924(e).
C. Missing Persons: 1. A person of any age who is missing and who is
under proven physical/mental disability or is senile, thereby
subjecting that person or others to personal and immediate danger.
2. A person of any age who is missing under circumstances indicating
that the disappearance was not voluntary.
3. A person of any age who is missing under circumstances indicating
that that person's physical safety may be in danger.
4. A person of any age who is missing after a catastrophe.
5. A person who is missing and declared unemancipated as defined by
the laws of the person's state of residence and does not meet any of
the entry criteria set forth in 1-4 above.
D. Individuals designated by the U.S. Secret Service as posing a
potential danger to the President and/or other authorized protectees.
E. Members of Violent Criminal Gangs: Individuals about whom
investigation has developed sufficient information to establish
membership in a particular violent criminal gang by either:
1. Self admission at the time of arrest or incarceration, or
2. Any two of the following criteria:
a. Identified as a gang member by a reliable informant;
b. Identified as a gang member by an informant whose information has
been corroborated;
c. Frequents a gang's area, associates with known members, and/or
affects gang dress, tattoos, or hand signals;
d. Has been arrested multiple times with known gang members for
offenses consistent with gang activity; or
e. Self admission (other than at the time of arrest or incarceration).
F. Members of Terrorist Organizations: Individuals about whom
investigations has developed sufficient information to establish
membership in a particular terrorist organization using the same
criteria listed above in paragraph E, items 1 and 2 a-e, as they apply
to members of terrorist organizations rather than members of violent
criminal gangs.
G. Unidentified Persons: 1. Any unidentified deceased person. 2. Any
person who is living and unable to ascertain the person's identity
(e.g., infant, amnesia victim). 3. Any unidentified catastrophe
victim. 4. Body parts when a body has been dismembered.
Categories of records in the system:
A. Stolen Vehicle File: 1. Stolen vehicles. 2. Vehicles wanted in
conjunction with felonies or serious misdemeanors. 3. Stolen vehicle
parts including certificates of origin or title.
B. Stolen License Plate File.
C. Stolen Boat File.
D. Stolen Gun File: 1. Stolen guns. 2. Recovered guns, when ownership
of which has not been established.
E. Stolen Article File.
F. Securities File: 1. Serially numbered stolen, embezzled or
counterfeited, securities.
2. "Securities" for present purposes of this file are currently
(e.g., bills, bank notes) and those documents or certificates which
generally are considered to be evidence of debt (e.g., bonds,
debentures, notes) or ownership of property (e.g., common stock,
preferred stock), and documents which represent subscription rights,
warrants and which are of the types traded in the securities exchanges
in the United States, except for commodities futures. Also, included
are warehouse receipts, travelers checks and money orders.
G. Wanted Person File: Described in "CATEGORIES OF INDIVIDUALS
COVERED BY THE SYSTEM. A. Wanted Persons, 1-4."
H. Foreign Fugitive File: Identification data regarding persons who
are fugitives from foreign countries, who are described in
"
Categories of individuals covered by the system: A. Wanted Persons,
5 and 6."
I. Interstate Identification Index File: A cooperative Federal-state
program for the interstate exchange of criminal history record
information for the purpose of facilitating the interstate exchange of
such information among criminal justice agencies. Described in
"
Categories of individuals covered by the system: B. 1."
J. Identification records regarding persons enrolled in the United
States Marshals Service Witness Security Program who have been charged
with serious and/or significant offenses: Described in "CATEGORIES OF
INDIVIDUALS covered by the system: B."
K. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) Violent Felon File:
Described in "
Categories of individuals covered by the system: B.
2."
L. Missing Person File: Described in "CATEGORIES OF INDIVIDUALS
covered by the system: C. Missing Persons."
M. U.S. Secret Service Protective File: Described in "CATEGORIES OF
INDIVIDUALS covered by the system: D."
N. Violent Criminal Gang File: A cooperative Federal-state program for
the interstate exchange of criminal gang information. For the purpose
of this file, a "gang" is defined as a group of three or more
persons with a common interest, bond, or activity characterized by
criminal or delinquent conduct. Described in "CATEGORIES OF
INDIVIDUALS covered by the system: E. Members of Violent Criminal
Gangs."
O. Terrorist File: A cooperative Federal-state program for the
exchange of information about terrorist organizations and individuals.
For the purposes of this file, "terrorism" is defined as activities
that involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a
violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state or
would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of
the United States or any state, which appear to be intended to:
1. Intimidate or coerce a civilian population,
2. Influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion,
or
3. Affect the conduct of a government by crimes or kidnapping.
Described in "
Categories of individuals covered by the system: F.
Members of Terrorist Organizations."
P. Unidentified Person File: Described in "CATEGORIES OF INDIVIDUALS
covered by the system: G. Unidentified Persons."
Authority for maintenance of the system: The system is established and maintained in accordance with 28 U.S.C. 534; Department of Justice Appropriation Act, 1973, Pub. L. 92-544, 86 Stat. 1115, Securities Acts Amendment of 1975, Pub. L. 94-29, 89 Stat. 97; and 18 U.S.C. Sec. 924 (e). Exec. Order No. 10450, 3 CFR (1974).
Purpose(s): The purpose for maintaining the NCIC system of record is to provide a computerized data base for ready access by a criminal justice agency making an inquiry and for prompt disclosure of information in the system from other criminal justice agencies about crimes and criminals. This information assists authorized agencies in criminal justice objectives, such as apprehending fugitives, locating missing persons, locating and returning stolen property, as well as in the protection of the law enforcement officers encountering the individuals described in the system.
Routine uses of records maintained in the system, including categories of users and the purposes of such uses: Data in NCIC files is exchanged with and for the official use of authorized officials of the Federal Government, the States, cities, penal and other institutions, and certain foreign governments. The data is exchanged through NCIC lines to Federal criminal justice agencies, criminal justice agencies in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, U.S. Possessions and U.S. Territories. Additionally, data contained in the various "want files," i.e., the stolen vehicle file, stolen license plate file, stolen gun file, stolen article file, wanted person file, securities file, boat file, and missing person data may be accessed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Criminal history data is disseminated to non-criminal justice agencies for use in connection with licensing for local/state employment or other uses, but only where such dissemination is authorized by Federal or state statutes and approved by the Attorney General of the United States.
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Data in NCIC files, other than the information described in "Categories of records in the system: I, J, K, M, N, and O," is disseminated to (1) a nongovernmental agency subunit thereof which allocates a substantial part of its annual budget to the administration of criminal justice, whose regularly employed peace officers have full police powers pursuant to state law and have complied with the minimum employment standards of governmentally employed police officers as specified by state statute; (2) a noncriminal justice governmental department of motor vehicle or driver's license registry established by a statute, which provides vehicles registration and driver record information to criminal justice agencies; (3) a governmental regional dispatch center, established by a state statute, resolution, ordinance or Executive order, which provides communications services to criminal justice agencies; and (4) the national Automobile Theft Bureau, a nongovernmental nonprofit agency which acts as a national clearinghouse for information on stolen vehicles and offers free assistance to law enforcement agencies concerning automobile thefts, identification and recovery of stolen vehicles.
Disclosures of information from this system, as described above, are for the purpose of providing information to authorized agencies to facilitate the apprehension of fugitives, the location of missing persons, the location and/or return of stolen property, or similar criminal justice objectives.
Information on missing children, missing adults who were reported missing while children, and unidentified living and deceased persons may be disclosed to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). The NCMEC is a nongovernmental, nonprofit, federally funded corporation, serving as a national resource and technical assistance clearinghouse focusing on missing and exploited children. Information is disclosed to NCMEC to assist it in its efforts to provide technical assistance and education to parents and local governments regarding the problems of missing and exploited children, and to operate a nationwide missing children hotline to permit members of the public to telephone the Center from anywhere in the United States with information about a missing child.
In addition, information may be released to the news media and the public pursuant to 28 CFR 50.2, unless it is determined that release of the specific information in the context of a particular case would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy;
To a Member of Congress or staff acting upon the member's behalf whom the member or staff requests the information on behalf of and at the request of the individual who is the subject of the record; and,
To the National Archives and Records Administration and the General Services Administration in records management inspections conducted under the authority of 44 U.S.C. Sec. Sec. 2904 and 2906.
System Maintenance Policies
Storage: Information maintained in the NCIC system is stored electronically for use in a computer environment.
Retrievability: On line access to data in NCIC is achieved by using the following search descriptors:
A. Stolen Vehicle File:
1. Vehicle identification number;
2. Owner applied number;
3. License plate number;
4. NCIC number (unique number assigned by NCIC computer to each NCIC
record.)
B. Stolen License Plate File:
1. License plate number;
2. NCIC number.
C. Stolen Boat File:
1. Registration document number;
2. Hull serial number;
3. Owner applied number;
4. NCIC number.
D. Stolen Gun File:
1. Serial number of gun;
2. NCIC number.
E. Stolen Article File:
1. Serial number of article;
2. Owner applied number;
3. NCIC number.
F. Securities File:
1. Type, serial number, denomination of security, and issuer for other
than U.S. Treasury issues and currency;
2. Type of security and name of owner of security;
3. Social Security number of owner of security (it is noted the
requirements of the Privacy Act with regard to the solicitation of
Social Security numbers have been brought to the attention of the
members of the NCIC system);
4. NCIC number.
G. Wanted Person File:
1. Name and one of the following numerical identifiers:
a. Date of birth;
b. FBI number (number assigned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation
to an arrest fingerprint record);
c. Social Security number (it is noted the requirements of the Privacy
Act with regard to the solicitation of Social Security numbers have
been brought to the attention of the members of the NCIC system);
d. Operator's license number (driver's number);
e. Miscellaneous identifying number (military number or number
assigned by Federal, state, or local authorities to an individual's
record);
f. Originating agency case number;
2. Vehicle or license plate known to be in the possession of the
wanted person;
3. NCIC number.
H. Foreign Fugitive File: See G, above.
I. Interstate Identification Index File:
1. Name, sex, race, and date of birth;
2. FBI number;
3. State identification number;
4. Social Security number;
5. Miscellaneous identifying number.
J. Witness Security Program File: See G, above.
K. BATF Violent Felon File: See G, above.
L. Missing Person File: See G, above, plus the age, sex, race, height
and weight, eye and hair color of the missing person.
M. U.S. Secret Service Protective File: See G, above.
N. Violent Criminal Gang File: See G, above.
O. Terrorist File: See G, above.
P. Unidentified Person File: the age, sex, race, height and weight,
eye and hair color of the unidentified person.
Safeguards: Data stored in the NCIC is documented criminal justice agency information and access to that data is restricted to duly authorized criminal justice agencies. The following security measures are the minimum to be adopted by all criminal justice agencies having access to the NCIC.
Interstate Identification Index (III) File. These measures are designed to prevent unauthorized access to the system data and/or unauthorized use of data obtained from the computerized file.
1. Computer Center. a. The criminal justice agency computer site must have adequate physical security to protect against any unauthorized personnel gaining access to the computer equipment or to any of the stored data. b. Since personnel at these computer centers can have access to data stored in the system, they must be screened thoroughly under the authority and supervision of an NCIC control terminal agency. (This authority and supervision may be delegated to responsible criminal justice agency personnel in the case of a satellite computer center being serviced through a state control terminal agency.) This screening will also apply to non-criminal justice maintenance or technical personnel. c. All visitors to these computer centers must be accompanied by staff personnel at all times. d. Computers having access to the NCIC must have the proper computer instructions written and other built-in controls to prevent criminal history data from being accessible to any terminals other than authorized terminals. e. Computers having access to the NCIC must maintain a record of all transactions against the criminal history file in the same manner the NCIC computer logs all transactions. The NCIC identifies each specific agency entering or receiving information and maintains a record of those transactions. This transaction record must be monitored and reviewed on a regular basis to detect any possible misuse of criminal history data. f. Each State Control terminal shall build its data system around a central computer, through which each inquiry must pass for screening and verification. The configuration and operation of the center shall provide for the integrity of the data base.
2. Communications: a. Lines/channels being used to transmit criminal history information must be dedicated solely to criminal justice, i.e., there must be no terminals belonging to agencies outside the criminal justice system sharing these lines/channels. b. Physical security of the lines/channels must be protected to guard against clandestine devices being utilized to intercept or inject system traffic.
3. Terminal Devices Having Access to NCIC: a. All agencies having terminals on this system must be required to physically place these terminals in secure locations within the authorized agency. b. The agencies having terminals with access to criminal history must screen terminal operators and restrict access to the terminal to a minimum number of authorized employees. c. Copies of criminal history data obtained from terminal devices must be afforded security to prevent any unauthorized access to or use of the data. d. All remote terminals on NCIC III will maintain a manual or automated log of computerized criminal history inquiries with notations of individuals making requests for records for a minimum of one year.
Retention and disposal: Unless otherwise removed, records will be retained in files as follows:
A. Vehicle File: a. Unrecovered stolen vehicle records (including
snowmobile records) which do not contain vehicle identification
numbers (VIN) or Owner-applied number (OAN) therein, will be purged
from file 90 days after date of entry. Unrecovered stolen vehicle
records (including snowmobile records) which contain VIN's or OANs
will remain in file for the year of entry plus 4.
b. Unrecovered vehicles wanted in conjunction with a felony will
remain in file for 90 days after entry. In the event a longer
retention period is desired, the vehicle must be reentered. c.
Unrecovered stolen VIN plates, certificates of origin or title, and
serially numbered stolen vehicle engines or transmissions will remain
in file for the year of entry plus 4.
(Job No. NC1-65-82-4, Part E. 13 h.(1))
B. License Plate File: Unrecovered stolen license plates will remain
in file for one year after the end of the plate's expiration year as
shown in the record.
(Job No. NC1-65-82-4, Part E. 13 h.(2))
C. Boat File: Unrecovered stolen boat records, which contain a hull
serial number of an OAN, will be retained in file for the balance of
the year entered plus 4. Unrecovered stolen boat records which do not
contain a hull serial number or an OAN will be purged from file 90
days after date of entry.
(Job No. NC1-65-82-4, Part E. 13 h.(6))
D. Gun file: a. Unrecovered weapons will be retained in file for an
indefinite period until action is taken by the originating agency to
clear the record. b. Weapons entered in file as "recovered" weapons
will remain in file for the balance of the year entered plus 2.
(Job No. NC1-65-82-4, Part E. 13 h.(3))
E. Article File: Unrecovered stolen articles will be retained for the
balance of the year entered plus one year.
(Job No. NC1-65-82-4, Part E. 13 h.(4))
F. Securities File: Unrecovered stolen, embezzled or counterfeited
securities will be retained for the balance of the year entered plus
4, except for travelers checks and money orders, which will be
retained for the balance of the year entered plus 2.
(Job No. NC1-65-82-4, Part E. 13 h.(5))
G. Wanted Person File: Person not located will remain in file
indefinitely until action is taken by the originating agency to clear
the record (except "Temporary Felony Wants", which will be
automatically removed from the file after 48 hours).
(Job No. NC1-65-87-114, Part E. 13 h.(7))
H. Foreign Fugitive File: Person not located will remain in file
indefinitely until action is taken by the originating agency to clear
the record.
I. Interstate Identification Index File: When an individual reaches
age of 80.
(Job No. NC1-65-76-1)
J. Witness Security Program File: Will remain in file until action is
taken by the U.S. Marshals Service to clear or cancel the records.
K. BATF Violent Felon File: Will remain in file until action is taken
by the BATF to clear or cancel the records.
L. Missing Persons File: Will remain in the file until the individual
is located or action is taken by the originating agency to clear the
record.
(Job No. NC1-65-87-11, Part E 13h (8))
M. U.S. Secret Service Protective File: Will be retained until names
are removed by the U.S. Secret Service.
N. Violent Criminal Gang File: Records will be subject to mandatory
purge if inactive for five years.
O. Terrorist File: Records will be subject to mandatory purge if
inactive for five years.
P. Unidentified Person File: Will be retained for the remainder of the
year of entry plus 9.
System manager(s) and address: Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover Building, 10th and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20535.
Notification procedure: Same as the above.
Record access procedures: It is noted the Attorney General has exempted this system from the access and contest procedures of the Privacy Act. However, the following alternative procedures are available to requester. The procedures by which computerized criminal history record information about an individual may be obtained by that individual are as follows:
If an individual has a criminal record supported by fingerprints and that record has been entered in the NCIC III file, criminal history record information, it is available to that individual for review, upon presentation of appropriate identification and in accordance with applicable State and Federal administrative and statutory regulations. Appropriate identification includes being fingerprinted for the purpose of insuring that the individual is who the individual purports to be. The record on file will then be verified through comparison of fingerprints.
Procedure: 1. All requests for review must be made by the subject of the record through a law enforcement agency which has access to the NCIC III File. That agency within statutory or regulatory limits can require additional identification to assist in securing a positive identification.
2. If the cooperative law enforcement agency can make an identification with fingerprints previously taken which are on file locally and if the FBI identification number of the individual's record is available to that agency, it can make an on-line inquiry of NCIC to obtain the record on-line or, if it does not have suitable equipment to obtain an on-line response, obtain the record from Washington, DC by mail. The individual will then be afforded the opportunity to see that record.
3. Should the cooperating law enforcement agency not have the individual's fingerprints on file locally, it is necessary for that agency to relate the prints to an existing record by having the identification prints compared with those already on file in the FBI or possibly in the State's central identification agency.
Contesting record procedures: The Attorney General has exempted this system from the contest procedures of the Privacy Act. Under this alternative procedure described above under "Record Access Procedures," the subject of the requested record shall request the appropriate arresting agency, court, or correctional agency to initiate action necessary to correct any stated inaccuracy in subject's record or provide the information needed to make the record complete.
Record source categories: Information contained in the NCIC system is obtained from local, state, Federal and international criminal justice agencies.
Systems exempted from certain provisions of the Privacy Act: The Attorney General has exempted this system from subsection (c) (3) and (4), (d), (e)(1) (2), and (3), (e)(4) (G), (H), (e)(5), (e)(8) and (g) of the Privacy Act pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 552a(j)(2) and (k)(3). Rules have been promulgated in accordance with the requirements of 5 U.S.C. 553 (b), (c) and (e) and have been published in the Federal Register.
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**Misuse law enforcement databases, go from being a cop to being a convict.**
Guilty plea entered in computer misuse
By William Kaempffer, Register Staff
08/14/2008
NEW HAVEN — A former Department of Correction employee has pleaded guilty in federal court to accepting cash and gift certificates to expensive restaurants from three corrupt bail bondsmen in exchange for misusing a state computer to help them catch fugitives.
James Barone, 48, is the third state employee to be ensnared in the bribery scheme and the ninth person — including three New Haven police officers — to plead guilty to corruption counts.
Among them were the three bondsmen, Robert Jacobs, 81, and his sons, Paul and Philip, who for decades used their influence to secure bail customers in Superior Court. Federal prosecutors also say the bondsmen illegally obtained information to help capture bail jumpers.
That’s where federal prosecutors say Barone came in.
It appears that Barone may have been in the sights of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for some time. He resigned from the Department of Correction in January after nearly 26 years, and just a month after the FBI arrested two court employees who Philip Jacobs helped set up in hopes of a lighter sentence.
The U.S. District Court on-line database did not have any record of Barone’s case Wednesday afternoon, and the U.S. Attorney’s office released no other records Wednesday.
Barone worked at the New Haven Correctional Center on Whalley Avenue as a counselor supervisor, DOC spokesman Brian Garnett said Wednesday. He declined further comment, referring questions to prosecutors.
Barone pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of exceeding his authorized access to a state computer, a charge that could land him in prison for up to a year when he is sentenced in November. He could get significantly less.
A former judicial marshal who pleaded guilty to providing illegal favors to Philip Jacobs got probation in May, and the two Jacobs sons received four months each, in part because of their cooperation.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, from at least 2005 through March 2007, Barone used his position at the New Haven Correctional Center to assist the Jacobses by providing them pictures of individuals who failed to appear in Superior Court, and also with inmate information from the Connecticut Online Law Enforcement Communications Teleprocessing system and the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database.
NCIC is a computerized index of criminal justice information that is available to federal, state, and local law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies. Usage is restricted to official duties and it is a crime to misuse it.
Last October, Madison Patrol Officer Bernard Durgin Jr. was arrested on state charges for misusing the state law enforcement database to look up information about ex-girlfriends and women he worked with as a security guard at Yale-New Haven Hospital.
In March 2007, the FBI went public with a months-long undercover investigation of members of the New Haven Police Department and the bail bondsmen.
The net result of the probe was the arrests of two prominent figures: New Haven Lt. William White, a cop of nearly four decades, and Robert Jacobs, who had been a fixture at the Elm Street courthouse for just as long.
White got the stiffest sentence, 38 months, for stealing money planted in a sting by the FBI and taking thousands of dollars in bribes from the Jacobs for running down fugitives while on the job. He is serving his sentence in West Virginia.
The elder Jacobs got 15 months for paying bribes. Only Philip has so far reported to prison, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
Detective Justen Kasperzyk is serving a 15-month sentence in New Jersey for planting evidence, and Detective Jose Silva has already been released from his three-month stint.
Jill D’Antona, a judicial marshal at the Elm Street courthouse, and Cynthia McClendon, a clerk in the public defender’s office, were more minor players. Both have pleaded guilty to taking “gratuities” from the Jacobses in exchange for their help. D’Antona received probation. McClendon has yet to be sentenced.
In court Tuesday, Barone admitted that as a gratuity for providing assistance, during the holiday season, the Jacobses over the years gave him gift certificates to expensive restaurants and, in December 2006, Robert Jacobs gave Barone $200 as thanks for the assistance that Barone provided in his official capacity.
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http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/31725_Illegal_Joe_the_Plumber_Searches_-_Update
Illegal 'Joe the Plumber' Searches - Update
Politics | Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 3:09:00 pm PST
As we reported Friday, shortly after the third presidential debate Ohio government computers were used to look up personal information on “Joe the Plumber.”
Today, one of the people involved in checking the state child support system to try to dig up some dirt has been outed: Inspector general investigating access to Joe the Plumber’s personal information.
Ohio’s inspector general is investigating why a state agency director approved checking the state child-support computer system for information on “Joe the Plumber.”
Helen Jones-Kelly, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, confirmed today that she OK’d the check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher following the Oct. 15 presidential debate.
She said there were no political reasons for the check on the sudden presidential campaign fixture though the Support Enforcement Tracking System.
Amid questions from the media and others about “Joe the Plumber,” Jones-Kelley said she approved a check to determine if he was current on any ordered child-support payments. Such information was not and cannot be publicly shared, she said. It is unclear if Wurzelbacher is involved in a child-support case. Reports state that he lives alone with a 13-year-old son.
“Our practice is when someone is thrust quickly into the public spotlight, we often take a look” at them, Jones-Kelley said, citing a case where a lottery winner was found to owe past-due child support. “Our practice is to basically look at what is coming our way.”
And if you believe that, maybe I can convince you the moon landings were faked.
Because Helen Jones-Kelly also happens to be a maximum $2300 contributor to the Barack Obama campaign. (Hat tip: Ace.)
This is a little glimpse into a very dark future, in which the power of the government is used against private citizens who dare to criticize the anointed One.
And more news on this front, via Michelle Malkin; a Toledo police clerk is being charged with performing an illegal search of Joe’s records: Clerk charged with unlawful search of Joe the Plumber.
Toledo Police have confirmed that a TPD records clerk is accused of performing an illegal search of information related to ‘Joe the Plumber.’
Julie McConnell, has been charged with Gross Misconduct for allegedly making an improper inquiry into a state database in search of information pertaining to Samuel Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16.
Yesterday, the mayor of Toledo admitted that the request to search police records for dirt on Joe the Plumber came from the media.
Toledo Mayor Carty Finkbeiner admitted yesterday that a member of the media made the request of the Toledo Police Department for Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher’s records, NewsTalk 1370 WSPD is reporting. The comments were made in response to questions during an unrelated press conference.
Finkbeiner did not say which news outlet, nor which reporter, made the request. He also did not identify the individual who ran the report.
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http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/editorials/stories/2008/10/29/Theplumber.ART_ART_10-29-08_A6_JDBNIBM.html?sid=101
Editorial: Privacy violations
Officials shouldn't be snooping for private records on Ohioans who are thrust into public eye
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 3:01 AM
The Dispatch does not have room to publish all letters to the editor. Many appear online only. Click here to read them.
Gov. Ted Strickland should order his agency directors not to snoop on private citizens who land in the campaign spotlight. Such scrutiny could have a chilling effect on the willingness of people to stand up and be counted prior to elections.
It also undermines the confidence of all Ohioans that their state government is serious about protecting sensitive information.
The director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Helen Jones-Kelley, confirmed on Monday that she approved a records check on suddenly famous Joe the plumber, who was mentioned frequently by John McCain in his Oct. 15 presidential debate with Barack Obama.
Joe the plumber, real name Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, of Holland, near Toledo, was thrust into the spotlight because he told Obama at a Toledo appearance that he fears the Democratic presidential candidate's tax proposals would prevent Wurzelbacher from buying the business that he works for.
Jones-Kelley said checking for child-support data on Wurzelbacher was routine, not political, citing a previous records check on a lottery winner. Checking the child-support status of someone who has come into money makes sense. But that rationale doesn't apply to Wurzelbacher. Jones-Kelly will have to make a much better case that the records check was not politically motivated.
Strickland, who also said there were no political motives in the data-checking, apparently is giving her the benefit of the doubt.
Access to such data is supposed to be restricted to official business of government and law enforcement.
Ohio Inspector General Thomas P. Charles is investigating whether the data-checking was improper or illegal. Through public-records requests, The Dispatch has determined that there were at least four checks for records on Wurzelbacher. That sounds like an effort to dig up dirt.
Driver's-license and vehicle-registration data about Wurzelbacher were obtained from the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Also, the State Highway Patrol is investigating unauthorized access to data about Wurzelbacher in the attorney general's office from a test account that the office shared with contractors who developed a computer network for the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police.
Unauthorized and unjustified dredging of restricted government databases to find possibly embarrassing information on Americans simply for participating in democracy is unacceptable.
At the very least, Jones-Kelley should be reproved, and anyone who conducted an illegal search of Wurzelbacher's records should be prosecuted.
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"This is a little glimpse into a very dark future, in which the power of the government is used against private citizens who dare to criticize the anointed One."
Exactly so.
Thank you for these two articles GM.
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http://dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/10/29/joe30.html?sid=101
Checks on 'Joe' more extensive than first acknowledged
Tax, welfare info also sought on McCain ally
Wednesday, October 29, 2008 8:05 PM
By Randy Ludlow
Amy Sancetta | AP
Joe Wurzelbacher, also known as "Joe the Plumber," signs autographs at a rally with GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Document
Read the letter from Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, about background checks made on Joe the Plumber [pdf]
A state agency has revealed that its checks of computer systems for potential information on "Joe the Plumber" were more extensive than it first acknowledged.
Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, disclosed today that computer inquiries on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher were not restricted to a child-support system.
The agency also checked Wurzelbacher in its computer systems to determine whether he was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes, she wrote.
Jones-Kelley made the revelations in a letter to Ohio Senate President Bill M. Harris, R-Ashland, who demanded answers on why state officials checked out Wurzelbacher.
Harris called the multiple records checks "questionable" and said he awaits more answers. "It's kind of like Big Brother is looking in your pocket," he said.
If state employees run checks on every person listed in newspaper stories as buying a business, "it must take a lot of people a lot of time to run these checks," he said. "Where do you draw the line?"
The checks were run after the news media reported that Wurzelbacher was considering buying a plumbing business with more than $250,000 in annual income, Jones-Kelley wrote.
"Given our understanding that Mr. Wurzelbacher had publicly indicated that he had the means to purchase a substantial business enterprise, ODJFS, consistent with past departmental practice, checked confidential databases ," she wrote.
"Not surprisingly, when a person behind in child support payments or receiving public assistance is receiving significant media attention which suggests that the person appears to have available financial resources, the Department risks justifiable criticism if it fails to take note and respond," Jones-Kelley wrote.
The results of the searches were not publicly released and remain confidential, she wrote. Wurzelbacher has said he is not involved in a child-support case and has not purchased any business.
Jones-Kelley wrote that the checks were "well-meaning," but misinterpreted amid the heated final weeks of a presidential election.
Wurzelbacher became a household name when Republican presidential hopeful John McCain frequently referred to "Joe the Plumber" during his Oct. 15 debate with Democrat nominee Barack Obama. The checks began the next day.
Wurzelbacher, who has endorsed and campaigned for McCain, had been caught on videotape challenging Obama about his tax proposals during a campaign visit to "Joe's" neighborhood in the Toledo suburb of Holland.
Republicans have painted the checks on Wurzelbacher as a politically motivated bid by Democrats to dig up dirt and discredit the McCain ally. The Obama campaign has said it has no ties to the checks and supports investigations.
The administration of Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland has said the information was not improperly shared and that there were no political motives behind the checks.
The Dispatch has uncovered four uses of state computer systems to access personal information on Wurzelbacher, including the child-support check authorized by Jones-Kelley.
She said on Monday that her department frequently runs checks for any unpaid child support obligations "when someone is thrust quickly into the public spotlight."
Republican legislators have challenged Jones-Kelley's reason for checking on Wurzelbacher as "frightening" and flimsy.
Jones-Kelly also has denied any connections between the computer checks on Wurzelbacher and her support for Obama. She donated the maximum $2,500 this year to the Obama campaign.
Ohio Inspector General Thomas P. Charles is investigating whether the child-support check on Wurzelbacher was legal.
rludlow@dispatch.com
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Thank you for these reports-- what do you make of them GM?
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Thus far I see no justifiable reason the "Joe files" were accessed. It sure looks like politically motivated use of state power. I sure hope this results in indictments and prosecution of those responsible. Law enforcement, like the military is supposed to be apolitical. This is what makes us different from the banana republics.
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http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/10/31/joe.html?sid=101
State employee says she was ordered to check out Joe the Plumber
Friday, October 31, 2008 10:21 PM
By Randy Ludlow
The Columbus Dispatch
Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.
Niekamp didn't know she just had checked on "Joe the Plumber," who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain's example in a debate of an average American.
The senior manager would not learn about "Joe" for another week, when she said her boss informed her and directed her to write an e-mail stating her computer check was a legitimate inquiry.
The reason Niekamp said she was given for checking if there was a child-support case on Wurzelbacher does not match the reason given by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are "thrust into the public spotlight," amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.
Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. "I've never done that before, I don't know of anybody in my office who does that and I don't remember anyone ever doing that," she said today.
Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland and Jones-Kelley, both supporters of Democrat Barack Obama, have denied political motives in checking on Wurzelbacher. The Toledo-area resident later endorsed McCain. State officials say any information on "Joe" is confidential and was not released.
Today, Strickland press secretary Keith Dailey said neither the governor's office nor Job and Family Services officials could comment due to an ongoing investigation by Ohio's inspector general.
Republican legislators have called the checks suspicious and Jones-Kelley's reason for them flimsy. They are demanding to know whether state computers were accessed in an attempt to dig up dirt on Wurzelbacher.
Jones-Kelley has revealed that her agency also checked to see if Wurzelbacher was receiving welfare assistance or owed unemployment compensation taxes. "Joe the Plumber" has said he is not involved in a child-support case.
About 3 p.m. on Oct. 16, Niekamp said Carrie Brown, assistant deputy director for child support, asked her to run Wurzelbacher through the computer. Citing privacy laws, Niekamp would not say what, if anything, was found on "Joe."
On Oct. 23, Niekamp said Doug Thompson, deputy director for child support, told her she had checked on "Joe the Plumber." Thompson "literally demanded" that she write an e-mail to the agency's chief privacy officer stating she checked the case for child-support purposes, she said.
Thompson told her that Jones-Kelley said Wurzelbacher might buy a plumbing business and could owe support. Thompson said he replied that he "would check him out."
Niekamp, 38, a senior child-support manager, said she never heard any discussion of politics amid what her supervisors told her about the checks on Wurzelbacher.
Worried about her $69,000-a-year job and potential criminal charges, the 15-year state employee said she went to Inspector General Thomas P. Charles on Oct. 24. She has seen employees fired, and dismissed one herself, for illegally accessing personal information in support cases. Niekamp, a registered Republican, said politics played no role in what she told investigators.
The e-mail that Niekamp said she wrote was not among records provided today to The Dispatch in response to a public-records request. Nor did the agency, as required by state law, say it withheld any records.
Strickland spokesman Dailey later said one e-mail was withheld from The Dispatch because its release is prohibited by federal or state laws that forbid the release of information on the state's child-support system. Daily said he was neither confirming nor denying the existence of a case on Wurzelbacher.
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http://hotair.com/archives/2008/11/01/a-cover-up-in-plumbergate/
A cover-up in Plumbergate?
posted at 9:50 am on November 1, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
Looks like Ohio has a first-class political scandal brewing over Joe the Plumber. After Helen Jones-Kelley tried to bluff her way out of her actions to check Joe Wurzelbacher’s records when he became a national story, the employee who conducted the search says that she’s never heard of a “famous person” investigation. Vanessa Niekamp also says her supervisors lied to her about the investigation, and then asked her to lie about it afterwards:
Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.
Niekamp didn’t know she just had checked on “Joe the Plumber,” who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain’s example in a debate of an average American. …
Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are “thrust into the public spotlight,” amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.
Niekamp told The Dispatch she is unfamiliar with the practice of checking on the newly famous. “I’ve never done that before, I don’t know of anybody in my office who does that and I don’t remember anyone ever doing that,” she said today.
The case gets even murkier. The Dispatch, which has done yeoman work on this story, got the public records surrounding the Wurzelbacher inquiry — but Niekamp’s e-mail wasn’t included. Nor did the records indicate any redaction or gap, as required by law. Afterwards, a spokesperson for Governor Ted Strickland acknowledged the omission, saying that Niekamp’s status as a child-welfare agent exempted them from providing her e-mail.
What’s becoming apparent is that Ohio officials have something to hide. The records-check request came from an assistant deputy director for child support. When the story went public, the deputy director “literally demanded” Niekamp write the e-mail that would get them off the hook. The agency’s leadership engaged in a cover-up — and that strongly implies that a crime got committed.
Niekamp told the Dispatch that she’s seen people get fired for unauthorized records checks, and that she herself fired one employee for the violation of public trust. This has gone beyond just a mere firing. It now looks as though Helen Jones-Kelley’s staff engaged in an attempt to obstruct justice, and Jones-Kelley’s lie about the Famous People Records Check appears to be part of it.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/01/conyers-calls-for-investigation-into-aunti-zeituni-info-lead-joe-the-plumber-still-on-his-own/
Conyers calls for investigation into Aunti Zeituni info leak; Joe the Plumber still on his own
By Michelle Malkin • November 1, 2008 11:25 PM
I predicted the totally predictable last night. And so it has come to pass: The left-wing fairweather friends of privacy are all over the leak of Aunti Zeituni’s immigration info — while Joe The Plumber remains persona non grata. Democrat Rep. John Conyers has already called for a federal investigation. The WaPo is already up with an A-section story on the anonymous leak. And the liberal blogs are up in arms.
The MSM abhor anonymous leaks — unless they’re helping to undermine Bush administration anti-terrorism programs or conservative causes and candidates.
Laughably, the Obama cultists suspect that Bush administration officials are in cahoots with the McCain campaign and the Associated Press.
These people have reading comprehension and reality comprehension problems. It’s the Bush administration that has moved to protect Aunti Zeituni. It’s the pro-shamnesty Bush administration that will ensure that nothing happens to her. Pro-shamnesty McCain isn’t going to touch the story. McCain adviser Mark Salter told WaPo that it’s a “family matter.”
Another predictable prediction: McCain will issue an edict forbidding staff from talking about this the same way the staffers are forbidden from mentioning Jeremiah Wright — with disastrous results.
Never mind that the massive, systemic problem of deportation fugitives is a matter of national security and rule of law.
“Family matter,” my foot.
By the way: Where in the world is Aunti Zeituni? Who knows? And if it wasn’t Barack Obama who helped her get here, who did? How did she get a Social Security card? Who advised her to apply for public housing? Who did she know with a saavy enough legal background to help her navigate the paperwork of the welfare state?
Hmmmm?
Obama and his future wife, Michelle, met Onyango on a subsequent visit to Kenya in 1992, and she visited the Obama family in Chicago on a tourist visa about nine years ago, his campaign said. Onyango attended Obama’s U.S. Senate swearing-in ceremony in 2005, and the senator last heard from her about two years ago, according to the campaign.
A campaign source said Obama provided Onyango no assistance in obtaining a tourist visa or housing, or in her immigration case.
In an interview with the Times of London, which first reported Onyango’s presence in Boston and her campaign contributions, Onyango said she had traveled to and from the United States since 1975. Commercial databases indicate she received a Social Security card in 2001, indicating she was legally present and authorized to work at that time.
Onyango was not at her state-subsidized West Broadway residence yesterday in South Boston, and no one answered her telephone.
William McGonigle, deputy director of the Boston Housing Authority, said Onyango applied for public housing in 2002 and was approved in 2003 as an eligible noncitizen. She was paid a small stipend for volunteering as a resident health advocate starting in December 2007, he said.
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Hi ALL,,,,
Well , what can i say to all of this but...thank the Big Man Upstairs that yoy dont live in the UK...because it is, after all ,the worlds leader of all things surveillance ...and thats official .But lets not forget that the US made a treaty with all the comonwealth countries (INC. Britain) to have a little piece of the US in each of their lands.This enabled the long arm of Big Brother to extend globally.Its just that 98% of us are blissfully aware of the fact.
Part of the treaty allowed a "quid - pro - quo " deal of these countries to the US and also allows them individual countries laws to be bypassed by the US stations who listen in on home grown problems and report back by proxy - thus no Privacy laws are seem to be broken.
So its beeen going on since WW2, well, 1947 in fact , but with more and more "social networking sites" popping up like cobwebs, this just allows people to be tracked via numbers of accomplices instead of the old Plod doing the footwork.
You wouldnt run after a Big Cat all day to trap it ,you will give it some incentive to do the work for you...
BTW a system already exists to monitor e-mails , cellphones fax and the like ....Its called ECHELON and flags up keywords or groups of words for further monitoring (read human presence) thus enabling "THE EARS MAN" to do another job....
Rant over (LAUGHS)
Cheers Thomas , Wales
PS DONT LOOK Up!! - You will be on Google Maps in 18 months 8-) 8-) 8-)
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GM:
Would you be OK with this for the US?
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3384743/Internet-black-boxes-to-record-every-email-and-website-visit.html
Internet black boxes to record every email and website visit
Internet "black boxes" could be used to record every email and website visit made by computer users in Britain, it has been reported.
By Graham Tibbetts
Last Updated: 12:24AM GMT 06 Nov 2008
Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database.
The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week.
It is further evidence of the Government's desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has described it as a "step too far".
The proposal is expected to be put out to consultation as part of the new Communications Data Bill early next year.
At Monday's meeting in London representatives from BT, AOL Europe, O2 and BSkyB were given a presentation of the issues and the technology surrounding the Government's Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), the name given by the Home Office to the database proposal.
They were told that the security and intelligence agencies wanted to use the stored data to help fight serious crime and terrorism.
Officials tried to reassure the industry by suggesting that many smaller ISPs would be unaffected by the "black boxes" as these would be installed upstream on the network and hinted that all costs would be met by the Government.
One delegate at the meeting told the Independent: "They said they only wanted to return to a position they were in before the emergence of internet communication, when they were able to monitor all correspondence with a police suspect. The difference here is they will be in a much better position to spy on many more people on the basis of their internet behaviour. Also there's a grey area between what is content and what is traffic. Is what is said in a chat room content or just traffic?"
Ministers have said plans for the database have not been confirmed, and that it is not their intention to introduce monitoring or storage equipment that will check or hold the content of emails or phonecalls on the traffic.
A spokesman for the Home Office said: "We are public about the IMP, but we are still working out the detail. There will a consultation on the Communications Data Bill early next year."
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Or how about this?
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/soar01_.html
Short Cuts
Daniel Soar
For a moment in the late 1990s, it looked as though mobile phones might make us free. You could work in the park, be available when you wanted to be, choose who you answered to. You could be anywhere while you did anything. If location was mentioned it was gratuitous chatter (‘I’m on the train!’) or a handy lie (‘I’m in the office’). Back then, a phone in your pocket was an expensive novelty. Ten years later, there are 3.3 billion active mobile phones, meaning that – if you ignore the show-offs who have several – half the planet has one; 85 per cent of the million new subscriptions taken up each day come from the developing world. Three billion people are just a few button presses away, and where they are doesn’t matter. But if you’re the retiring type, the trouble is that the phone companies and interested others do know exactly where you are, at any given second, so long as you have your handbag with you and your phone switched on: even the most basic technology, phone mast triangulation, locates you to within a couple of hundred metres; newer phones, with GPS built in, will tell any system that asks whether you’re in the kitchen or the loo.
You might assume that this information is either of interest to no one or, at the very least, protected by privacy laws and accessible only by the agencies that hunt suicide bombers and paedophiles. But you’d be wrong. Anyone can, for instance, sign up – at £29.99 a year – to mapAmobile.com (‘you’ll always know where your loved ones are’), which allows you to follow the movements of your ‘family and friends’ on a computer screen. The safeguard, from your friend’s point of view, is that he has to consent to being tracked, a process which involves his replying to a text message alerting him to the request; this shouldn’t be much of a hindrance to you as would-be stalker if he happens to leave his phone lying around. That this sort of enterprising solution is possible is the result of the major networks – in the UK, Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile – having decided, in around 2002, to sell their location data to any company willing to pay for it.
Such services are obscure, and barely legal, but it’s about to be brought home to the majority of mobile users that what they’re up to isn’t private information. Owners of the latest version of Apple’s iPhone – avidly queued for at stores around the world last month – can now download an application that displays a friend’s location as a bright green dot on a map. In 2009, phones running Google’s Android operating system will be able to show you in pictures how to reach that green dot while avoiding traffic snarl-ups and stray hurricanes; they’ll also tell you how much a drink will cost when you get there. Along the way you might have to dodge a virtual attack from a passing stranger who, like you, has signed up to an urban espionage ‘immersive game’ and has pegged you in the street as a target. If all this sounds like unnecessary gimmickry, and you’re perfectly happy with your phone the way it is, or would be if only you knew how to make it ring like a phone rather than a wheezing horse or a three-dimensional aural representation of the rings of Saturn, then you’re out of luck: the information your phone provides is out there anyway. It doesn’t belong to you, and anyone with the required resources can do with it what they will.
At a very rough estimate half a trillion calls are made each day on the world’s mobile networks: their origin and destination, their time and duration and all identifying codes are logged on telecom provider hard-drives and generally retained, under emerging legislation, for up to two years. It’s impossible to exaggerate the value of these data. In most countries no one can listen in to your conversation – though it’s technically trivial to do – without a warrant, but given what most of us talk about most of the time what we actually say when we’re on the phone may be the least interesting thing about the call. Certainly this is the view of the growing Intelligence Support Systems industry (ISS), which sells analysis tools to government agencies, police forces and – increasingly – the phone companies themselves. Take the case of ThorpeGlen, a company headquartered in a business park outside Ipswich that also hosts research divisions of BT and Nokia Siemens Networks. At the frequent ISS conferences – Dubai, Qatar, Washington, Prague – one of the key topics of discussion tends to be how to identify targets for LI (that’s ‘lawful intercept’) in the first place: it’s a cinch to bug someone, but how do you help a law enforcement agency decide who to bug?
To help answer that question, companies like ThorpeGlen (and VASTech and Kommlabs and Aqsacom) sell systems that carry out ‘passive probing’, analysing vast quantities of communications data to detect subjects of potential interest to security services, thereby doing their expensive legwork for them. ThorpeGlen’s VP of sales and marketing showed off one of these tools in a ‘Webinar’ broadcast to the ISS community on 13 May. He used as an example the data from ‘a mobile network we have access to’ – since he chose not to obscure the numbers we know it’s Indonesia-based – and explained that calls from the entire network of 50 million subscribers had been processed, over a period of two weeks, to produce a database of eight billion or so ‘events’. Everyone on a network, he said, is part of a group; most groups talk to other groups, creating a spider’s web of interactions. Of the 50 million subscribers ThorpeGlen processed, 48 million effectively belonged to ‘one large group’: they called one another, or their friends called friends of their friends; this set of people was dismissed. A further 400,000 subscriptions could be attributed to a few large ‘nodes’, with numbers belonging to call centres, shops and information services. The remaining groups ranged in size from two to 142 subscribers. Members of these groups only ever called each other – clear evidence of antisocial behaviour – and, in one extreme case, a group was identified in which all the subscribers only ever called a single number at the centre of the web. This section of the ThorpeGlen presentation ended with one word: ‘WHY??’
Once you’ve found your terrorist, how do you know that he won’t, say, pass on his phone, or get a new number or use a throwaway pay-as-you-go handset (as British Olympic officals were advised to do by MI6 in an attempt to evade Chinese spies)? ThorpeGlen has a solution for that too. It also sells ‘profiling’ systems, which measure the behaviour pattern of an individual subscriber and, using statistical analysis, determine whether that same pattern is now appearing from another source. In other words, if your terrorist gets a new phone you’ll still know it’s him. If he keeps the same phone and starts changing his pattern, then he’s about to blow up Jakarta International Airport. This is important stuff. If you want to see how ThorpeGlen’s systems work for yourself, just log on to https://81.143.55.50:58443; all you need to do is figure out a username and password. Who isn’t a spy now?
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No, but it pretty much exists already. Not quite as formalized, but your ISP knows where you go and what you're doing pretty much anyway and that can be subpeonaed or accessed via a search warrant.
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Keep in mind that your cell phone is for all intents and purposes a microphone, transmitter and GPS beacon wrapped into one. It doesn't take an MIT trained engineer to see the potential surveillance aspects inherent in such a device.
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Well, isn't the idea and fact of a search warrant rather important in our Constitutional scheme of things?!?
Again I ask the question: Are you OK with what my two posts describe or is there something there that goes too far, even for you?
If so, what is it?
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I think that 4th Amd. rules apply for tracking internet usage and cellphones. I think a judge should regulate access based on probable cause or reasonable suspicion, bepending on the degree of invasiveness of the search.
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http://michellemalkin.com/2008/11/10/ohio-governor-downplays-snoopers-blatant-misuse-of-office/
Where is the outrage? Where is the MSM?
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Nice follow up on this example of why some of us are deeply uneasy with the march of technology into our private lives , , ,
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Abuses and illegal acts by public officials happened long before the first computer was ever invented.
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Exactly so-- it is the nature of things and that is exactly what makes it worrisome when they so much more knowledge that was previously private about people.
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Like it or hate it, the pandora's box of technology is wide open. We live in the age of the panopticon.
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Emanuel to Republican Drug Warriors: 'Thanks for the White Flag'
Jacob Sullum | November 12, 2008, 1:20pm
In today's column, I noted that Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), Barack Obama's choice for chief of staff, has a history as a hard-line drug warrior. Here is another example of his tougher-than-thou rhetoric, from a 2006 press release "in response to reports that Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez' [sic] called the war on terror a real war, not like the war on drugs":
Thanks for the white flag. From the United States' most senior law enforcement official, the man who should be leading the war on drugs, this white flag of surrender will not be reassuring to the millions of parents trying to protect their kids.
The excuse for Emanuel's attempt to position himself to the right of the Bush administration on drug policy is not just lame but alarming. The statement by Gonzales to which he refers was made during an interview with The Kansas City Star in which the attorney general defended the administration's unilateral, indefinite detention of suspected terrorists. Here's an excerpt from the Star article, which I found on Nexis (italics added):
[Gonzales] said that "just like in every other war," the American people will have to trust the government to protect the rights of those in custody while pursuing justice in secret. Pressed on how long extraordinary measures—for instance, the imprisonment of suspects without the filing of charges—might continue, he said they would last at least until the pursuit of al-Qaida and its accomplices has come to an end.
"First of all this is a real war," he said, drawing a distinction between the war on terror and "the war on drugs or the war on poverty or something like that. It's like the Cold War. At some point this conflict is going to be over. But today it is not over."
Instead of challenging the Bush administration's use of war rhetoric to justify chucking habeas corpus, due process, and the separation of powers, Emanuel faulted it for waging the war on drugs with insufficient enthusiasm. Not only does this not bode well for drug policy in the Obama administration; it further undermines the next president's claim to be better than Bush on civil liberties in general.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/130053.html
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http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/is_big_brother_1.html
Schneier on Security
A blog covering security and security technology.
« The Most Secure Car Park in the World | Main | Sex Toy Security Risk »
May 11, 2007
Is Big Brother a Big Deal?
Big Brother isn't what he used to be. George Orwell extrapolated his totalitarian state from the 1940s. Today's information society looks nothing like Orwell's world, and watching and intimidating a population today isn't anything like what Winston Smith experienced.
Data collection in 1984 was deliberate; today's is inadvertent. In the information society, we generate data naturally. In Orwell's world, people were naturally anonymous; today, we leave digital footprints everywhere.
1984's police state was centralized; today's is decentralized. Your phone company knows who you talk to, your credit card company knows where you shop and Netflix knows what you watch. Your ISP can read your email, your cell phone can track your movements and your supermarket can monitor your purchasing patterns. There's no single government entity bringing this together, but there doesn't have to be. As Neal Stephenson said, the threat is no longer Big Brother, but instead thousands of Little Brothers.
1984's Big Brother was run by the state; today's Big Brother is market driven. Data brokers like ChoicePoint and credit bureaus like Experian aren't trying to build a police state; they're just trying to turn a profit. Of course these companies will take advantage of a national ID; they'd be stupid not to. And the correlations, data mining and precise categorizing they can do is why the U.S. government buys commercial data from them.
1984-style police states required lots of people. East Germany employed one informant for every 66 citizens. Today, there's no reason to have anyone watch anyone else; computers can do the work of people.
1984-style police states were expensive. Today, data storage is constantly getting cheaper. If some data is too expensive to save today, it'll be affordable in a few years.
And finally, the police state of 1984 was deliberately constructed, while today's is naturally emergent. There's no reason to postulate a malicious police force and a government trying to subvert our freedoms. Computerized processes naturally throw off personalized data; companies save it for marketing purposes, and even the most well-intentioned law enforcement agency will make use of it.
Of course, Orwell's Big Brother had a ruthless efficiency that's hard to imagine in a government today. But that completely misses the point. A sloppy and inefficient police state is no reason to cheer; watch the movie Brazil and see how scary it can be. You can also see hints of what it might look like in our completely dysfunctional “no-fly��? list and useless projects to secretly categorize people according to potential terrorist risk. Police states are inherently inefficient. There's no reason to assume today's will be any more effective.
The fear isn't an Orwellian government deliberately creating the ultimate totalitarian state, although with the U.S.'s programs of phone-record surveillance, illegal wiretapping, massive data mining, a national ID card no one wants and Patriot Act abuses, one can make that case. It's that we're doing it ourselves, as a natural byproduct of the information society.We're building the computer infrastructure that makes it easy for governments, corporations, criminal organizations and even teenage hackers to record everything we do, and -- yes -- even change our votes. And we will continue to do so unless we pass laws regulating the creation, use, protection, resale and disposal of personal data. It's precisely the attitude that trivializes the problem that creates it.
This essay appeared in the May issue of Information Security
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http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corporations-versus-the-market-or-whip-conflation-now/ (http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/11/10/roderick-long/corporations-versus-the-market-or-whip-conflation-now/)
Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now
by Roderick Long
Lead Essay
November 10th, 2008
Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge?
No and yes. Emphatically no—because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare. But also, in all too many cases, yes —because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible.
First, the no. Corporations tend to fear competition, because competition exerts downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on salaries; moreover, success on the market comes with no guarantee of permanency, depending as it does on outdoing other firms at correctly figuring out how best to satisfy forever-changing consumer preferences, and that kind of vulnerability to loss is no picnic. It is no surprise, then, that throughout U.S. history corporations have been overwhelmingly hostile to the free market. Indeed, most of the existing regulatory apparatus—including those regulations widely misperceived as restraints on corporate power—were vigorously supported, lobbied for, and in some cases even drafted by the corporate elite.
Corporate power depends crucially on government intervention in the marketplace. This is obvious enough in the case of the more overt forms of government favoritism such as subsidies, bailouts, and other forms of corporate welfare; protectionist tariffs; explicit grants of monopoly privilege; and the seizing of private property for corporate use via eminent domain (as in Kelo v. New London). But these direct forms of pro-business intervention are supplemented by a swarm of indirect forms whose impact is arguably greater still.
As I have written elsewhere:
One especially useful service that the state can render the corporate elite is cartel enforcement. Price-fixing agreements are unstable on a free market, since while all parties to the agreement have a collective interest in seeing the agreement generally hold, each has an individual interest in breaking the agreement by underselling the other parties in order to win away their customers; and even if the cartel manages to maintain discipline over its own membership, the oligopolistic prices tend to attract new competitors into the market. Hence the advantage to business of state-enforced cartelisation. Often this is done directly, but there are indirect ways too, such as imposing uniform quality standards that relieve firms from having to compete in quality. (And when the quality standards are high, lower-quality but cheaper competitors are priced out of the market.)
The ability of colossal firms to exploit economies of scale is also limited in a free market, since beyond a certain point the benefits of size (e.g., reduced transaction costs) get outweighed by diseconomies of scale (e.g., calculational chaos stemming from absence of price feedback)—unless the state enables them to socialise these costs by immunising them from competition – e.g., by imposing fees, licensure requirements, capitalisation requirements, and other regulatory burdens that disproportionately impact newer, poorer entrants as opposed to richer, more established firms.
Nor does the list end there. Tax breaks to favored corporations represent yet another non-obvious form of government intervention. There is of course nothing anti-market about tax breaks per se; quite the contrary. But when a firm is exempted from taxes to which its competitors are subject, it becomes the beneficiary of state coercion directed against others, and to that extent owes its success to government intervention rather than market forces.
Intellectual property laws also function to bolster the power of big business. Even those who accept the intellectual property as a legitimate form of private property can agree that the ever-expanding temporal horizon of copyright protection, along with disproportionately steep fines for violations (measures for which publishers, recording firms, software companies, and film studios have lobbied so effectively), are excessive from an incentival point of view, stand in tension with the express intent of the Constitution’s patents-and-copyrights clause, and have more to do with maximizing corporate profits than with securing a fair return to the original creators.
Government favoritism also underwrites environmental irresponsibility on the part of big business. Polluters often enjoy protection against lawsuits, for example, despite the pollution’s status as a violation of private property rights. When timber companies engage in logging on public lands, the access roads are generally tax-funded, thus reducing the cost of logging below its market rate; moreover, since the loggers do not own the forests they have little incentive to log sustainably.
In addition, inflationary monetary policies on the part of central banks also tend to benefit those businesses that receive the inflated money first in the form of loans and investments, when they are still facing the old, lower prices, while those to whom the new money trickles down later, only after they have already begun facing higher prices, systematically lose out.
And of course corporations have been frequent beneficiaries of U.S. military interventions abroad, from the United Fruit Company in 1950s Guatemala to Halliburton in Iraq today.
Vast corporate empires like Wal-Mart are often either hailed or condemned (depending on the speaker’s perspective) as products of the free market. But not only is Wal-Mart a direct beneficiary of (usually local) government intervention in the form of such measures as eminent domain and tax breaks, but it also reaps less obvious benefits from policies of wider application. The funding of public highways through tax revenues, for example, constitutes a de facto transportation subsidy, allowing Wal-Mart and similar chains to socialize the costs of shipping and so enabling them to compete more successfully against local businesses; the low prices we enjoy at Wal-Mart in our capacity as consumers are thus made possible in part by our having already indirectly subsidized Wal-Mart’s operating costs in our capacity as taxpayers.
Wal-Mart also keeps its costs low by paying low salaries; but what makes those low salaries possible is the absence of more lucrative alternatives for its employees—and that fact in turn owes much to government intervention. The existence of regulations, fees, licensure requirements, et cetera does not affect all market participants equally; it’s much easier for wealthy, well-established companies to jump through these hoops than it is for new firms just starting up. Hence such regulations both decrease the number of employers bidding for employees’ services (thus keeping salaries low) and make it harder for the less affluent to start enterprises of their own. Legal restrictions on labor organizing also make it harder for such workers to organize collectively on their own behalf.
I don’t mean to suggest that Wal-Mart and similar firms owe their success solely to governmental privilege; genuine entrepreneurial talent has doubtless been involved as well. But given the enormous governmental contribution to that success, it’s doubtful that in the absence of government intervention such firms would be in anything like the position they are today.
In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles. Small wonder that big business, despite often paying lip service to free market ideals, tends to systematically oppose them in practice.
So where does this idea come from that advocates of free-market libertarianism must be carrying water for big business interests? Whence the pervasive conflation of corporatist plutocracy with libertarian laissez-faire? Who is responsible for promoting this confusion?
There are three different groups that must shoulder their share of the blame. (Note: in speaking of “blame” I am not necessarily saying that the “culprits” have deliberately promulgated what they knew to be a confusion; in most cases the failing is rather one of negligence, of inadequate attention to inconsistencies in their worldview. And as we’ll see, these three groups have systematically reinforced one another’s confusions.)
Culprit #1: the left. Across the spectrum from the squishiest mainstream liberal to the bomb-throwingest radical leftist, there is widespread (though not, it should be noted, universal) agreement that laissez-faire and corporate plutocracy are virtually synonymous. David Korten, for example, describes advocates of unrestricted markets, private property, and individual rights as “corporate libertarians” who champion a “globalized free market that leaves resource allocation decisions in the hands of giant corporations”—as though these giant corporations were creatures of the free market rather than of the state—while Noam Chomsky, though savvy enough to recognize that the corporate elite are terrified of genuine free markets, yet in the same breath will turn around and say that we must at all costs avoid free markets lest we unduly empower the corporate elite.
Culprit #2: the right. If libertarians’ left-wing opponents have conflated free markets with pro-business intervention, libertarians’ right-wing opponents have done all they can to foster precisely this confusion; for there is a widespread (though again not universal) tendency for conservatives to cloak corporatist policies in free-market rhetoric. This is how conservative politicians in their presumptuous Adam Smith neckties have managed to get themselves perceived—perhaps have even managed to perceive themselves—as proponents of tax cuts, spending cuts, and unhampered competition despite endlessly raising taxes, raising spending, and promoting “government-business partnerships.”
Consider the conservative virtue-term “privatization,” which has two distinct, indeed opposed, meanings. On the one hand, it can mean returning some service or industry from the monopolistic government sector to the competitive private sector—getting government out of it; this would be the libertarian meaning. On the other hand, it can mean “contracting out,” i.e., granting to some private firm a monopoly privilege in the provision some service previously provided by government directly. There is nothing free-market about privatization in this latter sense, since the monopoly power is merely transferred from one set of hands to another; this is corporatism, or pro-business intervention, not laissez-faire. (To be sure, there may be competition in the bidding for such monopoly contracts, but competition to establish a legal monopoly is no more genuine market competition than voting—one last time—to establish a dictator is genuine democracy.)
Of these two meanings, the corporatist meaning may actually be older, dating back to fascist economic policies in Nazi Germany; but it was the libertarian meaning that was primarily intended when the term (coined independently, as the reverse of “nationalization”) first achieved widespread usage in recent decades. Yet conservatives have largely co-opted the term, turning it once again toward the corporatist sense.
Similar concerns apply to that other conservative virtue-term, “deregulation.” From a libertarian standpoint, deregulating should mean the removal of governmental directives and interventions from the sphere of voluntary exchange. But when a private entity is granted special governmental privileges, “deregulating” it amounts instead to an increase, not a decrease, in governmental intrusion into the economy. To take an example not exactly at random, if assurances of a tax-funded bailout lead banks to make riskier loans than they otherwise would, then the banks are being made freer to take risks with the money of unconsenting taxpayers. When conservatives advocate this kind of deregulation they are wrapping redistribution and privilege in the language of economic freedom. When conservatives market their plutocratic schemes as free-market policies, can we really blame liberals and leftists for conflating the two? (Well, okay, yes we can. Still, it is a mitigating factor.)
Culprit #3: libertarians themselves. Alas, libertarians are not innocent here—which is why the answer to my opening question (as to whether it’s fair to charge libertarians with being apologists for big business) was no and yes rather than a simple no. If libertarians are accused of carrying water for corporate interests, that may be at least in part because, well, they so often sound like that’s just what they’re doing (though here, as above, there are plenty of honorable exceptions to this tendency). Consider libertarian icon Ayn Rand’s description of big business as a “persecuted minority,” or the way libertarians defend “our free-market health-care system” against the alternative of socialized medicine, as though the health care system that prevails in the United States were the product of free competition rather than of systematic government intervention on behalf of insurance companies and the medical establishment at the expense of ordinary people. Or again, note the alacrity with which so many libertarians rush to defend Wal-Mart and the like as heroic exemplars of the free market. Among such libertarians, criticisms of corporate power are routinely dismissed as anti-market ideology. (Of course such dismissiveness gets reinforced by the fact that many critics of corporate power are in the grip of anti-market ideology.) Thus when left-wing analysts complain about “corporate libertarians” they are not merely confused; they’re responding to a genuine tendency even if they’ve to some extent misunderstood it.
Kevin Carson has coined the term “vulgar libertarianism” for the tendency to treat the case for the free market as though it justified various unlovely features of actually existing corporatist society. (I find it preferable to talk of vulgar libertarianism rather than of vulgar libertarians, because very few libertarians are consistently vulgar; vulgar libertarianism is a tendency that can show up to varying degrees in thinkers who have many strong anti-corporatist tendencies also.) Likewise, “vulgar liberalism” is Carson’s term for the corresponding tendency to treat the undesirability of those features of actually existing corporatist society as though they constituted an objection to the free market. Both tendencies conflate free markets with corporatism, but draw opposite morals; as Murray Rothbard notes, “Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness.”[18] And if many leftists tend to see dubious corporate advocacy in libertarian pronouncements even when it’s not there, so likewise many libertarians tend not to see dubious corporate advocacy in libertarian pronouncements even when it is there.
There is an obvious tendency for vulgar libertarianism and vulgar liberalism to reinforce each other, as each takes at face value the conflation of plutocracy with free markets assumed by the other. This conflation in turn tends to bolster the power of the political establishment by rendering genuine libertarianism invisible: Those who are attracted to free markets are lured into supporting plutocracy, thus helping to prop up statism’s right or corporatist wing; those who are repelled by plutocracy are lured into opposing free markets, thus helping to prop up statism’s left or social-democratic wing. But as these two wings have more in common than not, the political establishment wins either way. The perception that libertarians are shills for big business thus has two bad effects: First, it tends to make it harder to attract converts to libertarianism, and so hinders its success; second, those converts its does attract may end up reinforcing corporate power through their advocacy of a muddled version of the doctrine.
In the nineteenth century, it was far more common than it is today for libertarians to see themselves as opponents of big business. The long 20th-century alliance of libertarians with conservatives against the common enemy of state-socialism probably had much to do with reorienting libertarian thought toward the right; and the brief rapprochement between libertarians and the left during the 1960s foundered when the New Left imploded. As a result, libertarians have been ill-placed to combat left-wing and right-wing conflation of markets with privilege, because they have not been entirely free of the conflation themselves.
Happily, the left/libertarian coalition is now beginning to re-emerge; and with it is emerging a new emphasis on the distinction between free markets and prevailing corporatism. In addition, many libertarians are beginning to rethink the way they present their views, and in particular their use of terminology. Take, for example, the word “capitalism,” which libertarians during the past century have tended to apply to the system they favor. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this term is somewhat problematic; some use it to mean free markets, others to mean corporate privilege, and still others (perhaps the majority) to mean some confused amalgamation of the two:
By “capitalism” most people mean neither the free market simpliciter nor the prevailing neomercantilist system simpliciter. Rather, what most people mean by “capitalism” is this free-market system that currently prevails in the western world. In short, the term “capitalism” as generally used conceals an assumption that the prevailing system is a free market. And since the prevailing system is in fact one of government favoritism toward business, the ordinary use of the term carries with it the assumption that the free market is government favoritism toward business.
Hence clinging to the term “capitalism” may be one of the factors reinforcing the conflation of libertarianism with corporatist advocacy. In any case, if libertarianism advocacy is not to be misperceived—or worse yet, correctly perceived! —as pro-corporate apologetics, the antithetical relationship between free markets and corporate power must be continually highlighted.
Roderick Long is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University.
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http://www.cato-unbound.org/
Pretty hefty reading and trending towards more philosophical debates, but an interesting website.
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Came thro` today on YahOO UK & Ireland.....
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/5/20081127/tuk-sci-fi-film-cctv-predicts-crime-45dbed5.html
SOOO, everyone out there better not LOOK like Criminals.....
Top Hats and Tails it is then.......
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Rachel posted on "Ephemeral Conversation" on the Internet Tech thread-- it is also quite relevant to this thread here.
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http://mcso.org/index.php?a=GetModule&mn=Videos&p=Intro
Here is why TIPS and other, similar programs are a good idea. I'd hope everyone here would report if they saw something that was a potential threat.
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F'g A! :-D
Next time we talk on the phone remind me to tell you the Newark story.
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http://www.reason.com/news/show/129993.html (http://www.reason.com/news/show/129993.html)
The Libertarian Moment
Despite all leading indicators to the contrary, America is poised to enter a new age of freedom.
Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch | December 2008 Print Edition
If someone looked you in the eye in 1971 and said “Man, you know what? We’re about to get a whole lot freer,” you might have reasonably concluded that he was nuts, driven mad by taking too much LSD and staring into the sun.
Back during that annus horribilis, a Republican president from the Southwest, facing an economy that was groaning under the strain of record deficits and runaway spending on elective and unpopular overseas wars, announced one of the most draconian economic interventions in Washington’s inglorious history: a freeze on wages and prices, accompanied by an across-the-board 10 percent tariff on imports and the final termination of what little remained of the gold standard in America.
Though the world wouldn’t learn until later that this president was using federal law enforcement agencies to attack his real and imagined enemies, Richard Nixon’s yen for paranoid secrecy and executive branch power-mongering was well-established, providing an actuarial foreshadowing of corruption. Which isn’t to say that the Democrats of the time were any less statist: In 1972, their presidential nominee was even more economically interventionist than Tricky Dick. Widely (and rightly) considered the most liberal Oval Office candidate in decades, George McGovern actually claimed that wage and price controls were applied “too late—they froze wages but let prices and profits run wild.” And individual states were passing income taxes like so many doobies at a beachside singalong.
Yet even during that dark night of the American soul, with all its eerie echoes of George W. Bush’s final miserable days in office, premonitions of liberty-loving life abounded for those who knew where to look. The contraceptive pill, which gave women unprecedented control over their sexual and reproductive lives, had been made legal for married women in 1965, and was on the verge of being legalized for unmarried women too. A new political group, the Libertarian Party, started in December 1971, and a larger libertarian movement manifested itself in a host of young organizations and publications. Free agency in sports, music, and film, triggered by a series of legal battles and economic developments, ushered in a wild new era of individualistic expression and artistic independence. It was an unfree world but, as bestselling author (and eventual Libertarian presidential candidate) Harry Browne could attest, it was one in which you could still find plenty of freedom.
Widespread middle-class prosperity gave the average American the tools and the confidence to experiment with a thousand different lifestyles, many of them previously the sole dominion of the rich, giving us everything from gay liberation to encounter groups, from back-to-the-garden communes to back-to-the-old-ways fundamentalist churches, from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to Looking Out for #1. In 1968, the techno-hippies at the Whole Earth Catalog announced, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” A year later, a new technology allowing university computers to communicate with one another went live, laying the foundations for what would become the Internet. And the magazine you are holding, in its September 1969 issue, made what might have been the craziest argument of all during the Age of Nixon: If you abolish the Civil Aeronautics Board and get the federal government out of regulating “every essential aspect” of the airline business, Robert W. Poole wrote, then air traffic will grow while prices plummet. (For more on Poole’s story, see “40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets,” page 28.)
By the end of the 1970s, the Civil Aeronautics Board was in the dustbin of history, sharing much-deserved space with price controls, the reserve clause, and back-alley abortions. What started out as a decade marred by pointless war and Soviet-style central planning ended up being the decade that ended military conscription and—arguably even more stunning—regulation of interstate trucking. The personal computer introduced possibilities few people had ever dreamed of (though reason did; see “Speculation, Innovation, Regulation,” page 44), a property tax revolt in California spread like a brush fire across the country, and the Republican Party went from the big-government conservatism of Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller to the small-government rabble-rousing of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The Libertarian Party…well, it kept trying, winning one electoral vote in 1972 and 921,299 popular votes in 1980.
Most importantly, individuals burned through the 1970s with the haughty grandeur and splashiness falsely predicted of Comet Kohoutek. Stagflation be damned: Americans finally learned to live, dammit, in a no-collar world where both electricians and executives dressed like peacocks and women starting earning real money, not just as entertainers but as doctors and lawyers. Boys grew hair longer than girls, and girls started playing Little League baseball. As Tom Wolfe wrote in his era-naming 1976 essay, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “But once the dreary little bastards started getting money…they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran! They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken!”
Everything solid dissolved into the Bermuda Triangle, or at least a long series of Chariots of the Gods sequels. During the 1970s, we undoubtedly felt more discombobulated (Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull shared the bestseller lists), but there is no question in retrospect that we were considerably more free even by the time Thatcher padlocked the coal mines in Olde England and the Reagan Revolution ushered in the 1980s as a glorious decade of greed.
That ’00s Show
As in 1971, there is no shortage of reasons to grumble about the state of American liberty at the end of 2008. As this issue went to press, Congress had passed the economic equivalent of the PATRIOT Act, a nearly trillion-dollar bailout of the financial industry, involving whole-scale nationalization of the mortgage lending business (see “Back to the Barricades,” page 2, and “Atlas Blinked,” page 18). Despite (or perhaps because of ) eight years of a president who has increased regulatory spending by more than 61 percent in real terms, “deregulation” has become a concept even more panic-inducing than Janet Jackson’s nipple. Whether in international security, the financial world, or the cultural arena, the answer to everything seems to be a new clampdown. It is nearly impossible to cross a North American border without showing a passport, revealing biomedical information, and being entered into a database for decades. Every day across this great country some city council is finding a new private activity to ban, whether it’s selling food cooked with trans fats, using a cell phone behind the wheel, or smoking a cigarette outdoors. And the two major-party candidates for president are trying to out-populist one another with Oliver Stone–level attacks on Wall Street “greed,” while advancing economic plans filled with centralized industrial policy and extravagant promises that would undoubtedly burst the federal government’s already near-broken budget.
Yet if 1971 contained a few flickers of light in the authoritarian darkness, 2008 is chock full of halogen-bright beacons shouting “This way!” Turn away from the overhyped prize of the Oval Office and all the dreary, government expanding policies and politics that go with it, and the picture is not merely one of plausible happy endings to our current sob stories of mortgage-finance meltdowns and ever-lengthening war, but something far more radical, more game-changing, than all that we’ve grown to expect.
We are in fact living at the cusp of what should be called the Libertarian Moment, the dawning not of some fabled, clichéd, and loosey-goosey Age of Aquarius but a time of increasingly hyper-individualized, hyper-expanded choice over every aspect of our lives, from 401(k)s to hot and cold running coffee drinks, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to online dating services. This is now a world where it’s more possible than ever to live your life on your own terms; it’s an early rough draft version of the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s glimmering “utopia of utopias.” Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky. If you don’t believe it, ask your gay friends, or simply look who’s running for the White House in 2008.
This new century of the individual, which makes the Me Decade look positively communitarian in comparison, will have far-reaching implications wherever individuals swarm together in commerce, culture, or politics. Already we have witnessed gale-force effects on nearly every “legacy” industry that had grown accustomed to dictating prices and product and intelligence to their customers, be they airlines, automakers, music companies, or newspapers (it was nice knowing all of you). Education and health care, handicapped by their large streams of public-sector and hence revanchist funding, lag behind, but even in those sorry professions, practitioners are scrambling desperately to respond to consumer demands and compete for business. Politics, always a crippled, lagging indicator of social change, will be the last entrenched oligopoly to be squashed like a bug on the windshield of history, since the two major parties have effectively rigged the game to their advantage in a way no robber baron ever could. But the Dems and Reps, more bankrupt as brands than Woolworth’s and Sears Roebuck, are already in ideological Chapter 11.
The Libertarian Moment is based on a few hard-won insights that have grown into a fragile but enduring consensus in the ever-expanding free world. First is the notion that, all things being equal, markets are the best way to organize an economy and unleash the means of production (and its increasingly difficult-to-distinguish adjunct, consumption). Second is that at least vaguely representative democracy, and the political freedom it almost always strengthens, is the least worst form of government (a fact that even recalcitrant, anti-modern regimes in Islamabad, Tehran, and Berkeley grudgingly acknowledge in at least symbolic displays of pluralism). Both points seem almost banal now, but were under constant attack during the days of the Soviet Union, and are still subject to wobbly confidence any time capitalist dictatorships like China seem to grow ascendant in a time of domestic economic woe. Though every dip in the Dow makes the professional amnesiacs of cable TV and the finance pages turn in the direction of Mao, there is no going back to the Great Leap Forward.
Or the Great Society, for that matter. Try as politicians might, citizens continue their great escape from grand designs. Financially ruinous entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare are going nowhere slow, but all of us are getting better at finding ways to work around such stultifying bureaucracies. Virtually across the board, the government’s pension plan is becoming less important to retirees and the medical cartel is slowly losing its death grip on providing basic services. Even across old Europe, government spending as a percentage of GDP has fallen over the past several decades. The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom has charted nothing but global increases since it began in 1995.
The ne plus ultra change agent as we lurch through the finish line of yet another electoral contest between our 19th century political parties is the revolutionary, break-it-down-and-build-it-back-up power of the Internet, and all the glorious creative destruction it enables at the expense of lumbering gatekeepers and to the benefit of empowered individuals. No single entity in the history of mankind has been so implicitly and explicitly libertarian: a tax-free distributed network and alternative universe where individuals, usually without effective interference from government, can reshape their identities, transcend limitations of family, geography, and culture. It’s a place where freaks and geeks and regular folks can pool their intelligence and compete (even win!) against entities thousands of times their size.
The generation raised on the Internet has essentially been raised libertarian, even if they’ve never even heard of the word. Native netizens now entering college exhibit a kind of broad-based tolerance toward every manner of ethnic, religious, and sexual-orientation grouping in a way that would have seemed like science fiction just a generation ago. The products and activities they enjoy and co-opt most, from filesharing to flying discount airlines to facebooking, are excrescences of the free-market ideas of deregulation and decontrol. Generations X, Y, and those even younger swim in markets—that is, in choices among competing alternatives—the way those of us who grew up in the ’70s frolicked on Slip ’n Slides.
Feelin’ Groovy
Understanding the Libertarian Moment is fundamental to understanding the 21st century. Power—economic, cultural, political—will accrue to those people who recognize that it’s over for existing power centers. The command economy, the command culture, and the command polity have all been replaced by a different model—that of a consultant, a docent, a fixer, a friend. The individuals and groups that will flourish in the Libertarian Moment will be those who open things up, not shut them down.
The first step toward understanding is to recognize that the moment is indeed upon us. In reason’s 20th anniversary issue, the most talked-about piece was Robert Poole’s then-controversial contention that 1988 was a lot “groovier” than 1968. (For Poole’s take on the freedoms to emerge since then, see “Groovier and Groovier,” page 14; also, consult Veronique de Rugy’s “Are You Better off Than You Were 40 Years Ago?,” page 24.) The single biggest piece of good news in the past 20 years (and arguably the past 90) was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it the final discrediting of Marxism as an economic and social model. Communism had ironically sided with the producer rather than the consumer, the factory owner rather than the workingman, by trying without success to shove unwanted commodities on unmanageable customers.
If the end of World War II hastened the end of old-style colonialism (by the mid-1960s, virtually all the conventional Old World empires had been thoroughly dismantled), the end of the Cold War marked the end of countless proxy wars between the two major superpowers. The erosion of top-down hegemony resulted not in chaos (as many feared) but a new era of freedom and mostly peaceful coexistence. As of the end of 2007, Freedom House ranked 90 of 193 countries as “free,” 60 as “partly free,” and 43 as “not free,” which is up from 81/57/53 in 1997, and 58/51/51 in 1987.
Not only are countries increasingly independent and free, but thanks to global trade they are increasingly prosperous as well, with an estimated 600 million people lifted out of poverty in China alone over the past three decades. War is declining, too: As the political scientist John Mueller documents in 2004’s The Remnants of War, armed global conflicts in which 1,000 people have died yearly have been in decline for decades.
Global freedom and prosperity may be the greatest single cause for rejoicing, but the Libertarian Moment affects our humdrum daily lives here in America as well. As Madge always told us about Palmolive, we’re soaking in it.
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The Internet alone has created entire new economies, modes of scattered and decentralized organization and work, and a hyper-individualization that would have shocked the Founding Fathers. Liberated from the constraints of geography and 20th century career paths, Americans are more productive than they ever have been and their jobs are more personalized than ever, with strictly enforced punch-the-clock jobs morphing into flextime, telecommuting gigs. In less than two decades, we’ve moved from a “You want fries with that?” world to one in which “You want soy with that decaf mocha frappuccino?” no longer elicits laughs—except unintentionally, when John McCain tries to use Starbucks flavors as a stand-in for Americans’ lack of seriousness.
Critics continue to worry about the demise of what John Kenneth Galbraith and others described in the 1950s and ’60s as The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, in which too-big-to-fail megacorporations such as IBM and General Motors replaced the welfare state as a cradle-to-grave provider of social welfare services, status, and meaning. But fears of “a great risk shift” in which post-industrial free agents are left to fend for themselves is based on what the management guru Tom Peters once called, in a reason interview, the “‘false-nostalgia-for-shitty-jobs phenomenon’: Oh for the halcyon days when I could sit on the 37th floor of the General Motors Tower passing memorandums from the left side of the desk to the right side of the desk for 43 years. It’s just total shit. It really is. Life was not as glorious as imagined.”
The era of the blockbuster and the bestseller has been replaced with something new and wonderful: a world in which individuals are free to express themselves by tapping into millions of different book titles at Amazon, tens of thousands of different songs at Rhapsody, and dozens of different beers at even the least-provisioned supermarket (at least those that aren’t banned outright from selling alcohol). Smart retailers realize that the key to the future is to give the customer more choices, not to act as a chokepoint. In a similar way, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not structure interaction as much as provide a not-so-temporary autonomous zone to facilitate it. Individual users tailor the experience to their own desires rather than submit to a central authority. The inhabitants of such a world are instinctively soft libertarians, resisting or flouting most nanny-state interference, at least on issues that affect their favorite activities. When it comes to online commerce, at least, both producers and consumers scream bloody murder every time 20th century politicians attempt to levy taxes or restrictions on goods and services.
This wave of individualized creative destruction is battering incumbents in seemingly every industry except politics, where the status quo parties keep partying like it’s 1899. But look closer, and you’ll see they’re hemorrhaging market share just like broadcast dinosaurs on network TV. In 1970, the Harris Poll asked Americans, “Regardless of how you may vote, what do you usually consider yourself—a Republican, a Democrat, an Independent, or some other party?” Fully 49 percent of respondents chose Democrat, and 31 percent called themselves Republicans. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, those figures were 35 percent for Democrats and 26 percent for Republicans. The only real growth market in politics is voters who decline political affiliation, and the only political adjective seemingly gaining in popularity is…libertarian.
From lefty comedian Bill Maher to righty columnist Jonah Goldberg, from in-the-tank Democratic blogger Markos “Daily Kos” Moulitsas to in-the-tank Republican talk show host Neal Boortz, you can’t turn around in a political discussion anymore without hearing someone identify themselves at least partially (whether rightly or wrongly) as a “libertarian.”
The 2008 presidential campaign, and to a heartening degree the public debate and all-too-temporary congressional defeat of the Wall Street bailout, gave the first hints at what may soon become a permanent libertarian strain in politics. An uncharismatic libertarian congressman from Texas, Ron Paul, ignited a decentralized swarm of money-bombing donors to the Republican presidential primaries with his message of not wanting to run people’s lives (“we all have different values”), or the economy (“people run the economy in a free society”), or the world (“we don’t need to be imposing ourselves around the world”).
Though the Paul movement didn’t end up coalescing behind a single candidate for president after the primaries were over, its impact could still be felt in the fall, when, faced with a historic opportunity to socialize losses by throwing tax money at investment banks, Main Street Americans shrugged at least temporarily while Wall Street Atlases wept. As the chattering classes, politicians, and analysts compared a run of recent bankruptcies and market downturns to an economic Pearl Harbor requiring an immediate call to arms, more than half of the House of Representatives said that prudence dictated taking a deep breath or three.
On the stump, Barack Obama preaches a less-interventionist foreign policy and an interventionist domestic agenda; John McCain presents roughly the obverse. Despite each of them claiming to foment change, their adherence to old forms and old labels represents not the first real choice in the new era but the last presidential contest of the 20th century. Yet between them, and outside of their spheres, is a glimmering of a fusion that just might appeal to most Americans: engagement and integration with the world via cultural and economic exchange, and a more personally autonomous society at home in which individuals are responsible for charting their own course.
It’s wrong to look at politics as anything other than the B.A. Baracus of American society, the last one through the door and the last member of The A-Team to get the joke. And a simple study of incentives will tell you that political parties will use whatever is at their disposal to stay in power, particularly the government they control. Expecting Washington to cut back its main instrument of power after a capitalism-bashing political campaign is like expecting Michael Moore to share his Egg McMuffin with a homeless man.
But when the gap grows too wide between voter desire and government policy, between the way people actually live their lives and the way government wants them to behave, then a situation that looks stable can turn revolutionary overnight. Richard Nixon may have been sitting pretty in 1971, but he was sent packing to San Clemente by 1974. As back then, we emerge from life under George W. Bush bruised and battered but looking forward not to a protracted twilight struggle with an existential foe but to a new and largely unimaginable world of wonders. There is a learning curve at work here, one that human beings have been struggling with for 40 years, 400 years, 4,000 years. In context, it has only been recently that the concept of individual liberty has been prototyped and subjected to testing in anything approaching real-world conditions. Advances are inevitably followed by setbacks, and we stagger into the future punch-drunk, more like Muhammad Ali than Rocky Marciano.
But the power to swarm in the direction of freedom is the new technology fueling an idea that is as old as the American republic itself: No central government shall interfere with our life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The Libertarian Moment is taking these self-evident truths and organizing them into a comprehensive approach toward living. It started where it always does, in business and culture, where innovation is rewarded. Statist politicians—it’s not fully clear that there is any other kind—will ignore that epochal shift at their peril. And will eventually be forced to fly to their own personal San Clementes.
Nick Gillespie is editor of reason online and reason.tv. Matt Welch is editor in chief of reason.
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http://reason.com/blog/show/130406.html
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SBM:
Please post WHY you are posting a URL.
Thank you,
CD
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Sorry... :oops:
Interesting, if short, round table discussion on whether or not we are "free-er" now than in the past, the future of the Libertarian party, and comparisons between Libertarian political thought in past and present.
http://reason.com/blog/show/130406.html (http://reason.com/blog/show/130406.html)
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Hmm, love to see the probable cause used here.
Gotcha!
Radley Balko | December 6, 2008, 1:28pm
Like Mark Draughn, I've been somewhat skeptical of Barry Cooper, the former drug cop turned pitchman for how-to-beat-the-cops videos. He comes off as more of a huckster than a principled whistle-blower, which I think does the good ideas he stands for (police reform) more harm than good.
But damn. I have to hand it to him. This might be one of the ballsiest moves I've ever seen.
KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.
To clarify just a bit, according to Cooper, there was nothing illegal going on the bait house, just two evergreen trees and some grow lamps. There was no probable cause. So a couple of questions come up. First, how did the cops get turned on to the house in the first place? Cooper suspects they were using thermal imaging equipment to detect the grow lamps, a practice the Supreme Court has said is illegal. The second question is, what probable cause did the police put on the affidavit to get a judge to sign off on a search warrant? If there was nothing illegal going on in the house, it's difficult to conceive of a scenario where either the police or one of their informants didn't lie to get a warrant.
Cooper chose the Odessa police department for baiting because he believes police there instructed an informant to plant marijuana on a woman named Yolanda Madden. She's currently serving an eight-year sentence for possession with intent to distribute. According to Cooper, the informant actually admitted in federal court that he planted the marijuana. Madden was convicted anyway.
The story's worth watching, not only to see if the cops themselves are held accountable for this, but whether the local district attorney tries to come up with a crime with which to charge Cooper and his assistants. I can't imagine such a charge would get very far, but I wouldn't be surprised to see someone try.
Here's some local media coverage:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Fu4YVH8nA&eurl=http://www.reason.com/blog/printer/130429.html[/youtube]
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/130429.html
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I'd like to see the affidavit for the search warrant. I expect the DOJ/FBI will be looking at this with great interest.
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Audit
As the first digital president, Barack Obama is learning the hard way how difficult it can be to maintain privacy in the information age. Earlier this year, his passport file was snooped by contract workers in the State Department. In October, someone at Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaked information about his aunt's immigration status. And in November, Verizon employees peeked at his cell phone records.
What these three incidents illustrate is not that computerized databases are vulnerable to hacking -- we already knew that, and anyway the perpetrators all had legitimate access to the systems they used -- but how important audit is as a security measure.
When we think about security, we commonly think about preventive measures: locks to keep burglars out of our homes, bank safes to keep thieves from our money, and airport screeners to keep guns and bombs off airplanes. We might also think of detection and response measures: alarms that go off when burglars pick our locks or dynamite open bank safes, sky marshals on airplanes who respond when a hijacker manages to sneak a gun through airport security. But audit, figuring out who did what after the fact, is often far more important than any of those other three.
Most security against crime comes from audit. Of course we use locks and alarms, but we don't wear bulletproof vests. The police provide for our safety by investigating crimes after the fact and prosecuting the guilty: that's audit.
Audit helps ensure that people don't abuse positions of trust. The cash register, for example, is basically an audit system. Cashiers have to handle the store's money. To ensure they don't skim from the till, the cash register keeps an audit trail of every transaction. The store owner can look at the register totals at the end of the day and make sure the amount of money in the register is the amount that should be there.
The same idea secures us from police abuse, too. The police have enormous power, including the ability to intrude into very intimate aspects of our life in order to solve crimes and keep the peace. This is generally a good thing, but to ensure that the police don't abuse this power, we put in place systems of audit like the warrant process.
The whole NSA warrantless eavesdropping scandal was about this. Some misleadingly painted it as allowing the government to eavesdrop on foreign terrorists, but the government always had that authority. What the government wanted was to not have to submit a warrant, even after the fact, to a secret FISA court. What they wanted was to not be subject to audit.
That would be an incredibly bad idea. Law enforcement systems that don't have good audit features designed in, or are exempt from this sort of audit-based oversight, are much more prone to abuse by those in power -- because they can abuse the system without the risk of getting caught. Audit is essential as the NSA increases its domestic spying. And large police databases, like the FBI Next Generation Identification System, need to have strong audit features built in.
For computerized database systems like that -- systems entrusted with other people's information -- audit is a very important security mechanism. Hospitals need to keep databases of very personal health information, and doctors and nurses need to be able to access that information quickly and easily. A good audit record of who accessed what when is the best way to ensure that those trusted with our medical information don't abuse that trust. It's the same with IRS records, credit reports, police databases, telephone records -- anything personal that someone might want to peek at during the course of his job.
Which brings us back to President Obama. In each of those three examples, someone in a position of trust inappropriately accessed personal information. The difference between how they played out is due to differences in audit. The State Department's audit worked best; they had alarm systems in place that alerted superiors when Obama's passport files were accessed and who accessed them. Verizon's audit mechanisms worked less well; they discovered the inappropriate account access and have narrowed the culprits down to a few people. Audit at Immigration and Customs Enforcement was far less effective; they still don't know who accessed the information.
Large databases filled with personal information, whether managed by governments or corporations, are an essential aspect of the information age. And they each need to be accessed, for legitimate purposes, by thousands or tens of thousands of people. The only way to ensure those people don't abuse the power they're entrusted with is through audit. Without it, we will simply never know who's peeking at what.
Obama stories:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/20/...
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/01/...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122724536331647671.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/...
NSA domestic spying:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120511973377523845.html
FBI's Next Generation Identification System:
http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel08/...
This essay first appeared on the Wall Street Journal website.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122877438178489235.html
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Second post of the morning
FOIA docs show feds can lojack mobiles without telco help
By Julian Sanchez | Published: November 16, 2008 - 10:45PM CT
Related StoriesCourt: warrant needed to turn cell phone into homing beacon
Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that "triggerfish" technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all.
Triggerfish, also known as cell-site simulators or digital analyzers, are nothing new: the technology was used in the 1990s to hunt down renowned hacker Kevin Mitnick. By posing as a cell tower, triggerfish trick nearby cell phones into transmitting their serial numbers, phone numbers, and other data to law enforcement. Most previous descriptions of the technology, however, suggested that because of range limitations, triggerfish were only useful for zeroing in on a phone's precise location once cooperative cell providers had given a general location.
This summer, however, the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Justice Department, seeking documents related to the FBI's cell-phone tracking practices. Since August, they've received a stream of documents—the most recent batch on November 6—that were posted on the Internet last week. In a post on the progressive blog Daily Kos, ACLU spokesperson Rachel Myers drew attention to language in several of those documents implying that triggerfish have broader application than previously believed.
As one of the documents intended to provide guidance for DOJ employees explains, triggerfish can be deployed "without the user knowing about it, and without involving the cell phone provider." That may be significant because the legal rulings requiring law enforcement to meet a high "probable cause" standard before acquiring cell location records have, thus far, pertained to requests for information from providers, pursuant to statutes such as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and the Stored Communications Act.
The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices—which allow tracking of incoming and outgoing calls from a phone subject to much less stringent evidentiary standards—to gather location data. "By its very terms," according to the manual, "this prohibition applies only to information collected by a provider and not to information collected directly by law enforcement authorities.Thus, CALEA does not bar the use of pen/trap orders to authorize the use of cell phone tracking devices used to locate targeted cell phones."
Perhaps surprisingly, it's only with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 that the government has needed any kind of court order to use triggerfish. While previously, the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology. Under the updated definition, these explicitly include any "device or process which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information."
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Makes me laugh when citizens give the finger to government factotums:
He Tried Using the Fourth, But It Was Full of Holes
Radley Balko | January 14, 2009, 12:07am
Clearwater, Florida businessman Herb Quintero spent $500,000 renovating his bait and tackle shop and the property it's on, including commissioning a fish mural on the side of the building. Though the mural contains no text, the city of Clearwater determined he needed a billboard permit, because the subject matter is related to his business. They began fining him $130 for each day he left the mural uncovered.
So Quintero responded (rather awesomely) by covering the mural with a banner depicting the First Amendment. All of which sets up this beautiful line from a local news report of the dustup:
Meanwhile, the city's legal department is looking to see what, if anything, it can do about the First Amendment banner.
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131045.html
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Lew Rockwell needs to stop hyperventilating, but this piece off his site has an interesting perspective on the rescue effort that materialized after US Airway flight that landed on the Hudson.
An Outbreak of Order in NYC
by Butler Shaffer
A few years ago, I was on an airliner about to make a landing in Denver. As any experienced flyer knows, a landing at this airport is always subject to the turbulence of air coming in over the mountains. But on this day, the turbulence was extraordinary; some of the worst I have experienced as a passenger. So troublesome was it that the pilot aborted his first landing try and went around for a second effort.
A woman sitting next to me was rather perturbed by the experience, and asked me "do you think we’ll ever get on the ground?" "I guarantee it," I responded. "I know enough about physics to be able to assure you that we will not be floating around up here forever. The forces of gravity will see to it that we will end up on the ground. What shape we will be in is another matter!" She laughed and, bumpiness and all, the pilot made a safe landing.
This event reminded me of an oft-ignored truth: pilots do not land airplanes; gravity lands airplanes. A skilled pilot has learned how to maneuver and manipulate many thousand pounds of metal in order to trick gravity into reducing the harshness of its mandate that objects fall at an accelerating rate of 9.8 meters per second squared. The pilot is not simply a machine responding in some programmed manner, but is engaged in a kind of performance art. As with any artist, a competent pilot is able to combine his or her learned, mechanical skills with judgments gained from years of experience in playing with gravity’s seemingly inexorable rules.
155 passengers and 5 crew members of a U.S. Airways flight were fortunate to have been in a plane under the control of a highly skilled pilot, Chesley Sullenberger III. His now-famous landing of a powerless jet on the Hudson River provides more than simply evidence of his mechanistic skills – as great as those were – but of his judgment in deciding for a watery landing. A less experienced – though equally skilled – pilot might have opted for the suggestion made to him of trying to nurse what had now become a glider to a nearby airport. Had that decision been made, we might now be reading of more than 160 fatalities following the plane crashing into a row of apartment buildings. Capt. Sullenberger was a performance artist – a man who is also a glider instructor – who, carrying out a judgment that in this instance only he was capable of making in response to the peculiar circumstances which he faced, completed his dance with gravity’s indifference to outcome, albeit in an unexpected venue.
Upon landing in the river, and with the fate of 160 people in the balance, rescue efforts immediately began. Officials of the FAA, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, New York Mayor Bloomberg, and Senator Hillary Clinton, all descended on the scene to begin helping passengers to safety. No? It didn’t work out that way? But it must have been so. Is it not an integral part of our thinking that social order can be fostered and sustained only by a political system that can plan for responses to troublesome events? Wasn’t this the logic upon which federal, state and city governments acted in New Orleans, following hurricane Katrina? Do we not elect politicians who, in turn, create bureaucracies to make our lives secure?
Initially, the only seen presence of government at the site of the U.S. Airways emergency landing involved police helicopters interfering with rescue efforts by keeping the water around the plane churned up. These helicopters were of value to the state, of course, as a visual symbol of its superintending presence above a scene in which its practical role was nonexistent. Like a president or state governor flying over an area hit by a tornado or flooding, such an aerial presence reinforces the vertically-structured mindset upon which political authority depends. After rescue efforts were substantially completed – with no loss of life – New York and New Jersey police officials arrived (those whom the New Jersey governor incorrectly described as the "first responders").
The real work of rescuing passengers and crew members was left to the sources from which the only genuine social order arises: the spontaneous responses of individuals who began their day with no expectation of participating in the events that will henceforth be high-water marks in their lives. After the airliner came to a stop, one private ferry-boat operator, sensing the danger of the plane’s tail submerging, began pushing up on the tail in an effort to keep it elevated. Other private ferry-boat operators – whose ordinary work involved transporting people between New York and New Jersey – came to the scene in what became a spontaneously organized rescue under the direction of no one in particular. Photos of the area show the plane surrounded by ferryboats on all sides.
On board the plane, passengers were making their own responses. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer – a man who has probably seen one-too-many Irwin Allen films – interviewed a passenger, asking whether those aboard the plane were yelling and screaming at their plight. "No," the man replied, going on to describe how calm and rational was the behavior of his fellow passengers; removing exit doors; putting on life vests; and helping one another get out onto the wing of the plane.
This man’s words reminded me of so many other descriptions I have heard from those who find themselves involved in catastrophes. A few weeks after 9/11, I spoke with a man and a woman who had been in one of the World Trade Center buildings on that day. I asked them how those leaving the damaged building behaved. Each replied that people were calm but determined as they left the building; they saw no screaming or yelling persons running frantically from the building. In my book, Calculated Chaos, I have provided a description of the informal, spontaneous responses of many Omahans to the damage inflicted by a tornado upon that city in 1975.
One of the more telling distinctions between informal and formal responses to problems was seen in Capt. Sullenberger’s being the last person to leave the plane but, before exiting, making two trips through the aircraft to be certain that everyone on board, for whom he felt responsible, had gotten off. No government officials would likely have deigned to exhibit such a personal sense of responsibility: they would have been too busy conducting press conferences!
Whether we are considering the patterns of regularity found in the marketplace, or from our relationships with strangers on streets and highways, or, in this case, the aftermath of a disaster or near-disaster, so much of the order that prevails within society arises, without anyone’s intention, as a result of our pursuing other ends. Our politicized training – reinforced by media and government officials – leads most of us to believe that social order is the product of the conscious design of wise leaders, whom the political process allows us to identify and elect. In the face of the wars and economic collapse that are now destroying our world, it is difficult for intelligent men and women to any longer embrace such childlike thinking that is probably a carryover from a dependence on parental authority.
As the events of that day slowly fade, those most immediately affected will recite, for others, their recollections. Capt. Sullenberger will doubtless enjoy his well-deserved hero status with appearances on television and radio programs. The ferryboat operators will likewise enjoy their earned fifteen minutes of fame. Other than memories, nothing permanent will come of this event. Those directly involved will return to their normal work: Capt. Sullenberger piloting other flights; ferryboat operators transporting people across the Hudson.
But the statists will figure out ways to exploit all of this for their narrow ends, insinuating their non-existent roles in the rescue. In an effort to reinforce the illusion that their authority carried the day, the politicians – along with Homeland Security officials – will likely concoct statutes or other rules in an effort to repeat, in the future, the kinds of spontaneous responses that arose, without design. Hearings will probably be conducted on behalf of some proposed "Water-ditching of Aircraft" regulations – to be administered by a newly-created federal agency to be housed in the Department of Homeland Security. Thereafter – and reflecting the governmental responses in New Orleans – woe be unto any future Capt. Sullenberger who dares to exercise his independent judgment should it conflict with government-mandated conduct. Nor shall this agency be inclined to tolerate the unapproved efforts of ferryboat operators – or others – who might dare to act, without prior authorization to save lives.
I will be surprised if the bureaucratic control freaks fail to see this event as an opportunity to expand their forced ministrations upon human affairs. The National Transportation Safety Board will make its routine "investigation" – to reinforce the supervisory mindset that, in finding out "what went wrong," the government will be able to "keep this from happening again." What will be overlooked in all of this is the fact that volumes upon volumes of FAA regulations already micro-manage air travel, and that such directives played no part in this emergency landing.
Those who believe themselves capable of directing complex systems for the achievement of desired ends, are unaware of the fact that the separate – but interconnected – events in our lives are underlain by numerous influences peculiar to given situations. The forces that combined to create the situation to which Capt. Sullenberger made his spontaneous response, will likely never recur. On the other hand, there will be another pilot who, on some future day, will have to deal with unforeseen and even bizarre circumstances to which he – like the good captain in this case – will have to be flexible enough to respond.
But as the politically-minded seek to exploit this near-tragedy into some "what if" hypotheticals to rationalize their ongoing quest for power over others, 155 passengers, 5 crew members, and their families, can celebrate the fact that they owe their lives not to government planning, but to the playing out of a spontaneous order for which no planning was possible.
January 21, 2009
Butler Shaffer [send him e-mail] teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938 and of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer187.html
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Initially, the only seen presence of government at the site of the U.S. Airways emergency landing involved police helicopters interfering with rescue efforts by keeping the water around the plane churned up. These helicopters were of value to the state, of course, as a visual symbol of its superintending presence above a scene in which its practical role was nonexistent. Like a president or state governor flying over an area hit by a tornado or flooding, such an aerial presence reinforces the vertically-structured mindset upon which political authority depends. After rescue efforts were substantially completed – with no loss of life – New York and New Jersey police officials arrived (those whom the New Jersey governor incorrectly described as the "first responders").
**Dumbest thing i've read in a long, long time. Lew Rockwell is a scumbag and idiots like the author prove again and again why Libertarians are fringe loons worthy only of contempt.**
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https://nydailynews.com/archives/news/2006/07/31/2006-07-31_finest_s_fabulous_flyboys__n.html
FINEST'S FABULOUS FLYBOYS. NYPD HELICOPTER PILOTS' SKILL, COURAGE SAVES DROWNING WOMAN
BY PATRICE O'SHAUGHNESSY DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Monday, July 31th 2006, 1:34AM
Hero of the Month spotlights those men and women, civil servants and civilians, who go beyond the call of duty to make New York a better place.
POLICE OFFICERS Devin Buonanno and Dennis DeRienzo were patrolling in a sleek Agusta A119 helicopter, checking the city's bridges and railyards - potential terror targets - when they got a call of a body floating in the Harlem River.
From 1,400 feet above the World Trade Center site, they zoomed up to the Bronx and lowered the aircraft to search the water.
Amid floating debris in the middle of the rain-swollen river, the face of a woman - alive, but seemingly fading fast - appeared. There was no time to wait for the special rescue chopper.
The cops used a combination of DeRienzo's steady hands and calm expertise at piloting and Buonanno's strong grip and derring-do as he perched on the helicopter's skid to save the woman and bring her safely to shore.
For the July 5 rescue, DeRienzo and Buonanno are the Daily News Heroes of the Month.
It was about 5 p.m., two hours into their shift, when they heard the call of a "floater." Police units on land had been told a woman had jumped in the river, but they couldn't see anyone in the water.
The two cops responded, Buonanno at the controls. They searched the water between the Alexander Hamilton and University Heights bridges but couldn't find anything - but a witness kept insisting to cops that someone was in there.
Then Buonanno spotted the face. He made a left turn and transferred the controls to DeRienzo, the unit's chief pilot and flight instructor. Buonanno grabbed a life vest for the victim.
DeRienzo, who flew helicopters in the Marine Corps, hovered close above the woman, who was later identified as Iris Jimenez, 61. She had entered the water on the Manhattan side and now was in the middle of the river.
"She was exhausted, trying to keep her head up," said Buonanno, 37. "She wasn't able to get her hands or arms above the water for me to grab her."
"We couldn't wait for the air/sea rescue [helicopter], which has scuba divers and all the equipment for water rescues....It wasn't called out right away because the report was for a floater, not a live victim," said DeRienzo, 35. "It would have turned into a recovery instead of a rescue if we waited."
"Dennis got me right down on the water. I was saying, 'Two feet to the right . . . come back a little more, get me right next to her.' And he brought the helicopter just inches above the water."
Buonanno got out on the skid.
"I was out of the helicopter, holding the door frame. We were fingertips to fingertips, but anytime we moved, she went under," Buonanno said. "I grabbed her by her hair and got her shoulder and grabbed her clothing. I brought her to me, and said, 'Okay, we got her.' "
DeRienzo hovered low; Buonanno was still on the skid holding the woman. DeRienzo tried to get to the riverbank on the Bronx side of the river, alongside Roberto Clemente State Park.
"But when I got them closer to shore, we were so low that trees and rocks were in the way of the main rotor blades, and it would take down the whole helicopter if a blade struck," DeRienzo said.
Buonanno added, "We were checking the tail rotor and whether boats were coming; it was very finessed flying."
Then he told his partner, "I'm gonna jump," and inflated the tactical vest he always wears.
"I had no idea how deep the water was. We were 30 feet offshore," said Buonanno. "It turned out to be about chest high. . . . I couldn't tell you how cold the water was. I just don't remember."
He swam with Jimenez to the shore. Cops from the 46th Precinct helped them up the slippery rocks and put the woman in an ambulance.
Jimenez, who police said was distraught and irrational, was taken to Lincoln Hospital.
"I hope she got the help she needed," said Buonanno, who has been with the NYPD since 2000, joining the aviation unit two years ago.
His son, Devin, 10, had two words for him about the rescue, which was captured on video.
"Dad, awesome!"
DeRienzo, a cop for 13 years, came to the unit on Sept. 10, 2001. The former Marine didn't think he would be applying all the military tactical flying and expertise in shoulder-fired weapons and rappelling as a cop in New York City. "But 9/11 changed that," DeRienzo said.
Their rescue of Jimenez - the first for each cop - illustrated their specialized skills.
They didn't have much time to think about their act of lifesaving until they were heading home hours later. They had resumed patrol after Buonanno changed into dry clothes, completing their 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. shift.
When it sunk in, "I was happy for him, he was happy for me," DeRienzo said.
"And we were both happy for her," Buonanno added.
poshaughnessy@nydailynews.com
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http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2001b/pr271-01.html
MAYOR GIULIANI AND POLICE COMMISSIONER KERIK HONOR THE MEMBERS
OF THE NYPD INVOLVED IN BREEZY POINT JETTY RESCUE
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani today joined Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik to honor members of the New York City Police Department responsible for the daring air lift rescue of three fishermen trapped on the Rockaway Point jetty in Breezy Point, Queens yesterday.
"Despite high waves, strong rip tides and windy conditions, these officers worked together to bring three men to safety," Mayor Giuliani said. "Thanks to the teamwork and resourcefulness of these members of the NYPD, a tragedy was averted. Yesterday's rescue mission demonstrates the bravery and commitment of our uniformed personnel to preserving the lives of all New Yorkers."
Police Commissioner Kerik said, "Due to the superb training of these officers, what could have been a tragedy was a text-book example of an Air-Sea Rescue. These officers demonstrated the best of the NYPD with their skill and professionalism. I am happy to join the Mayor and the rest of New York City in cheering these officers for their selfless acts of bravery during this extraordinary rescue."
Shortly after 4:30 PM yesterday, the crew of an FDNY launch spotted three men stranded on the Breezy Point jetty amid pounding waves, and made a report to the NYPD. Within minutes, an NYPD Aviation Air-Sea rescue team and NYPD harbor launch were dispatched to rescue the three men who had ventured out onto the 500-foot jetty to go fishing. Two police officers, Thomas Kelly and John Dalton, dove into the water from the helicopter with life vests to try to swim the three men to the safety of the harbor launch. Detective Alan Kane, using an inflatable boat, tried to assist the divers with a sea rescue. However, the high waves pounded Police Officer Kelly against the jetty rocks, injuring his left knee, and made a water rescue impossible. While Officer Kelly swam to the harbor launch, Officer Dalton led the three men onto the top of a 25-metal light tower at the end of the jetty. Sgt. Kelly Fitzpatrick dislocated his shoulder while helping Officer Kelly board the harbor launch in the heavy surf.
The NYPD Air Sea Rescue 12 helicopter, piloted by Detective James Lagarenne and co-piloted by Lt. Glenn Daley, was steadied in the high winds so that the crew could lower a sling harness to the tower. While Officer Dalton secured each man, one at a time into the harness, Officer Fernando Almeida guided the winch cable and Officer Patrick Corbett kept the harness from being swept away by the waves.
Once the three men were safely on board, the helicopter flew them to shore where they were treated by EMS personnel. The helicopter then returned to the light tower to pick up Officer Dalton.
Officer Kelly was taken to Jamaica Hospital where he was treated for a bruised knee. Sergeant Fitzpatrick was also taken to Jamaica Hospital to be treated for a dislocated shoulder.
The Mayor presented certificates of recognition to Detective James Lagarenne, the helicopter pilot; Lt. Glenn Daley, the co-pilot; Police Officer Fernando Almeida, helicopter crew; Police Officer Patrick Corbett, helicopter crew; Police Officer John Dalton, diver; and Police Officer Thomas Kelly, diver. Sgt. Kelly Fitzpatrick and Detective Alan Kane were not present for the press conference, but also received certificates of recognition.
www.nyc.gov
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Yeah, I agree there is some breathless hyperbole and silly symbology in the piece. What resonated with me, however, was how folks stepped up unbidden and the social mores that cause that to happen.
I was participating in a drill a couple months back where we set up an ad hoc Cipro distribution center where I work. The local health department was waving the baton, and they showed up with their clipboards and plans, and proceeded to fall all over themselves as they set up the center. We'd lined up several hundred volunteers to go through the line, get interviewed, and then have the right anthrax meds distributed to them and their families. Won't go through all that got gummed up, but one thing that stood out were the barriers they set up to manage patient flow. They grabbed a bunch of chairs and some police tape and set up a couple hundred feet of circuitous flow through the various interview, triage and dispensing stations.
So we had this line set up, but all the health department poobahs have to keep crossing the tape to consult, so the tape gets knocked down and the chairs moved and the lines got sloppy after a while, which gummed up flow. I know the building we were in like the back of my hand, everyone in it owes me a favor, and have a submaster key that would let me into most storage rooms, including the one full of pylons and linking retractable tape. So I go grab a poobah and ask if she wants me to snag the pylons. Oh dear, it's not on the clipboard so we must continue to trip over the chairs and stretched out crime scene tape.
There was plenty of other stuff like this that I won't rattle on about; suffice to say that by the end of the drill I'd vowed to myself that if ever we go live setting up a distribution center for our side of the county I was going to ignore the officious pricks swinging the clipboards, task local resources I'm able to tap, and just go ahead and get things rolling right. And indeed, when I reflect back on scenes I've rolled up on--and there have been a fair number--there have always been a few amateurs around who stepped up and got things done, while occasionally whatever officialdom happened to be underfoot got bogged down trying to remember their training or running mental checklists and such.
Bottom line, the thing I took from the piece is that Americans have a habit of stepping up and filling voids when emergencies occur. Alas, the corollary that sprung to mind is, with the nanny state left currently on the ascendancy and with the "stand back and wait for the professionals to arrive lest you deal with litigation" ethic being expressed elsewhere around here, I fear the social mores that cause volunteers to step up when needed are likely being eroded.
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I fully appreciate GM's point and as usual am in awe of his ability to drop pertinent articles making his point at the drop of a hat.
I also think BBG's point is quite correct. The effective resistance on 911 was "We the unorganized militia".
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Calling for a "new era of responsibility" in his inaugural address, President Barack Obama reminded us that there are no limits to "what free men and women can achieve." Indeed. America achieved greatness as the can-do society. This is, after all, the country of Thomas Paine and barn raisings, of Grange halls and Google. Other countries shared, at least in part, our political freedoms, but America had something different -- a belief in the power of each individual. President Obama's clarion call of self-determination -- "Yes We Can" -- hearkens back to the core of our culture.
David KleinBut there's a threshold problem for our new president. Americans don't feel free to reach inside themselves and make a difference. The growth of litigation and regulation has injected a paralyzing uncertainty into everyday choices. All around us are warnings and legal risks. The modern credo is not "Yes We Can" but "No You Can't." Our sense of powerlessness is pervasive. Those who deal with the public are the most discouraged. Most doctors say they wouldn't advise their children to go into medicine. Government service is seen as a bureaucratic morass, not a noble calling. Make a difference? You can't even show basic human kindness for fear of legal action. Teachers across America are instructed never to put an arm around a crying child.
The idea of freedom as personal power got pushed aside in recent decades by a new idea of freedom -- where the focus is on the rights of whoever might disagree. Daily life in America has been transformed. Ordinary choices -- by teachers, doctors, officials, managers, even volunteers -- are paralyzed by legal self-consciousness. Did you check the rules? Who will be responsible if there's an accident? A pediatrician in North Carolina noted that "I don't deal with patients the same way any more. You wouldn't want to say something off the cuff that might be used against you."
Here we stand, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, and Americans no longer feel free to do anything about it. We have lost the idea, at every level of social life, that people can grab hold of a problem and fix it. Defensiveness has swept across the country like a cold wave. We have become a culture of rule followers, trained to frame every solution in terms of existing law or possible legal risk. The person of responsibility is replaced by the person of caution. When in doubt, don't.
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All this law, we're told, is just the price of making sure society is in working order. But society is not working. Disorder disrupts learning all day long in many public schools -- the result in part, studies by NYU Professor Richard Arum found, of the rise of student rights. Health care is like a nervous breakdown in slow motion. Costs are out of control, yet the incentive for doctors is to order whatever tests the insurance will pay for. Taking risks is no longer the badge of courage, but reason enough to get sued. There's an epidemic of child obesity, but kids aren't allowed to take the normal risks of childhood. Broward County, Fla., has even banned running at recess.
The flaw, and the cure, lie in our conception of freedom. We think of freedom as political freedom. We're certainly free to live and work where we want, and to pull the lever in the ballot box. But freedom should also include the power of personal conviction and the authority to use your common sense. Analyzing the American character, Alexis de Tocqueville, considered "freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones. . . . Subjection in minor affairs does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to sacrifice their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated."
This is not an ideological point. Freedom in daily choices is essential for practical reasons -- necessary for government officials and judges as well as for teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs. The new legal order doesn't honor the individuality of human accomplishment. People accomplish things by focusing on the goal, and letting their instincts, mainly subconscious, try to get them there. "Amazingly few people," management guru Peter Drucker observed, "know how they get things done." Most things happen, the philosopher Michael Polanyi wrote, through "the usual process of trial and error by which we feel our way to success." Thomas Edison put it this way: "Nothing that's any good works by itself. You got to make the damn thing work."
Modern law pulls the rug out from under all those human powers and substitutes instead a debilitating self-consciousness. Teachers lose their authority, Prof. Arum found, because the overhang of law causes "hesitation, doubt and weakening of conviction." Skyrocketing health-care costs are impossible to contain as long as doctors go through the day thinking about how they will defend themselves if a sick person sues.
The overlay of law on daily choices destroys the human instinct needed to get things done. Bureaucracy can't teach. Rules don't make things happen. Accomplishment is personal. Anyone who has felt the pride of a job well done knows this.
How do we restore Americans' freedom in daily choices? Freedom is notoriously malleable towards self-interest. "We all declare for liberty," Abraham Lincoln observed, "but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."
Freedom, however, is not just a shoving match. Freedom has a formal structure. It has two components:
1) Law sets boundaries that proscribe what we must do or can't do -- you must not steal, you must pay taxes.
2) Those same legal boundaries protect an open field of free choice in all other matters.
The forgotten idea is the second component -- that law must affirmatively define an area free from legal interference. Law must provide "frontiers, not artificially drawn," as philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, "within which men should be inviolable."
This idea has been lost to our age. When advancing the cause of freedom, law today is all proscription and no protection. There are no boundaries, just a moving mudbank comprised of accumulating bureaucracy and whatever claims people unilaterally choose to assert. People wade through law all day long. Any disagreement in the workplace, any accident, any incidental touching of a child, any sick person who gets sicker, any bad grade in school -- you name it. Law has poured into daily life.
In Today's Opinion Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Stimulus Time MachineStates of Distress
TODAY'S COMMENTARY
Information Age: Bad News Is Better Than No News
– L. Gordon CrovitzThe Americas: Drug Gangs Have Mexico on the Ropes
– Mary Anastasia O'Grady
COMMENTARY
Geithner Is Exactly Wrong on China Trade
– Bret SwansonWatch Out for Stimulus 'Leaks'
– George MelloanCongress Needs to Help the Economy Fast
– John Kerry and Kent ConradThe solution is not just to start paring back all the law -- that would take 10 lifetimes, like trying to prune the jungle. We need to abandon the idea that freedom is a legal maze, where each daily choice is like picking the right answer on a multiple-choice test. We need to set a new goal for law -- to define an open area of free choice. This requires judges and legislatures to affirmatively assert social norms of what's reasonable and what's not. "The first requirement of a sound body of law," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, "is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community."
The profile of authority structures needed to defend daily freedoms is not hard to imagine. Judges would aspire to keep lawsuits reasonable, understanding that what people sue for ends up defining the boundaries of free interaction. Schools would be run by the instincts and values of the humans in charge -- not by bureaucratic micromanagement -- and be held accountable for how they do. Government officials would have flexibility to meet public goals, also with accountability. Public choices would aspire to balance for the common good, not, generally, to appease someone's rights.
Reviving the can-do spirit that made America great requires a legal overhaul of historic dimension. We must scrape away decades of accumulated legal sediment and replace it with coherent legal goals and authority mechanisms, designed to affirmatively protect individual freedom in daily choices. "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, "and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical . . . ." The goal is not to change our public goals. The goal is make it possible for free citizens to achieve them.
Mr. Howard, a lawyer, is chair of Common Good (www.commongood.org), and author of the new book "Life Without Lawyers," published this month by W.W. Norton & Co.
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http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.ph...=gowzF&u=HpTzs
Quote:
Police tackle internet knife gangs
By Dan Whitworth
Newsbeat technology reporter, Glasgow
Hundreds of weapons have been taken off the streets of Glasgow six months after police started using the web to crack down on gang violence.
Young trainee officers at Strathclyde Police search social networking sites for pictures of people posing with weapons, mainly knives.
Constable Holly McGee and Cadet Fraser Reed, both 18, carry out the work.
"We're looking for anyone who is brandishing offensive weapons or blades," Holly told Newsbeat.
"We take the date, the time, detail of what's in the photograph, [then] a copy of the photograph is printed out and thereafter it's all sent to the gangs task force unit."
That's when more experienced officers in the Violence Reduction Unit at Strathclyde Police get involved.
'The law's been broken'
The man in charge of this, Superintendent Bob Hamilton, says there are two ways of dealing with people once they've been tracked down. If they were posing in a public place, like on the street or a park, the law has been broken and they'll be arrested. Even when pictures are taken in private, though, which isn't technically breaking the law, he says the weapons are so dangerous his officers pay a visit to the people involved.
"We have large kitchen knives, axes, samurai swords, baseball bats, a huge number and different type of weapons" said Superintendent Bob Hamilton "We show the parents their pictures," he explained, "recover the weapons and make sure they know that behaviour is unacceptable. We have large kitchen knives, axes, samurai swords, baseball bats, a huge number and different type of weapons - in simple terms weapons that can kill."
Superintendent Hamilton says Operation Access has been a complete success.
"We've questioned more than 400 people, most of them teenagers, as part of it and it's worked so well it will carry on indefinitely," he said.
Other forces from across the UK have also been in touch about the possibility of setting up similar operations. Social networking sites Facebook and Bebo both say they're committed to improving safety for their members as well as helping cut crime.
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Oh noes! The poolices has the intraweb! :roll:
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Can a New York Bureaucrat Put the Whole Country on a Low-Salt Diet?
Jacob Sullum | January 29, 2009, 11:34am
Having taken on smoking, trans fats, and calories, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden is poised for an assault on salt. He wants packaged food producers and restaurant chains to cut the salt content of their products by 25 percent during the next five years and another 25 percent in the five years after that. "If there's not progress in a few years," he warns, "we'll have to consider other options, like legislation."
Since salt is linked to dangerously high blood pressure in only a small subset of the population, Frieden's proposal is the very model of a modern "public health" intervention. It disregards individual preferences and goes over the heads of consumers, treating the population as a collective. To its credit, The New York Times, toward the end of its story about what Frieden ambitiously calls his "national salt-reduction initiative," notes that not everyone thinks it's a good idea:
Beyond the technical hurdles, Dr. Frieden might encounter resistance on scientific grounds. Some medical researchers question whether a mass reduction in sodium is the best way to spend public-health resources when losing weight and quitting cigarettes would do more for the country's heart health.
Genetics dictate that different people have different reactions to sodium. Some people are more sensitive to high levels of salt. For others, low levels of sodium can be unhealthy.
But public health officials say there is a strong consensus that salt leads to higher rates of heart attacks and strokes.
That consensus alarms Dr. Michael Alderman, editor in chief of the American Journal of Hypertension, who thinks more clinical studies need to be done.
In a 2002 review of the research, Alderman, a past president of the American Society of Hypertension, concluded that "existing evidence provides no support for the highly unlikely proposition that a single dietary sodium intake is an appropriate or desirable goal for the entire population." Despite the weakness of the evidence, Alderman noted, the dogma of less salt is still "preached with a fervour usually associated with religious zealotry."
I noted the controversy over low-salt prescriptions in my 2003 Reason story about the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has been railing against the "deadly white powder," a.k.a. "The Forgotten Killer," since the 1970s. In 2005 CSPI filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing the FDA to stop considering salt an ingredient "generally recognized as safe."
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/131339.html
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Don't tell him about sunlight and skin cancer!!!!!!! :-D :evil: :wink:
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I agree that there are plenty of good uses to which this technology can be put.
I also think it worth noting that it exists.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28956016/
Begin Text
WASHINGTON - As President Obama's motorcade rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, federal authorities deployed a closely held law enforcement tool: equipment that can jam cellphones and other wireless devices to foil remote-controlled bombs, sources said.
It is an increasingly common technology, with federal agencies expanding its use as state and local agencies are pushing for permission to do the same. Police and others say it could stop terrorists from coordinating during an attack, prevent suspects from erasing evidence on wireless devices, simplify arrests and keep inmates from using contraband phones.
But jamming remains strictly illegal for state and local agencies. Federal officials barely acknowledge that they use it inside the United States, and the few federal agencies that can jam signals usually must seek a legal waiver first.
The quest to expand the technology has invigorated a debate about how widely jamming should be allowed and whether its value as a common crime-fighting strategy outweighs its downsides, including restricting the constant access to the airwaves that Americans have come to expect.
"Jamming is a blunt instrument," said Joe Farren, vice president of government affairs for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association. He and others pointed out that when authorities disable wireless service, whether during a terrorist attack or inside a prison, that action can also stop the calls that could help in an emergency. During November's raids in Mumbai, for example, citizens relied on cellphones to direct police to the assailants.
Jamming in downtown D.C.
Propelled by the military's experience with roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, jamming technology has evolved to counter bombs triggered by cellphones, garage openers, remote controls for toy cars or other devices that emit radio signals. Federal authorities rank improvised bombs, which are cheap and adaptable, as one of the greatest terrorist threats to the West.
On Inauguration Day, federal authorities were authorized to jam signals at some locations in downtown Washington, according to current and former federal officials. The Secret Service and other officials declined to provide specific details, some of which are classified.
Most of the nearly 2 million people attending the swearing-in and along the parade route would have been oblivious to any unusual disruption.
"Chances are, you wouldn't even notice it was there," said Howard Melamed, an executive with CellAntenna Corp., a small Coral Springs, Fla., company that produces jamming equipment. If someone in the crowd was on a call, they might have confused the jamming with a dropped signal. "Your phone may go off network," he said. In other cases, "it may never signal, if it's a quick interruption."
Industry officials said that radio-jammers work in several ways: They can send a barrage of energy that drowns out signals across multiple bands or produce a surge of energy on a particular frequency. In other instances, the devices detect and disrupt a suspicious signal, a technique known as "scan and jam."
Private citizens get gear
Some private citizens, hoping to eliminate cellphone calls in restaurants, churches or theaters, have tapped into an underground market of jamming equipment that has trickled into the United States. But that, too, is illegal under the 70-year-old federal telecommunications act, which bans jamming commercial radio signals. The Federal Communications Commission has begun to crack down on private use, which is punishable by an $11,000 fine.
The U.S. military is capable of shutting down communications across a wide area and has done so overseas, including when it has conducted raids to capture suspects. To counter explosives, devices can be set to jam signals for a distance of 50 to 500 meters, for example, or enough to allow a car to pass out of the blast zone of a small bomb.
Some federal agencies, including the FBI and the Secret Service, have standing authority to use jamming equipment or can request waivers from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a Commerce Department agency, when there is an imminent threat, a federal official said.
Jamming has been approved in the past for major events, ranging from State of the Union addresses to visits by certain foreign dignitaries, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the subject.
After transit bombings in Europe, the Department of Homeland Security reached an agreement in 2006 under the National Communications System with cellphone companies to voluntarily shut down service under certain circumstances, which could disable signals for areas ranging from a tunnel to an entire metropolitan region, a DHS official said.
Local demands
Much of the controversy has been fueled by the growing demands from state and local governments.
In the District, corrections officials won permission from the FCC for a brief test of jamming technology at the D.C. jail last month, after citing the "alarming rate" of contraband phones being seized at prisons around the country.
"Cell phones are used by inmates to engage in highly pernicious behavior such as the intimidation of witnesses, coordination of escapes, and the conducting of criminal enterprises," D.C. corrections chief Devon Brown wrote to the federal agency.
The test has been put on hold because of a legal challenge, but the city will keep seeking permission, said D.C. Attorney General Peter J. Nickles.
Texas prison officials made a similar request last fall after a death row inmate placed an illicit call threatening a state legislator, and South Carolina corrections officials said their department staged a test without permission in November.
In a pilot project, the FBI deputized about 10 local bomb squads across the country in 2007 so they could use a small number of radio jammers similar to the military equipment used overseas.
Friendly reception in Congress
The local pleas for expanded permission are beginning to get a friendly reception on Capitol Hill. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate homeland security committee, plans to introduce legislation that would give law enforcement agencies "the tools they need to selectively jam" communications in the event of a terrorist attack, a spokeswoman said.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (Tex.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, has introduced a bill that would allow the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and governors to seek waivers from the FCC to jam calling at prisons.
"When lives are at stake, law enforcement needs to find ways to disrupt cellphones and other communications in a pinpointed way against terrorists who are using them," New York City Police Commissioner Raymond F. Kelly told a Senate panel Jan. 8. He also cited the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when hostage-takers used media spotters and satellite and mobile phones to help them outmaneuver police at hotels, train stations and other targets.
Backing up such requests are the commercial interests that could provide the jammers.
Melamed, with CellAntenna, has worked for several years to open what the company forecasts could be a $25 million line of domestic jamming business for itself, and the amount could be more for bigger players such as Tyco and Harris Corp. He said rules that prevent government agencies from blocking signals don't make sense.
"We're still trying to figure out how it's in the best interest of the public to prevent bomb squads from keeping bombs from blowing up and killing people," he said.
Cell phone industry alarmed
But the cellular industry trade group warns that letting the nation's 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies decide when and where to jam phone calls would create a messy patchwork of potential service disruptions.
Critics warn of another potential problem, "friendly fire," when one agency inadvertently jams another's access to the airwaves, posing a safety hazard in an emergency. Farren said there are "smarter, better and safer alternatives," such as stopping inmates from getting smuggled cellphones in the first place or pinpointing signals from unauthorized callers.
Still, analysts said, events such as the Mumbai attacks may tip the debate in favor of law enforcement.
"Without something like Mumbai, the national security and public safety cases would not be as compelling," said James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. "Now, the burden of proof has been shifting to people who don't want these exceptions, rather than the people who do."
End Text
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Does this mean that the government can be jammed too?
http://www.discount-blockers.com/
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What Michael Phelps Should Have Said
Smoking pot shouldn't be a crime. Or the public's business.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/131438.html (http://www.reason.com/news/show/131438.html)
Radley Balko | February 2, 2009
Dear America,
I take it back. I don’t apologize.
Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months a year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.
I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.
Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have, without a shred of evidence, beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.
You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.
Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.
So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.
Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.
Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.
Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen...is also a proud pot smoker.
Yours,
Michael Phelps
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Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Reefer Madness [Andrew Stuttaford]
Look, I don't blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do.
In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man's failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone's health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDc0MzBiOWZkZDRkODc5YTU4NmM3ZTVhOGU1NTA2MjM=
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Show me one high performing pot smoker and i'll show you 10,000 middle aged losers living with their parents. Yes?
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No.
One of my best friends in law school (Columbia) made law review and later went on to become a senior VP of legal affairs at a major Hollywood studio as well as a law professor.
His modus operandi before plowing into some heavy SEC regs was to fire up a fat doobie. It wasn't my way, but it sure worked for him.
GM, I could give you lots and lots of stories like this. Perhaps because of your profession, there are a lot of people around you who unbeknownst to you, are stoners. Unlike you, because of my pursuit of happiness, live and let live approach to life, such people do not fear that I will try to throw them in jail-- so they see no need to hide from me who they are.
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http://blutube.policeone.com/Clip.aspx?key=7350646A116A3395
Much more common than gold metal winners or Columbia laws school grads, in my personal experience.
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Well of course it is! You are a LEO! :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Multiple times I have contacted people and busted them because they had weed and/or drug paraphenalia in plain view. So stoned/stupid that that forgot they left it sitting out on their dashboard/console/ashtray.
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Then there was they guy with weed in his socks. When we find the weed, he looks us in the eye and says "Those aren't my socks".
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Question: You know those you caught. How do you know those you didn't?
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Sounds like a zen koan.
If someone you loved needed neurosurgery, would you want a Dr that smokes weed to perform it? Airline pilot ? Any other person in a position of responsibility?
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Would you want a Dr that smokes weed to perform it? Airline pilot ? Any other person in a position of responsibility?
How would you know if they were or were not marijuana users? And please don't respond with "drug testing" because we all know how well that works... :roll:
I'm going to guess many pot smokers are like many drinkers. They find a time and place for it. Many people who drink alcohol do it responsibly, why would that be different for marijuana users? Bad drunk exist, so do bad pot smokers. I would no more make a blanket statement about enjoyers of alcohol than enjoyers of marijuana.
To each his own...
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"Sounds like a zen koan."
Exactly. Perhaps in its contemplation you will find satori. :-D
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I think i've proven that I absolutely cannot be enlightened.... ; )
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Would you want a Dr that smokes weed to perform it? Airline pilot ? Any other person in a position of responsibility?
How would you know if they were or were not marijuana users? And please don't respond with "drug testing" because we all know how well that works... :roll:
I'm going to guess many pot smokers are like many drinkers. They find a time and place for it. Many people who drink alcohol do it responsibly, why would that be different for marijuana users? Bad drunk exist, so do bad pot smokers. I would no more make a blanket statement about enjoyers of alcohol than enjoyers of marijuana.
To each his own...
** A key difference is the nature of alcohol vs. the nature of THC. Alcohol is water soluble and quicky metabolized. I don't want a surgeon that is working on a major hangover from the night before, but a surgeon that had two or three glasses with dinner the night before is fine. THC is fat soluble and can be detected weeks after a single use in the user's system, raising legitimate concerns about a longer term degree of impairment related to it's use.
You might be surprised at the things I detect in people that aren't obvious to the average person.**
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"I think i've proven that I absolutely cannot be enlightened.... ; )"
Argue for your limitations and they are yours. :lol:
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THC is fat soluble and can be detected weeks after a single use in the user's system
Depends on the user and depends on the system.
I just don't buy the all-encompassing, reefer madness, rabid, stupid stoners stereotype that has been perpetuated for so many years. And I think it gets people bent when someone like Phelps who has performed at an extremely high level (no pun intended) turns out to be a pot smoker.
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THC is fat soluble and can be detected weeks after a single use in the user's system
Depends on the user and depends on the system.
**Ok, do you know of someone who totally metabolizes THC in the same way most people can metabolize alcohol?**
I just don't buy the all-encompassing, reefer madness, rabid, stupid stoners stereotype that has been perpetuated for so many years.
**Reefer madness. No. Stupid stoner. You think there is nothing to the stereotype?**
And I think it gets people bent when someone like Phelps who has performed at an extremely high level (no pun intended) turns out to be a pot smoker.
**Yeah, because there is never any news about high level athletes using drugs....... :roll:
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GM is right that it is fat soluble, therefore lingers in your system. People say it takes 30 days abstention to pass a zero tolerance test, but tests don't have a zero threshold. The biggest other problem is that there is no portion control or active ingredients strength labeling, like an ibuprofen measuring 200 mg.
Granted it takes away from the attention span and short term memory. Let's say usage in moderation takes 10 points off your intelligence during the effects. That would explain Crafty's friend still able to tackle complex legal issues while a person with 85 cents on the dollar intelligence-wise is lowered to near retarded levels.
I would not accept Crafty's old acquaintance representing me high in front of the Supreme Court, but I have no objection to an average Joe enjoying a few breaths while enjoying a Friday evening sunset on his private deck in the mountains.
Pot harms plenty of people. In most cases I think they over-use, cause other problems in their life and then eventually quit. People with mental health issues also tend to self-medicate and cause themselves deeper problems, and alcohol pot are the most accessible crutches.
The pilot who landed the jet in the Hudson could do a normal day's work flying on auto pilot and calling the tower a couple of times with a small residue of THC in his blood. But his job is not to fly on auto-pilot on a calm, clear day, it is to take charge of the safety of hundreds in every possible unforeseen circumstance. I want my pilot, my surgeon and my Fannie Mae oversight chairman to be drug-free.
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But is this a matter for freedom of choice (a.k.a. "Stupid should hurt") or for the feds kicking in doors?
==============
By STANTON PEELE
The sheriff's office in Richland County, S.C., is investigating a report -- prompted by a photo of the event published in a British tabloid -- that Olympic hero Michael Phelps smoked marijuana there. It's possible Mr. Phelps will be prosecuted. That's right: For those of you who don't know, marijuana is illegal.
I'm guessing it won't take much investigating to discover that Mr. Phelps used the drug at a University of South Carolina house party last November. After all, the 23-year-old swimming phenom -- whose feats in the pool and at meals have been promoted across the globe -- has publicly apologized for doing so, promising "my fans and the public it will not happen again."
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And why wouldn't he apologize? Fat chance Mr. Phelps is about to become a drug policy reformer. He -- and his mom -- want to keep those endorsements rolling in. Imagine if all the prominent people who have ever been exposed for drug use argued for their decriminalization? There would be mayhem -- a lot of people might take drugs and no one would arrest them! The federal government's own surveys reveal that 40% of Americans have consumed marijuana, including the last three presidents of the United States.
The attitude of most Americans, Richland County's sheriff aside, is "Who cares?" After all, smoking pot didn't prevent Barack Obama from becoming president. And obviously, recreational marijuana use hasn't harmed Mr. Phelps, whose prodigious performances have garnered 14 gold medals, the most in Olympic history. If he can smoke pot and perform at such a superhuman level, then perhaps we should reconsider the effects of -- and punishments for -- use of the substance.
Today, not only is it illegal to smoke marijuana, but, most people are surprised to learn, the number of arrests for marijuana use and possession are increasing. In that bastion of liberal values and political views, New York City, close to 400,000 people were apprehended for marijuana misdemeanors in the decade ending in 2007. This was almost 10 times the number arrested in the previous decade. In 2007 alone, nearly 800,000 Americans were arrested for simple possession of marijuana, according to FBI statistics.
But, you're probably thinking, very few presidents, Olympic champions and college students are arrested for drug use. My daughter attends a prominent private university in the city, and she tells me many of her peers smoke pot. Yet neither she nor I had ever heard of a single arrest for this crime on campus.
Who are all of these people getting arrested? And what the heck's the matter with them? Don't they know how to get pot delivered 24/7 to their dorm via carriers from whom you order by cellphone?
Well, here's a hint: 83% of those arrested in New York City in the last decade were African-American or Latino. This occurred even though these groups, while underrepresented among college students, don't actually comprise the majority of drug users.
Then why are they the ones who are most often arrested?
It's complicated. Neighborhoods, social status, police activism, lingering racism, money and power, legal representation: It's a giant ball of wax.
Which gets us back to Michael Phelps and the sheriff of Richland County. What's amazing is not that he would prosecute a marijuana user -- this happens daily across the U.S. What's incredible is that the sheriff wants to apply the law equally, including to an Olympic god.
Next thing you know, he'll be suggesting that we imprison government officials who don't pay their taxes. Doesn't the man know how the world works?
Let me mention one thing I am grateful for: At least Mr. Phelps didn't claim he was addicted, enter the Betty Ford Center for 28 days, then emerge to do public service ads about his recovery. Now that would be hypocritical.
Mr. Peele is a psychologist, attorney and creator of the Life Process Program for addiction recovery. His most recent book is "Addiction-Proof Your Child" (Crown, 2007).
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Stupid should hurt. I doubt very much that it's possible to make a viable case against Phelps if the bong photo is all they have.
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http://www.reason.com/news/show/131612.html
Fear Is His Friend
Obama takes a page from Bush's crisis management book.
Jacob Sullum | February 11, 2009
I flashed back to the fall of 2001 upon reading the subhead over a New York Times story about Monday's presidential press conference: "He Says That Failing to Act Could Lead to Catastrophe." To rush a complex, ill-considered piece of legislation through Congress, George W. Bush invoked the specter of another terrorist attack. Barack Obama, bringing the change he promised, invoked the specter of economic collapse.
Just as the PATRIOT Act was a grab bag of legal changes that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had been seeking for years, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a grab bag of expenditures that leftish Democrats have long wanted, repackaged for the crisis du jour. In both cases, instilling fear was the key to suspending skepticism and cutting off debate.
In a Washington Post op-ed piece last week, President Obama warned that if Congress did not immediately pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, "our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse." While Bush gave us the concept of the never-ending War on Terror, Obama has introduced the idea of the never-ending recession, a phenomenon that has never been seen before but that can be averted only by uncritically approving his spending priorities.
"We can't afford to make the perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary," Obama declared in his weekly radio address on Saturday. "The time for action is now." During an appearance in Elkhart, Indiana, on Monday, he said "the situation we face could not be more serious" and insisted "we can't afford to wait." At his press conference that evening he said "a failure to act will only deepen this crisis" and "could turn a crisis into a catastrophe."
Obama insisted there was no time for debate. "We can't posture and bicker," he said in Elkhart. "Endless delay or paralysis in Washington in the face of this crisis will only bring deepening disaster." At the same time, he claimed there had been plenty of debate already: "many weeks of debate and discussion," as he put it at the press conference.
The stimulus bill was introduced in the House on January 26 and passed two days later. The Senate began debating its version last week and approved the bill this week. No hearings were held in either house. If that's Obama's idea of "many weeks of debate and discussion," verging on "endless delay or paralysis," maybe we should not worry so much about his prediction of an endless recession.
The false sense of urgency created by the president was designed to override two kinds of doubts: about Keynesian stimulus spending generally and about this package in particular. "Doing nothing is not an option," he said in Elkhart. It should be, especially when the something the president wants to do could be worse than nothing, adding $1 trillion to the national debt and diverting resources from more productive uses without delivering on the promise to "jolt our economy back to life."
And that probably won't be the end of the story. At Monday's press conference, Obama said the Japanese government "did not act boldly or swiftly enough" in the 1990s, when it spent trillions of dollars on construction projects in a vain attempt to revive the country's economy. From his study of Japan, the Times reports, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner concluded that "spending must come in quick, massive doses, and be continued until recovery takes firm root."
As with the PATRIOT Act, the success of Obama's Recovery and Reinvestment Plan will be hard to assess. If the Bush administration can take credit for the absence of terrorist attacks without any firm evidence that its policies were decisive in preventing them, the Obama administration can take credit for an economic recovery that would have occurred anyway. I hope that's what happens, because otherwise we can expect further expensive sacrifices to the god of economic stimulus.
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Every time I read something by a libertarian on the PATRIOT act, I'm reminded why they are the flat earthers of national security and justly a fringe party.
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Of course you do. And I have quite a bit of sympathy with the "err on the side of national security" argument. But you gotta admit, watching BHO read from the playbook his side of the aisle had aneurisms over is a source of amusement.
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Sure. I'm not fan of "If ACORN doesn't get millions of taxpayers' dollars, you'll be eating your babies for breakfast!" currently being touted, but it's apples and oranges compared with 9/11/01 and stopping the next one.
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Alas, not the chew toy for GM it might have been. . . .
Is Libertarianism a Sign of Mental Illness?
Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell
I don’t know whether this belongs in the comic-relief category or the future-threats category, but the Harvard Law School is having a conference to analyze the “free market mindset.” The basic premise of the conference seems to be that people who believe in limited government are psychologically troubled.
The conference schedule features presentations such as “How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community” and “Addicted to Incentives: How the Ideology of Self Interest Can Be Self-Fulfilling.” The most absurd presentation, though, may be the one entitled, “Colossal Failure: The Output Bias of Market Economies.” According to the description, the author argues that the market “delivers excessive levels of consumption.” Damn those entrepreneurs for creating so much wealth!
In the good old days of Soviet dictatorship, the regime classified dissidents as being mentally ill (after all, only a nutcase would fail to see the glories of communism).
Now that leftists at Harvard want to portray laissez-faire philosophy as being somewhat akin to a mental disorder, maybe the next step will be re-education camps for Cato staff? Maybe the next “stimulus” bill could include a few earmarks for such facilities? I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I get sent some place warm.
Daniel J. Mitchell • February 25, 2009 @ 11:48 am
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/02/25/is-libertarianism-a-sign-of-mental-illness/
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Funny enough, I believe in small gov't and free markets.
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Abstract for a much longer paper regarding Portugal's experience decriminalizing drugs, including heroin and cocaine.
White Paper
April 2, 2009
Drug Decriminalization in Portugal:
Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies
by Glenn Greenwald
July 1, 2001, a nationwide law in Portugal took effect that decriminalized all drugs, including cocaine and heroin. Under the new legal framework, all drugs were "decriminalized," not "legalized." Thus, drug possession for personal use and drug usage itself are still legally prohibited, but violations of those prohibitions are deemed to be exclusively administrative violations and are removed completely from the criminal realm. Drug trafficking continues to be prosecuted as a criminal offense.
While other states in the European Union have developed various forms of de facto decriminalization — whereby substances perceived to be less serious (such as cannabis) rarely lead to criminal prosecution — Portugal remains the only EU member state with a law explicitly declaring drugs to be "decriminalized." Because more than seven years have now elapsed since enactment of Portugal's decriminalization system, there are ample data enabling its effects to be assessed.
Notably, decriminalization has become increasingly popular in Portugal since 2001. Except for some far-right politicians, very few domestic political factions are agitating for a repeal of the 2001 law. And while there is a widespread perception that bureaucratic changes need to be made to Portugal's decriminalization framework to make it more efficient and effective, there is no real debate about whether drugs should once again be criminalized. More significantly, none of the nightmare scenarios touted by preenactment decriminalization opponents — from rampant increases in drug usage among the young to the transformation of Lisbon into a haven for "drug tourists" — has occurred.
The political consensus in favor of decriminalization is unsurprising in light of the relevant empirical data. Those data indicate that decriminalization has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates in Portugal, which, in numerous categories, are now among the lowest in the EU, particularly when compared with states with stringent criminalization regimes. Although postdecriminalization usage rates have remained roughly the same or even decreased slightly when compared with other EU states, drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization.
This report will begin with an examination of the Portuguese decriminalization framework as set forth in law and in terms of how it functions in practice. Also examined is the political climate in Portugal both pre- and postdecriminalization with regard to drug policy, and the impetus that led that nation to adopt decriminalization.
Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer and a contributing writer at Salon. He has authored several books, including A Tragic Legacy (2007) and How Would a Patriot Act? (2006).
The report then assesses Portuguese drug policy in the context of the EU's approach to drugs. The varying legal frameworks, as well as the overall trend toward liberalization, are examined to enable a meaningful comparative assessment between Portuguese data and data from other EU states.
The report also sets forth the data concerning drug-related trends in Portugal both pre- and postdecriminalization. The effects of decriminalization in Portugal are examined both in absolute terms and in comparisons with other states that continue to criminalize drugs, particularly within the EU.
The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success. Within this success lie self-evident lessons that should guide drug policy debates around the world.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/greenwald_whitepaper.pdf
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http://hotair.com/archives/2009/04/17/dhs-ignored-civil-liberties-lawyers-warnings-on-report/
DHS ignored civil-liberties lawyers’ warnings on report; Update: Senators demand data, explanation
POSTED AT 10:56 AM ON APRIL 17, 2009 BY ED MORRISSEY
The DHS pushed its report out on right-wingers in one hell of a hurry, according to the AP. Internal reviews of the document showed concerns over potential civil-liberties violations before its publication, but DHS ignored them in order to quickly make the document public. What was the rush?
Civil liberties officials at the Homeland Security Department flagged language in a controversial report on right-wing extremists, but the agency issued the report anyway. …
Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said the report was issued before officials resolved problems raised by the agency’s civil rights division about analysts’ definition of right-wing extremism.
In a footnote in the report, right-wing extremism was defined as hate-motivated groups and movements, such as hatred of certain religions, racial or ethnic groups. It went on to say, “It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
This answers the rather absurd meme that has popped up on liberal blogs, that the Bush administration is responsible for this report. First, while the Bush administration might have wanted an assessment of right-wing extremist threats, it didn’t necessarily want one that painted returning veterans and conservative thought on abortion, illegal immigration, and federalism as extremist threats, nor did it want a threat assessment that couldn’t find a threat and had no data on actual, specific groups. Secondly, and most obviously, this report was dated April 7, 2009, almost 3 months after Bush left office.
Just when does the new administration take responsibility for reports they release? 2013? For people who thought Bush was such a dunce, they seem to give him remarkable powers to control government months after he’s retired to Crawford.
Now we see that this wasn’t just left lying around from the Bush administration. In fact, it was such a rush job that Janet Napolitano couldn’t wait to resolve the obvious civil-liberty concerns raised by her own lawyers before shoving it out the door. Napolitano would later have to backtrack on the exact same language flagged by the attorneys by claiming that she didn’t specifically approve the report issued by her office and that she would have changed the language in hindsight. She had the opportunity to fix it before its release, but the completely threadbare report was deemed such a high priority that it went out anyway.
Now, what could have triggered that? Anyone know of events occurring just after April 7, 2009, that such an assessment could have painted as radical, extremist, and threats to national security? Hmmm.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the FBI has tracked a few veterans for extremist activity, but because they joined extremist groups, not because they’re veterans:
Michael Ward, FBI deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said in an interview Thursday that the portion of the operation focusing on the military related only to veterans who draw the attention of Defense Department officials for joining white-supremacist or other extremist groups.
“We’re not doing an investigation into the military, we’re not looking at former military members,” he said. “It would have to be something they were concerned about, or someone they’re concerned is involved” with extremist groups.
That’s the way it’s supposed to work — and that’s the way it did work in the Bush administration, whose assessment of left-wing extremists focused on groups with histories of violent actions and on actual data showing threats.
Update: Via Michelle, Senators Coburn, Brownback, DeMint, Burr, Murkowski, Inhofe, and Vitter sent the following letter to DHS Secretary Napolitano yesterday concerning the DHS report:
April 16, 2009
The Honorable Janet Napolitano
Secretary
The Department of Homeland Security
310 7th street, S.W.
Washington, DC 20528-0150
VIA FASCMILLE
Dear Secretary Napolitano,
We write today concerning the release of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” prepared by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, of the Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division.
While we agree that we must fight extremists who are both foreign and domestic we are troubled by some of the statements your department included as fact in the report titled above, without listing any statistical data to back up such claims.
First, your report states that “Returning veterans possess combat skills and experience that are attractive to rightwing extremists…” without listing any data to support such a vile claim against our nation’s veterans.
Second, the report states that the millions of Americans who believe in the Second Amendment are a potential threat to our national security. Why? Do you have statistics to prove that law-abiding Americans who purchase a legal product are being recruited by so-called hate groups?
Thirdly, the report states that those that believe in issues such as pro-life legislation, limited government, and legal versus illegal immigration are potential terrorist threats. We can assure you that these beliefs are held by citizens of all races, party affiliation, male and female, and should not be listed as a factor in determining potential terror threats. A better word usage would be to describe them as practicing their First Amendment rights.
Also, you list those that bemoan the decline of U.S. stature and the loss of U.S. manufacturing capability to China and India as being potential rightwing extremists. We would suggest that the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in the manufacturing industry to foreign countries are not potential terror threats, but rather honest Americans worried about feeding their families and earning a paycheck.
In closing, we support the mission of DHS in protecting our country from terror attacks and are proud of the many DHS employees who make this possible in conjunction with our state and local law enforcement. We ask that DHS not use this report as a basis to unfairly target millions of Americans because of their beliefs and the rights afforded to them in the Constitution. We also ask that you provide us with the data that support the unfair claims listed in the report titled above and to present us with the matrix system used in collecting and analyzing this data?
Finally, we look forward to your prompt reply and we offer our assistance to DHS in our shared effort to fight terrorism both home and abroad by using data that is accurate and independent of political persuasion.
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Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police
By RYAN J. FOLEY | Associated Press Writer
2:42 PM CDT, May 7, 2009
MADISON, Wis. - Wisconsin police can attach GPS to cars to secretly track anybody's movements without obtaining search warrants, an appeals court ruled Thursday.
However, the District 4 Court of Appeals said it was "more than a little troubled" by that conclusion and asked Wisconsin lawmakers to regulate GPS use to protect against abuse by police and private individuals.
As the law currently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track people without violating their constitutional rights -- even if the drivers aren't suspects.
Officers do not need to get warrants beforehand because GPS tracking does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lundsten wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel based in Madison.
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Picking a GPS That means "police are seemingly free to secretly track anyone's public movements with a GPS device," he wrote.
One privacy advocate said the decision opened the door for greater government surveillance of citizens. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials called the decision a victory for public safety because tracking devices are an increasingly important tool in investigating criminal behavior.
The ruling came in a 2003 case involving Michael Sveum, a Madison man who was under investigation for stalking. Police got a warrant to put a GPS on his car and secretly attached it while the vehicle was parked in Sveum's driveway. The device recorded his car's movements for five weeks before police retrieved it and downloaded the information.
The information suggested Sveum was stalking the woman, who had gone to police earlier with suspicions. Police got a second warrant to search his car and home, found more evidence and arrested him. He was convicted of stalking and sentenced to prison.
Sveum, 41, argued the tracking violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. He argued the device followed him into areas out of public view, such as his garage.
The court disagreed. The tracking did not violate constitutional protections because the device only gave police information that could have been obtained through visual surveillance, Lundsten wrote.
Even though the device followed Sveum's car to private places, an officer tracking Sveum could have seen when his car entered or exited a garage, Lundsten reasoned. Attaching the device was not a violation, he wrote, because Sveum's driveway is a public place.
"We discern no privacy interest protected by the Fourth Amendment that is invaded when police attach a device to the outside of a vehicle, as long as the information obtained is the same as could be gained by the use of other techniques that do not require a warrant," he wrote.
Although police obtained a warrant in this case, it wasn't needed, he added.
Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, said using GPS to track someone's car goes beyond observing them in public and should require a warrant.
"The idea that you can go and attach anything you want to somebody else's property without any court supervision, that's wrong," he said. "Without a warrant, they can do this on anybody they want."
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's office, which argued in favor of the warrantless GPS tracking, praised the ruling but would not elaborate on its use in Wisconsin.
David Banaszynski, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association, said his department in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood does not use GPS. But other departments might use it to track drug dealers, burglars and stalkers, he said.
A state law already requires the Department of Corrections to track the state's most dangerous sex offenders using GPS. The author of that law, Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, said the decision shows "GPS tracking is an effective means of protecting public safety."
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http://www.reason.com/blog/show/133427.html
Fifth Circuit: No SWAT Teams for Regulatory Searches
Radley Balko | May 11, 2009, 4:52pm
It's a "Well gee, you'd hope so" sort of victory, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that using a SWAT team to conduct an administrative or regulatory search is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The case stems from what was clearly a drug raid conducted on a bar in Louisiana by the Rapides Parrish Sheriff's Department. But the raid was conducted under the auspices of an alcohol inspection, which allowed the department to get around the need for a criminal search warrant.
The Fifth Circuit ruled such a raid violates the Fourth Amendment, and is allowing a civil rights suit against the officers involved to go forward. From the opinion:
Taking plaintiffs' factual allegations as true, defendants did not enter Club Retro as would a typical patron; instead, they chose to project official authority by entering with weapons drawn in a S.W.A.T. team raid. They lacked any particularized suspicion or probable cause when they subsequently searched Club Retro, its attic, and the separate apartment and seized and searched all of its patrons and employees. Thus, defendants' entry and search was not a reasonable acceptance of Club Retro's invitation to the public. Any other conclusion would be an invitation for S.W.A.T. team raids by law enforcement officers of any business that is open to the public and would severely undermine the Fourth Amendment protections afforded to owners of commercial premises.
We are likewise not convinced by defendants' second argument that they conducted a permissible administrative inspection. Although Louisiana statutes and Rapides Parish ordinances authorizing administrative inspections may have provided justification for an entry and inspection of Club Retro, no such law permits the scope and manner of the raid that plaintiffs allege occurred here...
Administrative inspections, by their very nature, require more limited, less intrusive conduct than is alleged to have occurred here. We thus conclude that defendants' S.W.A.T. team entries and extensive searches, as described in the amended complaint, unreasonably exceeded the scope of Louisiana and Rapides Parish administrative inspection laws. Any other conclusion would allow the administrative inspection exception to swallow the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement for searches of private property.
The court also cited a similar opinion from the 11th Circuit:
In Swint v. City of Wadley, 51 F.3d 988 (11th Cir. 1995), the Eleventh Circuit relied on existing Supreme Court precedent to reject qualified immunity as a defense for officers who conducted two raids of a nightclub that were comparable in relevant respects to the raid here. There, a S.W.A.T. team of thirty to forty officers, wearing ski masks, swarmed a club after receiving a signal from an undercover officer who had probable cause to arrest one patron for an illegal drug transaction. Id. at 993. The officers pointed their weapons at many of the club's patrons and employees; prohibited the owners, employees, and patrons from moving or leaving; searched all individuals; refused patrons' and employees' requests to use the restrooms; searched the club, its cash registers, and door receipts; and maintained control of the premises and persons for between one and one and one-half hours. Id. The court concluded that the officers could point to "no authority that even suggests that the search and seizure of one suspect in a public place can be bootstrapped into probable cause for a broad-based search of the business establishment and its patrons."
For a few years now, I've been covering the ongoing saga of David Ruttenberg, a former pool hall owner in Virginia whose business was raided by a massive police force in 2004. The mix of SWAT, undercover, and uniformed officers stormed Ruttenberg's bar on ladies' night. Like the cases above, the search on Ruttenberg's bar was also clearly a criminal search disguised as an alcohol inspection, though in Ruttenberg's case, it was really only one of numerous violations of his civil rights by the police and political establishment in Manassas Park, Virginia. The police had tried to obtain a search warrant against Ruttenberg for the 2004 raid, but couldn't convince a judge they had probable cause he'd committed a crime. So the merely brought along some representatives from the Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control, and called it an inspection.
So far, Ruttenberg hasn't had much luck in his own federal civil rights suit. His case was rejected outright the first time he appeared in federal court. Last July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit gave Ruttenberg a small glimmer of hope, affirming the lower court's dismissal of every claim, save for one—that the use of SWAT tactics to enforce a regulatory inspection was a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Last month, the same circuit court judge once again threw out that claim, too.
But Ruttenberg is appealing, and given how the similar the facts are to his own case, one would think this latest ruling from the Fifth Circuit could only help his cause. If it doesn't, the split between the Fifth Circuit and the Fourth and 11th Circuits would seem to make the case ripe for the Supreme Court.
It's pretty remarkable that we're even discussing this. We're talking about using SWAT teams to conduct regulatory inspections on businesses. That there would even be a debate shows just how tolerant we've become of the government using this sort of force.
Here's surveillance video of the raid on Ruttenberg's bar. Keep in mind, this was done other the auspices of an alcohol inspection. And a federal judge has now twice ruled that he sees nothing excessive about it.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHCXOiN3ybM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ereason%2Ecom%2Fblog%2Fshow%2F133427%2Ehtml&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
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HAven't looked into this for myself yet, but these are said to have GPS jammers:
DIY version. Some experience required.
http://www.navigadget.com/index.php/...ade-gps-jammer
Store-bought versions. Some do cell phones or GLONASS as well.
http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/GPS_Jammer.html
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First link is truncated. Should read:
http://www.navigadget.com/index.php/2008/04/21/gps-tracking-jammer
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Thank you.
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I know cell phone jamming is a violation of federal law, even for local level law enforcement. I'd guess that GPS jamming is illegal, but this is a guess.
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GPS Evidence Too Unreliable For Legal Purposes
GPS devices can be easily jammed and their data can be spoofed, particularly when tied to cellular systems, experts argue.
By Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek
April 30, 2009
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217201050
GPS location data from tracking devices and mobile phones has become an important component of court cases as a way to establish where people have been and when they were there.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the constitutionality of warrantless GPS tracking, a more fundamental question may be whether GPS data is reliable enough to be admissible in court.
Todd Glassey, chief scientist of Certichron, a time data trust service, and founder of the U.S. Time Server Foundation, argues that GPS devices can be easily jammed and that their data can be spoofed, particularly when tied to cellular systems -- as offender tracking bracelets may be.
This isn't a novel concern. The U.S. Department of Defense has forbidden the use of L1 GPS -- the version of GPS available to civilians -- for military purposes since 1998, owing to data integrity and security shortcomings. The military relies on L2 GPS, which is encrypted and more accurate.
A 2003 Los Alamos National Laboratory research paper by Jon S. Warner and Roger G. Johnston, members of the lab's Vulnerability Assessment Team, states, "Civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are vulnerable to attacks such as blocking, jamming, and spoofing." The VAT had previously demonstrated that claim by simulating the hijacking of a cargo truck monitored by GPS.
The FCC has tried to prevent the sale of GPS jammers, which are illegal under the Communications Act of 1934. But schematics for a do-it-yourself GPS jamming device can be easily found online and built for less than $150. And they can be bought online through various Web sites.
For less than $2,000, says Glassey, someone could acquire the gear necessary to spoof the location of GPS bracelets issued to sex offenders or other parolees. The potential risks are obvious.
Many law enforcement entities have opted to use L1 GPS tracking bracelets to allow defendants to remain free prior to trial and to track high-risk releases like sex offenders. Often, they wed these systems to voice-recognition systems and cellular location-sensing backup systems.
But according to Glassey, the availability of call-redirectors, Vonage, Skype, and other VoIP systems means that system safeguards aren't sufficiently secure.
"The knowledge of the use of GPS test equipment to alter or affect the readings inside of GPS receivers has already made the jump from the technology community to the hacker community such that commercial products and general knowledge of how to spoof L1 GPS systems is available everywhere," Glassey explained in a technical brief he prepared for the D.C. Circuit appeal of U.S. v. Jones.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed an amicus brief in that case in support of a claim by defendant Antoine Jones that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the warrantless placement of a GPS tracking device in his car.
But constitutional considerations aside, Glassey maintains that L1 GPS data should not be admissible in court without some other form of corroborating evidence. He contends that the reliability claims made to the court by manufacturers of GPS tracking devices are misrepresentations.
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http://www.corrections.com/articles/20369
Allow cell phone jamming
By Jon Ozmint, Director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections
Published: 01/12/2009
Technology advances at an amazing pace, and criminals figure out how to employ it for illegal purposes at an equally amazing pace. Within prisons across our nation criminals and their accomplices are using wireless technology to threaten public safety.
The Federal Communications Act of 1934 was created “for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communication.” By with-holding surgical jamming technology from state and local law enforcement, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) violates this purpose and fails to acknowledge advancing technology.
Cell phones are contraband in prison. However, contraband can get past even the best detection systems. X-ray scanners, metal detectors, drug and bomb dogs, and the best of search techniques are all creations of human ingenuity and they can all be defeated by human ingenuity.
In South Carolina prisons, we have improved procedures to squeeze the traditional contraband pipelines. As a result, we are now experiencing an increase in what we call ‘throw-overs:’ efforts to introduce contraband directly over our fences by throwing, shooting or dropping packages containing contraband. This method requires coordination with the ‘throwers’ on the outside, via cell phones.
Today, cell phones and related technology are now the contraband of choice in America’s prisons. Here’s why.
Cell phones allow inmates to avoid using inmate phone systems, where calls can be monitored and recorded. Recently, witnesses and others have been murdered as a result of ‘hits’ issued by inmates using cell phones. From drug dealing to credit card fraud to escapes, cell phones in prisons threaten public safety.
There are two ways to deal with the issue of cell phones in prisons. One is detection and location technology. This technology is expensive and imprecise. Further, it is only partially effective since it only works while phones are operating and it requires continuous staffing to monitor and search for phones, SIMS cards, and parts.
The second method, blocking or jamming, is 80% cheaper and 100% more effective. It is continuous and it cannot be defeated by hiding and moving phones and their parts: it eliminates the threats created by cell phones.
Years ago, technology used to block and jam signals was imprecise: in order to block cell phones within a limited area, such as a prison or a single building, the technology would interfere with other calls outside of that radius. Thus, the FCC was justified in prohibiting such blocking.
Now, improved technology can block only certain signals and within a set radius only. ‘Surgical jamming’ can be aimed. In fact, we invited the FCC to attend our recent demonstration of this technology in one of our maximum security prisons. Disappointingly, they refused to even send a representative.
From the beginning, the wireless industry has voiced two objections to using this technology in prisons: (1) interference with calls outside of prison, such as E-911 calls; and, (2) interference with our own law enforcement radios. After our demonstration, the public and the media present know that these arguments are specious: surgical jamming does not interfere with law enforcement radios or block E-911 calls. In fact, it will not block any call or frequency outside of the prison perimeter.
Jamming cell phones can be an effective and necessary tool for law enforcement. Federal agencies are already allowed to purchase and use this jamming technology. So, if a cell-phone detonated bomb threatens the U.S. Capital or the FCC building, federal law enforcement can jam the signal. After all, they are very important people!
But, out here in the hinterlands, if a cell phone-detonated bomb threatens a local courthouse or school, Congress and the FCC have made it a crime for our state and local law enforcement to use the same technology that they afford to federal authorities. Apparently, our safety is not quite as important.
This double-standard is the pinnacle of arrogance, even by Washington standards.
Congress and the FCC should be ashamed. And, they should act.
Jon Ozmint is the Director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections and is asking the FCC to allow state and local law enforcement authorities to use jamming technology and to allow South Carolina to pilot surgical jamming technology in prisons, immediately.
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http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone-jammer.htm/printable
A good primer on the topic.
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The prison application of cell phone jamming is extremely persuasive though I would think guards also need some form of wireless communication for emergencies such as calling for backup.
In a church or music/theatre application I have mixed feelings. When I turn my ringer off I miss calls half the following day until I discover it off. But on silent mode in a quiet area I at least might know what calls I've missed and could excuse myself. Playing tennis or golf with doctors on call for example, it may be rude to take a call, but if jammed they couldn't participate if they couldn't regularly look to see if calls were missed.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/11/state-pursues-cell-phone-jamming-test/print/
Monday, May 11, 2009
Maryland pursues cell-phone jamming test
Brian Witte ASSOCIATED PRESS
ANNAPOLIS -- Gov. Martin O'Malley plans to ask federal regulators to allow Maryland to hold a cell-phone jamming demonstration at a state prison to show the effectiveness of stopping inmate cell-phone use, which has been a safety threat in prisons around the nation.
The Federal Communications Commission can give federal agencies permission to jam cell-phone signals, but the Communications Act of 1934 doesn't allow state and local agencies to use the technology, which prevents cell-tower transmissions from reaching the targeted phone.
"Current attempts to ensure that cell phones stay out of prisons can easily be foiled and must be supplanted by the best technology available," Mr. O'Malley wrote in a letter to Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland Democrat, who is co-sponsoring legislation in Congress to legalize cell-phone jamming at state and local prisons.
The Democratic governor wrote the letter to Maryland's senior senator to indicate his intent to request a demonstration and to update Miss Mikulski on the state's efforts to clear prisons of illegal cell phones.
"I am committed to seizing the opportunity that this legislative initiative has created to move law enforcement and the enhancement of public safety to the 21st century as cell phones become smaller and more difficult to find," Mr. O'Malley wrote.
South Carolina ran a demonstration in Nov. 2008 without federal permission, while Texas planned one, then called it off because of the federal restriction. The FCC has denied two recent requests from the District of Columbia and Louisiana for test jamming sessions.
Rick Abbruzzese, an O'Malley spokesman, said the time is right for the FCC to consider Maryland's request because Congress is taking up the issue and that there's a need for up-to-date data on how the technology can be used to prevent prisoners from using cell phones.
Inmates use cell phones to get around security, further gang activity and conduct criminal activity from behind bars, authorities say.
Last week, a Baltimore drug dealer who used a cell phone in the city jail to plan the killing of a trial witness was sentenced to life without parole. Patrick A. Byers Jr. was convicted of murdering Carl S. Lackl Jr., who had identified Byers as the gunman in a previous killing. Mr. Lackl, a 38-year-old single father, was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting outside his home in July 2007, a week before Byers was scheduled for trial.
Maryland corrections officials confiscated 947 cell phones in 2008 by using specially trained dogs and other security measures. That's a 71 percent increase in confiscations compared with 2006, according to the O'Malley administration.
Mr. O'Malley said the confiscations helped reduce serious assaults by inmates on staff by taking away a tool that inmates can use to coordinate attacks - resulting in a 32 percent drop from 2006 to 2008. Mr. O'Malley wrote that serious weapon assaults are down 75 percent over the same period.
"But while we have made progress, we can do much more to improve public safety and eradicate the harm caused by these cell phones by shutting them down," Mr. O'Malley wrote in the May 7 letter to Miss Mikulski.
Mr. Abbruzzese said state officials are working on the details of a demonstration, and it's not known where or when it would occur.
Chris Guttman-McCabe, vice president of regulator affairs at CTIA - The Wireless Association, the industry's leading trade group, said he has concerns about cell-phone jamming affecting customers who live near prisons.
"While we don't want prisoners to have service inside the jails, we also don't want our customers to be impacted outside the jails," Mr. Guttman-McCabe said.
Examples of inmates using cell phones to further criminal activity have cropped up nationwide.
In Texas earlier this month, a death-row inmate and two relatives were indicted in a purported cell-phone smuggling case that led to a statewide prison lockdown. A grand jury also indicted Richard Lee Tabler on a felony retaliation charge for threatening to kill a state senator.
In Kansas, convicted killer John Manard planned his 2006 prison escape using a cell phone smuggled in by an accomplice. The following year, two inmates escaped another Kansas prison with the help of a former guard and a smuggled cell phone.
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By JACOB SULLUM
In October, British newspapers reported that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government was working on a plan to monitor every phone call, Web-site visit, text message and email in the country, entering the information into a vast database that would be used to catch terrorists, pedophiles and scam artists. Dominic Grieve, the shadow home secretary (that is, a member of the Conservative opposition), warned that "any suggestion of the government using existing powers to intercept communications data without public discussion is going to sound extremely sinister." The Sunday Times reported a "fierce backlash inside Whitehall," with senior officials calling the database scheme "impractical, disproportionate and potentially unlawful." Michael Parker, the spokesman for a British civil-liberties group, told the Daily Express: "This is stalking. If an individual carried out this sort of snooping, it would be a crime."
Mr. Brown's government tried to blunt such attacks by saying that its electronic dragnet would not be as extensive as the press had claimed and that government investigators, in any case, would still need "ministerial warrants" to listen to or read the contents of communications. Not everyone felt reassured, however. Ken MacDonald, the director of public prosecutions for England and Wales, warned that "decisions taken in the next few months and years about how the state may use these [surveillance] powers, and to what extent, are likely to be irreversible," adding: "We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom's back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security state."
The episode illustrates two points that are reinforced by British journalist Ross Clark's wry and revealing book "The Road to Big Brother." First, despite the U.K.'s reputation as one of the most watched societies in the world -- it has more surveillance cameras per capita than any other country -- its citizens, including its law-enforcement officials, still care about privacy. Second, their complaints are more easily ignored than analogous complaints in the U.S., where the Fourth Amendment, along with various statutes, prevents the executive branch from unilaterally changing the rules that limit government snooping.
In the U.S., implementing a data-collection program like the one contemplated by the British government would require not only the "public discussion" demanded by Dominic Grieve but congressional authorization, which would in turn be reviewed by courts that are unlikely to allow the state to gather so much private information on so many innocent people. Nor would American courts let the police stop and search people's pockets and bags in any public place for any reason, a policy that Mr. Clark says may soon become British law.
The Road to Big Brother
By Ross Clark
(Encounter, 140 pages, $21.95)
Still, there is much that Americans can learn from the British experience with surveillance. Take all those cameras. So far in the U.S., they have been limited mainly to detecting traffic violations. Although traffic cameras have generated heated debate, the main concern has to do with whether they reduce or increase accidents and whether municipalities are sacrificing public safety for the sake of revenue (by reducing the duration of yellow lights, for example). But there is no constitutional barrier to erecting surveillance cameras throughout the U.S. -- provided they focus only on public areas. After all, the government could, in theory, post police officers on every corner, and they would be free to look and listen without violating anyone's Fourth Amendment rights. Looking and listening from a distance does not change the constitutional question.
Yet there is something to be said, fiscal concerns aside, for not having a cop on every corner. The sense of being constantly watched does tend to put a damper on things, potentially affecting the topics people discuss, the ways they dress, the businesses they visit, even the books they read while sitting on park benches.
By Mr. Clark's account, the cost of such surveillance is not worth paying. In Britain, he says, the evidence that the government's cameras are good at deterring or detecting crime is thin. Facial-recognition software aimed at catching known suspects has been a bust, easily foiled by poor lighting, hats, sunglasses and even a few months of aging. Mr. Clark argues that Britain's cameras are, in reality, a relatively cheap way of seeming to do something about crime. He finds that "electronic surveillance is not always augmenting traditional policing; it is more often than not replacing it, with poor results." Likewise, huge collections of information gleaned from private sources such as phone companies, banks and credit bureaus (along the lines of America's renamed but not abandoned Total Information Awareness Program) are apt to be unmanageable and rife with errors. Mr. Clark notes: "There is a fundamental rule about databases: the bigger they are, the more useless they become."
Again and again, Mr. Clark finds, high-tech systems that seem at first to be outrageous invasions of privacy turn out to be outrageous boondoggles that don't succeed at their official goals and actually get in the way of catching the bad guys and protecting the public. "The excessive collection of data tends to act as a fog through which authorities struggle to find what they are looking for," Mr. Clark writes. "The more Big Brother watches, the less he seems to see."
An excessively nosy government poses many dangers, as Mr. Clark emphasizes, including exposure to fraud and blackmail, unjustified interference with freedom of travel, and mistaken incrimination. But it is reassuring to realize that the government is not competent enough to be omniscient.
Mr. Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist.
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http://www.reason.com/blog/show/133610.html
Don't Covet Your Neighbor's Ass, Report Him for It
Radley Balko | May 20, 2009, 1:36pm
Since 2006, parts of the U.K. have participated in a public relations effort that encourages citizens to anonymously report neighbors who they feel are living beyond their means—for possible criminal investigation.
In partnership with regional chapters of the charity group Crimestoppers U.K., multiple local police forces have launched a program called "Too Much Bling? Give Us a Ring." The object of the program is to encourage people who suspect that a neighbor or acquaintance is living off the proceeds of crime to anonymously provide information about that person to the police...
A key component of the "Too Much Bling?" program is its effort to tap into any resentment and anger members of the public may feel toward suspected criminals.
In a release issued by the Sussex Police Department, which used the program to help seize more than £1.5 million between April and December of last year, Detective Sergeant Mick Richards said, "Members of the public are sick and tired of seeing people with no legitimate income living a lavish lifestyle. We are working hard towards taking the cash out of crime making use of all the powers granted to us under the Proceeds of Crime Act and other legislation.
"I am very aware that in these difficult times how disheartening it is to see people 'flashing the cash' when you know that it has come from a life of crime and that they appear to be 'getting away with it,'" he said.
Bling website:
http://www.2muchbling.co.uk/
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Schneier on Security
A blog covering security and security technology.
June 24, 2009
Fixing Airport Security
It's been months since the Transportation Security Administration has had a permanent director. If, during the job interview (no, I didn't get one), President Obama asked me how I'd fix airport security in one sentence, I would reply: "Get rid of the photo ID check, and return passenger screening to pre-9/11 levels."
Okay, that's a joke. While showing ID, taking your shoes off and throwing away your water bottles isn't making us much safer, I don't expect the Obama administration to roll back those security measures anytime soon. Airport security is more about CYA than anything else: defending against what the terrorists did last time.
But the administration can't risk appearing as if it facilitated a terrorist attack, no matter how remote the possibility, so those annoyances are probably here to stay.
This would be my real answer: "Establish accountability and transparency for airport screening." And if I had another sentence: "Airports are one of the places where Americans, and visitors to America, are most likely to interact with a law enforcement officer - and yet no one knows what rights travelers have or how to exercise those rights."
Obama has repeatedly talked about increasing openness and transparency in government, and it's time to bring transparency to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
Let's start with the no-fly and watch lists. Right now, everything about them is secret: You can't find out if you're on one, or who put you there and why, and you can't clear your name if you're innocent. This Kafkaesque scenario is so un-American it's embarrassing. Obama should make the no-fly list subject to judicial review.
Then, move on to the checkpoints themselves. What are our rights? What powers do the TSA officers have? If we're asked "friendly" questions by behavioral detection officers, are we allowed not to answer? If we object to the rough handling of ourselves or our belongings, can the TSA official retaliate against us by putting us on a watch list? Obama should make the rules clear and explicit, and allow people to bring legal action against the TSA for violating those rules; otherwise, airport checkpoints will remain a Constitution-free zone in our country.
Next, Obama should refuse to use unfunded mandates to sneak expensive security measures past Congress. The Secure Flight program is the worst offender. Airlines are being forced to spend billions of dollars redesigning their reservations systems to accommodate the TSA's demands to preapprove every passenger before he or she is allowed to board an airplane. These costs are borne by us, in the form of higher ticket prices, even though we never see them explicitly listed.
Maybe Secure Flight is a good use of our money; maybe it isn't. But let's have debates like that in the open, as part of the budget process, where it belongs.
And finally, Obama should mandate that airport security be solely about terrorism, and not a general-purpose security checkpoint to catch everyone from pot smokers to deadbeat dads.
The Constitution provides us, both Americans and visitors to America, with strong protections against invasive police searches. Two exceptions come into play at airport security checkpoints. The first is "implied consent," which means that you cannot refuse to be searched; your consent is implied when you purchased your ticket. And the second is "plain view," which means that if the TSA officer happens to see something unrelated to airport security while screening you, he is allowed to act on that.
Both of these principles are well established and make sense, but it's their combination that turns airport security checkpoints into police-state-like checkpoints.
The TSA should limit its searches to bombs and weapons and leave general policing to the police - where we know courts and the Constitution still apply.
None of these changes will make airports any less safe, but they will go a long way to de-ratcheting the culture of fear, restoring the presumption of innocence and reassuring Americans, and the rest of the world, that - as Obama said in his inauguration speech - "we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."
This essay originally appeared, without hyperlinks, in the New York Daily News.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/06/fixing_airport.html
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July 27, 2009
The Unlikely Orchid Smuggler: A Case Study in Overcriminalization
by Andrew M. Grossman
Legal Memorandum #44
George Norris, an elderly retiree, had turned his orchid hobby into a part-time business run from the greenhouse in back of his home. He would import orchids from abroad--South Africa, Brazil, Peru--and resell them at plant shows and to local enthusiasts. He never made more than a few thousand dollars a year from his orchid business, but it kept him engaged and provided a little extra money--an especially important thing as his wife, Kathy, neared retirement from her job managing a local mediation clinic.
Their life would take a turn for the worse on the bright fall morning of October 28, 2003, when federal agents, clad in protective Kevlar and bearing guns, raided his home, seizing his belongings and setting the gears in motion for a federal prosecution and jail time.
The Raid
Around 10:00 a.m., three pick-up trucks turned off a shady cul-de-sac in Spring, Texas, far in Houston's northern suburbs, and into the driveway of Norris's single-story home. Six agents emerged, clad in dark body armor and bearing sidearms. Two circled around to the rear of the house, where there is a small yard and a ramshackle greenhouse. One, Special Agent Jeff Odom of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, approached the door and knocked; his companions held back, watching Odom for the signal.
Norris, who had seen the officers arrive and surround his house, answered the knock at the door with trepidation. Odom was matter-of-fact. Within 10 seconds, he had identified himself, stated that he was executing a search warrant, and waved in the rest of the entry team for a sweep of the premises. Norris was ordered to sit at his kitchen table and to remain there until told otherwise. One agent was stationed in the kitchen with him.
As Norris looked on, the agents ransacked his home. They pulled out drawers and dumped the contents on the floor, emptied file cabinets, rifled through dresser drawers and closets, and pulled books off of their shelves.
When Norris asked one agent why his home was the subject of a warrant, the agent read him his Miranda rights and told him simply that he was not charged with anything at this time or under arrest. Norris asked more questions--What were they searching for? What law did they think had been broken? What were their names and badge numbers?--but the agents refused to answer anything. Finally, they handed over the search warrant, but they would not let Norris get up to retrieve his reading glasses from his office; only an agent could do that.
It was as if he were under arrest, but in his own home.
Attached to the warrant was an excerpt of an e-mail message, from two years earlier, in which a man named Arturo offered to have his mother "smuggle" orchids from Ecuador in a suitcase and send them to Norris from Miami. Norris remembered the exchange; he had declined the offer and had stated that he could not accept any plants that were not accompanied by legal documentation.
The agents questioned Norris about the orchids in his greenhouse, asking which were nursery-grown and which were collected from the wild. Norris explained that nearly all of them had been artificially propagated; one agent, knowing little about orchids, asked whether this meant they had been grown from seeds.
The agents boxed and carried out to their trucks nearly all of Norris's business records, his computer, his floppy disks and CD-ROMs, and even installation discs, and left him a receipt for the 37 boxes that they took. Then they left. Norris surveyed the rooms of his home. In his tiny office, papers, old photographs, and trash were strewn on the floor. Everything was out of place.
His wife arrived home shortly after the agents left. She had panicked when, calling home to talk to her husband, an agent picked up the phone and refused to put him on or answer any questions. It took the two of them hours to clean up the house and try to assess the damage.
A Passion Blossoms
George Norris, now 71 and arthritic, carries his large frame wearily. His gestures are careful, as if held back by pain or fear, and his stride slow and deliberate. And his voice, once booming, is now softer and tentative. Visibly, he is a man who has been permanently scarred by experience.
Yet his mood and movements become animated when he discusses the birth of his passion for orchids. His first was a gift, twice over: A neighbor had received the blooming plant, straight from the store, for Mother's Day, and she gave it to Norris after the flowers faded. At the time, he had a small lean-to greenhouse and dabbled in horticulture. He put it there and forgot about it. A year later, as he was doing the morning watering, his eyes were drawn to two stunning yellow flowers on stems shooting out of the plant. They were prettier than any other flowers he had ever seen.
He dove into the world of orchids with an unusual passion, reading everything he could find on the subject. One book extolled the diversity of species in Mexico. It was not so far from Houston, and his wife spoke fluent Spanish, so they planned an orchid-hunting trip. In every small town, the locals would point them to unusual plants, often deep in the woods. Norris managed to collect 40 or 50 plants, and their beauty and diversity were stunning. He was hooked.
That was 1977, years before an orchid craze would hit the United States. All of a sudden, Norris found himself part of a small, close-knit community of orchid enthusiasts and explorers committed to finding and collecting the unknown species of Asia, Africa, and South America. They communicated by newsletters and at regional orchid shows. While man had thoroughly covered and mapped the terrain of the world, the world of orchids was still frontier, with exotic specimens being discovered regularly.
Within a few years, orchids were taking up more and more of Norris's time and attention, and he had become dissatisfied with his work in the construction field. So he quit work and set off to see if he could make a living as a full-time explorer, finding orchids in the wild and introducing them to serious collectors in the U.S.
His new business was not initially a success. It took years to build up a mailing list of customers and credibility in the field. By the mid-1980s, he was beyond the break-even point, and from there, business kept growing. In 2003, revenues topped $200,000--a huge sum considering that most plants sold for less than $15.
Norris, meanwhile, was gaining prominence. Through word of mouth, and after seeing his orchids in collections, more and more enthusiasts wanted to be on his mailing list, and he began using his catalogue as a platform for his views on orchids, the orchid community, and even politics. Orchid clubs all around the South invited him to deliver talks and slideshows.
Norris made a name for himself as one of the few dealers importing non-hybrid plants, known as "species" orchids. He got commissions from botany departments at several universities that needed non-hybrid plants for their research, from botanical gardens, and from the Bronx Zoo when it needed native orchids to recreate a gorilla habitat. Years later, some of those orchids are still a part of the zoo's Congo Gorilla Forest.
Norris's work took him to Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, and other countries where exotic species grew wild. On each trip, he tried to meet local collectors and growers, contacts who could lead him to the best plants. Some of these, in later years, would become his chief suppliers.
Rules at the time were lax. In Mexico, Norris explained, "You could collect as many as you wanted" and get permits for them all. And with that paperwork, importing them into the U.S. was a breeze.
As orchids became more popular, however, that would change.
"The Regulation Is Out of Hand"
Passion for the flower is not enough today to succeed in the orchid business. Moving beyond the standard hybrids sold at big-box stores requires either gaining a detailed knowledge of several complicated bodies of law or hiring attorneys. This is a necessity because not only is the law complicated, but the penalties for getting anything wrong are severe: fines, forfeiture, and potentially years in prison.
Trade in orchids is regulated chiefly by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an international treaty that has been ratified by about 175 nations. Though initially conceived to protect endangered animals, the subject matter was expanded to include flora as well.
CITES classifies species, and the limitations on their trade, in three appendices.
Appendix I species are the most in danger of extinction; importing or exporting them from any CITES country is prohibited, except for research purposes.
The species listed in Appendix II are less endangered and can be traded so long as they are accompanied by permits issued by the exporting country.
Appendix III species are listed by individual countries and are subject to the permit requirement only when they originate in the listing country.
Determining the listing of a plant is not always an easy task. Some species of orchids are listed in Appendix I, and so cannot be traded, and Appendix II covers the remainder. Exporters, however, often have a tough time identifying plants, especially those collected from the wild. The result is rampant mislabeling of orchid species. Usually, this has few consequences, because permitting agencies and customs agents, who tend to focus on animals and invasive species, rarely have the expertise to recognize the often subtle differences between varieties of orchids, especially when they are not in bloom.
Making matters even more complicated, CITES contains a major exception to the tough restrictions of Article I. Article I plants that are artificially propagated are deemed to be covered by Article II and so may be traded. But artificial propagation is not simply a matter of ripping a plant from the wild and breeding it in a nursery. To take advantage of the exception, nurseries must be registered with CITES and obtain a permit from their government to remove a small number of plants from the wild for the purpose of propagation. Then there is the difficulty--and often impossibility--of distinguishing Article I plants raised in nurseries from those collected from the wild.
Countries that have joined CITES agree to enforce its requirements within their laws. This means establishing agencies to research domestic wildlife and, when appropriate, grant permits. It also requires close monitoring of imports and exports to ensure that no Appendix I species are traded and that shipments of species listed in Appendix II and Appendix III are properly permitted. While the treaty requires countries to "penalize" improper imports and exports, it does not require any specific penalties; that is left up to each country's lawmakers.
In the United States, CITES is implemented through both the Lacey Act, a 1900 wildlife protection act that was amended in 1981 to protect CITES-listed species, and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Both, in their original forms, covered only animals; plants were added later and made subject to the same restrictions as animals. Taken together, these laws prohibit trade in any plants in violation of CITES, as well as possession of plants that have been traded in violation of CITES.
More specifically, federal regulations lay out the requirements for importing plants. Every plant must be accompanied by a tag or document identifying its genus and species, its origin, the name and address of its owner, the name and address of its recipient, and a description of any accompanying documentation required for its trade, such as a CITES permit. The importer is required to notify the government upon the arrival of a shipment. After that, the plants are inspected by the Animal and Plant Inspection Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which checks for possible infestations, banned invasive species, and proper documentation. Any red flags can cause a shipment to be turned back at the port of entry.
Violations also carry severe penalties. Under the ESA, "knowing" violations--that is, ones in which the dealer knew the basic facts of the offense, such as what kind of plant was being imported or that the CITES permit did not match the plant, though not the legal status of the plant, such as whether it was legal to import--can be punished by civil fines of up to $25,000 for each violation, criminal fines of up to $50,000, and imprisonment. The same conduct can also be punished under the Lacey Act, which allows civil penalties of up to $10,000 for each violation, criminal fines of up to $20,000, and imprisonment of up to five years.
Importers also face possible legal penalties under more general federal statutes, such as those prohibiting false or misleading statements to government officials (imprisonment of up to five years); the mail fraud statute (20 years); the wire fraud statute (20 years); and the conspiracy statute (five years).
The result is that minor offenses, such as incorrect documentation for a few plants, are treated the same as the smuggling of endangered animals and can lead to penalties far more severe than those regularly imposed for violent crimes and dealing drugs. Because this legal risk is so great, many orchid dealers have stopped importing foreign plants--even those that can be traded legally-- while others have sharply curtailed their imports.
Perversely, the result of this drop in legal imports has been a blossoming in black-market orchids, illegally imported into the country and commanding large premiums due to their rarity and allure. Meanwhile, those who continue to import plants through the proper channels, even if they do so with great care and top-notch legal advice, know that they could be ruined at any time by so much as a single slipup. As one academic ecologist put it, "The regulation is out of hand."
Worse than that, it's ineffective. "Habitat destruction poses much more of a threat to [the] survival" of orchid species than collection and trade do, concludes a recent survey of the ecology literature. In Singapore, for example, clearance of old-growth forest caused the extinction of 98 percent of orchid species versus 26 percent of other plants. While there are several examples of collection dealing the final blow to a vulnerable species--for example, the Vietnamese Lady Slipper--the vulnerability in each instance was due to development, particularly rain forest clearance.
CITES strictly regulates trade in orchids but does nothing to address this greater threat. Indeed, some argue that CITES has not protected a single species of orchid from extinction.
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It may even have pushed a number of species into extinction. Orchid growers frequently complain that the treaty's restrictions on collection from the wild restrict preservation efforts in the face of habitat destruction. Under CITES, it is illegal to collect wild orchids for artificial propagation without a permit, but obtaining a permit can take months if it can be had at all. By that time, the point may be moot: The habitat has already been destroyed. And when collection is allowed, it is highly regulated and usually limited to just a few plants. If those plants cannot be propagated, there is no second chance; even if another specimen exists, if it was not legally collected, neither are its offspring.
Further, there is evidence that regulation has served to increase wild collection and smuggling of rare species. Trade in Phragmipediums surged in advance of their Appendix I listing, leading to the loss of several species. After the listing went into effect, black-market prices rose for many species, increasing incentives for smugglers. Growers, meanwhile, struggled to collect species from the wild legally for propagation. In this way, CITES benefits poachers while putting hurdles in the path of legitimate, conservation-minded collectors.
The other group that benefits are the large orchid growers of Germany and the Netherlands, which supply the bulk of the world market. The Dutch, in particular, lobbied for the inclusion of Phrags in Article I, despite little evidence that Phrags were more endangered than other orchids, on the grounds that they were difficult to distinguish from plants from the unrelated Paphiopedilum family. The listing stifled growing competition with European growers in the potted-plant market from lower-cost producers in South America. The respite, however, lasted only a few years--the time it took for dealers to cultivate ties with growers in Southeast Asia, whose output multiplied, and push prices down.
The fundamental problem may be that CITES is simply a poor fit for plants. As originally conceived, the treaty was intended to cover only endangered animals; plants were added toward the end of negotiations. The amendment was crude, doing little more than replacing "animals" in every instance with "animals or plants." An orchid picked from the wild, which could produce a thousand seedlings in short order, is subject to the same regulation as an elephant, a female of which species will produce fewer than 10 offspring in its decades-long lifespan. And by extension, that orchid and elephant are subject to the same means of criminal enforcement in the United States.
The difference, needless to say, is that elephant poaching may lead to that species' extinction, while picking the orchid will more likely lead to its species' preservation in the face of widespread habitat destruction. It is truly a perverse result that furthering the ends of CITES and U.S. environmental law carries the same massive penalties as frustrating them.
Business as Usual
George Norris was among that group of legal importers, counting on his common sense and understanding of orchids to see him through any legal risks. That would be his downfall.
Over the years, he had built relationships with orchid gatherers and growers around the world, and many became his suppliers. He worked the most with Manuel Arias Silva, who operated several nurseries in Peru and was known for cultivating the toughest species from the wild that few others could persuade to grow.
Norris had met Arias in the late 1980s, when Arias had just started his export business and was looking to build a customer base in the United States. The two hit it off immediately, and in 1988, Norris spent two weeks in Peru with Arias, collecting plants and surveying Arias's operations.
Their families also grew close. After meeting Arias's relations, Norris and his wife offered to take in two of Arias's sons, Juan Alberto and Manolo, who were badly scarred about their hands and faces from a fire years earlier, and to arrange plastic surgery for them. Kathy Norris persuaded a local hospital to donate its facilities, and Dr. David Netscher, a prominent surgeon and professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, agreed to do the work for $1,500 per child, barely enough to cover his expenses.
In 1993 and 1994, first Manolo and then Juan Alberto spent six months with the Norrises undergoing surgery, follow-up care, and recuperation. After that experience, the Norrises and the Arias family were in regular contact, exchanging family photographs and visiting from time to time.
Norris had other suppliers. One was Raul Xix, a native Maya in Belize who supported his 11 children and wife through odd jobs: building homes, tapping chicle trees, and collecting orchids from the jungle. Norris had befriended Xix on a trip and encouraged him to try his hand at exporting plants, a potentially more lucrative and dependable source of income.
Xix, Norris soon learned, had no business experience, could barely read and write, and knew little about exotic orchids. He would ship boxes loaded with all manner of flora, some not even orchids and many infested with ants, and though bearing CITES permits from Belize, few plants were correctly identified--not that it ever mattered.
Norris, charmed by Xix and admiring his work ethic, decided that he would be a regular customer and use their interactions to teach Xix the ins and outs of the business. Keeping that commitment was a challenge: Xix's first few shipments were a total loss, and others were turned back at the port of entry because of poor packing and infestations. But slowly, Xix did become more reliable.
For Xix and Norris's other suppliers, paperwork was more of a hassle than growing or gathering orchids. In most developing nations, months pass between applying for and receiving a CITES permit. To compensate, orchid exporters request permits early, long before the plants are ready to sell. In that gap between applying for a permit and receiving it, some plants die and others thrive. Or a big shipment comes in from the countryside. Or a new family or species comes into fashion overseas.
And then the permits arrive, and the plants are ready to ship. Because of the delay, only rarely does the permit perfectly match the merchandise. There are always at least a few discrepancies. Going strictly by the book would mean giving up the lucrative foreign markets that account for nearly all profits.
Importers face a similar dilemma. Fashionable plants come from foreign soil, and without imports, no boutique could attract collectors--that is, anyone willing to pay more than fifteen or twenty dollars for a flower.
In the 1990s, what these collectors wanted were Phragmipediums, better known as tropical lady slippers. Phrags became popular in the early 1990s after all of the species in the family were uplisted to CITES Article I, a move that many in the orchid business attribute to commercial rather than preservationist motives. Demand for the flowers surged.
Arias had been breeding Phrags for years from plants that he had legally taken from the wild. But in Peru, Phrags were common and almost worthless. So in 1998, he turned to the export market. It would be months or even years, Arias guessed, before he was approved to have all of them listed on his permits.
Arias began including Phrags in the price sheets that went to his best foreign customers. Norris ordered a few, along with hundreds of other plants. On the forms, they were described as Maxillarias, a type of orchid that Arias had cleared for export. Per usual industry practice, he received a separate letter matching the names on the permit with the plants' real identities.
Over time, Arias's nurseries received permits and CITES registration to grow many of the Phrags he had previously shipped under other names, and as that happened, he began labeling them properly in his shipments. But there were always at least a few in each shipment that were mislabeled because he had not yet received the proper permit.
But it was a flower that Norris never actually imported that would lead to the investigation and his arrest.
If there is a rock star of the orchid world, it is the Phragmipedium kovachii. James Michael Kovach discovered the flower while on an orchid-hunting trip to the Peruvian Andes in 2002 and sneaked it back into the United States without any CITES documentation to have it catalogued by Selby Botanical Gardens' Orchid Identification Center, a leader in identifying and publishing new species. Two Selby staff members, recognizing the importance of the discovery, rushed out a description of the new flower, christening it kovachii, after Kovach, and barely beating into print an article by Eric Christensen, a rival researcher who had been working from photos and measurements taken in Peru.
The most striking thing about the kovachii is its size. The plants grow thick leaves up to two feet in length. Flower stalks shoot up from the plant, rising two feet or more. But the real stunner is the flower: It is velvety, a rich pink-purple at the tips of its petals, brilliant white in the center. And the size! Some measure more than 10 inches across. The flower is a rare combination of grace and might, a giant unrivalled in its delicacy and elegance. Lee Moore, a well-known collector, dubbed it "the Holy Grail of orchids."
Pictures circulated on orchid mailing lists and discussion reached a fever pitch. "People decided they would become excited beyond all reason," said one orchid dealer. "Everyone wanted it. It was a meteoric plant." According to rumors, black-market specimens had sold for $25,000 or more.
The orchid fever was only heightened by the legal drama that had engulfed Selby Gardens and Kovach as a result of the find. The Peruvian government caught wind of the frenzy over the flower and, irked that its country had lost out on the honor of identifying the plant, pressed U.S. authorities to investigate for CITES violations. Eventually, criminal charges were brought against Kovach, Selby Gardens, and its chief horticulturalist, Wesley Higgins. All pleaded guilty, receiving probation and small fines.
Right after he heard about the kovachii, Norris contacted Arias to press for information about the flower, especially when they would be available for sale. With illegal trade in the flower already flourishing, Arias figured that he could get the right permits to collect a few from the wild for artificial propagation. Breeding the flower would not be easy--Phrags have a reputation for being difficult plants, and that is especially true of the rarer ones--but he had succeeded before with other tough plants and had a high-altitude greenhouse that would be perfect for the kovachii. Doing it legally could take a year or two, maybe even three.
Norris was more optimistic and ran with the information in his next catalog, boasting that he would have legal kovachiis for sale in a year, perhaps less--far sooner than anyone else thought possible. That caught the attention of an orchid researcher who had long believed that the U.S. orchid trade was overrun with illegal plants, threatening the survival of many species in the wild. Enforcement was a joke; there had been only one prosecution to date for dealing in illegal orchids. He decided to take a closer look at Norris's spring orchid specialties and brought Norris to the attention of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Around that time, a new customer placed an order for four Phrags and specifically asked Norris to include the CITES permits for the flowers. It was an unusual request. Usually, the Department of Agriculture inspectors took the permits at the port of entry for their records. Except for the few times that shipping brokers made copies, Norris hardly ever received them with plant shipments. Assuming that the request was just a misunderstanding, he shipped the plants with a packing list but no permits.
Several days after the orchids were delivered, Norris received another e-mail from the buyer, asking again for the permits. The Department of Agriculture had them, Norris responded, but he would try to get a copy. That, thought Norris, was the end of the matter. The buyer made another order for more Phrags a year later and again asked for the permits. Once again, Norris shipped the flowers without them.
Unknown to Norris, the buyer in these transactions was working with Fish and Wildlife Service agents. Because of the controversy over the kovachii, the Service had a newfound interest in orchids. A few prominent prosecutions would serve as a warning to the rest of the tight-knit orchid community.
That informant's two transactions with Norris would serve as the basis for the raid on Norris's home.
The Prosecution
The raid occurred in October 2003, but George Norris was uncertain of his fate for the next five months, receiving no communications from the government. On the advice of friends, he wrote a letter to the Miami-based prosecutor who was probably overseeing the case, explaining that he had never imported kovachiis--this was at the time that others were being charged for importing the flower--and asking for a meeting to answer any questions. At the very least, he asked, could the government tell him what he was suspected to have done? After a few weeks, his computer was returned, broken, and Norris resumed business as best he could, taking orders and showing off his plants at shows.
Meanwhile, Fish and Wildlife Service Agents were poring over the records retrieved from Norris's home, as well as others obtained from the Department of Agriculture. There was no evidence that Norris had ever obtained or sold a kovachii, but the agents did notice minor discrepancies in the documents. Some of the plants Norris had offered for sale were not listed on any CITES permits. Among those missing were three of the 10 Phrags in the informant's second order. The agents also found Norris's correspondence with Arias and Xix, which seemed to confirm their hunch: Norris had been engaged in a criminal conspiracy to skirt CITES and violate U.S. import laws.
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Norris's business slowly recovered but suffered a devastating blow when Manuel Arias Silva was arrested in Miami one day before the Miami Orchid Show in March 2004. After that, everyone assumed that Norris would be next. Norris and his wife scrambled to sell Arias's flowers (mostly Phrags, by now properly permitted) at the show, earning just enough to pay his expenses and get him out of jail. With no one else to step in, they guaranteed Arias's $25,000 bail and $175,000 personal surety bond: He was now their responsibility. Rumors raged that Norris would be arrested on the floor of the show.
But it was another week before Norris was indicted. There were seven charges: one count of conspiracy to violate the Endangered Species Act, five counts of violating CITES requirements and the ESA, and one count of making a false statement to a government official, for mislabeling the orchids. Arias faced one additional false-statement charge.
On March 17, 2004, Norris and his wife flew to Miami, where he voluntarily surrendered to the U.S. marshals. The marshals put him in handcuffs and leg shackles and threw him in a holding cell with three other arrestees, one suspected of murder and two suspected of dealing drugs. Norris expected the worst when his cell mates asked him what he was in for. When he told them about his orchids, they burst into laughter. "What do you do with these things, smoke 'em?" asked one of the suspected drug dealers.
The next day, Norris pleaded not guilty, and a day after that, he was released on bail. The Norrises returned to Spring, Texas, to figure out their next steps. Their business was destroyed; their retirement savings and home were on the line for the Peruvian orchid dealer who was now living in the spare bedroom; and Norris, 67 and in frail health, faced the prospect of living out his days in a federal prison. Still, Norris believed he had not done anything wrong and would win out in the end.
So they made a go of fighting the charges. Norris hired an attorney who, with most of his experience at the state or county level, quickly found himself in over his head with the complexities of international treaties, environmental law, and the intricacies of a federal prosecution.
In April, the attorney accompanied Norris to what turned out to be a proffer meeting, at which defendants are typically offered the opportunity to cooperate with the government in exchange for leniency. Norris had not been told what to expect and did not have anything to say when prosecutors asked what he was willing to admit. They peppered him with names of other orchid dealers, but Norris was not inclined to inform on them--not that he knew enough about their operations, in any case, to offer anything more than speculation.
After that, Norris got a more experienced--and much more expensive--attorney. With bills piling up and the complexity of the case and the resulting difficulty of mounting a defense finally becoming apparent, Norris took the step he had been dreading: changing his plea to guilty. "I hated that, I absolutely hated that," said Norris. Five years after the fact, the episode still provokes pain, his face blushing and speech becoming softer. "The hardest thing I ever did was stand there and say I was guilty to all these things. I didn't think I was guilty of any of them."
While Norris and his wife were focused on his case, Manuel Arias Silva was plotting his own next moves. By mid-May, he had managed to obtain a new passport and exit visa from the Peruvian Consulate. On May 19, soon after they had returned to Texas from a hearing in Miami, Kathy Norris received a call from Juan Silva, in Peru, who was in tears. His father, he explained, had returned home to evade the charges against him in the United States. The Norrises would be on the hook for Arias's bail and bond--nearly $200,000.
Based on Norris's transactions with Arias, as well as those with Xix, the government recommended a prison sentence of 33 to 41 months. Such a lengthy sentence was justified, according to the sentencing memorandum, because of the value of the plants in the improperly documented shipments. Two choices pushed the recommended sentence up.
First, the government used Norris's catalog prices to calculate the value of the plants rather than what he had paid for them.
Second, it included all plants in each shipment in its calculations, reasoning that the properly documented plants--by far the bulk of every shipment--were a part of the offense because they were supposedly used to shield the others.
On October 6, Norris was sentenced to 17 months in prison, followed by two years of probation. In the eyes of the law, he was now a felon and would be for the rest of his life. The sentencing judge suggested to Norris and his wife that good could come of his conviction and punishment:
Life sometimes presents us with lemons. Sometimes we grow the lemons ourselves. But as long as we are walking on the face of the earth, our responsibility is to take those lemons and use the gifts that God has given us to turn lemons into lemonade.
Norris reported to the federal prison in Fort Worth on January 10, 2005; was released for a year in December 2006 while the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals considered a challenge to his sentence; and then returned to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. Prison officials, angered by Norris's temporary reprieve, threw him in solitary confinement, where he spent a total of 71 days. He was released on April 27, 2007.
The Aftermath
George Norris has lost his passion for orchids. The yard behind their home is all dirt and grass, nothing more. The greenhouse is abandoned. Broken pots, bags of dirt, plastic bins, and other clutter spill off its shelves and onto the floor. The roof is sagging. A few potted cacti are the only living things inside it, aside from weeds.
A dozen potted plants grace the Norrises' back porch; three or four are even orchids, though none are in bloom. Kathy waters them. "They're the ones I haven't managed to kill yet," she says.
The couple's finances are precarious. Following the flood of 1994, Norris rebuilt most of their home himself, but they had to refinance the house to pay for materials. Kathy had to make those payments and all the others while Norris was in prison, relying on her salary as director of Montgomery County's Dispute Resolution Center, which she ran on a shoestring budget. The same discipline now reigns at home. "I figured out how to live on as little as it's possible to live on and still keep the house," says Kathy.
Neither Norris nor his wife knows how they will face retirement with all of their savings used to pay legal expenses. Arias's bond hangs over their heads as well, and the government has said that it will seek to enforce it. That threat keeps Kathy up at nights. She doesn't know what else they could give up, other than the house, or how they could possibly come up with the $175,000 still owed.
Norris has already suffered the indignity of his grandchildren knowing that he spent over a year in federal prison and is a convicted criminal. What hurts him now is that he cannot introduce them to the hunting tradition--small game, squirrels, and rabbits--that has been a part of his family, passed from generation to generation. As a felon, he cannot possess a firearm. They sold off and gave away his grandfather's small gun collection, which he had inherited. In poor health and unarmed, Norris fears that he cannot even defend his own family.
But the hardest blow, explains Kathy, has been to their faith in America and its system of criminal justice:
I got raised in a country that wasn't like this. I grew up in a reasonably nice part of Dallas, I came from a family where nobody had been indicted for anything, and so had George. And the government didn't do this stuff to people. It wasn't part of anything I ever got taught in my civics books.
That lack of faith is almost visible in George Norris's frailty and fear. "I hardly drive at all anymore," he explained. "The whole time I'm driving, I'm thinking about not getting a ticket for anything…. I don't sleep like I used to; I still have prison dreams." He pauses for a moment to think and looks down at the floor. In a quiet voice, he says, "It's utterly wrecked our lives."
Conclusion
Probably any dealer in imported plants could have been prosecuted for the charges that were brought against George Norris. His crime, at its core, was a paperwork violation: He had the wrong documents for some of the plants he imported but almost certainly could have obtained the right ones with a bit more time and effort. Neither he nor other dealers ever suspected that the law would be enforced to the very letter so long as they followed its spirit.
Norris was singled out because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As controversy roared over the kovachii and prosecutors were gunning for a high-profile conviction to tamp down sales in truly rare and endangered plants, Norris bragged that he would soon have the extraordinary flower in stock.
To this date, he has never seen one.
Armed with overly broad laws that criminalize a wide range of unobjectionable conduct, prosecutors could look past that fact. Burrowing through Norris's records, they found other grounds for a case. One way or another, they would have their poster child.
This is the risk that all American entrepreneurs face today. Enormously complex and demanding regulations are regularly paired with draconian criminal penalties for even minor deviations from the rules. Minor violations from time to time are all but inevitable because full compliance would be either impossible or impossibly expensive. Nearly every time, nobody notices or cares, but all it takes is one exception for the hammer of the law to strike.
Andrew M. Grossman is Senior Legal Policy Analyst in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/lm0044.cfm
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It's Time to Legalize Drugs
By Peter Moskos and Stanford "Neill" Franklin
Monday, August 17, 2009
Undercover Baltimore police officer Dante Arthur was doing what he does well, arresting drug dealers, when he approached a group in January. What he didn't know was that one of suspects knew from a previous arrest that Arthur was police. Arthur was shot twice in the face. In the gunfight that ensued, Arthur's partner returned fire and shot one of the suspects, three of whom were later arrested.
In many ways, Dante Arthur was lucky. He lived. Nationwide, a police officer dies on duty nearly every other day. Too often a flag-draped casket is followed by miles of flashing red and blue lights. Even more officers are shot and wounded, too many fighting the war on drugs. The prohibition on drugs leads to unregulated, and often violent, public drug dealing. Perhaps counterintuitively, better police training and bigger guns are not the answer.
When it makes sense to deal drugs in public, a neighborhood becomes home to drug violence. For a low-level drug dealer, working the street means more money and fewer economic risks. If police come, and they will, some young kid will be left holding the bag while the dealer walks around the block. But if the dealer sells inside, one raid, by either police or robbers, can put him out of business for good. Only those virtually immune from arrests (much less imprisonment) -- college students, the wealthy and those who never buy or sell from strangers -- can deal indoors.
Six years ago one of us wrote a column on this page, "Victims of the War on Drugs." It discussed violence, poor community relations, overly aggressive policing and riots. It failed to mention one important harm: the drug war's clear and present danger toward men and women in blue.
Drug users generally aren't violent. Most simply want to be left alone to enjoy their high. It's the corner slinger who terrifies neighbors and invites rivals to attack. Public drug dealing creates an environment where disputes about money or respect are settled with guns.
In high-crime areas, police spend much of their time answering drug-related calls for service, clearing dealers off corners, responding to shootings and homicides, and making lots of drug-related arrests.
One of us (Franklin) was the commanding officer at the police academy when Arthur (as well as Moskos) graduated. We all learned similar lessons. Police officers are taught about the evils of the drug trade and given the knowledge and tools to inflict as much damage as possible upon the people who constitute the drug community. Policymakers tell us to fight this unwinnable war.
Only after years of witnessing the ineffectiveness of drug policies -- and the disproportionate impact the drug war has on young black men -- have we and other police officers begun to question the system.
Cities and states license beer and tobacco sellers to control where, when and to whom drugs are sold. Ending Prohibition saved lives because it took gangsters out of the game. Regulated alcohol doesn't work perfectly, but it works well enough. Prescription drugs are regulated, and while there is a huge problem with abuse, at least a system of distribution involving doctors and pharmacists works without violence and high-volume incarceration. Regulating drugs would work similarly: not a cure-all, but a vast improvement on the status quo.
Legalization would not create a drug free-for-all. In fact, regulation reins in the mess we already have. If prohibition decreased drug use and drug arrests acted as a deterrent, America would not lead the world in illegal drug use and incarceration for drug crimes.
Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.
We simply urge the federal government to retreat. Let cities and states (and, while we're at it, other countries) decide their own drug policies. Many would continue prohibition, but some would try something new. California and its medical marijuana dispensaries provide a good working example, warts and all, that legalized drug distribution does not cause the sky to fall.
Having fought the war on drugs, we know that ending the drug war is the right thing to do -- for all of us, especially taxpayers. While the financial benefits of drug legalization are not our main concern, they are substantial. In a July referendum, Oakland, Calif., voted to tax drug sales by a 4-to-1 margin. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug war would save $44 billion annually, with taxes bringing in an additional $33 billion.
Without the drug war, America's most decimated neighborhoods would have a chance to recover. Working people could sit on stoops, misguided youths wouldn't look up to criminals as role models, our overflowing prisons could hold real criminals, and -- most important to us -- more police officers wouldn't have to die.
Peter Moskos is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of "Cop in the Hood." Neill Franklin is a 32-year law enforcement veteran. Both served as Baltimore City police officers and are members of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
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A Casualty of the Technology Revolution: ‘Locational Privacy’ Sign in to Recommend
ADAM COHEN
Published: August 31, 2009
NYTimes
When I woke up the other day, I went straight to my computer to catch up on the news and read e-mail. About 20 minutes later, I walked half a block to the gym, where I exercised for 45 minutes. I took the C train to The New York Times building, and then at the end of the day, I was back on the C train. I had dinner on my friends Elisabeth and Dan’s rooftop, then walked home seven blocks.
I’m not giving away any secrets here — nothing I did was secret to begin with. Verizon online knows when I logged on, and New York Sports Club knows when I swiped my membership card. The M.T.A. could trace (through the MetroCard I bought with a credit card) when and where I took the subway, and The Times knows when I used my ID to enter the building. AT&T could follow me along the way through my iPhone.
There may also be videotape of my travels, given the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in New York City. There are thousands of cameras on buildings and lampposts around Manhattan, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, many near my home and office. Several may have been in a position to film dinner on Elisabeth and Dan’s roof.
A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up “locational privacy.” Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.
Privacy advocates are rightly concerned. Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.
People’s cellphones and E-ZPasses are increasingly being used against them in court. If your phone is on, even if you are not on a call, you may be able to be found (and perhaps picked up) at any hour of the day or night. As disturbing as it is to have your private data breached, it is worse to think that your physical location might fall into the hands of people who mean you harm.
This decline in locational privacy, from near-absolute to very little in just a few years, has not generated much outrage, or even discussion.
That is partly because so much of it is a side-effect of technology that people like. Drivers love E-ZPasses. G.P.S. enables all sorts of cool smart phone applications, from driving directions and find-a-nearby-restaurant features to the ever-popular “Take Me to My Car.”
And people usually do not know that they are being monitored. The transit authority does not warn buyers that their MetroCards track their subway use (or that the police have used the cards in criminal investigations). Cameras that follow people on the street are placed in locations that are hard to spot.
It is difficult for cellphone users to know precisely what information their devices are sending about their current location, when they are doing it, and where that information is going. Some privacy advocates were upset by recent reports that the Palm Pre, which has built-in G.P.S., has a feature that regularly sends its users’ location back to Palm without notifying them at the time.
What can be done? As much as possible, location-specific information should not be collected in the first place, or not in personally identifiable form. There are many ways, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, to use cryptography and anonymization to protect locational privacy. To tell you about nearby coffee shops, a cellphone application needs to know where you are. It does not need to know who you are.
When locational information is collected, people should be given advance notice and a chance to opt out. Data should be erased as soon as its main purpose is met. After you pay your E-ZPass bill, there is no reason for the government to keep records of your travel.
The idea of constantly monitoring the citizenry’s movements used to conjure up images of totalitarian states. Now, technology does the surveillance — generally in the name of being helpful. It’s time for a serious conversation about how much of our privacy of movement we want to give up.
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http://www.reason.com/blog/show/135886.html
Feds Bust Doctor for . . . Meeting Women on the Internet
Radley Balko | September 4, 2009, 11:15am
Last June, I put up a post about a Mississippi cardiologist named Roger Weiner. Weiner moved to the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1999. I had contacted Weiner because he was involved in a protracted court battle with controversial Mississippi medical examiner Steven Hayne. You can read about that battle at the link above.
Weiner is an outspoken guy. He not only gave me an on the record interview about Hayne and what he, Weiner, perceived to be Mississippi's corrupt medical investigation system, he has also spoken out against the HMOs he says he came to the state to get away from. He was so disturbed by his experience with Hayne that he successfully ran for Coahoma County Supervisor. He also told me that though he'd never previously touched a gun in his life, after he was elected he felt compelled to keep a shotgun in his home, dryly explaining that, "Not everyone down here is happy about an East Coast Jew getting elected to county office."
In May of this year, Weiner was arrested by five FBI agents at the improbably named Shady Nook gas station. The charge? Violating the federal Mann Act—a century-old law banning the transport of women across state lines for "immoral purposes." Specifically, federal agents had posed as prostitutes on a chat room for a Memphis-based website called sugardaddyforme.com, a site aimed at pairing older wealthy men with young women.
The FBI claims Weiner agreed to pay agents posing as escorts to make the 80-mile trip from Memphis to Clarksdale to have sex with him. My sources in Mississippi told me at the time that unofficial word from the U.S. Attorney's office was that more serious charges against Weiner were imminent. The implication was that he'd be indicted for child pornography, or soliciting sex a minor. But as weeks went by, those charges never came. All the women, or fake women, Weiner is accused of soliciting were of age (one agent posted as a 31-year-old).
Now the solicitation charges themselves are looking pretty weak, too. U.S. District Judge Neal Biggers recently threatened to toss the entire case against Weiner unless U.S. attorneys turned over the cell phone records they had been keeping from Weiner's defense. As it turns out, there was a pretty good reason why the feds were keeping those records to themselves. It came out yesterday at Weiner's hearing. The Mississippi blog NMissCommentor was there:
What happened here was that the F.B.I. had a "tip" that Dr. Weiner was somehow involved in child pornography on the site sugardaddy.com. So they checked it out and discovered, nope, no child pornography there. Case closed? Nope, the F.B.I. then decided to run in some fake “sugarbabies”– agents masquerading as escorts– to try to lure Weiner into agreeing to meet them. Some of the time, one of the agents playing "escort" was a guy!
Just to be clear: Dr. Weiner never met one of these "women." Dr. Weiner never paid one of these "women" a dime. Dr. Weiner even told the first would be escort, Ginger (well, the agent or agents masquerading as Ginger), that there was "a difference between a sugar baby and a hooker, and I’m not interested in a hooker."
According to a motion Weiner's lawyer filed in federal court, federal prosecutors left this information out of the affidavit they filed to get a search warrant for Weiner's home. The motion says "the Government knew when it applied for the search warrant that the defendant had already informed the Government agent that he was not interested in a hooker, wanted noting to do with a hooker, and the Government agent assured him that she was not a hooker." If you're going to arrest a man for soliciting prostitutes, it seems like it would be pretty important to include in your affidavit the fact that he specifically told an undercover agent he wasn't interested in a prostitute. Of course, you'd then have no pretext to search his home for the really juicy stuff.
Back to the NMissCommentor:
This led the F.B.I. to run in a second fake sugar baby, Mary. And, because masquerading Mary was in Mississippi during all the conversations with Dr. Weiner, there was no chance of her crossing a state line, the very essence of a Mann Act violation! (The U.S. Attorney argues that, well, he meant for her to cross a state line, because she said she was in Memphis)...
...it gets even weirder. Mary emailed the doctor that she was in Memphis on business, and would like to come down to see him. He said nope, I’m on call and too busy. She then asked how’s about tomorrow lunch. He said don’t bother to come all the way just for me. She then ventured– oh, I’ve got to drive back home from Memphis to Mobile, and can just pass through Clarksdale en route. He said well all right, she got off the phone, and some brighter prosecution-side type thought–
–wait a minute, if she’s “going to drive home” and that’s why she’s “crossing state lines,” where’s the Mann Act violation!?
So she calls back to suggest, er, um, I’m not really going to Mobile at all, just coming to see you. Shortly thereafter, five F.B.I. agents arrested Dr. Weiner at the Shady Nook north of Clarksdale.
Let me stress here that I have no evidence that the feds' pursuit of Dr. Weiner is in any way related to his outspoken criticism of Steven Hayne and Mississippi's death investigation system. But it sure seems like someone had a reason to . . . well, I'll just defer to Judge Biggers, here:
Judge Biggers asked some pointed questions: Why are they prosecuting him? Judge Biggers also said, "Something is going on here that is not on the surface that they would bring in 3 government agents in contact with him over and over again. When he didn’t express interest, they bring in another one. Something is going on that is not evident. Perhaps [U.S. Attorney] Mr. Roberts can explain it."
Other comments from the bench: “You’ve come a long way from the purpose of this statute in the bringing of this charge.” “It took five F.B.I. agents...to arrest him?” (This drew a response from the prosecutor hemming and hawing about not being able to assume things just because the arrest involves a doctor and not second guessing the agents about safety). And: “This case seems like overload.”
It sure does. Let's assume for a second that the feds' pursuit of Weiner has nothing to do with his criticism of Hayne, the Coahoma County coroner, the medical establishment in Mississippi, or that it has any political motivation whatsoever. Let's just look at it as a question of priorities. Because that's troubling enough. Hayne and Michael West have been corrupting Mississippi's justice system for 20 years, with little attention from the federal government. Yet the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office have time to devote three agents and a team of prosecutors to invoke a century-old law against sex slavery to entrap a man who was using an Internet dating site to meet women.
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The heavy handedness of the feds boggles the mind. What part of informed debate can't they wrap their heads around?
An Open and Honest Debate About Drug Policy in El Paso, Texas
Posted by Juan Carlos Hidalgo
Last January, the city council of El Paso, Texas, unanimously approved a resolution urging the federal government to support “an honest, open, national debate on ending the prohibition on narcotics.” Soon afterwards, the mayor of El Paso received a call from Washington, DC demanding that he veto the resolution, otherwise his city would be cut off from some federal money. He did. However, the city council approved a new resolution calling for a conference assessing U.S. drug policy and the War on Drugs.
That led to the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) organizing a two-day conference on the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs with leading experts from all over the world in the field of drug policy. The event was heavily attended by students, journalists and people interested in the subject. I had the chance to speak on the first panel, addressing the “History, Successes and Failures” of the War on Drugs. Not surprisingly, I failed at pointing out a single success from the current prohibitionist approach to drug policy. A summary of that first panel is available here.
Unfortunately, two Obama czars (on border and drugs) called off their participation just days before the conference. It was a missed chance to find out if there’s any change going on with the new administration regarding drug policy. In his opening remarks, Beto O’Rourke, the city councilman who introduced the original resolution that was later vetoed, said that he never imagined that calling for an “open and honest debate” on drug policy was going to be so controversial.
El Paso is at the crossroads of the War on Drugs. One of the safest cities in the Unites States, it’s just across the Rio Grande from one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez, where so far this year more than 1,000 people have died in drug related violence. El Paso is not isolated from this carnage. Both cities are deeply intertwined economically, culturally and by blood ties. “Todos somos juarences” (we are all Juarezians) was the most common phrase from residents of El Paso expressing concern about the situation in their sister city.
Needless to say, the participants at the conference were highly critical of the War on Drugs. Some speakers focused on the empirical evidence coming from countries with flexible drug laws, such as the Netherlands and more recently Portugal. Luis Astorga, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) gave an interesting presentation on the history of drug cartels in Mexico. Other presentations dealt with the social consequences of prohibition, and how the War on Drugs is affecting communities in Mexico and the United States.
As I’ve written earlier, in Latin America there have been growing calls in recent months to reconsider the War on Drugs. It is about time that this discussion also takes place in the United States. Kudos to UTEP and the city of El Paso for taking that step.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/09/23/an-open-and-honest-debate-about-drug-policy-in-el-paso-texas/
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Gullible eager-beaver planet savers
Oct 29, 2009 by Mark Steyn
I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means. Tim Flannery, the jet-setting doomsaying global warm-monger from down under, was in Ottawa the other day promoting his latest eco-tract, and offered a few thoughts on “Copenhagen”—which is transnational-speak for December’s UN Convention on Climate Change. “We all too often mistake the nature of those negotiations in Copenhagen,” remarked professor Flannery. “We think of them as being concerned with some sort of environmental treaty. That is far from the case. The negotiations now ongoing toward the Copenhagen agreement are in effect diplomacy at the most profound global level. They deal with every aspect of our life and they will influence every aspect of our life, our economy, our society.”
Hold that thought: “They deal with every aspect of our life.” Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? But in a good way! So no need to worry. After all, we all care about the environment, don’t we? So we ought to do something about it, right? And, since “the environment” isn’t just in your town or county but spreads across the entire planet, we can only really do something at the planetary level. But what to do? According to paragraph 38 on page 18 of the latest negotiating text, the convention will set up a “government” to manage the “new funds” and the “related facilitative processes.”
Tim Flannery’s disarmingly honest characterization passed almost without notice, reported as far as I can tell only by Brian Lilley of CFRB Toronto and CJAD Montreal. But professor Flannery has it right. Government transport policy is about transport, and government education policy is about education, but environmental policy is about everything, because everything’s part of “the environment”: your town, your county, your planet—and you. “We are the environment. There is no distinction,” declared another renowned expert, David Suzuki, last year. And just as the government now monitors air and water quality so it’s increasingly happy to regulate your quality.
In the name of “the environment,” the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy efficiency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.
Hey, but who would ever find out?
Don’t be so sure. In 2006, to comply with the “European Landfill Directive,” various municipal councils in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland introduced “smart” trash cans—“wheelie bins” with a penny-sized electronic chip embedded within that helpfully monitors and records your garbage as it’s tossed into the truck. Once upon a time, you had to be a double-0 agent with Her Majesty’s Secret Service to be able to install that level of high-tech spy gadgetry. But now any old low-level apparatchik from the municipal council can do it, all in the cause of a sustainable planet. So where’s the harm?
And once Big Brother’s in your trash can, why stop there? Our wheelie-bin sensors are detecting an awful lot of junk-food packaging in your garbage. Maybe you should be eating healthier. In Tokyo, Matsushita engineers have created a “smart toilet”: you sit down, and the seat sends a mild electric charge through your bottom that calculates your body/fat ratio, and then transmits the information to your doctors. Japan has a fast-aging population imposing unsustainable costs on its health system, so the state has an interest in tracking your looming health problems, and nipping them in the butt. In England, meanwhile, Twyford’s, whose founder invented the modern ceramic toilet in the 19th century, has developed an advanced model—the VIP (Versatile Interactive Pan)—that examines your urine and stools for medical problems and dietary content: if you’re not getting enough roughage, it automatically sends a signal to the nearest supermarket requesting a delivery of beans. All you have to do is sit there as your VIP toilet orders à la carte and prescribes your medication.
But think of the environmental benefits: readers may recall Sheryl Crow’s brief campaign to get people to use only one sheet of toilet paper (I recommended an all-star consciousness-raising single—“All we are saying is give one piece a chance”). Last month, the Washington Post reported a new front in this war. Two-ply bathroom tissue, according to Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “is the Hummer of the paper industry.” Oh, and blame Canada, as that’s where most American two-ply comes from: this decadent Dominion is apparently the House of Saud of toilet paper. In Britain, where closed-circuit cameras monitor you to check you’re not eating a sandwich while driving, is it such a stretch to foresee those toilet sensors that wire your stool analysis to the government health centre also snitching on your two-ply Cottonelle? Or perhaps, if it’s a Matsushita toilet, a few extra volts from the buttock-zapper will be enough of a warning.
“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You float a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you.
In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham began working on his famous “Pan-opticon”—a radial prison in which a central “inspector” could see all the prisoners, but they could never see him. In the computer age, we now have not merely panopticon buildings, but panopticon societies, like modern London—and soon perhaps, excepting a few redoubts such as Waziristan and the livelier precincts of the Horn of Africa, a panopticon planet.
Yet high-tech statism still needs an overarching narrative. In the new school of panoptic fiction—such as John Twelve Hawks’s recently completed Fourth Realm trilogy—the justification for round-the-clock surveillance is usually “security.” But the “security state” is a tough sell: if you tell people the government is compiling data on them for national security purposes, the left instinctively recoils. But, if you explain that you’re doing it to “lower emissions,” starry-eyed coeds across the land will coo their approval. And the middle-class masochists of the developed world will whimper in orgasmic ecstasy as you tighten the screws, pausing only to demand that you do it to them harder and faster.
Consider a recent British plan for each citizen to be given an official travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—all in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee. The Soviets restricted freedom of movement through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British favoured the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes: the movement’s still free; it’s just that there’ll be a government processing fee of £412.95. And, in a revealing glimpse of the universal belief in enviro-statism, this proposal came not from Gordon Brown’s Labour Party but from the allegedly Conservative Party.
At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition.
The problem, alas, is that, for the moment, there’s still more than one party. But why? Last year, David Suzuki suggested that denialist politicians should be thrown in jail. And only last month the New York Times’s Great Thinker Thomas Friedman channelled his inner Walter Duranty and decided that democracy has f*cked up the planet. Why, in Beijing, where they don’t have that disadvantage, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”
Forward to where?
Well, fortunately the Copenhagen convention’s embryo “government” appears immune to such outmoded concepts as democratic accountability.
Don’t take my word. Listen to what the activists are saying: it’s about every aspect of your life.
PS: Just to be safe, after reading this column, tear into pieces and flush down your toilet.
Oh, no, wait, don’t…
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/10/29/gullible-eager-beaver-planet-savers/
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Pfizer abandons site of infamous Kelo eminent domain taking
By: Timothy P. Carney
Examiner Columnist
11/09/09 1:47 PM EST
The private homes that New London, Conn., took away from Suzette Kelo and her neighbors have been torn down. Their former site is a wasteland of fields of weeds, a monument to the power of eminent domain.
But now Pfizer, the drug company whose neighboring research facility had been the original cause of the homes' seizure, has just announced that it is closing up shop in New London.
To lure those jobs to New London a decade ago, the local government promised to demolish the older residential neighborhood adjacent to the land Pfizer was buying for next-to-nothing. Suzette Kelo fought the taking to the Supreme Court, and lost. Five justices found this redevelopment met the constitutional hurdle of "public use."
The Hartford Courant reports:
Pfizer Inc. will shut down its massive New London research and development headquarters and transfer most of the 1,400 people working there to Groton, the pharmaceutical giant said Monday....
Pfizer is now deciding what to do with its giant New London offices, and will consider selling it, leasing it and other options, a company spokeswoman said.
Scott Bullock, Kelo's co-counsel in the case, told me: "This shows the folly of these redevelopment projects that use massive taxpayer subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare and abuse eminent domain."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Pfizer-abandons-site-of-infamous-Kelo-eminent-domain-taking-69580497.html
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The Miracle of the Market
Campaign for Liberty ^ | 2010-02-16 | Jacob Hornberger
In preparation for the two recent back-to-back blizzards, D.C. residents were emptying the shelves of neighborhood grocery stores. Notwithstanding the pre-blizzard panic buying, what's interesting is that no one was freaking out about whether the stores would be adequately stocked after the blizzards.
After all, think about it: there is absolutely no government planning that goes into what is stocked in grocery stores. No federal Department of Food. No local or state planning commission. No grocery boards. No bureaucrats or bureaucracies. No laws requiring grocery stores to be well-stocked. No rules and regulations dictating how much of each food item, including bread, milk, and chicken, needs to appear on the shelves.
So, how in the world do grocery stores get stocked without government planning or direction? How is it that so much food appears, almost by magic, within a day or two after most of the shelves have been emptied? Indeed, how do grocery stores manage to have more than enough food for people throughout the year given that no government department or agency is doing the planning and issuing food directives?
Let's look at the situation another way. Suppose that in 1900, it was decided that food was just too important an item to be left to the free market. To ensure that there would always be enough food for people, state and local governments took over the grocery-store industry, just as they took over the education industry. To provide support for grocery stores, the U.S. government established the federal Department of Food to provide grants and set standards for the grocery stores, just as the U.S. Department of Education does for state and local public schools.
So, imagine that we're here in 2010, having lived under more than 100 years of a system of government-run grocery stores. Wouldn't people be incessantly complaining about the shoddy quality of products and services, as they constantly do with the state-run schools?
Along come libertarians and say the same thing about the grocery business that they say about the education business. Get government out of the grocery business, at all levels -- local, state, and federal. Abolish the federal Department of Food. Sell off all the grocery stores. Abolish all the taxes needed to run the grocery stores. Separate food and state, just as our ancestors separated church and state. Let the free market reign in the grocery-store industry.
What would today's statists say? They would say the same things they say when libertarians call for the same solution in education. "Where would the poor get their food? There would only be grocery stores for the rich. How could we count on the free market to make sure that there was the right amount of food for each grocery store? What if some grocery stores went empty while others were plentiful? How could we be sure that each grocery store received the correct quantities of each item? You libertarians are dreamers. Do you honestly believe that you could leave something as important as grocery stores to the free market?"
Yet, today no one gives a free market in food a second thought. Every day, people have a wide range of grocery stores from which to choose, each one vying for his business. Practically every day -- blizzards being a possible exception -- every one of those grocery stores is packed with food, all with a dizzying array of choices.
And it's all accomplished through the miracle of the market, with no government planning or direction. And no one gets freaked out about the fact that it all happens without government intervention. People just take it for granted.
Now, while we're on the subject of a free market in the grocery-store industry, can we talk about the same thing in the context of the education industry?
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=615
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Which describes exactly why I do not want to see the government get health care, especially in its current form.
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http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/06/up-from-slavery
Up from Slavery
There's no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty
David Boaz | April 6, 2010
For many libertarians, "the road to serfdom" is not just the title of a great book but also the window through which they see the world. We’re losing our freedom, year after year, they think. They (we) quote Thomas Jefferson: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” We read books with titles like Freedom in Chains, Lost Rights, The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans, and yes, The Road to Serfdom.
The Cato Institute's boilerplate description of itself used to include the line, "Since [the American] revolution, civil and economic liberties have been eroded." Until Clarence Thomas, then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, gave a speech at Cato and pointed out to us that it didn't seem quite that way to black people.
And he was right. American public policy has changed in many ways since the American Revolution, sometimes in a libertarian direction, sometimes not.
Brink Lindsey talks of an "implicit libertarian synthesis" in American politics today in his book The Age of Abundance. He argued in 2007:
Nevertheless, the fact is that American society today is considerably more libertarian than it was a generation or two ago. Compare conditions now to how they were at the outset of the 1960s. Official governmental discrimination against blacks no longer exists. Censorship has beaten a wholesale retreat. The rights of the accused enjoy much better protection. Abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and gay sex are legal. Divorce laws have been liberalized and rape laws strengthened. Pervasive price and entry controls in the transportation, energy, communications, and financial sectors are gone. Top income tax rates have been slashed. The pretensions of macroeconomic fine-tuning have been abandoned. Barriers to international trade are much lower. Unionization of the private sector work force has collapsed. Of course there are obvious counterexamples, but on the whole it seems clear that cultural expression, personal lifestyle choices, entrepreneurship, and the play of market forces all now enjoy much wider freedom of maneuver.
Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others. If we look at the long term—from a past that includes despotism, feudalism, absolutism, fascism, and communism—we’re clearly better off. When we look at our own country's history—contrasting 2010 with 1776 or 1910 or 1950 or whatever—the story is less clear. We suffer under a lot of regulations and restrictions that our ancestors didn’t face.
But in 1776 black Americans were held in chattel slavery, and married women had no legal existence except as agents of their husbands. In 1910 and even 1950, blacks still suffered under the legal bonds of Jim Crow—and we all faced confiscatory tax rates throughout the postwar period.
I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery. Take R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., longtime editor of the American Spectator. In Policy Review (Summer 1987, not online), he wrote:
**Read it all**
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Some valid points made therein.
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I can't believe myself. I am actually posting a POTH editorial approvingly :-o
Published: April 8, 2010
The Internet has given the government powerful 21st-century tools for invading people’s privacy and monitoring their activities, but the main federal law governing online privacy is a 20th-century relic. Adopted in 1986, it has had trouble keeping up with technological advances and is now badly out of date.
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Congress has not moved to fix this problem, but a surprising coalition of major technology companies and civil liberties advocates have produced a blueprint for updating the law and both houses of Congress are poised to hold hearings. Having lawmakers proclaim their concern and ask learned questions will not be enough. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act is long past due for an upgrade.
Privacy is central to American law. And in 1986, Congress applied that principle to electronic communications by setting limits on law enforcement access to Internet and wireless technologies. It was a laudable law at the time, but cellphones were still oddities, the Internet was mostly a way for academics and researchers to exchange data and the World Wide Web that is an everyday part of most Americans’ lives did not exist.
The law is no longer comprehensive enough to cover the many kinds of intrusions made possible by the advances of the past 24 years. In the absence of strong federal law, the courts have been adrift on many important Internet privacy issues. The law is not clear on when search warrants are required for the government to read stored e-mail, what legal standards apply to GPS technology that tracks people’s whereabouts in real time and other critical questions.
Digital Due Process — a coalition that includes Google, Microsoft, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the American Civil Liberties Union — recently proposed a good set of principles for addressing those issues. The coalition recommends that all private data not voluntarily made public, such as stored e-mail or private financial data, should be as protected as data in a person’s home. To get it, the government should need a search warrant.
For locational data — information about where a person has physically been, or currently is — the coalition also recommends that a search warrant be required. That would clear up a murky area of the law in which courts have reached different conclusions about information obtained through GPS devices, cellphone towers and other technologies.
The coalition argues that when federal law authorizes a subpoena for customer data, it should be limited to information about a particular individual or individuals. This would prevent fishing expeditions, such as a request for data on everyone who visited a particular Web site on a given day.
The coalition’s recommendations do not address other important Internet privacy issues that involve the ability of private companies to monitor and record their users’ behavior. They also sidestep questions about how accessible data should be to private litigants, such as one company suing another. The recommendations do not include requirements that companies report on the personal data they are collecting and storing — a kind of transparency that customers should be entitled to.
Despite that, the Digital Due Process has gotten this much-needed discussion off to a strong start and set the bar high for hearings by the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.
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Yeah, I saw that elsewhere. It is good this is coming up for discussion. I suspect the EFT (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is in the mix there too?
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I'm in shotgun instructor class this week and hence am short on scribbling time, but will note in regard to GM's piece that just because there was no golden age of Libertarianism there's no reason not to strive for one, not because it will ever be achieved, but because I believe there is a deeply rooted human penchant to impose values and restrictions on others. You can't turn around without finding someone making adamant arguments as to why this, that, or the other liberty shouldn't be superseded for the sake of the community, children, Allah, Yaweh, whatever. I think keeping people individually or amalgamated in to governments collectively the f#ck out of my life unless I choose to let them in is a nobel end unto itself and so make no apologies for resisting what I see as endless encroachment efforts.
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Those that live without the rule of law are just as oppressed as those that live under a police state.
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Libertarian = living with no law?
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I've seen more than a few anarchists designate themselves libertarians.
I'd like to hear what laws you do want to have and how you'd enforce them.
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The mainstream libertarians seem to be more of the strict constitutionalist mindset. The differences come when you try and determine what date you want to "roll back" to. (just after prohibition, pre/post EPA, "great society", pre/post income tax, etc.) Anarchists are just that, they seem to want no government at all, which tends to look like law of the jungle to me.........
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I've seen more than a few anarchists designate themselves libertarians.
And this applies to me? Seems like an awfully broad brush with which to paint us freedom loving miscreants.
I'd like to hear what laws you do want to have and how you'd enforce them.
Should I start with the United States Code, Annotated, state law tomes, those of my county, or those of my town? Will it suffice to say I'm good with laws against murder, but not ones regulating the size of toilet tanks or what substances you can imbibe while at home?
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Anarchists and libertarians are not the same.
Anarchists can range from "left" (communalists) to "right" (individualist). To somewhat oversimplify, the gripe is not government, it is against heirarchical authority structures in general. As such, "the state" is immediately targeted as bad ju-ju, but so are, say, certain business models & what are viewed as exploitative economic or social systems.
Libertarians also have a wide range of beliefs, but are minarchists, not anarchists, and view government, in the worst light, as a necessary evil.
What laws do libertarians want? Very few, and only those that protect individual rights (generally speaking).
How to enforce? A libertarian gov would be limited to core functions: military (whether standing or not), police, and courts. Some of that might even be farmed out.
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I've seen more than a few anarchists designate themselves libertarians.
And this applies to me? Seems like an awfully broad brush with which to paint us freedom loving miscreants.
**If my intent was to call you an anarchist, I'd call you an anarchist. I debated a "libertarian" elsewhere who asserted that there should be no govenment, no courts, no police.**
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I'd like to hear what laws you do want to have and how you'd enforce them.
Should I start with the United States Code, Annotated, state law tomes, those of my county, or those of my town? Will it suffice to say I'm good with laws against murder, but not ones regulating the size of toilet tanks or what substances you can imbibe while at home?
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What if your next door neighbor wants to home brew his meth? Should there be a law?
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What if your next door neighbor wants to home brew his meth? Should there be a law?
I think it should be available over the counter so he has no need to home brew it, mark it up substantially to cover his risk, defend it from predator who would rip him off, etc. The drug war has created far more pathologies than it has addressed.
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Just because it's legally available does not mean someone won't home brew their own. Meth is not expensive to make, especially if the precursor chemicals are unregulated.
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A justification for opposing meth lab next door is the unusually high risk of explosion and contamination. Liberties tend to end when they cross over and take away someone else's liberty - (like abortion).
Over the weekend, a neighbor of a property of mine had a huge barn fire very close to my property. My tenants were downwind and evacuated; any further spreading could have certainly taken lives. Cause unknown so the lesson from it is unknown, point is that some regulation can be justified. This was in a very unregulated, unenforced area, my other properties are in the highly and overly regulated city where virtually nothing is allowed. Yet all my real damage seems to occur in the regulated area including vandalism, crime and continuous threats of closure from the regulators as I try be a law abiding citizen and eek out a living providing affordable housing. They can't regulate reasonably and stop there. They can't send a statement or notice without a threat of closure, because that is their power. It becomes an occupation, a power and an entity all its own.
At our own home the neighbor built a tall home on a narrow lot and blocked all mid-day winter sun from our house forever. There should a law against that. Actually 13 different ordinances prohibit what they built, so variances were approved to get the 'improvement', much like Kelo. My pet peeve is the certain laws come with exceptions. Real laws against real crimes like murder don't require exceptions. For zoning and regulating people's lives and properties, the exceptions always bring us back toward third world bribe and corruption and power of the state, and away from equal protection.
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The devil is always in the details. Alcohol is legal, but still has laws regulating it, and still has law enforcement officers enforcing those laws.
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Any law is a use of force, since the Police with guns show up to enforce it. what is required for any citizen to justify useing force (a gun?) against another? If a law cannot meet those criteria, it should never have been written.
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You'll note that law enFORCEment has the use of force implied in the title. Without enforcement, there is no rule of law. It's worked pretty darn well for western civilization up to this point. Also, most calls are handled strictly by officer presence and verbal skills and the use of deadly force is a very tiny part of most officer's performance of their duties.
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The Wrong Man
IN THE FALL OF 2001, A NATION REELING FROM THE HORROR OF 9/11 WAS ROCKED BY A SERIES OF DEADLY ANTHRAX ATTACKS. AS THE PRESSURE TO FIND A CULPRIT MOUNTED, THE FBI, ABETTED BY THE MEDIA, FOUND ONE. THE WRONG ONE. THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW FEDERAL AUTHORITIES BLEW THE BIGGEST ANTI-TERROR INVESTIGATION OF THE PAST DECADE—AND NEARLY DESTROYED AN INNOCENT MAN. HERE, FOR THE FIRST TIME, THE FALSELY ACCUSED, DR. STEVEN J. HATFILL, SPEAKS OUT ABOUT HIS ORDEAL.
By David Freed
IMAGE CREDIT: MELISSA GOLDEN/REDUX
THE FIRST ANTHRAX attacks came days after the jetliner assaults of September 11, 2001. Postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, and believed to have been sent from a mailbox near Princeton University, the initial mailings went to NBC News, the New York Post, and the Florida-based publisher of several supermarket tabloids, including The Sun and The National Enquirer. Three weeks later, two more envelopes containing anthrax arrived at the Senate offices of Democrats Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, each bearing the handwritten return address of a nonexistent “Greendale School” in Franklin Park, New Jersey. Government mail service quickly shut down.
The letters accompanying the anthrax read like the work of a jihadist, suggesting that their author was an Arab extremist—or someone masquerading as one—yet also advised recipients to take antibiotics, implying that whoever had mailed them never really intended to harm anyone. But at least 17 people would fall ill and five would die—a photo editor at The Sun; two postal employees at a Washington, D.C., mail-processing center; a hospital stockroom clerk in Manhattan whose exposure to anthrax could never be fully explained; and a 94-year-old Connecticut widow whose mail apparently crossed paths with an anthrax letter somewhere in the labyrinth of the postal system. The attacks spawned a spate of hoax letters nationwide. Police were swamped with calls from citizens suddenly suspicious of their own mail.
See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/the-wrong-man/8019/
VIDEO: The author and Steven Hatfill speak with The Today Show’s Matt Lauer
Americans had good reason to fear. Inhaled anthrax bacteria devour the body from within. Anthrax infections typically begin with flu-like symptoms. Massive lesions soon form in the lungs and brain, as a few thousand bacilli propagate within days into literally trillions of voracious parasitic microbes. The final stages before death are excruciatingly painful.As their minds disintegrate, victims literally drown in their own fluids. If you were to peer through a microscope at a cross-section of an anthrax victim’s blood vessel at the moment of death, it would look, says Leonard A. Cole, an expert on bioterrorism at Rutgers University, “as though it were teeming with worms.”
The pressure on American law enforcement to find the perpetrator or perpetrators was enormous. Agents were compelled to consider any and all means of investigation. One such avenue involved Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College and a self-styled literary detective, who had achieved modest celebrity by examining punctuation and other linguistic fingerprints to identify Joe Klein, who was then a Newsweek columnist, as the author of the anonymously written 1996 political novel, Primary Colors. Foster had since consulted with the FBI on investigations of the Unabomber and Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park bombing, among other cases. Now he was asked to analyze the anthrax letters for insights as to who may have mailed them. Foster would detail his efforts two years later in a 9,500-word article for Vanity Fair.
Surveying the publicly available evidence, as well as documents sent to him by the FBI, Foster surmised that the killer was an American posing as an Islamic jihadist. Only a limited number of American scientists would have had a working knowledge of anthrax. One of those scientists, Foster concluded, was a man named Steven Hatfill, a medical doctor who had once worked at the Army’s elite Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which had stocks of anthrax.
On the day al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with hijacked jetliners, Hatfill was recovering from nasal surgery in his apartment outside the gates of Fort Detrick, Maryland, where USAMRIID is housed. We’re at war, he remembers thinking as he watched the news that day—but he had no idea that it was a war in which he himself would soon become collateral damage, as the FBI came to regard him as a homegrown bioterrorist, likely responsible for some of the most unsettling multiple murders in recent American history. His story provides a cautionary tale about how federal authorities, fueled by the general panic over terrorism, embraced conjecture and coincidence as evidence, and blindly pursued one suspect while the real anthrax killer roamed free for more than six years. Hatfill’s experience is also the wrenching saga of how an American citizen who saw himself as a patriot came to be vilified and presumed guilty, as his country turned against him.
“It’s like death by a thousand cuts,” Hatfill, who is now 56, says today. “There’s a sheer feeling of hopelessness. You can’t fight back. You have to just sit there and take it, day after day, the constant drip-drip-drip of innuendo, a punching bag for the government and the press. And the thing was, I couldn’t understand why it was happening to me. I mean, I was one of the good guys.”
Don Foster, the Vassar professor, was among those who set the wheels of injustice in motion. Scouring the Internet, Foster found an interview that Hatfill had given while working at the National Institutes of Health, in which he described how bubonic plague could be made with simple equipment and used in a bioterror attack. Foster later tracked down an unpublished novel Hatfill had written, depicting a fictional bioterror attack on Washington. He discovered that Hatfill had been in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) during an anthrax outbreak there in the late 1970s, and that he’d attended medical school near a Rhodesian suburb called Greendale—the name of the invented school in the return address of the anthrax letters mailed to the Senate. The deeper Foster dug, the more Hatfill looked to him like a viable suspect.
“When I lined up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats,” Foster later wrote, “those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud.”
In February 2002, Foster tried to interest the FBI in Hatfill, but says he was told that Hatfill had a good alibi. “A month later, when I pressed the issue,” Foster wrote, “I was told, ‘Look, Don, maybe you’re spending too much time on this.’”
Meanwhile, Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a passionate crusader against the use of bioweapons, was also convinced that an American scientist was to blame for the anthrax attacks. In an interview with the BBC in early 2002, she theorized that the murders were the result of a top-secret CIA project gone awry, and that the FBI was hesitant to arrest the killer because it would embarrass Washington. A molecular biologist and professor of environmental science who had once served as a low-level bioweapons adviser to President Clinton, Rosenberg had taken it upon herself to look into the anthrax murders, and her investigations had independently led her to Hatfill. (Hatfill says he believes Rosenberg was made aware of him by a former acquaintance, a defense contractor with whom Hatfill had clashed over a proposed counter-anthrax training program intended for the U.S. Marshals Service.) Rosenberg wrote a paper she called “Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator,” which was disseminated on the Internet. Although Rosenberg would later deny ever having identified him publicly or privately, the specific details of her “Portrait” made it clear she had a particular suspect in mind: Steven Hatfill.
Foster says he met Rosenberg over lunch in April 2002, “compared notes,” and “found that our evidence had led us in the same direction.” Weeks dragged on while he and Rosenberg tried to interest the FBI in their theories, but the bureau remained “stubbornly unwilling to listen.” Two months later, her “patience exhausted,” Rosenberg, according to Foster, met on Capitol Hill with Senate staff members “and laid out the evidence, such as it was, hers and mine.” Special Agent Van Harp, the senior FBI agent on what by then had been dubbed the “Amerithrax” investigation, was summoned to the meeting, along with other FBI officials.
Rosenberg criticized the FBI for not being aggressive enough. “She thought we were wasting efforts and resources in a particular—or in several areas, and should focus more on who she concluded was responsible for it,” Harp would later testify.
“Did she mention Dr. Hatfill’s name in her presentation?” Hatfill’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Thomas G. Connolly, asked Harp during a sworn deposition.
“That’s who she was talking about,” Harp testified.
Exactly a week after the Rosenberg meeting, the FBI carried out its first search of Hatfill’s apartment, with television news cameras broadcasting it live.
In his deposition, Harp would dismiss the timing of the search as coincidental.
Beryl Howell, who at the time of the investigation was serving as Senator Patrick Leahy’s point person on all matters anthrax, recently told me that asking Harp and other lead agents to sit down with the “quite persistent” Rosenberg was never meant to pressure the FBI to go after Hatfill. The meeting, Howell says, was intended simply to ensure that investigators cooperated with other experts outside the bureau and objectively considered all theories in the case in order to solve it more quickly.
“Whether or not Rosenberg’s suspicions about Hatfill were correct was really not my business,” Howell says. “It was really law enforcement’s prerogative to figure that one out.”
There was enough circumstantial evidence surrounding Hatfill that zealous investigators could easily elaborate a plausible theory of him as the culprit. As fear about the anthrax attacks spread, government and other workers who might have been exposed to the deadly spores via the mail system were prescribed prophylactic doses of Cipro, a powerful antibiotic that protects against infection caused by inhaled anthrax. Unfamiliar to the general population before September 2001, Cipro quickly became known as the anti-anthrax drug, and prescriptions for it skyrocketed.
As it happened, at the time of the anthrax attacks, Hatfill was taking Cipro.
Hatfill’s eccentricity also generated suspicion among colleagues and FBI agents. Bench scientists tend toward the sedate and gymnasium-challenged. Steve Hatfill was a flag-waving, tobacco-chewing weight lifter partial to blood-rare steaks and black safari suits that showed off his linebacker’s physique, a physician with a bawdy sense of humor and a soldier’s ethos, who told stories over cocktails of parachuting from military aircraft and battling Communists in Africa. While few people who knew him could deny his intellect or his passion as a researcher, some found him arrogant and blustery. Others feared him. Even his allies acknowledge that Hatfill could sometimes come across as different. “If you try to link Steve and the word normal, they’re not going to match up,” says Jim Cline, a retired Special Forces sergeant major and anti-terror expert who worked with Hatfill from 1999 to 2002 at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a large defense contractor.
It also happened that Hatfill was familiar with anthrax. He had done his medical training in Africa, where outbreaks of anthrax infections have been known to occur among livestock herds. In 1999, after going to work for SAIC, Hatfill had a hand in developing a brochure for emergency personnel on ways to handle anthrax hoax letters. In the long run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, he also oversaw the construction of a full-scale model designed to show invading U.S. troops what a mobile Iraqi germ-warfare lab might look like and how best to destroy it. But while he possessed a working knowledge of Bacillus anthracis, Hatfill had never worked in any capacity with the spore-forming, rod-shaped bacterium.
“I was a virus guy,” he told me, “not a bacteria guy.”
Still, when FBI agents asked to interview him 10 months after the anthrax murders, Hatfill says, he wasn’t surprised. In their hunt for what he believed were the foreign terrorists who had sent the letters, Hatfill assumed that agents were routinely interviewing every scientist who’d ever worked at USAMRIID, including those, like himself, who had never set foot in the high-security laboratory where anthrax cultures were kept. Hatfill answered the agents’ questions and willingly took a polygraph test, which he says he was told he passed.
“I thought that was the end of it,” Hatfill says. “But it was only the beginning.”
In June, agents asked to “swab” his apartment. Hatfill complied, feeling he had nothing to hide. On June 25, 2002, after signing a consent form at the FBI’s field office in nearby Frederick, Maryland, he came home to find reporters and camera crews swarming. TV helicopters orbited overhead. “There’s obviously been a leak,” Hatfill says one of the agents told him. He was driven to a Holiday Inn to escape the crush of news media and sat in a motel room, watching incredulously as a full-blown search of his home played out on national television. The experience was surreal.
Agents conducted a second search five weeks later amid a repeated media circus. This time they came equipped with a warrant and bloodhounds. The dogs, Hatfill would later learn, had been responsible for false arrests in other cases. Hatfill says he innocently petted one of hounds, named Tinkerbell. The dog seemed to like him. “He’s identified you from the anthrax letters!” Tinkerbell’s handler exclaimed.
“It took every ounce of restraint to stop from laughing,” Hatfill recalls. “They said, ‘We know you did it. We know you didn’t mean to kill anyone.’ I said, ‘Am I under arrest?’ They said no. I walked out, rented a car, and went to see an attorney about suing the hell out of these people.”
The FBI raided Hatfill’s rented storage locker in Ocala, Florida, where his father owned a thoroughbred horse farm; the agency also searched a townhouse in Washington, D.C., owned by his longtime girlfriend, a slim, elegant accountant whom Hatfill calls “Boo.” (To guard her privacy, he asked that her real name not be used.) Agents rifled through Boo’s closets and drawers, breaking cherished keepsakes. “They told me, ‘Your boyfriend murdered five people,’” she said to me recently, unable to talk about it without tears.
Hatfill was fired from SAIC. The official explanation given was that he had failed to maintain a necessary security clearance; the real reason, he believes, was that the government wanted him fired. He immediately landed the associate directorship of a fledgling Louisiana State University program designed to train firefighters and other emergency personnel to respond to terrorist acts and natural disasters, a job that would have matched the $150,000 annual salary he’d been getting at SAIC. But after Justice Department officials learned of Hatfill’s employment, they told LSU to “immediately cease and desist” from using Hatfill on any federally funded program. He was let go before his first day. Other prospective employment fell through. No one would return his calls. One job vanished after Hatfill emerged from a meeting with prospective employers to find FBI agents videotaping them. His savings dwindling, he moved in with Boo.
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By this time, the FBI and the Justice Department were so confident Hatfill was guilty that on August 6, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly declared him a “person of interest”—the only time the nation’s top law-enforcement official has ever so identified the subject of an active criminal investigation. Agents grilled Hatfill’s friends, tapped his phone, installed surveillance cameras outside Boo’s condo, and for more than two years, shadowed him day and night, looking for any grounds on which to arrest him.
Many of Hatfill’s friends, worried for their own reputations, abandoned him as the FBI gave chase. Certain of Hatfill’s innocence, his former colleague Jim Cline was among the few who stood by him, afraid that his increasingly socially isolated friend would kill himself to escape his torment. “When you have the world against you,” Cline says, “and only a few people are willing to look you in the eye and tell you, ‘I believe you’—I mean, to this day, I really don’t know how the guy survived.”
Virtually everywhere Hatfill went, the FBI went too, often right behind him—a deliberately harassing tactic called “bumper locking.” Hatfill believes that local authorities joined in tormenting him at the behest of the Justice Department. Coming home from dinner one Friday night, he was pulled over by a Washington, D.C., police officer who issued him a warning for failing to signal a lane change. Three blocks later, another cop stopped him, again for not using his turn signal. The officer asked if he’d been drinking. Hatfill said he’d had one Bloody Mary. He was ordered out of his car. “Not unless you’re going to arrest me,” Hatfill says he responded indignantly. The officer obliged. Hatfill spent the weekend in jail and would later be ordered to attend a four-day alcohol counseling program. The police, he says, refused to administer a blood-alcohol test that would have proved he wasn’t drunk.
Connolly, Hatfill’s attorney, offered to have Hatfill surrender his passport and be outfitted with a tracking device, to have FBI agents ride with him everywhere, to show them that they were wasting their time. The offer was rejected. “They were purposely sweating him,” Connolly says, “trying to get him to go over the edge.”
Much of what authorities discovered, they leaked anonymously to journalists. The result was an unrelenting stream of inflammatory innuendo that dominated front pages and television news. Hatfill found himself trapped, the powerless central player in what Connolly describes as “a story about the two most powerful institutions in the United States, the government and the press, ganging up on an innocent man. It’s Kafka.”
With Hatfill’s face splashed all over the news, strangers on the street stared. Some asked for his autograph. Hatfill was humiliated. Embarrassed to be recognized, he stopped going to the gym. He stopped visiting friends, concerned that the FBI would harass them, too. Soon, he stopped going out in public altogether. Once an energetic and ambitious professional who reveled in 14-hour workdays, Hatfill now found himself staring at the walls all day. Television became his steady companion.
“I’d never really watched the news before,” Hatfill says, “and now I’m seeing my name all over the place and all these idiots like Geraldo Rivera asking, ‘Is this the anthrax animal? Is this the guy who murdered innocent people?’ You might as well have hooked me up to a battery. It was sanctioned torture.”
Hatfill decided to redecorate Boo’s condo as a distraction from the news. He repainted, hung wallpaper, learned to install crown molding. He also began drinking.
An afternoon glass of red wine became three or more. At night, Hatfill would stay up late, dipping Copenhagen tobacco and getting drunk while waiting in a smoldering rage for his name to appear on television, until finally he would pass out and wake up gagging on the tobacco that had caught in his throat, or stumble around and “crash into something.” Boo would help him to bed. After a few anguished hours of sleep, Hatfill would see her off to work, doze past noon, then rise to repeat the cycle, closing the blinds to block the sun and the video camera the FBI had installed on a pole across the street. For a while, Boo bought newspapers, so the two of them could fume over the latest lies that had been published about him. But soon he asked her to stop bringing them home, because he couldn’t take it anymore.
STEVEN HATFILL WAS BORN ON October 24, 1953, and raised with a younger sister in Mattoon, Illinois. His father designed and sold electrical substations. His mother dabbled in interior decorating. He studied piano, soloed a glider at 14, and wrestled for the varsity team in high school. By his own admission, he was a poor student. “I never took a book home,” Hatfill says. But he read plenty on his own, especially about science and the military. In 1971, he enrolled at Southwestern College, a small liberal-arts school in Kansas affiliated with the Methodist Church, where he majored in biology and signed up for a Marine Corps summer leadership course with dreams of piloting jet fighters. But when his vision was measured at less than 20/20, he opted out of the program rather than accept a navigator slot. Midway through his sophomore year, he left college and went to Africa.
Hatfill says he always wanted to help people in the developing world. He got his chance at a remote Methodist mission hospital in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he learned blood chemistry, parasitology, and basic hematology in a rudimentary lab. A year later, he returned to the United States; he graduated from Southwestern in 1975, and signed up for the Army.
He took a direct-enlistment option to join the Green Berets, attended parachute school, trained as a radio operator, and was assigned to the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an operational A-Team, Hatfill reentered civilian life. He joined the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon he had worked with in Africa, and returned to Mattoon to work the night shift as a security guard at a radiator factory. His marriage soon faltered. After they separated, his wife delivered their only child, a girl. Hatfill would not see his daughter for 27 years.
From 1978 to 1994, Hatfill lived in Africa. He earned a medical degree from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, Rhodesia, and saw combat as a volunteer medic with the territorial forces of the Rhodesian army, eventually being attached to a unit called the Selous Scouts, which was renowned for its ruthlessness in battle. While he was in Rhodesia, Hatfill says, a truck he was riding in was ambushed by Marxist insurgents. Leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose. For decades afterward he would have trouble breathing—which is why, in September 2001, he finally elected to have surgery on his sinuses, an operation that would lead doctors to prescribe him Cipro, to guard against infection.
Following his medical internship in Africa, he spent 14 months as the resident physician at an Antarctic research base. He went on to obtain three master’s degrees in the hard sciences from two South African universities and finish a doctoral thesis in molecular cell biology that described a new marker for radiation-induced leukemia.
Hatfill returned once more to the United States in 1994. He painted barns for six months on his father’s horse farm before taking a one-year fellowship to study a cancer protein at Oxford University. He parlayed the Oxford fellowship into a job researching cancer, HIV, and Lyme disease at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In September 1997, Hatfill accepted a two-year fellowship as a medical doctor and hematologist to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers at USAMRIID. He was earning $45,000 a year.
Part of his research involved fatal viral experiments on macaque monkeys. Sometimes, with permission from staff veterinarians, Hatfill would slip the animals Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to assuage his own guilt over helping cause them harm. He found his USAMRIID assignment both anguishing and rewarding. Some months, he never took a day off. “It’s altruism, in a way,” Hatfill says. “You’re trying to find cures for diseases to help people who have no other means of help. It was a privilege just to be there.”
THE FBI WOULD later speculate that Hatfill had somehow gained access to anthrax cultures while working at USAMRIID, perhaps through an inadvertently unlocked door. Drawing in part on the work of the Vassar professor Foster and the anti-bioweapons activist Rosenberg, federal investigators began trying to connect bits of circumstantial evidence, assembling them into a picture of Hatfill as the anthrax killer.
He’d been in Britain and Florida, respectively, when two letters with fake anthrax were mailed from those locations. His girlfriend was Malaysian-born—and a hoax package had been sent from Malaysia to a Microsoft office in Nevada. He’d been in Africa during a major anthrax outbreak in the late 1970s. Rhodesia’s capital city has that suburb called Greendale—and, as noted, “Greendale School” was the return address on the anthrax letters sent to Daschle and Leahy. He’d written that unpublished novel, which Don Foster had unearthed, about a bioterror attack on Washington. He was close to Bill Patrick, widely recognized as the father of America’s bioweapons program, whom he’d met at a conference on bioterror some years earlier. And, of course, he’d taken Cipro just before the anthrax attacks.
The government became convinced all of it had to amount to something.
It didn’t.
The FBI’s sleuthing had produced zero witnesses, no firm evidence, nothing to show that Hatfill had ever touched anthrax, let alone killed anyone with it. So thin was the bureau’s case that Hatfill was never even indicted. But that didn’t stop the FBI from focusing on him to the virtual exclusion of other suspects.
In law enforcement, there is a syndrome known as “detective myopia.” Former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told me he suspected that FBI agents had succumbed to this condition, becoming so focused on Hatfill that they lost their objectivity. “This mostly happens when the case is important and there is pressure to solve it,” Gates says. “In the case of the FBI, the pressure most certainly can be, and is, political. When a congressman may be a victim of anthrax—well, the case needs to be solved or the suspect made impotent.”
Special Agent Harp, who initially headed the anthrax investigation, conceded after Hatfill sued the government in August 2003 that the FBI had been sensitive to accusations that it had stumbled in other high-profile investigations, and that it had consciously sought to assure the public that it was working hard to crack the anthrax murders. Part of providing such assurance involved actively communicating with news reporters. Questioned under oath, Harp admitted to serving as a confidential source for more than a dozen journalists during the case, but he insisted that he had never leaked privileged information about Hatfill, or anyone else for that matter.
Hatfill’s attorney has his doubts. After taking Harp’s deposition, Connolly says, he went home and half-jokingly told his wife, “We’re building a bomb shelter. If these are the guys in charge of our national security, we’re all in serious trouble.”
In their own depositions, both John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller, the FBI director, said they had expressed concern to underlings about news leaks that appeared to single out and smear Hatfill. Both, however, denied any knowledge of who specifically was doing the leaking.
In August of 2002, following the searches of his apartment, Hatfill held two press conferences to proclaim his innocence. He offered to undergo, and eventually took, blood and handwriting tests in an attempt to help clear his name. “I want to look my fellow Americans directly in the eye and declare to them, ‘I am not the anthrax killer,’” Hatfill told reporters. “I know nothing about the anthrax attacks. I had absolutely nothing to do with this terrible crime. My life is being destroyed by arrogant government bureaucrats who are peddling groundless innuendo and half-information about me to gullible reporters, who in turn repeat this to the public in the guise of news.”
One newspaper reporter even called Boo’s former in-laws in Canada, inquiring whether Hatfill had had anything to do with the death of her late husband—who had succumbed to a stroke a year before Boo met Hatfill. The call, Boo says, prompted her former brother-in-law to fly to Washington and demand, “What are you doing, living with this murderer?”
Months passed with Hatfill cloistered in Boo’s condominium, watching television and drinking alone. He binged on chocolate and fried chicken, putting on weight, growing too lethargic and depressed to even get on the bathroom scale. He developed heart palpitations. He wondered whether he was losing his mind.
Remembering what her boyfriend was like back then, Boo grows emotional. “I got tired of cleaning up your vomit,” she tells him over dinner at an Indian restaurant down the street from her condo. Tears stream down her cheeks. Hatfill chokes up too, the trauma still raw nearly eight years later.
“Every human being has to feel a part of a tribe,” he explains. “It’s programmed into us. And you have to feel that you’re contributing to something. They tried to take all that away from me. No tribe wanted me. I just didn’t feel of value to anything or anyone. I had Boo. Boo was my only tribe.”
The next morning, driving through Georgetown on the way to visit one of his friends in suburban Maryland, I ask Hatfill how close he came to suicide. The muscles in his jaw tighten.
“That was never an option,” Hatfill says, staring straight ahead. “If I would’ve killed myself, I would’ve been automatically judged by the press and the FBI to be guilty.”
SOME JOURNALISTS became convinced there was plenty pointing to Hatfill’s guilt. Among those beating the drum early and loud, in the summer of 2002, was Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times. At least initially, Kristof stopped short of naming Hatfill publicly, instead branding him with the sinister-sounding pseudonym “Mr. Z.” Without identifying his sources, in a July column Kristof wrote:
If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. But he is a true-blue American with close ties to the U.S. Defense Department, the C.I.A. and the American biodefense program. On the other hand, he was once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard “hot suite” at Fort Detrick, surrounded only by blushing germs.
With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it’s time for the F.B.I. to make a move: either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.
One of those threads, Kristof reported, pointed to the possibility that Mr. Z was a genocidal racist who had carried out germ warfare to slaughter innocent black Africans. Kristof addressed his column directly to the FBI:
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Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978–80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian Army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army’s much-feared Selous Scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks?
Kristof didn’t mention that the majority of soldiers in the Rhodesian army, and in Hatfill’s unit, were black; or that many well-respected scientists who examined the evidence concluded that the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak emerged naturally when cattle herds went unvaccinated during a turbulent civil war. Kristof also failed to mention that Mr. Z had served in that war as a lowly private. To have been involved in some sort of top-secret Rhodesian germ-weapons program “would’ve been like a Pakistani army private being brought in to work on a project at Los Alamos,” Hatfill says today.
Kristof wrote that Mr. Z had shown “evasion” in repeated FBI polygraph examinations. He also claimed that following the anthrax attacks, Mr. Z had accessed an “isolated residence” that Kristof described as a possible safe house for American intelligence operatives where, the columnist reported, “Mr. Z gave Cipro to people who visited it.” Other journalists would later describe this mysterious residence as a “remote cabin,” a kind of Ted Kaczynski–style hideout where a deranged scientist could easily have prepared anthrax for mailing.
In fact, the “cabin” was a three-bedroom weekend home with a Jacuzzi on 40 acres of land in rural Virginia owned by a longtime friend of Hatfill’s, George R. Borsari Jr., an avuncular Washington communications lawyer and retired Army lieutenant colonel. Borsari says he found speculation that his place had been a haven for spies or bioterrorists laughable.
When an FBI agent asked Borsari if he would allow a search of the property, Borsari said no. “I told him, ‘I’m not going to be a part of your publicity game,’” Borsari says. No search was ever conducted, but by then the damage to Hatfill had been done.
In late 2001, before being publicly implicated in the anthrax attacks, Hatfill had attended a weekend dinner party at Borsari’s Virginia retreat along with more than a dozen other guests, including some of Hatfill’s co-workers at the defense contractor where he was then employed. Borsari, who’d read a recent article about anthrax-fighting drugs, said he jokingly asked Hatfill, “Hey, by the way, we’re your friends. How come we don’t have any Cipro?” Hatfill advised him to go to a hospital if he felt he’d been exposed to anthrax. In subsequent news reports, Hatfill was alleged to have warned everyone to begin taking Cipro, as if to suggest that another attack was imminent. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Borsari later told me. “But, apparently, they did.”
Though he cannot prove it, Hatfill says he believes that a friend-turned-political-enemy heard about the Cipro conversation from a co-worker who was at Borsari’s house that night, misconstrued it, and passed it on to federal agents. The same former friend, Hatfill asserts, also was responsible for undermining his efforts to secure a higher security clearance that would have enabled him to work on top-secret CIA projects when he was employed at SAIC.
The former friend, who works today at a high level within the intelligence community and requested anonymity after I contacted him, denies Hatfill’s version of events. He says he never approached the FBI regarding Hatfill, but would not discuss whether he ever talked with agents about him, suggesting instead that simmering workplace conflicts between Hatfill and former colleagues at USAMRIID could have prompted someone there to “drop a dime to the bureau.” “Steve always saw himself as having the purest of motivations. I don’t think that was always apparent to everyone around him,” the former friend says. “There’s a line from Tom Jones, ‘It’s not enough to be good. You have to be seen as being good.’ I don’t think Steve ever learned that lesson.”
Though the two have not spoken in more than a decade, he says he still regards Hatfill warmly.
The feelings are hardly mutual. Hatfill believes that his former friend helped perpetuate false and damaging rumors about him. As evidence for this assertion, Hatfill says he once confided to him about having taken a shower with a female colleague inside the decontamination area of a USAMRIID lab. The story, according to Hatfill, was a fiction meant to amuse and titillate. He says he told the story to no one other than this one friend. As the FBI began focusing on Hatfill in July 2002, The Times’s Nicholas Kristof would report Hatfill’s fictitious laboratory dalliance as fact.
Hatfill would later sue The New York Times for that and a host of other alleged libels. The case would eventually be dismissed, after a judge ruled that Hatfill was a public figure. To successfully sue for defamation, public figures must prove that a publication acted with “actual malice.”
IN LATE 2002, news bulletins reported that either an unnamed tipster or bloodhounds, depending on which report was to be believed, had led FBI agents to a pond in the Maryland countryside about eight miles from Hatfill’s former apartment. There, divers discovered what was described as a makeshift laboratory “glove box.” Reports speculated that Hatfill, a certified SCUBA diver, had used the airtight device to stuff anthrax microbes into envelopes underwater to avoid contaminating himself. The Washington Post reported that “vials and gloves wrapped in plastic” also were recovered from the water. Tests to determine the presence of anthrax produced “conflicting results,” The Post reported, yet so “compelling” were these finds that the FBI would later pay $250,000 to have the pond drained in search of more evidence. Nothing retrieved from the pond ever linked Hatfill, or anyone else, to the murders. According to some news reports, the laboratory “glove box” turned out to be a homemade turtle trap. But the pond story helped keep alive the public perception that FBI agents were hot on the trail, with Hatfill in their sights.
At Connolly’s urging, Hatfill reluctantly agreed to a few informal, one-on-one get-togethers with journalists to show them he was no monster. The effort did little to stanch the flow of negative reporting. Two weeks after Hatfill met with CBS correspondent Jim Stewart, in May 2003, Stewart aired a story on the CBS Evening News. The anchor, Dan Rather, read the lead-in:
Rather: It has been more than a year and half now since the string of deadly anthrax attacks in this country, and still no arrests, even though investigators believe they know who the culprit is and where he is. CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart is on the case and has the latest.
Stewart: Bioweapons researcher Dr. Steven Hatfill, sources confirm, remains the FBI’s number-one suspect in the attacks, even though round-the-clock surveillance and extensive searches have failed to develop more than what sources describe as a “highly circumstantial” case.
And now one possible outcome, sources suggest, is that the government could bring charges against Hatfill unrelated to the anthrax attacks at all, if they become convinced that’s the only way to stop future incidents. Not unlike, for example, the income-tax evasion charges finally brought against Al Capone, when evidence of racketeering proved elusive.
After watching Stewart’s report that night, Hatfill recalls, “I just lost it.” He left an angry message on Stewart’s voice mail, vowing to sue. It was, as Hatfill looks back, the last straw. “I just decided I wasn’t going to let it get to me anymore. Screw ’em,” Hatfill says. “I mean, what more could the press and the FBI do to me than they already had?”
Plenty, as it turned out.
Boo was driving Hatfill to a paint store a week later when FBI agents in a Dodge Durango, trying to keep up with them, blew through a red light in a school zone with children present. Hatfill says he got out of his car to snap a photo of the offending agents and give them a piece of his mind. The Durango sped away—running over his right foot. Hatfill declined an ambulance ride to the hospital; unemployed, he had no medical insurance. When Washington police arrived, they issued him a ticket for “walking to create a hazard.” The infraction carried a $5 fine. Hatfill would contest the ticket in court and lose. The agent who ran over his foot was never charged.
“People think they’re free in this country,” Hatfill says. “Don’t kid yourself. This is a police state. The government can pretty much do whatever it wants.”
Sitting alone day after day, Boo’s condo by now completely redecorated, Hatfill realized that he needed something else to keep his mind occupied while waiting for his day in court. He decided to act as though he were starting medical school all over. He dug out his old textbooks and began studying. The hours flew by.
“I was back on familiar ground, something I knew and understood. It was therapy,” Hatfill says. “There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that there would be a payday eventually,” from lawsuits against those who had destroyed his reputation. “At that point, it became a waiting game for me. Everything else became tolerable.”
One afternoon, Hatfill was reading a scientific publication about problems researchers were having in developing promising new antibiotics, when he had a life-changing thought. Many antibiotics and anti-cancer agents, he knew, are synthesized from plants or derived from fungi found in jungles and rainforests. Instead of transporting samples to the lab, why not take the lab to the samples? The concept so excited him that Hatfill ran out and bought modeling clay to begin crafting his vision of a floating laboratory. FBI agents tailed him to a local hobby shop and back.
IN THE AFTERMATH of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people, Hatfill joined a relief effort and flew to Sri Lanka in early 2005. Tending to the sick and injured reminded him that he still had something to contribute to the world. Finally, he says, he stopped worrying about the press and the FBI. He stopped constantly looking over his shoulder.
By early 2007, after fresh investigators were brought in to reexamine evidence collected in the anthrax case, the FBI came to believe what Hatfill had been saying all along: he’d never had access to the anthrax at USAMRIID; he was a virus guy. The FBI, meanwhile, began to focus on someone who had enjoyed complete access: senior microbiologist Bruce Edward Ivins.
Ivins had spent most of his career at USAMRIID, working with anthrax. Agents had even sought his advice and scientific expertise early in their investigation of Hatfill. Now they subjected Ivins to the same harsh treatment they’d given Hatfill, placing Ivins under 24-hour surveillance, digging into his past, and telling him he was a murder suspect. Soon Ivins was banned from the labs where he had labored for 28 years. In July 2008, following a voluntary two-week stay in a psychiatric clinic for treatment of depression and anxiety, Ivins went home and downed a fatal dose of Tylenol. He was 62.
Less than two weeks later, the Justice Department officially exonerated Steven Hatfill. Six years had passed since he was first named a person of interest.
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As it had done with Hatfill, the press dissected the pathology of Ivins’s life, linking him, however speculatively, to the murders. Ivins was a devout Catholic, which could’ve explained why anthrax was sent to two pro-choice senators, Daschle and Leahy. Reports said that Ivins harbored homicidal urges, especially toward women. He had purportedly been obsessed with a particular sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, ever since being rebuffed by one of its members while attending the University of Cincinnati, which could’ve explained why the anthrax letters were mailed from a box near a storage facility used by the sorority’s Princeton chapter. Ivins, of course, was no longer alive to defend himself. But in him, the FBI had found a suspect against whom tangible evidence existed.
Ivins had been the sole custodian of a large flask of highly purified anthrax spores genetically linked to those found in the letters. He had allegedly submitted purposely misleading lab data to the FBI in an attempt to hide the fact that the strain of anthrax used in the attacks was a genetic match with the anthrax in his possession. He had been unable to provide a good explanation for the many late nights he’d put in at the lab, working alone, just before the attacks. Agents found that he had been under intense pressure at USAMRIID to produce an anthrax vaccine for U.S. troops. A few days after the anthrax letters were postmarked, Ivins, according to the FBI, had sent an e-mail to a former colleague, who has never been publicly identified, warning: “Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas,” and have “just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans.” The language was similar to the anthrax letters that warned, “We have this anthrax … Death to America … Death to Israel.”
Following his suicide, some of Ivins’s friends insisted that the FBI had pressured him into doing what Hatfill would not. Ivins’s own attorney, Paul F. Kemp, disagrees. “Dr. Ivins had a host of psychological problems that he was grappling with, that existed long before the anthrax letters were mailed, and long after,” Kemp told me.
Though Hatfill’s apartment in Frederick was less than a quarter mile from Ivins’s modest home on Military Road, and both men worked at Fort Detrick at the same time, Hatfill says the two never met. Hatfill was surprised when the FBI ultimately pinned the anthrax murders on a fellow American scientist.
“I thought it would eventually be proven that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks,” he says.
IN THE YEARS since the attacks, postal officials have equipped more than 270 processing and distribution centers with sensors that “sniff” the air around virtually every piece of incoming mail to detect deadly biohazards. The sensors have never picked up so much as a whiff of anthrax, according to a Postal Inspection Service spokesman, Peter Rendina. “Your mail,” Rendina says, “is safer today than at any other time in our history.”
The same, Hatfill believes, cannot be said about American civil liberties. “I was a guy who trusted the government,” he says. “Now, I don’t trust a damn thing they do.” He trusts reporters even less, dismissing them as little more than lapdogs for law enforcement.
The media’s general willingness to report what was spoon-fed to them, in an effort to reassure a frightened public that an arrest was not far off, is somewhat understandable considering the level of fear that gripped the nation following 9/11. But that doesn’t “justify the sliming of Steven Hatfill,” says Edward Wasserman, who is the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia. “If anything, it’s a reminder that an unquestioning media serves as a potential lever of power to be activated by the government, almost at will.”
In February 2008, Reggie B. Walton, the U.S. District Court judge presiding over Hatfill’s case against the government, announced that he had reviewed secret internal memos on the status of the FBI’s investigation and could find “not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with” the anthrax attacks.
Four months later, the Justice Department quietly settled with Hatfill for $5.82 million. “It allowed Doc to start over,” Connolly, his lawyer, says.
For Hatfill, rebuilding remains painful and slow. He enters post offices only if he absolutely must, careful to show his face to surveillance cameras so that he can’t be accused of mailing letters surreptitiously. He tries to document his whereabouts at all times, in case he should ever need an alibi. He is permanently damaged, Hatfill says. Yet he still professes to love America. “My country didn’t do this to me,” he is quick to point out. “A bloated, incompetent bureaucracy and a broken press did. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if I didn’t still love my country.”
Much of Hatfill’s time these days is devoted to teaching life-saving medical techniques to military personnel bound for combat. They are his “band of brothers,” and the hours he spends with them, Hatfill says, are among his happiest. He also serves as an adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University.
Then there is his boat.
Hatfill has committed $1.5 million to building his floating genetic laboratory, a futuristic-looking vessel replete with a helicopter, an operating room to treat rural indigenous peoples, and a Cordon Bleu–trained chef. Hatfill intends to assemble a scientific team and cruise the Amazon for undiscovered or little-known plants and animals. From these organisms, he hopes to develop new medications for leukemia, and for tuberculosis and other diseases that have been growing increasingly resistant to existing antibiotics. Any useful treatments, he says, will be licensed to pharmaceutical companies on the condition that developing nations receive them at cost. Hatfill hopes to christen the boat within two years. Scientists at USAMRIID, where the FBI once suspected him of stealing anthrax, have expressed tentative interest in helping him mount his expedition.
IN ADDITION TO SUING the Justice Department for violating his privacy and The New York Times for defaming him, Hatfill also brought a libel lawsuit against Don Foster, Vanity Fair, and Reader’s Digest, which had reprinted Foster’s article. The lawsuit led to a settlement whose dollar amount all parties have agreed to keep confidential. The news media, which had for so long savaged Hatfill, dutifully reported his legal victories, but from where he stands, that hardly balanced things on the ledger sheet of journalistic fairness.
Three weeks after the FBI exonerated Hatfill, in the summer of 2008, Nicholas Kristof apologized to him in The New York Times for any distress his columns may have caused. The role of the news media, Kristof wrote on August 28, is “to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted.”
Many others who raised critical questions about Hatfill have remained silent in the wake of his exoneration. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the molecular biologist who spurred the FBI to pursue Hatfill, retired two years ago. Through a former colleague, she declined to be interviewed for this article. Jim Stewart, the television correspondent whose report compared Hatfill to Al Capone, left CBS in 2006. Stewart admitted in a deposition to having relied, for his report, on four confidential FBI sources. When I reached the former newsman at his home in Florida, Stewart said he couldn’t talk about Hatfill because he was entertaining houseguests. When I asked when might be a good time to call back, he said, “There isn’t a good time,” and hung up.
“The entire unhappy episode” is how Don Foster, the Vassar professor who wrote the Vanity Fair article, sums up Hatfill’s story and his own role in it. Foster says he no longer consults for the FBI. “The anthrax case was it for me,” he told me recently. “I’m happier teaching. Like Steven Hatfill, I would prefer to be a private person.”
Foster says he never intended to imply that Hatfill was a murderer, yet continues to stand by his reporting as “inaccurate in only minor details.” I asked if he had any regrets about what he’d written.
“On what grounds?” he asked.
“The heartache it caused Hatfill. The heartache it caused you and Vanity Fair.”
Foster pondered the question, then said, “I don’t know Steven Hatfill. I don’t know his heartache. But anytime an American citizen, a journalist, a scientist, a scholar, is made the object of unfair or inaccurate public scrutiny, it’s unfortunate. It’s part of a free press to set that right.”
This past February, the Justice Department formally closed its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, releasing more than 2,500 pages of documents, many of them heavily redacted, buttressing the government’s assertion that Bruce Ivins was solely responsible for the anthrax letters.
When I asked FBI spokesperson Debra Weierman how much money had been spent chasing Hatfill, she said the bureau was unable to provide such an accounting. She would neither confirm nor deny that the FBI ever opened any administrative inquiries into the news leaks that had defamed him. The FBI, she said, was unwilling to publicly discuss Hatfill in any capacity, “out of privacy considerations for Dr. Hatfill.” Weierman referred me instead to what she described as an “abundance of information” on the FBI’s Web site.
Information about the anthrax case is indeed abundant on the bureau’s Web site, with dozens of documents touting the FBI’s efforts to solve the murders. Included is a transcript of a press conference held in August 2008, a month after Ivins’s suicide, in which federal authorities initially laid out the evidence they had amassed against him. But beyond a handful of questions asked by reporters that day, in which his last name is repeatedly misspelled, and a few scant paragraphs in the 96-page executive summary of the case, there is no mention anywhere on the FBI’s Web site of Steven Hatfill.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/the-wrong-man/8019/
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You'll note that law enFORCEment has the use of force implied in the title. Without enforcement, there is no rule of law. It's worked pretty darn well for western civilization up to this point. Also, most calls are handled strictly by officer presence and verbal skills and the use of deadly force is a very tiny part of most officer's performance of their duties.
Bullcrap. Neighbors make agreements all the time, and for that group of neighbors there is no force involved. People do learn how to get along without laws, or the ones who refuse to get along end up finding another place where they do fit. Yes, there should be a few basic laws as outlined by the constitution, but anything beyond those is definately something that is neighborhood level, not national, or even county level. A police officer present is the defacto presence of coercion by deadly force by the government. I do not call the police unless I feel there was a chance of someone/something needing shot.
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The argument here makes me think of the times I have been wronged by police, once by their action and others by their inaction over a couple of decades. In the case of the action they took, they had to deal as I did with a false accusation and the truth sorted itself out over time. In the cases of inaction, there were limited clues to solve those crimes so indicating there is little they can do about it was probably just the unfortunate truth that I didn't want to hear at the time.
Everybody comes at this with different experiences, but I must come down on the side of GM. The system we have works pretty well. Where I live I can't imagine locking my home or car and our town budgets for roughly half a cop. In the inner city, a house unattended will find its plumbing pipes stolen. We need some presence and availability of law enforcement, but some possibility of crime is better than living under total surveillance and police control.
Municipal budget challenges are one limiting factor on police forces and the rules they operate under are another.
Many of the complaints against police are really complaints against the laws, as Rarick suggests. You may want only deadly crimes dealt in a peaceful area but the Giuliani experience for big cities suggests that when they started writing tickets for littering, loitering and spitting, the murder rate went down.
My main gripes against the strong arm of government are against the other departments like inspectors, regulators, taxing authorities, eminent domain and IRS for examples. Again, the laws we pass set us up for these types of abuse. I have twice this year paid civil fines far greater than punishment for a misdemeanor for the crime of converting vacant property into code compliant affordable housing in the city of Minneapolis. They call it an administrative fee not a fine, but if I don't pay the 'fee' it becomes a much larger fine and ultimately a taking.
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I accept the need for police as a necessary evil. When towns turn into cities there seems to be a transition where that kind of authority is necessary. The town on little house on the prarrie did not need police, but New York city in that same time frame had its chief gang of enforcers that eventyually evolved into the NYPD.
There seems to be something inherent in large cities that overcomes what I regard as the regular human nature concept of respect. You do not deliberately offend or act criminally in smaller towns, because people will know who you are and act appropriately. Suddenly the grocer won't sell you food or othter things, the hardware store won't sell ammo for the gun, your neighbors let you know that you are on your own. In a big city there are so many people that a person can get lost in the crowd, and will only see his circle of friends with any kind of consistancy, this allows for the break down of the shunning priciple and probably encourages the "just take it" impulse.
My problem is with national laws that are most often based on the urban outlook, that is where most of the representatives come from after all. Most laws that may be entirely appropriate for the city, are just wrong in a rural setting. Those range from anti-gun laws to the growing popularity of legislation of "greeness'. In many ways the city raised people running the government have no clue how to really help people in a rural situation that King Charles had a clue about the colonies during the revolutionary war. The constitution is a lot about self government and a little about fitting into a bigger world, the current federal government is a lot about outside government and the bigger world, and very little about letting people find their own solutions.
There in lies the dichotomy that is starting to create rifts and tears. The independant minded farmers and other rural people that need that mindset to survive vs the collective solution and social compliance of the city dweller mindset that works in the city. There are 2 different sets of ethics colliding here where there used to be some flexibility. The government in recent years has been increasingly "centralizing" when a lot of stuff has been trending the other way. The centralizing is causing inflexibility.............
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A very perceptive comment Rarick. It tracks quite closely with a lot of the evolutionary biology/psychology based analysis of Konrad Lorenz (see thread dedicated to EB/EP/ and KL). The human animal evolved in social units where all were known to all, yet in the nano-second of human history that is the city, city dwellers now operate much of their lives in the dynamic of the anonymous horde-- a dynamic for which our evolutionary history leaves us woefully underprepared.
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"When towns turn into cities there seems to be a transition... "
Not just anonymity from size but also from physics we know collisions increase with the square of density. As the density increases, 'bumping into each other' increases exponentially.
The 'smart growth' advocates want us to live closer together while libertarians often prefer a yard, a driveway and a front door that is not shared with the neighbor.
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Are we sleepwalking into a surveillance society?
Although it is undoubtedly useful, personal identity technology could potentially lend itself to the gradual erosion of democracy and support for an authoritarian, protective state.
Personal Identity technology (ID-tech) is the complex of devices and techniques by which the identity of individuals is established and/or verified. It largely consists of biometric systems, that is, automated technical systems that measure physical human characteristics, some of them dynamically and in real time. The biometric device matches the input sample against a stored template, in order to include or exclude an individual from some action or activity. It is used for verifying who you are (with smart card, username or ID number) or identifying who you are. The data so collected could be used for purposes other than those initially intended.
Fingerprint biometrics were first used at the 2004 Olympic Summer Games, Athens. In the USA, Australia, UK, EU and other countries biometrics are being introduced into passport and visa control. For example, citizens of Brazil have their signature, photo, and 10 rolled fingerprints collected by passport requests. There is a very wide variety of uses e.g. in immigration, customs, ATMs, retail, schools, policing, and intelligence.
While ID-Tech has many uses and conveniences it poses risks to privacy, and most significantly is a technology that could lend itself to government tracking and profiling of individuals on a wider than acceptable scale. In a nutshell the convergence and synchronising of of ID-tech capabilities lends itself to the potential for a ‘Panopticon State’, one that has the policing powers to profile any citizen almost continuously and simultaneously in several dimensions of life, anywhere on the globe.
Both physiological and behavioural traits can be measured and recorded by biometrics systems. The former include fingerprinting, face identity, facial thermogram, hand and footprints, iris, retina, ear canal, DNA, and even personal odour and scent. The latter include computer keystroke dynamics, signature and writing, speech, voice (speaker), and gait. We should also note the potential of RFID (radio frequency identification) implants and body scans.
The benefits of biometric systems
Biometric systems have benefits in the prevention and reduction of crime generally, especially fraud and impersonation, and terrorism. They may also help to solve crime, including ‘cold cases’, and stop the evasion of arrest. It is often claimed, and may be true in many instances, that such systems make for an efficient use of resources (creating new demands, however). In the Super Bowl event of 2001 Florida police used the facial recognition software FaceIt to search the crowd for criminals, and found 19 people on arrest warrants. In the case of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann (2007), the UK police asked visitors at the Resort in Portugal in the two weeks prior to child’s disappearance to provide any photographs of passers-by for use in a biometric facial recognition system. Since 2001 a retinal system has helped apprehend thousands of persons re-entering the wealthy UAE with fraudulent travel documents.
How reliable are they?
There are many issues of technical reliability, and these will raise worries about misidentification. A biometric identification system is expected to be universally applicable, whereas some individuals may not qualify e.g. missing limbs, burns, loss of organ, injury-related changes to gait, and cataract. They must be capable of unique identification, whereas there is always some (very small) margin of fuzziness, especially with family relatives and twins. They should be resistant to the ageing of the individual; but faces etc. change with age, illness, and injury and cosmetic surgery. There is also the problem of ‘data collection’ being affected by overload and noise, e.g. in a crowd. The efficiency and effectiveness may be in doubt because there will be thresholds of definition (eg, a face at a distance), too slow a response of the device, poor light, and software deficiencies. Biometric data will ‘ideally’ be correlatable with other individual data, whereas these may not be available or be compatible. There are also issues of standardisation and interoperability.
With all these difficulties, and the inevitable dose of human incompetence, one may give a sigh of relief for the future of individual freedom and privacy. However, great efforts and resources are being put into resolving them. Ultimately, developers of such technologies know that their techniques must be socially acceptable, whereas public may reject. We have recently seen that there have been human rights concerns about airport body scans (admittedly, a detection technology rather than an ID one).
The Hydra Effect
In any case, history has shown that technologies will be implemented, sometimes widely, even when there are known difficulties (as well as difficulties that emerge in practice). In this case a fundamental issue is that the identity of the ‘target’ person may be compromised. There is the impersonation issue: the system depends on the individual who is the subject of the test being correctly identified at original enrolment. If a biometric profile is stored for person ‘A’ then that data becomes definitive even if this person is not in fact A. This is fundamental, and has little to do with how sophisticated the technology is, and yet there is a tendency in some quarters to assume that the technology cannot be wrong. But if the ‘input’ is wrong, then the technology will simply process it efficiently.
There are least another two fundamental problems. Firstly, there is the possibility of someone using as a test input what is in fact a hacked copy of the stored template. (Some suggest a way around this is to technically exclude any absolutely ‘perfect match’.) Secondly, an ID device does not ‘know’ what it is looking at. For example, face recognition systems are fooled with a high-quality photograph of a face instead of a real face, so are unsuitable for unsupervised applications such as door access. There is a similar problem with fingerprints and iris patterns.
There are genuine concerns about the security of storage of biometric data. It should be obvious, but is often forgotten, that a security system is only as trustworthy as the people operating it, from low level operatives to high level authorities. Malicious verifiers may wish to steal templates from the database (although it has been suggested this could discouraged with ‘reverse engineering’ technique). Then there is the possibility of the ‘secondary use’ of biometric data: a user who accesses two systems with the same fingerprint may allow another person to ‘impersonate’ him. Most of these problems, evidently, have to do with human not technological weakness. Technology does not make people better.
You may think that internal hacking is unlikely. Yet, to give one example, in 2007 tens of millions of credit card users were put at risk by financial-transactions company Heartland Payment Systems (USA) when malicious software was installed inside the system.
If dependency on such systems grows then permanent identity loss is not impossible. A system must retain the uniqueness of the trait template unchanged (changed within narrow range), over the lifetime of the individual. This ‘life-time’ property brings a risk. If biometric data obtained by unauthorized users (eg, compromised from a database) then the owner loses control over the data and loses his identity. Lost passwords can be changed, but e.g. if someone’s face is compromised from a database, they cannot cancel it or reissue it. A proposed solution is the ‘cancellable biometrics’ technique which distorts the biometric image before matching. But for every solution there is another problem. A criminal employee could undistort the template with knowledge of the distortion key. If we distrust the employees sufficiently to require a distortion key, why would we trust them with the distortion key?
There is what I call a ‘Hydra Effect’ in technology. In Greek mythology whenever the Hydra beast was decapitated it grew two more heads. Similarly, every technical solution creates at least one more problem, which is often trickier to solve. A technical solution is eventually found at great cost, and then more problems appear. There may well be diminishing returns on the resources being put into this ceaseless round of technical innovations that ultimately cannot overcome the fundamental issue of human weakness and failure.
Can we preserve our privacy?
We may take privacy to be the state of being free from unsanctioned intrusion into one’s personal life. It is a value that is embodied in human rights, national laws and diverse regulations. ID-technology gives rise to the possibility of the misuse (real or perceived) of personal biometric information for gainful intrusion. Examples of known misuses are surveillance videos of vehicle licence plates being used to record license plates to blackmail people, to stalk women and to track estranged spouses. In some cases it has been police officers who have been guilty of these offences.
Fingerprint recognition for the ignition of your car might seem like the latest desirable innovation in hi-tech protection. But one may forget the human factor. In 2005 Malaysian car thieves cut off the finger of the driver of a Mercedes S-Class car so that they could steal his car. If he had not had a sophisticated biometric device in the ignition he would at least still have his finger. In the USA and EU some fear that biometric information can be ‘skimmed’ and sold to criminals to identify individuals for ransom-kidnapping and the like. In even worse scenarios a racist or totalitarian government ( Hitler, Pol Pot, etc.) could use data to determine unwanted traits in humans for population control
The Panopticon state?
One future scenario that does not receive enough serious attention is the convergence of different ID-technologies into one (more or less) interconnected system. Intelligence services world-wide are well on their way. We could already be witnessing an information cascade, held back only by lack of harmonisation, human incompetence and poor communications. Public protest is not yet a major hindrance.
The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived a plan in 1791 for a new kind of prison, the Panopticon, the novelty of which was that any prison could be seen from anywhere at any time. A variety of modern technologies, including those based on biometrics, may be converging towards the possibility of a Panopticon State, in which any citizen can be tracked and a life-profile composed without their ever knowing. Body scans, bank details, credit card trails, Google, RFID, fingerprints, face and iris, recognition, GPS, health records, mobile phone use, bus and train cameras, spy satellites, street cameras, wire taps and now body scans could, in theory, be brought together in various configurations. Perhaps only the political will stands in the way.
Biometric information may be shared or different databases may be networked, eg, telebiometric systems join biometrics with telecommunications. There is the possibility of tracking individuals. For example, security cameras can be linked to a facial recognition system or a public transport system using biometry. At the moment, in most cases the information from different sensors generate differently encrypted outcomes so cannot be compared, but this can be overcome. The unification of different biometric outcomes by means of data exposure or through global or regional standardisation is not impossible. Already there are some public concerns about ‘leakage’ of fingerprint data from schools to health, insurance and other agencies with a discriminatory effect on access to services.
Sir Ken MacDonald QC, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions (2003-08) has said, "We need to take very great care not to fall into a way of life in which freedom's back is broken by the relentless pressure of a security State.” Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner is reported as saying “My anxiety is that we don’t sleepwalk into a surveillance society”. He was thinking mainly of the UK’s National Identity Scheme. These two people are hardly radicals, and know ‘from the inside’ what they are talking about.
We may think the main issue is National ID cards, but they have a lesser role than the database they are linked to, i.e. the National Identity Register. A new law specifies 50 categories of information that the Register can hold on each citizen, including up to 10 fingerprints, digitised facial scan and iris scan, current and past UK and overseas places of residence, throughout their lives and with indices to other Government databases which would allow them to be connected into a personal profile. The legislation also says that any further information can be added. The amount of data which can be recorded on the scheme’s Register is unlimited. Still, the good news is that fingerprints are not yet being taken, and plans to take iris scans have been dropped, although not ruled out.
This is not the place to go into the detail of the scheme but the Home Office forecasts that 265 government departments and as many as 48,000 accredited private sector organisations would have access to the database, and that 163 million identity verifications or more may take place each year. The cost of the scheme is variously put at between 5 and 15 billion pounds over 10 years.
Naturally, the Commission for Racial Equality and ethnic/religious minorities are expressing concerns about discrimination. If one thinks this is far-fetched or alarmist one should recall that in the USA not so long ago the FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (and his vast fingerprint records) pursued not only criminals, but people he chose to classify as "security risks," "subversives," "agitators," "deviants," "black nationalists," and "peaceniks."
Provisions for consent to biometric schemes
Public acceptance of the national ID scheme has been mixed and controversial (but not controversial enough), with diminishing support after reports of the loss of millions of items of public service information in several quarters (See the NGO called “NO2ID”). Meanwhile, some UK parents have been protesting school fingerprinting since 2001. These are used for purposes of registration, truancy control, parental payments, replacements of library or meal cards, and possibly for exam ID.
Protests sometimes take a more colourful form. The Chaos Computer Club of hackers published a fingerprint of the German Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, in its magazine Datenschleuder (March 2008). The magazine included the fingerprint on a film for readers to give them access to whatever the Minister had access to. If they can do it, criminals can do it, and undemocratic governments can do it.
A particular focus for protest in the UK has been school fingerprinting without consent. One surprising facet of this is that the Data Protection Act does not explicitly require schools to gain consent. The Act is, apparently, about information, not images. More research also needs to be given to how the Human Rights Act and the Freedom of Information Act relate to the storage and transmission of ‘data’ which is perhaps not ‘information’ in the sense of text. A democratic future depends on asking many questions that are currently not even being conceived, let alone asked.
Professor Geoffrey Hunt teaches at St Mary's University College in London. This article by Professor Hunt was originally published on the website of BioCentre, a think-tank focusing on emerging technologies and their ethical, social and political implications.
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It might be acceptable IF the ability to "pull the record" was severely hedged with protections, and the record was designed to loop with automatic self destruction on a time frame of a week to month, randomly determined by the machine. People get stupid and if the parties determined "no harm" at the time of the incident, then it should not be a liftime ghost someone has to worry about. The randomness of the erase would "keep honest people honest", and do the same with management.......
Any identification should be by the method evolution gives anyone, Face and Attributes. By attributes would be height, body type, male, female, etc. The deeper, and more intrusive means should require a warrent or subpeona.
The thing with technology is the ability of humankind to hack the system, so the "false positive" issue of Identifying the wrong guy must be addressed and other similar issues of unintended consequences.
All that said, I really do not like the stuff, just a basic reaction.
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http://abcnews.go.com/WN/times-square-bomb-scare-york-authorities-probe-evidence/story?id=10532755&page=2
Authorities were examining security cameras and other evidence to see if they could identify a possible suspect or motive -- and already had located video of the car being driven to the scene.
"Right now, we have no evidence that this was anything but a one-off" attack, Napolitano told "This Week" this morning.
"Tape is being reviewed and additional forensics are being done in addition to that," she added. "Times Square, I think, now is safe."
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I hear they actually caught some frames of a man changing his shirt. Maybe then can send them off to one of the CSI labs for "enhancement."
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Generally, you can't do much with most video footage as fas as enhancement. You end up with bigger pixels, in most cases. However, given the number of various cameras this individual had to pass by, I'm willing to bet we'll have a good idea of what he looks like, if not who he is soon. It may also ID any accomplices, if any.
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I was being tongue in cheek (and probably passive aggressive, too :evil:) Use to run a multimedia lab where the local PD was forever bringing us 96K frames of this and that and asking us to "enhance" it. Can't make data that isn't there, so most "enhancement" is more of a guess than anything you'd want to introduce as evidence. Bleeping CSI, however, has people thinking you can pull that stuff out of any pixel:
http://moronail.net/img/2010_see_if_you_can_enhance_that_license_plate
The passive aggressive part is this surveillance didn't prevent the crime, I'll be surprised if it solves it, and it could muddy the waters like the "white van" did during the DC Sniper's run. Not sure I'd celebrate it just yet.
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If he's arrested before he can build a better bomb, it will prevent a crime and save lives.
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While if all LEOs are chasing shirt changers that aren't the right guy energy is diverted from perhaps more fruitful pursuits. Have a lot of buddies in the trades; they couldn't drive 20 miles in their white panel vans during the DC Sniper's rampage without being pulled over 4 times. Much as you can't pull data that isn't there out of a collection of pixels, I would hope there's not too much law enforcement attention focused on these few frames if other avenues prove more germane.
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Believe me, this is not the only avenue they are looking at. A lot of detective are running down leads from about every conceivable angle aside from this video.
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From the AP:
Investigators were also looking to speak with a man in his 40s videotaped shedding his shirt near the sport utility vehicle where the bomb was found.
The surveillance video, made public late Sunday, shows an unidentified white man apparently in his 40s slipping down Shubert Alley and taking off his shirt, revealing another underneath. In the same clip, he's seen looking back in the direction of the smoking vehicle and furtively putting the first shirt in a bag.
The NYPD and FBI also were examining "hundreds of hours" of security videotape from around Times Square.
Police said the crude gasoline-and-propane bomb could have produced "a significant fireball" and sprayed shrapnel and metal parts with enough force to kill pedestrians and knock out windows. The SUV was parked on one of America's busiest streets, lined with Broadway theaters and restaurants and full of people out on a Saturday night.
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/video/nyc-times-square-car-bomber-surveillance-video-10536898
Thoughts?
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Amateur hour. No diesel, wrong fert, timers and fire crackers to initiate, no redundancy. Hope they sort our who these folks were working for.
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I think GM was asking whether we were glad to have video from a surveillance camera , , ,
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Either/or.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/NEWS/NYPD-London.pdf
Note the last page.
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I've a fair amount of experience with security cams; had footage of mine appear on America's Most Wanted that helped secure arrests and convictions. Cams are a very mixed blessing. You get something redhanded as I did, you still got to match the face to one of the 3 billion plus people crawling the planet. In my case pawned merch narrowed things down to the point that became possible, though the guy we had the most frames of was also very good at changing his appearance so software that matched features had to be employed.
And that's just the glory stuff. To get to that point you have to wade through a lot of data. My system was analog at the time, which meant I had to eyeball each cam in more or less real time. Had frames caught on 5 cams, which means real time x 5. Talk about utterly tedious. Oh wait, did they case the place? We keep 60 days of footage. 5 x 60 days gets you into mind numbing territory. I helped, thank goodness the cops did most the work. We've since gone digital which allows us to use some software cheats and there were some I employed with the analog footage, but this stuff is utter tedium and leads to more blind alleys than it does gotchas. One thief had an odd gait; imagine watching 300 days worth of video looking for someone who walks funny. Just thinking about all that fun makes me want to scream. Very easy to zone out and have to start over again.
I could go on, but my take is the film they got of someone stripping off a shirt won't amount to much. The MSM is vid starved so I think the vid got tossed out as a bone they could replay umpteen times. Hoping something meatier is being held in reserve, but know from hard experience that a fuzzy vid of some random guy does not a closed case make.
Big reorg around work tomorrow that'll have me inheriting headaches. I might be scarce over the next week or so as this stuff sorts out.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050300847_pf.html
Officials increasingly see international link in Times Square bomb attempt
By Spencer S. Hsu, Anne E. Kornblut And Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 3, 2010; 3:52 PM
The failed car bombing in Times Square increasingly appears to have been coordinated by more than one person in a plot with international links, Obama administration officials said Tuesday.
The disclosure, while tentative, came as the White House intensified its focus on the Saturday incident in New York City, in which explosives inside a Nissan Pathfinder were set ablaze but failed to detonate at the tourist-crowded corner of Broadway and 45th Street.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7674080/Two-men-hunted-over-Times-Square-car-bomb.html
Two men hunted over Times Square car bomb
Police investigating a failed attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square are hunting two men filmed acting suspiciously at the scene.
By Tom Leonard in New York
Published: 7:04PM BST 03 May 2010
Link to this video They released security camera footage shot just after the car was abandoned with its engine running and hazard lights flashing.
It showed a white man in his 40s stopping in the street near the car, looking around and taking off his dark shirt, revealing a red one underneath.
Stuffing the shirt into a bag, the man glanced back towards the now smoking car and he walked off in the opposite direction.
Raymond Kelly, the chief of New York's police, said the man was acting in a "furtive" manner.
Investigators were also expected to release another videotape, shot by a tourist, which was expected to show a man running north on Broadway away from the area.
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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/times-square-car-bomber-police-release-video-suspect/story?id=10534834
Persons of interest.
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Let's take this to the Homeland Security thread.
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This has me looking like a Jewish Don King
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8EjQrrsZIU&feature=player_embedded
especially when combined with this:
Bailout Bill Would Require Banks to Track and Report Personal Checking Accounts to Feds
Published on 04-30-2010
It’s amazing to watch the civil libertarians hide when Democrats propose the most sweeping intrusions of privacy in generations. In addition to the litany of bad policies contained in the Dodd Financial Reform bill is this nugget on pages 1039-1040. In short, it extends government reach to every deposit account of every citizen.
Required Acct MonitoringSubtitle G of the Dodd discussion draft bill requires that records be maintained and reported “for each branch, automated teller machine at which deposits are accepted, and other deposit taking service facility with respect to any financial institution, the financial institution shall maintain a record of the number and dollar amounts of deposit accounts of customers.”
What’s worse, banks will be required to submit these records to the new super regulatory agency called the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (page 1041). The CFPA will be allowed to use this information for any purpose “as permitted by law” under CFPA rules—rules set by CFPA themselves.
So, lets get this straight—the law requires banks to snoop on its customers MOST PERSONAL INFORMATION and submit it to another government agency so it can be used anyway the CFPA see’s fit.
Must submit to CFPASo, if the CFPA Czar see’s fit, information about your deposit account activity could be shared with the IRS, immigration officials, state officials, or any other entity that the Administration and their various Czar’s think beneficial.
But CFPA will impact your life even before they give away your personal data. Remember that part of the excuse for including this authority is to make policy recommendations. So, be careful not to run your credit limit too high above the amount of money you are depositing in the bank or the CFPA will know you can’t pay your bills and make the appropriate “policy recommendations”.
This is exactly why conservatives have fought so hard against things like national ID cards—if the government is authorized to collect and utilize data, there is no way to prevent the government as a whole or certain individuals within the government from using the information against the citizens.
But passage of the CFPA will settle the whole ID card thing once and for all. There will be no need for them because if you have a bank account, you already have a number and the CFPA will have it.
The breadth of sweeping new powers given to the federal government by these three pages is astonishing. Yet we have heard nary a peep about this provision.
After capitulation and surrender, Republicans will have a chance to amend the legislation when it comes to the floor of the Senate and protect the private details of your banking account.
But if they don’t, smile the next time you go to the ATM because Big Brother will be watching.
article: http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-8469-0-13-13--.html
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The PA. ad is silly.
The 2nd is a real issue, especially with the costs involved in archiving the data, which we all get to foot the bill for.
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IMHO storage technology is accelerating exponentially and costs are dropping dramatically. No firewall to be found on that front.
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There are still administrative costs related to storage, audits. I know banks already have to hire staff just to meet current financial reporting statutes. In the big picture, the feds or other LE can already pick apart your financial transactions without much effort anyway.
www.fincen.gov
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I think a lot of Libertarians have given up the political fight and are just "shrugging" out of the city. Maybe it is that crucial percentage that allowed the Rebublicans to go Neocon, and the Dems to go progressive.........
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http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/11/a-drug-raid-goes-viral
A Drug Raid Goes Viral
A violent drug raid posted to YouTube catches fire online. But the only thing unusual about the raid is that it was caught on video.
Radley Balko | May 11, 2010
Last week, a Columbia, Missouri, drug raid captured on video went viral. As of this morning, the video had garnered 950,000 views on YouTube. It has lit up message boards, blogs, and discussion groups around the Web, unleashing anger, resentment and even, regrettably, calls for violence against the police officers who conducted the raid. I've been writing about and researching these raids for about five years, including raids that claimed the lives of innocent children, grandmothers, college students, and bystanders. Innocent families have been terrorized by cops who raided on bad information, or who raided the wrong home due to some careless mistake. There's never been a reaction like this one.
But despite all the anger the raid has inspired, the only thing unusual thing here is that the raid was captured on video, and that the video was subsequently released to the press. Everything else was routine. Save for the outrage coming from Columbia residents themselves, therefore, the mass anger directed at the Columbia Police Department over the last week is misdirected. Raids just like the one captured in the video happen 100-150 times every day in America. Those angered by that video should probably look to their own communities. Odds are pretty good that your local police department is doing the same thing.
First, some background on the raid depicted in the video: On February 11, the Columbia, Missouri, police department's SWAT team served a drug warrant at the home of Jonathan Whitworth and Brittany Montgomery. Police say that eight days earlier they had received a tip from a confidential informant that Whitworth had a large supply of marijuana in his home. They say they first conducted a trash pull, and found marijuana residue in the family's garbage. During the raid, police shot and killed the family's pit bull. At least one bullet ricocheted, injuring the family's pet corgi. Whitworth, Montgomery, and their 7-year-old son were at home at the time. The incident was written up in the Columbia Daily Tribune, noted on a few blogs that cover drug policy (including a post I put up here at Reason), and then largely forgotten for several weeks.
On April 28, I received an email from Montgomery. She had seen my post at Reason and read an account of some of my reporting on SWAT teams published in Reader's Digest. She said she was reading to her son in his bedroom at the time of the raid. Her husband had just returned home from work. Police fired on their pets within seconds of entering the home.
"I've never felt so violated or more victimized in my life," Montgomery wrote. "It's absolutely the most helpless and hopeless feeling I could ever imagine. I can't sleep right ... and I am constantly paranoid. It's a horrible feeling ... to lose the safety and security I thought I was entitled to in my own home. Nobody protected us that night, my son and I were locked in the back of a police car for nearly four hours on a school night while they destroyed my home."
According to Montgomery, when the couple's neighbors inquired about the raid, they were told that the SWAT team had merely conducted a drill, and no shots were fired. When neighbors learned from the family that this was a lie, they began writing to the department and the Daily Tribune to demand answers. When the couple discovered the police had videotaped the raid, they requested a copy of the video. Montgomery said in her email that the copy they were initially given had no audio, and the incriminating (to the police) portions of the video had been removed.
On February 23, the Daily Tribune published its first story on the raid. The paper made its own request for the SWAT video, which the police department initially denied. On April 20, Jonathan Whitworth pleaded guilty to a single charge of possession of drug paraphernalia. He wasn't even charged for the minor amount of marijuana in his home (marijuana for personal use has been decriminalized in Columbia). He was issued a $300 fine. On April 27, the Daily Tribune made a formal request for the video, which it received on April 30, with full audio and with no visuals removed. The paper posted the video with an accompanying article on May 3. On May 5, I posted it here at Reason, and the video went viral.
The police department has since conceded it was unaware that there were pets or a child in the home at the time of the raid. A spokesman for the Columbia Police Department initially said police had to conduct the raid immediately before the drug supply could be moved, a statement later shown to be false when police revealed the raid was conducted more than a week after the initial tip.
According to surveys of police departments conducted by University of Eastern Kentucky criminologist Peter Kraska, we've seen about a 1,500 percent increase in SWAT deployments in this country since the early 1980s. The vast majority of that increase has been to serve search warrants on people suspected of nonviolent drug crimes. SWAT teams are inherently violent. In some ways they're an infliction of punishment before conviction. This is why they should only be used in situations where the suspect presents an immediate threat to others. In that case, SWAT teams use violence to defuse an already violent situation. When they're used to serve drug warrants for consensual crimes, however, SWAT tactics create violence where no violence was present before. Even when everything goes right in such a raid, breaking into the home of someone merely suspected of a nonviolent, consensual crime is an inappropriate use of force in a free society.
The overwhelmingly negative reaction to the video is interesting. Clearly, a very large majority of the people who have seen it are disturbed by it. But this has been going on for 30 years. We've reached the point where police have no qualms about a using heavily armed police force trained in military tactics to serve a search warrant on a suspected nonviolent marijuana offender. And we didn't get here by accident. The war on drugs has been escalating and militarizing for a generation. What's most disturbing about that video isn't the violence depicted in it, but that such violence has become routine.
As horrifying as the video from Columbia, Missouri, is, no human beings were killed. The police got the correct address, and they found the man they were looking for. In many other cases, such raids transpire based on little more than a tip from an anonymous or confidential informant. Nor is it unusual for raids just as violent as the one depicted in the video to turn up little in the way of drugs or weapons. (Whitworth wasn't exactly an outstanding citizen—he had a prior drug and DWI conviction. But he had no history of violence, and there were no weapons in the home.) Surveys conducted by newspapers around the country after one of these raids goes bad have found that police only find weapons of any kind somewhere between 10-20 percent of the time. The percentage of raids that turn up a significant amount of drugs tends to vary, but a large percentage only result in misdemeanor charges at worst.
Shooting the family's dogs isn't unusual, either. To be fair, that's in part because some drug dealers do in fact obtain vicious dogs to guard their supply. But there are other, safer ways to deal with these dogs than shooting them. In the Columbia case, a bullet fired at one dog ricocheted and struck another dog. The bullet could just as easily have struck a person. In the case of Tarika Wilson, a Lima, Ohio, SWAT officer mistook the sounds of a colleague shooting a drug dealer's dogs for hostile gunfire. He then opened fire into a bedroom, killing a 23-year-old mother and shooting the hand off of the one-year-old child in her arms.
The Columbia raid wasn't even a "no-knock" raid. The police clearly announced themselves before entering. The Supreme Court has ruled that police must knock and announce themselves before entering a home to serve a search warrant. If they want to enter without knocking, they have to show specific evidence that the suspect could be dangerous or is likely to dispose of contraband if police abide by the knock-and-announce rule. As is evident in the Columbia video, from the perspective of the people inside the home that requirement is largely ceremonial. If you were in a backroom of that house, or asleep, it isn't at all difficult to see how you'd have no idea if the armed men in your home were police officers. The first sounds you heard would have been gunfire.
But because this was a knock-and-announce raid, the police didn't need to show that Whitworth had a violent background or may have had guns in the home to use the violent tactics in the video. They didn't need to show that Whitworth posed any sort of threat at all, other than the fact he was suspected of dealing marijuana. Though SWAT teams are frequently defended as necessary tools reserved for the most dangerous of drug offenders, the reality is that in many communities, all search warrants are served with forced entry and paramilitary tactics.
The militarization of America's police departments has taken place over a generation, due to a number of bad policy decisions from politicians and government officials, ranging from federal grants for drug fighting to a Pentagon giveaway program that makes military equipment available to local police departments for free or at steep discounts. Mostly, though, it's due to the ill-considered "war" imagery our politicians continue to invoke when they refer to drug prohibition. Repeat the mantra that we're at war with illicit drugs often enough, and the cops on the front lines of that war will naturally begin to think of themselves as soldiers. And that's particularly true when you outfit them in war equipment, weaponry, and armor. This is dangerous, because the objectives of cops and soldiers are very different. One is charged with annihilating a foreign enemy. The other is charged with keeping the peace.
Soon enough, our police officers begin to see drug suspects not as American citizens with constitutional rights, but as enemy combatants. Pets, bystanders, and innocents caught in the crossfire can be dismissed as regrettable but inevitable collateral damage, just as we do with collateral damage in actual wars. This is how we get images like those depicted in the video.
It's heartening that nearly a million people have now seen the Columbia video. But it needs some context. The officers in that video aren't rogue cops. They're no different than other SWAT teams across the country. The raid itself is no different from the tens of thousands of drug raids carried out each year in the U.S. If the video is going to effect any change, the Internet anger directed at the Columbia Police Department needs to be redirected to America's drug policy in general. Calling for the heads of the Columbia SWAT team isn't going to stop these raids. Calling for the heads of the politicians who defend these tactics and promote a "war on drugs" that's become all too literal—that just might.
Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.
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that is the point that needs to be made- these raids are happening for realtively minor crimes. There was one last year that was for an alleged Xbox theft, and several others made based on unverified informant statements. You add these 3 factors up and there is a shift to what is increasingly looking like punative raids to encourage the others.........
Even smaller departments that do not need a swat team are getting them, which is creating a bad trend towards a police state, once they have a team the start finding uses for it.......
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Drug dealers present potentially serious threats. Using a tactical team is entirely reasonable to serve a search warrant. As usual, Radly Balko fills his writing with misinformation, if not outright lies.
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http://www.shouselaw.com/search-warrants.html
Although the above is Cali. specific, most all of applies to other states as well.
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http://www.fletc.gov/training/programs/legal-division/podcasts/4th-amendment-roadmap-podcasts/4th-amendment-transcripts/search-warrants-podcast-transcript.html
Search Warrants (podcast transcript)Miller: We’re back. This is Tim Miller and Jennifer Solari. We’re making some progress don’t you think, Jenna?
Solari: I think so.
Miller: Ah, we’ve explained that a government intrusion into a place where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy triggers the 4th Amendment, and that once triggered, the search has to be reasonable and to be reasonable the courts are typically going to require probable cause supporting a warrant. Now Jenna you did an excellent job explaining probable cause.
Solari: Thanks.
Miller: Now I’m going to ask what’s a search warrant?
Solari: In a nut shell, it’s judicial permission to search a particular place for specific evidence of a crime.
Miller: Who can issue one?
Solari: Federal judges or state court judges of record, as long as they’re neutral and detached. And, when I say neutral and detached, I mean they’re just not partial to either side.
Federal judges obviously can issue warrants and there are magistrate judges, district court judges, appellate court judges and of course we have justices of the Supreme Court. I really don’t envision too many agents knocking on the doors of the Supreme Court to get a warrant. For the most part, they’re going to be dealing with federal magistrate judges and as I stated state court judges of record can also issue warrants.
I’m doubt a whole lot of federal agents use state court judges of record, but I would imagine that it probably comes into play when we have people, say working for Bureau of Land Management, where they may be a single agent by him or herself, way out in the wilderness, and they just don’t have easy access to a federal court. Whether a court is a court of record, a state court of record, is determined by state law, but an essential feature of that is a permanent record - a record of proceedings be kept and be made in that state court. That’s what makes it a court of record.
Miller: Sounds to me like most federal agents are going to be going before federal judges. Do you agree?
Solari: That’s right and for the most part; it’s going to be a magistrate court judge.
Miller: Federal magistrate?
Solari: Yes.
Miller: Do the judges have any kind of jurisdictional limits?
Solari: Yes; since federal search warrants can be issued by federal judges, or again from a judge in the state court of record. They’re issued to search for and seize a person or property located within that judge’s district. So, with a few limited exceptions, the person to be searched, or the place to be searched has to be found within that judge’s district.
Miller: What district does Georgia fall into?
Solari: First, federal districts don’t cross state lines. Each state consists of one or more districts. Kansas is only a single district. Georgia has three districts - the Southern, Middle and Northern Districts of Georgia.
Miller: Suppose an agent wanted to search a house here in Brunswick, Georgia; where would the agent go for a search warrant?
Solari: Well, since Brunswick is in the Southern District of Georgia, the agent would go to a federal magistrate within the Southern District.
Miller: Makes sense.
Solari: Mmmhmm
Miller: What if the person or thing to be searched moved outside of the district before the search?
Solari: Well as long as the place to be searched is within the judge’s district when the warrant’s issued, the warrant can still be executed outside the district if that item or place happens to move.
Miller: Are there any exceptions to these jurisdiction requirements?
Solari: A couple. Nation wide warrants are authorized in certain cases. Say for instance terrorist activities occur within a certain district; the judge in that district can issue a warrant that’s good in any other district, as long as some of those terrorist activities took place in that judge’s district. Also, in cases of stored electronic communications, nation wide search warrants are possible by a judge with jurisdiction over the offense that’s involved.
Miller: Now we talked about this before when we were talking about probable cause; but, how does an agent get a search warrant?
Solari: With a search warrant application; and, again that application consists of three primary pieces of information. The agent has to set forth where he or she wants to search. We have to particularly describe the place to be searched to a reasonable certainty.
The agent has to set forth what he wants to search for. Again, with particularity so we know what the agent’s authorized to search for and seize.
And, of course, probable cause. This is the meat of the application describing the facts that support probable cause. It shows that the things to be searched for are located in the place to be searched.
Miller: Now let’s, let’s talk a little bit about each of these three parts. How does the agent describe the place to be searched?
Solari: Well, first let’s talk about where the requirement comes from. The 4th Amendment actually states that no warrant shall issue without a particular description describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. So agents have to describe the place with reasonable certainty. I’d like to explain that. Let’s say, someone’s not involved in your operation at all. You’re running a case and you’ve obtained a warrant from the court, but for some reason you and your team can’t execute it that day. You need someone else to come in and do it for you. That person should be able to pick up your warrant and based on your description of that place, they should be able to get to that place and identify it to a reasonable certainty - so they know they’re at the right place when they execute that warrant.
Miller: So somebody’s given directions to a party before, he ought to accomplish this task. Don’t you think?
Solari: I think so.
Miller: What can agents search for?
Solari: Well you can find that list in Federal Rules of Criminal Procedures 41C. There’s a laundry list of things like evidence of a crime, and that seems like it includes just about anything, but let me give you a for instance.
Bloody clothes would be evidence of a crime if you suspect someone of an assault, rape, or murder. We can also search for contraband and by that, I mean stuff that’s illegal to possess, like drugs, explosives, or child pornography; just unlawful to possess in of themselves. We can search for fruits of a crime, so the fruits of a larceny maybe a stolen t.v. set or something else that was stole from a premises. We can search for instruments of crime, things that were used in the offense, like the gun used in the bank robbery, or we can search for a person to be arrested or a person who is being illegally held.
Miller: I guess that agents also have to be pretty careful about how they describe those things, don’t they?
Solari: Yes. Again, the 4th Amendment requires that the things to be seized be described with particularity, which makes sense. The particularity requirement makes sure that a search is confined in its scope to the particular described evidence that relates to the crime for which the agent demonstrated probable cause. So if the agent’s looking for contraband, then he has to tell the magistrate what kind of contraband You can’t just say contraband or items illegally possessed. You have to be specific and say for instance marijuana. If the agent is looking for a stolen TV set, or the gun that was used in the robbery, he has to describe those items and if possible give the make, model or even a serial number if one is available.
Miller: Now the third piece of this puzzle is that probable cause affidavit. Now we discussed this a little bit earlier when we talked about probable cause. Ah, can you reiterate a little bit?
Solari: Sure. The affidavit establishes, or should establish a nexus between those items you’re looking for - the evidence you’re seeking - and the place that you want to search. The standard proof again is probable cause - facts that would lead a person of reasonable caution to believe that that search is going to reveal specific evidence of the crime that you suspect. So, factors to consider in determining whether you satisfied that nexus requirement would be direct observations.
Suppose an informant with a reliable track record tells you that he saw narcotics in the suspect’s home. So there we have a nexus between possession of illegal narcotics and the suspect’s home. The nature of the crime and the items sought.
We talked before about the sale of counterfeit currency. It’s only natural to think that if a person has something of high value, they are probably going to secure it in their home. Sometimes agents have to rely on inferences rather than a direct observation. Umm and we have to be mindful also so that the information can’t be stale, and this probably comes into play most often with drug offenses.
If your informant came to you and said he saw narcotic in the suspects home, the very next question you probably need to ask is “when?.” If this was six months ago, narcotics might not be there any longer. The information is stale. The age of the information is going to be a critical factor in determining probable cause, depending on the item that you’re looking for.
Miller: Okay, thanks. I tell ya, let’s take a break and when we come back, we’ll talk about how these warrants must be executed. You know like who can execute them, the method of entry, locations that can be searched, durations of search, and the need to inventory what’s taken.
Solari: All right.
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John Stossel - A Cops License to Steal
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zQxI0aMOy0[/youtube]
To me Private property is the foundation this country is built on and should be held almost sacred in nature.
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I don't mind the seizure of assets, but it should only happen after a conviction. It should never happen with charges not being filed.
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http://www.fletc.gov/training/programs/legal-division/podcasts/4th-amendment-roadmap-podcasts/4th-amendment-transcripts/execution-of-a-search-warrant-i.html
http://www.fletc.gov/training/programs/legal-division/podcasts/4th-amendment-roadmap-podcasts/4th-amendment-transcripts/execution-of-a-search-warrant-ii-podcast-transcript.html
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Drug dealers present potentially serious threats. Using a tactical team is entirely reasonable to serve a search warrant. As usual, Radly Balko fills his writing with misinformation, if not outright lies.
Wasn't aware that dealable amounts of drugs were found. Balko certainly isn't the the only source for this story and the facts aren't in dispute: off an informants tip SWAT swarmed a family's house and shot their dogs in front of their child. This is not an uncommon set of circumstances, what makes this case unique is that there is a video of it that allows American citizens to draw their own conclusions about the efficacy of SWAT tactics v. an American family and a minuscule amount of pot. The past 3 presidents, as the article mentioned, partook of these small quantities; George Washington's estate records hemp being grown. How 'bout we error on the side of the Bill of Rights for a while and quit scaring the sh!t out of families and killing their dogs over laughable amounts of dope claimed by dubious informants?
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It appears that a dealable amount wasn't found, however this does not mean that they were not there earlier. Dealer implies that the drugs are being sold. A search warrant was issued by a judge, who obviously found there was probable cause to believe there was evidence of a crime to be seized at the residence. Pardon the officers serving a search warrant for not wanting to be a pit bull's chew toy. Shooting an aggressive dog is quite reasonable and to be expected under those circumstances.
So, when G. Washington grew hemp, was it legal? Yes.
Has any court anywhere ruled that drug laws are unconstitutional? No.
Can you offer any evidence that the search warrant in Radly Balko's little propaganda piece was unlawful or unconstitutional? You may not like drug laws or tactical teams and search warrants, but the general public does, so I guess you'll just have to adjust to the concept.
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I think the concept of intercepting everyone's electronic correspondences is fundamentally un-American. I think the idea of police forces kicking in citizens doors more than 100 times a day in the name of the WOD is fundamentally un-American. The Founders were quite clear in their feelings on these matters--see the Federalist Papers et al--and I so have little sympathy for arguments that go "that's the way it is and a judge signed the paper so deal with it." Something every bit as wrong as BHO's appropriation of the healthcare system has occurred, and if you are unable to see it no amount of keyboarding on my end is going to change that.
Do you have a source for your ad hominem attacks on Balko? His pieces appear well documented, his stats are sourced, the incidents he speaks to are easily found; is there some piece of information out there I'm missing that would taint him as a source? I've already mentioned the case of the local Mayor who had his two friendly, fleeing dogs shot by SWAT as part of an abject intelligence failure and raid; the viral nature of the video certainly ought to give you an idea what American citizens think of this use of force, and if these raids are indeed occurring at a rate of up to 150 per day isn't it appropriate for citizens to weigh the benefits and costs and then speak accordingly? Or is there nothing to see here and we should just move along and perhaps reinforce our doors?
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I think the concept of intercepting everyone's electronic correspondences is fundamentally un-American. I think the idea of police forces kicking in citizens doors more than 100 times a day in the name of the WOD is fundamentally un-American.
**These are your opinions, however you are in the minority.**
The Founders were quite clear in their feelings on these matters--see the Federalist Papers et al--and I so have little sympathy for arguments that go "that's the way it is and a judge signed the paper so deal with it."
**THe 4th amd. says No UNREASONABLE search and seizure, not No search and seizure. **
Something every bit as wrong as BHO's appropriation of the healthcare system has occurred, and if you are unable to see it no amount of keyboarding on my end is going to change that.
Do you have a source for your ad hominem attacks on Balko? His pieces appear well documented, his stats are sourced, the incidents he speaks to are easily found; is there some piece of information out there I'm missing that would taint him as a source? I've already mentioned the case of the local Mayor who had his two friendly, fleeing dogs shot by SWAT as part of an abject intelligence failure and raid; the viral nature of the video certainly ought to give you an idea what American citizens think of this use of force, and if these raids are indeed occurring at a rate of up to 150 per day isn't it appropriate for citizens to weigh the benefits and costs and then speak accordingly? Or is there nothing to see here and we should just move along and perhaps reinforce our doors?
I've never seen anything from Balko that wasn't hysterical misinformation. Oh my, the widdle puppies got shot! Sad eyes...... :cry:
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"In many other cases, such raids transpire based on little more than a tip from an anonymous or confidential informant."
Ok, first of all, there is a big difference between an anonymous and a confidential informant. I'm sure Mr. Balko understands the difference, but he doesn't want the truth to get in the way of stirring the the uninformed into a hysterical froth.
I know that reading all the real case law and police procedure I post isn't nearly as satisfying as getting upset that the hemp that our first president grew is now geting sad-faced doggies shot, but if you want to make a reasoned arguement you're going to have to employ logic rather than waving bloody dog collars.
Ok good info on CIs: http://www.lawofficer.com/news-and-articles/articles/lom/0311/establishing_informant_reliability.html
Now on using anonymous informant for a search warrant: http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=172539
Intended for police training, this report summarizes the facts and reasoning that led to an appellate court decision that a court was not justified in issuing a search warrant based solely on information provided by an anonymous informant to a law enforcement officer.
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Balko: ad hominem is all that's needed, check.
Dogs: tough sh!t, check.
I think the concept of intercepting everyone's electronic correspondences is fundamentally un-American. I think the idea of police forces kicking in citizens doors more than 100 times a day in the name of the WOD is fundamentally un-American.
**These are your opinions, however you are in the minority.**
You aren't paying attention. Finally a video of one of these grossly counterproductive raids emerges and the reaction clearly leaves your side of the argument in the minority. I say film 'em all and then broadcast 'em on Spike. Call the program "Dope Raids." Betcha Americans only to to see so many grannies get their heads kneeled on before the hue and cry cuts this stupidity by 75 percent.
I've mentioned the mayor raided in the DC area a couple time with scant response. Are you defending that dog shoot, grandma head kneeling too? Are only the raids launched clearly in error and the ones caught on video questionable, or is perhaps the percentage higher than the few we actually have documentation for?
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So exactly what is your policy suggestion for search warrants?
I'll bet a keg of Guinness that next year and the year after that tactical teams are still shooting the occasional dog and even kicking in the wrong door every so often to serve search warrant.
I quoted Radly Balko from the article you posted and then showed how he deliberately placed confidential informant in with anonymous informant for propaganda purposes. Either that, of he knows less on the topic than anyone who read this thread and half-way paid attention. Either scenario does not lend credibility to his writing on the topic. Call that an ad hominem if you want.
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"I don't mind the seizure of assets, but it should only happen after a conviction. It should never happen with charges not being filed."
AMEN!!! And, to be perfectly clear, nor should it happen with only charges filed.
As for my recommended search warrant policy, it would start by dramatically limiting or ending the WOD. I suppose that one can make a case that certain drugs physiologically bypass free will, hence personal responsibility, but that really cannot be said of pot.
IMHO the pot prohibitions violate our 9th Amendment rights to pursue happiness as we see fit and as such should be voided by the Supreme Court. This would make for a lot less door kicking.
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I'll never say never, but it's very doubtful that any search warrants are being issued/served anywhere for personal use quantities of marijuana. I'd also note that I doubt very many, if any originalist scholars would interpret the 9th to mean that weed smoking was an inherent right.
The WOD will continue until you see a serious shift in numbers from what this polling says: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002941-503544.html
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Weed was legal until 1936, yes?
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Okay, so you've dismissed the whole of Balko's work because of some confidential informant/anonymous informant verbiage issue. Think his work is sourced and so stands on it's own despite any semantic dispute. Yes he takes a strong Libertarian stand every bit as ardent as your Authoritarian stand. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but I find value in the data he presents.
I've rolled/sparred with a lot of cops in my martial training. About 80 plus percent have been clowns who thought their innate authority should somehow impact my offense. Few of 'em lasted in class any longer than any other of the testosterone addled punks we'd have come through class.
I've shot with a lot of cops. About 80 percent plus have been clowns who have no business unholstering a weapon in a violent encounter. None have proved any more educable than the MA folks noted above.
I volunteer at the local police academy as a role player. About 80 percent of the candidates I've dealt with have no business being cops. Their takedowns are laughable, their cuff use sucks after 12 weeks of training, their baton skills would leave a Filipino in hysterics. And so on.
Now I'm willing to cede that you are not a member of that 80 percent, but those guys get in, move up the ranks, and if they are particularly good at scenting the political winds and tonguing a$$ they become command staff where budgets are made or broken off what you confiscate, as the feds shower them with shiny new boomsticks and armored toys, while the WOD turns a huge swath of otherwise average citizens into fodder for confiscations, high profile raids, and successful arrest stats. And amid these buffoons showered with perverse incentives we are supposed to believe all but the rare raid where there happens to be a non-PD controlled source of information available are good? I don't buy it.
Here's one that happened earlier this week, sending a granny to the hospital with a coronary:
WSB News
Woman Hospitalized Following Botched Raid
By Jon Lewis @ May 13, 2010 6:52 AM Permalink | Comments (30)
(WSB Radio) An elderly Polk County woman is hospitalized in critical condition after suffering a heart attack when drug agents swarm the wrong house. Machelle Holl tells WSB her 76-year-old mother, Helen Pruett, who lives alone, was at home when nearly a dozen local and federal agents swarmed her house, thinking they were about to arrest suspected drug dealers.
"She was at home and a bang came on the back door and she went to the door and by the time she got to the back door, someone was banging on the front door and then they were banging on her kitchen window saying police, police," said Holl.
Holl says her house was surrounded and she was scared to open the door. When the Polk County Police Chief finally convinced her she was safe, she let them in.
"They never served her with a warrant. At that point, she said the phones were ringing with the other men that were in the yard and they realized that it was the wrong address," said Holl.
Chief Kenny Dodd says they realized the subject they were looking for was not there.
"She made us aware that she was having chest pains and we got her medical attention. I stayed with her and kept her calm and talked with her, monitored her vital signs until the ambulance arrived," said Dodd.
"My mother has had a heart attack. She has had congestive heart failure and she is in ICU at the moment. She is not good condition and her heart is working only 35 percent," said Holl.
Holl admits that her mother has had three heart attacks but has been doing well for the past couple of years.
"She was traumatized. Even the doctor said this is what happens when something traumatic happens. He said it's usually like a death in the family or something like that just absolutely scares them half to death, and that is what has happened," said Holl.
Police say they have had her mother's home under surveillance for two years.
Holl says if that's true, how could police get the wrong address?
"We have just found out from a neighbor that they (police) went into some other elderly woman's home who was on oxygen and took her oxygen off of her and scared her half to death," said Holl.
Holl remembers the Kathyrn Johnston, the elderly woman shot to death in a botched drug raid in Atlanta, and thinks thinks this kind of thing happens too often.
"They have totally made a really bad mistake. You would think that with the officers and the SWAT team and the DEA they would make sure that all of their I's are dotted, all of their T's are crossed before they go bursting into someone's home like that," said Holl.
Dodd says he has gone to the hospital to check on Pruett and apologize to the family for what has happened.
Police did end up making seven drug arrests relating to the two year investigation, but the DEA is investigating to see how this mix-up happened.
Categories:local
http://wsbradio.com/localnews/2010/05/woman-hospitalized-following-b.html
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Okay, so you've dismissed the whole of Balko's work because of some confidential informant/anonymous informant verbiage issue. Think his work is sourced and so stands on it's own despite any semantic dispute. Yes he takes a strong Libertarian stand every bit as ardent as your Authoritarian stand. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but I find value in the data he presents.
**The law is all about the specific use of words with specific definitions. When alarmists such as Balko misinform the public with the idea that a single phone call from an unidentifed person can cause a search warrant to get issued, it's untrue and damaging to both law enforcement and the public. He is the Al Gore of this topic with an agenda that won't let the facts get in the way of emotional propaganda.**
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Valid points, yet so too is the point that cavalier responses to grannies being given heart attacks and family pets being shot is also not good for law enforcement's rep.
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There is nothing cavalier in my response, just a statement of fact. Just as innocents and friendlies die of "friendly fire" in combat. As an example, no one bust their hump to become a military aviator just so years down the line, they can accidentally drop a bomb on troops they are trying to support in a firefight with the enemy. I remember seeing footage from Desert Storm where If I recall correctly, a Apache crew chewed up what they thought was a column of Iraqi armor, just to find out they were Bradley fighting vehicles filled with our troops. I recall the pilot of the helo saying "Oh god" as the vehicles burned. Can you imagine living with that? Do you think cops want to kick in doors in the wrong house and give an elderly woman a heart attack? Do you think there are no consequences for these officers, both formal and informal?
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If you read my post again I think you will see that there was no suggestion whatsoeverthat those who make mistakes take it any less lightly than the good human beings that they are. Rather, the aspersion was on your response here :-D Humorous reparatee aside, part of the calculus needs to be that such things do happen and need to be weighed with respect for their true meaning and value.
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I can assure you that most everyone in law enforcement spends a huge amount of time and energy worrying about the civil and criminal liabilities that come with the job. The vast majority of people that get into this job do it to do the right thing. We do what we do because we want to get the job done and go home at the end of the shift in the same condition we reported for duty in. I have been injured in the line of duty more than once and as I type this I have fresh, open wounds obtained in a struggle that wasn't going to end with us being friends at the end of the day.
I don't want to shoot someone's pet, but I don't want to be someone's pet's chew toy even more. When I first pinned on a badge at 22, I wanted action. Now, I just want to make sure that me and everyone I'm responsible for goes home safe, with as little drama and paperwork as possible.
No one in their right mind says "I want to go out and fcukup so profoundly that I get IA'ed, named in hostile press reports, sued and potentially investigated and prosecuted at the state and local levels.
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Understood and agreed! , , , and not the point as far as I am concerned. You asked what my suggestions were to decrease these tragedies and invasions of the sanctity of the homes of innocent Americans and I responded by suggesting that we dramatically curtail the WOD.
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And unless/until the general public changes it's collective mind on the topic, the WOD will continue. Even if every drug became legal, there would still be drug enforcement, just as there is still enforcement of laws related to alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals.
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Of course! It is simply that there would be less of it! With less profit in crime, criminals would become less violent, our police's jobs less dangerous, less doors would be kicked in by accident, less grannies with heart attacks, less puppies with sad eyes getting shot, etc etc etc.
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I would rather move toward decriminalization than legalization. What you self-grow and self-consume on your own property would already be legal if the constitution was interpreted with any meaning or consistency. As much as I want to move with you in a libertarian direction, I already don't appreciate Viagra/Cialis commercials during prime-time family television much less want to see the beginning of ad agencies glamorizing pot. I am not anti-pot but don't have any desire to see it more out in the open nor to have government expanded to take over the control and distribution, and don't kid yourself - they would. (IMHO)
I assume you would look at cocaine, crack, meth, the date rape drug and hard narcotics differently, but also I have seen pot over-use mess up plenty of people's lives. It comes down to what is government's role when some can enjoy it for relaxation and for others it becomes an obsession if not an addiction.
I remember the story about the lab mouse given one dispenser of cocaine and one of food, then he starved to death based on his choices. Also the story of the pot addicts who held up the bakery but forgot to empty the register - but i digress.
If we wanted to move this large ship in a gradually more libertarian direction there are a lot of other less controversial steps we could take first before drug legalization. Legalizing the lemonade stand would be a start; it violates literally dozens of ordinances in most municipalities. Minneapolis shut down a church-based clothing shelf right before Christmas one cold winter for license and zoning violations. A landlord with a PhD in EE can't change his own smoke detector without a contractor license and an informed patient can't authorize their own pain remedy.
The bulk of street drug abuse in my observation is tied to our welfare system. Generalizing a bit about the inner city, but the breadwinner of the family is the woman who can have children and qualify for increasing amounts of assistance leaving the male not needed for support and free to pursue other interests. If we cleaned up the free lunch / free ride from within our public system and forced the able minded and able bodied to self-support, they might traffic less and indulge more responsiblibly with their own hard earned money and their own need to get up and be sharp the next morning.
The war on drugs was a failure, okay, so we go back to more traditional methods like re-evaluating penalties and arresting and prosecuting only after evidence of a crime has come to the attention of law enforcement.
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An AP piece:
AP IMPACT: US drug war has met none of its goals
By MARTHA MENDOZA (AP) – 3 days ago
MEXICO CITY — After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.
"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."
This week President Obama promised to "reduce drug use and the great damage it causes" with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.
Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.
Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for the spending to match the rhetoric.
"Nothing happens overnight," he said. "We've never worked the drug problem holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction."
His predecessor, John P. Walters, takes issue with that.
Walters insists society would be far worse today if there had been no War on Drugs. Drug abuse peaked nationally in 1979 and, despite fluctuations, remains below those levels, he says. Judging the drug war is complicated: Records indicate marijuana and prescription drug abuse are climbing, while cocaine use is way down. Seizures are up, but so is availability.
"To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven't made any difference is ridiculous," Walters said. "It destroys everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."
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In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.
"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive."
His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation.
Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:
_ $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.
_ $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
_ $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
_ $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
_ $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.
At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" — cost the United States $215 billion a year.
Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.
"Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use," Miron said, "but it's costing the public a fortune."
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From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether law enforcement — no matter how well funded and well trained — could ever defeat the drug problem.
Then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had his doubts, has since watched his worst fears come to pass.
"Look what happened. It's an ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars. It has loaded our jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Colombia," he said.
In 1970, proponents said beefed-up law enforcement could effectively seal the southern U.S. border and stop drugs from coming in. Since then, the U.S. used patrols, checkpoints, sniffer dogs, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, drone aircraft — and even put up more than 1,000 miles of steel beam, concrete walls and heavy mesh stretching from California to Texas.
None of that has stopped the drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy says about 330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine are sold in the United States every year — almost all of it brought in across the borders. Even more marijuana is sold, but it's hard to know how much of that is grown domestically, including vast fields run by Mexican drug cartels in U.S. national parks.
The dealers who are caught have overwhelmed justice systems in the United States and elsewhere. U.S. prosecutors declined to file charges in 7,482 drug cases last year, most because they simply didn't have the time. That's about one out of every four drug cases.
The United States has in recent years rounded up thousands of suspected associates of Mexican drug gangs, then turned some of the cases over to local prosecutors who can't make the charges stick for lack of evidence. The suspects are then sometimes released, deported or acquitted. The U.S. Justice Department doesn't even keep track of what happens to all of them.
In Mexico, traffickers exploit a broken justice system. Investigators often fail to collect convincing evidence — and are sometimes assassinated when they do. Confessions are beaten out of suspects by frustrated, underpaid police. Judges who no longer turn a blind eye to such abuse release the suspects in exasperation.
In prison, in the U.S. or Mexico, traffickers continue to operate, ordering assassinations and arranging distribution of their product even from solitary confinement in Texas and California. In Mexico, prisoners can sometimes even buy their way out.
The violence spans Mexico. In Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of drug violence in Mexico, 2,600 people were killed last year in cartel-related violence, making the city of 1 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, one of the world's deadliest. Not a single person was prosecuted for homicide related to organized crime.
And then there's the money.
The $320 billion annual global drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all commerce on the planet.
A full 10 percent of Mexico's economy is built on drug proceeds — $25 billion smuggled in from the United States every year, of which 25 cents of each $100 smuggled is seized at the border. Thus there's no incentive for the kind of financial reform that could tame the cartels.
"For every drug dealer you put in jail or kill, there's a line up to replace him because the money is just so good," says Walter McCay, who heads the non-profit Center for Professional Police Certification in Mexico City.
McCay is one of the 13,000 members of Medford, Mass.-based Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who want to legalize and regulate all drugs.
A decade ago, no politician who wanted to keep his job would breathe a word about legalization, but a consensus is growing across the country that at least marijuana will someday be regulated and sold like tobacco and alcohol.
California voters decide in November whether to legalize marijuana, and South Dakota will vote this fall on whether to allow medical uses of marijuana, already permitted in California and 13 other states. The Obama administration says it won't target marijuana dispensaries if they comply with state laws.
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Mexican President Felipe Calderon says if America wants to fix the drug problem, it needs to do something about Americans' unquenching thirst for illegal drugs.
Kerlikowske agrees, and Obama has committed to doing just that.
And yet both countries continue to spend the bulk of their drug budgets on law enforcement rather than treatment and prevention.
"President Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the non-profit Drug Policy Alliance. "This despite Obama's statements on the campaign trail that drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue."
Obama is requesting a record $15.5 billion for the drug war for 2011, about two thirds of it for law enforcement at the front lines of the battle: police, military and border patrol agents struggling to seize drugs and arrest traffickers and users.
About $5.6 billion would be spent on prevention and treatment.
"For the first time ever, the nation has before it an administration that views the drug issue first and foremost through the lens of the public health mandate," said economist and drug policy expert John Carnevale, who served three administrations and four drug czars. "Yet ... it appears that this historic policy stride has some problems with its supporting budget."
Carnevale said the administration continues to substantially over-allocate funds to areas that research shows are least effective — interdiction and source-country programs — while under-allocating funds for treatment and prevention.
Kerlikowske, who wishes people would stop calling it a "war" on drugs, frequently talks about one of the most valuable tools they've found, in which doctors screen for drug abuse during routine medical examinations. That program would get a mere $7.2 million under Obama's budget.
"People will say that's not enough. They'll say the drug budget hasn't shifted as much as it should have, and granted I don't disagree with that," Kerlikowske said. "We would like to do more in that direction."
Fifteen years ago, when the government began telling doctors to ask their patients about their drug use during routine medical exams, it described the program as one of the most proven ways to intervene early with would-be addicts.
"Nothing happens overnight," Kerlikowske said.
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Until 100 years ago, drugs were simply a commodity. Then Western cultural shifts made them immoral and deviant, according to London School of Economics professor Fernanda Mena.
Religious movements led the crusades against drugs: In 1904, an Episcopal bishop returning from a mission in the Far East argued for banning opium after observing "the natives' moral degeneration." In 1914, The New York Times reported that cocaine caused blacks to commit "violent crimes," and that it made them resistant to police bullets. In the decades that followed, Mena said, drugs became synonymous with evil.
Nixon drew on those emotions when he pressed for his War on Drugs.
"Narcotics addiction is a problem which afflicts both the body and the soul of America," he said in a special 1971 message to Congress. "It comes quietly into homes and destroys children, it moves into neighborhoods and breaks the fiber of community which makes neighbors. We must try to better understand the confusion and disillusion and despair that bring people, particularly young people, to the use of narcotics and dangerous drugs."
Just a few years later, a young Barack Obama was one of those young users, a teenager smoking pot and trying "a little blow when you could afford it," as he wrote in "Dreams From My Father." When asked during his campaign if he had inhaled the pot, he replied: "That was the point."
So why persist with costly programs that don't work?
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, sitting down with the AP at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, paused for a moment at the question.
"Look," she says, starting slowly. "This is something that is worth fighting for because drug addiction is about fighting for somebody's life, a young child's life, a teenager's life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult.
"If you think about it in those terms, that they are fighting for lives — and in Mexico they are literally fighting for lives as well from the violence standpoint — you realize the stakes are too high to let go."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iLZNYd6C9SGpa2oeiZIqT-HKVrCQD9FMCM103
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We need to start with the "war" metaphor as that headset justifies all the excesses that follow.
We need to acknowledge that abject failure is all the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the WOD has bought us.
We need to consider if the pursuit of altered mental states is somehow hardwired into the human psyche and, if so, let that understanding guide our response.
We need to remember that we've been down this road with Prohibition with results that very much mirror the current cluster frack. What makes that experience so hard to learn from?
There was a time when black people were considered to be three fifths of a human being and could be beaten into submission or worse if they failed to perform as demanded.
There was a time when handing out smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans and then forcing them to undergo a thousand mile journey on foot with scant shelter and few provisions was considered an effective policy.
There was a time when women were disenfranchised chattel subject to marital abuse and sexual assault with little in the way of legal recourse.
All these commonplace things are now looked on in horror. Someday I expect the WOD will be viewed through a similar lens. We ban substances that are cheap to produce and distribute thus driving up their costs geometrically. Unsavory folks willing to risk police confrontation perform a benefit cost analysis and find the rewards irresistible, establishing a correlation between profits and utter ruthlessness along the way. Lawmakers finding their edicts unheeded direct law enforcement officials to enforce the unenforceable. LEOs, in turn, demand resources with which to tilt at windmills, gravitating toward the tools and tactics employed by the armed forces as there's no reason to reinvent that wheel. Drug dealers respond by using their buckets of money to subvert LEOs and governments, passing on the most dangerous duties to low income cannon fodder who, if they prove particularly ruthless, work their way up the organization. And this only outlines the unintended consequences and perverse incentives this process spins off by the gross.
Enough. This stuff is madness and folly, producing results that would horrify this nation's founders. It's time to stop talking about the citizens who find themselves in this meat grinder as collateral damage and start speaking of them as victims of a process run horribly amok.
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"gravitating toward the tools and tactics employed by the armed forces as there's no reason to reinvent that wheel."
Law enforcement has been structured under a paramilitary model since Sir Robert Peel founded the London Metropolitan Police, which was the model for police forces in the US. Law enforcement has always adopted the tools and tactics employed by the armed forces, subject to the needs of policing and the appicable laws and policies governing their use.
Read up on Graham v. Connor. You'll find that no matter how a LEO is dressed, or exactly how they are armed, the legal standards in using force are identical. There is no "SWAT" exemption in the law or caselaw.
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BBG: "We need to start with the "war" metaphor as that headset justifies all the excesses that follow." - agree
"We need to acknowledge that abject failure is all the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the WOD has bought us." - agree
"We need to consider if the pursuit of altered mental states is somehow hardwired into the human psyche and, if so, let that understanding guide our response." - Yes with limits. I see this under the area of the privacy of your own home and your own time but am not interested in bus drivers, air traffic controllers or eye surgeons pursuing altered states on the job, for examples.
The comparison with prohibition I can follow; the comparisons to smallpox and slavery I cannot.
My questions remain, do you see any value in political incrementalism here such as my suggestion of decriminalizing over legalizing or distinguishing between softer recreational drugs and harder narcotics?
In spite of the failure and unintended consequences of the WOD, do you see any unintended consequences or potential failures of instant and full legalization?
Do you welcome the barrage of advertising the new legalized industry would bring, especially in the context of those of us who have a teenager at home, or would then be a prohibition on that form of free speech?
Do you suggest putting full legalization front and center in the 2010 and 2012 campaigns despite polling data GM posted and the fact that parties that have already done that typically receive 1% of the vote or less?
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"I would rather move toward decriminalization than legalization. What you self-grow and self-consume on your own property would already be legal if the constitution was interpreted with any meaning or consistency. As much as I want to move with you in a libertarian direction, I already don't appreciate Viagra/Cialis commercials during prime-time family television much less want to see the beginning of ad agencies glamorizing pot."
I would be quite comfortable with this.
Haven't read BBG's posts yet, I'm off to teach.
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Did the legend of Robin Hood steal from the rich and give to the poor as some say or did he fight for liberty and against tyrannical authority? Interesting commentary in the context of the new Robin Hood film by Cathy Young, contributing editor at Reason magazine. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/17/the_new_robin_hood_libertarian_rebel_105613.html
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Crafty- you got it. "Self made for recreational use by self only" would be more the statement of my concept. If I make something complex while I am high and it kills me......... If I start dealing it? wellllll.......... I would suggest some sort of minors law use and sale to? just those 2 changes, and stop the WOD. Give it about 5 years to shake out, and then see what needs done-if anything?
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The comparison with prohibition I can follow; the comparisons to smallpox and slavery I cannot.
An attempt at subtlety as I think cops have a tough job and in fact decided not to pursue a reserve officer position as I don't think I have the self control to not slap the sh!t out of people who desperately need it. I assume there were law enforcement officials holding jurisdiction in the smallpox blanket distribution stations who went along as it was the status quo; I know there were LEOs who enforced slavery statutes and chased down escaped slaves. In view of the millions incarcerated, the thousands killed, the hundreds of billions spent, et al to no discernible benefit, I think enforcing current drug laws will some day be seen in a similar light.
My questions remain, do you see any value in political incrementalism here such as my suggestion of decriminalizing over legalizing or distinguishing between softer recreational drugs and harder narcotics?
Sure. It can't be worse than the current, failed regimen.
In spite of the failure and unintended consequences of the WOD, do you see any unintended consequences or potential failures of instant and full legalization?
Sure, though it's hard to imagine them being worse than the current, failed regimen.
Do you welcome the barrage of advertising the new legalized industry would bring, especially in the context of those of us who have a teenager at home, or would then be a prohibition on that form of free speech?
No I don't, but it can't be worse than the current, failed regimen.
Do you suggest putting full legalization front and center in the 2010 and 2012 campaigns despite polling data GM posted and the fact that parties that have already done that typically receive 1% of the vote or less?
The founders accepted slavery as the only route through which a union would be achieved. That bill came due in the 1860s. I entertain no illusions concerning the sensibilities of the electorate--they elected BHO, after all--but that don't mean that this bill won't come due, either.
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CCP, Maybe people who hear the story of the Palins' stalker can feel a small part of the pain you have described here about having family privacy violated. Too bad anyone would do business with such a scoundrel.
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Palin said the news of the investigative reporter renting out the house next to her has put her family on edge and has left her more concerned about the privacy of her children. AP
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0510/37818.html
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http://www.activistpost.com/2010/07/ten-ways-we-are-being-tracked-traced.html
Saturday, July 10, 2010
10 Ways We Are Being Tracked, Traced, and Databased
Are technological advances infringing on our right to privacy?
Activist Post
The war on terror is a worldwide endeavor that has spurred massive investment into the global surveillance industry - which now seems to be becoming a war on "liberty and privacy." Given all of the new monitoring technology being implemented, the uproar over warrantless wiretaps now seems moot. High-tech, first-world countries are being tracked, traced, and databased, literally around every corner. Governments, aided by private companies, are gathering a mountain of information on average citizens who so far seem willing to trade liberty for supposed security. Here are just some of the ways the matrix of data is being collected:
GPS -- Global positioning chips are now appearing in everything from U.S. passports, cell phones, to cars. More common uses include tracking employees, and for all forms of private investigation. Apple recently announced they are collecting the precise location of iPhone users via GPS for public viewing in addition to spying on users in other ways.
Internet -- Internet browsers are recording your every move forming detailed cookies on your activities. The NSA has been exposed as having cookies on their site that don't expire until 2035. Major search engines know where you surfed last summer, and online purchases are databased, supposedly for advertising and customer service uses. IP addresses are collected and even made public. Controversial websites can be flagged internally by government sites, as well as re-routing all traffic to block sites the government wants to censor. It has now been fully admitted that social networks provide NO privacy to users, while technologies for real-time social network monitoring are already being used. The Cybersecurity Act attempts to legalize the collection and exploitation of your personal information. Apple's iPhone also has browsing data recorded and stored. All of this despite the overwhelming opposition to cybersurveillance by citizens.
RFID -- Forget your credit cards which are meticulously tracked, or the membership cards for things so insignificant as movie rentals which require your SSN. Everyone has Costco, CVS, grocery-chain cards, and a wallet or purse full of many more. RFID "proximity cards" take tracking to a new level in uses ranging from loyalty cards, student ID, physical access, and computer network access. Latest developments include an RFID powder developed by Hitachi, for which the multitude of uses are endless -- perhaps including tracking hard currency so we can't even keep cash undetected. (Also see microchips below).
Traffic cameras -- License plate recognition has been used to remotely automate duties of the traffic police in the United States, but have been proven to have dual use in England such as to mark activists under the Terrorism Act. Perhaps the most common use will be to raise money and shore up budget deficits via traffic violations, but uses may descend to such "Big Brother" tactics as monitors telling pedestrians not to litter as talking cameras already do in the UK.
Computer cameras and microphones -- The fact that laptops -- contributed by taxpayers -- spied on public school children (at home) is outrageous. Years ago Google began officially to use computer "audio fingerprinting" for advertising uses. They have admitted to working with the NSA, the premier surveillance network in the world. Private communications companies already have been exposed routing communications to the NSA. Now, keyword tools -- typed and spoken -- link to the global security matrix.
Public sound surveillance -- This technology has come a long way from only being able to detect gunshots in public areas, to now listening in to whispers for dangerous "keywords." This technology has been launched in Europe to "monitor conversations" to detect "verbal aggression" in public places. Sound Intelligence is the manufacturer of technology to analyze speech, and their website touts how it can easily be integrated into other systems.
Biometrics -- The most popular biometric authentication scheme employed for the last few years has been Iris Recognition. The main applications are entry control, ATMs and Government programs. Recently, network companies and governments have utilized biometric authentication including fingerprint analysis, iris recognition, voice recognition, or combinations of these for use in National identification cards.
DNA -- Blood from babies has been taken for all people under the age of 38. In England, DNA was sent to secret databases from routine heel prick tests. Several reports have revealed covert Pentagon databases of DNA for "terrorists" and now DNA from all American citizens is databased. Digital DNA is now being used as well to combat hackers.
Microchips -- Microsoft's HealthVault and VeriMed partnership is to create RFID implantable microchips. Microchips for tracking our precious pets is becoming commonplace and serves to condition us to accept putting them in our children in the future. The FDA has already approved this technology for humans and is marketing it as a medical miracle, again for our safety.
Facial recognition -- Anonymity in public is over. Admittedly used at Obama's campaign events, sporting events, and most recently at the G8/G20 protests in Canada. This technology is also harvesting data from Facebook images and surely will be tied into the street "traffic" cameras.
All of this is leading to Predictive Behavior Technology -- It is not enough to have logged and charted where we have been; the surveillance state wants to know where we are going through psychological profiling. It's been marketed for such uses as blocking hackers. Things seem to have advanced to a point where a truly scientific Orwellian world is at hand. It is estimated that computers know to a 93% accuracy where you will be, before you make your first move. Nanotech is slated to play a big role in going even further as scientists are using nanoparticles to directly influence behavior and decision making.
Many of us are asking: What would someone do with all of this information to keep us tracked, traced, and databased? It seems the designers have no regard for the right to privacy and desire to become the Controllers of us all.
Posted by Activist at 6:45 AM Labels: biometrics, databased, facial recognition, GPS tracking, Internet freedom, RFID, right to privacy, tacked, traced
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Crafty,
Can we change the title of this thread to "Unhinged paranoia" or something else more accurate?
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How 'bout "Authoritarian Chew Toys?"
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http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/208/48/
A how-to on building a RFID blocking wallet. Sorry, nothing on hats.....
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Place I work has its own police force; someone somehow got the card swipe info off an LEO room access card and began using it for nefarious purposes. Know the tech guy holding sway over the system in question; he's bright and isolated the thief, who now is sitting in jail. Folks ought to keep in mind, however, just how easy it is for a relatively untrained hacker to snag card swipe, RFID, bluetooth, and other data that they can then use for their own end.
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GPS -- Global positioning chips are now appearing in everything from U.S. passports, cell phones, to cars.
So, knowing what you know about RFID chips, is the above line from the post below accurate? Can you track a person globally using the RFID in a passport?
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Eh, it'd take a really freaking large, well placed parabolic dish to do it across any sort of distance. Bet the NSA has toys that could to one degree or another, but you're not gonna do it off a Keyhole sat through a thunderstorm. Some of the antenna farms out my way might be able to do it locally, but I'd want one of those Cray supercomputers to sift the noise out of the signal. Dimes to dollars some bright boy is looking at a way to do it with a Predator-type autonomous aircraft.
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What if the wallet was lined with foil?
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G M: "can we change the title of this thread to "Unhinged paranoia" or something else more accurate?"
BBG; How 'bout "Authoritarian Chew Toys?"
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Very Funny! Hey - both of you - this debate is healthy, and important.
I remember conservative fund raising letters of decades ago that were loaded with tin foil. You will lose this freedom and that one, if you don't contribute now. Government will take over everything from healthcare to auto manufacturing, from energy to housing. Liberals will teach sex ed to kindergardners, gays will marry and men's rooms will require diaper changing stations. Big brother will decide what you will drive, where you will live, whether you can water your lawn, and how much salt you can put on your french fries. The government will take your house on a whim. Tens of millions will cross our border illegally - and for it receive citizenship. Enemy combatants will be caught just to be released back to re-join the fight against us. Freedom isn't free - send money - based on these ridiculous, exaggerated scare tactics.
Unfortunately most of it already came true.
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The debate should be based on reality and not hype and exaggeration. The vast majority of the privacy invasions cited below were voluntary transactions with private entities.
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What if the wallet was lined with foil?
Likely make it pretty freaking hard.
Of course there's already DARPA research that seeks to track people by IDing their unique biological/odor signatures:
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/scent_of_a_terrorist/
Not much tinfoil can do for that.
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Should we outlaw any further scientific research ?
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Yes. Enforced by beheadings.
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Interesting. I think the AGW advocates have the same policy endgame in mind.
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If only they had my honesty and charm.
ETA: I've already heard a couple rumors that the biomarker stuff has been deployed to a sandbox or two.
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RFID is short range stuff, it would be more like tracking credit card purchases- from the parking lot in front of the store.
There are wallets out there made with satainless steel thread- for durability.
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How Much Private Property is the Government Stealing in Your State?
by Bob Ewing
You’ve probably heard about eminent domain abuse. That’s where the government takes your land and hands it over to another private party….one that is more politically connected.
But you may not have heard about civil forfeiture. And yet, today, it could very well be the most egregious abuse of private property rights in America.
We all know that one of the many beautiful things about the United States is that citizens are innocent until proven guilty. But civil forfeiture turns that fundamental principle on its head.
This sounds bizarre, but with civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hytkAaoF2k&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Consider the case of Margaret Davis.
As a 77-year-old woman living alone with multiple medical problems, Margaret left her Pennsylvania home unlocked so her neighbors could regularly check on her. One day while the police were chasing alleged drug dealers through her neighborhood, they all ran through Margaret’s house. The dealers dropped some of their stash on Margaret’s floor, in plain sight.
Instead of apologizing to Margaret for the traumatic experience, the government seized her house.
Under civil forfeiture laws, Margaret’s property—her house—was guilty until she could prove it innocent to get it back. And that’s not all. As it turns out, most state and federal laws allow the government to keep the property they take through civil forfeiture. So authorities have a big incentive to pursue property over justice.
Predictably, abuse is rampant:
In Louisiana, police were caught stealing innocent people’s property by making up crimes that never happened. They used the proceeds to fund ski trips to Aspen.
In Texas, a government official was caught pumping forfeiture funds into his re-election campaign.
In Nebraska, officials stole over $124,000 from a resident without ever charging, let alone convicting, him of a crime.
In Missouri, authorities were caught turning forfeitures over to the federal government in order to avoid a legal requirement that proceeds go to schools. That way, both groups could split the proceeds without having to share any with the children that were supposed to get the money.
Unfortunately, these are not isolated incidents. Civil forfeiture is now a nationwide epidemic. A new report by the Institute for Justice found that the federal government is now holding over a billion dollars in assets seized through civil forfeiture.
And that’s not counting any of the state and local governments.
IJ’s report, available to view and download for free here, is the first to grade the civil forfeiture laws of the federal government and all 50 states.
What grade did your state get? You can easily search the report by state here.
This is part of a new national campaign started by the Institute for Justice to end civil forfeiture. We also filed suit in Texas, which has some of the worst forfeiture laws and practices in the country.
We are representing a small business entrepreneur from Houston whose American Dream was turned into a nightmare after his property was stolen through civil forfeiture. He did nothing wrong and was never accused of a crime.
Our forfeiture campaign follows in the footsteps of our eminent domain work. In courtrooms across the country, we will keep fighting the government to secure the bedrock American principle of private property rights.
Even though IJ has had tremendous success in courts, eminent domain abuse was stopped in large part by grassroots activists. We desperately need a similar grassroots backlash against civil forfeiture. Simply put, we need your help.
Will you work with IJ to help end civil forfeiture?
Please speak out. Consider blogging and talking about the property being stolen in your state. I encourage you to make use of the research included in our forfeiture report as well as our forfeiture video.
Should you write something up, please email me the link at bewing@ij.org. And if you have any questions, or you’d like to be a part of our national coalition of property rights activists, just let me know.
Governments should protect, not plunder, our property. Common sense and justice demand that this rampant abuse of private property rights must end.
Our fight will not be easy. But working together, we can stamp out the injustices of civil forfeiture once and for all.
http://biggovernment.com/bewing/2010/08/02/how-much-private-property-is-the-government-stealing-in-your-state/
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It seems Margaret's house is a thoroughfare for drug dealers on the run:
Seizing Elderly Woman’s Home in Philadelphia
Margaret Davis, a 77-year-old homeowner with multiple serious medical conditions, including end-stage renal disease, was in the habit of leaving her North Philadelphia home unlocked so her neighbors, who routinely checked up on her, could come and go. She used paratransit to travel to dialysis treatment three times a week.[1]
In August 2001, police chased several alleged drug dealers through Davis’ front door. The suspects escaped out the back. Davis gave the officers permission to search her home and they found drugs, left in plain view, presumably by the fleeing suspects.[2] The matter should have ended there, but in September 2001 the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office filed a motion to seize the home even though Davis was not a party to any drug dealing.[3]
Unable to afford an attorney, Davis was referred to the Civil Practice Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, which took on the case in February 2002. In April, as the case was working its way through court, police chased another suspect into Davis’ house and caught him attempting to hide drugs. Fortunately, Davis’ attorney was able to reach an agreement with the District Attorney’s office, which withdrew the petition in November of 2003.[4]
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[1] E-mail exchange with Louis S. Rulli, Practice Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs, University of Pennsylvania Law School, August 18-20, 2009.
[2] Amended Petition for Forfeiture at 10, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. 1365 W. Colwyn Street No. 2903 (Pa. Ct. Common Pleas filed May 16, 2002).
[3] Civil Docket Report, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Davis, Case ID: 010902903.
[4] E-mail exchange with Louis S. Rulli; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. 1365 W. Colwyn Street No. 2903 at 10.
Return to Forfeiture main page
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Hmmmmmmmm.......
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1-eBz8hyoE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
As opposed to the irrational paranoia that typically gets posted here, this is something to legitimately be pissed off at.
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Glad we agree!
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O, gosh golly gee. Bay area california. Sound familiar? It is good to see some people in the area are waking up...........
That 77 year old is not maintaining the integrity of her property, what does she expect. The US is doing the same thing on the southern border, what can we expect?
As far as illegal confiscation of property- some lawmen can still recognize the rights.
http://www.infowars.com/constitutional%C2%A0sheriff-tony-demeo/ (http://www.infowars.com/constitutional%C2%A0sheriff-tony-demeo/)
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Very interesting article, but may I suggest double checking anything from that site? IMHO it has a poor track record for accuracy.
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Coming off my fight with NYPD and what I don't know about what they do and how expensive it is to live there, which is true, may I point out that people in Washington DC have no idea about private sector work and pay across the heartland either. Short of forced labor camps etc. they should not be concerned about what free people pay each other with legislation like minimum wage and other mandates.
GM linked a story on the Govt Spending thread that NYPD would pay $80,000 to train a police officer and then a competing department elsewhere hires them away and saves the expense. That happens in the private sector too. There should be no mandate that companies pay people to be trained or pay certain amounts before they are providing a positive value to the organization. Consenting adults can work out private contracts amongst themselves. Once the employee is of good value to the organization then seldom is there any need for protection from the government anyway. People can vote with their feet and leave and spread the word about which companies are lousy to work for.
Employers shouldn't face minimums to pay people who make substantial tips. At the high end we shouldn't be basing any public policies on tyrannical views like that is enough money - no one needs more money than xxx. We shouldn't be mandating what programs people's own pay gets put into other than their paycheck. It is a violation of their economic freedom. Unions that do that are not always doing their members a favor. Maybe they make 3% on an investment account while they are paying 20% on a credit card or late on their mortgage.
Even with the taxes we pay the withholding should not be mandatory before a taxpayer even knows what their deductions and credits for the year will be. It is enough for them to mandate the filing and require the payment. They have enough power to enforce that without mandatory withholding.
Besides minimum wage laws, there are also maximum wage proposals out there, that a company for example cannot pay anyone more than 20 times what the lowest person in the organization is paid. The concept is a violation of your economic liberties and violates common sense. In our town and MVP like Joe Mauer might make 20 million so should there be a law that the lowest batboy make a million? If you are in Washington and think so then you don't understand the dynamics of markets or baseball, which means you don't understand the business of any other industry either. Yet they want caps on bank fees and anything other gripe that people want the government to intervene on. These proposals are gaining steam with the infusion of government money into private company ownership, like the 3 CEO changes at Government Motors. These infusions are a violation of the economic rights of the competitor to operate freely and fairly on a level playing field
Groups should not be targeted for taxation, like the top 1%, the top 2% or 'only those making over 200,000'. Taxation to pay for public goods should be applied evenly across people and across income. The right to keep the rest of what you earned, other than taxes at the rate everyone is taxed at, is a basic human liberty whether you are rich or not. When they chip away at one group and then another, they are chipping away at you.
Short of things like pouring mercury into ground water and forced labor camps, they need to start respecting people's economic liberties and allow us to run our own businesses and make our own economic decisions. Believe it or not, we can do it better ourselves.
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Libertarians on the Shrink's Couch
by Gene Healy
We libertarians tend to think of ourselves as a tiny, embattled sect, ignored when we're not reviled. Lately, though — with Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" shooting up the Amazon charts and Tea Partiers with "Don't Tread on Me" flags storming Capitol Hill — there's increasing interest in figuring out how this strange tribe thinks.
A team of social psychologists, including the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, provides some of the most detailed answers yet, putting libertarians on the couch in a new study, "Understanding Libertarian Morality."
"Libertarian morality?" you say. "Isn't that an oxymoron, like 'military intelligence' or 'law school talent show'?" No, smartass, it isn't. "Libertarians are not amoral," Haidt and his colleagues report. (Whew!) We simply have "a unique moral-psychological profile." That profile helps explain both why we can be hard to get along with and why we're needed, now more than ever.
Haidt et al. aren't engaged in the sort of judgmental head-shrinking-from-afar that often mars political debate. For several years now, at YourMorals.org, they've let self-described liberals, conservatives, and libertarians speak for themselves, by voluntarily taking a battery of psychological tests measuring personality characteristics, cognitive style, and moral values. Along the way, they've compiled the "largest dataset of psychological measures ever compiled on libertarians" — with more than 10,000 respondents.
What they learned may sound familiar, if you've ever been cornered at a college kegger by a twitchy Randian who called you "anti-life" when you dutifully threw your cup in the recycling bin.
Liberals and conservatives beat us handily on "agreeableness" and "extraversion." Libertarians tend to be dispassionate and cerebral, less likely to moralize based on gut reactions like disgust (one source, the authors suggest, of our disagreement with conservatives on social issues).
"We found strong support," they write, for the proposition that libertarians "will rely upon reason more — and emotion less — than will either liberals or conservatives." Blubbery Clintonian empathy isn't our bag, baby; we don't "feel your pain." Where "liberals have the most 'feminine' cognitive style ... libertarians have the most 'masculine.' " And where others often "rely on peripheral cues, such as how attractive or credible a speaker is," when formulating opinions, libertarians are more likely to pay "close attention to relevant arguments."
Conservatives routinely outscore liberals on measures of self-reported happiness (getting to rub that in makes conservative pundits even happier). Alas, per Haidt, et al., "Libertarians appear to be less satisfied with their lives when compared to liberals and conservatives."
The authors speculate that this may be due to relatively lower social connectedness: libertarians "score high on individualism, low on collectivism, and low on all other traits that involved bonding with, loving, or feeling a sense of common identity with others."
Gene Healy is a vice president at the Cato Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency.
But I prefer the explanation offered by my friend John Hasnas in his essay, "What It Feels Like to Be a Libertarian." (First line? "I'll tell you: It feels bad.")
We're doomed, Cassandra-like, to predict the disastrous effects of government policy. It's "human nature," John writes, "to want to shoot the messenger," so we suffer "scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events." (We're not so modest, either).
Personally, I've found that a dark sense of humor makes for an effective coping mechanism. As Elvis Costello put it, "I used to be disgusted/Now I try to be amused."
Our looming fiscal crisis is no joke, however. As the bill for the party comes due, more and more Americans are looking to libertarians for answers. Sure, we're cantankerous and sarcastic — anything but huggable — and we can occasionally come off as cold. But we're firmly "reality based," and good at facing the hard truths.
Join the tribe!
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12556&utm
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TSA: What Would Rosa Parks Do?
By Mary Theroux
Wednesday December 1, 2010 at 9:12:55 AM PST
shareNew 0share0
Today marks the 55th anniversary of Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. As she explained in her book, Quiet Strength:
Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.
Institutionalized by racist laws and upheld by racist governments, especially across the American South, such humiliations were daily visited as part of riding public transit.
Rosa Parks’s dramatic refusal sparked the Montgomery bus strike and eventually led to governments having to back down across the board, from public buses, to public schools, to rescinding black codes and Jim Crow laws that constrained private commerce and voluntary relations among races.
Today, pundits from the left to neocon right argue that airline passengers give up their rights when they “choose” to travel by plane. They would no doubt have argued that Ms. Parks similarly gave up her rights when she “chose” to ride the public bus.
Ms. Parks in her simple eloquence knew such thinking was just plain wrong. Whether an individual is ordered out of her seat by a public bus driver or made to either “assume the position” or be subjected to unwanted intimate contact by command of a government agent, she is no longer sovereign; she is a subject.
Ms. Parks knew when it was time to say enough. Do we?
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For more on the State’s role in upholding and institutionalizing racism and injustice, see our book Race and Liberty in America
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"Today, pundits from the left to neocon right argue that airline passengers give up their rights when they “choose” to travel by plane. They would no doubt have argued that Ms. Parks similarly gave up her rights when she “chose” to ride the public bus."
**Lacking any practical alternatives, a Libertarian uses an ad hominem attack. Nothing unusual in that. "Libertarians. Providing simplistic non-answers to complex problems since 1971!**
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I'm not seeing an ad hominem there at all; it seems like an analogy to me.
""Libertarians. Providing simplistic non-answers to complex problems since 1971!**" While no doubt there are times that this is so, sometimes simplicity is the highest level.
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Using a law to enforce a ritual humiliation based on race is very different from a aviation security system intended to keep all the passengers alive and unharmed, no matter their racial/ethnic identities. But I guess that's just too complex for some.
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IMHO GM most of us here are of above average IQ. I'm even vain enough to include myself in that. :-)
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Yes, and yet here we have the TSA compared with the Jim Crow south. We may disagree as to the value of TSA methods, or the constitutionality and need for them, however the comparison to the malevolent racial laws of the pre-civil rights south is obviously bogus. BBG is a smart guy, I'm sure he gets that this is just mud slinging.
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http://www.ncpa.org/pub/st268?pg=3
Ten Consequences of Economic Freedom
...
4. Economic freedom helps reduce poverty.
...
7. Economic freedom improves the lives of children.
(read it all :-))
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An issue I mull is how to build voting blocs large enough to overcome redistributionist voter cadres. As such I find think pieces like this interesting.
What if Libertarians and Conservatives Agreed on Empirical Issues?
Ilya Somin • March 17, 2011 1:24 am
Following up my post on what might happen if liberals and libertarians agreed on empirical issues, this post addresses the question of what might happen if libertarians came to agree on empirical issues with conservatives.
Unfortunately, answering this question is a lot tougher than the previous one about liberals. Libertarianism and liberalism are fairly coherent ideological movements. By contrast, “conservatism” is a hodgepodge of different ideologies united mainly by their opposition to the political left. George Will, Pat Buchanan, Bill Kristol, and Mike Huckabee are all considered conservatives. But they differ greatly from each other on both empirical issues and values. So too with neoconservatives, religious right social conservatives, and Burkean conservatives. Moreover, some conservatives are quite close to libertarians on most issues because they have a assimilated a great many libertarian ideas.
To make the question more tractable, I’m going to focus primarily on social conservatives who generally support free market policies on “economic” issues, while also supporting a high degree of “social” regulation. I recognize that this is far from the only type of conservatism out there. But it’s probably the most common one in the United States, especially among conservative intellectuals.
As with some libertarians and liberals, some social conservatives are purely utilitarian in their values. They support conservative policies because they think that will maximize human happiness. If a utilitarian libertarian and a utilitarian conservative could agree on empirical issues, their policy differences would disappear. They would then agree on both values and the best way to implement them. But pure utilitarianism is even less common among conservatives than among liberals and libertarians, possibly because many social conservatives are strongly religious and the major religions all incorporate many non-utilitarian values. Here are some issues where non-utilitarian conservatives will continue to disagree with libertarians even if the two groups could come to a consensus on empirics:
I. Nationalism.
Many, though not all, conservatives are nationalistic. By contrast, most libertarians are hostile to nationalism, usually for the kinds of reasons I outlined here. Some of these differences are traceable to disagreements over the empirical effects of nationalism. But not all of them. At the level of fundamental values, many nationalistic conservatives are willing to impose severe costs on foreigners for the purpose of securing significantly smaller benefits for members of their own polity.
This has important implications for issues like trade and immigration. Let’s assume that greatly expanded immigration creates huge net benefits for immigrants, but inflicts much smaller net costs on native-born Americans. Most libertarians would accept that tradeoff. After all, the freedom and utility of immigrants is, in their view, no less valuable than that of natives. And the majority of libertarians see immigration restrictions as infringements on liberty, not just utilitarian harms.
Not so with nationalistic conservatives. For example, conservative Harvard economist George Borjas wants to greatly reduce immigration in order to prevent what he estimates to be fairly modest wage reductions for low-skilled Americans, even though he realizes the enormous harm that would inflict on potential migrants. In a recent book, conservative scholar Edgar Browning explicitly states that immigration policy should be determined entirely without reference to the welfare of the immigrants themselves (which he views as an uncontroversial premise). Views like Borjas’ and Browning’s are quite common among nationalistic conservatives, though admittedly not universal.
What is true for immigration also holds for trade. The only difference is that fewer conservatives believe that free trade inflicts net harms on Americans than believe the same of immigration. Those who do believe that trade inflicts net harm on Americans tend to support protectionism entirely without reference to the impact on foreigners (Pat Buchanan is a good example).
Agreement on empirical issues surrounding immigration, trade and other such issues would eliminate libertarian-conservative differences only if conservatives came to believe that fully laissez-faire policies in these fields create net benefits for current American citizens.
II. Social Regulation.
Much of the libertarian-conservative disagreement over social and “morals” regulation comes down to disagreement over the empirical effects of such regulations. Elsewhere, I have criticized conservatives such as Robert Bork for ignoring the ways in which their empirical critiques of economic regulation apply to social regulation as well.
But empirical disagreements are not the only source of the conflict. Many conservatives believe that some forms of “immoral” behavior are intrinsically wrong even if legalizing them would increase happiness on net. For example, some argue that it is intrinsically wrong to gamble, take mind-altering drugs, engage in “unnatural” sex, or consume pornography. Conservatives who believe this might still be willing to support legalization if the harms of prohibition are great enough. That accounts for William F. Buckley’s and now Pat Robertson’s opposition to the War on Drugs. But the threshold level of harm needed to persuade social conservatives to support legalization is a lot higher than for libertarians.
The flip side is that many libertarians might still oppose social regulation even in cases where they agree that it creates net utilitarian benefits. They, after all, value social freedom for its own sake, not just because they think it increases happiness. Most libertarians might be willing to support regulation if they thought the utilitarian benefits were extremely large. If banning pornography were the only way to prevent a massive epidemic of rape, I would be in favor of it. But the threshold level of benefit would, for most libertarians, have to be pretty high. Certainly much higher than for most social conservatives.
III. Retribution.
Conservatives generally favor harsher punishments for criminals than libertarians do. This difference reflects various empirical disagreements between the two groups. But there’s also a difference in values. Conservatives are, on average, much more committed to the value of retribution than libertarians are. That’s a key reason why many libertarians, but almost no conservatives, favor moving the criminal justice system towards a model based on restitution rather than punishment (see this article by co-blogger Randy Barnett). Personally, I’m much more of a retributivist than most of my fellow libertarians. But my view is definitely in the minority among libertarian intellectuals.
I have not mentioned war and foreign policy in this post, largely because the issue deeply divides libertarians among themselves. I think that the internal division among libertarians (people who mostly share the same values) suggests that the divide between dovish libertarians and hawkish conservatives on these issues is also largely about empirics rather than values. However, it’s possible that the conservative commitment to nationalism also plays a role here.
Overall, a social conservative who came to agree with libertarians on empirical issues but not values would be more supportive of free trade and immigration and more skeptical of social regulation. But she might still differ with libertarians on these issues because of the conservative commitment to nationalism and nonutilitarian justifications for social regulation. Full convergence with libertarian policy positions would only occur if the conservative came to believe that social regulation inflicts very great harm and that free migration is a net benefit to Americans. Even then, we would still have the disagreement over retribution.
A libertarian who came to agree with social conservatives on empirical issues would endorse higher levels of social regulation and lower levels of immigration. But we would only see full convergence if the libertarian came to believe that the harm caused by laissez-faire was great enough to outweigh the nonutilitarian value he assigns to freedom.
UPDATE: For readers who may be interested, here’s a post I wrote about F.A. Hayek’s classic libertarian critique of conservatism that focuses on some of the same issues as this one, though it does not try to distinguish empirical issues from differences in values.
http://volokh.com/2011/03/17/what-if-libertarians-and-conservatives-agreed-on-empirical-issues/
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First note that the previous post in this thread by BBG slipped by without discussion -how to get conservatives and libertarians more on the same page, at least on the empirical side of things. That point deserves serious follow up...
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Speed of vehicles costs lives in a crash, but so does the same government mandating smaller vehicles, so I stick this under libertarian issues. (High speed rail and light rail and going out to get the mail also cost lives.) Two complaints with the journalism here (WSJ), they include an crowded urban freeway photo with the proposal does not apply to urban freeways. Second, it takes them until the end to admit their NY journalism from afar viewpoint and admit what the drivers there already know, have you seen how far apart things are in Texas - with flat, empty roads?
http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2011/04/12/texas-at-85-mph-would-it-cause-more-deaths/
Texas At 85 MPH: Would It Cause More Deaths? - WSJ 4/12/2011
Texas is in the process of possibly raising its speed limit from 80 to 85 miles per hour on certain stretches of highway. The move, if approved by the state senate (it already passed the Texas House), would give the Lone Star State the highest speed limit in the U.S.
A spokeswoman with the Texas Department of Transportation said the change probably wouldn’t come quickly, in part because of an amendment in the bill that says the higher limit will apply only to new road construction. Then again, the vast state currently has about 3,000 miles of road under construction, more than 600 of which is interstate highway.
Still, it is hard to say how many miles of 85-mph driving will eventually emerge from the political process. Whatever the amount, safety groups say it will almost certainly lead to more fatal car wrecks.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says there is historical link between higher speed limits and rising highway fatality rates. The safety-research group, which is funded by the insurance industry, says its studies have shown that deaths on rural interstates increased 25-30 percent when states began increasing speed limits from 55 to 65 mph in 1987. In 1989, about two-thirds of this increase — 19 percent, or 400 deaths — was attributed to increased speed, the rest to increased travel, the Insurance Institute says.
The group says a 1999 study of the effects of the 1995 repeal of the national maximum speed limit suggests the trend continued. A 2009 study of the long-term effects of the 1995 speed-limit repeal found a 3 percent increase in road fatalities attributable to higher speed limits on all road types, with the highest increase of 9 percent on rural interstates. In all, an estimated 12,545 deaths were attributed to increased speed limits in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005.
Of course, if you have ever driven across Texas, you may be torn over this debate even if you consider yourself a stickler for safety. Driving the state’s vast expanses of arrow-straight rural highways where other cars appear only occasionally, one can quickly come to appreciate the ability to cruise along between 80 and 90 mph without much risk of a ticket.
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Just because the speed limit is 85 MPH, doesn't mean one must drive 85. The greater the speed, the greater the severity of the accident.
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"First note that the previous post in this thread by BBG slipped by without discussion -how to get conservatives and libertarians more on the same page, at least on the empirical side of things. That point deserves serious follow up..."
Well, exactly how much time and energy should conservatives spend to get a group that has about 225,000 registered voters in the US?
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A school notice received in the email follows. Context: only the timing is unknown; all parents and students already know this is going to happen. Includes cars on public streets. Comments or objections?
"Hello Parents of ## High School students,
This is [principal] with an announcement.
Today we conducted a drug search of our parking lots and student traffic/gathering areas outside of school. Three dogs were used and they alerted us to five points of interest, four of which were in our student parking lot. Upon further search no drugs were found in any of the on campus autos. As always if a student vehicle drew attention during the dog search parents were contacted and the vehicle was searched.
The dogs alerted us to one vehicle parked off campus in a parking area typically frequented by students. A further search of that vehicle turned up paraphernalia, but no drugs. Again parents were contacted.
Our searches are conducted several times during the year and focus on different areas inside and outside of the building."
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On campus searches are one thing, the off campus search another. I doubt that any evidence obtained in the off campus search would be admissable and I'd tend to think there is the serious potential for civil liability in conducting that search.
The courts have tended towards allowing school personnel greater latitude in search and seizure than LEOs. One key question is that if the LEOs that did the search would be viewed by the court as school personnel or LEOs in conducting the search. A LEO assigned as a school resource officer is one thing, a LEO just called with a K9 to conduct a search is another in some cases.
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http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec01/vol59/num04/The-Right-to-Search-Students.aspx
Reasonable Suspicion
The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." Before 1985, doubt existed about whether this right applied to students in the public schools. Schools argued that administrators acted in loco parentis—in the place of the parent—while students were at school. In 1985, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Fourth Amendment applies to students in the public schools (New Jersey v. T.L.O., 1985). The Court concluded, however, that the school environment requires an easing of the restriction to which searches by public authorities are normally subject. School officials, therefore, do not need probable cause or a warrant to search students.
The Court articulated a standard for student searches: reasonable suspicion. Reasonable suspicion is satisfied when two conditions exist: (1) the search is justified at its inception, meaning that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will reveal evidence that the student has violated or is violating the law or school rules, and (2) the search is reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justified the search, meaning that the measures used to conduct the search are reasonably related to the objectives of the search and that the search is not excessively intrusive in light of the student's age and sex and the nature of the offense.
In New Jersey v. T.L.O., a teacher's report of a student smoking in the bathroom justified a search of the student's purse. Since this landmark decision, several cases have debated what constitutes reasonable suspicion:
Four students huddled together, one with money in his hand and another with his hand in his pocket, does not provide reasonable suspicion (A.S. v. State of Florida, 1997).
An anonymous phone call advising an administrator that a student will be bringing drugs to school, coupled with the student's reputation as a drug dealer, creates reasonable suspicion to search the student's pockets and book bag (State of New Hampshire v. Drake, 1995).
A report made by two students to a school official that another student possesses a gun at school constitutes reasonable suspicion to search the student and his locker (In re Commonwealth v. Carey, 1990).
An experienced drug counselor's observation of a student who appears distracted and has bloodshot eyes and dilated pupils justifies taking the student's blood pressure and pulse (Bridgman v. New Trier High School District No. 203, 1997).
The fact that the search of all but one student in a class fails to reveal allegedly stolen property gives school officials reasonable suspicion to search that student (DesRoches v. Caprio, 1998).
The odor of marijuana in the hall does not provide reasonable suspicion to search all students' book bags, purses, and pockets (Burnham v. West, 1987).
Although the legal standard for reasonable suspicion is clear, the application of it in different contexts is not always as clear. The Court has even noted that
articulating precisely what reasonable suspicion means . . . is not possible. Reasonable suspicion is a commonsense, nontechnical conception that deals with the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent men, not legal technicians, act. (Ornelas v. United States, 1996, at 695)
Probable Cause and Student Consent
School officials need only reasonable suspicion to search students in public schools, but sworn law enforcement officials normally must have probable cause to search students. Probable cause to search exists when "known facts and circumstances are sufficient to warrant a man of reasonable prudence in the belief that contraband . . . will be found" (Ornelas v. United States, 1996, at 696). But are law enforcement officials assigned to schools to maintain safety subject to the reasonable suspicion standard or the higher probable cause standard? The answer depends on whether the court views law enforcement personnel assigned to the school as school officials or law enforcement officials.
When the police or school administrators act at one another's request, they run the risk of becoming one another's agents. Such a relationship could change the standard necessary to conduct a student search. Some courts treat police officers as school officials subject to the lower standard of reasonable suspicion when they search students at the request of school administrators (In the Interest of Angelia D.B., 1997). Other courts hold that school officials conducting a search on the basis of information from the school resource officer are acting as agents of the police and are, therefore, subject to the higher standard of probable cause (State of New Hampshire v. Heirtzler, 2000). The mere presence of a sworn law enforcement officer during a search by a school administrator does not trigger the need for probable cause (Florida v. D.S., 1996).
School officials and sworn law enforcement officers may conduct a search without reasonable suspicion or probable cause if the student voluntarily consents to the search. Voluntariness is determined on the basis of the circumstances—including the student's age, education level, and mental capacity—and the context of the search. When consent is granted, officials may conduct the search only within the boundaries of the consent. If a student consents to the search of her purse, for example, an administrator may not search her locker unless the search of the purse provides probable cause or reasonable suspicion to search the locker. School officials and law enforcement officers are not required to advise students that they have a right to refuse to give consent to search. Some school policies or state regulations, however, may require that they advise students of their rights.
Some school policies require students to provide consent to a search or risk discipline. In at least one federal circuit, the court has upheld this policy (DesRoches v. Caprio, 1998). In this case, all but one student consented to a search of their personal belongings. The search of the consenting students revealed nothing. Pursuant to school board policy, DesRoches was suspended for 10 days for failure to consent to the search. The student claimed that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated because the administrator did not have reasonable suspicion to search him. The court held that when the search of all other students in the class failed to reveal the stolen item, the administrator had reasonable, individualized suspicion to search DesRoches. Therefore, his discipline for failing to consent to a legal search was upheld.
Individual Versus Random Searches
School officials conduct individual searches when they suspect that a student or a small group of students possesses evidence of a violation of the law or school rules. Such searches are subject to the reasonable suspicion standard. Officials conduct random or blanket searches not because of individualized suspicion, but as a preventive measure. Examples of random searches include the use of metal detectors in school entrances and sweeps of parking lots and lockers. The legality of a random search depends on whether the school has a compelling interest or special need that warrants the use of a search without suspicion. The most common need articulated by schools is the prevention of drug abuse.
Perhaps the most controversial random search is the use of drug-sniffing dogs in schools. The right of school officials or police to use dogs to detect drugs in students' belongings is well established. In fact, most courts conclude that such detection is not a search because the dogs merely sniff the air around the property and that students do not have an expectation of privacy in the air around their belongings.
One federal court has recently held that the use of drug-sniffing dogs on a student's person requires individualized, reasonable suspicion. Prevention of drug abuse, according to this court, does not justify the dog sniffing the person because it intrudes on the expectation of privacy and security (B.C. v. Plumas Unified School District, 1999). This case changed practices in many school districts—those schools no longer use the dogs to sniff around students.
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Interesting legal opinion/decisions on the school searches. In our case it is deterrence, not reasonable suspicion, because I have a series of these emails without any significant find or arrest.
"...such detection is not a search because the dogs merely sniff the air around the property and that students do not have an expectation of privacy in the air around their belongings." - Is that like having some super listening device outside of homes and saying no expectation of privacy in your home? I would stay with the idea that these are kids in schools and we get to make the rules.
In my case, I approve of the program in the sense that I have pre-consented when I bought the parking pass. I have the option of sending my kid elsewhere and the option of not sending my car to school. I want the school to be drug free.
I am mostly puzzled by the 'off-campus' search. As the legal decisions say, they do that because they can.
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http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-10th-circuit/1166937.html
Thus, the general rule we have followed is that a dog's alert to the presence of contraband is sufficient to provide probable cause. We decline to adopt the stricter rule urged by Mr. Parada, which would require the dog to give a final indication before probable cause is established.7 “Probable cause means that ‘there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place.’ ” Ludwig, 10 F.3d at 1527 (quoting Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 238, 103 S.Ct. 2317, 76 L.Ed.2d 527 (1983)). A trained narcotic dog's detection of the odor of an illegal substance emanating from a vehicle creates a “fair probability” that there is contraband in that vehicle. See id. (“[A] dog alert usually is at least as reliable as many other sources of probable cause and is certainly reliable enough to create a ‘fair probability’ that there is contraband.”). We hold that probable cause was satisfied by Rico's alert to the odor of an illegal substance in the vehicle and that it was not necessary for the dog to indicate the exact source of that odor. Indeed, it might be dangerous to permit a narcotics dog to pinpoint the location of the drugs in certain circumstances, such as here, where the vehicle's occupants were still inside and the dog was trained to indicate by barking, scratching, and biting at the source of the odor.
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In honor of my Libertarian homeys :-D I drink a Four Loko in your honor!
As Ali G would say: Respect! :wink:
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Uhhh , , , what is a "Four Loko"?
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It's the malt liquor with caffeine drink that some states have wanted to ban because of it's alleged dangerous propeties. I saw it for sale at a liquor store and could not resist, though normally I stick to beer and the occasional hard liquor.
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That is pretty college, GM! :lol: :-o
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I gots to get mah drank on, yo! :-D
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Separate from the excellent 4th amendment arguments going on elsewhere and this is already covered there, but there is quite a move going on with people voluntarily putting all there private correspondence, photos, documents and secrets out there where it is one hack or one perfectly legitimate search warrant away from giving it all to others. From an efficiency standpoint, I like having all my most valuable documents with me in my hand in case I can't get online. Then when smartphones or computers crash, I like having all my private information downloadable back to me from gmail or one of those backup services.
The trend is brought back to the forefront with new capabilities coming out from Apple that already exist with Google and others: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/google-apple-cloud-computer.htm
Aside from legal questions, we sure are giving away a lot of information to an awful lot of people and places - as if security breaches at their end never happen.
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Yup.
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I have heard of college administrators finding evidence, such as self posted FaceBook pictures, of students drinking/smoking/smoking/stealing/etc. on campus (or elsewhere) and using those as evidence of transgression that can lead to disciplinary actions. There is a whole new public culture in those under about 25, and it creeps older.
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Lots of law enforcement agencies now required that the IA investigators doing the applicant's background be "friended" for all social network sites.
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http://mercatus.org/freedom-50-states-2011
Where does your state rank?
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http://www.infowars.com/raw-food-raid-armed-agents-bust-raw-milk-cheese-sellers/
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The reason that a producer can't sell or even consume a raw food product on their own property, if prohibited by federal law, is because they are engaging in interstate commerce. :?
The police state accusation IMO is not of the police tasked with enforcement, but a tyranny of the majority - tyranny of the do-gooders, enabled by some bizarre court rulings over the years where government over time seems to no longer have meaningful limits.
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I disagree. For the common good, I think one of the duties of the government is to protect the consumer from tainted products.
That said, "raw milk" for many many years here in CA has fallen into the "grey" area.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milk-raid-20110804,0,7791693.story
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I disagree. For the common good, I think one of the duties of the government is to protect the consumer from tainted products.
That said, "raw milk" for many many years here in CA has fallen into the "grey" area.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milk-raid-20110804,0,7791693.story
That's great JDN, but then you can look forward to a private company to do that for you as I have no wish to have some ill funded government program wasting my tax dollars teling me what I should and shouldn't do for myself. I say this with the utmost respect.
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I disagree. For the common good, I think one of the duties of the government is to protect the consumer from tainted products.
That said, "raw milk" for many many years here in CA has fallen into the "grey" area.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milk-raid-20110804,0,7791693.story
That's great JDN, but then you can look forward to a private company to do that for you as I have no wish to have some ill funded government program wasting my tax dollars teling me what I should and shouldn't do for myself. I say this with the utmost respect.
I do look forward to a private company doing that for me, but unfortunately they don't always do the "right" thing. I also believe in the goodness of the
average man, but there are exceptions; that is why we have Police.
I don't think it's a waste of taxpayer's money to regulate health laws, pharmaceutical products, etc. I buy American drugs knowing that they are "safe" or at least have passed a rigorous test. I shop at Whole Foods knowing that their products are regulated and checked, therefore I won't get sick from faulty chicken improperly stored, etc. I think Doctors should be licensed. Etc.
However, I will acknowledge too much regulation is well, too much. It's a fine line.
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FWIW I Regard inforwars.com as a highly unreliable site and generally do not read anything that comes from there. Surprised to see a true scholar like you surfing there BD. :-)
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I didn't surf there. The article was sent to me by a conservative.
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I didn't surf there. The article was sent to me by a conservative.
As a joke? Alex Jones isn't what I'd call a conservative by any means.
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Then again, if you want the inside scoop on how the 9/11 conspiracy went down, the FEMA camps we'll soon be housed in or how the internationalists will soon wipe out 95% of humanity, then it's a good site.
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Nope. As another example for the need to stop President Obama.
I didn't surf there. The article was sent to me by a conservative.
As a joke? Alex Jones isn't what I'd call a conservative by any means.
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10-4.
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Nope. As another example for the need to stop President Obama.
I didn't surf there. The article was sent to me by a conservative.
As a joke? Alex Jones isn't what I'd call a conservative by any means.
One need not go to fringe sites to find abundant evidence of that.
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http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/04/who-cut-the-cheese-police-raid-raw-dairy-producers-in-l-a-destroy-inventory/
A yearlong sting operation involving a multitude of state and federal agencies brought to justice Wednesday a dangerous ring of raw dairy enthusiasts in California.
Los Angeles police yesterday arrested a farmer, one of her employers and the owner of a raw foods store on criminal conspiracy charges stemming from their allegedly illegal production and sale of unpasteurized milk, cheese and other nefarious dairy products.
Sharon Palmer, 51, James Cecil Stewart, 64, and Eugenie Victoria Bloch, 58, were all charged in a thirteen-count complaint, which includes “the felony crime of processing milk without pasteurization” and four counts of conspiracy. Arraignments were scheduled for today.
Stewart is the owner of Rawesome Foods, a private buying club that offers customers raw milk and cheese, in addition to other products. State agents raided his store yesterday and seized or destroyed his entire inventory.
“In total, it looks like they took $30,000 to $50,000 worth of food,” said one Rawesome member in a video interview. “They backed up a twenty foot truck with a flatbed, and they filled it up with food. It was full when they left here, and you could see watermelons, coconuts, fresh produce that James had just bought this morning. They took it away. That truck was full. And when we came back in, they had double padlocked all the locks, and everything was bare.”
In the search warrant, authorities were authorized to seize any possible evidence of “interstate transportation,” including tax records, real estate transactions, billing records, purchasing and club records, emails, receipts, cash register data, credit cards receipts and inventory records.
Police also were ordered to seize Stewart’s computers and electronic devices, address books, telephone numbers, contacts, client lists and business cards.
Stewart is being held on $123,000 bail.
The Food and Drug Administration contends raw milk can carry harmful bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria. It’s lawful to manufacture and sell unpasteurized dairy products in California, but certain licenses and permits are required. Stewart and Palmer, the owner of Healthy Family Farms, allegedly didn’t have those permits.
According to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, law enforcement agencies launched a yearlong sting operation when they caught wind of Stewart’s and Palmer’s illicit cheese.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/08/04/who-cut-the-cheese-police-raid-raw-dairy-producers-in-l-a-destroy-inventory/
**So, if you can use police powers to shut down raw milk distributors, can you use police powers to shut down venues that facilitate homosexual sex? I'm guessing the illness and death rate from consuming raw milk is much lower than the illness and death rate from HIV transmission in LA county.
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GM: You would have been one hellacious law school professor when it came to devising questions for exams!
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GM: You would have been one hellacious law school professor when it came to devising questions for exams!
:?
I didn't go to law school, but the answer is simple; one is legal on is not.
Stupdid...
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GM: You would have been one hellacious law school professor when it came to devising questions for exams!
:?
I didn't go to law school, but the answer is simple; one is legal on is not.
Stupdid...
Ok, so laws are passed against homosexual male sex under health codes. We have taxes on gerbil sales from West Hollywood pet stores similar to taxes on tobacco. We have PSAs on the dangers of homosexual sex "Fisting, be smart, don't start". After the school presentations showing diseased lungs from smoking, they have presentations on prolapsed rectums and ugly, graphic pictures of late stage AIDS victims.
We can distribute buttons or stickers with slogans like "Sodomy kills". As liberals like to say "If it saves just one life....."
After all, if the general public has to pay for health care, then we get to have a say in the individual behaviors that contribute to health care costs.
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The logic is impeccable :lol:
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The logic is impeccable :lol:
Really?
Odd, I thought Crafty you were a Libertarian?
From the Libertarian Party Platform.
Section 1.3 "Personal Relationships":
Sexual orientation, preference, gender, or gender identity should have no impact on the government's treatment of individuals, such as in current marriage, child custody, adoption, immigration or military service laws. Government does not have the authority to define, license or restrict personal relationships. Consenting adults should be free to choose their own sexual practices and personal relationships."
Section 3.5 "Rights and Discrimination"
We condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant. Government should not deny or abridge any individual's rights based on sex, wealth, race, color, creed, age, national origin, personal habits, political preference or sexual orientation. Parents, or other guardians, have the right to raise their children according to their own standards and beliefs.
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It's not about morality, it's a health and safety issue. Like raw milk products, or fast food or salt intake or tobacco use.
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"I didn't go to law school, but the answer is simple; one is legal on is not."
The point of libertarian issues is to dare to question what should or should not be law, not just blind support fro whatever they are.
When you expand the public role in maintaining our health, you cause the erosion of the liberty to do things considered risky. Motorcycling, stickfighting and putting penises where they weren't designed to go. Is driving a car today without a seatbelt more dangerous than riding a motorcycle? One is legal, one is not (in 49 states). That can change.
Can't have it both ways. If you are the risk manager of you, then you decide. If the Sec. of Heath is in charge, then she decides. You might not like the next czar's decisions.
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Hmmm I disagree on how you are making your point.
However, I do agree that if heath issues are brought to the forefront so everyone is aware of the implications and if there is truth in packaging and advertising, I see no reason to make laws prohibiting raw milk, fast food, salt, or tobacco use. Or seat belts, or helmets, etc.
Due to my bike accident, I'm not feeling well, therefore I am not in a good mood this week. A woman walked by my table at an outdoor coffee shop yesterday afternoon. She aggressively asked me, "Do you know that smoking is bad for your health"? I looked up, and loudly said, "No, but I do know being fat and ugly like you (she was) is bad for your health and my eyes."
Frankly, I know smoking cigars is not good for me. And probably, the woman knows being fat is not good for her. But I think it's better if the government stays out of it.
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JDN, with you on those agreement points. :-)
"I think it's better if the government stays out of it."
But they can only do that if it is your responsibility, meaning all the consequences of your actions.
Some nanny state laws are good in their effect and result, like seat belts, but then how do we stop there and not end the other things mentioned. I forget my seat belt sometimes and find myself reaching for it every time I see law enforcement. I rode with my youthful 87 year old dad driving the other day. Just a short drive but I got in and buckled up. He saw that and stopped to do his. One sibling of mine has been harping on him to do that. Hard to change old habits and the law gives people an excuse to say - just do it, but that is in the context that everything relating to driving is regulated. Everything related to living is not regulated or at least shouldn't be.
Our state was first I think to enact smoking bans, with a mixed effect on liberty. Then we repealed the helmet law. A gain I suppose for liberty, but I can't imagine getting on a motorcycle without a helmet so it seems like a lousy symbol for liberty. Still they require eye protection and I'm sure we have both been hit with bugs in the glasses enough to know why.
True libertarianism would oppose all these restrictions and true liberalism of today (fascism) would put an end to nearly all personal choice and responsibility. It seems to me we could have a very few, very carefully considered laws and restrictions without going hogwild but experience seems to prove that I am wrong.
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One of the justifications of taxes and restrictions on tobacco use is the health care costs that must be imposed on the public as a whole. The same argument is made about fast food/sugar/salt. If you think obesity/heart disease is expensive, imagine the cost per year for the antiviral drugs to treat HIV infection. Imagine the future costs for the VA (and thus the taxpayers) now that openly homosexual males can join the military. A group of less than 1% to at most 3% of the population is about 61% of the HIV + cases now in the US.
If I'm paying, I have a say in your behavior, right?
Or maybe we should pay our own medical bills and then take personal responsibility for our individual choices. Nah, that's crazy talk!
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Or maybe we should pay our own medical bills and then take personal responsibility for our individual choices.
And if we paid our own medical bills, the cost levels set by providers would be limited to what people could generally afford and were willing to pay (imagine that!), not what an entity with the power to print money could possibly spend.
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Yeah, it's funny how a free market can make products and services cheaper for everyone to access but somehow that can't be used for healthcare.
Oh well, at least all our medical records will be stored on a secure federal database thanks to Obamacare. Meaning the Chinese Ministry of State Security will be reading my lipid panels before I do.
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Or maybe we should pay our own medical bills and then take personal responsibility for our individual choices.
And if we paid our own medical bills, the cost levels set by providers would be limited to what people could generally afford and were willing to pay (imagine that!), not what an entity with the power to print money could possibly spend.
While I understand your point; I choose to smoke cigars and ride motorcycles, someone else may choose to eat too much fatty food, etc. still there is not a 100% direct cause and effect. In many/most health issues a direct cause and effect cannot be found.
Also, many/most people would not be able to pay their own bills. Do you know what cancer costs? Or a heart attack? Even just a "routine" visit to the emergency room is $1000's of dollars, Etc.
Nor do I think doctors would lower their wages; medical care is not an option or luxury like my cigars and Ducati. I can, I'ld be sad :-) do without. I cannot do without medical care. But doctors are business people too. Why should they treat someone for cancer if they cannot pay? Or even a broken leg. Many/most doctors would focus on high income areas; few if any would want to work in low income or even middle income areas.
My grandfather was a small town surgeon near Milwaukee, albeit he was quite famous in WI. If you were rich, my grandfather charged you top dollar, if you were poor my grandfather would take vegetables or whatever as payment. He never turned anyone away. I don't remember a holiday meal in which he didn't have to leave for an emergency somewhere. For various reasons, good and bad, those days are gone.
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JDN, I will try to split my answer, libertarian issue here and the rest over on health care politics.
GM put it succinctly (as he does), "If I'm paying, I have a say in your behavior".
I don't care if you don't care (but you are certainly entitled to that opinion) that you might lose your freedom or preferred recreation because I care about mine and I know plenty here care about the right to fight which would most certainly be among the first to go.
If you can ride Dukatis for recreation, not exactly third world poverty behavior, you certainly should not need someone else to be picking up your basic living expenses, healthcare, so you you don't have to dip into your own resources.
(http://www.ducati.com/pub/image.do?rule=white-border2&src=/cms-web/upl/img/bikes/Monster/Monster%201100%20S/img-configurator-mnster1100S.jpg&output=JPEG&cache=true&httpCache=true&interpolation=bicubic2&width=240&color=%23000000&height=160&ext=image.jpeg)
No intent to hit while you are down, but theoretically your choice of riding superbikes at higher speeds on mountain roads, in a nanny state system, jeopardizes my right to putz around carefully at 80 mpg on my Honda 200. Soon they will all be prohibited. Or they will limit you to what mine is and that is a different sport, likely of no interest to a Dukati enthusiast. You are perhaps willing to lose what you have. I am not.
Your right to your pursuit without harming others and my right to not pay for it are both clearly enumerated in the 9th amendment IMO.
"I choose to smoke cigars and ride motorcycles, someone else may choose to eat too much fatty food, etc. still there is not a 100% direct cause and effect. In many/most health issues a direct cause and effect cannot be found."
Government prohibitions and regulations and penalties have been issued with far less certain causation than those examples.
Let's take one of my summer favorites, waterskiing, passed down in our family through at least 4 generations. I remember my grandfather skied on one ski on his 70th birthday and my mother into her 80s, while my award winning daughter just got her first successful one-ski ride at 17, last weekend. Others pull hamstrings and fill up chiropractic wards with their pulls and twists. It burns fossil fuels. Why is that necessary - in some Washington bureaucratic view - it isn't! Banned. Dessert - banned. How would you like your shrimp cooked, battered with french fries, just kidding, we'll tell you how your food will be prepared. Whoops, shrimp was banned too. It just isn't necessary. Even lean beef is inefficient and oatmeal is on the latest list of foods to not advertise to children. There is no end when the alleged consequence is a public expense.
"My grandfather was a small town surgeon near Milwaukee, albeit he was quite famous in WI. If you were rich, my grandfather charged you top dollar, if you were poor my grandfather would take vegetables or whatever as payment. He never turned anyone away."
My grandfather and father were dentists serving the downtown community including some of its most famous citizens like our current govenor in his childhood, charged low, fair rates that no one ever questioned, worked long weeks and long hours well into their 80s because they loved what they did and serving people and did not charge people extra or give better service for being rich. Good grief.
"While I understand your point, ..."
No, I think that you don't.
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Doug, perhaps I am wrong, but I think we are saying the same way, but just differently.
I don't like government interference either; that said, we do need laws against murder, rape, etc. Also against untested drugs, food storage, safety building codes, etc.
I guess my point is if it primarily only is going to affect me, stay out of it, but but if my actions directly affect others then there is an issue. Who cares if I get drunk tonight (it helps the pain go away) but I shouldn't drive (there should be and is a law) since I might kill someone else. Also, I want truth in packaging and advertising. Don't tell me lies. But after I know the truth, if I still want to eat fat food, smoke, drink, not wear a seatbelt or helmet or whatever, I agree, that should be my choice. Do you see my point?
By the way I have/had (totaled) a Ducati GT 1000. An old man's Ducati, not a true sports bike, that said, it is still 1000cc and quite fast and I've had it modified. Maybe now I'll buy a Honda like yours. :-)
I never said I was 3rd world poverty. Nor are you. Then again, back to the subject, I could never afford to pay for cancer or a heart attack out of my own pocket.
That is why your father and grandfather's occupation is different than my grandfather's. Dental in this discussion is apples and oranges to Medical issues. Insurance is suppose to be for that which is unexpected and cataclysmic. I don't count a cleaning, a cavity, or even a root canal in that category so I've never bought dental insurance. People can either afford the cost, shop around and find a lower cost provider, or simply go without for a while. But I do buy/need medical insurance since I could be hit by a car, come down with cancer, have a heart attack, etc. and I could never afford the cost, nor do I have time to shop for a low cost provider. Plus coverage may be needed immediately. Insurance, therefore somehow needs to be available and affordable. The same applies to car insurance; I may not need to buy casualty insurance (damage to my car) but I always buy liability insurance to insure against the unknown.
As for my grandfather, I know a few big time lawyers here in town who do the same. For rich clients, they charge rich prices. For the downtrodden they will discount their fees and sometimes they do pro bono. I see nothing wrong with that. Frankly, I admire them. As I did my grandfather. However now a days medical insurance reimbursement rate is controlled by the insurance companies; it's not the government (except Medicare), but I'm not sure that is right either. Imagine if all lawyers were paid the same rate regardless of education, experience, or ability? It's not an easy question nor is there an easy answer.
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I warned that legalization will lead to greater regulation and taxation, and not remove the money and black markets of drugs as promised.
This LA Times is about environmental aspects, and starts the ball rolling on regulation first and taxation sure to follow: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pot-enviro-20121223,0,1182034,full.story
Pot farms wreaking havoc on Northern California environment
Burgeoning marijuana growing operations are sucking millions of gallons of water from coho salmon lifelines and taking other environmental tolls, scientists say.
Wildlife technician Aaron Pole surveys a forest trashed by growers. Carbofuran, an insecticide lethal to humans in small doses, is found regularly at large-scale pot farms. Also flowing into the watershed are rodenticides, fungicides, diesel fuel and other pollutants
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Libertarians should have worked toward reversing Wickard v. Filburn before thinking legalization is possible. (Growing wheat on your own property that is consumed on your own property is an act of interstate commerce.) Also Kelo where they can just take your property for other private purposes.
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(Is THIS what we had in mind with drug legalization?)
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2013/03/06/drug-testing-company-sees-spike-in-children-using-marijuana/
Drug Testing Company Sees Spike In Children Using Marijuana
March 6, 2013 11:53 PM
Share on email 488
(credit: CBS)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (CBS4) – A drug testing company says it’s seeing a big spike in children using marijuana following the passage of Amendment 64.
...It’s not just more students, but it appears they’re using pot more often. ... “In high school it has kind of gotten out of hand,” student Alaina Tanenbaum said.
Experts say the test results show that children are getting higher than ever with alarming levels of THC, marijuana’s active ingredient, in their bodies. “A typical kid (is) between 50 and 100 nanograms. Now were seeing these up in the over 500, 700, 800, climbing,” (More at link)
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Who could have seen this coming?
(Is THIS what we had in mind with drug legalization?)
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2013/03/06/drug-testing-company-sees-spike-in-children-using-marijuana/
Drug Testing Company Sees Spike In Children Using Marijuana
March 6, 2013 11:53 PM
Share on email 488
(credit: CBS)
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (CBS4) – A drug testing company says it’s seeing a big spike in children using marijuana following the passage of Amendment 64.
...It’s not just more students, but it appears they’re using pot more often. ... “In high school it has kind of gotten out of hand,” student Alaina Tanenbaum said.
Experts say the test results show that children are getting higher than ever with alarming levels of THC, marijuana’s active ingredient, in their bodies. “A typical kid (is) between 50 and 100 nanograms. Now were seeing these up in the over 500, 700, 800, climbing,” (More at link)
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This certainly bear watching; while not denying the possibility that GM is implying here, is there also a possibility of more testing leading to skewed results or a motive by the company to skew the data?
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This certainly bear watching; while not denying the possibility that GM is implying here, is there also a possibility of more testing leading to skewed results or a motive by the company to skew the data?
I'm sure there will be lots of followup research on this. I expect the same result.
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We know about the programs, taxes and regulations here in the US that are overly burdensome. Then we hear of stories from third world countries where regulations are even worse, much worse. Only the richest people with the deepest pockets and highest connections can jump through the hoops that empower the powerful and hold down the masses.
While we argue the age old question of whether you help people best by giving them a fish or by teaching them to fish, one observer pointed out that what we really are doing with our policies is denying them access to the pond.
Economic liberty is your access to the pond. You shouldn't be taxed and regulated like a mulit-national conglomerate with teams of extra employees dedicated to compliance before you have found your first customer or earned your first dollar.
The default position ought to be that a person who is infringing on no one else ought to have a right to make a living.
One comprehensive set of measurements applied across the globe over time is the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom (already posted in other threads): http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking What we know is that with each country's policies they are choosing between being rich and poor. If the choice is between being free and prosperous versus forcing people to either stay in poverty or be held back from improving their lives, aren't we really choosing between right and wrong?
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Child pot poisonings increase in Colo.
The Associated Press
DENVER – Colorado doctors say looser pot laws are leading to more child poisonings for youngsters who are often attracted by drug-laced edibles such as gummy worms or brownies.
From early 2005 to late 2009, Children’s Hospital Colorado had no emergency-room visits by kids who had ingested marijuana. In the next two years, after medical marijuana became legal in Colorado, it had 14 cases. So far, no deaths have been reported.
Doctors are campaigning for mandatory safety packaging as Colorado lawmakers debate even broader legal sales of pot with recreational-marijuana stores.
“We’ve seen a dramatic increase in pediatric exposure,” said Dr. George Wang, a Children’s ER doctor who also works with Denver Health’s Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center.
Dr. Michael Kosnett said careful parenting is also part of the equation.
Children ingesting pot is also dangerous because emergency-room doctors aren’t usually looking for it as a cause of any symptoms they see, Wang said. That can lead to invasive and expensive diagnostic efforts, such as a spinal tap or CT scan, if parents are embarrassed or scared to mention the true cause.
“When children get admitted to the ICU, that’s serious,” Kosnett said. Symptoms may appear similar to meningitis, for example.
At Children’s Hospital Colorado, doctors reported serious symptoms, including decreased levels of consciousness and breathing trouble. Children can also vomit from ingesting too much of it.
Some industry members favor tamper-proof seals, but they would rather not break each individual joint or candy into a lockable bag that cost $7 or more.
Robin Hackett, co-owner of Botana Care, a medical-marijuana store in Northglenn, said that would drive up the cost.
The Denver Post reported calls about potential marijuana exposure for all ages have doubled since 2009 at one poison center.
Prescribed dosages of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana products used to control nausea from chemotherapy, is between 4 and 12 milligrams for most children ages 2 to 4, while some edibles have up to 300 milligrams of the active ingredient in marijuana.
There is no statewide reporting. Some doctors have gone through files to try to determine the impact, while others do not track those cases.
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A legitimate area of concern and regulation.
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A legitimate area of concern and regulation.
Regulate abuse outside of the law?
Making it legal, making it acceptable and making it accessible for adults somehow leads to children stoned before their brain fully develops.
I studied the situation on my trips to the state this winter. The 'medical' side only is what is up and running. No new legal licensed shops for the public have opened yet. All pot sales to the public so far are coming from medical license abuse or just through the usual crime channels. Everyone that wanted a medical license got one if they stuck to basic points like chronic pain in their 'doctor' interview. What a licensee can buy is virtually unlimited and the active ingredient level in your blood is something users can dial up like a volume switch, not limited by old fashioned things like coughing or lung capacity. Low prices serve to make it more available and more available means more children using.
Next it will get much worse in terms of THC levels in the children as new production comes on line, new stores, new advertising, pot tourism, adds to the new enthusiasm gone viral, and the futility of parent warnings or prohibitions.
Then it will get worse in different ways as our 'concerned' 'regulatory' authorities get ramped up to handle all the new business. New taxes will replace what was lost in pricing, 'legal' product will get co-mingled with smuggled, organized crime based product, tax laws will replace drug laws as the new enforcement mechanism, and the powers of the all powerful state will grow and benefit from this ill-fated movement toward liberty. MHO.
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http://www.coloradoan.com/viewart/20130401/NEWS11/304010028/Child-marijuana-poisoning-up-for-some-Colorado-hospitals Child marijuana poisoning up for some Colorado hospitals
Apr 1, 2013
New Colo House bill passed: drivers are too high if their blood contains more than 5 nanograms of THC per milliliter http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/04/02/colorado-house-approves-bill-to-set-pot-limits-for-drivers/#ixzz2PVbWbYnA ('Open containers' are already illegal.)
For Legal Pot Sellers, A Big Tax Problem
http://www.npr.org/2013/04/02/176042513/for-legal-pot-sellers-a-big-tax-problem
"I'm still treated as an illegal business," - owner of Choice Organics in Fort Collins
Next it will be Big Cannibis... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/colorado-marijuana-laws
Denver Post, 30 pot legalization questions with answers: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22184944/colorado-pot-legalization-30-questions-and-answers
"About the only place it is 100 percent clear you can smoke marijuana is in a free-standing home that you own."
"The amendment allows people to grow up to six plants — only three of which can be flowering, or ready for harvest, at any given time." Selling what you grow (or procure any other way) if you aren't a legal shop (and there aren't any) is still illegal.
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It will be interesting to see how this all plays in the 2016 Presidential nomination fight between Hillary and Gov. Hickenlooper.
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Well, off the top of my head, certainly food/candy containing pot should be sold in a manner that no one, including children, can be confused about what it is. Legal standards similar to those about firearms being kept inaccessible to children seem to be a real good idea.
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Well, off the top of my head, certainly food/candy containing pot should be sold in a manner that no one, including children, can be confused about what it is. Legal standards similar to those about firearms being kept inaccessible to children seem to be a real good idea.
Yes. They already have that. Both the gun and the bong (now all vaporizers) are hard to use in the lockbox. Legalization only extends to persons 21 and over, no shops have opened, and yet child poisoning incidences and child THC blood levels are increasing.
Drug legalization for adults includes the reality that use and abuse by children accelerates.
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"...a guy in Denver legally growing medical-marijuana in his house was charged with felony child abuse because of the dangers prosecutors said the grow posed. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors and avoided jail."
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22184944/colorado-pot-legalization-30-questions-and-answers#ixzz2PWBfUgCv
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I could put this under Europe but you know it will come to the US next.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/road-safety/10278702/EU-plans-to-fit-all-cars-with-speed-limiters.html
Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded.
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"Wittes is a smart guy who surrounds himself with other smart people." - BD on the privacy thread
A previous piece by Wittes:
What Ben Franklin Really Said
By Benjamin Wittes
Friday, July 15, 2011
Here’s an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what it seems to say. Not at all.
I started looking into this quotation because I am writing a frontal attack on the idea that liberty and security exist in some kind of “balance” with one another–and the quotation is kind of iconic to the balance thesis. Indeed, Franklin’s are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship. A version of them is engraved on the Statue of Liberty. They are quoted endlessly by those who assert that these two values coexist with one another in a precarious, ever-shifting state of balance that security concerns threaten ever to upset. Every student of American history knows them. And every lover of liberty has heard them and known that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized government–that we empower governments to protect us in a devil’s bargain from which we will lose in the long run.
Very few people who quote these words, however, have any idea where they come from or what Franklin was really saying when he wrote them. That’s not altogether surprising, since they are far more often quoted than explained, and the context in which they arose was a political battle of limited resonance to modern readers. Many of Franklin’s biographers don’t quote them at all, and no text I have found attempts seriously to explain them in context. The result is to get to the bottom of what they meant to Franklin, one has to dig into sources from the 1750s, with the secondary biographical literature giving only a framework guide to the dispute. I’m still nailing down the details, but I can say with certainty at this stage that Franklin was not saying anything like what we quote his words to suggest.
The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.
What’s more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes–and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier–as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance–and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.
In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303309504579182091428213278?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
Coloradans also approved a 25% tax on the marijuana sales they legalized in 2012. The money is earmarked for education, so now parents can tell their kids they're getting high for their future, or something. The problem is that the tax rate, which can reach 35% in some localities, will be so high that it may encourage a black market, thus defeating the supposed purpose of legalization. This is what comes from toking up before economics class.
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My intuitive sense of things is that this level of taxation still does not approach the costs attendant to a criminal market.
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"The money is earmarked for education, so now parents can tell their kids they're getting high for their future, or something"
:roll:
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Time to legalize pot, prostitution in NJ. Legalize them and tax them and keep the business and government tax base here. Screw NY. We have been getting screwed by NY ever since I can remember:
( I say this with tongue in cheek. I guess the prostitution money could go to health school lunch programs, and pot could go to pay for the half of the population that gets it "free". Maybe free mammograms or something and that would also double to secure the chick vote.)
*****Why New York casinos could crush Atlantic City
Richard Cummins | Lonely Planet Images | Getty Images
New Yorkers have approved an amendment that will allow seven casinos to open in the state, including one to three in the New York City area in seven years. And that could sound the death knell for Atlantic City, already struggling under the weight of regional competition.
Atlantic City should be "very concerned," said Chad Mollman, an analyst who covers casino and hotel stocks for Morningstar. "New York City is the biggest feeder market in Atlantic City. There is a question in terms of the viability of Atlantic City in the long term."
Resorts was the first legal casino on the East Coast when it opened in Atlantic City in 1978. A lot has changed since then.
"Atlantic City's time has come and gone," said Harold Vogel, the CEO of Vogel Capital Management and the author of the bedrock textbook "Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis." "It was second after Nevada, and it was a special place in a small location. It had 10 good years when it was pretty unique, but then we got Indian casinos, and then gambling in Pennsylvania."
(Read more: Stronger than the storm? Maybe not Atlantic City)
Part of the rationale for opening casinos in New York has been that it will capture gambling money that has been going to Atlantic City and other places.
The New York Daily News reported that Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the case for the casino amendment by telling the press, "New Jersey has casinos. Connecticut has casinos. Pennsylvania has casinos. We literally hemorrhage people from the borders who go to casinos. I think it will keep the money in this state and I think it is a major economic development vehicle for the Hudson Valley especially and for upstate New York."
If New York money stops crossing the southern border, Atlantic City is in big trouble.
Richard "Skip" Bronson, the chairman of U.S. Digital Gaming and the author of "The War at the Shore," which chronicled his effort to build a luxury Mirage Resorts casino in Atlantic City, said New York casinos will make a bad situation even worse.
"There are only so many gambling dollars in the pot," Bronson said. "And there has been a massive proliferation of casinos throughout America. It's a form of real estate, and like any form of real estate, it goes through a cycle: Demand, saturation, and then glut. A place like Atlantic City has too many casino hotels and too many rooms. This is a fact of life."
Play VideoRoll the dice on a casino?
Is now the time to be on casino stocks? With CNBC's Melissa Lee and the "Options Action" traders.If Atlantic City does slip into further decline, Caesars Entertainment could be deeply affected. The company owns four casinos there (Bally's Atlantic City, Caesars Atlantic City, Harrah's Atlantic City and Showboat Atlantic City), which have been a serious drag on earnings. The company lost $761 million in the third quarter, largely because of a massive write-down of Atlantic City assets.
"We continue to have a negative outlook for casino companies in the U.S. due to what we're seeing in regional casino markets, and Caesars is the most exposed to regional casino markets," Mollman said. He rates Caesars shares sell, and estimates their fair value (similar to a price target) at $9.
Yet, despite the fact that New York casinos are likely to hasten the demise of Atlantic City, Caesars donated $100,00 to the New York Jobs Now Committee, which supported the pro-casino amendment.
Caesars did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Read more: Science says casinos could make Wall Street riskier)
Of course, ignoring potential New York City casinos might be impossible.
"There isn't a gaming company in America that isn't paying attention to New York, and there's not a gaming company in America that's not interested in having an opportunity in New York," Bronson said.
New York casinos could still face an uncertain future because of the extent of regional competition.
"In an oversaturated market, now there's a much higher risk for people who will have to build up these casino palaces, and it's not clear that they'll be at all successful," Vogel told CNBC.com. "This is how markets fall apart, and this is how you have bankruptcies."
—By CNBC's Alex Rosenberg. Follow him on Twitter @CNBCAlex.****
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My intuitive sense of things is that this level of taxation still does not approach the costs attendant to a criminal market.
Agree. They will do fine for now with this level of taxation, only paid by tourists and casual users. 'Medical marijuana' market will not be subject to this tax. The heavy burners just had to utter 'chronic pain' to a doctor, and their friends all know to just call them to get around the tax.
I'm mostly pointing out legalization is a misnomer. The black market is still illegal. Levying a 35% tax that most people can easily avoid will result in a permanent and prosperous 'black market'.
One libertarian point in favor of legalization was that crime would disappear with the big money and illegal status removed, but then we tax it to get the price back up to old, black market prices. I see an incongruity.
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The Laffer curve still applies.
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Good story:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/26/my_trip_to_the_pot_shop_122062.html
My contacts on the ground in Colo tell me the recent legalization of recreational and tourist purchasing has completely screwed up the pricing for the medical license holders. It is taxed differently but the exact same supplies serve both markets.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/06/mary-matalin-the-gop-left-me-i-didnt-leave-them/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160506GlennBeckDailyV4_FINAL&utm_term=Smart%20List%20-%20Responsive%20Group%20Control
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/06/mary-matalin-the-gop-left-me-i-didnt-leave-them/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160506GlennBeckDailyV4_FINAL&utm_term=Smart%20List%20-%20Responsive%20Group%20Control
As the republicans implode, there will probably more of this. Perhaps this will make the Libertarians more rational and viable.
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http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/06/mary-matalin-the-gop-left-me-i-didnt-leave-them/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20160506GlennBeckDailyV4_FINAL&utm_term=Smart%20List%20-%20Responsive%20Group%20Control
As the republicans implode, there will probably more of this. Perhaps this will make the Libertarians more rational and viable.
Well, so much for that.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/436011/libertarians-convention-florida-crazy-fun-unserious
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I left the party when I discovered a NAMBLA plank in the CA party platform.
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http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2016/10/Johnsons-Malpractice-copy.jpg
(http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2016/10/Johnsons-Malpractice-copy.jpg)
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http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/denver-decriminalizes-public-defecation-make-life-easier-migrants-homeless#.WSiTX7O6P_8.twitter
Legalize it!
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http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/denver-decriminalizes-public-defecation-make-life-easier-migrants-homeless#.WSiTX7O6P_8.twitter
Legalize it!
This is serious business. Is the city or country now in charge of restrooms - as a right?
I watched an inner city McDonalds security guard refuse restroom access to a youth where it is clearly marked no use without purchase and the kid had no money. I felt sorry for the kid. One could only guess what was going to happen next, out back.
Forgive the bad analogy but with pets in parks at least the cities normally require the mess to be scooped up and disposed. Can we require that with human migrants? I doubt it. We don't even enforce littering laws.
And how do they squat and drop trow without breaking public exposure laws? Those laws go next?
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http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/denver-decriminalizes-public-defecation-make-life-easier-migrants-homeless#.WSiTX7O6P_8.twitter
Legalize it!
This is serious business. Is the city or country now in charge of restrooms - as a right?
I watched an inner city McDonalds security guard refuse restroom access to a youth where it is clearly marked no use without purchase and the kid had no money. I felt sorry for the kid. One could only guess what was going to happen next, out back.
Forgive the bad analogy but with pets in parks at least the cities normally require the mess to be scooped up and disposed. Can we require that with human migrants? I doubt it. We don't even enforce littering laws.
And how do they squat and drop trow without breaking public exposure laws? Those laws go next?
Yes. Of course. Don't want to discriminate against anyone!
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(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2018/03/Libertarian-ideas-versus-candidates.jpeg)
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The better the appeal of the Libertarian candidate, the more chance the Dems have to steal the seat. Like Nader with Bush Gore, libertarians often win more than the margin of Dem victory, as they did in MN 2016:
Democrat: Clinton 46.9% 1,366,676
Republican: Trump 45.4% 1,322,891
margin 43,785
Libertarian G. Johnson 3.9% 112,944
Independent E. McMullin 1.8% 53,080
Bring the libertarian issues INTO the parties. Both parties!
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Indeed!
If you add the Green vote to Hillary and the Libertarian vote to Trump, Trump won the popular vote by a small margin.
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Indeed!
If you add the Green vote to Hillary and the Libertarian vote to Trump, Trump won the popular vote by a small margin.
Yes (I didn't know that!), and a little more yet with McMullin figured in.
Clinton + Stein = 67,302,113
Trump + Gary Johnson + Evan McMullin = 68,197,921
A center-right nation! (?)
That doesn't mean Nader voters would have otherwise voted for Gore, Johnson for Trump, etc. but a very interesting stat.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmVjKIEC8rw
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmVjKIEC8rw
He is right but there is a fine line between us using government powers to achieve our outcome objectives and them using government powers to achieve theirs.
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Agreed.
The simple example that I use to zero in on libertarian economics is this: China now has virtual monopoly on our anti-biotics. Has does libertarian economics respond to this?
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Agreed.
The simple example that I use to zero in on libertarian economics is this: China now has virtual monopoly on our anti-biotics. Has does libertarian economics respond to this?
Yes. Here's how I see it. Free markets, free choices is the rule. National security and national interest is the exception.
We need to retain the manufacturing capability here for some strategic things especially as we head into a potential conflict period with China. How to make that happen in our best interest and not wrapped up in crony government corruption will be enormously complex and challenging.
Anti biotics are a good example. Masks. The world leader in protective equipment is headquartered right here, 3M, yet we had no stockpile and no ability to respond to a crisis with emergency manufacturing capability.
Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing was the craze the last couple of decades. Stock next to nothing and have every input come in exactly as needed. Then came covid supply chain interruptions and the game has changed. The new way might be called 'anti-fragile'. How do we make systems resilient
Still, what JD Vance was suggesting is alarming. He says we chose Walmart box store goods over jobs. It would have taken quite a expansion of big government and contraction of economic freedoms to stop that.
In the area of pornography he makes a good point. Free 'speech' is one thing. Protecting our children is another. There is no real mechanism to stop the 'entertainment' available to adults from reaching children and children are being harmed, so therefore ... we should do what?
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http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211027%2007.jpg
(http://ace.mu.nu/archives/meme%2020211027%2007.jpg)