The experience with another case can be taken to suggest that there could be an alternative, and far less costly, approach to dealing with would-be terrorists, one that might generally (but not always) be effective at stopping them without actually having to jail them.
It involves a hothead in Virginia who ranted about jihad on Facebook, bragging about how “we dropped the twin towers.” He then told a correspondent in New Orleans that he was going to bomb the Washington, D.C. Metro the next day. Not wanting to take any chances and not having the time to insinuate an informant, the FBI arrested him. Not surprisingly, they found no bomb materials in his possession. Since irresponsible bloviating is not illegal (if it were, Washington would quickly become severely underpopulated), the police could only charge him with a minor crime — making an interstate threat. He received only a good scare, a penalty of time served and two years of supervised release.
That approach seems to have worked: the guy seems never to have been heard from again. It resembles the Secret Service’s response when they get a tip that someone has ranted about killing the president. They do not insinuate an encouraging informant into the ranter’s company to eventually offer crucial, if bogus, facilitating assistance to the assassination plot. Instead, they pay the person a Meaningful Visit and find that this works rather well as a dissuasion device. Also, in the event of a presidential trip to the ranter’s vicinity, the ranter is visited again. It seems entirely possible that this approach could productively be applied more widely in terrorism cases. Ranting about killing the president may be about as predictive of violent action as ranting about the virtues of terrorism to deal with a political grievance. The terrorism cases are populated by many such ranters — indeed, tips about their railing have frequently led to FBI involvement. It seems likely, as apparently happened in the Metro case, that the ranter could often be productively deflected by an open visit from the police indicating that they are on to him. By contrast, sending in a paid operative to worm his way into the ranter’s confidence may have the opposite result, encouraging, even gulling, him toward violence.
Month: April 2015
Philly PD Declares All Drivers To Be ‘Under Investigation’ While Denying Request For License Plate Reader Data
The City of Philadelphia does not want you to know in which neighborhoods the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) is focusing their use of powerful automatic license plate readers (ALPR), nor do they want disclosed the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of this technology, as they continue to fight a Declaration public records request filed in January with MuckRock News.
City officials argue in their response that every metro driver is under investigation, in an effort to exempt so-called criminal investigatory records from release under PA’s Right-to-Know Act:
Moreover, records “relating to or resulting in a criminal investigation” are exempt from disclosure under the Act, in particular “[i]nvestigative materials, notes, correspondence, videos and reports.” 65 P.S. § 67.708(b)(16)(ii). Such individual license plate readings and accompanying information are investigative materials that relate to individual criminal investigations, and, as your request indicates, these investigations may result in vehicle stops, arrests, or other police actions. Therefore, the individual license plate reading data is exempt from disclosure under the Act.
Wisconsin cutting environmental science, limiting talk of climate change
Since taking office in 2010, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has reshaped the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). He appointed a former state senator and critic of the agency to be its secretary, and hired an outside “deer czar” in response to hunters’ complaints about the state’s management of the deer herd. Gov. Walker also re-wrote state mining regulations to clear the way for an ill-fated iron mine proposal that was finally abandoned last month. Several days ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the mining company’s lobbyist and spokesman had been considered for appointment as the DNR’s deputy secretary—until officials realized there was a federal law specifically preventing that kind of thing. (He was, instead, hired for a job in another agency.)
Now, the DNR has come under the budget knife. Among other changes and position cuts, the agency’s science bureau faces a 30 percent reduction in staff. Now, Wisconsin Watch reports that the DNR is considering eliminating the science bureau altogether, shuffling remaining staff into other divisions.
The bureau performs the local, applied ecological research and monitoring that informs state regulations. Timothy Van Deelen, a University of Wisconsin ecologist, told Wisconsin Watch he was concerned about losing that work. “Long-term data sets are so incredibly rare,” he said. “And now a lot of that monitoring, such as with the deer herd, is up in the air.”
Former Prenda Lawyer Hit With A $50,000 Counterclaim In ADA Shakedown Lawsuit
Late in 2013, Paul Hansmeier, formerly of Prenda Law’s Legal Buffoonery on Wheels Copyright Death Suicide Squad, realized that participating in a multi-jurisdictional legal train wreck had left him oddly unfulfilled. If the promise contained in his law degree was ever to be fulfilled, he would need to reassess his shakedown-focused lawyering.
After an indeterminable amount of thought, Hansmeier apparently arrived at the conclusion that — unfulfilled promise or no — he was really only good at one thing: shaking people down. And, sadly, he wasn’t even all that great at that. But “sue what you know,” as they say, and Hansmeier went about rebranding himself as a Champion of the Weak and Underprivileged.
No longer would he be throwing shaky demand letters and even shakier lawsuits at Household Members Voted Most Likely To Download Porn by the loose confederation of shakedown artists d/b/a An Actual Law Firm (“Come see our letterhead!”). That was the old Paul Hansmeier.
The new Paul Hansmeier would instead be throwing shaky lawsuits and demand letters at any company whose towel racks were located more than 32″ above the ground or whose entry threshold was a ¼” above the legally-mandated height. The smaller the company the better, as they rarely even bothered to show up in court and would instead settle for a small fee.
The new Paul Hansmeier’s operations were so efficient he could barely keep himself stocked in A4. Filings were submitted so fast not even the plaintiffs were aware they were listed as plaintiffs. And it was working, to a limited extent. Hansmeier was able to knock over a few mom-and-pop businesses for a few grand each. But now he’s run into Kahler Hotels, which not only isn’t interested in his ADA shakedown claims, but is countersuing him for $50,000+. (h/t to Dan Browning of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
DEA Orchestrates Disinformation Campaign To Conceal Surveillance Powers
In Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Cryptonomicon, a protagonist works for a shadowy Allied unit called “Detachment 2702.” Detachment 2702 creates elaborate fake evidence to offer explanations of how the Allies learned of German movements, thus concealing that the Allies had cracked the Enigma code. Though fictional, the Detachment is based on actual World War II tactics. The Allies did things like send spotter planes to places they knew German ships would be to fortuitously “spot” them, and reportedly sent a fake radio message of congratulations to a non-existent spy to suggest a source for other intelligence.
You expect the government to use secret surveillance and disinformation campaigns against a wartime enemy. You probably don’t expect the government to use secret surveillance and disinformation campaigns in court against its own citizens.
You should.
Why Don’t Surveillance State Defenders Seem To Care That The Programs They Love Don’t Work?
There is a strong argument for ending these programs on the basis of their high cost and lack of effectiveness alone. But they actually do damage to our society. TSA agents participating in the behavioral detection program have claimed the program promotes racial profiling, and at least one inspector general report confirmed it. Victims unfairly caught up in the broader suspicious activity reporting programs have sued over the violations of their privacy. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded the telephone metadata program violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and raised serious constitutional concerns.
The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act passed by Senate Intelligence Committee last week is yet another example of this phenomenon. Experts agree that the bill would do little, if anything, to reduce the large data breaches we’ve seen in recent years, which have been caused by bad cyber security practices rather than a lack of information about threats. If passed by the full Congress, it would further weaken electronic privacy laws and ultimately put our data at greater risk. The bill would add another layer of government surveillance on a U.S. tech industry that is already facing financial losses estimated at $180 billion as a result of the exposure of NSA’s aggressive collection programs.
One ISP’s Prices Are So Bad, It Refuses To Tell Anyone What They Are
Given that the lack of competition keeps broadband prices sky high, it’s really no surprise that most ISPs make their pricing as confusing as possible, either hiding what you’ll pay behind a prequalification wall, or sacking users with a bevy of bizarre fees to covertly jack up the advertised rate post sale. While the industry is quick to issue a slew of press releases every time they bump their downstream speeds a few megabits, they’ll usually do their best to avoid mentioning what customers pay for the honor of these faster services, well aware that they’re only drawing additional attention to competitive shortcomings.
Still, even with layers upon layers of obfuscation, broadband ISPs will usually tell you what they charge users when pressed. Not so with FairPoint. When an industry outlet recently reached out to FairPoint as part of a series trying to compare prices, FairPoint actually refused to tell the news outlet how much it charges for DSL service. When pressed, the company would only provide what has to be one of the most long-winded non-answers I’ve ever seen:
“We offer internet access to both consumer and business customers through a variety of technologies leveraging both copper and fiber infrastructure, including digital subscriber line (‘DSL’), dedicated fiber and lit buildings throughout our footprint,” FairPoint said in an e-mailed statement. “Certain of these services provide speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. In select markets, we also offer cable modem internet service, ‘Fiber to the Home’, and wireless internet access. We sell Internet service as both a standalone, managed or packaged solution. Many customers like to simplify vendors and utilize our packaged and bundled solutions to meet their communications needs.”
That’s code for saying that FairPoint faces so little competition in its territories, it not only doesn’t have to disclose how much it charges for service, it doesn’t have to care whether you find that kind of stonewalling obnoxious. If you need FairPoint’s broadband service, there’s a pretty good chance that FairPoint service is your only option, so you’ll have to wait until you’ve actually signed up to truly learn how much you’ll get to pay.
Lobbyists for Spies Appointed To Oversee Spying
Who’s keeping watch of the National Security Agency? In Congress, the answer in more and more cases is that the job is going to former lobbyists for NSA contractors and other intelligence community insiders.
A wave of recent appointments has placed intelligence industry insiders into key Congressional roles overseeing intelligence gathering. The influx of insiders is particularly alarming because lawmakers in Washington are set to take up a series of sensitive surveillance and intelligence issues this year, from reform of the Patriot Act to far-reaching “information sharing” legislation.
After the first revelations of domestic surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, President Obama defended the spying programs by claiming they were “subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate.” But as Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., and other members of Congress have pointed out, there is essentially a “two-tiered” system for oversight, with lawmakers and staff on specialized committees, such as the House and Senate committees on Intelligence and Homeland Security, controlling the flow of information and routinely excluding other Congress members, even those who have asked for specific information relating to pending legislation.
How St. Louis Police Robbed My Family of $1000 (and How I’m Trying To Get It Back)
On a late spring evening eight years ago, police pulled over my mother’s 1997 Oldsmobile Aurora, in the suburb of St. Ann, Missouri, as she raced to pick up a relative from St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport. “Do you know why I stopped you?” the officer asked. “No I don’t,” my mother answered. The police charged her with speeding, but she did not receive a mere ticket. Instead, an officer ran my mother’s name and told her that since she had failed to appear in court for driving without a license, there was a six-year-old warrant out for her arrest. “I just started crying. I couldn’t believe it,” my mother said. The police arrested her and hauled her off to St. Louis County Jail, where authorities eventually allowed her one phone call, which she placed to my stepfather. He said, shaking his head, “I was surprised because I knew she didn’t have no warrants.”
St. Ann is one of the more notorious cities in the county when it comes to traffic violations, and in my mother’s case, the city’s finest, quite simply, fucked up. As it was, my mother had no warrant; the police confused her with another woman who shared her name — sans the middle initial.
She would go on to spend two nights in jail, pay $1,000 in fines that she did not owe, and plead guilty to the crimes of the other woman. She paid a devastating price, financially and emotionally, for the racist and classist policing described in last month’s Justice Department report on the tumult in Missouri. The 102-page document details the physical and economic terror inflicted upon the poor and black residents of Ferguson, Missouri. The report echoed the torrent of criticism that residents have long lodged at the city’s overseers. But, as my mother’s experience helps illustrate, the injustices cataloged by the investigation are not confined to one tiny Midwestern suburb. Ferguson is emblematic of how municipalities in the St. Louis region, and across the country, operate as carceral, mob-like states that view and treat poor black people as cash cows.
In Ferguson, at least 16,000 individuals had arrest warrants last year compared with the town’s total population of just 21,000 residents. Those warrants fed what the DOJ called a “code-enforcement system … honed to produce more revenue.” In nearby City of St. Louis, the 75,000 outstanding arrest warrants are equivalent to about one-quarter of the population, part of a county-wide problem of cash-strapped cities incentivized to “squeeze their residents with fines,” as The Washington Post put it. One city, Pine Lawn, Missouri, recently had 23,000 open arrest warrants compared with the city’s population of just 3,275 residents; court fees and traffic tickets make up nearly 30 percent of its municipal revenue. “Getting tickets — and getting them fixed — are two actions that define living in the St. Louis area,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported earlier this month.
Turns Out Feds Actually Tracked Most International Calls For Nearly A Decade Before 9/11 — Didn’t Stop The Attack
One of the big arguments trotted out repeatedly by surveillance state defenders concerning the NSA’s Section 215 program to collect records on all phone calls is that such a thing “would have prevented 9/11” if it had been in place at the time. Here’s former FBI boss Robert Mueller making just that argument right after the initial Snowden leaks. Here’s Dianne Feinstein making the argument that if we had that phone tracking program before September 11th, we could have stopped the attacks. And here’s former NSA top lawyer and still top NSA supporter Stewart Baker arguing that the program is necessary because the lack of such a program failed to stop 9/11.
Except, it turns out, the feds did have just such a program prior to 9/11 — run by the DEA. As you may recall, back in January it was revealed that the DEA had its own database of phone call metadata of nearly all calls from inside the US to foreign countries. Brad Heath at USA Today came out with a report yesterday that goes into much more detail on the program, showing that it dates back to at least 1992 — meaning that the feds almost certainly had the calls that Feinstein and Mueller pretended the government didn’t have prior to 9/11.