Category: Ignorant or unreasonable

The terrorists have won

To quote a commenter to the story:

Well its official. The terrorists have won.
They have us quaking in our boots, sensitive to the slightest little thing.

The Register writes

A US airline delayed a flight on Sunday evening after an unidentified person somewhere in or around Los Angeles International Airport picked a rather unfortunate name for a Wi-Fi hotspot.

American Airlines Flight 136 from Los Angeles to London was grounded for nearly a day after a passenger spotted a Wi-Fi network named “Al-Quida Free Terror Network” (sic).

Link (The Register)

Seattle Cops Bring Lawsuit Claiming They Have A Constitutional Right To Use Excessive Force

Just for reference, you (even if you’re a law abiding citizen) are a lot more likely to be killed or hurt by a police officer than a terrorist…

Over the past year, the Seattle police department has revised its policies on when police can use force, as part of a settlement with the Justice Department over findings that officers used frequent excessive, unconstitutional force on suspects.
But some 125 Seattle police officers responded by filing a lawsuit challenging the new rules. In their view, the new policies infringe on their rights to use as much force as they deem necessary in self-protection. They represent about ten percent of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild membership. The police union itself declined to endorse the lawsuit.
This week, a federal judge summarily rejected all of their claims, finding that they were without constitutional merit, and that she would have been surprised if such allegations of excessive force by officers did not lead to stricter standards.
The officers claimed the policies infringed on their rights under their Second Amendment and under the Fourth, claiming a self-defense right to use force. Chief U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman pointed out that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms — not the right to use them — and that the officers “grossly misconstrued” the Fourth Amendment when they claimed that it protects them, and not individuals who would be the subjects of police force or seizures.

Link (ThinkProgress)

CIA Apparently ‘Impersonated’ Senate Staffers To Gain Access To Documents On Shared Drives

According to sources familiar with the CIA inspector general report that details the alleged abuses by agency officials, CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation. These sources requested anonymity because the details of the agency’s inspector general report remain classified.

“If people knew the details of what they actually did to hack into the Senate computers to go search for the torture document, jaws would drop. It’s straight out of a movie,” said one Senate source familiar with the document.

Link (Techdirt)

Microsoft Takes Down A Bunch Of Non-Infringing YouTube Videos Over People Posting Product Keys In Comments

This seems to me like a very clear-cut reason why there should be harsh penalties imposed on those who sends false DMCA takedown notices:

Oh, Microsoft. The company has now admitted that it ended up sending a bunch of DMCA takedown notices on non-infringing videos, all because someone had posted product keys in comments to those videos. To its credit, Microsoft has apologized and said that it has “taken steps to reinstate legitimate video content and are working towards a better solution to targeting stolen IP while respecting legitimate content.” That’s all well and good, but this seems like the kind of thing that they should have done long before issuing obviously bad takedowns.

Link (Techdirt)

Ebola is the New Black [or not]

Marc Randazza over at The Legal Satyricon writes in a blog post how people seem to go crazy over the ebola craze, and without reason.

Ok, not really, but I figured it [Ebola is the New Black] was a catchier title than “Ebola is the new paranoia for the stupid genetic refuse that proves that Idiocracy was not just a movie, but a prophecy.”
That would just not do as a headline. But, I suppose it is a clumsy, but effective lede.

Remember “give up ANY rights, as long as it keeps us safe from Beardsley McTurbanhead, who is going to kill us all if he can?”

How could you forget? That fad isn’t over yet.

But, just in time for the new fall idiot fashion season, we have Ebola!

A nurse at the Howard Yocum School in Maple Shade Township, New Jersey sent a letter to staff members informing them that two new students from Rwanda, Africa would be arriving at the school on Monday.
“This is not an area identified as a country with an Ebola outbreak, however l am taking precautions as per the health guidelines of the Burlington County Health Department,” the nurse wrote. “I will be taking the students’ temperature three times a day for 21 days.”

Link (The Legal Satyricon)

UK Court Blocks Author From Publishing A Book About His Own Sexual Abuse, At Ex-Wife’s Request

A British performing artist has been forced to shelve a book based on his experiences of childhood sexual abuse after his ex-wife obtained an injunction to prevent their young son from reading it. In a case that is alarming freedom of speech campaigners and which publishers say is deeply disturbing, the court of appeal has ordered that the artist cannot publish key sections of the book until the issue has been decided at trial.

However, his ex-wife’s lawyers dispute claims that the case could set a precedent undermining the rights of other authors, arguing that it is concerned only with the rights of one child, who has a number of health problems, who they say would suffer catastrophic psychological distress were he to read parts of his father’s work.

Link (Techdirt)

Whisper tracks its users. So The Register tracked down its LA office.

We [The Register] were surprised as anyone when The Guardian revealed that, far from being “the safest place on the internet”, the anonymous messaging app Whisper was tracking the location of its users – even when they specifically denied the app access to their location.

Worse, if someone’s posts were deemed newsworthy, according to The Guardian, the company went out of its way to find out where they were located, using the device’s identification number and IP addresses to track them. This information was then “shared” with news organizations and the Department of Defense.

In response, the app’s editor-in-chief Neetzan Zimmerman and CTO Chad DePue took to Twitter and Hacker News to defend themselves, and even posting a lengthy rebuttal. Unfortunately, nothing they said appeared to persuade anyone that what The Guardian has reported was anything but entirely true.

As luck would have it, your correspondent was in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, home to Whisper’s headquarters, at the time – and decided that maybe Whisper would like to walk through the accusations face-to-face.

Link (The Register)

What ‘Democracy’ Really Means in U.S. and New York Times Jargon: Latin America Edition

With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator. Mr. Chávez, a ruinous demagogue, stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader, Pedro Carmona.

Thankfully, said the NYT, democracy in Venezuela was no longer in danger . . . because the democratically-elected leader was forcibly removed by the military and replaced by an unelected, pro-U.S. “business leader.” The Champions of Democracy at the NYT then demanded a ruler more to their liking: “Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate to clean up the mess, encourage entrepreneurial freedom and slim down and professionalize the bureaucracy.”

Link (The Intercept)

UK DROPS CHARGES AGAINST THE WAR CRITIC IT JAILED FOR SEVEN MONTHS

Begg had been jailed for the last seven months on allegations that he had attended a terrorist training camp during a 2012 visit to Syria. He has maintained that his visits were part of an investigation into Britain government involvement in the torture and rendition of War on Terror detainees, an investigation which was being conducted under the aegis of his detainee advocacy organization CAGE UK. As reported previously by The Intercept, far from being clandestine, Begg’s trip to Syria had in fact been conducted with the full knowledge and permission of MI5. Despite this, over a year after he came home from Syria, he found himself suddenly detained on allegations that he had engaged in terrorist activities while in the country.

From the start, it was clear that Begg’s arrest by British authorities was motivated by the government’s dislike for his advocacy rather than any actual criminality.

Link (The Intercept)

Head Of City of London Police Unit That Operates Without Court Orders Worries About Online ‘Lawlessness’

A year ago, Techdirt wrote about a new unit set up by the City of London Police to tackle crimes involving intellectual monopolies. Since then, there have been a flood of posts about its increasingly disproportionate actions, including seizing domain names, shutting down websites, inserting ads on websites, and arresting someone for running an anti-censorship proxy. This makes a PCPro interview with the head of that unit, Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Andy Fyfe, particularly valuable, since it helps shed a little light on the unit’s mindset. It’s well-worth reading the whole thing

Link (Techdirt)