Jane Doe 3 [a TSA supervisor]: You know who did 9/11?
George: Osama bin Laden.
Jane Doe 3: Do you know what language he spoke?
George: Arabic.
Jane Doe 3: Do you see why these cards are suspicious?
Category: Human stupidity
Homeland Security Totally Misunderstands Trademark Law; Seizes Perfectly Legal Sporting Goods Anyway
Homeland Security’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement group (ICE) has a history of seizing stuff without understanding even the most basic concepts around intellectual property. After all, these are the same meatheads who seized some blogs for alleged copyright infringement, and then had to return some of them over a year later, after they realized it was a mistake. ICE also has a history of using big sporting events to kiss up to the multi-billion dollar sports organizations by shutting down small businesses, protecting Americans from unlicensed underwear. And, of course, what bigger sporting event is there than the Super Bowl. Every year they make a bunch of seizures related to the Superbowl, and this year was no different.
ICE agents gleefully were patrolling Phoenix looking for clothes to seize. But there was just one, rather large, problem with how they went about it. It appears that the people in charge of all this, didn’t know the first thing about the “law” they were supposedly enforcing. Seizing counterfeits is about stopping trademark infringement. But not everything using a trademark is infringing. Trademark, after all, is a form of a consumer protection law, designed to protect people from buying one thing, believing it’s another. If there’s no likelihood of confusion, then ICE isn’t supposed to be seizing it (and, yes, there is also dilution of trademark, but ICE isn’t supposed to be seizing products that dilute someone’s trademark — just those that are “counterfeit”). But that’s not, apparently, how ICE sees things
Michael Hayden: September 11th Gave Me Permission To Reinterpret The 4th Amendment
Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director, has revealed what most people already suspected — to him, the Constitution is a document that he can rewrite based on his personal beliefs at any particular time, as noted by Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic. Specifically, he admits that after September 11th, 2001, he was able to totally reinterpret the 4th Amendment to mean something entirely different:
In a speech at Washington and Lee University, Michael Hayden, a former head of both the CIA and NSA, opined on signals intelligence under the Constitution, arguing that what the 4th Amendment forbids changed after September 11, 2001. He noted that “unreasonable search and seizure,” is prohibited under the Constitution, but cast it as a living document, with “reasonableness” determined by “the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves in history.”
He explained that as the NSA’s leader, tactics he found unreasonable on September 10, 2001 struck him as reasonable the next day, after roughly 3,000 were killed. “I actually started to do different things,” he said. “And I didn’t need to ask ‘mother, may I’ from the Congress or the president or anyone else. It was within my charter, but in terms of the mature judgment about what’s reasonable and what’s not reasonable, the death of 3,000 countrymen kind of took me in a direction over here, perfectly within my authority, but a different place than the one in which I was located before the attacks took place. So if we’re going to draw this line I think we have to understand that it’s kind of a movable feast here.”
Cops Arrest Public Defender For Attempting To Do Her Job
A San Francisco deputy public defender was handcuffed and arrested at the Hall of Justice after she objected to city police officers questioning her client outside a courtroom…
Medical care
Horace Edwards Snowden And Others For Billions Of Dollars Adds The United States As An Involuntary Plaintiff
Remember when former Kansas Secretary of Transportation Horace Edwards filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and others connected to the CitizenFour documentary “on behalf of the American people?” And remember when plenty of American people said, “STFU Edwards, you don’t speak for me?”
Well, suck it, dissenters. Horace Edwards has other plans for you.
Horace Edwards, the retired naval officer who last month sued the makers and distributors of Citizenfour, has filed an amended complaint that names the “United States of America” as a putative involuntary plaintiff.
David Cameron: I’m off to the US to get my bro Barack to ban crypto
UK Prime Minister David Cameron is hoping to gain the support of US President Barack Obama in his campaign-year crusade to outlaw encrypted communications his spies can’t break, sources claim.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Conservative Cameron would like to see left-leaning Obama publicly criticize major US internet companies like Facebook and Google, many of which have made strong encryption the default on their online services.
The President hasn’t taken a public position on the issue so far, but several prominent federal law enforcement officials have given internet firms lashings over their use of encryption tech, which they claim undermines national security interests.
Last September, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey went as far as to describe encrypted communications as “something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.”
NSA: SO SORRY we backed that borked crypto even after you spotted the backdoor
“With hindsight, NSA should have ceased supporting the Dual EC DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor. In truth, I can think of no better way to describe our failure to drop support for the Dual EC DRBG algorithm as anything other than regrettable,”
Australia tries to ban crypto research
While the world is laughing at UK PM David Cameron for his pledge to ban encryption, Australia is on the way to implementing legislation that could feasibly have a similar effect.
Moreover, the little-debated Defence Trade Control Act (DCTA) is already law – it’s just that the criminal sanctions it imposes for sending knowledge offshore without a license are being phased in, and don’t come into force until May 2015.
As noted in Defence Report, the lack of an academic exclusion in the law, which passed parliament under the previous Labor government in 2012, could mean “an email to a fellow academic could land you a 10 year prison sentence”.
The control of defence research isn’t new or surprising, and in fact this law was put into place to align Australia’s regime with that of the USA (the International Traffic in Arms Regulations), but the haste with which it was implemented means someone forgot that academic researchers routinely discuss sensitive technologies.
Warning: Using encrypted email in Spain? Do not pass go, go directly to jail
Seven people have been detained for, among other allegations, using encrypted email, a civil-rights group has said.
Spanish cops investigating bomb attacks raided 14 homes and businesses across the country last month and arrested 11 people: seven women and four men, aged 31 to 36, from Spain, Italy, Uruguay, and Austria.
Since then, four people have been released, and the remaining seven were charged with belonging to a “criminal organization of an anarchist nature with terrorist ends.”
That organization has been linked to explosives placed at cash machines, and in the Almudena Cathedral in Madrid and the Pilar Basilica in Zaragoza last year, according to Spanish journalists.
Lawyers defending the accused said investigating Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez partly chose to further detain the seven due to their use of “emails with extreme security measures” – specifically, freedom-fighting RiseUp.net’s email servers.