How many of these can you justify? (And still sleep at night)

At what point do we say enough? [Link]

Links for anyone interested… I have many more pages of links to these stories of cops killing innocent unarmed people, and cops never get in trouble (at worst let go from the job)….

Cops murder Kelly Thomas, a gentle homeless man with schizophrenia, because they didn't want him sitting in that area and threatened to “f--- him up” before killing him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KU0Imk2Bstg

Cops threw flashbang into baby's crib (with children's toys all around the yard of the house and with no police work to justify the warrant).http://www.salon.com/2014/06/24/a_swat_team_blew_a_hole_in_my_2_year_old_son/http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/05/30/drug-task-force-that-burned-a-toddler-this-week-also-killed-an-innocent-pastor-in-2009/

Cops shoot and kill a 7 year old girl who was asleep during a midnight home raid (while film crews were filming for TV): http://countercurrentnews.com/2014/11/aiyana-stanley-jones/#

Cop kills unarmed man holding baby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMDIK4bOpwk

Cops shoot to kill without even identifying the target: http://www.hlntv.com/article/2014/04/11/john-winkler-shot-dead-police-mistaken-identity-tv-producer?hpt=hp_t2

Cop shoots and kills homeless Albuquerque man for no reason:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/10/albuquerque-ordered-pay-6m-wrongful-death

Cop kills innocent, unarmed father in a stairwell because he claimed the stairwell was dark:http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/21/us/new-york-police-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Cop’s record cleared for accidentally shooting boy in head: http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=44700

Cop shoots boy in chest when he answered the door, mistaking a Wii controller for a gun:http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/attorney-teen-was-shot-having-wii-controller-hand/ndSrL/

Cops beat delusional man to death as citizens watch: http://atlasleft.org/washington-man-cries-for-help-as-hes-beaten-to-death-by-police-video/

Cops unleash attack dog on innocent college kid already being restrained on ground by numerous officers, no punishment to officers: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/02/us/police-beating-video/

Cops shoot and kill elderly man in his own garage at night while checking out the wrong address:http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/27/police-shoot-dead-grandfather-72-while-searching-the-wrong-home-for-burglar-blame-poor-lighting/

Cops shoot at man in streets in NY, hit bystanders: http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/justice/times-square-police-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Cops lied to obtain a no-knock warrant and shot and killed a grandma in her own home, then planted drugs to cover up the crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Johnston_shooting

Cops shoots and kills honors student at college campus: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2519842/Valedictorian-honors-student-shot-dead-college-campus-cop-routine-traffic-stop.html

Cops shoot and wound man getting cigarettes from his own car at his own house for no reason at all:http://gawker.com/unarmed-man-shot-by-deputies-inside-his-own-car-outside-949237195

Cops kill man by compressing him while arresting him while he was distraught:http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/26/justice/oklahoma-arrest-death-video/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Police shoot diabetic man after his wife called for medical help, they claim he picked up a knife:http://reason.com/blog/2013/10/07/woman-says-she-called-911-for-an-ambulan

Cops shoot man holding a toy gun in walmart with no warning and lied in their report.http://www.whio.com/news/news/crime-law/special-grand-jury-selected-john-crawford-case/nhRwM/

Covert officers assault girls for buying bottled water, cops thought it was alcohol:http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/07/02/198047492/felony-arrest-of-student-who-bought-water-riles-many-in-virginia

Cop shoot elderly man reaching for cane: http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/03/14/mxp-sot-deputy-shoots-elderly-mane-reaching-for-cane.cnn.html

Cops kill man with garden hose using a shotgun and no warning: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6S7LRrCru8

Florida man survives 13 shots by officers while sitting in his car: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/21/us/florida-shot-by-mistake/index.html

Cops almost shoot and kill a hospital-worker in her own home with a warrant for an entire apartment complex and screaming at her door: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20130718/COLUMNIST/130719612/2256/NEWS?p=1&tc=pg

Cops raiding small friendly poker games with militarized tactics, accidentally killing people-- dying man says “Why did you shoot me, I was reading a book.”:http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book_the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/

Cop beats handcuffed teen and is acquitted because video ‘should only be used to protect cops, not prosecute them.’ http://intellihub.com/2013/07/05/judge-finds-cop-not-guilty-of-assault-after-refusing-to-watch-video-of-assault/

Cop purposely holds onto door handle so he would have the right to shoot and kill a Sunday school teacher who was driving away from the cops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BSPhC916GQM

Cops use dubious excuses to justify lethal force: http://www.allgov.com/news/us-and-the-world/border-patrol-used-dubious-tactics-to-create-pretext-to-justify-shootings-cbp-tried-to-bury-scathing-report-140302?news=852571

Cop shoots homeless man who was deaf and doing woodcarving: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/22/us/44-officers-are-charged-after-ohio-sting-operation.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Cop shoots man in back several times, then stands over him and shoots again to kill him—questionable whether the man actually was armed or not—conflicting evidence given. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=159PM7ZKcv0

Cop attacks random people in crowd and punches NY judge, judge shocked that cop not charged:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/22/judge-thomas-raffaele-attacker-charges_n_1822928.html

Drunk NY cops shoot at people: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/three-drunk-nypd-officers-shoot-at-people.html

Cop with dismal record shoots 12 year old boy with toy gun: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/03/officer-who-fatally-shot-tamir-rice-had-been-judged-unfit

Cop shoots and kills handcuffed man: https://news.vice.com/article/el-paso-releases-video-of-cop-executing-handcuffed-man-wheres-the-anger

Edit: Whoa never got gold before, thank you very much, unfortunate that it is for such a sad post. Also, just to clarify, I don't seek these stories out, but they began to disturb me and so I just began pasting them in a document when I read them on the news. There are many more pages of links that also involve police corruption and abuse of various sorts. I only posted some links here because these mistakes and abuses have gotten out of control and few people seem to recognize it. Thank you.

Fun Quiz

A quiz on military style police tactics. [Link]

Today's Quiz:

You should find this one more difficult than the previous quiz.

Police did not carry out an aggressive, military-style raid to accomplish which of the following purposes?

    (a) To find the source of a parody Twitter feed

    (b) To check a bar for underage drinkers

    (c) To recover a large number of overdue library books

    (d) To enforce copyright law against a DJ

    (e) To check whether barbers had valid barbering licenses

    (f) To apprehend Tibetan monks who overstayed their visas

    (g) They did that in all these cases

I think it is worth considering this one for a moment, so I'm going to put the answer and further discussion after the jump below.

If you find it slightly terrifying that they did this (and by "this," I mean used a SWAT team or a gang of officers using similar tactics) for any of those purposes, congratulations, you are sane. The answer is (c): to my knowledge, a SWAT team has never been used to recover overdue library books, but I think that example is no less ridiculous than the others. And inevery one of those other cases, police aggressively stormed the premises with guns drawn, wearing body armor and even masks, though they had no reason to think there would be any danger.

The Tibetan monks were here on a peace mission, for Christ's sake.

Well, not for Christ's sake, but you know what I mean.

But at least there's a process

The TSA is NOT listening to your complaint. [Link]

Today I begin a series of posts that will use documents obtained from the TSA following a FOIA request. I asked for, and got, complaints sent to the agency in the last year by active duty military personnel or combat-wounded military veterans. To the TSA’s credit, I filed my request in August, and – very much to my surprise – got 216 pages of documents in early October. While the agency has fiercely resisted transparency, they got this one right. And the documents I received are pretty revealing.

First thing the documents tell us: when you complain to the TSA, you aren’t complaining to the TSA. Whether you call or use their website to write to them, your complaint is processed and answered by an employee of K4 Solutions, the TSA’s call center contractor. This form does not send information directly to the TSA. If you use it, you’re writing to a corporation. To be sure, the forms often indicate that the complaints have been sent on to TSA officials at the appropriate airport, but K4 Solutions is a layer of insulation. It is not TSA headquarters, and your complaints don’t go directly to TSA headquarters. The contractor controls the messages, and decides where and if to route them.

Second, news stories about TSA outrages always contain the obligatory statement from the TSA press office, and it’s always a meaningless jumble of lines read from a script: the TSA takes passenger safety very seriously and has multiple layers of security. The responses to TSA complaints are exactly the same. The K4 employee who reads or hears your complaint has a scripted set of available responses, and cuts and pastes a set of paragraphs to answer your call or letter. The amount of thought that goes into that cutting and pasting is, let’s put this charitably, negligible.

Submit

This will all be over quicker if you just submit. [Link]

Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?

Welcome back to the 50's

When do they take out the attack dogs and water hoses? [Link]

The protests were peaceful for many hours, and turned chaotic when police shot rubber bullets, tear gas (or another form of noxious gas), used an LRAD sonic weapon to blast the crowd with painful sound, and assaulted protesters.

Livestreams: one, two, three.

From the Los Angeles Times:

"Hands up! Don't shoot!" demonstrators chanted as they walked down West Florissant Avenue in a permitted march. Some young men at the back of the group raised their middle fingers as they passed a Ferguson Police Department officer, shouting profanities at him. About 30 demonstrators, who were almost all black, sat down in the middle of an intersection near a line of about a dozen riot police, who were all white.

Huffington Post reporter Ryan J. Reilly and Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery were arrested. They were among reporters live-tweeting events in Ferguson this afternoon, and ducked into a McDonalds to recharge their smartphones and other devices. Subsequent tweets indicated they were taken into police custody. Lowery confirms: "Was arrested. Also Ryan Reilly of Huff Po. Assaulted and arrested. Officers decided we weren't leaving McDonalds quickly enough, shouldn't have been taping them." Both journalists have been released, possibly thanks to a phone call from Matt Pearce of the LA Times to the Ferguson police chief, asking why the men were being held.

"Ferguson chief tells me Lowery and Reilly's arresters were 'probably somebody who didn't know better," tweeted Pearce. Here is video of the arrest.

I would hope this will be the catalyst to change the militarization of policing in America, but I fear it will require more incidents like this.

Big Brother parenting in Scotland

Talk about nanny state. [Link]

Imagine the very worst home a child could grow up in: No food in the fridge, parents strung out on drugs, the children covered with scabs and beaten regularly. You would want someone to step in and save the kids.

And then there's Scotland.

Scotland wants to treat all families as potentially abusive and appoint a "named person" (that is, a guardian) as soon as the child is born and up through age 18 to oversee the parenting. This "shadow parent" would be empowered by the government under the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act, which will take effect in 2016.

As Josie Appleton, founder of the U.K.'s Manifesto Club, writes in SpikedOnline:

It is based on the idea that a person who has been named by the state, touched on the shoulder, has a superior authority and insight to others. Those who have been ‘named’ are seen as better qualified to ‘safeguard’ the wellbeing of a whole nation’s children. Therefore, concern for children’s wellbeing becomes a state-appointed position.

...This is a new kind of parenting-by-surveillance.

The day-to-day role of a named person is to follow ‘reports’ about a child, to keep an eye on their files. They will have rights to see private medical reports, and to request information about that child from other agencies (there is a legal ‘duty to help named person’).... The other aspect of a named person’s role is to propose ‘interventions’. They will have a role in drawing up a ‘child’s plan’ if a child is found to have a ‘wellbeing need’: this plan will outline the ‘targeted intervention which requires to be provided… in relation to the child’.

UK secretary of state: "There is no surveillance state"

Britain once again mistakes 1984 as a manual to implement rather than a cautionary tale. [Link]

UK Secretary of State Theresa May -- part of a regime that presides over a spy service thatclaims the right to intercept all webmail, search and clicks; that spends hundreds of millions sabotaging Internet security; that dirty-tricks and psy-opses peaceful protest groups; thatlaunched illegal denial of service attacks; that slurps up 200M SMS messages a day; thatuses Google cookies to follow people around the Web; that targets NGOs and charities for deep surveillance; that sent spies into World of Warcraft hunting jihadis; that hacked a Belgian Internet exchange; knowingly participated in illegal surveillance at the telcos' data-centers; attacked Tor; detained a journalist's boyfriend under anti-terror laws; accepted£100M from foreign spies for help in spying on Britons; tapped into undersea cables; andmore -- insists that Britain is not a "surveillance state."

But, she says, there's all kinds of scary, scary terrorists out there. And she's foiling lots of terrorist plans. But she can't tell you about it, because that would be "cavalier and reckless." But we should trust her. And give her more powers to spy on us without a warrant.

As unbelievably stupid as this is, it at least beats last time, when the prime minister said TV crime dramas demonstrated the need for mass surveillance.

Contempt

The story of why Lavabit shutdown. I think the government overreached by demanding all the user information and not just Snowden's. [Link]

In the first two weeks, I was served legal papers a total of seven times and was in contact with the FBI every other day. (This was the period a prosecutor would later characterize as my "period of silence".) It took a week for me to identify an attorney who could adequately represent me, given the complex technological and legal issues involved – and we were in contact for less than a day when agents served me with a summons ordering me to appear in a Virginia courtroom, over 1,000 miles from my home. Two days later, I was served the first subpoena for the encryption keys. 

With such short notice, my first attorney was unable to appear alongside me in court. Because the whole case was under seal, I couldn't even admit to anyone who wasn't an attorney that I needed a lawyer, let alone why. In the days before my appearance, I would spend hours repeating the facts of the case to a dozen attorneys, as I sought someone else that was qualified to represent me. I also discovered that as a third party in a federal criminal indictment, I had no right to counsel. After all, only my property was in jeopardy – not my liberty. Finally, I was forced to choose between appearing alone or facing a bench warrant for my arrest. 

In Virginia, the government replaced its encryption key subpoena with a search warrant and a new court date. I retained a small, local law firm before I went back to my home state, which was then forced to assemble a legal strategy and file briefs in just a few short days. The court barred them from consulting outside experts about either the statutes or the technology involved in the case. The court didn't even deliver transcripts of my first appearance to my own lawyers for two months, and forced them to proceed without access to the information they needed.

Then, a federal judge entered an order of contempt against me – without even so much as a hearing.

But the judge created a loophole: without a hearing, I was never given the opportunity to object, let alone make any any substantive defense, to the contempt change. Without any objection (because I wasn't allowed a hearing), the appellate court waived consideration of the substantive questions my case raised – and upheld the contempt charge, on the grounds that I hadn't disputed it in court. Since the US supreme court traditionally declines to review decided on wholly procedural grounds, I will be permanently denied justice.

In the meantime, I had a hard decision to make. I had not devoted 10 years of my life to building Lavabit, only to become complicit in a plan which I felt would have involved the wholesale violation of my customers' right to privacy. Thus with no alternative, the decision was obvious: I had to shut down my company.

The largest technological question we raised in our appeal (which the courts refused to consider) was what constitutes a "search", i.e., whether law enforcement can demand the encryption keys of a business and use those keys to inspect the private communications of every customer, even when the court has only authorized them to access information belonging to specific targets.

The problem here is technological: until any communication has been decrypted and the contents parsed, it is currently impossible for a surveillance device to determine which network connections belong to any given suspect. The government argued that, since the "inspection" of the data was to be carried out by a machine, they were exempt from the normal search-and-seizure protections of the Fourth Amendment.

More importantly for my case, the prosecution also argued that my users had no expectation of privacy, even though the service I provided – encryption – is designed for users' privacy.

If my experience serves any purpose, it is to illustrate what most already know: courts must not be allowed to consider matters of great importance under the shroud of secrecy, lest we find ourselves summarily deprived of meaningful due process. If we allow our government to continue operating in secret, it is only a matter of time before you or a loved one find yourself in a position like I did – standing in a secret courtroom, alone, and without any of the meaningful protections that were always supposed to be the people's defense against an abuse of the state's power.

I find the contempt charge particularly egregious.

China makes Reader's Digest censor book

The price of liberty is $30,000. [Link]

The notion that the formerly mighty American publisher Reader's Digestwould allow the Chinese Communist party to censor its novels would once have appeared so outrageous as to be unimaginable. In the globalised world, what was once unimaginable is becoming commonplace, however. The Australian novelist LA (Louisa) Larkin has learned the hard way that old certainties no longer apply as the globalisation of trade leads to the globalisation of authoritarian power.

The fate of her book is more than a lesson in modern cynicism. It is the most resonant example of collaboration between the old enemies of communism and capitalism I have encountered.

Larkin published Thirst in 2012. She set her thriller in an Antarctic research station, where mercenaries besiege a team of scientists.

Larkin was delighted when Reader's Digest said it would take her work for one of its anthologies of condensed novels. Thirst would reach a global audience and – who knows? – take off. Reader's Digest promised "to ensure that neither the purpose nor the opinion of the author is distorted or misrepresented", and all seemed well.

One of Larkin's characters trapped in the station is Wendy Woo, a Chinese-Australian. Woo fled to Australia because the Chinese authorities arrested her mother for being a member of the banned religious group Falun Gong. Larkin has her saying that she had not "learned until much later of the horrific torture her mother had endured because she refused to recant".

State oppression in China is not a major theme of a novel set in Antarctica. But Larkin needed to provide a back story for Woo and a link between her and the villains of her drama. In any case, she was a free author living in a free country and was free to express her abhorrence of torture and the denial of freedom of conscience. Or so she thought, until she discovered last week that she was not as free as she thought.

The cost of printing makes up the largest part of the price of book production. Publishers have outsourced manufacturing to China, like so many other industries have done. The printing firm noticed the heretical passages in Larkin's novel. All references to Falun Gong had to go, it said, as did all references to agents of the Chinese state engaging in torture.

They demanded censorship, even though the book was a Reader's Digest "worldwide English edition" for the Indian subcontinent, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore – not, you will note, for China.

Phil Patterson from Larkin's London agents, Marjacq Scripts, tried to explain the basics for a free society to Reader's Digest. To allow China to engage in "extraterritorial censorship" of an Australian novelist writing for an American publisher would set a "very dangerous precedent", he told its editors. Larkin told me she would have found it unconscionable to change her book to please a dictatorship.

When she made the same point to Reader's Digest, it replied that if it insisted on defending freedom of publication, it would have to move the printing from China to Hong Kong at a cost of US$30,000.

People ask: "What price liberty?" Reader's Digest has an answer that is precise to the last cent: the price of liberty is US$30,000. The publisher, from the home of Jefferson, Madison and the first amendment, decided last week to accept the ban and scrap the book.

Routing around censorship

The internet in action. Go Turks! [Link]

Over the last few weeks we've discussed a few times how Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan wanted to ban Twitter. If you don't follow the details of what's happening in Turkey, Zeynep Tufecki has a great backgrounder piece in the NY Times. Either way, the threats became reality, as Erdogan flat out announced his intent was to "eradicate Twitter" and also:

I don't care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic

Turkish ISPs followed the orders to block Twitter, but so far, it's not the power of the Turkish Republic we're seeing, but the power of people and technology to route around attempts at censorship. Many people quickly turned to VPNs or realized that they could still Tweet via text message... or that they could use alternative DNS providers. In fact, it's reached such a level that there's graffiti on the walls in Turkey pointing to Google's DNS which lets users route around the Twitter block:

Twitter is blocked in Turkey. On the streets of Istanbul, the action against censorship is graffiti DNS addresses. pic.twitter.com/XcsfN7lJvS

— Utku Can (@utku) March 21, 2014

And it appears that the people are winning so far, as Turkish Twitter users are still tweeting at quite a rapid rate. 

Chutzpah!

CIA: We Only Spied On Senate Intelligence Committee Because They Took Classified Documents That Prove We're Liars. [Link]

Earlier this week, we wrote about the accusations that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were working on a massive $40 million, 6,300-page report condemning the CIA's torture program. The DOJ is apparently already investigating if the CIA violated computer hacking laws in spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee computers. The issue revolved around a draft of an internal review by the CIA, which apparently corroborates many of the Senate report's findings -- but which the CIA did not hand over to the Senate. This internal report not only supports the Senate report's findings, but also shows that the CIA has been lying in response to questions about the terror program. 

In response to all of this, it appears that the CIA is attempting, weakly, to spin this as being the Senate staffers' fault, arguing that the real breach was the fact that the Senate staffers somehow broke the rules in obtaining that internal review. CIA boss John Brennan's statement hints at the fact that he thinks the real problem was with the way the staffers acted, suggesting that an investigation would fault "the legislative" branch (the Senate) rather than the executive (the CIA).

In his statement on Wednesday Brennan hit back in unusually strong terms. “I am deeply dismayed that some members of the Senate have decided to make spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts,” Brennan said.

“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch,” Brennan continued, raising a suggestion that the Senate committee itself might have acted improperly.

A further report detailed what he's talking about. Reporters at McClatchy have revealed that the Senate staffers working on this came across the document, printed it out, and simply walked out of the CIA and over to the Senate with it, and the CIA is furious about that. Then, in a moment of pure stupidity, the CIA appears to have confronted the Senate Intelligence Committee about all of this... directly revealing that they were spying on the Committee staffers.

Several months after the CIA submitted its official response to the committee report, aides discovered in the database of top-secret documents at CIA headquarters a draft of an internal review ordered by former CIA Director Leon Panetta of the materials released to the panel, said the knowledgeable person.

They determined that it showed that the CIA leadership disputed report findings that they knew were corroborated by the so-called Panetta review, said the knowledgeable person.

The aides printed the material, walked out of CIA headquarters with it and took it to Capitol Hill, said the knowledgeable person.

“All this goes back to what is the technical structure here,” said the U.S. official who confirmed the unauthorized removal. “If I was a Senate staffer and I was given access to documents on the system, I would have a laptop that’s cleared. I would be allowed to look at these documents. But with these sorts of things, there’s generally an agreement that you can’t download or take them.”

The CIA discovered the security breach and brought it to the committee’s attention in January, leading to a determination that the agency recorded the staffers’ use of the computers in the high-security research room, and then confirmed the breach by reviewing the usage data, said the knowledgeable person.

There are many more details in the McClatchy report, which I highly recommend reading. And, yes, perhaps there's an argument that Senate staffers weren't supposed to take such documents, but the CIA trying to spin this by saying it was those staffers who were engaged in "wrongdoing" is almost certainly going to fall flat with Congress. After all, the intelligence committee is charged with oversight of the CIA, not the other way around. "You stole the documents we were hiding from you which proved we were lying, so we spied on you to find out how you did that" is not, exactly, the kind of argument that too many people are going to find compelling. 

Still, the latest is that the CIA has successfully convinced the DOJ to have the FBI kick off an investigation of the Senate staffers, rather than of the CIA breaking the law and spying on their overseers. 

Making email worse

I didn't think it was possible - but it is. [Link]

Email is broken because it’s far easier to send someone a message that creates work for them than it is for them to  do that work. So you can quickly make the lives of people worse, at little cost to yourself.

Today, not responding to email is implicitly stating that your note was not important enough to warrant a response. That’s appropriate! Not everything everyone thinks or says merits a response. What we want in life is less, not more email, right?

Yet a startup called Rebump has found a way to make email even worse. How is that possible, you ask.? Well, Rebump is a service that automatically re-pings people — via email, of course — that haven’t answered your original message. It will keep doing so until you get a response.

Note that this implies that your initial email was both worth reading, and worth replying to. In reality most email fails both tests. So, Rebump is essentially a brilliantly passive aggressive way to force people into responding to you, or the flood of notes will not fucking stop.

Using my psychic powers, I sense that anyone using this will end up in the spam folder.

Missing the point

Keith Alexander Supports Law To Gag Press So He Can Get His Preferred Online Surveillance Bill Passed. [Link]

He's flat out admitting -- as many have noted -- that his pet cybersecurity bills are dead right now because of all of the Snowden leaks, showing just how abusive the NSA has been. And his answer to that is not to fix the NSA, but to pass bills to stifle the free press from reporting on NSA efforts, which he then thinks will allow the government to pass legislation like CISPA. 

As the report in the Guardian notes, no one seems to have any idea what this "media leaks legislation" is going to entail, as nothing has yet been proposed, and there haven't even been any real rumors of anything until now. However, with James Clapper recently referring to reporters asaccomplices, and Rep. Mike Rogers making the out-of-left-field argument that reporters who are covering Snowden are thieves who traffic in stolen government property, you can connect a few dots and guess at what's coming down the pike. 

Alexander's own comments seem to similarly suggest that reporters "have no standing" to report on these issues, because they're not insiders, using the Miranda detention as a launching pad:

“Recently, what came out with the justices in the United Kingdom … they looked at what happened on Miranda and other things, and they said it’s interesting: journalists have no standing when it comes to national security issues. They don’t know how to weigh the fact of what they’re giving out and saying, is it in the nation’s interest to divulge this,”

Still, a bill to stifle investigative reporting is going to face stiff opposition, and even bringing up such a concept suggests that Alexander still has no clue what current public perception is like concerning the NSA's surveillance activities. Just the fact that he's suggesting a bill to silence a free press, and he specifically admits he wants to do so in order to get his troubling surveillance bill approved, shows the depths of Alexander's thinking on these issues. A free press? Not important. More power for the NSA to spy on everyone? That's the priority.

Tar and feathers are too good for him.

Probing for drugs

Violations, both personal and Constitutional. [Link]

No current government agency keeps track of the overall number of civil-rights violations that occur or are alleged during traffic stops. Although they have not passed, the two pieces of proposed federal laws show an increased awareness of the cauldron of race, immigration and drug searches brewing at traffic stops. Kennedy, Eckert's lawyer, believes another force is in play.

"What's motivating these law enforcement officers in small towns is that they can seize drug money, and they get federal grants for these task forces," he said.

Case in point: between 2006 and 2008, as many as 1,000 black and Latino drivers were pulled over in Tenaha, TX, where police officers illegally confiscated an estimated $3 million in cash and property. Motorists faced a choice: they could sign over a form forfeiting cash and valuables or be arrested, in which case, children in the car would be taken and placed in the custody of child protective services. A class-action lawsuit against Tenaha and Shelby County, TX, was settled in August 2012.

While Vanita Gupta, the deputy legal director at the ACLU, said Tenaha was an egregious case of unconstitutional behavior, she said the civil-liberties organization had found multiple instances of similar schemes in other states. "They incentivize police agencies to engage in unconstitutional behavior in order to fund themselves off the backs of low-income motorists, most of whom lack the means to fight back," she said.

Kennedy was more blunt.

"The drug war has become a war on people," he said. "And the courts don't protect civil liberties like they used to."

Kafkaesque

Accidental checkmark leads to 10 years on the no-fly list. [Link]

We've been covering the case of Rahinah Ibrahim for a little while now. She's the Stanford PhD student who was wrongfully placed on the no fly list -- something that pretty much everyone admitted early on -- but because of that her student visa to the US was pulled, and every attempt she made to come back was rejected, leaving her unable to come back to this country for nearly 10 years. As we noted last month, it seemed clear that Judge William Alsup had ruled that the feds needed to remove her from the no fly list and any other terrorist watch lists, but it was a little unclear, since the full ruling remained under seal. That ruling has now been released in redacted form, and is well worth reading. Not only does it highlight massive bureaucratic bungling over a ten year period, it also shows how disingenuous and dishonest the DOJ has been in handling the entire case -- even to the point of promising not to argue "state secrets" to kill the case, and then (of course) claiming "state secrets" and trying to kill the case just a few weeks later. Judge Alsup appears somewhat limited in what he can do in response to all of this for procedural reasons, but he makes it clear that he's not pleased about all of this and orders the government to confirm that Ibrahim has been fully removed from the various terrorist databases and lists, as the government has flatly admitted that they don't believe she poses any threat to national security. 

In fact, the ruling highlights that this is all do to one FBI agent totally fucking things up back in 2004 -- and not even realizing he had done so until his deposition a few months ago. Alsup makes clear (and it seems everyone agrees) that the FBI agent, Kevin Michael Kelley didn't screw up maliciously, but he simply misunderstood the directions in filling out the form:

Agent Kelley misunderstood the directions on the form and erroneously nominated Dr. Ibrahim to the TSA's no-fly list [redacted]. He did not intend to do so. This was a mistake, he admitted at trial. He intended to nominate her to the [very long redaction]. He checked the wrong boxes, filling out the form exactly the opposite way from the instructions on the form. He made this mistake even though the form stated, "It is recommended the subject NOT be entered into the following selected terrorist screening databases."

And from that one screwup, basically a bureaucratic mess appears to have followed, and even if she was removed from that list (as is suggested elsewhere), once her name got into a series of connected databases, she effectively became toxic, and no one would allow her back into the US. So even though everyone now admits that she posed no threat to national security, when she applied for a visa to come back to the US, not only was it rejected, but the reason for the rejection was given as the code for "terrorist activities" (8 USC 1182 (a)(3)(B) -- and to make matters even more insane, someone at the State Department helpfully scribbled "terrorist" on the form that was sent to her denying her entry.

Presidential Fiat and Enemies Lists

Imperial powers. [Link]

If Obama used to sigh to supporters that he was not a dictator who could just implement progressive agendas by fiat, he now seems to have done away with the pretense of regret.Obama has all but given up on the third branch of government since he lost control of it in 2010: “And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.”
There are lots of creepy things about such dictatorial statements of moving morally backward in order to go politically “forward.” Concerning issues dear to the president’s heart — climate change, more gun control, de facto amnesty, more massive borrowing supposedly to jump-start the anemic, jobless recovery — Obama not long ago had a Democratic supermajority in the Senate and a strong majority in the House. With such rare political clout, he supposedly was going to pass his new American agenda. Instead, all he got from his Democratic colleagues was more borrowing and Obamacare. In the case of the latter, the bill passed only through the sort of pork-barrel kickbacks and exemptions to woo fence-sitting Democratic legislators that we hadn’t seen in the U.S. since the 1930s. And for what? Obamacare (be careful what you wish for) is proving to be the greatest boondoggle in American political history since Prohibition. If Obama sincerely wished to work in bipartisan fashion with Congress, he probably could easily get a majority vote to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, or a backup sanction plan against Iran in case his own initiatives fail.
Note as well that Obama says he will bypass Congress for “our kids.” Politicians usually cite the “kids” when promoting something that is either illegal or unethical.

And

Without the media acting as a watchdog, the administration has with impunity found the IRS useful in going after political opponents. When Obama’s IRS appointees were exposed, he for the moment called their deeds outrageous; when the media did not pursue the outrage, he wrote it off as a nothing story.
The media certainly thought it was nothing, given that none of the obsequious Washington press corps will be unduly audited or indicted. But the administration has also monitored Associated Press reporters. Most of what it initially said about the National Security Agency snooping proved untrue — including Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s flat-out lie to Congress while under oath, when he testified that the NSA was not collecting data on millions of Americans. All we know for now about Benghazi is that everything the administration alleged about the murders was false — from why Americans were there, to what prompted the violence, to why no help was sent before or during the attack, to the aftermath promises to hunt down the perpetrators.

Finally

Note the ripple effect, as partisans appreciate a new climate and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to even scores and advance the cause. The governor of New York announces that there is no place in his state for those whom he derides as “extreme conservatives” — only to be seconded by the new mayor of New York City. (Imagine the governor of Utah suggesting to liberal residents that their support for gun control, late-term abortion, and gay marriage might be good reasons for them to leave the state — and being seconded by the mayor of Salt Lake City. Or imagine a Republican president arbitrarily deciding that he does not like the DREAM Act component of a recently passed comprehensive immigration-reform bill, and so simply choosing to ignore it and deport students who are illegal aliens anyway.)
The first black senator from South Carolina since Reconstruction is blasted by a state NAACP official as a “dummy,” only to have that slur seconded by the national organization. On MSNBC, one newscaster hopes Sarah Palin ingests feces and urine; another takes a jab at Mitt Romney for having an African-American adopted grandchild; still another labels radio personality Laura Ingraham a “slut” — all convinced that the periodic presidential sermon about a new civility empowers their crudity and deters critics.
As the president’s polls dance around a 40 percent approval rating, we are now told in the New Yorker interview that Obama believes that his race may be the cause of his unpopularity. Apparently, Obama believes that he is increasingly distrusted not because of Benghazi, or the AP, IRS, NSA, or Fast and Furious scandals, or the new $9 trillion in national debt, or the new normal of 7 percent unemployment, or the lies about Obamacare, but because his father was African.
Consider the logic: Apparently after twice electing Barack Obama, a public that is 89 percent non-African-American suddenly, in 2014, five years after his first inauguration, discovered, and now is angry, that its president is half black. Consider the box into which the president of the United States has put the public. He seems to be saying that to the degree that he is elected twice and polls over 45 percent, Americans are let off the hook as non-racist. To the degree that he falls below 45 percent in the polls, he is not sure that we aren’t racist. So will we please regain his trust, and not be called racist, by voting for his candidates in the 2014 midterm elections?

Clapper needs to go

It would be a good start. Lying under oath to Congress should have consequences. And that's not even getting into the massive overreach of the NSA into our private lives. [Link]

A bipartisan group of House members is criticizing President Obama for not going far enough in his attempts to rein in the country’s surveillance programs.
In a letter to the White House on Monday, six lawmakers led by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said that the Obama administration should “take immediate and effective safeguards” to reform the National Security Agency (NSA) and make sure that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is not involved in the process.
“The continued role of James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs and ensuring the highest level of transparency,” they wrote.Earlier this month, Obama gave a speech outlining reforms he would like to see for the embattled NSA. He proposed new limits on the agency's ability to collect and search data about nearly all Americans’ phones calls, among other measures, but called on Clapper and Attorney General Eric Holder to come up with additional reforms.
Clapper has been a subject of lawmakers’ ire since early last year, when he denied that the NSA spied on millions of Americans while under oath. He has since said that he tried to give the “least untruthful” answer without revealing classified information.
“Asking Director Clapper, and other federal intelligence officials who misrepresented programs to Congress and the courts, to report to you on needed reforms and the future role of government surveillance is not a credible solution," legislators wrote on Monday.
Reps. Ted Poe (R-Texas), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Doug Collins (R-Ga.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) also signed the letter.
The White House on Monday stood by the intelligence chief.
“The President has full faith in Director Clapper’s leadership of the intelligence community,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an email to The Hill.
She added that Clapper “has provided an explanation” for his previous answers about the NSA’s surveillance “and made clear that he did not intend to mislead the Congress."
The lawmakers added that the president’s instructions for overhauling the NSA “fall short” of the necessary measures.
“We cannot effectively guard our constitutional liberties and operate our national security programs with unresolved administrative questions," they wrote. "Additional layers of bureaucracy and reporting directives cannot act as a substitute for concrete reforms and overdue transparency.” 

IRS and Corrupt Government

You may not agree with the politics of those the IRS has targeted, but if you are not chilled by the attempt to stifle dissent (dissent is only good when done against Republicans) and punish those who dare to speak up to their 'betters', you are part of the problem. [Link]

Christine O'Donnell, a Tea Party candidate from a few years ago, may not be everyone's cup, but she was spot-on when she told the Washington Times on Sunday: "Unless this is all exposed, unless every level of inappropriateness and corruption is exposed, I certainly won't be the last person to be politically intimidated like this."
Back in 2010, as she campaigned for a Senate seat in Delaware, O'Donnell's private tax records were leaked by the IRS to her political opponents and phony claims about her tax liabilities were leaked to the press, all in a sleazy subterranean effort to keep her from winning that election.
And by remarkable coincidence, that was done by the same agency that has since admitted to targeting Tea Party groups applying for tax-exempt status, harassing them with insanely intrusive questions and delaying their applications for years at a time — all to repress political groups disliked by President Obama, who made it clear his administration considered them "terrorists."
And let's not forget that Joe the Plumber's tax records were leaked in 2008 and conservative Commentary magazine was targeted for a "corruption" probe in 2009. Now Chuck Heath Jr., brother of Tea Party manque Sarah Palin, has declared on his Facebook page that their father was "horribly harassed" six times beginning in 2008, after 50 years of faithfully paying his taxes without a single IRS inquiry.
During the tax-exempt debacle, IRS operatives such as Lois Lerner admitted wrongdoing but were allowed to resign with zero consequences and a full pension and invoke their Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination before Congress, a privilege never extended to taxpayers. The travesty was compounded earlier this month by an FBI probe that insisted "nothing to see here, move along" and took no further action.
Now the dodge is getting creepier. The Washington Times is reporting that the IRS is stonewalling the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, each of which is seeking the truth about the illegal targeting.
The agency cites employee confidentiality rules, so too bad about all the citizens who've had their rights violated, because nothing trumps an IRS operative's right to operate in secret.