Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2010

Montessori school raided by New Mexico drug cops

Filed under: Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:10

You can rest easy, knowing that a potentially dangerous grow op has been investigated by New Mexico Schutzstaffel drug cops:

“We were all as a group eating outside as we usually do, and this unmarked drab-green helicopter kept flying over and dropping lower,” she said. “Of course, the kids got all excited. They were telling me that they could see gun barrels outside the helicopter. I was telling them they were exaggerating.”

After 15 minutes, Pantano said, the helicopter left, then five minutes later a state police officer parked a van in the school’s driveway. Pantano said she asked the officer what was happening, but he only would say he was there as a law-enforcement representative.

Then other vehicles arrived and four men wearing bullet-proof vests, but without any visible insignias or uniforms, got out and said they wanted to inspect the school’s greenhouses. Pantano said she then turned the men over to the farm director, Greg Nussbaum.

Ms. Pantano must have nerves of steel . . . most schools would have gone into emergency lock-down at the sight of all those paramilitary types deploying in the driveway.

The comments on BoingBoing were good, and this one was great:

The War on Organic Produce continues to go well. Each of those tomatoes cost the taxpayer $75.00 US! WE WILL NOT BE SATISFIED UNTIL THE DRUG CZAR IS RUMOURED TO CURE GOUT BY WASHING THE FEET OF THE AFFLICTED.
—
Seriously: What the fucking fuck fuck happened to Probable Cause in this day and age? “We’re spending $20,000 on this operation because we herd thai leik mudkips, so we kipped in thair mud so thai can mud whail thai kip.” In the immortal words of Plato, NON FUCKING SEQUITUR is NOT a RIVER in EGYPT!

“What else floats the same as a Cannabis Sativa plant??? – er, WOOD! – Good, what else? – well, tiny rocks. – OH! A DUCK! – Right! So if the suspects are raising ducks — THEN THEY’RE RAISING POT! – WELL /DONE/!”

Law Enforcement by Superstition is horse-shit.

September 30, 2010

Even rustlers are going vegetarian

Filed under: Europe, France, Law, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:01

The scourge of the old west (at least in TV and movie representations) were cattle rustlers. Their modern counterparts are apparently grape rustlers:

Thieves in France have broken into a vineyard and stolen an entire crop of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, say police.

They struck in Villeneuve-les-Beziers on Sunday night, taking advantage of a full moon and using a harvesting machine to seize 30 tonnes of the crop.

Farmer Roland Cavaille said similar crimes had taken place before in the Languedoc-Roussillon, one of France’s best-known wine growing regions.

He said the theft amounted to a year’s work and about 15,000 euro (£12,900).

“They used a harvesting machine to gather grapes. This means there was no need to have lots of people, two people would have been enough,” Mr Cavaille told Le Parisien newspaper.

“The area was quite isolated, it is a a few kilometres from the village and near a river. So the thieves were able to work safely.”

I’m sure there’s a joke in there about sour grapes, but I’m not clever enough to put it together.

Censorship and blocking ineffective, says AK Zensur

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:41

Attempts to block websites showing child pornography don’t appear to be as effective as direct action, according to a press release from the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur):

Internet blocking is advocated as an allegedly effective measure against the proliferation of child abuse images. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have been using this technology for years. But a practical test by the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) in cooperation with European civil rights advocacy groups has shown: Internet blocking does not fight abuse, in practice it only serves to conceal the failures of politics and police. Websites can remain on blocking lists for years even though they have either been deleted or could be deleted easily and quickly.

How is this possible, and what could be done against illegal sites? Answers are given by a new analysis of current blocking lists from Sweden and Denmark by the Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship. The group developed software to select, categorise and geo-locate 167 blocked Internet domains as a representative sample of websites blocked in Denmark at the time of the investigation. “The result is a smack in the face of law enforcement authorities”, says Alvar Freude of the Working Group. “Of the 167 listed sites, only three contained material that could be regarded as child pornography.” Two of these three sites had been blocked in Denmark since 2008, and these are, or least were, blocked in Sweden, Norway and Finland as well. These sites were therefore known for at least two years in several countries, and apparently law enforcement authorities did nothing to try and get this illegal content removed.

This is even more disturbing because the Working Group managed to take down the remaining sites just by sending a few emails. Two of the sites were hosted in the USA, and even during the weekend (Friday, ca. 10 p.m. EDT) they were removed by the hosters within 30 minutes. On the following Tuesday, the third website was taken down by its registry in India, three hours after notification. The content was stored on a server in the Netherlands. “The removal of this dehumanising content and the pursuit of the perpetrators must have absolute priority. Internet Blocking leads to the exact opposite”, says Alvar Freude, who sent the take-down requests.

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

September 22, 2010

QotD: Gun registry math

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:45

If the Globe is right, it seems only a bit of sloppily written verbiage in the new report on the registry — interpreted by dissimulators with badges, and faithfully broadcast by writers with poor financial instincts — could possibly have led anyone to believe the gun registry is a bargain. (The Firearms Centre in Miramichi has 240 federal employees, guys! $4 million wouldn’t cover 12 weeks of payroll expenses, right?) And maybe I’m just some Western flake, but in retrospect it does seem as though the propagation of $4 million figure was possible only because the RCMP played undisguised politics with the report, dawdling over a “translation” (a tactic that the Conservatives somehow ended up taking most of the blame for) and making sure to pass it around to friendly, gullible media outlets in a timely way before the vote on C-391. All of which, now, can serve only the electoral interests of the Conservatives themselves — keeping alive the hated totem and allowing them to exploit the real financial numbers in their search for a Commons majority.

Colby Cosh, “Junius explains that gun-registry math”, Macleans.ca, 2010-09-21

September 21, 2010

Canadian women more free than American women

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:56

. . . if only in the right to bare their breasts in public:

A court has ruled that women’s nipples do not enjoy freedom of expression under the US Constitution.

The case was brought by a 16 year old girl, who was one of three women accused of exposing their breasts to passing traffic on an Indianapolis street last year.

She would have faced a misdemeanour charge of public nudity if she had been 18 or over.

She took issue with the fact that exposure of male nips would not have been covered by the law, as Indiana law specifically prohibits exposure of female nipples.

She decided to take the issue, and presumably the breasts in question, to the State Appeals Court. Her argument was that the equal protection afforded by the 14th Amendment meant her breasts should be treated the same as male breasts. The amendment holds that States may not “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” It has been a feature of civil rights cases since the 19th century — not always in the ways you’d expect.

Of course, having established that right several years ago, very few Canadian women actually exercised that right . . .

September 20, 2010

“I can do whatever I want”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

H/T to LibertyIdeals for the link.

Comparative prices for marijuana

Filed under: Economics, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:22

By way of Tim Harford‘s Twitter feed, a site which claims to track the current prices for high, medium, and low quality marijuana:


Click on the image to go to the site

September 19, 2010

The end of “ownership”?

Filed under: Economics, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Cory Doctorow finds Intel adopting a Hollywood-style “crippleware”/license model in new hardware. As he correctly points out, this is an attempt to move us away from the ownership model, where you buy full control of the object you pay for, to a licensing model, where you only get certain rights of use:

This idea, which Siva Vaidhyanathan calls “If value, then right,” sounds reasonable on its face. But it’s a principle that flies in the face of the entire human history of innovation. By this reasoning, the company that makes big tins of juice should be able to charge you extra for the right to use the empty cans to store lugnuts; the company that makes your living room TV should be able to charge more when you retire it to the cottage; the company that makes your coat-hanger should be able to charge more when you unbend it to fish something out from under the dryer.

Moreover, it’s an idea that is fundamentally anti-private-property. Under the “If value, then right” theory, you don’t own anything you buy. You are a mere licensor, entitled to extract only the value that your vendor has deigned to provide you with. The matchbook is to light birthday candles, not to fix a wobbly table. The toilet roll is to hold the paper, not to use in a craft project. “If value, then right,” is a business model that relies on all the innovation taking place in large corporate labs, with none of it happening at the lab in your kitchen, or in your skull. It’s a business model that says only companies can have the absolute right of property, and the rest of us are mere tenants.

September 16, 2010

QotD: Trial By Jury

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:03

In 1850 Spooner published A Defence for Fugitive Slaves, Against the Acts of Congress on February 12, 1793 and September 18, 1850, where he argued that juries “are judges of the law, as well as the fact” and are therefore justified in nullifying federal fugitive slave laws. “No man can be punished for resisting the execution of any law,” Spooner wrote, “unless the law be so clearly constitutional, as that a jury, taken promiscuously from the mass of the people, will all agree that it is constitutional.” Today we call this radical approach “jury nullification.”

Two years later, in Trial by Jury, Spooner developed his argument in full, expertly tracing the right of jury nullification back to the Magna Carta. “It is indispensable that the people, or ‘the country,’ judge of and determine their own liberties against the government,” he wrote. “How is it possible that juries can do anything to protect the liberties of the people against the government; if they are not allowed to determine what those liberties are?” According to Spooner, it was essential to distinguish between trial by jury, which meant trial by the people, chosen by lot, and trial by government, which was an illegal usurpation of the people’s power. “If the government may decide who may, and who may not, be jurors,” he wrote, “it will of course select only its partisans, and those friendly to its measures.” Furthermore, he said, if the government had its way, it “may also question each person drawn as a juror, as to his sentiments in regard to the particular law involved in each trial…and exclude him if he be found unfavorable to the maintenance of such a law.”

Of course, that’s exactly what happens today when potential jurors who oppose the death penalty are prevented from serving on death penalty cases or when those who oppose drug prohibition are excluded from drug cases, thereby stacking the jury in the government’s favor. As Spooner presciently observed, “if the government may dictate to the jury what laws they are to enforce, it is no longer a ‘trial by the country,’ but a trial by the government.”

Damon W. Root, “Clarence Thomas’ Favorite Anarchist: The radical anti-statism of Lysander Spooner”, Reason, 2010-09-16

September 10, 2010

Clarifying the clarification

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

It’s going to scroll off the front page soon, so I thought I’d better put in a link to this post about the ongoing confusion in Britain over photography and the right of the police to confiscate images or recordings in certain circumstances. I’ve updated the post twice with more information from The Register.

September 8, 2010

New Police policy: photography not illegal, but we’ll safeguard it for you

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

British police forces may be starting to accept that photography is legal in public spaces, but the Sussex police have come up with a new and sneaky way to get between photographers and their equipment:

According to a statement by Sussex Police: “Under Section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act [1984], an officer policing the event seized a video tape from a member of the public. Section 23 of the Act states that this can take place in ‘any place’, providing the officer is lawfully there and has reasonable grounds to believe it provides evidence of a criminal offence.

“The officer reasonably believed the tape contained evidence of a protester being assaulted by someone taking part in the march. It has been seized temporarily to ensure that evidence cannot be inadvertently lost or altered and will be returned, intact, to the owner as soon as possible.”

See, the very worst people to leave in charge of the camera or the storage media are the photographers: those people always take photos just to delete them, out of spite. The plod are totally within their rights to confiscate safeguard it, just to preserve the evidence.

Good luck on getting it back in working order, of course.

Update, 9 September: Jane Fae Ozimek updates the original story with a bit of additional information:

The police officer taking the film claimed legal justification under Section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which permits the police to seize film or memory sticks discovered “under lawful search” and where there are reasonable grounds to believe they provide evidence of a criminal offence.

So far, so straightforward. However, under s.14 of the same legislation, police may not remove “special procedure material” of a journalistic nature without a warrant. The question therefore arises whether Williams’ filming efforts, even though he does not describe himself as “a journalist”, is nonetheless of a journalistic nature.

The waters are further muddied by a letter sent out just four days earlier by Andy Trotter, Chair of ACPO’s Media Advisory Group to all Chief Constables. In it, Mr Trotter reminds police chiefs that there are no powers to prevent the public from taking photographs in a public place. Significantly, he goes on: “We must acknowledge that citizen journalism is a feature of modern life.”

“Once an image has been recorded, the police have no power to delete or confiscate it without a court order.”

Update, 10 September: Clarifying the clarification to the declaration, or something. The Register is still on the case:

It would appear that at this point alarm bells started ringing at ACPO HQ, and late yesterday afternoon we received a further communication from ACPO. A spokeswoman told us: “We have clarified our guidance note to forces, however, as this does not affect the legal right of officers to seize photographic equipment in certain circumstances, such as during the course of a criminal investigation.

“While it is the job of police officers to be vigilant, to keep an eye out for any suspicious behavior and to act accordingly, we have been very clear in expressing our view that the taking of photographs is not normally a cause for concern. Whether s.19 PACE was used appropriately in the case in question would ultimately be a matter for Sussex.”

More to the point, Trotter’s freshly updated advice has been re-issued and now reads: “Once an image has been recorded the police have no power to delete it without a court order; this does not however restrict an officer’s power to seize items where they believe they contain evidence of criminal activity.”

For those readers too busy to play compare and contrast, the original guidance stated that the police have no power to confiscate recorded images, whereas the clarified guidance explains that they have. Clear?

September 6, 2010

When “informers” become “enablers”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Stephan Salisbury writes that many “foiled” terror plots could never have become actual threats . . . without government assistance:

Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work — suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while following the scripts of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the ever-distracting war against . . . what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?

The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four — each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds — provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones — provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition — issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions — leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.

It’s often been observed that war is the health of the state. Can we now also say that the war on terror is the health of the intelligence agency?

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

September 5, 2010

Detroit Police save money by eliminating pistol practice?

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:36

At least, based on this story, you’d have to think it’s the most likely answer:

Cop Fires Twelve Shots at Dog, Hits Two Animal Control Workers Instead

[. . .]

Detroit Police needed to remove the dogs, so they called the Michigan Anti-Cruelty Society. While the rescuers were setting traps for the three pit bulls, one got loose and started running towards a police officer. That’s when, we’re told, she pulled her gun and fired off twelve rounds.

[…]

“The police pulled a gun out and shot, but she missed the dog. I guess she was scared or something, and she hit the animal control person,” he said.

One animal rescue worker took a bullet in the back of the leg. Another grazed his back side. A stray bullet also clipped his co-worker’s boot.

Not quite the best advertisement for range safety, weapons handling expertise, or accuracy.

Craigslist surrenders, problem totally resolved

Filed under: Humour, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Dan Tynan recounts the glorious moral victory scored by unhappy state legislators against the final bastion of sin and decadence, Craigslist:

Bowing to pressure from 17 state attorneys general, Craigslist has begun censoring its Adult Services ads. Visitors coming to any of the 400+ Craigslist sites will encounter a big black CENSORED tab where Adult Services used to be.

As we all know, the scourge of prostitution had been entirely eradicated from modern society before Craigslist came along. And now that Adult Service ads are banned, you can expect all those hard-working gals to pack up their condoms and lubricants and enroll in secretarial school.

Alas, we fear that — despite the best intentions of 17 state attorneys general desperately trying to get re-elected — a ban on Adult Services won’t quite put an end to adult-oriented advertising on Craigslist.

September 4, 2010

When you’ve lost the Globe, you’ve lost the argument

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

At least it means you’ve lost the argument to keep the long-gun registry:

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police cannot be faulted for their recent unanimous vote in support of the national long-gun registry. Police will understandably always want as much information about those they investigate as they can lay their hands on. It is in the nature of their business. A national fingerprint registry of Canadians would no doubt also be seen as an aid to police work. But just because police chiefs would like a long-gun registry does not make it good public policy or a wise public expenditure.

[. . .]

If passed, a vote in Parliament on a Conservative MP’s bill to end the long-gun registry would not represent the end of gun control in Canada. Stringent and necessary requirements will remain in place for handguns, and restricted weapons such as automatic rifles. A process that already requires gun owners to be licensed before obtaining a firearm would remain, with safety and background checks required for gun owners. Rules for safe handling and storage of guns will remain in place. What will end is the cost, the red tape and the stigmatization of the “law-abiding duck hunters and farmers,” often cited by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. In the absence of any meaningful evidence of the long-gun registry’s efficacy, the program should be ended.

I can’t possibly emphasize how unlikely an editorial like this from the Globe and Mail would have seemed just days ago. Did we enter an alternate universe with that New Zealand earthquake? Does Spock not only have a beard, but also a Mohawk and body piercings?

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress