Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2010

Adding “ordinary” criminals to the sex offender registry

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:00

The sex offender registry in most jurisdictions doesn’t work — at least, it doesn’t work to deter re-offence and it almost certainly doesn’t work to protect the public. What these registries do quite successfully, however, is to continue punishing the criminals long after they have served their sentences.

People who appear in these registries have a long list of prohibited activities, most frequently requiring them to stay a certain distance from schools (which often means there is little or no choice for where they can live, work, or travel, as the legallly mandated distance exceeds the average distance between schools). Ordinary ex-cons have great difficulty getting employment even in a growing economy, and the situation for identified “sex offenders” is close to impossible.

As a general rule, having your name added to the sex offender registry is as close to a life sentence as possible, but with no hope of parole and no hope of even a semblance of living a normal life.

Georgia apparently thinks this situation is not only fine, but they’d like to add non-sexual offenders to the registry too:

Georgia’s Supreme Court is upholding the government’s right to put non-sex offenders on the state’s sex-offender registry, highlighting a little-noticed (but growing) nationwide practice.

Atlanta criminal defense attorney Ann Marie Fitz estimated that perhaps thousands of convicts convicted of non-sexual crimes have been placed in sex-offender databases. Fitz represents a convict who was charged with false imprisonment when he was 18 for briefly detaining a 17-year-old girl during a soured drug deal. He unsuccessfully challenged his mandatory, lifelong sex-offender listing to the Georgia Supreme Court, which ruled against him Monday.

Under the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2007, the states are required to have statutes demanding sex-offender registration for those convicted of kidnapping or falsely imprisoning minors. The Georgia court ruled that the plain meaning of “sex offender” was overridden by the state’s law.

If it’s your world view that criminals should never be forgiven for their transgressions, then this sort of deliberate act is understandable. It’s morally indefensible, but it’s understandable.

March 11, 2010

Reducing the over-mighty penalty kick in soccer

Filed under: Soccer — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:08

Andrew Potter makes a strong case for FIFA to address the disproportional effect of awarded penalty kicks in soccer games:

. . . the real problem is that it is the penalty shot itself which is unsportsmanlike. With a success rate of 85% it is already such a gross mismatch in the striker’s favour that I don’t see how much additional advantage is gained by permitting a bit of a fake-out; if anything, I suspect we’ll see the occasional embarrassment when a shot-taker pauses over the ball only to see the goalie standing calmly, waiting for a week one-legged kick from an out-faked faker.

But otherwise, I expect the penalty shot to continue to wreak havoc with the tactical nature of the game, for two reasons. First, because goals are so hard to come by in regular play, second, because a penalty shot has such a high success rate, and third, because one must be awarded for any direct foul inside the 18-yard box ­ the referee has no discretion here ­ it makes diving (or “simulation”) one of the most effective moves in the attacker’s arsenal. It doesn’t matter if you were hauled down from behind at the 8 yard line while on a breakway, or tripped by accident in the far corner of the box with your back to the goal, both get you a trip to the twelve-yard line for a pk, and what is pretty close to a free goal.

I can think of fewer rules in sport that have such an overwhelming impact on how the game is played, and play such a decisive role in determining the outcome of so many games. As such, I find the penalty kick in soccer one of the most unsportsmanlike elements in any sport. But maybe this is because I misunderstand the intent of the rule.

Back when I was still coaching youth soccer, we didn’t have too much trouble with penalties, but only because our games were played with only a single official. As soon as you add in a couple of assistant referees, the number of penalties awarded seemed to go up . . . because there was more chance that infractions would be noticed with the extra eyes on the game (and probably also a greater chance that diving would successfully draw a penalty, too).

March 10, 2010

Some things never change

Filed under: Humour, Law, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

I was looking though some old postings and found this little gem, which is as true as ever:

It is a sad real-world fact that most legislators, when presented with something they do not understand, almost always attempt to ban it. This probably started with the first neolithic fire-tamer . . . who was probably beaten to death with sticks when the tribal shaman saw it. Senator Hatch is showing all the finely nuanced reactions of Ug the caveman here.

This was in reaction to Senator Orrin Hatch introducing a bill to make peer-to-peer file sharing illegal back in 2004.

March 9, 2010

Opening the door to arbitrary punishment

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:33

Cory Doctorow talks about why the proposed “three strikes” internet ban is such a stupid idea:

March 4, 2010

The jokes just write themselves

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

By way of Kathy Shaidle’s blog, a court case that was custom-designed for certain political campaigns:

A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.

Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.

Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.

And remember, guns don’t kill people: lobbyists for anti-domestic violence groups do.

March 2, 2010

Linking Olympic glory with jackbooted thugs?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:14

Frequent commenter “Lickmuffin” responded to the post entitled SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing with a long comment tying together the Olympics and the omnipresent SWAT teams:

I have to say that I really don’t understand your views here.
Olympic fascist spectacle: A-OK!
The actual functional trappings of a police state: Boo, hiss!
You can’t have one without the other. As the man said, you have to break a few skulls to make Olympic Gold. Or something like that.

Lickmuffin then provided an extended discussion on the same theme:

It’s quite simple, really: if you want to host the Olympics, and you want to have a succesful national Olympic team, you have to have armed-to-the teeth SWAT teams.

To fund the Olympics and Olympians, you need to have confiscatory tax rates.

When you have confiscatory tax rates, you’re going to have people trying to avoid the taxes.

Some of those people are going to engage in dodgy and risky behaviour, such as importing, growing, manufacturing or just generally dealing with narcotics.

Some of those people are going to use violence to protect their businesses.

To deal with those guys, you need heavily armed and specially trained police.

Just three degrees of separation there, really, but it works out to something like this:

Publicly funded Olympics = SWAT teams on every corner.

What do we tell people whose family members are killed in no-knock raids where the cops had the wrong address? “Sorry about that, but that snowboarding dude needed a gold medal.”

It’s ironic that the first snowboarder to win a medal for the sport — a Canadian — tested positive for weed.

It’s not ironic at all that the same dude wants to become a Liberal MP. Snowboard boots, jackboots — same thing, really.

It really does cover all the ground, doesn’t it? Just lacking the obligatory German rendering of SWAT as Sturmabteilung, and we’re golden, as they say.

SWAT forces now spend more time doing non-SWAT policing

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Or, more accurately, militarizing the sort of police activity that ordinary police officers would once have done:

. . . last year Maryland became the first state in the country to make every one of its police departments issue a report on how often and for what purpose they use their SWAT teams. The first reports from the legislation are in, and the results are disturbing.

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

Worse even than those dreary numbers is the fact that more than half of the county’s SWAT deployments were for misdemeanors and nonserious felonies. That means more than 100 times last year Prince George’s County brought state-sanctioned violence to confront people suspected of nonviolent crimes. And that’s just one county in Maryland. These outrageous numbers should provide a long-overdue wake-up call to public officials about how far the pendulum has swung toward institutionalized police brutality against its citizenry, usually in the name of the drug war.

It’s easy to see how this happened, all over North America, not just in Maryland. Increasing perception of the dangers of the drug war fed the demand for more SWAT-type forces in more and more police departments. Once in place, extensively equipped and expensively trained, the police authorities needed to justify keeping these teams active and involved . . . that is, they couldn’t pay them to sit around waiting for a hostage-taking or a major drug bust. They needed those officers to be out doing things — preferably media-friendly “big” things.

Even in the most dangerous areas, there are only so many situations that rationally require the heavy hand of the fully-armed SWAT team, so the incentives were already in place to expand the role from the original (and relatively rare) combat-style deployment to other, less dangerous (but often more mediagenic) crime fighting.

Anyone in the army can tell you that even in wartime, the majority of soldiers don’t get shot at: they patrol, they train, they do various military and non-military activites. For policemen-as-combat-troops, there are even fewer chances to use all their expensive equipment and training. The temptation to use the SWAT team for less and less dangerous activities is overwhelming, which is why you get the lads and lasses in bullet-proof vests and army helmets appearing even for non-violent misdemeanor offenses.

The choices for law enforcement are not good: disband your SWAT team and run the risk of not having the resources on hand when you actually do need that kind of force, or stay the course, keep the SWAT team(s), and keep them busy so it doesn’t look like you’re wasting a big chunk of your annual budget on inessential services. The bureaucratic instinct is to avoid courses which carry a potential result that could reflect negatively on the organization — which is why you rarely hear about police departments giving up their SWAT teams.

March 1, 2010

UK Photographers . . . act now, or lose your rights

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:52

Philip Dunn has all the bad news, photography-wise:

Photographers to lose copyright protection of their work

This startling and outrageous proposal will become UK law if The Digital Economy Bill currently being pushed through Parliament is passed. This Bill is sponsored by the unelected Government Minister, Lord Mandelson.

Let’s look at the way this law will affect your copyright:

The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work — as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 — will be utterly ignored. If future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.

I had wondered where Lord Mandelson had picked up his “of Mordor” sobriquet. Now I know. Oh, and it gets even worse:

Photographers are to lose all effective rights to take photographs in public places.

Not content with taking away photographer’s copyright, another section of this Government is proposing sweeping changes to your freedom to take pictures in public places.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has deemed that a photograph taken in a public place may now be considered to contain ‘private data’.

This means that if you take a picture in the street and there is a member of the public in the shot, that person has the right to demand either payment — if you wish to publish the image — or that you do not publish it. In fact, according to the ICO. There does not actually have to be an objection, it is up to the photographer to ‘judge’ whether the subject might object. Now work that one out if you can.

You may think this won’t affect you . . . but if you’ve got a camera in your cell phone or MP3 player, it’s going to have an impact. Contact your MP now and explain that you don’t approve of this drastic change in the law and try to get it tossed out before it becomes law.

February 17, 2010

“Not a single American consumer complained”

Filed under: Europe, France, USA, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:26

French wine merchants scam US wine importer:

A dozen French winemakers and traders have been found guilty of a massive scam to sell 18 million bottles of fake Pinot Noir to a leading US buyer.

The judge in Carcassonne, south-west France, said the producers and traders had severely damaged the reputation of the Langedoc region.

The 12 more than doubled profits passing off the wine to E and J Gallo under its Red Bicyclette brand.

The case came to light when French Customs noticed that the winemakers were selling more Pinot Noir to Gallo than was grown within the Langedoc region. Don’t feel sorry for the fraudsters: along with suspended sentences ranging from 1-6 months and fines from $2,000 to $156,000. The swindle netted over $10 million. It’s not clear whether they had to repay those profits.

We once had neighbours nearly this bad . . .

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:13

. . . and yes, there was a body, but that’s a different story. Solomon talks about the Alabama shooter, before she moved to Alabama:

By now you’ve heard all about the University of Alabama shooter, Amy Bishop, the shooting rampage, the old murder she got away with (the “cover-up” and the connection to now retiring Congressman Bill Delahunt), the letter bomb she likely sent…

Turns out I have a tenuous connection to this woman. You see she used to be the next door neighbor of a good friend of mine in Ipswich (a north shore Boston suburb) for a few years. At the time I used to hang out at his house quite a bit. This was one of those typical suburban neighborhoods with little traffic, lots of kids, smallish houses fairly close together without a lot of fences.

I remember when the previous neighbor moved out it wasn’t long before my friend started complaining. He had a deck in the back of his place that was effectively on the second floor making it very visible to the neighbor’s yard and house. So one day I go over to find that he had erected a wooden privacy fence on the side of the deck facing their yard — and only on that side. So I’m like, “Uhh…isn’t that a little uncomfortable. I mean it’s obvious you put that there just to block only those people.” He tells me he does…not…care. He doesn’t want to look at them, and he doesn’t want them to look. He hates them, as does the entire neighborhood.

Our bad neighbour issues weren’t quite as bad, although we did feel like we were escaping when we finally did move out. And we did have to provide emergency first aid to a severely wounded man who staggered to our front door one night (he eventually died, but not officially of his wounds from that incident). He’d been partying at our neighbour’s house, and an argument got out of hand. But, so far as I know, our bad neighbour didn’t leave a trail of multiple bodies . . .

February 11, 2010

QotD: Slandering and insulting Uzbekistan

Filed under: Asia, Law, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:02

Yesterday Uzbek photographer Umida Akhnedova was convicted of slandering and insulting her people. Her crime consisted of taking pictures, such as the one on the right, that government officials thought made Uzbekistan look bad. Among other things, The New York Times reports, Akhnedova was accused of “showing people with sour expressions or bowed heads, children in ragged clothing, old people begging for change or other images so dreary that, according to a panel of experts convened by the prosecutors, ‘a foreigner unfamiliar with Uzbekistan will conclude that this is a country where people live in the Middle Ages'” (a misleading impression, since the Spanish Inquisition never persecuted people for taking photographs). The government also charged that Akhnedova’s 2008 documentary about the Uzbek custom of verifying a bride’s virginity is “not in line with the requirements of ideology” and “promotes serious perversion in the young generation’s acceptance of cultural values.” Although her crime is punishable by up to three years in prison, the judge let her go, officially to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Uzbek independence but possibly also because the publicity surrounding the case was tarnishing Uzbekistan’s reputation (no mean feat).

Jacob Sullum, “One Frown Over the Line”, Hit and Run, 2010-02-11

February 3, 2010

Turning a retreat into a rout

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

ESR calls for even more naming and shaming of the climate fraudsters:

I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:

If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.

He’s quite right, many of the people deeply involved in the swindle would have been just as happy in another pseudo-scientific attempt to wrest control of the economy in order to “protect us” from ourselves.

Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually . . .

Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.

Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.

My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.

There’s lots here . . . go read the whole thing.

January 25, 2010

The Tiger Woods effect hits the PGA in the pocketbook

Filed under: Media, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Tiger Woods may be invisible at the moment, but the public reaction to his troubles appears to be contributing to further financial trouble for the PGA:

The troubles facing the professional-golf tour without Tiger Woods will be on display when the annual tournament tees off at the Torrey Pines course in San Diego this week: Ticket sales are down, fewer hospitality tents have been sold, and the title sponsor had to be lured with a cut-rate price.

It is a harbinger of what the PGA Tour may be without its most popular player. Three of the Tour’s 46 tournaments scheduled for 2010 don’t have a lead corporate sponsor, nor do 13 of next year’s tournaments. Television viewership of the first two events of this year’s Tour tumbled.

In past years, Mr. Woods, the game’s most popular player, usually skipped the first three tournaments and began play on the San Diego tournament’s seaside course, perched on scenic cliffs overlooking the Pacific. As Mr. Woods’s opener, San Diego became one of the highest-profile early events of each PGA Tour season. This year, Mr. Woods, caught up in a sex scandal, is on leave from the game, with no word on when he will return. Without his unmatched star power, the value of Tour sponsorships, through which companies cover most tournament prizes, could be sharply lower. And without a rich flow of cash from those sponsorships, the PGA Tour’s economic model is cracked.

This shows the danger inherent in having a single, iconic representative. If the icon stumbles, it has a severe knock-on effect.

January 21, 2010

And yet more on passwords

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

This is becoming a quarterly topic around here. Imperva has done some statistical analysis of the 32 million passwords which were exposed in the Rockyou.com security breach:

Key findings of the study include:

* The shortness and simplicity of passwords means many users select credentials that will make them susceptible to basic forms of cyber attacks known as “brute force attacks.”

* Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password is “123456”.

* Recommendations for users and administrators for choosing strong passwords.

“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second—or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva’s CTO Amichai Shulman.

The report identifies the most commonly used passwords:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

So there you go — all the tools you need to be a world-class password cracker.

January 19, 2010

A round-up of current “non-lethal” weaponry

Filed under: Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:16

Strategy Page looks at some new developments in the non-lethal weaponry category:

Israel has developed a new non-lethal weapon; the Thunder Cannon. Light enough to be mounted in a cart, it uses a new Pulse Detonation Technology that combines LPG (liquefied natural gas) with air to create a sonic boom in a cannon type barrel. Each burst moves forward at 2,000 meters per second and lasts 300 milliseconds. The cannon generates 60 to 100 bursts per second. One 27 pound (12kg) canister of LPG can create 5,000 bursts. A PDA size control unit does the mixing and detonation. The cannon is effective, at hitting people with these sonic bursts, at ranges of up to fifty meters (152 feet), and eventually double that. At ten meters or less, the burst can cause injury, or even be fatal. Anyone hit by the sonic bursts feels it, and hears it. It’s disorienting, and most people exposed to it flee the area. The technology was first developed to chase birds away from crops. It has been very effective at that. The military version can be mounted on vehicles, and fitted with a nozzle that can calibrate the shockwaves for special mission requirements. [. . .]

The problem is that, non-lethal weapons are not one hundred percent non-lethal, and not nearly as effective as proponents would like. But people love to call them non-lethal, because such devices are intended to deal with violent individuals by using less lethal force. A classic example of how this works is the Taser. A gun like device that fires two small barbs into an individual, and then zaps the victim with a non-lethal jolt of electricity, the Taser has been popular with police, who can more easily subdue violent, and often armed, individuals. Before Taser, the cops had a choice between dangerous (for everyone) hand-to-hand combat, or just using their firearms and killing the guy. While the Taser has been a major success for non-lethal weapons, for every thousand or so times you use it, the victim will die (either from a fall, another medical condition, use of drugs or whatever). This has been fodder for the media, and put Taser users, and non-lethal-weapons developers, on the defensive. Naturally, the manufacturers of these devices want zero deaths, and the users want a device that will bring down the target every time, at a price (for the device) they can afford to pay. There’s no way of satisfying all these demands, but it makes great press, insisting that someone should make it so.

Of course, the media also — rightly — points out cases where police officers use their Tasers like wands of domination . . . Tasering in situation where there’s no need for it or using the Taser like they’re playing paintball with the victim. There’s no need to blame the technology when it’s misused by “professionals”.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress