John Dvorak thought that this was “meant to be satire or commentary (or is it?) on where London is heading with it’s multiple cameras on every street and where the former East Germany was. And were we could eventually go if we aren’t vigilant.” I don’t think so:
The link provided goes to the LAPD website. Creepy.
Regardless of your opinions on the particular cause, the recent arrest of a protest organizer should cause concern. Harry A. Valetk looks at the case from a legal standpoint:
“SWAT teams rolling down 5th Ave. … Report received that police are nabbing anyone that looks like a protester. … Stay alert watch your friends!” Pennsylvania State Police arrested New York social worker Elliot Madison last month for being part of a group that posted messages like those on Twitter. The arrest took place in a Pittsburgh motel during protests at the Group of 20 summit. In all, almost 5,000 protesters demonstrated throughout the city during two days, and about 200 were arrested for disorderly conduct.
But Madison wasn’t among those protesting on the street. Instead, published reports say he was part of a behind-the-scenes communications team using Twitter to “direct others, specifically protesters of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse.” A week later, FBI agents spent 16 hours in Madison’s home executing a search warrant for evidence of federal anti-rioting law violations.
This isn’t, at least based on the initial reports, a criminal mastermind perpetrating some atrocity . . . this is someone trying to help others falling afoul of legal entanglement. If it turns out that he was attempting something that is clearly illegal, then the courts will sort it out — but that isn’t what appears to be the case here.
Presumably, officers believed that Madison violated this statute when he warned other protesters on Twitter about “impending” police apprehension. But this prohibition assumes that the warning is given to fugitives or others committing a crime. Can we make this broad assumption about an entire group of protesters? Not likely. And, even so, the statute specifically allows warnings to bring that individual into compliance with law (e.g., a motorist warning a speeder about a speed trap).
Still, it seems this arrest is really about speech — what you can say to others during a public protest. Can you warn others online by saying, “Hey, don’t go down that street because the police have issued an order to disperse”?
BBC News reports that a couple of Edinburgh pub-goers chose a particularly unsuitable place to go have sex after meeting in the pub:
An amorous couple have been fined for having sex in broad daylight — in a police station car park.
Leanne Richardson, 26, and Ross Welsh, 30, had to be physically stopped mid sex act by officers from Portobello police station in Edinburgh.
They both pleaded guilty to committing a breach of the peace in the car park on 21 April and were fined £200.
I sent a link to Jon the other day, asking if he’d really voted for this guy. This prompted Jon to send this to his Member of Parliament:
Dear Mr. Van Loan —
Just wondering if you could comment on the Michael Geist article that appears at the following locations:
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4424/135/
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/701824
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/curious+case+access+request+that+wasn/2045337/story.htmlI am wondering if you could elaborate on why you are using the kidnapping case mentioned in the article as an example of why law enforcement agencies require increased access to internet service provider (ISP) information without oversight by the courts. Considering that ISP information seems to have played no role in this case, the case does not sound like a particularly good example of why such access is required.
Also, should the “lawful access” legislation pass, what guarantees are there that government agencies will not abuse such access for political purposes? I suspect that this sort of thing already happens in Canada, but such abuse is currently (in theory) illegal. Removing the requirement for a warrant and providing open access to an ISP’s customer records is something that seems to be wide open to abuse.
Please advise as time permits.
Thanks and best regards —
Jonathan [Redacted]
In a separate email, he also explained that he’d met Van Loan once before, with less-than-perfect meeting of the minds:
Ah yes. We knew however many years ago it was when we first voted for the guy what he would be doing. That whole telepathy and prescient seeing thing is working very well for us. Explains my success at Casino Rama.
Snark aside, though, I will admit that I put on the badge of shame years ago when I asked the guy at a local event about the child care tax credit — you know, the $100-per-month-per-kid-beer-and-popcorn fund. When I asked why they did not just reduce parents’ taxable income by $1200 per year rather than give us back our own money (less interest and opportunity cost, of course), he said that “But then people who have no income wouldn’t get anything.” My wife and I responded in unison: “Well, that’s their problem!”<flea-asterisk>**</flea-asterisk>
Van Loan and I looked at each other and I think we both regretted that I had voted for him.
<flea-asterisk>**</flea-asterisk><flea-snark>That sentence could also be emphasised as “”Well, that’s their problem, [right there]!”</flea-snark>
Canada’s archaic laws governing the sex trade are being challenged in court:
If she could do it herself, Terri-Jean Bedford would strike down Canada’s prostitution laws, perhaps using the riding crop she plans to bring to court.
Instead, the Toronto dominatrix and two other sex workers have launched a sweeping constitutional challenge to the legislation, arguing it perpetuates violence against women.
The landmark case gets underway Tuesday in a University Ave. courtroom where Bedford, in a nod to traditionalism, is promising to arrive conservatively attired, even if she is packing a tool of her trade.
Prostitution is legal in Canada: that fact always seems to be a surprise to most people. What isn’t legal are all the other activities surrounding the act: soliciting customers, having a safe place to conduct your business, and so on. This has always made prostitutes more liable to be injured or killed because they have to ply their trade in unsafe conditions, and they are rarely taken seriously when they attempt to get the police protection they should be entitled to.
The 49-year-old Toronto grandmother, along with prostitutes Valerie Scott, 51, and Amy Lebovitch, 30, is asking Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice to invalidate Criminal Code provisions that serve as Canada’s policy response to the world’s oldest profession.
They argue that prohibitions on keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living on the avails of the trade force them from the safety of their homes to the insecurity of the street, where they are exposed to physical and psychological violence.
There’s been very little I could find to praise in the performance of the current US majority party in both houses of Congress, until very recently. Democrats, including newly minted Senator Al Franken, are appearing to seriously threaten the renewal of several portions of the Patriot Act, due to expire this year:
Some Democratic lawmakers have long wanted to weaken the act, and now, with big majorities in the House and Senate, they have their chance. But the renewal debate just happens to come at a time when recently uncovered domestic terror plots — most notably the Denver shuttle bus driver and his colleagues caught with bomb-making materials and a list of specific targets in New York City — are highlighting the very threats the act was designed to counter. Republicans are fighting to keep the law in its current form.
“These three provisions have been very important for the investigative agencies who are working every day to protect us from terrorist attack,” says Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the committee. “Before the Patriot Act, terrorist investigators had far less authority to get records and documents than a DEA or an IRS agent.”
Democrats have proposed a number of changes, all of which would weaken the law. Sen. Russell Feingold wants to do away with the “lone wolf” provision entirely. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, would make it more difficult for investigators to obtain business records. In addition, Leahy wants to return to legal standards that existed before September 11 regarding “national security letters,” which are essentially subpoenas issued by the FBI and other security agencies. “They are going back to a September 10th mentality — literally,” says one GOP committee aide.
The original Patriot Act was “the most abominable, unconstitutional congressional assaults on personal freedom since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 made it a crime to libel the government” (Andrew P. Napolitano). It was a blank cheque for the one of the most far-reaching extension of law enforcement into the private lives of Americans in over 200 years (ranking with both Prohibition and the War on Drugs as liberty-reduction methods).
The situation isn’t any less surreal than the original report. Kevin Drum provides an update:
He’s OK, but the police department, which was already in deep trouble for its habit of ticketing everything on wheels that rolled through Jericho, has been disbanded and all outstanding tickets have been voided. The town’s part-time judge has quit too. And nobody knows what’s happened to all the ticket revenue.
Radley Balko links to the weirdest “cops gone wild” story I’ve encountered in quite a while:
It was just too much, having to return to court twice on the same day to contest yet another traffic ticket, and Fire Chief Don Payne didn’t hesitate to tell the judge what he thought of the police and their speed traps.
The response from cops? They shot him. Right there in court.
Note also the fascinating fact that there are 7 police officers watching over a population of 174 people. That’s an amazing level of “protection” those folks are getting.
Original story here.
Update: Bonus story from Radley’s site, Feds bust doctor for . . . meeting women on the internet. Amazing. Just freakin’ amazing.
Natalie Solent looks at two particularly intrusive expansions of British policing. One I’ve already discussed: Police nicking goods from unlocked vehicles, but the other one is new to me:
On the same theme, Longrider has a story about the police in Northamptonshire impounding cars if the same car with foreign plates is seen twice more than six months apart. A Mr West writes:
I live in Spain for about seven months of the year and France for the other five. My Spanish-registered car was impounded in March after two short visits to the UK within nine months of each other.
At the start of 2009, a pilot scheme called Operation Andover started in Northamptonshire, with any foreign vehicle seen just twice, more than six months apart, being impounded without warning.
Once again, Mr West got his car back, eventually. But he had to fight not to pay a fee of several hundred pounds. As he points out, an enormously common reason for a foreign registered car being seen twice in the same place a year apart might be, not the effort to evade paying UK road tax that the police seem (pretend?) to suspect, but regular visitors coming to Britain at about the same time every year.
So the police can not only nick stuff out of your car, if it’s got a non-UK license plate, they can take the whole thing. Fascinating.
Radley Balko looks at the latest television travesty in the “reality” genre:
“There’s always a good time to use a Taser.”
So says Andrea, attractive single mom and one of the four stars of the new TLC reality show, The Police Women of Broward County. The trailer with the Taser quip then cuts to the show’s stars tackling suspects, putting knees into various backs, and pointing guns. Browse other clips on the TLC website, and it seems the network can’t make up its mind whether these women are sexpots with handcuffs or girls who want to be taken seriously for kicking just as much ass as the boys. A smug poster ad campaign for the show takes the the show’s identity problem to yet crasser heights. One ad reads, “Taser Time.” Another, “Cavity Search, Anyone?”
Of course, there isn’t “always a good time to use a Taser,” as the multitude of viral web videos depicting taserings of grandmothers, pregnant women, and children will attest. TLC’s ad campaign is offensive, though merely the latest iteration of a genre of television that trivializes the state’s use of force and makes a mockery of the criminal justice system.
I’ll take Radley’s word for it that the original Cops show was not as sensationalist and exploitative as the many successors that have aired since then. Even saying that, I had my doubts that “reality” TV was an improvement over the more traditional “cop” or “investigator” shows on regular network TV.
Fox then plumbed new depths of depravity last year with Smile . . . You’re Under Arrest!, featuring Maricopa County, Arizona’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio. In a premise that evokes the old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Running Man or Mike Judge’s dystopian parody Idiocracy, Sheriff Joe teams up with a crew of comedy writers and improv actors to create elaborate scenarios where “unaware criminal suspects with outstanding warrants are lured out of hiding in this high-energy prank show.”
Showing my cultural ignorance, I’d never heard of this show, but just on the basis of this description, I can imagine lots of ways it might go horribly wrong. If it hasn’t yet, I’m sure it’s got all the potential to do so in the future (assuming that it’s still on the air).
As for the SWAT programs, America has unfortunately grown comfortable with, or at least accustomed to, the idea of using SWAT teams to kick down doors and conduct volatile, confrontational raids for consensual, nonviolent crimes. We’ve seen a massive increase in these raids, from about 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to some 50,000 per year by the early 2000s. The popularity of SWAT shows didn’t cause the problem, but their popularity is sympomatic of it, and they can only further ingrain the troubling notion that there’s nothing wrong with sending a unit of cops dressed like soldiers into private homes to arrest nonviolent drug offenders. And of course, we’re never going to see the wrong-door raids, or police mistakes that result in fatalities.
Cop reality shows glamorize all the wrong aspects of police work. Their trailers depict lots of gun pointing, door-busting, perp-chasing, and handcuffing. Forget the baton-twirling Officer Friendly. To the extent that the shows aid in the recruiting of new police officers, they’re almost certainly pulling people attracted to the wrong parts of the job./p>
That last part is probably true. There are no other jobs open to the general public that provide so many opportunities to “go wrong” yet not face the realistic risk of punishment (the blue wall of silence will protect a fellow officer until — and sometimes well beyond — that officer being proven guilty of serious criminal activity). Any criticism of the police seems to be taken as a criticism of all police, and the “civilian” is always assumed to be wrong.
. . . to include educational theft:
To teach motorists who leave their cars unlocked a lesson, police in Richmond upon Thames, a borough of London, have begun taking their stuff. The
victimsbeneficiaries of thesetheftseducational efforts return to their cars and find that expensive items such as cameras, laptops, and leather jackets have been replaced by notes instructing them to retrieve their valuables at the police station. Not to worry, though: “If items are needed urgently,” the London Times reports, “police will return the goods immediately.” Which suggests that if you can’t show an urgent need for, say, your computer, they’ll take their own sweet time. The justification offered by Superintendent Jim Davis: “People would be far more upset if their property really was stolen.”What’s worse than Davis’ assumption that when the police violate your property rights it’s not really a crime? The supine attitude of the British Automobile Association, which allegedly represents the interests of motorists:
The initiative was welcomed by the AA. “It would be quite irritating for motorists to come back to their car and find that items have gone missing. But on reflection they may think it is better that the stuff has been taken by the police rather than local thieves.
Charles Stross looks at the situation in Britain:
NDNAD, the UK’s National DNA Database, run by the Forensic Science Service under contract to the Home Office contains DNA “fingerprints” for lots of folk — 5.2% of the population as of 2005, or 3.1 million people. Some of them are criminals; some of them are clearly innocent, but were either charged with a crime and subsequently found not guilty, or had the misfortune to be detained but not subsequently charged (that is: they’re not even suspects). The Home Office takes a rather draconian view of the database’s utility, and objects strenuously to attempts to remove the records of innocent people from it — it took threats of legal action before they agreed to remove the parliamentary Conservative Party’s Immigration spokesman from the database (which he’d been added to in the course of a fruitless investigation into leaked documents that had embarrased the government) — so if senior opposition politicians have problems with it, consider the prospects for the rest of us.
In use …
Whenever a new profile is submitted, the NDNAD’s records are automatically searched for matches (hits) between individuals and unsolved crime-stain records and unsolved crime-stain to unsolved crime-stain records — linking both individuals to crimes and crimes to crimes. Matches between individuals only are reported separately for investigation as to whether one is an alias of the other. Any NDNAD hits obtained are reported directly to the police force which submitted the sample for analysis.
Now, this in itself is merely a steaming turd in the punchbowl of the right to privacy: but its use as a policing intelligence tool is indisputable. While there are some very good reasons for condemning the way it’s currently used (for example, its use in the UK has sparked accusations of racism), I can’t really see any future government forgoing such a tool completely; a DNA database of some kind is too useful. So what interests me here is the potential for future catastrophic failure modes.
Now that we’re pretty certain that DNA evidence can be easily faked, the focus of how it can be used in investigations must shift from “presence proving guilt” to “absence implying innocence”.
DNA evidence can be created to match a known profile:
Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.
The scientists fabricated blood and saliva samples containing DNA from a person other than the donor of the blood and saliva. They also showed that if they had access to a DNA profile in a database, they could construct a sample of DNA to match that profile without obtaining any tissue from that person.
“You can just engineer a crime scene,” said Dan Frumkin, lead author of the paper, which has been published online by the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics. “Any biology undergraduate could perform this.”
H/T to Radley Balko.
But after you put down the peace pipe, a legitimate and important difference remains. It’s structural, and cultural, and (over the past four decades of relentless Drug Warring and Constitution-eroding), judicial as well. There is a strain in law enforcement, backed by various vague statutes, thousands of politicians, and everyone who tends to side with authority against an obnoxious popoff, in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable form to arrest, detain, or otherwise punish a non-threatening person for being an asshole. This includes the perceived assholery of yelling about one’s real (and sometimes imagined) trampled rights. If a person is considered undesirable by a police officer, for whatever reason, it’s far too easy to ruin his day, even if no law has remotely been broken. And as Balko has led the world in documenting, the literal militarization of domestic police forces, combined with awful Drug War-related enforcement, has caused grave injustice and the death of innocents.
The past two weeks has been a conversation about race, I guess (I tend to tune out such things pretty quickly, being a privileged white male and all). It’s always appropriate to point out, as in the Drug War in general, that disfavored minority groups (whether defined by skin color, class, lifestyle choice, politics, or whatever) will take a disproportionate brunt of abused power. But thankfully in modern America, when we peel back the general stereotype to the specific individual, most people (least I don’t think) aren’t racists and aren’t assholes. It may take two weeks to make that realization, or two decades, but after that you’re left with the underlying structural problem, one that might be even harder to dislodge. The pendulum of law enforcement in this country, as relates to the individual citizen, has for far too long swung in the same Constitution/individual-disrespecting direction.
Matt Welch, “‘When he’s not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy'”, Hit and Run, 2009-07-31
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