Month: November 2014

How to Write a Civil Forfeiture Christmas List

Christmas is right around the corner and many police departments are writing their wish list. But police departments don’t have to beg parents to buy them the things they want, they need only accuse people of possessing property suspected (by a random cop with no need to acquire a warrant or even have evidence of his accusation) of being related to a drug crime. This is the wonderful world of civil forfeiture and there are seminars that help police departments write their lists:

The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.

In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.

“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”

This is why I’m glad I don’t drive anything flashy. I very much doubt the police are drooling over a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix or a 2005 Ford Ranger. People with nice things just make themselves targets for state sponsored theft. And the theft is so beloved by police departments that they give each other tips on maximizing profit.

Shut Up, Slaves

It looks like British rulers are tired of hearing criticisms and have thus begun working on crushing free speech, at least from a legal point of view:

Nearly 350 years after us Brits abolished the licensing of the press, whereby every publisher had to get the blessing of the government before he could press and promote his ideas, a new system of licensing is being proposed. And it’s one which, incredibly, is even more tyrannical than yesteryear’s press licensing since it would extend to individuals, too, potentially forbidding ordinary citizens from opening their gobs in public without officialdom’s say-so.

It’s the brainchild of Theresa May, the Home Secretary in David Cameron’s government. May wants to introduce “extremism disruption orders”, which, yes, are as terrifyingly authoritarian as they sound.

[…]

Once served with an EDO, you will be banned from publishing on the Internet, speaking in a public forum, or appearing on TV. To say something online, including just tweeting or posting on Facebook, you will need the permission of the police. There will be a “requirement to submit to the police in advance any proposed publication on the web, social media or print.” That is, you will effectively need a licence from the state to speak, to publish, even to tweet, just as writers and poets did in the 1600s before the licensing of the press was swept away and modern, enlightened Britain was born (or so we thought).

There’s a reason George Orwell’s 1984 takes place in Britain, it really is the prototype police state for western civilization. It’s interesting to see a British politician take such an overt stance on destroying free speech. Most British politicians that I’ve heard anything about, much like the politicians here in the United States, at least pay lip service to free speech.

What’s laughable about this idea is that censoring speech is impossible. Thanks to the Internet a person can post material anonymously. We know this because people in tightly control countries such as China and Thailand have continued to post criticisms of the regimes of those countries without getting crushed (in all fairness some of them do get crushed but that’s what happens when you fail to properly utilize the tools available to you).

People wanting to post “extremist” speech in Britain will continue to do so. The only difference is that a few people of lukewarm intelligence that post “extremist speech” will get arrested and made an example of (and being individuals of lukewarm intelligence they will probably be unable to actually go through with any “extremist” plans they post about).

Arnold Abbott Arrested Again for Feeding the Homeless

The government of Fort Lauderdale, Florida really hates homeless people. In fact it hates them so much that it recently passed a law aimed at preventing people from feeding the homeless. Arnold Abbott and a few of his friends decided to keep feeding them in spite of the law and were actually arrested by, what I imagine are, the biggest assholes to ever become police officers (seriously, if you’re a police officer and you’re arresting people for feeding the homeless then you are part of the problem). The city cited Mr. Abbott and he decided to give them a rightly deserved middle finger by continuing on his mission to make the lives of homeless individuals slightly better. Needless to say he was arrested again:

Arnold Abbott, the 90-year-old advocate for the homeless who was issued a citation earlier this week for feeding the homeless without adhering to new rules that would require him to obtain a permit and provide portable toilets, was cited again Wednesday night for the same reason.

This is an example of civil disobedience done right. An erroneous law was passed because a city government believes that the best way to deal with the homeless is to make their lives more miserable so they mosey on to the next city. To demonstrate how shitty the law is people have decided to publicly disobey it, which requires the police and city government to either demonstrates the fact that they’re raging asshole or back down.

The people of Fort Lauderdale would be right if they decided to arrest and detain both the members of the city government and the police for their attempts at restricting voluntary association.

World’s First Telekinetic

Here’s a story I didn’t expect to read:

ORLANDO, FL (KTRK) — Police in Florida are looking for a man with no legs, hands and parts of his arms to question him about the murder of his parents.

Police named Sean Petrozzino, 30, as a “person of interest” but not an official suspect in the double murder of his parents, Nancy and Michael Petrozzino.

His parents were found shot to death at their home Tuesday morning, WFTV-TV reports.

A man with no arms and no legs who can fire a gun? He must be telekinetic!

If You’re Going to Run an Illegal Business Don’t Hire a Fed

The big news floating around the darknet community is that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) managed to shutdown Silk Road 2.0. When the news first broke there was a lot of speculation about how the FBI managed to do this. Many people theorized that the FBI has managed to break Tor’s hidden service functionality in such a way that it can identify the location of servers. As it turns out the FBI’s method was much more mundane:

The complaint describes how federal agents infiltrated Silk Road 2.0 from the very start, after an undercover agent working for Homeland Security investigators managed to infiltrate the support staff involved in the administration of the Silk Road 2.0 website.

“On or about October 7, 2013, the HSI-UC [the Homeland Security Investigations undercover agent] was invited to join a newly created discussion forum on the Tor network, concerning the potential creation of a replacement for the Silk Road 1.0 website,” the complaint recounts. “The next day, on or about October 8, 2013, the persons operating the forum gave the HSI‐UC moderator privileges, enabling the HSI‐UC to access areas of the forum available only to forum staff. The forum would later become the discussion forum associated with the Silk Road 2.0 website.”

The complaint also explains how the feds located and copied data from the Silk Road 2.0 servers. “In May 2014, the FBI identified a server located in a foreign country that was believed to be hosting the Silk Road 2.0 website at the time. On or about May 30, 2014, law enforcement personnel from that country imaged the Silk Road 2.0 Server and conducted a forensic analysis of it . Based on posts made to the SR2 Forum, complaining of service outages at the time the imaging was conducted, I know that once the Silk Road 2.0 server was taken offline for imaging, the Silk Road 2.0 website went offline as well, thus confirming that the server was used to host the Silk Road 2.0 website.”

The FBI didn’t utilize anything fancy, it relied on old fashioned investigative work. First it infiltrated an agent into the Silk Road 2.0 team and then it obtained the cooperation of foreign law enforcers to obtain an image of the server and looked to see if complaints of downtime corresponded to the server being taken down for imaging.

The takeaway from this is that keeping a hidden service truly hidden is difficult, especially when your adversary has the resources of government law enforcers on its side. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible but you have to know exactly what you’re doing.

As an agorist I’m a huge fan of “black” market businesses so long as they don’t involved initiating force against people. Silk Road was a great business that not only managed to siphon funds away from the state and render its drug prohibition irrelevant but it also made the drug trade safer by separating customers from sellers with a nice barrier of anonymity. While Silk Road 2.0 shutting down is rather sad it’s not the end of the world since another hidden service will rise to replace it. Hopefully the new online drug market will learn lessons from this case and make themselves even more difficult to shutdown.

I’m No Longer Doing Business with Crossbreed Holsters

Crossbreed Holsters, as the name implies, makes some damn fine holsters. Although the religious connotations behind the name don’t really jive with me the company’s customer service and warranty are good enough that I’m willing to let it slide. At least I was. I just found out that the company is suing Alien Gear for violating its intellectual property. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am against all forms of intellectual property so that’s the first strike. The second strike is against what the patent covers:

The abstract of the filed patent is as follows:

A concealable handgun holster is disclosed with a handgun encasement supported within clothing of a wearer by one or more attachment clips, the attachment clips being hidden “in plain sight” by decorative features that deceive an observer into thinking the clips are decorations rather than part of a holster. In preferred embodiments, the holster is a hybrid holster with a handgun encasement formed by a leather sheet attached to a rigid plastic cover, preferably made of Kydex.RTM.. The clips can be plastic or metal, preferably steel, and can be attached to the encasement by rivets, screws, or any other suitable fastening means known in the art. Decoration of the attachment clips can be by shaping of the clips, perforation of the clips with decorative shapes, engraving on the clips, printing on the clips, and/or attachment of decorative items to the clips.

Really? Crossbreed is suing because it has a patent on putting designs on belt clips that attach to holsters? That is right up there with Amazon’s patent on 1-click shopping and Microsoft’s patent on double-clicking.

Hopefully this patent gets shot down in the courts and Crossbreed is made to pay all of Alien Gear’s legal fees. Trying to take out competitors using the state’s intellectual property apparatus is low. It’s even more low when your patent is one something so glaringly stupid.

The President of Peace Needs More Freedom to Bomb People

I’m just going to start calling Obama the President of Peace. After all, he’s the only Nobel Peace Prize winner that I know who has bombed numerous countries. Congress, which is supposed to curtail the president’s powers, has done nothing to stand in his way and everything possible to support his murderous actions. That being the case I’m certain the President of Peace will receive the new freedoms he’s asking for to bomb foreign nations:

When he approved U.S. airstrikes in late September against extremists who have captured territory across Syria and Iraq, Obama used legal grounds of congressional authorizations that President George W. Bush relied on more than a decade ago. The White House maintained then that the Bush-era congressional authorizations for the war on al-Qaida and the Iraq invasion gave Obama authority to act without new approval by Congress under the 1973 War Powers Act.

That law, passed during the Vietnam War, serves as a constitutional check on presidential power to declare war without congressional consent. It requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of military action, and limits the use of military forces to no more than 60 days unless Congress authorizes force or declares war.

Now, however, Obama said a new military authorization is one of a few areas where he will seek to work with lawmakers during the lame-duck session before a new Congress is seated in January.

You have to give the man credit, when it comes to murdering people he doesn’t pursue it half-assed. And he still seems to have a ton of people willing to either act as apologists for hist reneging on his promises to end the wars or sweep his entire war mongering under the rug so they can continue to pretend that they’re anti-war while still claiming their guy is the best guy ever.

Not a Better 3D Printed Gun But a Better Bullet

The thing I like most about the 3D printed firearms community is their creativity. Developing a firearm that functions at all out of plastic is no small task. Developing one that can be fired multiple times without exploding is downright impressive. But a firearm that can only be fired a few times safely is still of limited use. Fortunately somebody is looking at improving 3D printed firearms by redesigning the ammunition instead of the gun:

Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round’s gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn’t easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns—even semi-automatic ones.

While it’s not a perfect solution it is promising. If the reloading community invested in this I’m sure it wouldn’t be long before somebody would begin mass producing the necessary steel shells. Another option may be to find an already actively produced steel sleeve that is close the to correct size and develop 3D printed barrels and bullets around that.

Minneapolis Decided It Had Too Much Democracy

While I didn’t pay much attention to the election results I was curious what Minneapolis’s attitude towards democracy ended up being. As it turns out the denizens of Minneapolis that decided to vote also decided that the city simply had too much democracy:

The city’s previous election filing fee was set at $20. The city will now require a $500 fee to run for mayor, $250 for the Board of Estimate and Taxation, $100 for the Park and Recreation Board. State law also allows candidates to gather signatures instead of paying the fee.

Talk about irony. Minneapolis, in general, is a bastion of neoliberalism. Neoliberals, again in general, spend a lot of time talking about the greatness of democracy, the need for people to go out and vote, and that the political process is where the little guy’s voice can truly be heard. But their actions betray their true beliefs.

Democracy is only great so long as there isn’t too much of it. Last year there were 35 mayoral candidates in Minneapolis, which irritated many neoliberals (and neocons) who worried that some of the candidates not endorsed by a major party would siphon precious votes away from their desired master. And they complained that having so much democracy on the ballot made it confusing for voters who, apparently, are too stupid to find the name of their desired master on a list containing more than two or three candidates. So the list had to be better curtailed to ensure no pesky poor people managed to get on it.

Of course curtailed lists are the cornerstone of voting. Voting is so awesome in the eyes of neoliberals that they get their panties in a bunch whenever somebody says they’re not going to vote. Some of them even claim that it’s one’s civic duty (as if such a thing actually existed) to vote. But they only want a very small list of options available to voters less they mistakenly choose the wrong candidate. Again, voters are too stupid to select the right master unless handed a very small list of potential options.

And what about the little guy’s voice? So long as the little guy can cough up $500 or take enough time off of his job to get the requisite number of signatures his voice can be heard. However if he’s too poor to afford the filing fee and working too much to afford the time to get signatures his voice won’t be heard. Too bad poor people, I guess you should have been wealthier if you wanted to rule.

I don’t live in Minneapolis so I couldn’t have voted on this measure if I wanted to nor could I run for mayor. So these results don’t impact me in any way. But it does show the level of hypocrisy neoliberals hold in regards to their precious god of democracy. That, to me, is amusing.