Category: Corruption Corner

Crossing the Thin Blue Line

One of the difficulties in holding police accountable in this country is that when an officer is accused of doing something wrong he is investigated by his fellows and usually found innocent of any wrongdoing. This thin blue line of cops protecting other cops is a breeding ground for corruption. When an officer does cross the thin blue line the vengeance dished out by their fellow officers can be terrible. Just ask Frank Serpico. His fellow officers attempted to get him killed on a drug raid because he spoke out against corrupt officers.

Smart officers who want to blow the whistle on their corrupt fellows lawyer up first. Even then the level police officers will sink to in order to exact revenge is frightening. A Arkansas lawyer who is representing some good officers that came forth against corruption found out first hand how low departments still stoop:

An Arkansas lawyer representing current and former police officers in a contentious whistle-blower lawsuit is crying foul after finding three distinct pieces of malware on an external hard drive supplied by police department officials.

The hard drive was provided last year by the Fort Smith Police Department to North Little Rock attorney Matt Campbell in response to a discovery demand filed in the case. Campbell is representing three current or former police officers in a court action, which was filed under Arkansas’ Whistle-Blower Act. The lawsuit alleges former Fort Smith police officer Don Paul Bales and two other plaintiffs were illegally investigated after reporting wrongful termination and overtime pay practices in the department.

According to court documents filed last week in the case, Campbell provided police officials with an external hard drive for them to load with e-mail and other data responding to his discovery request. When he got it back, he found something he didn’t request. In a subfolder titled D:\Bales Court Order, a computer security consultant for Campbell allegedly found three well-known trojans, including:

  • Win32:Zbot-AVH[Trj], a password logger and backdoor
  • NSIS:Downloader-CC[Trj], a program that connects to attacker-controlled servers and downloads and installs additional programs, and
  • Two instances of Win32Cycbot-NF[Trj], a backdoor

All three trojans are usually easily detected by antivirus software. In an affidavit filed in the whistle-blower case, Campbell’s security consultant said it’s unlikely the files were copied to the hard drive by accident, given claims by Fort Smith police that department systems ran real-time AV protection.

It makes you wonder what the officers who installed the malware on the hard drives were thinking. Did they believe their programs would bypass the lawyer’s anti-malware? Were they hoping he didn’t keep backups of the information he had related to the case and that erasing them on the laptop would ensure they were gone forever? Or were they hoping to install illegal material, such as child pornography, on his laptop in order to frame him? Who know. But this shows just how far officers will go to lash out against those who cross the thin blue line. Going after whistle blower’s lawyers is probably seen as nothing more than collateral damage to them.

The DEA’s Hookers and Blow Parties

What kind of parties does the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) throw on our dime? Hookers and blow parties, what else?

Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly had “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by drug cartels in Colombia, according to a new inspector general report released by the Justice Department on Thursday.

In addition, Colombian police officers allegedly provided “protection for the DEA agents’ weapons and property during the parties,” the report states. Ten DEA agents later admitted attending the parties, and some of the agents received suspensions of two to 10 days.

Isn’t it funny how these agencies always get caught up in scandals related to what they’re trying to stop? The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) was caught providing firearms to drug cartels, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) creates terrorists, and the National Security Agency (NSA) purposely tries to break Internet security for everybody.

The only thing that surprises me is that people still trust government agencies in any way. Every single one seems to eventually get caught up in a scandal where it provides resources to the criminals it’s supposed to be fighting. This shouldn’t surprise anybody since criminal gangs like to work together but it should erode any trust the public has in these agencies.

Congress Totally Cool With Being Spied On

I’m seldom surprised by Congress but this one made me take a step back. Congress has been entirely complicit in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance of the American people. I always imagined they would freak out if the same happened to them but it turns out they’re OK with being spied on. At least if Israel is doing the spying:

Israel is spying on the U.S.-Iranian nuclear talks? No problem, key Democrats and Republicans in Congress say. It’s just part of the game.

“I don’t look at Israel or any nation directly affected by the Iranian program wanting deeply to know what’s going on in the negotiations—I just don’t look at that as spying,” Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, said. “Their deep existential interest in such a deal, that they would try to figure out anything that they could, that they would have an opinion on it… I don’t find any of that that controversial.”

I wonder if it’s possible of us lowly serfs to setup a deal with the Israeli government to have them spy on our government and give us nice itemized reports. It would certainly save a lot of potential whistle blowers from being caged like Manning or exiled like Snowden.

Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes They Are Five.

Between pervasive surveillance and never ending warfare this police state we live in more accurately resembles 1984 every day. But now we have doctors reenacting the scene where O’Brien tortures Winston until he finally sees five fingers instead of the four being held up. A woman was kidnapped by police, taken to a psychiatric ward, forcibly sedated, and held prisoner for eight days because she claimed that Obama followed her on Twitter:

The NYPD disagreed — they handcuffed her and sent her to the hospital.

According to the lawsuit Brock is filing, the “next thing you know, the police held onto me, the doctor stuck me with a needle and I was knocked out. I woke up to them taking off my underwear and then went out again. I woke up the next day in a hospital robe.”

She said she was heavily sedated by hospital employees, and she told The Daily News that she only mentioned to doctors that the president follows her on Twitter to show them “the type of person I am. I’m a good person, a positive person. Obama follows positive people.”

Instead, the lawsuit alleges the doctor made her discharge contingent upon her denying that Obama follows her on the social media site. According to her “master treatment plan,” one of the objectives that would trigger her release was that she “state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.”

Here’s the real kicker, Obama does follow her on Twitter. The police or doctors could have taken two minutes to verify her claims before forcibly sedating and detaining her. But, you know, that wouldn’t have been as much fun!

This story strikes several nerves with me. The biggest one being that police can drag somebody to a psychiatric ward, forcibly hold them down, and some sick fuck of a doctor will inject sedatives into them completely against their will. Another thing that pisses me off about this story is the doctors blatantly ignoring the claims of a woman who was being kidnapped. Just because a kidnapper wears a badge doesn’t mean due diligence can be ignore (in fact the presence of a badge should make one more skeptical of any claims being made). As you can imagine the fact that the only way the woman could escape her imprisonment was to sign a document that was a blatant lie. Oh, did I mention the fact that she was also billed for the privilege of being subjugated to this? Because she was:

In her lawsuit, Brock is attempting to recoup the $13,637.10 bill she received for her involuntary incarceration, as well as an unspecified amount of additional damages.

In the end this is just another example on a large pile of examples pointing to the fact that this country is a police state. Anybody who argues otherwise is entirely ignorant of what’s going on.

Arizona Moves to Make Police Less Accountable

How could the United Police States of America possibly make police less accountable? By keeping their names secret for 60 days after shooting somebody, which is what Arizona is moving to do:

Critics call Senate Bill 1445 an attack on government transparency at a time when American police departments are trying to earn the public’s trust after a series of controversial shootings.

The bill would prevent law enforcement agencies statewide from releasing the names of police officers “involved in a use of deadly physical force incident that results in death or serious physical injury” for 60 days.

Why 60 days? Because that’s more than enough time for the story to fall off of the media’s radar. In fact 60 days is overkill since the media forgets about stories about two weeks after they happen in most cases. Regardless this bill would ensure that when people learn the identify of the shooter it will have little in the way of consequence. At most it will get a mention on the back page of a newspaper section under a generic title such as “Identify of police officer released.”

The DMCA is a Corporate Subsidy

Planned obsolescence is a term generally used by the economically ignorant to explain the improvement of products over time. The claim is that, for example, Apple doesn’t make as good of phones as they could because they want them to be obsolete next year so consumers will buy the new one. This ignores the fact that using the latest and greatest hardware drastically increases costs so manufacturers of mass produced devices tend to use components that are still very powerful but cheaper as they rely on older technology. It also ignores the fact that a phone isn’t suddenly obsolete just because a new model has been released. If there were the case there would be no market for used phones.

But there are times when examples of planned obsolescence, that is to say times when companies invested time and resources guaranteeing a product would cease to function after a certain period of time, can be found. Not surprisingly most of these examples rely on various corporate subsidies put into place by the state. One of those subsidies is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA criminalizes the production and distribution of technology that circumvents copyright protection schemes, which are commonly referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM). How is that a corporate subsidy? Let’s take this case of actual planned obsolescence as an example:

The IlluMask is a $30 “light therapy” mask that utilizes LED lights to zap away bacteria, stimulate skin cells and otherwise fight acne/aging (depending on what model you purchase.) Sounds great (if you buy IlluMask’s claims). A lifetime of skin revitalization, and all for just $30. Oh, wait.

The trouble is, it is limited to 30 daily uses of 15 minutes each, totaling just 7 1/2 hours, effectively lasting you a month. At the end of which, you just discard the device and get a new one. That seems like a ridiculous waste of a perfectly fine, functional device whose LED’s can last at least 30,000 to 40,000 hours.

Even if we ignore the negative environmental impact of discarding plastic masks loaded with perfectly good LEDs, there’s still the incredible audacity of IlluMask’s claim that its mask will only last 30 days, at which point the LEDs doing all of the facial revitalization/bacteria zapping are suddenly useless, even with well over 99.97% of their lifespan still ahead of them (based on 35,000 hours).

The manufacturers of the IlluMask utilize DRM to prevent the device from working after 30 days. Fortunately bypassing the DRM is easy:

1. Change the batteries if lights are getting dimmer.
2. Use a screwdriver and open the case. Then remove batteries and unscrew screws so the plastic battery holder on top of the circuit board can be moved over. Be careful NOT to damage any of the delicate wiring.
3. Now that the circuit board is exposed, put the batteries back in their slots.
4. Using a piece of wire (such as a paper clip) touch one end of your wire and place it where the thin copper wire connects to the circuit board (silver spot marked LED). Touch the other end to the little RESET copper circle–located on the left of the circuit board (use the copper circle above the word RESET, not below).
5. Press the start button while the wire is in place.
6. Move your wire from the RESET button to the TEST button.
7. Press the start button again while the wire is in place, and the count should reset to 30!

Unfortunately the DMCA makes disabling the DRM a potentially criminal offense. And herein lies the subsidy. Thanks to the DMCA developing DRM technology can be worth the investment in time and resources. Even though DRM can always be bypassed, which would making it a poor investment in time and resources under normal circumstances, the existence of the DMCA means that anybody who does develop methods of bypassing DRM faces fines and prison time for doing so. The state threatens violence against anybody who attempts to bypass DRM, which drastically raises the cost of doing so. And the tax victims gets to foot the bill for sending the heavily armed cops to kidnap developers of DRM bypassing technology, having highly paid prosecutors and judges argue and rule the developer’s guilt, and guarding the prison the developer will be kept in for years. Were the DMCA not in place bypassing DRM would carry no risks and manufacturers would have no recourse other than attempt to develop a hardier DRM mechanism.

Venezuela Going Full Dictatorship

It was bound to happen. As the failure of centrally planned economics wrecks the lives of Venezuelans and the United States places more sanctions on the country to make those miserable wretches even more miserable somebody was going to demand absolute power in the name of fixing everything. That demand was made by the country’s president, Nicolas Maduro, and was granted:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been granted the power to govern by decree until 31 December.

The measure was approved by the National Assembly, where Mr Maduro has a majority.

He requested the approval of the Enabling Law after the United States issued new sanctions against Venezuelan officials.

The opposition says he is using the incident to amass power and divert attention from the economic crisis.

Mr Maduro said he needed the special powers to deal with the threat posed by the United States, which he accuses of meddling in Venezuela’s affairs.

The opposition, that is to say the members of the National Assembly who aren’t completely ignorant of history, called it. Maduro is just exploiting a horrible situation to amass power. This is the exactly same playbook used by a million despots before him and will likely continue to be successful in the foreseeable future. What can Venezuela expect? It depends on how drunk with power Maduro gets. In the best case scenario little changes and his power to rule by decree goes away at the end of the year. But the worst case, which is also the more commonly case, involved his opponents all dying and his ability to rule by decree lasting indefinitely.

I really hate to see the lives of so many people become as miserable as the Venezuelans have. But our species seems entirely unwilling to learn from the mistakes of centrally planned failures. Even when we get reminders such as Venezuela the common reaction seems to be blaming the entire mess on not enough centralized power being wielded.

This is What Happens When Officers Can Turn Off Body Cameras

Advocates of police accountability have been arguing that police officers should be required to wear body cameras while on duty. Although there was some resistance to this idea from police apologists that has mostly faded. Many of them are now on board with the idea because they understand that body cameras can collect evidence to prosecute more people and that officers and disable the cameras when they’re about to beat somebody down. That second part is important because it will render any of the benefits of body cameras useless. What we can expect in the future is what Denver is experiencing now:

As the nation’s policing agents scramble to provide street officers with body cameras, a new study released Wednesday shows that a majority of use-of-force incidents weren’t captured by Denver police officers who are piloting use of the technology.

There were a host of reasons for officers failing to turn on the body worn cameras (BWCs) in violation of Denver Police Department policy. According to an independent police monitor’s report, which surveyed the six months ending in December, only 26 percent of the use-of-force incidents in the studied policing district were captured on video.

If officers can disable their body cameras without consequence then any benefits of mandating body cameras, at least as far as the people are concerned, go out the window. Unless officers are punished, and by that I mean charged with a crime, for disabling their body cameras while on duty the only purpose those fancy devices will serve is to collect evidence to prosecute people.

Body cameras along won’t hold officers accountable. There also needs to be policies that will result in officer being fired, fined, and opened up to lawsuits if they disabled their cameras. I believe arguments could even be made for jailing an officer who disables his body camera during a use of force incident (in which case I would argue that doing so would effectively be an admittance of guilt in a court hearing unless evidence of non-officer related failure could be shown).

Bloomington City Attorney Wanted to Prosecute Mall of American Employees Who Supported December’s Protesters

There was a major protest inside the Mall of America in December. Since then the authorities have been working hard to find ways to punish the protesters and that has resulted in some ridiculous charges. But it seems that the Bloomington City Attorney wasn’t satisfied with only charging a handful of protesters. She wanted to punish the employees at the Mall of America who showed support for the protesters:

Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson said the emails “appear to be valid” after they were posted on Facebook Monday by Black Lives Matter Minneapolis. The group said it obtained the emails through a public records request.

The December emails show the city attorney and Mall of America Corporate Counsel Kathleen Allen weighing trespassing orders and civil charges to deter further unsanctioned demonstrations. In one, Allen says the mall’s owners did not want trespassing orders against Lush employees who showed support for the protest, citing “the potential for further press.”

Johnson argued for a six-month ban from the mall for employees (with an exception allowing access to work at the store) in order to “send a good message to all persons employed at MOA. … Future demonstrations cannot be tolerated.”

This shows that these charges have nothing to do with the law. Under the law the protesters, at most, may have been guilty of trespassing (depending on whether or not you believe a mall that receives massive amounts of tax payer subsidies qualifies as private property). Any working employee wasn’t trespassing since it was their job to be there. If their employer felt those employees had violated any policies it could fire them but there was absolutely no reason for the Bloomington City Attorney to even suggest going after them.

What these charges amount to is petty vengeance. The Bloomington City Attorney is pissed that people decided to ignore her employer’s authority and protest in the Mall of America after being told not to. In the e-mail she said she wanted to “send a good message to all persons employed at MOA.” that future protests will not be tolerated in any way. Putting that statement into plain English she wanted to send a message to all of the serfs at the Mall of America that any disobedience against their lords will be punished swiftly.

She should be fired immediately.

It’s Because He’s in the Big Club

David Petraeus received a slap on the wrist because he leaked classified documents to his mistress. His punishment has raised a very important question:

Surely a person’s punishment for leaking classified material should not be greater when they act for selfless reasons (however misguided) rather than personal gain. So, why do Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden get the book thrown at them and General David Petraeus is let off with a fine and a promise not to do it again?

That is a very good question and I know the answer. The reason Petraeus received a slap on the wrist whlie Manning is rotting in a cage and Snowden is in exile is because those two aren’t in the big club.

Petraeus was a high ranking member within the state and with rank comes privileges. Meanwhile Manning and Snowden were both low ranking grunts. Another difference is that Petraeus caused little damage to the state. His leaks were far more controlled and didn’t give the state as many black eyes. Manning’s leaks gave the state one hell of a black eye by exposing actual war crimes it had committed. Snowden leaked a lot of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) dirty little secrets that it relied on to spy on people and allowed the people it was spying on (you and I) to adopt better tools to help protect against it.

In this world whether you’re punished severely or not often depends on where you rank. Remember the state has a monopoly on “justice” and tends to treat its own far better than it treats us lowly proles.