News You Need to Know – Page 30

No Honor Among Thieves

The primary job of a police officer is to extort wealth from the subjects of the State by enforcing the letter of the law. Most people don’t sign up for the job since the law prohibits a mind boggling number of peaceful activities and most people are disinclined to initiate violence against peaceful individuals. That means that the State has to recruit from the minority of people who enjoy initiating violence. While this gives the State an army of officers willing to do whatever it says, it also means that it has to deal with its ranks being filled with psychopaths and that has a lot of unintended consequences:

ST LOUIS – A black off-duty St. Louis police officer was shot by a white on-duty police officer from the same department who apparently mistook him for a fleeing suspect, according to a statement from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

There’s no honor among thieves. If given the opportunity one thief will gladly steal from another or, in this case, shoot another. With that said, I do appreciate it when violent gangs confine their violence to their own ranks.

Twin Cities Pride Disassociates Itself with Local Gang Members

After Officer Yanez was declared not guilty by a jury a lot of people are finally waking up to the realization that the police can literally get away with murder. This realization has lead a great deal of anger as well as a desire by many to disassociate themselves from the police as much as possible. The organizations of Twin Cities Pride, for example, announced that they will only have the legally mandated police presence. Not surprisingly this decision has created some butthurt in police circles:

St. Paul Deputy Police Chief Mary Nash said she was disappointed and that her colleagues have shared their frustration.

Nash, the department’s LGBTQ liaison, said 12 to 25 St. Paul officers have taken part in the parade in previous years.

“I understand people are angry and we can respect their feelings, but the reality is at the end of the day if we can’t work together it becomes more challenging to become better as a community and to become better as a police department,” Nash said.

It’s hard to work together with people who take every opportunity to steal from you and have a propensity for killing you because you had a taillight out, you were selling cigarettes, the officer smelled cannabis, your skin was too dark, or any of the plethora of other reasons cops have murdered peaceful individuals. Perhaps if the police made themselves easier to work with more people would be willing to work together with them.

At least Nash’s statement was, I believe, heartfelt and pretty decent. Bob Kroll’s statement? Not so much:

Lt. Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, said organizers should be “ashamed” and called the action “disturbing.”

“It’s shameful to see this group of leadership head in this direction,” Kroll said in a statement. “With the uptick in terrorist attacks worldwide, this outward anti-police sentiment is alarming. For an organization that prides itself on being accepting and inclusive, the hypocrisy amazes me.”

Uptick of terrorist attacks? That’s the kind of old fashioned fear mongering that I’ve come to expect from Kroll. As for this disassociation going against Pride’s history of inclusiveness, I will paraphrase one of the dumbest phrases I constantly hear from the alt-right and statist libertarians and apply it intelligently. Inclusiveness isn’t a suicide pact. Just because you’re inclusive doesn’t mean you have to associate with people whose job is literally extorting wealth from you.

I’m glad to see some pushback against the police. Perhaps someday there will be enough pushback to wake some police officers up enough to perform some serious introspection. If that were to happen, they might change their behavior and everybody could benefit.

Taxes Them Again

Whenever you mention privatizing roads some statist inevitably says, “But then we’ll all have to pay tolls to use the roads!” This is an especially funny criticism because many states including Illinois, Florida, and Texas charge tolls. And now Minnesota is looking to do the same thing:

State lawmakers have given Minnesota transportation officials an assignment: Study the feasibility of toll roads here and report back by January.

Were this to turn into a law Minnesotans would not only have to continue paying property taxes for local roads and gas taxes for state roads but they would also have to pay a toll on various roads. That is where privatized and government roads differ. On privatized roads you may have to pay a toll. However, unlike tolled government roads, you aren’t required to pay a tax in addition to the toll.

Your Vote Really Doesn’t Matter

I often pointed out that statistically your vote doesn’t matter. Moreover, your vote literally doesn’t matter:

Watching the ongoing clown show in Washington, Americans can be forgiven for asking themselves, “Why did we give this bunch of clowns so very much power over our nation and our lives?”

Well, don’t feel so bad, voters. Because you didn’t actually give them that much power. They just took it. That’s the thesis of Columbia Law Professor Philip Hamburger’s new book, The Administrative Threat, a short, punchy followup to his magisterial Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Both deal with the extraordinary — and illegitimate — power that administrative agencies have assumed in American life.

[…]

But today, the laws that actually affect people and businesses are seldom written by Congress; instead they are created by administrative agencies through a process of “informal rulemaking,” a process whose chief virtue is that it’s easy for the rulers to engage in, and hard for the ruled to observe or influence. Non-judicial administrative courts decide cases, and impose penalties, without a jury or an actual judge. And the protections in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (like the requirement for a judge-issued search warrant before a search) are often inapplicable.

If you received a public school education, your civics teacher probably taught you that laws are written by Congress and signed or vetoed by the president. That’s a gross simplification of the actual process. While laws must be written by Congress and signed by the president, rules can be made by any government agency. Those agencies aren’t headed by elected officials yet they have the power to create rules that directly impact your life.

Gun owners are intimately aware of this since the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has the power to make rules based on its interpretation of the law. What is an Any Other Weapon (AOW)? According to the ATF you can turn your regular pistol into an AOW by attaching a vertical foregrip to its front rail. Likewise, according to the ATF an arm brace on an AR-15 pistol isn’t a short-barreled rifle… unless you hold it incorrectly. While the National Firearms Act (NFA) created these categories of weapons the ATF was given the power to decide exactly what those categories entail.

A Rare Legal Victory

Once in a while the State sees fit to throw us serfs a bone. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that rejecting disparaging trademarks is a violation of the First Amendment:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a law that prohibits the government from registering trademarks that “disparage” others violates the First Amendment, a decision that could impact the Washington Redskins’ efforts to hang on to its controversial name.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. delivered the opinion for a largely united court. He said the law could not be saved just because it evenhandedly prohibits disparagement of all groups.

“That is viewpoint discrimination in the sense relevant here: Giving offense is a viewpoint,” Alito wrote.

He added that the disparagement clause in the law “offends a bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.”

The First Amendment is supposed to protect all forms of speech against government censorship. Since the government maintains a monopoly on trademarks it’s refusal to issue trademarks that it has deemed disparaging is a form a censorship.

Free speech is a hot topic at the moment. A lot of people, especially on college campuses, are hellbent on censoring the speech of individuals they disagree with. While there is no problem with private individuals and organizations censoring whatever speech they feel like (something a lot of free speech advocates forget) there is a huge problem when the government gets involved in deciding what forms of speech are acceptable and what forms are not. One of the biggest problems is how the definitions of acceptable and unacceptable change when the party in power changes. Allowing government to censor speech might sound reasonable at first because they’re censoring the speech you disagree with but when the other party comes into power your speech might suddenly be censored as well. The tendency of government to perform legal creep should be enough for everybody to oppose it when it tries to restrict the privileges we often mistakenly refer to as rights.

The System Worked as Intended

The Iron Maiden concert wasn’t the only big thing to happen on Friday. The jury for the Jeronimo Yanez case finished their deliberations and, as expected, determined that the officer was innocent. What was also unsurprisingly is that protesters responded by shutting down I-94.

A lot of people have been arguing that the system has failed but I would argue that the system is working as intended. Some people raised questions about the charges being brought against Yanez, mostly noting that other charges could have been brought against him that would have been easier to prove. I’m not familiar enough with the subject of charges to know if there’s any validity to that claim but brining difficult to prove charges against agents of the State isn’t unprecedented. However, we do know that the judge seemed to be extending a little professional courtesy to Yanez by denying the jury’s request to review some of the evidence. Since I wasn’t on the jury I don’t know whether that denial had any bearing on the ruling or not but it’s a fact that will likely haunt this trial for a while.

We know from previous trials that the courts purposely feed jurors erroneous information that benefits the State. For example, jurors are usually instructed that they must rule on the letter of the law, which goes against a jury’s right of nullification. As the Yanez trial demonstrated, judges also hold a great deal of sway over what jurors are allowed to see and not allowed to see. If the jury requests to review evidence, a judge can deny their request.

Jury trials are often thought of as a check on government power but the “justice” system here in the United States is designed in such a way that the State almost always wins. But the State holds a monopoly on writing, interpreting, and deciding the legality of laws. It makes the rules so it should come as no surprise that the rules favor it just as the rules of a Casino favor the house. When the State wins in its courts, even when the case against it is damning, people should realize that the system isn’t broken. In fact it’s working exactly as intended.

Judging a Case on Some of the Facts

The trail of Jeronimo Yanez took a strange turn yesterday when it was revealed that the jury wouldn’t be allowed to review the evidence:

Jurors requested to view the video of the shooting captured on Yanez’s squad car camera as well as the video that Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, live-streamed on Facebook in the incident’s immediate aftermath on the evening of July 6 in Falcon Heights.

Both videos were played during the trial.

Leary let jurors watch the two videos in court Tuesday.

The judge declined jurors’ requests to see transcripts of the squad car video as well as the initial statement Yanez gave about the shooting to in

Why did the man in the muumuu refuse the jury’s request to review the evidence that had already been presented? Since the judge didn’t give a reason and a spokesperson for Minnesota’s Judicial Branch only said that a man in a muumuu has the right to regulate jury deliberations we’re left to speculate. I’m not going to go so far as to say that the man in the muumuu is trying to extend a little professional courtesy to his fellow government stooge but I also won’t deny that it looks that way. What I do know is that this will likely be latched onto by protesters if the trial ends in a hung jury or a decision of not guilty (and I guarantee that there will be protesters in either of those two cases).

The Dangers of Insecure Internal Networks

It’s fairly well known that internally telephone networks operate on an insecure protocol called Signaling System 7 (SS7). How insecure is SS7? It has no mechanism for authentication so anybody able to access a network using SS7 can manipulate it. As you can imagine, gaining access to a global network that has no real authentication mechanism isn’t terribly difficult.

Security researchers have been warning about the dangers of SS7 for ages now but the telecom industry has shown little motivation to transition away from the insecure protocol. Now there is a Tor hidden service that claims to sell the ability to track individual phones using the SS7 protocol:

For years, experts have warned of vulnerabilities in the network that routes phone calls and cellular service — but those attacks may be more widespread than anyone realized. For more than a year, a Tor Hidden Service has been offering ongoing access to telecom’s private SS7 network for as little as $500 a month. Combined with known vulnerabilities, that access could be used to intercept texts, track the location of an individual phone, or cut off cellular service entirely.

Accessible on Tor at zkkc7e5rwvs4bpxm.onion, the “Interconnector” service offers a variety of services charged as monthly fees, including $250 to intercept calls or texts, $500 for full access, or $150 for cellphone reports (including location data and IMSI numbers). Well-heeled users can even pay $5,500 for direct access to the SS7 port, billed as “everything you need to start your own service.”

I checked the hidden service address and it appears that the site either went darker or never had much in the way of public information. Now it only lists an XMPP address to contact. However, while the service may or may not actually provide what it claims, the fact that it technically could offer such services should give people cause for concern.

SS7 is another example of the insecure legacy protocol that operates critical infrastructure. Considering the number of these legacy protocols being used to operate critical infrastructure, it’s a wonder that there aren’t more stores like this one.

It’s a Cyberpocalypse

Have you ever had a sneaking suspicion that an author of an article was given a keyword and paid based on the number of times they managed to insert that keyword into their article? I’m fairly certain that’s what precipitated this article. Doing a page search for “cyber” resulted in 29 hits.

If you can overcome the tedium of reading the word “cyber” every other sentence, you’ll find an article discussing the difficult the United States is having with fighting the Islamic State. It turns out that treating a decentralized organization like a centralized organization results in bad tactics. Who could have guessed that?

What’s even funnier though is the little tidbit the author snuck in that is supposed to justify the United State’s prohibition on carry-on electronics on flights originating from certain airports:

Even one of the rare successes against the Islamic State belongs at least in part to Israel, which was America’s partner in the attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Top Israeli cyberoperators penetrated a small cell of extremist bombmakers in Syria months ago, the officials said. That was how the United States learned that the terrorist group was working to make explosives that fooled airport X-ray machines and other screening by looking exactly like batteries for laptop computers.

Those must be some fantastically shitty x-ray scanners if they can’t actually tell the difference between legitimate laptop parts and bombs.

That tidbit might justify the carry-on electronics ban if it was in any way uniform. But the ban targeted specific airports, which means any terrorist with one of these highly advanced laptop bombs could get around the prohibition by flying to another airport, perhaps one in Europe, first and then flying to the United States from there. In other words, the “solution” to this threat wouldn’t have protected anybody and was therefore implemented for other reasons or was nothing more than security theater.

Police Body Camera Footage Being Placed Under Lock and Key

Equipping police with body cameras was supposed to help the public hold law enforcers accountable but like any solution the State agrees to, body cameras turned out to be yet another weapon in the State’s arsenal to expropriate wealth from its subjects. State governments are placing body camera footage under lock and key so it can’t be used by the public:

North Carolina, for example, passed legislation last year excluding body camera video from the public record, so footage is not available through North Carolina’s Public Records Act. That means civilians have no right to view police recordings in the Tar Heel state unless their voice or image was captured in the video.

Louisiana also exempts body camera video from public records laws.

South Carolina will only release body camera footage to criminal defendants and the subjects of recordings.

Kansas classifies body camera video as “criminal investigation documents” available only when investigations are closed. The Topeka Police Department may have wanted positive public relations with the release of its pond rescue video, but if a news outlet had requested that video through Kansas’ Open Records Act, that request would’ve likely been denied.

I stated pretty early on in the body camera debate that the footage would be useless, at least as far as holding the police accountable goes, unless the video was streamed directly to a third-party server that wasn’t under the control of any government entity. However, most body cameras upload their data to services, such as Axon’s evidence.com, that are controlled by parties with a vested interest in pleasing police departments. Combine that setup with the state laws that put the footage outside of the public’s reach and you have another tool that was sold as being good for the people that was actually very bad for them.