News You Need to Know – Page 68

Indoor Shooting Range

In general I’m not a fan of indoor shooting ranges. That may sound like a strange thing to here from a Minnesotan in November but indoor ranges are much louder than outdoor ranges and the air quality can be pretty iffy. Still, I would love to have one in my basement but I know the man would stop me from enjoying it:

Police were responding to a 911 call reporting shots fired inside the house near S. Circle and Hwy 24 in Colorado Springs. Officers say as they approached the house they heard more shots and noticed the front door was open.

When they got inside, they says they found three people in the basement. Two were allegedly taking turns shooting at glass bottles and a third person was watching.

Bummer. I guess those guys should have had suppressors. But seriously, the last sentence of the story reveals something that I doubt anybody will find surprising:

Police say they had also been drinking.

Well… no shit?

Again, on a serious note, I’m guessing the home owner hadn’t setup the basement with the proper outfitting for a firing range. Assuming somebody did properly setup their home to stop bullets from leaving I think having a range in their basement would be pretty awesome.

EDIT: 2014-11-18: 10:16: My derp caught up with me and I typed that indoor ranges are louder than indoor ranges. This has been fixed. Everything thank Mr. King for e-mailing me about this.

Be Careful When You Vote, You Never Know When the Rules Will Change

Voting can be a dangerous activity. Not only are the chances of dying on the way to the polling place greater than actually changing anything with your vote but the rules can chance at a moment’s notice. Take this woman for example, she was convicted of a nonviolent drug offense. She was told that her voting privileges would be restored after she served her probation. But then the rules changed in 2011 and she faced the possibility of more time in a cage:

Two months after I cast my ballot as a civics lesson for my daughter, the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation agents parked across the street from my house, questioned me, and eventually arrested me and charged me with voter fraud.

Let me explain: When I was convicted on a nonviolent drug charge in 2008, my defense attorney told me that once I served my probation, I would regain my right to vote automatically – correct information at the time. But Gov. Terry Branstad suddenly changed the rules in 2011, and now all citizens with a felony conviction lose their voting rights for life. Our Secretary of State Matt Schultz, in fact, has made this subversion of democracy a point of pride. He has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hunting down and prosecuting people with past convictions who unknowingly registered or cast a vote.

Luckily for her the jury utilized its right of nullification and acquitted her. But they very well could have convicted her. So the moral of the story is that the rules of voting (and anything involved the state in general) are made up and what you’ve been told by a defense attorney doesn’t matter.

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.

War is Peace

You have to love some members of the “peace” movement. For example, gun control advocates. They constantly talk about wanting to restrict or outright ban guns to bring peace to our world. What they seldom address is the fact that they want the state to maintain a monopoly on guns so it can enforce gun bans. In other words gun control advocates are peace activists that want to use violence to achieve their goals. But it’s not very often that we can to see straight up violence like this from a peace activist:

WASHINGTON, Pa. (AP) — Two “Stop the Violence” organizers allegedly beat one of their colleagues so severely that he vomited blood and was left unconscious in critical condition.

Peace through superior firepower, or in this case vicious beatings.

Sometimes the War Against the Homeless Becomes Literal

Usually when I talk about the state’s war against the homeless I’m speaking figuratively. But from time to time the state’s figurative war becomes a very real one:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has released a disturbing video of a police shooting. It shows eight officers of the Saginaw, Michigan Police Department lined up against Milton Hall, a mentally ill homeless man. There’s a brief stand-off in a vacant parking lot, in which Hall pulls out a pocketknife, then the law enforcement agents fire 45 bullets at Hall, hitting him 14 times, even as he drops to the pavement, but it doesn’t end there.

“One policeman, after [Hall] was on the ground, turned him over, handcuffed him, and put his foot on his back,” says Jewel Hall, the mother of the 45-year-old homeless man. “And his blood is running down the street like water.”

A knife is a deadly weapon, there’s no denying that. But us tax payers are forced to pay for a lot of less-likely-to-be-lethal weaponry for police officers so you would think they would humor us by attempting to use it from time to time on somebody other than small children. Especially when there are eight officers so if something like a Taser fails to be effective you still have seven sets of hands free to either bring in another Taser or a firearm.

As a side note we should also take a moment to look at the hit ratio. 14 out of 45 rounds is approximately a 31 percent hit ratio, which is pretty terrible. Criticizing their poor marksmanship isn’t just my attempt at taking a cheap shot at the officers. Having that poor of marksmanship in a town is dangerous since it means 31 rounds went who knows where. That’s a sizable risk to the people the police are supposedly there to protect.

When You Phish it’s Illegal, When the FBI Phishes it’s Law Enforcement

The biggest problem I have with law enforcers is that they enjoy a level of privileges above the rest of us. Whereas it’s illegal for you or I to lie to a law enforcement agent they can lie to us with impunity. Heck, it’s considered part of their job. But that differences in legally permissible actions doesn’t stop there. Let’s consider the act of phishing, which is an attempt to acquire personal information from a target using a fake version of a legitimate website. It’s illegal in the United States. Unless, of course, if you have a badge:

The FBI in Seattle created a fake news story on a bogus Seattle Times web page to plant software in the computer of a suspect in a series of bomb threats to Lacey’s Timberline High School in 2007, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in San Francisco.

[…]

The EFF documents reveal that the FBI dummied up a story with an Associated Press byline about the Thurston County bomb threats with an email link “in the style of The Seattle Times,” including details about subscriber and advertiser information.

The link was sent to the suspect’s MySpace account. When the suspect clicked on the link, the hidden FBI software sent his location and Internet Protocol information to the agents. A juvenile suspect was identified and arrested June 14.

Double standards are fun! The problem with allowing law enforcers to perform illegal actions without repercussions is that it sets a bad precedence. We’re witnessing these repercussions today as police officers use levels of force far and above what any sane person could justify, confiscate property of people who haven’t even been convicted of a crime, and hack into computers in order to obtain evidence, often against suspected hackers. Allowing law enforcers to act illegally also attracts people who want to perform illegal acts to the job, which is part of my theory of why we have so many violent individuals staffing many modern police departments.

Like You and Me, Only Better

Gun control loons always seem to make an exception for their hatred of guns when it comes to police. As far as many of them are concerned the police are paragons of all that is good and wholesome. You and I? We’re scum that can’t be trusted with a firearm. If allowed to carry a firearm we would pull it on whoever made us even slight perturbed. Meanwhile police officers, because of their advanced training and upstanding moral character, would never act irresponsibly with a firearm. Well except maybe this guy:

(KUTV) The passenger, who allegedly pointed a gun at the head of an Uber driver, is a federal police officer with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).

[…]

Brothers said he picked up McDonald and three other people from a downtown Salt Lake bar that night, after they called for a lift. He says he dropped off three passengers first, then drove McDonald to his hotel as he had a disagreement with one of the other passengers. Right after he pulled into the hotel entrance, Brothers said McDonald looked at him and said, “Do you want to live or die?” At first, Brothers said he thought it was a joke because McDonald appeared drunk. Then his passenger asked him the question again and pulled out a gun and pointed it at his head. Brothers said he tried to run but McDonald grabbed him by the collar and pulled him so hard he ripped his shirt and jacket and left scratch marks. Brothers pulled away, ran out of the car and called 911.

The District Attorney said surveillance video from the hotel supports Brothers’ story. McDonald was arrested in the hotel.

But that’s just one exception. The rest are all super upstanding. In fact they’re so upstanding that they are the only ones we could trust to be in possession of firearms. That will ensure incidents like this one will never happen again… who am I kidding? I can’t even keep up this level of sarcasm. Seriously though, be cautions of who you give a ride to.

Suicide Assistance Hotline

There are few things, at least in my opinion, more tragic than somebody being pushed to the brink of suicide. It seems I am not alone in my thinking since resources have been set aside for things like suicide hotlines where people contemplating suicide can call and hopefully get talked out of it. Unfortunately a call to a suicide hotline can result in police officers being dispatched to your location. At that point the suicide hotline may very well become the suicide assistance hotline:

The 35 year old man, who neighbors describe the as a quiet, friendly man, was divorced and now lived in the home with his girlfriend and her children. According to Detective Matthew Gwynn of the Roy City Police Department, the man called a suicide hotline around 4 a.m. and threatened to kill himself. The Weber County Consolidated Dispatch Center sent officers to the resident.

“There were people in the home at the time the call was placed,” Det. Gwynn told ABC4 News. “They left the home shortly thereafter.”

Roy City Police and the Weber Metro SWAT Team tried to convince the man to surrender and get help but seven hours after the initial call, something dramatic occurred in the garage causing SWAT officers to open fire.

People whose training mostly focuses on using force are probably not the type of people you want to send to a person who just declared that they are suicidal. What is interesting about this case though is that the police are investigating it as a suicide by cop incident. In order for that to be a possible reason for the call it would require the caller to know that the suicide hotline would dispatch police officers. Furthermore it would be reliant on having officers dispatched that are more prone to shoot a suicidal man than attempt to dissuade him on committing suicide. It’s also interesting that the police, so far, haven’t released any information regarding the actions the caller took that instigate the police opening fire (or, for that matter, what a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team was dispatched instead of regular police officers).

Hopefully the media actually covers the details of this case because I believe they could be very interesting.