United Police States of America – Page 24

With Special Badges Comes Special Privileges

Becoming a police officer is a pretty sweet gig. You don’t need to be intelligent. In fact, being intelligent can prohibit you from becoming a police officer. It’s not an especially dangerous. And you get to enjoy special privileges:

This week, a Tarrant County judge sentenced cop watcher Kenny Lovett to 90 days in jail after a jury determined he interfered with a high-risk traffic stop in Arlington in 2015.

“It’s a safety issue first and foremost,” said Melinda Westmoreland, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Lovett’s case.

On that day, Lovett and several other cop watchers pulled over to film Arlington police making a traffic stop.
Not long after they began filming, two officers approached them, concerned about the holsters some the cop watchers were also carrying. The exchange was caught on video.

“I need you to go back [to your vehicle] and put your weapons up if you’re armed,” the officer says in the recording. “Feel free to record after that.”

Two of cop watchers did what the officers told them to do. Lovett, who was carrying a black powder pistol, refused. He was then led away in handcuffs and charged with interfering with public duties and disorderly conduct.

When you interact with a police officer it’s OK for them to demand you to disarm but it’s not OK for you to demand they disarm. Considering the number of officers being killed is going down while the number of people being killed by cops is going up I think it would be fair to demand officers disarm when interacting with members of the public.

Power is easily abused by those who have it. By operating on a higher level than the general public law enforcement officers are in a position to abuse power. If we want to reduce power abuse by law enforcers they need to operate on the same level as the rest of us. That means they should fall under the same scrutiny when using force, being surveilled, and interacting with other individuals as every other person in society. If an officer can be armed while interacting with the general public then people keeping officers accountable by filming police interactions should be allowed to be armed as well.

FBI Asks Apple, “What If We Do What We’re Planning To Do?”

On Tuesday there was a congressional hearing regarding encryption. I didn’t watch it because I had better shit to do. But I’ve been reading through some of the highlights and the hearing was like most hearings. A handful of competent individuals were brought in to testify in front of a group of clueless idiots who are somehow allowed to pass policies. What was especially funny to me was a comment made by the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), James Comey (which should really be spelled James Commie):

When Florida Congressman Ted Deutch asked Comey if the potential repercussions of such a back door falling into the wrongs hands were of valid concern, Comey responded by posing a hypothetical situation in which Apple’s own engineers were kidnapped.

“Slippery slope arguments are always attractive, but I suppose you could say, ‘Well, Apple’s engineers have this in their head, what if they’re kidnapped and forced to write software?'” Comey said before the committee. “That’s where the judge has to sort this out, between good lawyers on both sides making all reasonable arguments.”

Comey likely made the comment to highlight how Apple is capable of creating a back door to break the iPhone’s encryption, a fact the company has admitted.

Comey should have said, “Well, Apple’s engineers have this in their head, what will happen when my agency kidnaps them and forces them to write the backdoor?” Because that’s exactly what his agency is trying to accomplish in the San Bernardino case. The FBI wants the court to order Apple to write a custom version of iOS that would bypass several security features and brute force the encryption key. If the court does issue such an order and Apple doesn’t obey some federal goons will kidnap members of Apple (likely Tim Cook). Of course, the FBI couches its criminal activities in euphemisms such as “arrest” to make them appear legitimate.

But what would happen? As it turns out, not much. Kidnapping one of Apple’s engineers wouldn’t give access to the company’s software signing key. Without that key any software the engineer was forced to write wouldn’t load onto an iOS device.

The Busses Have Ears

Surveillance is pervasive in our society. You can hardly walk down a street without some nosey camera recording your movements or ride public transportation without some snoopy microphone recording your conversation:

MTA began using recording devices inside some of its buses in 2012, without seeking legislative approval. Nearly 500 of its fleet of 750 buses now have audio recording capabilities. Officials say the devices can capture important information in cases of driver error or an attack or altercation on a bus.

They can also record conversations so they can later be requested by law enforcers looking to nail somebody to a cross. The dangers of pervasive surveillance are almost always understated by statists. Surveillance fetishists always justify their spying by claiming it’ll protect the children, thwart terrorism, or otherwise help combat some overblown concern. What they leave out is that the data is also available to prosecute nonviolent individuals.

Imagine if two people were making a peaceful drug transaction on one of these surveillance buses. Without the microphones in place the transaction would probably go unnoticed. But because the data exists it would only take one law enforcer or concerned citizen to listen to it to turn that previously peaceful transaction into a violent home raid.

Surveillance is dangerous precisely because law enforcers are willing to use any collected data to ruthlessly enforce victimless crimes. That’s a reality that is never mentioned by the surveillance state’s proponents.

Due Process Was A Pain In The Ass Anyways

I like to believe that a previous age existed where due process was value. If such an age existed it is obvious long since gone. More and more people seem willing to toss due process aside whenever it negatively impacts their ideological opposites. Throwing out due process is done in many ways. Some of those ways are as blatant as denying people rights based on where they were born. Other ways are more subtle, such as creating a new permit in order to punish an unreleased action:

As it stands, cops who suspect someone of prostitution must actually prove it before arresting them. But that’s a lot of work. So Eau Claire, Wisconsin, officials have a new plan: make non-sexual commercial companionship illegal without the proper paperwork.

To this end, the Eau Claire City Council is considering an ordinance that would require anyone advertising as an escort to get an occupational license from the government.

[…]

But because being an escort does not necessarily mean one is engaged in prostitution, police can’t just go around arresting anyone who advertises as an escort. Not yet, anyway. Ostensibly, cops must still interact with the individual and get them to agree to some sort of sexual activity for a fee. As Eau Claire Assistant City Attorney Douglas Hoffer put it, police are forced to do “intensive investigations” and get their targets to use “explicit language” in order to make charges stick.

Now city officials want to change that. Under their proposed legislation, escorts and escort businesses would have to be licensed by the city and subject to extensive regulations. Any escort operating without a license would be subject to a fine of up to $5,000.

But that’s not all: the proposed law would also punish customers who contract with unlicensed escorts. Hoffner said the idea is to end “demand” for prostitution. Anyone attempting to hire an unlicensed escort could also be charged up to $5,000, as well.

As the article notes, police cannot go after any escort business because many aren’t offering illegal services. This means the police have to effectively create a case with a sting operation or find evidence that a law was broken (but not evidence of a crime being committed since crimes require victims and voluntary prostration involves no victims). When situations like this arise it’s common for the local authorities to create some kind of permit requirement.

With permit requirements in place a police officer can arrest an escort and their customer on the grounds of the escort not having the proper paperwork. It’s a much easier violation to prove than prostitution. In fact the Eau Claire City Attorney admitted to exactly that:

Said Eau Claire City Attorney Stephen Nick: “This is another means, as opposed to actually having evidence of an act of prostitution, pandering, or offering a sexual act for money, so we can follow up” on sex-work suspects.

Cases like this should receive more publicity. It’s not enough for people to only get up in arms over overt violations of due process. People must learn about the more subtle methods as well.

Rules Are Different For The King’s Men

When the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) breaks into 1,300 computers with a single, vaguely written warrant it’s labeled justice. But when somebody breaks into the FBI’s computers it’s labeled criminal:

A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.

The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.

This is something that fascinates me about statism. It’s relies on the belief that humans are inherently bad and that the only solution is to absolve a handful of those humans of any responsibilities for their actions so they can control the rest.

A lot of people are willing to give the FBI a pass in breaking into 1,300 computers because the operation was dealing with combating child pornography. While I detest child pornography I also detest throwing due process out the window whenever it becomes inconvenient. There’s no way the FBI could know that all 1,300 computers it broke into were involved in the child pornography site. Not every visitor to a site is a user. Sometimes people are tricked into visiting a site, sometimes they’re curious if a site is actually as terrible as people are claiming (and often report sites containing illegal content to law enforcers if they find those claims to be true), etc. Due process involves identifying suspects based on evidence and investigating them specifically.

Further compounding the issue is the fact the FBI was knowingly distributing child pornography from its own servers. The agency was quite literally doing the exact same thing it was supposedly trying to stop.

Yet many people are calling what the FBI did justice while labeling what the hacker did as criminal.

News From The Crypto War Frontline In New York

I continue to be amused by politicians’ efforts to prohibit math. A bill has been introduce in New York that would require manufacturers to implement backdoors in their mobile devices or face… some kind of consequence, I guess:

A New York assemblyman has reintroduced a new bill that aims to essentially disable strong encryption on all smartphones sold in the Empire State.

Among other restrictions, the proposed law states that “any smartphone that is manufactured on or after January 1, 2016 and sold or least in New York, shall be capable of being decrypted and unlocked by its manufacturer or its operating system provider.”

If it passes both houses of the state legislature and is signed by the governor, the bill would likely be the first state law that would impose new restrictions on mobile-based cryptography. Undoubtedly, if it makes it that far, the law would likely face legal challenges from Apple and Google, among others.

One of the great things about democracy is if a vote doesn’t go the way you want you can reintroduce the vote and waste everybody’s time again.

One question you have to ask is how this bill could be enforced. As written, it would punish sellers who sold phones that couldn’t be decrypted by law enforcers. But New York isn’t that big of a landmass and Ars Technia points out the rather obvious flaw in Assemblyman Titone’s clever plan:

UPDATE 3:49pm ET: Also, it’s worth pointing out that even if this bill does pass, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult for New Yorkers to cross a state line to buy a smartphone.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to see what would happen if this bill was signed into law. Sellers in New York may go under but sellers in neighboring states would see a jump in sales. In addition to sellers in neighboring states, the sales of online stores would likely increase as well since, you know, you can just order a cell phone online and have it delivered to your home.

Part of me is amused by the idea of strong cryptography being outlawed. Imagine millions of Android users flashing customer firmware just so they could remove government mandated backdoors. Such a prohibition would almost certainly create a sizable black market for flashing customer firmware.

The Unpayable Debt To Society

The United States has reached the logical conclusion of the tough on crime mentality. This country has become so tough on crime that even a wrongful conviction and ruin somebody’s life:

Simmons, at the time a contract systems analyst making $90 an hour, was arrested in Seattle’s University District in 2006 and charged with selling crack as well as resisting arrest. He was convicted of the drug-dealing charge and sentenced to a year in prison.

Three months after his conviction, though, the King County deputy whose testimony led to Simmons’ conviction, James Schrimpsher, was fired for dishonesty in a different drug case. That the deputy was being investigated for lying at the same time as Simmons’ trial had not been disclosed to Simmons’ attorneys.

Simmons insists he didn’t sell drugs and believes he was profiled. Save for a marijuana possession charge from the 1990s in Tennessee, he has no criminal convictions before or since. Regardless, he served the full prison term at the Washington Corrections Center in Shelton, plus a year of probation when he got out.

[…]

What’s alarming about Simmons’ story is that his drug-dealing conviction was eventually stricken from the record. He was retroactively exonerated in 2010 because the testimony that convicted him was no longer considered credible. Yet he struggles to get a job because the story stalks him on the Internet.

Based on the job offers Simmons has received he’s a very capable individual. What he was original charged with, selling crack, wasn’t even a crime (because crimes require victims). But now, even after he has been exonerated, he cannot get a job.

Sadly this is exactly what the tough on crime crowd wanted. In their pursuit of an impossible goal, a society free of crime, they demanded harsh punishments be issued. The politicians, always happy to take up the cause of fear mongering, acted on these pleas and passed harsher laws. When the new harsher punishments failed to bring about Nirvana the the cycle continued. Now we’re at a point when anybody who has been incarcerated, regardless of the offense, is nearly unemployable.

Eliminating Due Process

We’re going back to 2009!

Talk about preventing “terrorists” from acquiring firearms is in the news again proving that everything old is new. With the shooting in San Bernardino in recent memory several politicians have taken the opportunity to introduce an amendment to a bill that would, amongst other things, prohibit people on the terrorist watch lists from buying firearms. This maneuver is being heralded as a tool to prevent terrorists from acquiring firearms but, as I noted back when this shit was being argued in 2009, the terrorist watch lists are secret lists. How do you end up on one of the lists? Who knows? It’s a secret. Are you already on one of the lists? Who knows? It’s a secret. All we do know is that the lists exist and a lot of names are on them.

Prohibiting people on the terrorist watch lists from buying firearms isn’t about prohibiting terrorists from buying firearms. It’s about removing due process before prohibiting people from buying firearms.

Unlike many people my support for due process isn’t dependent on whether or not an accused party shares my philosophical beliefs. I oppose any punishment issued without due process. Do you know why? Because not performing a full investigation and trial leads to shit like this:

A Guantanamo Bay prisoner locked up for 13 years has been found to be a victim of mistaken identity, originally thought to be a member of al-Qaeda.

Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri was kept in a secret prison camp for 13 years without charge because somebody mistook him for somebody else. The only reason this is known is because some kind of hearing was finally held. In that hearing it was determined that he was just some low level schmuck and not the evil mastermind trainer he was originally sold as. Of course some may point out that he was still a fighter in al-Qaeda so his incarceration was justified. To that I would point out that no such fact was known because no investigation or hearing had been conducted. All we know is he was locked in a secret prison camp for 13 years based on accusations so weak no charges were even filed against him. That’s the kind of shit that happens when you don’t have due process.

I’m not going to mince words. Anybody who endorses their philosophical and political opponents being punished by governments without requiring any manner of due process is an asshole. They are what’s wrong with the world. They are the reason we can’t have nice things. I’d consider rounding them all up and putting them in a secret prison camp for the good of humanity but, you know, I believe in due process so I could never support such a thing.

Unproductive Is Better Than Undoing Productivity

Since the news has hit national headlines I’m assuming most of you reading this blog are aware of the Black Lives Matters protest at the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) Fourth Precinct. If not here is your thumbnail storyline.

Two members of the MPD were involved in the shooting of Jamar Clark. A lot of questions surround the shooting, including the conflict of interest of having law enforcers investigate law enforcers. The protesters are demanding any video footage of the shooting be released for public scrutiny and the investigators are refusing claiming it could hinder the investigation. Although the protest has remained mostly civil five people were shot one night last week.

As with any protest there are both advocates and opponents. Of the two I find the opponents most interesting. Not because the protesters shutdown Highway 94 during rush hour one night but because they keep saying the protesters need to get jobs and be productive members of society. It’s the same argument the tough on crime crowd tends to fall back on whenever people are protesting police.

For me this brings up an interesting question. Is it better to be productive or to undo productivity? Even though many of the people at the protest are employed let’s consider their productivity. Although the protesters have not completely shutdown the precinct they are interfering with its day to day operations to some extent. A lot of officers are on duty guarding the precinct instead of driving around hoping to issue some petty traffic citations. And therein lies my issue. Even if the protesters are being productive the police are actually undoing previous productivity.

Consider what happens when an officer witnesses somebody driving above the arbitrarily posted speed limit. First the officer will turn on his bright flashy lights that divert everybody’s attention to them and cause epileptic people to have a seizure. Then the officers race down the highway and demand the offending motorist pull over to the side of the highway. Because of the way Minnesota’s traffic laws are written other people driving down the highway need to either merge over a lane or slow way down when passing the cop car. While motorists are creating legally mandated conditions that are more likely to cause an accident the officer is walking over to the pulled over car to write him a citation. Most people view the citation as a dollar amount but it really should be viewed as hours of a life. That citation effectively undoes a number of hours of productivity of the motorist. Instead of being able to, for example, buy a new television the motorist now has to give that money to the State.

Traffic citations are just one of many ways police actively undo productivity. Raiding cannabis growers results in a lot of already grown cannabis being destroyed. Civil forfeiture laws result in a lot of productivity being stolen in the form of property an office claims is related to a drug crime.

To me the protest is, at worst, a debate between unproductive people (although I don’t actually see the protesters as unproductive) and people who undo productivity. I’d much rather have a group of unproductive people than a group of people who are working to set back my productivity any day of the week.

What The FBI Demands When It Sends A Gag Order

The first rule about National Security Letters (NSL) is you don’t talk about NSLs. If you do the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) gets to put you in a cage. But a resent lawsuit has allowed us to get the first glimpse of an NSL. Specifically what the FBI demanded an Internet service provider (ISP) hand over about one of its customers:

The National Security Letter (NSL) is a potent surveillance tool that allows the government to acquire a wide swath of private information—all without a warrant. Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of them each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and you name it. The letters don’t need a judge’s signature and come with a gag to the recipient, forbidding the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target.

For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target’s complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that’s required is an agent’s signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation.

This looks like a fishing expedition more than an investigation. Investigations are supposed to involved people who are suspected of specific crimes and any information demanded from investigators should be specific to those suspected crimes. What the FBI demanded in this case was basically all information the ISP could have about their customer and some information it probably didn’t have (such as a history of online purchases). Such a vast amount of unspecific data would be useful if the FBI wanted to find evidence of a crime and charge the target based on that. Because of the secrecy of NSLs it’s impossible to know the exact motives of the FBI so there’s really nothing stopping it from going on fishing expeditions.

I’d like to see more NSLs disclosed because I’m betting most of them will look more like fishing expeditions than investigations.