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Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times
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The fact that federal, state, and local law enforcement can obtain communications "metadata"—URLs of sites visited, e-mail message headers, numbers dialed, GPS locations, etc.—without any real oversight or reporting requirements should be shocking, but it isn't. The courts ruled in 2005 that law enforcement doesn't need to show probable cause to obtain your physical location via the cell phone grid. All of the aforementioned metadata can be accessed with an easy-to-obtain pen register/trap & trace order. But given the volume of requests, it's hard to imagine that the courts are involved in all of these.
Wayne Co. profits from police property seizures
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Vaughn, who has no criminal record, was required to pay for the return of her car, which was seized by police after they mistook Vaughn's co-worker for a prostitute. Even though prosecutors later dropped the case, Vaughn still had to pay.
Her story is not unusual. In Wayne County, law enforcement officials regularly seize vehicles without levying charges -- even in cases in which they later concede no law was broken. The agency provides perhaps the most prolific and egregious example of what critics contend is the wrongful use of laws allowing the seizure of private property.
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Officers from the Wayne County Sheriff's Morality Unit accused Odom of solicitation after they saw her make eye contact with passing motorists while waiting for Vaughn to pick her up from the bank. On the strength of that observation, officers ticketed Odom and seized Vaughn's 2002 Chrysler Sebring.
In New York, Figures Show Bad Times Do Not Bring More Crime
Less wealth, not necessarily more crime.
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In 2009, the signs of a bad economy are like blinking neon lights on Broadway.
Yet Police Department statistics show that the number of major crimes is continuing to fall this year in nearly every category, upending the common wisdom that hard times bring more crime.
Skeptics doubt Mexican data on military abuses: Figures contradict U.S. numbers; complaints rise as drug war rages
Figures contradict U.S. numbers; complaints rise as drug war rages
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The Mexican military has come under scrutiny because of a surge in complaints against soldiers, including allegations of torture, beatings and illegal raids and arrests. The Mexican army is leading the fight against the powerful drug cartels as part of President Felipe Calderón's U.S.-backed strategy to put 45,000 troops into the streets and employ soldiers as police.
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Human rights monitors in Mexico and the United States describe the handful of convictions as proof that Mexico's military is incapable of prosecuting abuses among its officers and troops. The army pursues cases before secretive tribunals and refuses to release basic information, such as the names of the accused.
CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy
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The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.
Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. -
The prison opened in Sept. 2004.
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The Salvia Ban Wagon: How does terrible drug policy get made? The mad rush to criminalize a pschedelic herb provides a textbook case.
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The
endless repetition of a few anecdotes that supposedly demonstrate
salvia’s dangers—most conspicuously, the story of a Delaware
teenager’s 2006 suicide—has found a receptive audience among
politicians who automatically assume that an unfamiliar
psychoactive substance must be a menace. And since these
lawmakers bridle at the notion that anything good could possibly
come from altering your consciousness, they see no downside to
banning salvia before it becomes a problem. -
In a 1961 salvia ceremony, Wasson drank a foul-tasting mixture of
leaf juice and water under the guidance of a curandera. “The
effect of the leaves came sooner than would have been the case
with the mushrooms, was less sweeping, and lasted a shorter
time,” he reported. “There was not the slightest doubt about the
effect, but it did not go beyond the initial effect of the
mushrooms—dancing colors in elaborate, three-dimensional
designs.” - 5 more annotations...
How Could He Have Strangled Her Without a Permit to Carry a Handgun?
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In an effort to rebut the idea that allowing law-abiding
Americans to carry handguns in public helps prevent crime,
the Violence Policy Center has begun compiling a list of
homicides committed by people with carry permits. -
even if
the total number of homicides by permit holders is twice the
number tallied by VPC, the rate is remarkably low. - 1 more annotations...
Baldwin County unit to use stimulus funds to nab drug offenders
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The Baldwin County Drug Task Force will use $465,705 in economic stimulus funds to help the unit investigate, arrest and prosecute drug offenders.
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Baldwin County District Attorney Judy Newcomb said the funds will enable the task force to pay overtime for authorities to work on the effort.
Hasan Had a Carry Permit (and Other Irrelevancies)
Jacob Sullum responds to critics of his column, "The Folly of Unilateral Disarmament."
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Next Pennington notes that Hasan qualified for a Virginia
concealed carry permit in 1996, since at that point he had a
clean record. I'm not sure what that's supposed to
prove. Is Pennington suggesting that the lack of
a permit deters mass murderers from carrying
their weapons in public? The general problem with legal
restrictions on gun possession (as I'm sure Pennington has heard)
is that criminals do not obey them, while their law-abiding
victims do. -
"The death
toll from [gun accidents] far outstrips the body counts at
Fort Hood and Virginia Tech," Thomas writes. But this
comparison is meaningless. The total number of fatalities
from gun accidents in 2006, the latest year for which the
CDC
has data, was 642. That is indeed greater than the
fatalities at Fort Hood and Virginia Tech combined, but so
what? The total number of homicides by gun in 2006 was about
12,800*. If arming more victims and bystanders prevented even 1
percent of those deaths, the benefit would far outweigh any
deaths from additional accidents. - 1 more annotations...
We Don't Do Backlashes: Violent religious extremists are a tiny minority, but so are violent racists
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as long as the press is busting myths related
to Islam and terrorism, perhaps it is time to revisit the deeply
entrenched idea that America experienced a post-9/11 backlash
against Muslim-Americans—and will likely experience a new wave of
Islamophobia. -
A 2002 investigation by The
Washington Post found there to be "little proof of [a]
post-9/11 backlash" against Muslims. And while the FBI reported a
large increase in hate crimes against Arab and Muslim-Americans,
the number of incidents were still microscopically small, the
offenses often vague (most falling under the category of
"intimidation") and rarely violent, and still significantly lower
than those classified as anti-Semitic. - 1 more annotations...
Are photographers really a threat?
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The 9/11 terrorists didn't photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn't photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn't photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren't being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn't known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about -- the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 -- no photography.
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If we teach everyone to be alert for photographers, and terrorists don't take photographs, we've wasted money and effort, and taught people to fear something they shouldn't.
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The Folly of Unilateral Disarmament: At Fort Hood "more guns" assuredly were "the solution to gun violence."
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Neither Smith nor the other victims of Hasan’s assault had guns
because soldiers on military bases within the United States
generally are
not supposed to carry them. Last week’s shootings, which
killed 13 people and wounded more than 30, demonstrated once
again the folly of “gun-free zones,” which attract and assist
people bent on mass murder instead of deterring them.
Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez detained, beaten on way to march
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Famed Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez said Friday she and another blogger were punched and thrown violently into a car by presumed state security agents as they walked to participate in a peaceful march in downtown Havana.
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After driving for about 20 minutes, the driver stopped in an area far from where Sánchez and Pardo had been detained ``and we were violently thrown on the street,'' Sánchez said.
Police quash nude pumpkin run
Something to keep in mind the next time you hear about the shocking number of "sex offenders" living around you.
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Each year, dozens have run down the city's streets wearing only shoes and a hollowed-out pumpkin on their heads.
Police said "full" participants this year faced indecent exposure charges.
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A charge of indecent exposure could have led to participants being registered as sexual offenders.
Obama Administration Invokes State Secrets Privilege…Again
Yet again, Barack Obama = George W. Bush.
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The Obama administration invoked the controversial "state secrets" privilege again on Friday, arguing that if U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker were to permit a legal case against the government to proceed, he would be putting national security at risk.
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The case is a class action suit brought by four Brooklynites alleging that the Bush administration engaged in wholesale dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans in which they were unjustly caught because they regularly made phone calls and sent emails to individuals outside the U.S., specifically in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, and Norway.
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No Accountability: Why are bad prosecutors so rarely punished?
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It may well be true that the prosecutors
noted above represent a tiny minority of those who serve or have
served in the position. But whatever the number of "bad apples,"
our criminal justice and political systems seem unconcerned about
weeding them out. Instead, they're often rewarded and promoted,
despite long records of incompetence and misconduct. In fact, in
the sense that misconduct can help win convictions, such
prosecutors are often rewarded because of it.
Learning to Love Insider Trading
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Far from being so injurious to the economy that its practice must be criminalized, insiders buying and selling stocks based on their knowledge play a critical role in keeping asset prices honest—in keeping prices from lying to the public about corporate realities.
Prohibitions on insider trading prevent the market from adjusting as quickly as possible to changes in the demand for, and supply of, corporate assets. The result is prices that lie.
And when prices lie, market participants are misled into behaving in ways that harm not only themselves but also the economy writ large.
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These prohibitions are meant to prevent all insiders with non-public information from profiting from the use of such information before it becomes public. It follows that unbiased application of these prohibitions should target not only traders whose inside information prompts them to actively buy or sell assets, but also traders whose inside information prompts them not to make asset purchases or sales that they would have made were it not for their inside information.
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Bigot Bonus: Under a new federal law, the wrong beliefs can trigger a second trial and extra prison time.
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In more than a decade of lobbying for this law, its supporters
have never shown that state officials are letting people get away
with murder, or lesser crimes of violence, when the victims
belong to historically oppressed groups. Instead they have
presented the legislation as a litmus test of antipathy toward
violent bigots and sympathy for their victims. Given this
framing, it’s surprising the law’s opponents managed to resist it
for so long, when all they had on their side was the Constitution
and basic principles of justice. -
The idea, as then-Attorney General
Janet Reno explained
when the law was first proposed, is to “give people the
opportunity to have a forum in which justice can be done if it is
not done in the state court.”Although such serial prosecutions are permitted under the
doctrine of “dual sovereignty,” they look an awful lot like
double jeopardy, prohibited by the Fifth Amendment.
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