Unfortunately, this
happens a lot. And you can go back as far as you want. Texas Tower?
St. Valentines day?
A
Guide to Mass Shootings in America
(Related) It always
starts a debate about guns, but that's far too simple. If we were
talking automobiles, we know the really dangerous part is the nut
that holds the wheel. Why aren't we talking about mental illness?
Knife
attack at Chinese school wounds 22 children
One simple way manufacturers test radar
guns is by checking the speed of a tuning fork. Perhaps there was
something vibrating at 38 mph? I want a tuning fork that vibrates a
250 mph, that should be unbelievable enough to get me out of speeding
tickets...
"The Baltimore City speed
camera ticket alleged that the four-door Mazda wagon was going 38
miles per hour in a 25-mph zone — and that owner Daniel Doty owed
$40 for the infraction. But the
Mazda wasn't speeding. It wasn't even moving. The two photos
printed on the citation as evidence of speeding show the car was
idling at a red light with its brake lights illuminated. A
three-second video clip also offered as evidence shows the car
motionless, as traffic flows by on a cross street. Since the
articles' publication, several lawmakers have called for changes to
the state law that governs the way the city and other jurisdictions
operate speed camera programs. Gov. Martin O'Malley said Tuesday
that state law bars contractors from being
paid based on the number of citations issued or paid
—an approach used by Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard
County and elsewhere. 'The law says you're not supposed to charge by
volume . I don't think we should charge by volume,' O'Malley said.
"If any county is, they need to change their program.'"
(Related) Bad headline. The “Perfect
Storm” comes down to, “the camera might be bad or the officer
reviewing the camera might have screwed up” How many errors do
they catch?
'Perfect
storm' of errors caused speeding ticket to stopped car, police say
A "perfect storm of errors"
caused the city of Baltimore to issue a speed camera citation to a
stationary vehicle, the Police Department's chief spokesman said
Thursday.
Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi
acknowledged that Officer Christopher Izquierdo should not have
validated the citation, which alleged that a Mazda wagon was going 38
mph even though a video clip from the camera and two time-stamped
photos given as evidence clearly show the car stopped at a red light.
State law requires every citation to be
approved by a sworn law enforcement officer, and in the city that is
the final step before a ticket is mailed out to the vehicle's owner.
… The Sun recently published an
investigation focusing on the city's speed camera program, which
found that citations can be inaccurate and that judges routinely
throw out tickets for a variety of problems. The Sun also showed
that drivers cannot verify the alleged speeds with the information
printed on tickets from Baltimore County, Howard County and the State
Highway Administration.
… The Police Department has
previously said a single officer can be called on to review up to
1,200 citations per day, leaving little time to scrutinize each one.
"It's no secret the volume of
citations that have to be reviewed as authentic is a lot,"
Guglielmi said. "You rely almost exclusively on the equipment,
the validity of the equipment. That's all you have. You have the
photographs, the time stamps. You authenticate based on the
equipment.
Which of these statements are true:
“We can break
any law as long as we keep it secret.”
“Admitting that
we didn't break a perticular law might reduce our ability to
intimidate someone who thinks we did.”
“Everyone who
has resolved this paradox is dead.”
State
Secrets Defense Corners Judge in ‘Catch-22′ Predicament
A federal judge said Friday that the
Obama administration has pinned him in an inescapable, paradoxical
situation when it comes to whether he should dismiss a lawsuit
accusing the government of siphoning Americans’ electronic
communications from telecoms and funneling them to the National
Security Agency without warrants.
During a three-hour and highly nuanced
and esoteric hearing before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of San
Francisco, Justice Department lawyers invoked the state secrets
privilege and demanded White dismiss the case on grounds that it
threatened to expose national-security secrets.
The state secrets doctrine was first
recognized by the Supreme Court in the McCarthy era, and is
asserted when the government claims litigation threatens national
security. Judges routinely dismiss cases on that assertion alone.
Perhaps they looked at the Megaupload
case in New Zealand and thought, “maybe there is less here than
meets the eye.” Fortunately, the extradition agreement was written
in the Queen's English, so she gets to determine exactly what that
means...
"Computer hacker Gary McKinnon,
who is wanted in the U.S., will
not face charges in the U.K., the Crown Prosecution Service has
said. Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer QC said the
chances of a successful conviction were 'not high.'
He announced the decision some three months after Home Secretary
Theresa May stopped
the extradition. Mr. McKinnon, 46, admits accessing U.S.
government computers but says he was looking for evidence of UFOs.
The U.S. authorities tried to extradite him to face charges of
causing $800,000 (£487,000) to military computer systems and he
would have faced up to 60 years in prison if convicted."
Is this restrictive enough? If the
police had the address of a 20 unit apartment building, could they
search 19 innocent apartments looking for bad guy? Could they even
search two apartments, knowing one was completely uninvolved?
Vermont
Supreme Court Addresses Electronic Search Limits
December 14, 2012 by Dissent
Dan Barrett writes:
The Vermont
Supreme Court gave electronic privacy a big boost this morning when
it approved
restrictions placed upon police when conducting searches of
electronic devices.
The case
originated when police in Burlington, Vermont were investigating a
report of a person applying for credit cards online using someone
else’s identity. Once the police narrowed the
investigation to a street address where they thought the perpetrator
might live, they asked a judge to issue a search warrant
for “all computers or electronic media” located in the house—even
though the house had multiple residents.
The judge issued
the search warrant, but was wary about approving such a broad search
of computers, iPads, and other devices. So he imposed a number of
restrictions on the search, including that the police could only look
for evidence relating to the alleged identity theft, had to turn the
devices over to a third party to conduct the search, and would not be
permitted to prosecute a suspect based upon evidence of other crimes
found on the devices.
Read more on ACLU-Vermont.
Can you claim ignorance twice? Here,
they “guessed(?)” they didn't need a warrant, and they were
slapped on the wrist and allowed to continue as if they had acted
appropriately. What happens the next time they do this?
District
Court for the District of Columbia sidesteps 4th Amendment issues in
Antoine Jones case
December 14, 2012 by Dissent
Readers will recall that the Supreme
Court sent the Antoine Jones warrantless GPS surveillance
case back to the District Court for the District of Columbia after
ruling that 28 days of GPS surveillance and use of cell-site data
held by a third party provider was a search under the Fourth
Amendment. Unfortunately for privacy advocates, the district court
just handed the Department of Justice a win by side-stepping
the issue of whether a warrant was required and declaring that even
if it was, the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule would
apply:
On January 23,
2012, the Supreme Court vacated Antoine Jones’ conviction under 21
U.S.C. § 846 for Conspiracy to Distribute and Possess with Intent to
Distribute Five Kilograms or more of Cocaine and Fifty Grams or more
of Cocaine Base. United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012). In
that opinion, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the
government’s installation of a GPS device on Jones’ car and use
of the device to track the car’s movement for a period of
twenty-eight days constituted a Fourth Amendment search. Relying on
that decision, as well as the D.C. Circuit’s opinion in this case
in United States v. Maynard, 615 F.3d 544 (D.C. Cir. 2010),
aff’d on other grounds sub nom. United States v. Jones,
132 S. Ct. 945 (2012), defendant now moves to suppress cell-site data
covering a four-month period that was obtained pursuant to three
orders issued by United States Magistrate Judges of this Court in
June, August, and September of 2005. (Defendant’s Motion to
Suppress Cell Site Data, Mar. 29, 2012 [ECF No. 606] (“Mot.”).)
Defendant, with
the support of an amici curiae brief filed by Electronic Frontier
Foundation and Center for Democracy & Technology (Brief Amici
Curiae in Support of Defendant Jones’ Motion to Suppress, Aug. 13,
2012 [ECF No. 644] (“Amicus Br.”)), argues that under the Fourth
Amendment, the government was required to obtain a warrant based on
probable cause prior to tracking Jones’ location based on cell-site
data provided by a third party provider for a four-month period of
time. The Court, however, need not resolve this vexing question of
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, since it concludes
that the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies. [I
wonder if that had come up before? Bob]
The court also held that even if law
enforcement had violated the Stored Communications Act, the evidence
could still be used because there is no suppression
remedy in the SCA:
However, this
Court need not weigh in on this debate because even if a defendant
could argue that the government did not comply with the SCA, all
courts that have addressed the issue have held that the SCA does not
provide for a suppression remedy. See, e.g., United States v.
Ferguson, 508 F. Supp. 2d 7, 10 (D.D.C. 2007); United States v.
Hardrick, 2012 WL 4883666, at *8 n.44 (E.D. La. Oct. 15, 2012)
(collecting cases). Section 2708 of the SCA provides that “[t]he
remedies and sanctions described in this chapter are the only
judicial remedies and sanctions for nonconstitutional violations of
this chapter.” 18 U.S.C. § 2708 (emphasis added). Elsewhere, the
Act provides for civil damages, see id. §2707, and criminal
penalties, see id. § 2701(b), but nowhere does it provide for the
suppression of evidence. See United States v. Smith, 155
F.3d 1051, 1056 (9th Cir. 1998) (“[T]he Stored Communications Act
does not provide an exclusion remedy.”)
You can read the opinion here.
For all my techies. One hour video...
Meeting
the Cyber Risk Challenge
In this HBR webinar, panelists focus on
the best practices in information security and privacy programs.
For my students who read...
Mamas,
Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Writers
So this is awkward. Ownshelf
is a new service that lets people store and share ebooks online.
Pretty nifty, huh? They reached out to me in part because I’ve
released several of my own books for free under a Creative Commons
license. (For those of you new to this column, I write fiction when
not writing code, and have had a bunch of novels published by
HarperCollins, Hachette, etc., over the years; see picture.) What
they didn’t know is that for fun, all by my lonesome, I recently
created — and open-sourced
— a service called ePubHost
which, er, lets people store, search, and share quotes from their
ebooks online. Sound familiar? Um.
