Chicago will be hosting the NATO summit meeting this month, and it's turning into a typical display of government arrogance. For a recent example, the Metra commuter rail system has announced that they will be stopping service on the line that runs through the summit location:

Metra plans to operate regular service on 10 of its 11 lines. For the Metra Electric Line, most trains will operate, although some stations and the Blue Island branch line will be closed for all or part of the summit. Those closings are detailed below.

In other words, "Sorry, you poor working stiffs who have been our customers for years, but we're doing important stuff here and you'll just have to make do."

Naturally, they're also using this as an excuse for various infringements of our Fourth Amendment rights:

Riders of all lines may be subject to screening and baggage checks, with more extensive screening on the Metra Electric Line. Passengers on all lines will be prohibited from carrying many items onboard trains and will face other security restrictions outlined below.

These restrictions apply to all lines, even those that have nothing to do with the NATO summit, and Metra's description of the changes is kind of chilling:

In addition, the following safety measures apply to riders of all Metra lines during the three days (May 19, 20 and 21) of the summit:

1. Riders may be subject to search and/or screening before boarding or while en route.

2. Riders may carry only one bag not exceeding 15 inches square and 4 inches deep. Boxes, parcels, luggage, backpacks and bicycles will not be allowed on trains. Banned items cannot be stored at Metra stations. They must be removed or they will be disposed of.

3. Riders may not carry any food on the trains. Liquids and personal effects (such as makeup) must be less than three ounces in size. This includes coffee and other beverages. Breast milk can be carried but is subject to inspection and should be declared during any screening.

4. Riders may not carry any type of tools, pipes, stakes, wood or weapons, including pocket knives and pepper spray, on the trains.

5. Law enforcement personnel must identify themselves and present their credentials and any weapons. Security guards will not be allowed to carry any weapons onboard.

Failure to comply with these safety measures or instructions from law enforcement personnel, or attempted avoidance of screening, will result in ejection from the station or further police action.

The suspicionless searches amount to some kind of internal checkpoint, which is bad enough, but the rest of the rules are going to inconvenience thousands of people. No tools or pocket knives? What's the theory here? That someone will use a Swiss Army knife to derail a train? And the rules against food and beverages sound insane.

They even have the 3-ounce beverage rule! That was put in place on airplanes because of the theoretical threat that 3-ounces of liquid explosives could bring down a plane. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure 3 ounces of explosives wouldn't do much damage to a 40-ton solid-steel Metra passenger car, let alone a whole train of cars. And in the worst case, the train can just roll to a stop.

Remember, this is not just for people entering the NATO summit site. It affects everyone riding on the entire commuter rail system. Because, you know, someone might threaten the NATO summit from 15 miles away by carrying a sandwich onto a rail car.

The powers that be in NATO and Washington, D.C., and Chicago City Hall have decided to host this summit, and they're cracking down with the violent power of they state because they're scared that somebody somewhere might do something they don't understand and control. This is the totalitarian impulse in action.

(Hat tip: Tina Sfondeles and Casey Toner at the Chicago Sun-Times.)

One of the things Kip Hawley left out of his explanation of why the TSA sucks is the TSA's infestation of other forms of transportation, such as the one described in this press release from the Houston Metropolitan Transit Authority:

In an unprecedented approach that involved four law enforcement agencies - including federal agents - METRO launched a national BusSafe pilot program last Friday that saturated its system and resulted in quality arrests, making transit safer for passengers.

The METRO Police Department, Houston Police Department, Harris County Precinct 7 Deputy Constables and 15 agents - part of so-called viper teams - from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) joined forces in a synchronized, counter-terrorism exercise that focused on bus stops and shelters and transit centers.

Law officials performed random bag checks, conducted sweeps with our K-9 drug and bomb-detecting dogs, and assigned both uniformed and plainclothes officers at transit centers and rail platforms to detect and prevent criminal activity.

The call it a "counter-terrorism exercise," but in the very next paragraph they mention drug-sniffing dogs, which of course have nothing to do with catching terrorists. And given the incredibly self-serving nature of this press release, they would have mentioned it if any of the "quality arrests" had been for something even remotely resembling terrorist activity.

In reality, what they did was setup an internal checkpoint -- a place were citizens just going about their business are forced to show their papers and submit to questioning and investigation by the authorities -- which is the hallmark of tyrannical governments everywhere, and a sign of creeping totalitarianism here.

Naturally, our elected representatives don't see the problem:

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas District 18), a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called this a new era for the TSA, and a new era for surface transportation security.

"We're looking to make sure that the lady I saw walking with a cane...knows that METRO cares as much about her as we do about building the light rail," said Jackson Lee at the news conference.

What the hell is that? Mention a woman with a cane and somehow that makes it alright to harass citizens for no reason? Is she that stupid? Or does she think we're that stupid?

(Hat tip: Mark Bennett.)

Update: And now the Houston METRO folks have realized that "random" searches may not hold up in court, so they're trying to change their story. Mark Bennett is all over it.

There are many things wrong in this story, but let me focus on this one for the moment:

That's right, not only were they forced to live under the accusation of being child pornographers, but the FBI naturally had to seize all their computers, since they contained all the evidence.  Like nice pictures of their cat Fluffy.  Shouldn't that have had some impact on the FBI's allegations?

The seizing of computers by law enforcement has always been abusive, even in the earliest days. When the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson games (because they confused a game about hacking with actual hacking) they put the gaming company out of business by taking their computers, although even they didn't take all the computers:

The only computers taken were those with GURPS Cyberpunk files; other systems were left in place. In their diligent search for evidence, the agents also cut off locks, forced open footlockers, tore up dozens of boxes in the warehouse, and bent two of the office letter openers attempting to pick the lock on a file cabinet.

The next day, accompanied by an attorney, Steve Jackson visited the Austin offices of the Secret Service. He had been promised that he could make copies of the company's files. As it turned out, he was only allowed to copy a few files, and only from one system.

Nowadays, apparently, even a raid for possession of child porn results in all computers being seized and held for years.

My wife and I keep I keep our whole lives on our computers -- all our email, all our financial and legal records, everything both of us do for a living, and much of what we do for fun. Losing them would be a huge disaster, second only to losing our entire home.

(I have backups, but I assume the invading law enforcement agents would take all those too. And my offsite backups only cover critical stuff -- I'd still have a lot to put together.)

If the Supreme Court hadn't completely gutted the Fourth Amendment, this would surely be unconstitutional.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

My computer contains has about 2 terabytes of hard drive storage (not including disks used for RAID or backups). Making the generous assumption that an average book requires a full megabyte of storage, that's enought to store about 2 million books. Now, noting especially the use of the word "particular" in the Fourth Amendment, does it seem reasonable to assume that the Founding Fathers intended to allow the the government to seize, with a single warrant, more data than all of the Founding Fathers combined had in all their papers and personal libraries?

What makes this especially abusive is that it is technically unnecessary: Law enforcement officers could take a forensic mage of a computer's hard drive in just a few hours. At worst, they'd have to seize computers for a day or two before giving them back. Then they could search for what they need without incapacitating anyone.

There might be a legal issue with using second-best evidence (a copy instead of the original drive), but that sounds like something that could be fixed with a statute. Civil courts have been working around the problem for decades.

When police want to search a house, they can't lock out the legal occupants for years, so why should they be able to keep people out of the digital equivalents of their homes? If there isn't an organization out there working to revise these laws, then maybe I ought to start one...

The Transportation Security Agency's latest plans to abuse passengers have attracted a lot of attention. People aren't pleased at having to choose between body-imaging that shows all their naughty bits or a pat-down that that feels an awful lot like a sexual assault. Maybe this time the outrage will lead to action, and someone will put a stop to this insulting behavior.

Or maybe not. The social panic after 9/11 still hasn't died down, and the security theater at the TSA keeps getting more painful. Remember those innocent days when confiscating nail clippers seemed like the dumbest thing the TSA could possibly do? They've gone way beyond that on the stupidity front, from making travelers take off their shoes to prohibiting shampoo bottles larger than 3 ounces. Then, just the other day, the TSA agents told a guy that not only couldn't he get on the airplane without either the nudie pictures or the groping, he wasn't even allowed to change his mind and leave the airport.

The TSA is like a cancer on our freedom. We've been ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away, but it just keeps getting bigger. And it's time to do something about it, because I think the next step for the TSA is metastasis, when the cancer spreads everywhere. The first symptom will be when some government agency imposes checkpoints and intrusive searches someplace other than an airport and justitifies with reference to the TSA, saying something like, "The TSA has been doing this at airports for years. How can we not protect our children as well as we protect airline passengers?"

If you've been paying attention to civil liberties, that's a familiar refrain. Once we let the security state poke its appendages into one area of our life, they just start pushing everywhere else. Some years ago, in the name of the War On Drugs, we started letting narcotics officers perform surprise armed raids against suspected sites where illegal drugs were being stored and distributed. Today, the Consumer Product Safety Commission is using SWAT teams to raid manufacturers of children's chemistry sets.

The TSA's metastasis may already be underway. Last April, the TSA started helping New York City subway cops search passengers. Of course, no terrorist is going to be able to take control of a subway car and crash it into a skyscraper, so the rationale for this invasion of travelers' privacy is non-existent. (Actually, with the new armored cockpits--not to mention an entire plane full of aware passengers--nobody is going to do that to passenger jets either, but that's another story.)

Actually, the TSA may not be the source of this particular cancer. Poor people and minorities living in the inner city have been putting up with TSA-style searches by police for years. The legal justification is rather strained, but cops can essentially stop people for reasonable suspicion--a very weak standard--and frisk them for weapons, and it's not like they're going to be courteous about it.

The TSA is just the vector by which it's going to spread to the population at large--folks who are wealthier and/or whiter. Although the TSA searches only apply to air travelers, they are in some ways far more virulent, because police searches on the street require at least the pretext of specific suspicion that something will be found, whereas the TSA's broad search powers allow them to search everyone, with no need to justify their actions.

Hmm. Somewhere along the way, my metaphor has shifted from metastasizing cancer to infectious plague. Sorry about that. Either way, the TSA is a disease, and we need a cure.

I've been writing about the un-American and totalitarian horror of civil forfeiture laws for a while, and I've been following the issue on and off for two decades, so the latest bit of outrage to make the rounds isn't really a surprise:

On Monday, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the Missouri Highway Patrol and the U.S. Attorney's Office filed a joint complaint in the Eastern District of Missouri asking to seize the 350-acre Zoe Farm, alleging rampant drug dealing and drug use at events.

According to its website, the farm, called Camp Zoe, is located 150 miles southwest of St. Louis near Salem and hosts a popular Grateful Dead festival called Schwagstock every year, as well as biker and pagan rallies and individual concerts. Once a popular summer camp for kids, the property was purchased in 2004 by Jimmy Tebeau, a member of the Schwag, a Grateful Dead tribute band. He opened the grounds to recreational camping and float trips and began hosting the festivals soon after the purchase.

In the complaint, officials said investigators spent four years monitoring and interacting with concertgoers on the farm, witnessing drug use and completing open drug deals with participants during events. Officials allege that the owner and event operators were aware of the activity and "took no immediate action to prevent" the sale and use of cocaine, marijuana, LSD, ecstasy, psilocybin mushrooms, opium and marijuana-laced food.

This is typical. Fighting crime--even drug crime--is the job of the police. But that requires a criminal trial, which means the cops need to find things like proof and evidence. That's hard work. It's far easier just to declare that property owners should be responsible for fighting drugs on their own property and then seizing the property when they turn out to be no better at it than the police. It's more lucrative too, since law enforcement agencies get to keep some of the loot.

(Of course, if you try to help out the police by reporting drug crimes you believe are occurring on your property, you're just giving them more reasons to seize the property.)

Tebeau has not been charged with a crime. Nor would he have to be for the court to approve the seizure of the property under a civil asset forfeiture law that enables the federal government to take property that is relied upon by criminals as part of an illegal money-making enterprise.

Yes, this is real. Yes, this is America. It has worked this way for a couple of decades now.

It gets worse:

[Tebeau's lawyer, Dan] Viets, who is representing his client pro bono, said Tebeau discovered this week that officials had cleaned out his bank account, yet he has not been served legal notice on that forfeiture.

"It's pretty darn hard to hire legal counsel if you don't have any money -- and the government knows that," Viets said. "It's just heavy-handed and mean-spirited, and entirely uncalled for."

For a guy who's working for free, Viets is being awfully polite in describing the might-makes-right thuggery of the DEA agents, the Missouri Highway Patrol officers, and the U.S. Attorney. That's probably wise lawyering, but my way is more satifying to write about.

When I first read about Tebeau's problems at Scott Greenfield's Simple Justice blog, I wanted to confirm my understanding that without Viets's generous help, Tebeau would be unable to afford a lawyer and would have to try to fight a court battle on his own, against the government, if he wanted to keep his farm. I posted this comment:

Let me see if I understand the full horror of this situation. Tebeau is effectively indigent because the feds took his money, however, because forfeiture is a civil proceeding, he's not entitled to help from the federal defender, right? So if Viets wasn't willing to help him pro bono, he'd pretty much just lose everything, perhaps after an attempted pro se fight?

Scott's response blew my mind:

Almost.  The procedural rules for in rem forfeitures are under the Supplemental Maritime Rules, so he would have to know, pro se, how to navigate those instead of the usual Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

That's "maritime" as in "of or relating to navigation or commerce on the sea." I actually thought this might be some obscure attempt at lawyer humor on Scott's part. After a bit of googling, however, it looked like he didn't make that up. It's just one more example of how screwed up civil forfeiture is: The goverment is using laws about ships on the sea to seize a farm.

For almost a decade we have had heavy-handed rights abuses all in the name of keeping people safe from threats which kill far fewer people than traffic accidents do each year. We allow the files on your laptop to be perused with no cause. We take for granted that people can be detained indefinitely without being tried or even accused of a crime. The United States now condones tortuous acts, which we ourselves once prosecuted others for, as normal. We think it's OK to listen in on private conversations of anyone without any judicial review at all. The American public accepts all this, and more, in the name of safety.

Attention, pedophiles! Do you like touching children? Well, if you haven't been arrested yet, you've probably already applied for this job:

God, I hate this kind of crap.

After reading some of the comments from GW's recent NBC interview, I understand better the unconstitutional responses to 9/11 America is still suffering under. When questioned about the use of torture Bush's response was:

"I will tell you this: using those techniques saved lives. My job was to protect America. And I did."

We really need to make it more clear when we hire a president just what the job description is. Maybe we need to publish it in the want ads of various newspapers around the country before we accept any applications. Right at the top should be the oath they will be expected to take:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

I can understand when the newly hired president recites that oath that maybe they would forget the details. After all, inauguration day is a big event and they have parties to go to all afternoon and evening. You get a little drunk and wake up the next morning unable to remember everything you did or said the previous day.

Can somebody explain to me what the hell is going on in Jacob Sullum's latest post at Reason's Hit&Run blog? Here's the background:

Last week Kansas physician Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, who worked as a nurse in his practice, were sentenced to 30 and 33 years, respectively, for painkiller prescriptions the Drug Enforcement Administration considered inappropriate.

Not everyone believed they were guilty, especially Siobhan Reynolds, founder of the Pain Relief Network (PRN), who tried to draw publicity to their plight. For that, Tanya Treadway, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Schneiders, began her own campaign against Reynolds, only she used a grand jury.

Supposedly looking for evidence of obstruction of justice, Treadway obtained subpoenas that demanded, among other things, communications between Reynolds and the Schneiders, a PRN-produced video on the conflict between drug control and pain control, and documents related to a PRN-sponsored billboard in Wichita that proclaimed, "Dr. Schneider never killed anyone." This investigation followed Treadway's unsuccessful attempt to obtain a gag order prohibiting Reynolds from talking about the Schneiders' case.

This is where it gets really weird. The AP's Roxana Gegeman reports:

Siobhan Reynolds, president of the Pain Relief Network, has asked the nation's highest court to quash subpoenas issued to her and her nonprofit group and make public the proceedings against her. The usually public court docket--which includes court documents, hearing dates and other case information--has been sealed in her case in a federal district court in Kansas and 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Even at the U.S. Supreme Court, there was scant public record showing her case existed until last week, when the court agreed to make a redacted version of her appeal available while it decides whether to take the case.

I know grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret, but I'm kind of shocked that the targets of a grand jury can be prohibited from talking about their attempts to fight the subpoena.

Reynolds' attorney, Robert Corn-Revere of Washington, D.C., said the case is unusual because most secret proceedings involve some kind of national security and this one does not. Federal prosecutors have declined to talk about their reasons for pursuing the case in secret.

Well, I'll talk about the reason: Federal prosecutors are colossal dicks. Oh, sure, they sometimes nail real bad guys, but that's kind of their job description, and it doesn't excuse this kind of bullshit.

Actually, one federal lawyer sort-of talked about it:

Acting Solicitor General Neal Kumar Katyal has opposed unsealing the case or even making her full petition to the Supreme Court available. The document contains confidential grand jury material, he said in a written response to the court.

Wait a minute. Reynolds, the target of the grand jury, has stuff in her petition that is confidential grand jury material? How did that happen? And if she already has it, who are they hiding it from? What grand jury confidentially remains when someone not involved in the proceedings has information about them? And when did Reynolds acquire a duty to protect grand jury confidentiality?

The only scenario I can think of that doesn't offend the First Amendment is if during her attempt to quash the subpoena she somehow received grand jury materials under the condition that she keep them confidential. I don't even know if that's possible. And you'd think somebody involved with the story would have mentioned it.

One more twist. The Institute For Justice and the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief on Reynolds' behalf. You and I can't see it, though, because this brief, filed by outsiders to the original proceedings, is somehow covered by the gag order:

Before I wrote this post, I checked with Geoffrey Michael, the lead attorney on the I.J./Reason brief, to make sure it was OK to make the file available here. He thought that was fine, since the brief did not contain any secret grand jury information. But he has since informed me that the 10th Circuit's clerk says the brief should not be published, which is why it is no longer here. This instruction illustrates the ridiculously broad notion of grand jury secrecy at play in this case, since the amicus brief is based entirely on publicly available information. Scott Michelman, the ACLU attorney who is representing Reynolds, told me he was not allowed to share his U.S. District Court brief opposing the subpoenas, although he was free to reiterate the arguments it contained.

The War On Drugs has almost completely destroyed the Fourth Amendment, so I guess statist pigs like Tanya Treadway and Neal Kumar Katyal have decided to take a run at the First Amendment.

I'll let Jacob Sullum have the last word:

I'd like to show you the Reason/I.J. brief defending Reynolds' First Amendment rights, but I'm not allowed to!

So there I am, reading Norm Pattis's latest missive:

The government has seized the life savings of a hard working couple whose son was growing marijuana in their basement. The feds also want to seize the couple's home. There is no evidence to suggest the couple was complicit in their child's activity. None. The pot was in a remote corner of the basement behind a wall. You could live in that house for a decade and never go close to the location of the plants.

But that hasn't stopped the government from launching what in the law is known as in rem proceeding: The government brings an action against the things, in this case the money and the house. My clients must interpose a defense of innocent ownership to get their lives back. You see, not only did they lose their life savings, but the publicity surrounding the arrest and search of the home cost them their jobs. They are living on the edge of economic extinction while the government sits sassily on their money. I am trying to get the money back.

The government's lawyer was smug during the conference. The money can be tied up for years, he reported.

I've written about this civil forfeiture process before. I think it's a really evil law. I don't know if it literally makes my blood pressure rise, but I can sure feel myself tense up at the thought of it. In a country in which people are are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, the prosecutors and the cops aren't playing by the rules we all agreed on. In other words, they are criminals--thieves and highwaymen--and should be treated as such.

But they aren't ever brought to justice, because these criminals are operating within the justice system itself. They have subverted our government and perverted our legal system. They are tyrants, and I say to hell with them.

At this point in Norm's story, I was pretty pissed off, and while I'm not a violent person, I was not feeling kindly toward Norm's adversary. And apparently, neither was Norm:

I snapped.

"Judge, when I hear my government talk like this I understand why the Murrah building went up in smoke in Oklahoma City, or why folks think it fit to fly airplanes into Internal Revenue Service buildings," I said. "I'm leaving before I do something I regret." I walked out leaving co-counsel to pick up the pieces.

It's because of things like this that the tagline I use for Norm's blog in the sidebar is "Norm will fight for you!"

Still, Norm's not proud of his reaction:

I should not have lost my temper. It was unprofessional, and it did not advance my client's interests

I'm sure that's true. Norm took on an obligation to his client, and he should have controlled himself better. However, it's an understandable reaction. His violent emotions are the normal human reaction to encountering a situation so unfair and so unjust. So while Norm may feel guilty for risking his clients' welfare with his outburst, there's no shame in the emotions themselves. 

In the parking lot later, I spoke to the Assistant United States Attorney handling the matter. I apologized for losing my cool. We are old friends, you see, and have handled cases together now for nearly two decades.

Norm, I hate to tell you this, but your friend is a monster. The evidence I offer is that he is doing monstrous things.

I've always been a bit wary of extremely overt flag-waving patriots. Maybe it's just a reaction I have after watching the hoards of people forced to wave Soviet flags while at gunpoint, or the coerced crowds joining in the celebrations of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by furiously whipping little Chinese flags to and fro.

"He said, 'please stand for the pledge.'  Of course, we were all standing anyway because the judge had just come in - it's a matter of courtesy. I remained standing with my hands by my side," Lampley said.

The attorney told WTVA News he waited for everyone to finish the pledge. Lampley said when it was over the judge asked him to say it. He refused, and that is when the judge held him in contempt.

Scott Greenfield points out that if the police ask to search your car and you consent, the courts have ruled that you are consenting to let the police take your car apart. Here's the language he quotes from United States v. Garcia:

The search here was reasonable. When the officers requested permission to search the truck after asking Garcia whether he was carrying "anything illegal," it was natural to conclude that they might look for hidden compartments or containers.

Yes, I know that if a cop asked me "You don't mind if I look in your car, do you?" I would immediately assume he intended to take it apart. Wouldn't you?

Garcia only involves disassembling a speaker compartment, but where exactly does the court draw the line? Scott explains:

The problem, of course, is that the scope of the consent is whatever the cops say it is, and is based on a parsing of the language that far exceeds anything a reasonable person understands it to be.  When a cop asks a motorist if he can take a look in his car, does the motorist understand that to mean that he's going to pull off the fenders in search of a secret compartment?

...Some cars, like the Nissan Maxima, were favorites, because they were fast and offered some great hiding places.

The solution became clear.  Not only were cops targeting Maximas, but after obtaining consent, physically dismantling the cars by pulling off body parts on the side of the road.  It was bad enough when they happened to stop a mule carrying drugs, but when they destroyed cars of innocent people in their search for the [hidden compartment], people were outraged.  Unfortunately, there was little to be done to stop it.  The courts ignored the issue of the search exceeding consent, the outrageous destruction of property in the never ending war on drugs.

Wouldn't that suck? What do you do? Call a flatbed tow truck to pick up all the pieces and haul them to the dealer to be reassembled? Toss the parts in the back seat and drive to the body shop?

It was bad enough when they happened to stop a mule carrying drugs, but when they destroyed cars of innocent people in their search for the clavo, people were outraged.  Unfortunately, there was little to be done to stop it.  The courts ignored the issue of the search exceeding consent, the outrageous destruction of property in the never ending war on drugs.

Naturally, it's the war on drugs. I've heard similar stories of customs agents cutting apart valuable import goods to make sure there aren't drugs inside (except the customs agents don't need your consent).

Personally, this ruling could come in handy. No police officer has ever asked to search my car, but if one ever does, I hang around enough crimlaw blogs to know that I should refuse the search on general principles. But I'm not very good at confrontations. I like to get along with people, and saying no to a cop would make me nervous. And you know his next question is going to be along the lines of "Why not? Have you got something to hide?", which would really make me nervous.

Now, I've got an answer to "Why not?": Because I just heard about a court case that says consenting to a search allows the cop to take my car apart, and I can't afford the repair bill. It might work. Of course, if he manages to discover some probably cause, he's going to tear my car apart for sure. So maybe that's not a good idea.

Anyway, it seems to me that property damage during a search ought to be compensated, especially if nothing illegal is found. I'm sure the law-and-order types would argue that conducting searches of innocent people is an unavoidable cost of fighting crime. That's probably true. But shouldn't that cost be born by the public who benefit from all that crime fighting, and not the poor random folks whose property is damaged? Heck, since private property is being damaged for a public purpose, doesn't this sound like a constitutional taking -- requiring just compensation?

I know that sounds a bit crazy, but is it any crazier that the courts believing that people were actually consenting to have the police take their cars apart on the side of the road?

Police officers in Fairfax County, Virginia, have been killing civilians. Then they've been stonewalling everyone who asks about it, not even revealing the names of the officers who pulled the trigger:

Last November along the roadside of Richmond Highway, a major thoroughfare in Fairfax County, Virginia, a police officer shot and killed David Masters, an unarmed motorist, as he sat in the driver's seat of his car...

Last month, [a reporter] asked Fairfax County Police Public Information Officer Mary Ann Jennings why her department won't at least release the incident report on Master's death, given concerns raised about the shooting. "Let us hear that concern," Jennings shot back. "We are not hearing it from anybody except the media, except individual reporters."

That's an astounding answer. "Except the media?" That's exactly who you would expect to file most open records requests. When asked why her department won't even release even the name of the officer who shot Masters, Jennings got more obtuse. "What does the name of an officer give the public in terms of information and disclosure?" Jennings asked in reply, presumably rhetorically. "I'd be curious to know why they want the name of an officer."

Because he holds a position of public trust, and he just killed a member of the public.

It galls me to no end when police officers complain about their privacy. They spend all day, every day, poking their noses into other people's business, but when someone asks them the hard questions, they refuse to answer. (We could all learn a lesson here.) People who cash the public's paycheck should answer to the public.

So let me ask what every cop asks when a citizen refuses to cooperate: What are you trying to hide? Until I get a better answer, I'm going to assume that they're covering up a murder by a police officer. They're welcome to prove me wrong.

Matt Brown at the Chander Criminal Defense blog had a client who was accused of hurting her child, but the prosecutor dropped the charges. Nevertheless, Arizona Child Protective Services apparently ignored all that and conducted their own investigation. Brown blogged his account of their interview with his client.

It's one of the most chilling things I've ever read.

The meeting was conducted by a woman who proclaimed herself the "facilitator." She used the term "facilitator" with the kind of frequency I commonly encounter when a person using a word doesn't quite know what it means and thinks repeating it will make him or her appear smart. She also said things like "matter-of-factly" and "irregardlessly."

My client, my client's mother, the assigned CPS caseworker, and I were all in attendance. We each filled out little name cards. The back of the cards featured a list of ground rules. The last one was "no blaming or shaming." ...

The facilitator, who at times did a fair job of pretending to be impartial, generally undertook the role of grand inquisitress with zeal that would make Mike Nifong blush. When she first started attacking my client, no one seemed to notice my comment that it sounded an awful lot to me like some prohibited "blaming or shaming" was taking place. I don't think the facilitator thought the back of the name cards applied to her.

I don't know anything about the mother, and so for all I know, the child really does need to be taken away from her. I realize that you can't always wait for a criminal conviction to protect a child. But there's a difference between a measured response to a child welfare emergency and the Stalinist show trial Brown describes:

The facilitator clearly didn't listen to anything my client said. My client said she'd do anything for her kids, and the facilitator responded with "so you're unwilling and unable to care for them?" "No," my client said, "I will do anything." The caseworker and facilitator stared at my client like she just said "take my kids, I don't care and won't do anything to help them." It was like watching two different conversations.

When it suited the facilitator's preconceptions, she mixed up the facts. She exaggerated the length of CPS's involvement, the amount of time it took my client to get services for her daughter, the number of days of notice they'd given, and the severity of the alleged conduct underlying the scratched criminal charges. She was wholly incapable of wrapping her head around the fact my client did not assault her daughter. The caseworker claimed she saw choke marks on my client's daughter, which the facilitator agreed proved my client assaulted her. I found that very strange considering that the alleged assault was supposedly just three punches.

It all ends about how you'd expect:

After what I can honestly say was the most farcical proceeding I've ever witnessed, the facilitator and caseworker decided to take both of my client's children away. In a meeting they said lawyers never attended (and which most lawyers told me they never attended), CPS decided to take not just the child involved in the criminal case, but the child who had nothing to do with anything.

Here comes that special little touch that made me think of Communist show trials:

As my client cried her eyes out, the facilitator handed her a pamphlet entitled "Icebreakers" to help her prepare for when she next gets to see her children. The facilitator described CPS's programs to my client as if she expected my client to give her a hug and thank her.

Somehow I know, just know, that at some point in Brown's client's rehabilitation or treatment or counseling, she's going to be put in a situation where the only way she can get her children back is to "take responsibility for what she did"---admit to abusing here daughter---even if she never did any such thing.

Personally, I'm still in shock. I can't believe what I saw. I can't believe CPS can take kids based on nothing, can't believe the facilitator and the caseworker could do something like that to a family, and can't believe that any human being could be so willing to make a life-changing decision so callously. It's the kind of thing I'm going to have nightmares about for years to come.

I was getting angry just reading Matt Brown's account of all this. I can't imagine what it would be like to be in the room while it was happening and not be able to do anything about it. By the time I finished reading this post, I almost expected Matt to reveal that the meeting ended when he and his client beat the facilitator to death.

By the way, Radley Balko is not just a guy who knows how to find wacky videos. He's also one of the most interesting investigative reporters working today. His latest piece is about some of the shocking things being done in the area of civil asset forfeiture.

I've been saying for a while that asset forfeiture is theft by government employees, but what I didn't realize is that they've started to privatize the thievery:

Timothy Bookwalter, the elected chief prosecutor for Putnam County, Indiana, did not represent the county in its effort to keep Anthony Smelley's money. Nor did anyone else in his office. Instead, the case was handled by Christopher Gambill, a local attorney in private practice. Gambill manages civil forfeiture cases for several Indiana counties, and he gets to keep a portion of what he wins in court. "My contingency for my own county is a quarter; for the others it's a third," Gambill says.

Read the whole thing.

Here's an angle on the TSA's new full-body imaging that I wish I'd thought of: Wouldn't a full-body image of someone under the age of 18 be child pornography as a matter of law? Maybe.

At some point, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio decided that the rules no longer applied to him. He and his deputies had all the guns, so why couldn't they do whatever they want? If those guys in Somalia and Afganistan could become warlords, why couldn't he do it right here in America?

I think it must have started years ago, back when I first heard about Apaio. He was billing himself as "the toughest sheriff in America." If you don't already know, try to imagine what he must have done to claim that. Did he break up a bank robbery single-handed? Infiltrate a drug gang? Clean out corruption in his own department? Bust an organize crime syndicate?

No, nothing like that. He's tough on the prisoners in his jail. They don't get goodies like coffee or cigarettes or porno mags, they have very limited television viewing, and they spend a lot of time in chain gangs. And they eat very cheap food. Also, he makes them all wear pink underwear. Basically, he makes things very hard on a bunch of people who are powerless.

That's not tough. That's being a bully. A sadistic, hateful bully. (And one of the few Americans ever investigated by Amnesty International.)

I'd forgotten about Arpaio, but it appears that his hunger to control people has continued to grow. I noticed him again a few years ago when he arrested the owners of a Phoenix newspaper for publishing a story he didn't like, and tried to force them to reveal information about their readers.

That's almost unheard of in this country. Thanks to the First Amendment, journalists have a lot of legal protection. They routinely investigate and publish personal scandals, corporate trade secrets, and national security information without repercussions. The few exceptions are so rare that they have become the subjects of books and movies. Arresting journalists is the kind of crap they pull in third-world dictatorships.

Which is, I think, what Sheriff Joe Arpaio is trying to build for himself. He's spent many years as absolute ruler over the people in his prisons, and he now thinks that's a fine model for his relationship to the rest of the county as well. His deputies are his own personal army, and he's the Warlord of Maricopa County.

Arpaio's latest trick is right out of the dictator play book: He's trying to arrest a judge who ruled against him. The county attorney filing the charges, Andrew Thomas, was also involved in arresting the reporters.

Somehow all of this is escaping the attention of the national media. Do they not realize that Maricopa County is having a constitutional crisis? Do they not understand? Are they too busy covering Tiger Woods' personal life? It boggles the mind that all this is going on and it's not front page news.

If any of you are interested, however, Mark Bennett has collected a lot more information about this story.

The good news is that Joe Arpaio will probably not be Sheriff of Maricopa County for much longer. The bad news is that's because he's currently leading the polls for the Arizona Governor's race.

What are the chances he will try to arrest the other candidates?

Update: Via Josh King in the comments at Simple Justice, here's a new summary of what Arpaio's been up to.

Joe Arpaio is a scary guy. He's the Sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, and if things go the wrong way today, I think he'll be the closest thing this country has to a third-world warlord.

As usual, Scott Greenfield explains.

Really.

For those of you who think I'm going all Rush Limbaugh with this "feminazi" stuff: chill.  I'm talking about Elisha Strom, the now ex-wife of convicted kiddie porn felon, the loathesome Neonazi Kevin Alfred Strom. (The two of them had a falling out of some sort.  Nazis, like other people, find breaking up hard to do at times.)

That's her, at right, in a photo from around 2003.  She is apparently as uncharming as she looks, and calling her a Feminazi is only fair, because she's the closest thing the neonazis have to a feminist, okay? 

Okay.  Fine.  If she happens to be out walking someday and a cow falls out of a clear blue sky to squash her flat, that would be a sad thing only because it would be a waste of a good cow.  Got it.

But, alas, what she's apparently been charged with an is, basically, blogging and photograpy. The scumbag neonazi bitch has a blog; she makes comments hostile to, and posts snapshots of some local cops. 

Well, blogging and photography aren't a crime, and it would really be a shame -- really -- if all of our civil rights were further degraded because people wouldn't support the rights of this feminazi scumbag to write and to take pictures.

So:  please support the rights of this feminazi scumbag.  It's important that her case get coverage, and that she be acquitted of the absurd chages. 

Damn.  Well, you don't always get the good poster boys and girls on this civil rights stuff.  Yeah, sometimes you luck out and get a real hero like Rosa Parks, or Savana Redding.

But most of the time it's scumbags like Ernesto Miranda or Elisha Strom.

Live with it.

(h/t Scott over at SJ) <

In response to my recent missive ("Beating Customs Agents With Your Laptop") about the fourth-amendment-free zone overseen by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Lawrence Friedman at Customs Law sent an email explaining some of what can really happen when you try to apply technogeek law to the real world:

In response to your encryption-deleted key suggestion, you might think in terms of a lost key to a suitcase.  If CBP decides they want to search your locked suitcase, they will ask for the key.  If you say you lost the key, they will find the nearest pry bar and open it.  Same goes for your laptop.  The inspector at the border does not necessarily know or care anything about encryption levels.  What he or she knows is that he or she has the authority to take it, turn it over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and wait to see what they say.  You could be without your laptop for a very long time.

If Customs decides it wants to play hardball, the next thing that will happen is that you will get a summons demanding the release of the encryption key.  Even if you don't know it, the key is in your possession or control (since you left it with someone else).  That's good enough.  Fail to turn over the key, and you may find yourself in court with a federal judge threatening to toss you in jail until you come up with the key.

To me, that made no sense, so I explained my thinking:

Hypothetically, they wanted to see what was on my laptop, and it contained 160 gigabytes of ciphertext. They saw that. The decryption key is stored inside the country and is not crossing the border, so it's none of their business under the fourth amendment, and the plaintext doesn't even exist unless I decrypt the disk, so how can I be legally required to provide it?

I knew he'd eviscerate my argument, but the way he did it was chilling:

Your response, I think, points out the false premise in your thinking. The law is clear that the fourth amendment protects the interests of people, not property. And, it only applies to people inside the US. At the border, the fourth amendment offers you no protection against an unreasonable search and seizure with the limited exception of the most egregiously personal physical searches. The Supreme Court famously said that border searches are almost always reasonable because they are border searches.

Er, yes...I believe that is technically referred to as the "fuck you and your rights" theory of constitutional interpretation.

Actually, as Kip Esquire explained in a comment last year:

The same session of Congress that passed the Bill of Rights (to send to the states for ultimate ratification) had two months earlier passed a plenary customs search statute. Therefore the Fourth Amendment was "obviously" not meant to apply to customs searches -- the "legislative intent" is, we are told, unambiguous and not open for debate.

By the way, Lawrence Friedman was a really nice guy to answer my idiot questions, and his blog, Customs Law, is well-written. If you have an urgent desire to keep up with the latest word in enforcement of laws relating to textile imports and preference programs, fumigation of wood packing materials, and denial of special licenses to unlade, it's the only place to be.

One more thing. In his first message, Friedman also had this advice:

Best thing to do is cooperate with the search, identify any documents that may be privileged or business proprietary, and smile a lot.  Whenever possible, leave the laptop at home.  You can take some solace in the fact that these searches really are quite rare.

Heck, I've never been out of the country. It's the principle of the thing that pisses me off. I'd like to think that lying back and trying to enjoy it is not the American way.

[Excuse me while I rant...]

I've never been out of the country, so I've never had to deal with the U.S. Customs Service (or whatever self-important name these tax collectors are using lately), but I hate the whole organization on principle anyway because they're a bunch of weasels who insist on conducting unjustified searches of United States citizens.

Police need a warrant to search our homes, and even when we're driving there are standards they have to meet---not very high standards, to be sure, but standards nonetheless---but when Customs employees want to search our bags, our vehicles, or even our persons, they can do it for any reason. It's all right here:

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer's border search authority is derived from federal statutes and regulations, including 19 C.F.R. 162.6, which states that, "All persons, baggage and merchandise arriving in the Customs territory of the United States from places outside thereof are liable to inspection by a CBP officer." Unless exempt by diplomatic status, all persons entering the United States, including U.S. citizens, are subject to examination and search by CBP officers.

In fact, they can even search us when they have no reason:

Essentially, COMPEX examinations involve random selection of vehicles and/or air passengers that ordinarily would not be selected for an intensive examination. By combining the results of these examinations with the results of targeted examinations, CBP is able to estimate the total number of violations being committed by the international traveling public.

In other words, they search us just to gather statistics.

I don't know who is responsible for creating this reprehensible insult to our freedom, but I say it's tyranny, and I say to hell with it.

Now that I've got that out of my system, the issue I really wanted to write about is the information search, which allows the customs weasels to search your laptop. Jayson Ahern, Deputy Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, explains this in a document entitled "Laptop Inspections Legal, Rare, Essential":

First, it's important to note that for more than 200 years, the federal government has been granted the authority to prevent dangerous people and things from entering the United States. Our security measures at the border are rooted in this fundamental fact, and our ability to achieve our border mission would be hampered if we did not apply the same search authorities to electronic media that we have long-applied to physical objects--including documents, photographs, film and other graphic material. Indeed, there are numerous laws that apply to such material at the border including laws regarding intellectual property rights, technical data that can be imported or exported only under state department license and child pornography.

First of all, none of these things---electronic media, documents, photographs, film, graphic material, technical data, child pornography---count as "dangerous people and things." It's just data. Magnetic fields on a spinning disk, with no meaning other than what we give them.

Second, this argument is rejected everywhere else. Of course people could bring bad stuff into the United States. Everybody knows that. But we're supposed to have rights, and these rights are supposed to protect us. The same bogeymen---copyright infringement, restricted technical data, child pornography---could be used to justify unrestricted searches within the border as well, but we recognize that our rights are too important to allow government functionaries to crush them on a whim.

Now that I've got that out of my system as well, the real reason I started writing this is a post by Bruce Schneier about encrypting your laptop before you cross the border:

Companies and individuals have dealt with this problem in several ways, from keeping sensitive data off laptops traveling internationally, to storing the data -- encrypted, of course -- on websites and then downloading it at the destination. I have never liked either solution. I do a lot of work on the road, and need to carry all sorts of data with me all the time. It's a lot of data, and downloading it can take a long time. Also, I like to work on long international flights.

There's another solution, one that works with whole-disk encryption products like PGP Disk (I'm on PGP's advisory board), TrueCrypt, and BitLocker: Encrypt the data to a key you don't know.

Schneier goes on to describe a system for encrypting your data so it can be unlocked by either of two keys, one of which is easy to remember, and the other of which is a long string of random gibberish far too long to remember. Make sure someone back home has the long one (and test it to make sure it works) but go on using the short one normally while you travel. Then, just before you hit Customs, delete the short password. Your data is now encrypted to a password that you honestly and truly do not know.

It's simple and brilliant and technically correct.

But somehow, it all sounds like geek law. It assumes that cops and lawyers and judges are bound by rules---rules of law, rules of technology, rules of nature---and if we do everything just right, we can slip by without them laying a hand on us.

That's how it's supposed to be, but it doesn't always work that way. Cops aren't supposed to confiscate cameras from people who take pictures of them, but sometimes they do. Judges aren't supposed to allow testimony about a suspect's refusal to answer questions, but sometimes they do.

It makes perfect sense to me---and to anybody else familiar with the technology---that border agents shouldn't be able to compel you to provide an encryption key, even if you know it. Like it or not, they're free to examine the hard drive, but they have no right to ask for information in your head.

There are problems with this beautiful idea. For one thing, there's what cryptologists sometimes refers to as "rubber hose cryptography":

 

I'm not sure how far the U.S. government will go to get a peek at your laptop---the internet is surprisingly vague on actual Customs responses to encrypted data---but since they have all the guns and all the jails---and there's no Fourth Amendment at the border---I imagine they can take it pretty far. It's well established that they can grab your computer and keep it a few months while they investigate.

They can also refuse to let you enter the United States. You can probably fight that, but you'll be stuck outside the country while you wait.

It's not just criminals and libertarian weirdos who worry about this. It's anybody with data they don't want seen by random Customs employees---family finances, proprietary business data, confidential medical information, naked pictures of girlfriends. Just because it's legal doesn't mean you're okay if everyone sees it. Some corporations go so far as to provide employees with special scrubbed computers when they travel outside the country, just so proprietary data never falls into unsafe hands.

I hate it that Americans have to worry about totalitarian crap like this.

In George Orwell's famous distopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the most oppressive features of his totalitarian world is the ubiquitous surveillance. Every public place---and every private room as well---is always being monitored through a massive network of two-way video cameras called telescreens. Do anything that angered the tyrannical regime of Big Brother and a voice would scream at you for your insubordination.

The first time I read 1984, I had a lot of trouble with the idea of cameras everywhere. How could everyone be under surveillance? The ruling Party was only a small portion of the population. How could they watch everyone? And, of course, who watched the people who were watching the cameras? It didn't seem possible. The math didn't work out. The powers that be couldn't watch everybody all the time.

The second time I read 1984 (probably around 1984, now that I think about it) I was a Computer Science student, and that gave me a different perspective. Ubiquitous surveillance could be achieved with computers.

Not the computers of the day, to be sure. Digitized sound had only just become available to consumers, and digitized video had only just been introduced to high-end production studios. Scientists were conducting experiments in the various required artificial intelligence technologies---voice recognition, natural language understanding, image analysis, facial recognition---but it was all very, very primitive. Certainly nothing useful could be done in real time.

Automated recognition of faces and voices and behavior all seemed like insurmountable problems in computer science...except that we knew it was possible because even children could do it. Two things stood in our way: Raw processing power, and algorithm design.

The first barrier was clearly going to fall. Moore's Law---the relentless doubling of computer power every year or two---meant that sooner or later computers would have processing power equivalent to a human brain. No individual computer is as powerful as a human brain, but based on very little research, my guess is that a large modern cloud computing facility has the raw processing power and memory of several human brains. Of course, cloud data centers also use enough energy to power a small town, so we're not quite there yet.

We've made some progress on the algorithms, too. Voice recognition has become a commonplace feature of some of our technology, and everyone seems to think that the NSA has computers that can pick important keywords out of telephone calls. (Although, judging by my attempts to use my iPhone's Voice Control feature, I could hire myself out to spies and drug dealers as a low-rent version of a World War II code talker.)

Understanding natural language---spoken or written---still has a way to go. Search engines like Google can read a lot of documents, but Google only understands them at a fairly primative level. We're still a long way from feeding the AP wire to a computer and asking it to summarize what happened today.

On the other hand, facial recognition is good enough that webcam software can find a face in the real time video stream, follow it around the frame, and replace it with a digital mask that moves its mouth and eyebrows in sync with the subject. There's ongoing research into having computers monitor video feeds of public areas for suspicious activities.

Still, I think we're safe from computers for now. You need humans to watch humans.

But it's beginning to look like that may be more of a threat than I thought, and it depresses the hell out of me.

Scott Greenfield points us to the story of a blog called Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever. I'm not familiar with it, but apparently the author, Becky, has something of an irreverent libertarian outlook.

Unfortunately, if you click on the link above, you'll see that Blogger (which is owned by Google) has placed a warning on the blog.

Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is objectionable. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about our content policies, please visit the Blogger Terms of Service

[And if you click "I understand and I wish to continue" you'll hit a page that plays music, so be careful if you're at work.]

The content warning is devastating because it apparently interferes with the search engine indexing of her site---something that a Google-owned operation like Blogger should understand. Becky says she's vanishing fast from Google's search engine. (On the other hand, Google is still making money off of AdSense advertising on her site.)

Becky attributes this to "some rather low-level Google employee" responding to complaints. I have my doubts. Google likes to automate as much as possible, so I suspect the flagging of the content as objectionable is done entirely by algorithm. Here's what Google has to say on one of their help pages:

When someone visiting a blog clicks the Flag button in the Blogger Navbar, it means that person believes the content of the blog may be potentially offensive or illegal. We track the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and use this information to determine what action is needed.

I don't see anything about a human review. Google would prefer it that way so they can save labor and claim to be unbiased. In this way, labeling the content as "objectionable" is a purely objective designation: People have objected to it.

(If you're thinking of leaving a comment pointing out that libertarian principles allow a non-governmental entity like Google to censor whatever they want, please know that---as is typical of libertarian debate---me and Scott Greenfield and the guys from Popehat have been spraying each other with friendly fire all day over this issue in Scott's comment section.)

In any case, Becky also touches on a far more disturbing issue:

I am pretty certain that any readers, who took the time to bitch and moan to Google, were much more concerned about my politics, and ideological bent, than anything that actually offended their prurient sensibilities--this has historically been the case with this sort of thing on this blog.

I've been around the web long enough to hear a certain ring of truth in what she's claiming. Basically, her readers didn't like what she was saying and---rather than just reading something else---they decided to manipulate Blogger into silencing her.

Sigh. When there are cameras on every street, in every business, and in every room of our private homes, Big Brother won't need a hundred warehouses full of computers to keep an eye on all of us and punish us when we stray from the party line.

The computers might help, but we'll do it to each other.

Jon Katz writes about the Boucher case, where the government is trying to get a look at the contents of Boucher's encrypted hard drive:

Boucher prevailed with the magistrate judge below, who talked of the Fifth Amendment right not to reveal one's computer password. On appeal to District Court Judge Sessions, the prosecution fashioned its argument as not seeking a password but seeking an unencrypted copy of the hard drive of Boucher's laptop.

I hate this crap.

Unless I'm thinking of the wrong case, Boucher's computer was searched by Customs agents when he entered the country under the you-have-no-rights-when-crossing-the-border exception to the Constitution.

(These days, the government has stretched their power to search for contraband at the border so it even covers data on your hard drive. It makes no sense, but no one is stopping them.)

Boucher is, of course, accused of having child pornography on the hard drive. I say "of course" because when the feds want to chip away at our rights, they try to pick a crime where you'd really hate to see someone get away with it on a technicality.

For some reason, the agents did not preserve the ugly evidence at the time. Now they have Boucher's computer but they can't read it any more because the hard drive is encrypted. So they're trying to force Boucher to help them decrypt it.

In the infosec trade, this is called "rubber hose cryptography"---why go through the trouble of trying to crack the code when you can coerce the information out of someone?

Right now, it's only under narrow circumstances, and of course they're trying to save the children. But once that that camel's nose pokes through the tent flap, the whole stinky beast isn't far behind.

Anyway, I am not a lawyer, and what little I know about subpoenas comes from my unpleasant experiences with Illinois civil procedure, but I think if I were Boucher's lawyer, my response would be that my client does not possess an unencrypted copy of the hard drive.

Somehow, though, I'm sure the prosecutor and the judge will figure out a way.

. . . which this reminded me of.


It was about seven in the evening, the end of a nice spring day, and my older kid, then a junior at Washburn High in Minneapolis (a school so badly run that they had to fire all the staff, including some of the best teachers, and start over, but I digress...)  hadn't returned home. 

Not a big deal; she often went over to a friend's house after school, and had been known to stay for dinner, and the nice thing about cell phones is that it makes it easy to check up on things.

So I called her cell.

"Hi, Dad."

"Hey, kiddo.  About time to be heading home, no?"

"Sure.  I'm on my way right now."

"Oh?  Where are you?" 

A suspicious pause. "In a car."

"[Julie] giving you a ride?"

"No.  I'm getting a ride from a nice Minneapolis police officer."

I opened my mouth, closed it, and opened it again. "Put him on."

"I'm not in trouble."

"Good.  Put him on."

"I can't; I'm in the back, and there's that -- "

"It's called 'the cage.'  Slide the phone through.  Now."

She did.

The cop -- I'll call him Deputy Mike Williams, 'cause I got a strange sense of humor -- got on the phone. 

Nice guy.  He started off by explaining that no, my kid wasn't in trouble, and in fact, she and her friends had done a good thing.  He couldn't go into detail, he said, as there was another minor involved, but a friend of Judy's had disappeared from school, and Judy and her other friends had helped the police locate her, after which, well, he couldn't say more.

"You know my kid's going to tell me all about it."

"Sure.  But I gotta follow the rules; I can't."

Which was fair enough. 

I met him and Judy at the curb, and we chatted for awhile*.  Officer Williams couldn't go into detail, but Judy could, and she explained that a friend of hers -- I'm going to arbitrarily say it was a girl, and call her Granola Oatmeal-Smythe, which isn't her name, honest -- had was going through some not atypical teen drama, involving a boy having dumped her, and making noises about maybe doing some harm to herself, and disappeared from school in the middle of the day. 

After the school administration had turned a deaf ear to the concerns of the kids -- the administrators at Washburn High in Minneapolis were not exactly reknowned for having working clueservers -- the kids had ditched school to find Granola in Minnehaha Park, and enlisted the aid of a bunch of the boys and girls with guns and badges, and Granola had been located, unharmed, but still making those sorts of noises. 

She was taken to the nearest hospital for the appropriate sort of observation, with very little protest.  (My own guess is that the kid might, but probably wouldn't, have hurt herself if she'd been dared into it, but the badged adults and kids involved had all taken a sensible approach, and it probably didn't come as close to being tragic as it sounded to me, then, so I'm trying to downplay it a little.)

I could go more into detail, but if I do, that might identify Granola, so I won't. 

With the kid safe, it was starting to get late, and the cops involved all decided that they weren't all that comfortable with just leaving the kids alone at the park to make their various ways home, so various squads had gone off in different directions with kids in the back, and if it turned out that that wasn't exactly according to MPD policy, maybe I wouldn't have any trouble with that? 

I allowed as to how I wasn't in the business of enforcing even sensible MPD policy, much less stupid policy, and we parted with a handshake, and a mental note to myself that if I ever blogged about this to fudge a few details to hide Williams' identity, which I just did.

I was actually proud of Judy -- although fairly irritated that she hadn't informed her father (that would be me) as to what was going on, until it was all over.  Minnehaha Park is not the safest place in town -- there had recently been some remarkably unpleasant events there --

And she did agree that she should have, but pointed out that the kids actually were being driven around there by cops, and were probably pretty safe, under the circumstances. 

Which is where I thought things ended. 

But I was wrong.

Turns out that there were at least two people irritated by the whole thing -- one of the vice principals, and the school mall ninja security guard; I'll call him Ken Jones, even though that's not his name. Seems that their decision that there was nothing to worry about had turned out to be demonstrably wrong, and, let's face it, tinpot dictator types don't like to be proven wrong.

So, the next day, when Jones was searching through Granola's locker, what he was really doing was trying to find some way to get the kids who had embarrassed him in trouble. 

Which he kinda sorta found -- Granola's diary, in which she talked about all sorts of stuff, including some musing about how she might take an overdose of drugs.  His keen quasi-cop mind leaped to a stupid conclusion, and he summoned all the kids who had embarrassed him into the school security office, to engage in a little amateur interrogation.

I think his theory, such as it percolated through Ken Jones' pointy little head, is that if a kid is talking about taking drugs, other kids must be dealing drugs, and maybe that could be used to punish them for embarrassing him.

Which didn't work, which irritated the mall ninja.   So he called in the school "liaison officer", a cop who I'm going to call "Dan Grout" -- the name is pronounced like that stuff between tiles -- because that's the guy's name.

"I know you kids were dealing drugs to her," he opened with.  "And if you don't confess to me now, when she kills herself, I'll see you all charged with first degree murder."

At which point the kids started freaking out, just a little.

Including, on the inside, my kid.  But only on the inside.  "I want my father and I want my lawyer, now."

Daddy's girl did Daddy proud.

Grout snorted.  "Like you got a lawyer."  (Not sure I exactly agree with your police work, there, Danny.) 

"I have a lawyer, and I want my father and my lawyer, now." 

. . .

Which is kinda where I come in, a few minutes later, with the Vice Principal of the school calling me, out of irritation.  He gave me a rather abbreviated and not entirely accurate version of the events -- "We have to do these sorts of things for the children, of course" -- and asked what I planned to do about it . . .

"Well, I guess I better get in the car and head over there.  David on his way?"

"David?"

"My daughter's attorney.  He's on his way, right?  I'm kind of surprised that I haven't heard from him."  Then again, if he's representing Judy in this, I'm just the guy paying the bill, not the client, and he's got to at least talk to the client before he --

I think this is the moment where I realized that I was talking to an idiot:  "Why would a child need an attorney?" he asked.

"Because of jackbooted thugs with delusions that the Constitutions' been repealed for their fucking convenience," I said, about as gently as I could. 

"I don't think I like your tone."

"Well, good.  Let me ask you a question -- do you own your own home?  Got a lot of equity in it?"

"Are you threatening me, sir?"

"Play the tape back, if you've got any questions.  And, in case I'm not clear, nobody at your school -- not you, not your mall ninja, not anybody -- is to interrogate my kid on anything without either her attorney or me being present.  You can talk to her about her homework, but anything else, David or I are to be there.  On a good day, you might get us both.  You got that?"

Long pause.  "I want to hear a yes on that right about now."

"Yes."

That was the last time the Vice Principal of that school and I had a chat about anything. 

What we can learn from this is left as an exercise for the reader. 


_____________
* Since I know somebody's going to ask:  yes, yes, there was a gun visible on my right hip when I met them outside, no, that didn't enter into the conversation on either Williams part or mine.  Wasn't relevant. 

While our government was busy using enhanced interrogation methods on suspected terrorists, they were engaging in a shadowy quasi-legal battle against simulated torture, according to the directors and producers of the documentary Graphic Sexual Horror.

Other than the railroading of Paul "Max Hardcore" Little, the government's resurgence of pornography prosecutions under Bush has met with little success, which must be why they have also been trying a more underhanded approach.

Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security was sending notices to various banks telling them that violent porn websites were known to funnel money to terrorists. Because of this, banks stopped processing credit cards for sites that seemed to fit that description.

The documentary is about one such site, insex.com, which was driven out of business by this tactic. Here's an interview with some of the filmmakers:

(I'm a little sceptical about the repeated references to the Patriot Act because most of the recent governmental abuse has actually been due to earlier laws that were pushed to the limit or radically reinterpreted under the Bush administration.)

One especially chilling aspect of this underhanded persecution is that the letters to the banks came with a gag order, meaning that the banks were shutting off credit card access for these sites, but they weren't allowed to tell the site owners why. They only found out what was happening when a bank employee ignored the gag order and told them what was happening.

This is why warrentless searches and so-called national security lettersare so dangerous to liberty. How can you hold the government to account when no judge has the authority to stop them? How can you fight for your rights when the violations and the violators are hidden from you? It's almost always bad for freedom when the people who are supposed to enforce the law are allowed to operate in secret.

A few days ago the Washington Times had an editorial about the new random bag search policy their police are using on the Metro subways. It was mentioned in Flex Your Rights email message I just received, and while I normally don't jump at stories this old, the cluelessness is so astonishing I had to say something.

The group Flex Your Rights is not only opposed to the searches, but is encouraging the riding public to exercise its 4th Amendment right against "unreasonable search" by refusing to be searched.

...

We, too, have concerns about Big Brother's overreach...but this doesn't qualify as over-reaching.

I guess the Times editorial board thinks that searching someone's bags without any reason for suspicion is reasonable?

We understand reasonable requirements must be enacted at times to preserve public safety. Random search programs have become necessary since Sept. 11. We've become accustomed to searches at airports, and public rail systems seem to be a next logical step.

That's kind of the problem. Government can encroach on our liberties one "logical step" at at time until there aren't any liberties left. This is why I have a Creeping Totalitarianism department at Windypundit.

Such programs have already been instituted - with limited disruption - in New York, New Jersey and Boston. To take an extra 10 seconds to open your bag when asked is not unreasonable.

It's not really about the time that it takes, it's about the invasion of privacy.

Metro, which has jurisdiction and arrest powers throughout the 1,500-square-mile transit zone, is not only well within its right to conduct the operation but insists each search takes no more than 8-15 seconds to conduct - posing minimal impact on riders who have nothing to hide and want to easily get on to their destination.

There's every privacy thief's favorite phrase, "nothing to hide."

I could point out, as usual, that it's not about whether or not I have anything to hide, it's about my Constitutionally guaranteed rights as a United States citizen. But the fact is, also, that I do have something to hide: I want to hide my private stuff from people I don't know. This is why we have---or at least should have---a right to privacy.

But what Flex is encouraging has the potential to create major disruptions for commuters (imagine if, say, every 10th person decided he or she wasn't going to be searched).

That's such a police-state view of the problem. Until about three weeks ago, 100% of the people weren't being searched, and that didn't cause any disruptions, did it? But once the Metro police enact their intrusive search policy, the bootlickers at the Washington Times start complaining about those annoying people who want to keep their rights.

Their tactics also could pose undue health and safety risks to passengers and transit police.

It's hard to see how. We're talking about people turning around and leaving the station. People entering and leaving a train station is not a dangerous activity. Or if it is, then Metro has a lot more important things to worry about than the contents of people's bags.

If Flex Your Rights members don't want to be searched, they should ride Metrobus instead of Metrorail.

And I guess that in the 50's the Washington Times advised black people who didn't want to ride in the back of the bus to take a walk? (Come to think of it, that worked out pretty well, but you know what I mean.)

Metrorail is a public service paid for by public money, and it should be operated with respect for the rights of the public.

The folks at the TSA just keep having bright ideas:

If there is any truth to the old military expression that "the uniform makes the man," then new garb might do wonders for the morale of the nation's airport security screeners.

That, and generating more respect from the flying public, is the hope of the Transportation Security Administration. On Thursday--the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks--the TSA will put on a security fashion show of sorts at O'Hare International Airport.

...

The goal is to give screeners a more professional appearance and establish a greater air of authority, in an effort to command respect from travelers.

Yes, because we'll respect the people who examine the size of our shampoo bottles a lot more if they dress a little snappier.

Update: The image above is not a picture of the new uniform. I was trying to make a visual joke about their new uniforms, so I posted a screen capture from the video game Half-Life 2, showing one of the much-despised Civil Protection troopers. I thought this was obvious, because I've spent so much of my life playing that game, but Joel Rosenberg in the comments thought it was the real thing because it bears such a close resemblance to the uniforms worn by the riot cops around the Republican convention last week. I didn't make the connection at the time, but this would help explain why I had such an angry gut-level reaction to the riot cops.

My post a few months ago on the evils of Civil Forfeiture just drew this response:

Hmmm....you wouldn't have to worry about civil forfeiture if you weren't committing crime. Property is seized (money, cars, jewelry ect) when located in immediate proximity of narcotic related sales and when they are used in the commission of felony crimes.

That's not quite how it works. Despite the principle that people are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, police don't actually have to prove anything in order to sieze property under the forfeiture laws. Police merely have to assert a reasonable suspicion that property is involved in a crime in order to seize it.

Plain and simple, this is punishment without a trial.

It's true that for legal purposes a seizure under civil forfeiture is not considered punishment for a crime, but that's just so much legal sophistry. Police say you committed a crime, police get to take your stuff. Call it what you like, it's still a fine for criminal behavior without the dreary need for actual proof in a courtroom.

What's especially dangerous about civil forfeiture is that many police departments get to keep the stuff they seize and either use it or sell it and keep the money. Some departments would have to lay off a bunch of cops if the seizure money ever stopped coming in. This gives police in the department an incredibly strong incentive to lie when making seizures. It's a clear conflict of interest.

It also distorts police priorities. Who are police more likely to go after in a civil forfeiture action, the mid-level gangster who owns no vehicles or property in his own name, or the doctor who gave out suspicious prescriptions for painkillers and supposedly used these ill-gotten gains to buy his million-dollar home? Which one should they be going after?

Don't whine because the police seize drug and weapons profit in an effort to further make this crappy ass joke of a world filled with people like you a little better. How about you spend more time worrying about what these problems are doing in the way of destroying communities and less about protecting criminals.

Oh yeah, the War on Drugs. How's that going?

You see, there's an ugly side effect to paying for our police forces with money seized from drug dealers: The cashflow in the police department, and the jobs of the officers themselves, begins to depend on the existence of a robust drug-dealing economy. I'm not saying that the police are corrupt, but I do think this arrangement discourages governments from looking for alternative solutions to the problem of drug-related violence.

In particular, it makes it even less likely that we'll see drug legalization or even a significant program of harm reduction.

It is easy to bitch and moan about civil issues as you sit miles away in your suburban homes far removed from the destruction and violence these crimes cause.

Point of order: I don't live in the suburbs. I live in the city of Chicago. I was born here. Granted, I live in one of the safer neighborhoods, but I've heard shots fired and seen a body or two.

The whole point of having civil liberties is that they apply all the time. The right to a presumption of innocence isn't much of a right if it only applies when it's not inconvenient.

Just when I think police militarization couldn't possibly get more disturbing, Radley Balko and Pete Guither find this:

The Richland County (S.C.) Sheriff's Department has acquired an armored personnel carrier complete with a turret-mounted .50-caliber belt-fed machine gun for its Special Response Team.

Sheriff Leon Lott told the Columbia State newspaper that he hoped the vehicle, named "The Peacemaker," would let the bad guys know that his officers are serious.

Pete found this picture of the "Special" Response Team:

The armored vehicle may look scary, but it's not the real problem. In the event of a really ugly barricade situation, there's arguably a legitimate need for a bulletproof way to transport people. For example, you could use it to send paramedics to rescue someone wounded and trapped in the kill zone.

But that gun...it's a full-size machine gun. Someone gets shot with that, and parts go flying. Parts like arms and heads.

Police and other people who normally shoot in self defense are usually worried about overpenetration. They like to shoot bullets designed to stop fast when they hit a human body or the walls of a house. The last thing they want is to shoot at an offender only to have the bullet keep traveling and hurt an innocent person.

That's not how a .50 cal machine gun works. Open up on a house and bullets will go through sheetrock and bricks and bathtubs and cinderblocks and come flying out the other side with plenty of energy to kill the people in the house next door. Accidentally raise the barrel above the horizon and a deadly spray of bullets could travel for miles.

It's a sin to use a weapon like that in an American city. It's a weapon of war.

According to Sheriff Lott's bio, he came up through the department's narcotics division (no surprise to those of us familiar with the drug warrior mentality), is active in D.A.R.E., and was awarded the "Strom Thurmond Award of Excellence in Law Enforcement" and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Officers' Association's "Toughest Cop" award.

His biography lists no military experience.

Of course, if he had military experience, maybe he'd be even more out of control. Why drive the armored transport to the scene of the incident? Richland county is fairly compact. Just put an M198 Howitzer in the parking lot of every Sheriff's office, and deputies could spend their patrols calling in fire missions on crack dens and meth labs:

One of the signs of emerging totalitarianism is the intrusion of the state security apparatus into areas where they don't belong, have nothing to contribute, or can cause serious harm by usurping the authority of true experts. For example, DEA agents have increasingly been interfering with medical decisions, first with painkillers and now with medical marijuana.

Now Jim Campbell of Aero-News.Net has another example from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport where a Transportation Security Administration employee decided to check the security of parked aircraft by climbing up the outside of them. In doing so, he damaged the Total Air Temperature probes on nine American Eagle jets, causing all of them to be grounded by maintenance personnel.

If you or I did this, we would now be in federal prison awaiting trial, and in the old days, if some airport security employee had done this, he would have been fired and that would be the end of it. But since parts of airport security were federalized after 9/11, this fool is a government employee who is probably untouchable. Thus the expertise of highly-trained pilots and aircraft engineers is subjugated for the self-serving needs of government security agents.

This is, to be sure, a small thing. No one got hurt. It takes more than a bent probe to crash an airplane. But the police intrusion into medicine has certainly killed people---chemotherapy patients choking on vomit because they can't control their nausea with medical marijuana or patients with painful diseases committing suicide because their doctor has been arrested for prescribing them too many painkillers. If this new intrusion isn't stopped, it may only be a matter of time until airline passengers start dying.

(Hat tip: Jacob Grier)

Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, the Lima SWAT team member who killed Tarika Wilson and wounded her infant son, was not convicted. Not knowing all the facts of the case, that may even be the right decision.

I've always felt that the problem with these tragedies is not necessarily with the officers who pull the trigger, but with the very idea that it's a good idea to have cops doing armed home invasions.

Still, it's depressing that the system is set up to allow injustices like this.

(Hat tip: Pete Guither)

Do you realize that despite Fourth Amendment's right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, government agents can still stop U.S. citizens and search through all our possessions without a warrant, cause, or even suspicion, but just because they want to?

It's true. All you have to do is cross the border.

I've never really understood this. I'm under the impression that courts have ruled that the word "people" in the bill of rights means everybody in the United States, and all U.S. citizens anywhere in the world. So how come when we cross that fine line at the border, we lose our protection against unreasonable searches and seizures that we have on either side of it?

[Update: Kip explains all in a comment below.]

Anyway, it's getting worse. Under some newly published guidelines (which supposedly codify existing practices) Customs agents can seize and search your laptop coputer, iPod, and anything else containing data and search through all your data.

This is not just a case of turning on your computer and skimming it while you wait. They can take it to another location and hold it for days or months. They can make a copy of your data and do a complete forensic examination.

A lot of people keep their whole lives on their computers: All their friends' address, their medical records, financial records, love letters, sexy pictures of their girlfriends, cute pictures of their children. All these things will be read by a bunch of customs clerks.

If you use your computers for business, you may also have detailed client lists, confidential presentations, engineering design documents, proprietary software, internal memos, scientific test results, and all kinds of other business secrets. It could be damaging to your business if a customs employee carelessly reveals such data.

Not that the only revelations of data will be due to carelessness. FBI and CIA agents have sold out their country, and cops have sold their services to organized crime, so it's pretty much a sure thing that we'll be seeing stories about data theft rings in the customs service. How much do you think foreign competitors would pay for copies of the hard drives of a few hundred traveling Boeing executives?

As with all computer seizures, there is a certain backhanded punitive element as well. The government doesn't need your computer, just the data in it---it's a matter of a few hours work to take a forensic image of a hard drive---but customs employees will seize the actual computer and keep it for a while. This can bankrupt a small business.

Scott Greenfield has a great post about computer searches at the border.

For whatever it's worth, I keep my laptop hard drive encrypted so that if it gets lost or stolen I won't have to worry about bad guys having a huge window into my life. I wonder if customs agents can compel me to reveal the password...

In a comment to my post about the Lima shooting, someone named David writes:

Let's see. You're in a situation where you are a potential target. Two pit bulls charge you. You put your weapon down, reach in your pocket, pull out the pepper spray and hope it stops the dogs. If that doesn't work, you pull out your handy taser, ask the dogs to sit while you tase them. Then you go back, pick up your gun, and proceed with the raid. Works for me.

I detect sarcasm.  Fair enough.  I've never had SWAT training.  Maybe maneuvering through a house with both lethal and non-lethal weaponry at ready is harder than I think it is. But doesn't that mean that every SWAT-style raid is a death warrant for any large excitable dogs on the premises? Is that really what we want?

And isn't there some risk in firing a gun in an unfamilar building filled with people in unknown locations?  Most of the time you'll just have a dead dog, but how many times can you open fire in an inhabited house before an overpenetration or a ricochet or a miss does something awful?  Not to mention the risk of misidentifying your target, as apparently happened to Tarika Wilson in Lima.

I've been wondering why my posts about the Lima raid have been getting more pushback in the comments than usual. The events of the raid are indefensible unless you're willing to argue that it's okay for the cops to literally shoot a baby.

I realize now that I was making a mistake. It's the kind of mistake I see all the time in engineering and software development: I was telling the expert how to solve the problem when I should just be describing the problem and letting the expert figure out the solution.

So here's the problem as I see it: Police are doing dynamic entries into people's houses to make arrests and gather evidence. They do this thousands of times a year, and things keep going wrong. Totally innocent people will get killed by accident in botched raids. And even some of the guilty people didn't do anything that earns them a bullet.

Given how often police hit the wrong location or find no evidence of a crime, even when no one gets shot, they're still scaring the crap out of people. And shooting their dogs. It's a real horrorshow, and I want it to stop.

Defenders of these raids will say that using less lethal methods will be dangerous, or that a more careful approach will cause evidence to be lost. I don't care. That's not my problem. If cops can't do their job without terrorizing the citizens, then they're trying to do the wrong job.

I was a juror in a case where a man was accused of attacking a cop who had pulled him over for a traffic violation. We convicted him because his story wasn't believable for a number of reasons, one of which was his claim that the cop attacked him out of the blue without provocation. That just seemed unlikely.

I wonder how we would have felt if we'd seen this video before the trial:

The officer claims he was arresting the cyclist for disorderly conduct in blocking traffic, which might be true, but he also claims the cyclist deliberately drove into him and knocked them both to the ground, so I don't think he's believable.

(On the other hand, if I was stuck behind such an annoying buch of cyclists, I'd probably be cheering on the cop to kick his ass.)

I'm something of a libertarian, and libertarianism is about fighting big government. Usually when push comes to shove, it's law enforcement officers who are the point of the government's spear. So it would be easy to hate cops.

I try not to, though. Most of the cops I know seem like pretty decent folks doing a job that I couldn't do. They don't invent the rules, they just have the crappy job of enforcing them. So I try not to hate cops.

But sometimes, they don't make it easy for me. For example, I think I hate these cops:

Last December, I posted about a botched SWAT raid on an innocent Minnesota family. Acting on bad information from an informant, the police threw flash grenades though the family's windows, then exchanged gunfire with Vang Khang, who mistook the police for criminal intruders. Seven months later, no one in the police department has been held accountable for the mistakes leading up to the raid.

However, this week Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan and Mayor R.T. Rybak did give the raiding officers medals and commendations for their bravery in nearly killing Vang Khang, his wife, and their six children.

Radley Balko has the whole story.

Update: I've read a few more stories about this, and I may have to back down. It sounds like the SWAT team was acting on bad information from the Violent Offenders Task Force. They wouldn't have had reason to question the Task Force's determination that a raid was justified. The officers that were shot do not appear to have been at fault. In that case, they deserve their medals.

To the department's credit, at least they aren't trying to put the homeowner in jail for shooting at them, or planting drugs on him as certain other departments might have done. These days, that makes them honorable professionals.

Last week I wrote about the plans of D.C. police to impose checkpoints on residents. That fell through.

However, the innovative folks who run things in Rolling Meadows here in Illinois have been getting away with it for a whole week:

The owners of a Rolling Meadows apartment complex filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday charging that their civil rights were violated when police blocked off most access to the property last week and set up a checkpoint at the only open entrance.

Two police officers have staffed the checkpoint for several hours a day, stopping residents to give them crime-prevention tips and handing out brochures in English and Spanish that describe services provided by a police Neighborhood Resource Center.

"The village of Rolling Meadows has in essence said they can barricade a community for the purpose of handing out fliers," said Blake Horwitz, a lawyer with civil-rights expertise who is representing the owners of the 12 Oaks at Woodfield.

All in the name of crime prevention, of course.

(Read more in the Tribune story by Kristen Kridel.)

One of the hallmarks of police states everywhere is the internal checkpoint. Think of all the movies you've seen where some Nazi or Soviet bureaucrat---backed up by uniformed thugs---is blocking a road or a train platform and demanding that people "show me your papers!"

For a long time, we here in the United States could look down on other countries for their sad practice of making citizens justify their every movement to the government. We didn't put up with that here.

But times have been changing.

I guess it probably started with airport metal detectors. After a spate of aircraft hijackings, airports started passing all passengers through metal detectors, creating a checkpoint of sorts, although it wasn't necessary to show your papers.

(Yes folks, in ancient times---the 1950's and early 1960's, I think---you could walk into the airport and board a plane just by showing the nice stewardess your ticket.)

Keep in mind, however, that there has always been more to a security station than a metal detector. They can make you empty your pockets, and they can search through your belongings. They may not literally ask for your papers, but they can still mess with your stuffl

Metal detectors soon spread to courtrooms and then to schools. In each case, there was some justification on the basis of safety---nobody wants a shooting in either of those places. Of course, nobody wants a shooting anywhere else either, if we can help it, but that was never before a reason to allow warrantless searches.

Later---I think in response to the mid-air explosion of TWA flight 800---the rules changed, and airports started requiring travelers to show ID, turning the airport security stations into true checkpoints. (Someone must have thought that international terrorists would be stumped at the task of creating fake ID.) This intrusion remained, even after it was shown that the explosion of flight 800 was not a terrorist act.

Somewhere along the way, we started having drunk driving roadblocks, where police would stop everybody traveling down a road and try to figure out if they're driving under the influence. The justification, as usual, was public safety. Yet whenever police run one of these operations, the overwhelming majority of arrests are for crimes other than DUI, meaning that the safety argument is little more than a thin excuse for operating a checkpoint.

So, we've been sneaking up on internal checkpoints for a few decades now, but that's not good enough for some people. In our nation's capital, police chief Cathy L. Lanier wants to have the police cordoning off whole blocks and interrogating everyone who wants to enter or leave:

At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn't live there, work there or have "legitimate reason" to be there will be sent away or face arrest...

That's the real thing, internal checkpoints, like every totalitarian state in the world. Supposedly, other U.S. cities have done this already.

The proposal has the provisional support of D.C. Councilman Harry "Tommy" Thomas, D-Ward 5, whose ward has become a war zone.

"They're really going to crack down on what we believe to be a systemic problem with open-air drug markets," Thomas told The Examiner.

Thomas said, though, that he worried about D.C. "moving towards a police state."

No, when people need police permission to enter and leave the places where they live, that is a police state.

(Hat tip: Radley)

From the U.K. comes a new law that its backers claim will ban violent pornography:

Five years ago Jane Longhurst, a teacher from Brighton, was murdered. It later emerged her killer had been compulsively accessing websites such as Club Dead and Rape Action, which contained images of women being abused and violated.

The victim's mother has been campaigning for a law that would ban even the mere possession or viewing of such images, essentially treating some forms of adult pornography as if it involved children.

Then there's the question of just how the law defines the banned material:

"Obviously anything that leads to violence against women has to be taken very seriously," says Baroness Miller. "But you have to be very careful about the definition of 'extreme pornography' and they have not nearly been careful enough."

She has suggested the new act adopt the legal test set out in the OPA, which bans images which "tend to deprave and corrupt".

But the government has sought to broaden the definition and the bill includes phrases such as "an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person's life".

When asked about how this law will affect people who enjoy a little kinky sex, Mrs Longhurst responds in true nanny form:

There is no reason for this stuff. I can't see why people need to see it.

That's the creed of every petty legislative tyrant in the world: I don't need it, and I don't understand it, so we ought to ban it for my enjoyment.

And make no mistake, this is all about Mrs Longhurst's enjoyment. She can invoke her poor dead daughter all she wants, but her daughter will be just as dead after this law has passed. This law is about making Mrs Longhurst feel good about herself. It makes her feel like she did something to honor her daughter.

While I'd be happy to see her recover control over her life after this terrible tragedy, she has no business hurting other people in the process. This law will subject people with private sexual quirks to intrusive and humiliating investigations. They may even end up in jail.

Next time Mrs Longhurst responds to criticism by playing the dead daughter card, she's likely to be surprised when her critics respond with the cards for their imprisoned spouses, brothers, parents, and children.

(Hat tip: Reason.)

New York Criminal Defense Lawyer Scott Greenfield has some comments about a disturbing Fourth Amendment ruling.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protects everyone in the United States from unreasonable searches. And I'm pretty sure that the U.S. government can't conduct arbitrary searches of U.S. citizens outside the country either. But when we cross the border, anything goes.

In the interest of fighting smuggling and preventing the spread of diseases, government agents at a border crossing can search the affects of anyone---even a U.S. citizen---without having to justify the search. Crossing the border is justification enough.

It's getting even worse. The 9th Circuit has just ruled that the government can even search computer hard drives at the border, treating them as just another container entering the country.

As Scott explains in considerable detail, this is an absurd decision. First of all, unlike diseased agricultural products or radiological weapons, there's nothing inherently dangerous about letting hard drives full of data into the country. Vast amounts of unregulated data already enter the country all the time over transoceanic network trunks.

Second, many people have lots of very private data on their hard drives. As Scott puts it,

Judge Pregerson got it when he concluded that computers are like diaries, holding our personal secrets.

If you think you might ever transport a computer over the border, read Scott's post and write your representatives.

Check out the Security Check-in toy set from Playmobil.  Here's the description:

Every single smuggler is caught at the security check-in. With a modern X-ray machine every item not allowed on board is detected. At the same time, the passengers have to pass the passenger check-in under the watchful eyes of the security staff. Only then can they start in their hard-earned vacation.

The ad copy doesn't say if the passenger's shoes are removable.

(Hat tip: Scott Bludorn.)

[This is a little late by now, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway.]

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal had an editorial about the wiretapping bill in the Senate. Let's sample a few choice phrases:

The Senate takes up wiretapping of foreign terrorists this week, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Remember that "the stakes couldn't be higher" when we get to the more specific parts of the editorial.

Not long ago Democrats seemed ready to move a bipartisan bill passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last autumn. But under pressure from the anti-antiterror left, they are now bending and will try to weaken the bill on the Senate floor.

Ah, the "anti-antiterror" left, because wanting to cripple our antiterrorism capabilities is the only reason to oppose the wiretapping bill.

By far the worst threat is an amendment from Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) to deny legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the government on these wiretaps after 9/11. The companies face multiple lawsuits, so a denial of even retrospective immunity would certainly lead to less such cooperation in the future.

So, according to the WSJ editorial board, the stakes that "couldn't be higher" are a few civil lawsuits against some communications companies? Really?

As for the lawsuits' causing these companies to cooperate less in the future, I don't see how the two are related. After all, they're being sued because what they did was legally wrong. They had a contractual obligation to protect their customers' data, and I'm pretty sure they were also required to protect the data under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

If they had waited for a legal request from the FISA court like they were supposed to, they wouldn't need immunity now. And if the new wiretap bill becomes law, they'll be free and clear to cooperate. The idea that communications companies will be reluctant to comply with a legal wiretap request is absurd---most of them barely hesitated to comply with an illegal request.

The editorial goes on with a few paragraphs of liberal-bashing political gobbledygook, and then there's this:

[Bush has] also acceded to...Oregon Senator Ron Wyden's amendment requiring the FISA court to approve all overseas surveillance of U.S. citizens. This would go beyond current law, which allows eavesdropping of Americans abroad if the Attorney General makes a finding of "probable cause" of some criminal act. The Wyden provision would transfer that "probable cause" judgment to unelected judges -- which means that Americans abroad who are suspected of aiding terrorists would get more wiretap judicial review than do Americans suspected of drug offenses.

Well, I'll give them that last part. It is absurd that Americans suspected of drug offenses get less due process than Americans suspected of aiding terrorists. Obviously, Americans suspected of drug offenses need better protection. Perhaps we need a bill clarifying that the government has to respect the rights of it's citizens everywhere in the world.

What the hell is this nonsense about "unelected judges"? Aren't all federal judges unelected? More to the point, isn't the Attorney General unelected? Aren't the FBI agents who will be placing and monitoring the taps unelected?

The issue here is accountability. An Attorney General must answer to Congressional oversight, and ultimately to the voters through the President. By contrast, we still don't know which FISA judges were responsible for imposing the infamous "wall" of separation between intelligence and law enforcement that so harmed our ability to fight al Qaeda in the 1990s.

Look, we have an independent judiciary, and this is how the system works. If government agents want to tap people's phones, invade people's homes, or otherwise invade their privacy, they need an independent judge to approve it. Maybe if this system were a little more transparent we wouldn't have these problems.

Mr. Bush would do better by future Presidents if he opposed the Wyden amendment, and any further concessions would amount to an abdication as Commander in Chief. He has the political high ground on this issue. If Congress does more harm, he should declare that to protect the country he'll use his Constitutional war powers to wiretap al Qaeda anyway and toss the issue squarely in the middle of the Presidential campaign.

Reading this, you'd think we were talking about tapping phone calls between al Qaeda cells in the Anbar Province, but the new FISA bill would allow the Bush administration to listen in on conversations by U.S. citizens without a warrant. If they gave up on that seemingly unconstitutional provision, they wouldn't need the cooperation of the telecom companies, because the telecoms won't get sued for complying with a legal court order for a wiretap.

Finally, I can't help being suspicious about the intensity of the Bush administration's efforts to derail the lawsuits against the telecom companies. The supposed justification---ensuring future cooperation---makes no sense, since future cooperation can easily be obtained by future court orders. It's pretty clear the Bush administration has been playing fast and loose with the wiretapping laws, and they're worried the lawsuits will reveal what they've been up to.

I was going to write something about the disgraceful article by Cato's Roger Pilon in The Wall Street Journal extolling the virtues of warrentless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, but Julian Sanchez has got that covered.

The evil lawmaking just keeps on coming.

Automobiles with aftermarket exhaust systems may be seized if they pass through Rossville, Illinois and a police officer thinks the vehicle is making too much noise. The village will also authorize police to grab a vehicle if an unruly passenger "resists" an officer's commands.

This is, of course, another form of profitable punishment that allows towns and cities to make money off of punishing their citizens, but it's also something much worse.

The jurisdictions have also come up with a number of clever ways to accuse motorists of crimes meriting confiscation. Rockford and Peoria will seize cars with loud stereos. Oak Forest will seize the car of anyone accused of crimes like shoplifting that have nothing whatsoever to do with driving. In all jurisdictions, the seizure takes place upon a mere accusation by police -- not after any finding of guilt in a court of law. Kane County will even keep a confiscated car belonging to a motorist later found innocent.

Confiscation without trial is confiscation without law. If any cop can take your car just because he wants to, then you pretty much have to do what the cop says. You no longer have to obey the law, you have to obey the man with the gun.

This is lawlessness.

By passing laws like this, Rockford and Peoria and Kane County and all the other places have have turned their police forces into predatory street gangs, into auto theft rings with badges.

This is the creepiest and stupidest thing I've read all week.

The Transportation Security Agency is training people to look carefully at people's faces to detect signs of fear or anxiety that might indicate a terrorist.

Fear and anxiety at the airport? In the security lines? My God, do you think they'll find anybody like that?

How about rage? If I'm trying to get through the TSA security station and I'm filled with boiling, pent-up, anti-authoritarian rage, do you think they'll notice?

(For the record: I am always filled with boiling, pent-up, anti-authoritarian rage. It's what I do.)

The increased use—and abuse—of Tasers by police has been the subject of some recent controversy. Kip Esquire sums it up perfectly:

A big part of the problem with tasers is that they were originally marketed as a substitute for guns, but have become a substitute for exertion. Tasers are, increasingly, not used to save lives but to merely make cops' lives easier.

Read the whole thing.

John Kass breaks this shocking story about life in the city that banned foie gras:

Window washer Sam Hardison has been charged by City Hall with another crime of the century:

Falling asleep on a CTA train, with a cookbook in his lap. So the poor guy may have to pay City Hall a fine of up to $300 for sleeping dangerously. That's a lot of windows to wash for a nap on the CTA, where payrollers and political hacks have been napping for years, when they're not taking double pensions, golfing and goofing off.

Apparently, it's illegal to sleep in public in Chicago. I can understand that the City doesn't want bums sleeping all over the place, but this guy is a paying rider on the train. He worked hard all day and fell asleep on his ride home, and now the City wants to take several days' wages from him?

"I looked the officer right in the eye and said, 'You've got to be kidding. I have to go to court on this?' And he said, 'Yes, you do,'" Hardison, a West Sider, told us the other day about his June 5 ticket on the Red Line.

The officer's partner didn't like Hardison's attitude, which he says was shock and astonishment, not anger...

"And the other officer said, 'If you don't be quiet, we will take you to jail right now. We'll arrest you,'" Hardison said. "I let them write their citations. I felt that it was not right, but what can I do?"

He's getting free help from a lawyer...and all this publicity might help a bit too.

Update: The city backs down.

Starting July 1, Virginia will have "traffic tickets that come with assessments of up to $3000 in addition to an annual point tax that tops out at $700 a year for as long as the points remain."

Driving as little as 15 MPH over the limit on an interstate highway now brings six license demerit points, a fine of up to $2500, up to one year in jail, and a new mandatory $1050 tax...Although the amount of the tax can add up quickly, the law forbids judges from reducing or suspending it in any way.

Can you imagine getting a $3000 fine for a traffic violation? That would be painful for me, and my income is pretty decent. For a poor person, this would be a devastating financial setback. It's pretty clear this is all about raising revenue and has nothing to do with safety.

It also has nothing to do with justice. Everybody breaks traffic laws all the time, and the cops and the prosecutors have broad discretion over who to charge. If every cop can essentially impose a $3000 fine on any driver who pisses them off, it's just one more nail in the coffin of rule of law.

Read the whole ugly story.

Radley Balko on videotaping the police:

There's been a rash of arrests of late for videotaping police, and it's a disturbing development...

...

As noted, police are public servants, paid with taxpayer dollars. Not only that, but they're given extraordinary power and authority we don't give to other public servants: They're armed; they can make arrests; they're allowed to break the very laws they're paid to enforce; they can use lethal force for reasons other than self-defense; and, of course, the police are permitted to videotape us without our consent.

It's critical that we retain the right to record, videotape or photograph the police while they're on duty. Not only for symbolic reasons (when agents of the state can confiscate evidence of their own wrongdoing, you're treading on seriously perilous ground), but as an important check on police excesses.

There's a deep inconsistancy when the police who have such a broad mission to observe and investigate everyone else are attempting to avoid being watched and investigated themselves.

It's absurd for the police to assert the power to pull people over for a traffic violation, detain them, question them, insist on identification, have a dog sniff around, search people, vehicles, and buildings, and then get upset and vindictive when someone videotapes their own activities.

Police might well argue that it interferes with their job when people make a recording. Even ignoring the implied violation of the laws of physics, this is just special pleading. The rest of us are routinely observed by police and sometimes stopped and questioned. It's no fun, but if we can to put up with it, they can too. After all, somebody has to watch the watchers.

Be sure to read the rest of Radley Balko's article.

A few days ago Kip Esquire posted a terrific article about the likely responses to the Virginia Tech massacre from our politicians, and the dangers we face from that.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't? Sounds like job for — politicians!

Seriously, think back to September 11. The first knee-jerk reactions were "Never again!" and "We must do everything possible to prevent this!" You don't want another 9/11, do you?

The result was the Patriot Act — and much more — which eventually morphed into the current "Terror v. Civil Liberties" morass we now find ourselves in. To the Bush Administration and its apologists, no cost to privacy is too high, no restriction on liberty too extreme. You don't want another 9/11, do you?

Meanwhile, it is almost certain that, before long, calls of "Never again!" and "We must do everything possible to prevent this!" will bellow from the halls of Congress. You don't want another Blacksburg, do you?

Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post has a fascinating anonymous op-ed by someone who received a national security letter (NSL). These letters are demands for information by the FBI (or other agencies, I presume) that have not been approved by any court and which come with a gag order prohibiting their disclosure to anyone.

According to a report by the Justice department's inspector general, the FBI has issued an insane number of these letters, far more than could possibly be justified by legitimate issues of national security.

The author's report of life under the gag order is chilling:

Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

This man has not been convicted of a crime, he's not even a suspect, and no court has ordered his silence. Some FBI employee just decided to force him to do something and not tell anyone about it. As Jim Henley puts it:

This is tyranny. Not “the threat of” tyranny, not “practically” tyranny - the thing itself.

Want more proof? From the op-ed:

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law.

In our democracy, this man was prevented from complaining to his elected representatives about a matter of government that he found disturbing.

That's just not right. I think, also, that it's clearly unconstitutional. And even if it's not ruled unconstitutional, it's still a bad idea to give random FBI employees such unreviewed powers over Americans. That's not how this country is supposed to work, as the anonymous author points out:

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy.

In the unlikely event that anyone with national security responsibilities is reading this, please understand: If you are investigating a legitimate matter of national security—war, espionage, real terrorism—and you think I have some information which will help you, just ask me about it. I would be proud to help catch a terrorist or a spy. I would be proud to help make our nation strong against its enemies. And if you need me to keep my mouth shut, I will do that too. All I ask is that you treat me like a fellow patriot.

(Hat tip: Balko)

Brooksville, Florida is apparently being run by fascists:

According to the proposed ordinance, a vehicle owner must pay a parking fine within 72 hours if a meter maid claims his automobile was improperly parked, incurring tickets worth between $5 and $250. Failure to pay this amount results in the assessment of a fifty-percent "late fee." After seven days, the city will place a lien on the car owner's home for the amount of the ticket plus late fees, attorney fees and an extra $15 fine. The fees quickly turn a $5 ticket into a debt worth several hundred dollars, growing at a one-percent per month interest rate. The ordinance does not require the city to provide notice to the homeowner at any point so that after ninety days elapse, the city will foreclose. If the motorist does not own a home, it will seize his vehicle after the failure to pay three parking tickets.

Any motorist who believes a parking ticket may have been improperly issued must first pay a $250 "appeal fee" within seven days to have the case heard by a contract employee of the city. This employee will determine whether the city should keep the appeal fee, plus the cost of the ticket and late fees, or find the motorist not guilty.

Fascism is the idea that the state is all that matters and that the people exist only to serve the states interests. Many cries of "fascism" in the blogosphere are hyperbole, but since the Brookeville city council clearly thinks its citizens are little more than a source of money, I think this technically qualifies as the real thing.

(Hat tip: Balko)

Hey gentle readers.

As a new part of the terms and conditions for reading my blog, I'm now requiring every visitor to please pull out your digital camera (cellphone cameras will do just fine), strip naked, take a full-body picture of yourself, and email it to me.

I promise I'll only look at it once, I'll be the only person to look at it, and I'll delete it as soon as I'm done.

I'll wait...

By the way, this is all part of a public service I'm performing to help you get used to some of the new airport scanning techniques the Transportation Security Agency is planning for us.

PHOENIX - Sky Harbor International Airport here will test a new federal screening system that takes X-rays of passenger's bodies to detect concealed explosives and other weapons.

...

The security agency's Web site indicates that the technology will be used initially as a secondary screening measure, meaning that only those passengers who first fail the standard screening process will be directed to the X-ray area.

Even then, passengers will have the option of choosing the backscatter or a traditional pat-down search.

Ooh, good idea. If you don't want to send me a picture, let's just meet somewhere so I can run my hands over you for about a minute. That will work too.

The technology already is being used in prisons and by drug enforcement agents, and has been tested at London's Heathrow Airport.

That's right folks. And here you thought modern air travel couldn't possibly feel any more like being on the prison bus. Soon, the TSA will treat everyone just like a criminal.

Some say the high-resolution images — which clearly depict the outline of the passenger's body, plus anything attached to it, such as jewelry — are too invasive.

But the TSA said the X-rays will be set up so that the image can be viewed only by a security officer in a remote location. Other passengers, and even the agent at the checkpoint, will not have access to the picture.

In addition, the system will be configured so that the X-ray will be deleted as soon as the individual steps away from the machine. It will not be stored or available for printing or transmitting, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said.

That's right, just let the strange man peek for a moment...

Republicans have long made a big deal of the fact that they're the party of Lincoln, that they're the party that ended slavery. It's pure nonsense, of course, to try to rest on the moral superiority of what your party did almost 150 years ago. It's not as if the Democrats are the pro-slavery party.

Or so I used to think befire I read this:

Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has his way.

You know, the Republicans deserved to lose this last election, for all kinds of reasons. But the problem with throwing out the Republicans is that they're replaced by the Democrats. So we're throwing out one set of crackpot ideas and replacing it with another.

Rep. Charles Rangel..., D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars and to bolster U.S. troop levels insufficient to cover potential future action in Iran, North Korea and Iraq.

"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," Rangel said.

The focus is entirely on what kind of people are joining the army. This is so typical of the Democrats: It's all about identity politics. Those of us opposed to the War on Drugs have never been able to get the Democrats interested in decriminalization except for the sentencing disparity between powder cocaine and crack cocaine because crack's harsher penalties hurt the black community.

The most reprehensible policies are acceptable to some Democrats as long as they are race-neutral. They think it's better to force everyone equally to enter the military against their will than to allow people to decide freely, because minorities are more likely to decide to enlist.

If politicians like Rangel had been in charge in the 1800's, instead of ending slavery we would have passed a law allowing whites to be enslaved too.

Update: Here's video and a nice explanation of why this is all just theater.

(Also, I see that Representative Rangel is black. I might have had second thoughts about calling it slavery if I'd known. There are significant differences that make slavery as it was practiced in the United States much worse than conscription. But both of them are moral sinkholes.)

You know how in the Bible the lowest of the low are the tax collectors? I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure that's because tax collectors at the time weren't the dreary government bureaucrats we're all used to. They were armed men who came and took people's stuff, often with little law behind them and even less reason.

The D'Alliance refers us to a story in the Daily Record of Morris County, New Jersey:

The Morris County Prosecutor's Office has filed a lawsuit to take control of 11 vehicles and $30,219 seized from suspects during its Operation Painkiller crackdown in July on the use and sale of Oxycodone by young people.

The forfeiture lawsuit, made public Thursday in state Superior Court, Morristown, asks a judge to terminate any property rights the owners have to the money or vehicles because the cash and cars allegedly were obtained through, or used in furtherance of, criminal activity.

The lawsuit targets three vehicles owned by Gerard and Jane Trapp of Whippany. Their 19-year-old son, Gerard Trapp Jr., was one of about 58 young people arrested on or around July 27 in drug raids. Trapp Jr. has resolved a conspiracy to possess Oxycodone charge by being enrolled -- without admitting any wrongdoing -- into the county's Pre-Trial Intervention probationary program for first-time offenders.

In other words, the prosecutor's office wants to take all this stuff even though they haven't proven a crime has occurred. This is not just one crazy prosecutor's bizarre twist to the law. It's something called civil forfeiture, and it happens all the time.

Say you get caught selling drugs. The cops arrest you and take the drugs. Even if you beat the charge, or plea it down, or arrange for some kind of non-punitive intervention, the cops aren't going to give back the drugs. It's the same if they take burglary tools or a murder weapon. These things are the tools of a crime, even if no crime is proven.

Law enforcement—and the legislatures that enable them—have been extending this idea to cover other less-obvious tools of the crime, most notably cars, cash, and homes. If you sell drugs out of your home, the police might take it. If you try to hire a prostitute from your car, and she turns out to be a policewoman, they can take your car. If you have cash on you that you might have used or earned in a crime, they can take your cash.

Civil forfeiture apologists claim this is no different from taking drugs or burglary tools or murder weapons, but they're wrong because of one crucial difference: When the police take dope or burglary tools or guns, they eventually destroy them. But when the cops take someone's car, they use it. When they take someone's cash, they spend it. When they take someone's house, they sell it.

This is one of the most blatantly unconstitutional things that the Supreme Court allows police to get away with. The constitution plainly states that private property cannot be taken for public use without compensation. Destroying the tools of a crime is one thing, but simply taking them and selling them to get the cash can't be right. Not without ever proving a crime has occurred.

And they do get to keep the cash. In almost all states, some or all of the proceeds from the forfeiture will eventually end up in the police budget. This means that the police department has a material stake in the the arrest. Rather than being disinterested investigators, they have a chance to make money.

This inevitably leads to distortion of law enforcement goals. Take down a drug kingpin who owns nothing on paper, you get nothing but the arrest. But take down a kid growing pot in his parents' basement, you just might get yourself a house. Take down 19-year old kid with a bottle of prescription-only painkillers in his pocket, you can get every car he drove in.

(In this case, the charge is actually "conspiracy to possess" which sounds like he may not actually have had any drugs, but was just trying to find a drug deal. I don't really know.)

[Trapp family attorney Timothy] Smith argued that the family, including Gerard Trapp Sr., to whom the four family cars are registered to, were unaware of the younger Gerard's activities in three of the cars.

"To seek to have the people buy back their own cars when they need those cars for their daily activities seems to me to almost rise to the level of extortion," Smith said.

Men with weapons come and take their stuff and demand money to get it back. It is extortion. They can hide behind legal proceedings and explanations, but police departments doing civil forfeiture are the modern equivalent of Biblical tax collectors.

Jennifer continues her one-woman jihad against safe air travel.

...but I didn't speak up, for I rarely traveled by air.

Then they came for drivers suspected of drinking too much, but I didn't speak up, for I rarely drink.

Then they came for the subway riders, but I didn't speak up, for I rarely ride the subway.

Of course, when they eventually come to for me, there will be no one left to speak up for me.

Meanwhile, however, they've taken the next Jack-booted step toward tyranny:

Legal papers filed in U.S. District Court contend warrants issued by [Attorney General Terry] Goddard's office to seize wire transfers of $500 or more violate federal constitutional requirements that government must have probable cause before taking the money.

Those warrants have resulted in what plaintiffs contend is the illegal seizure of more than $12 million in interstate transfers of money involving in excess of 11,000 transactions.

...

Josh Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said he understands Arizona's desire to bust smuggling rings. But he said the state's use of warrants to take every transaction in excess of $500 — and then make senders prove the money is legal — is both unfair and illegal.

...

At the heart of the dispute are what the state calls "damming warrants." The name comes from the procedure that allows state prosecutors to get a court order to "dam" up all wire transfers meeting certain criteria until the person to whom the money is being sent can show that the money is for a legal purpose.

Assistant Attorney General Cameron Holmes said prosecutors use a computer algorithm to review every money transfer sent into Arizona. He said these tend to be in amounts between $800 and $1,500, usually in final payments to smugglers for ferrying people into the United States.

Then, under a court warrant, the funds are put into a special fund. The intended recipient can call a toll-free number to claim them. If no claim is made, the money is forfeited to the state.

But the lawsuit says the actions are far broader, with the state issuing warrants — generally good for 10-day periods — for all transfers exceeding a certain amount. Attorney Tim Eckstein, who filed the papers on behalf of three individuals whose money was taken by the state, said those warrants originally affected transfers of $2,000 or more. Now transactions of as little as $500 coming from certain states are subject to seizure.

Goddard said not all wire transfers are seized. He said only those that meet certain criteria are set aside — and recipients with "plausible" explanations can get them back.

"Plausible" explanations. Great. So much for Rule of Law, huh? Not when you have to get permission to receive your own money.

Just a little more of this and we'll have that hallmark of totalitarian regimes everywhere, internal checkpoints.

Hat tip: Kip Eqsuire.

How about you go fuck yourself? How about that?

Sincerely,

An American Citizen.

[end of letter]

From an AP wire story:

Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."

(I would have written something more eloquent, but I have to be somewhere in a few minutes and, well, it needed to be said.)

Update: Maybe Wynne should go back to helping Boeing stuff its pockets with taxpayers' money.

Hey here's an idea, the guy who invented the Taser gets Tasered himself all the time. How about you take a couple dozen hits off these weapons first and then come back to us with your brilliant ideas?

Item 1: One of the things bouncing around the libertarian blogosphere is Radley Balko's recent whitepaper for the Cato Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. It's about the absurd creation of SWAT-style teams for seemingly even the smallest towns. These teams often create violent confrontations where they appear not to have been necessary, often raid the wrong house, and occasionally kill innocent people.

Item 2: The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia has created a series of CounterAttack TV anti-drunk-driving ads, each of which ends with the death of the spokesperson in a violent collision, presumably caused by a drunk driver.

Does anybody else besides me think that the Cato Institute (or some other libertarian think tank) should be producing anti-paramilitary-police ads in which the spokesperson is killed in a botched SWAT-style raid?

Update: I've changed "SWAT" to "SWAT-style" because a lot of these teams aren't really in the mold of the original SWAT concept of a highly-trained specialized team.

You're the principal of a high school on graduation day. Students are supposed to arrive at 5pm for the 6pm ceremony, and the rules say nobody will be admitted after 5:55. The senior class vice president shows up late and is turned away by the guards at the door. Somehow, she manages to get inside anyway to catch the end of the ceremony, although her parents are still stuck outside. What, if anything do you do about it?

Well, if you're Principal Dwayne E. Evans of Thornton Fractional North High School in Calumet City, Illinois, you naturally have her arrested and hauled off in a police car.

[Update: Arg. I can't believe I screwed up principle/principal. I've known that rule for over 20 years. Fixed it now.]

Here's something that will keep me awake tonight: The Consumer Product Safety Commission conducts SWAT raids. Their target? A seller of chemistry sets for kids. Between fear of terrorist bombings and fear of meth labs, you can get arrested these days for having Pyrex glassware.

I've slacked off on the blogging over the past couple of months because I've been kind of busy, but I'll try to speed up again. Google Analytics claims that I have about a dozen or so regular readers, so to you folks, I apologize.

Unfortunately, the story that the NSA is getting all our call records has me nearly speechless.

I fully support government surveilance of known or strongly suspected terrorists or criminals. Those people should be captured, and surveilance is a necessary part of doing so.

However, I'm a lot more troubled by government surveilance when there's no individualized suspicion. There may well be some theoretical benenfit to NSA data gathering, some statistical chance of finding real miscreants, but I don't believe it's worth the effort or the intrusion into people's lives. Basically, I just think the government should be more respectful of people's privacy and not violate it for reasons that are unlikely to yield a net benefit to the public.

I'm also concerned about the frequent abuse of this kind of surveilance. It's real easy for government spies to slide down that slippery slope and start seeing everyone they don't like as a potential enemy of the state. Rather than trying to maximize the number of bad guys they catch, they spy on people they hate, in the hope of catching them doing something bad. The classic example of this is the surveilance of civil rights groups back in the 1960s.

This latest surveilance effort by the NSA (according to news reports) is even worse. They're not just spying on people they don't like, they're spying on everone.

(As I'm writing this piece, my wife received a phone call from my mother. Someday, perhaps even today, the NSA will get a record of that call.)

Or maybe I'm wrong there. Maybe they are spying on people they hate. Maybe they hate all of us.

One of the big stories in the news these days is that the National Security Agency (NSA) is apparently collecting information about millions of telephone calls made by Americans since 9/11.

They're apparently trying to get source and destination phone numbers as well as call time and duration for every phone call made in the United States, presumably to do some kind of data mining and social network analysis.

Many of the major telephone providers have apparently cooperated with them, even though disclosure of what's called Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) is strictly regulated by federal law, and the NSA has not been obtaining court orders for this information.

My telephone company, SBC, was recently taken over by ATT, which is specifically named in the news stories. So...

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am an SBC customer, and I'm disturbed by the recent news reports indicating that ATT (among others) has turned over information about their customers' calling patterns to the National Security Agency. I would like to find out more about that.

First of all, do you have a statement on the matter? I tried searching your customer support database for "NSA" and "National Security Agency" and found nothing pertinent.

Second, what specific information about my calling patterns does your company maintain and for how long? How do I get a copy of the records?

Third, what specific information about my account have you have disclosed to the NSA, and how do I get a copy of those records?

As I understand your Privacy Policy, you should not disclose CPNI to government agencies without a court order (except when reporting fraud or providing 911 service or similar situations). Yet your company is specifically named in several of the news reports, and those reports make clear that no court order was used.

I would appreciate your clarification of this matter.

Thank you,

-- Mark Draughn, customer account 773-[redacted]

I'll post their response, if any.

I'm no fan of celebrities receiving special treatment from law enforcement, but this seemed a bit silly:

LAS VEGAS - Paula Abdul was allowed to board a plane at the Las Vegas airport without passing through a security checkpoint, prompting all passengers and luggage to be screened when they landed in California, officials said Friday.

It's like they think she's some sort of Bond villain: Well-known music and television celebrity, but also a secret member of SPECTRE, using her fame to cover a plan for world domination that somehow starts with a hijacked passenger airplane...

I'm not saying that famous people should be given exceptional treatment because they are famous, but the fact is that the media has thoroughly investigated and documented her life. I think we can say with confidence that Paula Abdul is not a terrorist. We could let her board airplanes without delay for the rest of her life, and no one will be worse off for it.

On the other hand, I can understand the reasoning behind not making any exceptions, even for people who are too well known to be terrorists. Once you start allowing some special exceptions, it's hard to hold the line, and eventually more and more people demand to be excused. Today it's Paula Abdul, tomorrow it's Gary Coleman, and by next week it's Emo Philips and the personal assistant to Fabrice Morvan's agent. Pretty soon your security procedures are full of holes.

Actually, now that I think about it, my point of two paragraphs ago is probably wrong: It wouldn't be safe to let Paula Abdul board airplanes without a security screening for the rest of her life. Once it becomes well-known that certain people are not screened before boarding commercial aircraft, then those people become targets. If Paula Abdul can board airplanes without being screened, you can bet that some terrorist will be trying to sneak a bomb into her luggage.

So, I take it all back. Putting people like Paula Abdul through the screening process makes a lot of sense.

The real mystery, however, is this: Can someone explain the point of screening passengers and luggage after the flight is over? Several explanations come readily to mind.

• Security theater: It looks a bit like real security, and that might help re-assure people that the Transportation Safety Administration knows what it's doing. That might improve passenger peace-of-mind, not to mention the TSA's budget.
• Punishment: If Paula Abdul thinks she can get one past the TSA, they'll show her a thing or two. Not only will they search her, they'll also search everyone else on the plane again and tell people it's her fault.
• War On Drugs: They're not trying to keep bombs off the plane, they're trying to keep drugs from being transported by plane, and using the War On Terror as an excuse for an otherwise unwarranted exercise of power.
• Creeping Totalitarianism: Some people just like being able to push other people around, so they use Paula Abdul as an excuse to inconvenience an entire airplane full of people just to show them who's boss.

Is there a sensible explanation that I'm missing?

"If you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"

—Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt

He's talking about his idea to install security cameras all over Houston, including in private businesses and apartment buildings.

A fellow named Matt Asher has an interesting response:

The Hurtt Prize is a $1120 (and growing) reward for the first person who can provide definitive videotaped evidence of Houston police chief Harold Hurtt committing a crime, any crime. This evidence will posted here and forward to the Houston Police Department along with a demand that action be taken.

Of course, Hurtt is used to being in the local media spotlight, so this probably isn't too hard on him. If Asher really wanted to give him a taste of it, the prize would have been extended to cover crimes by his immediate family members as well.

No smarmy title here, just this:

A 12-year-old Aurora boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project this week has been charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug, Aurora police have confirmed.

...

Two other boys asked if the bag contained cocaine after he showed it to them in the bathroom Wednesday morning, the boy's mother said.

He joked that it was cocaine, before telling them, "just kidding," she said.

Aurora police arrested the boy after a custodian at the school reported the boy's comments.

...

East Aurora School District officials declined to comment on the case, citing privacy issues.

Apparently those privacy issues weren't enough to keep them from turning the poor kid in to the police. But when someone questions them about their judgement, then they suddenly start worrying about privacy.

The district issued a written statement, which said: "The dangers of illegal drugs and controlled substances are clear."

Apparently not, because the kid only had powdered sugar.

The district officials aren't the real villains of this piece. For all I know, they really thought the kid had a big bag of cocaine and just did what they felt they had to do by turning the kid over to the police.

The police may not be the real villains either, because they too might have believed it was really cocaine. (Cops only taste unidentified white powders on television. In real life, that's a little dangerous.)

The prosecutor, on the other hand, knew exactly what he was doing. We know this because he charged the kid under a law that criminalizes fake drugs. I believe it's intended to allow drug dealers to be charged with a crime even if it turns out they were ripping off their customers (or the undercover cops doing a buy-bust sting).

Unfortunately, it also allows idiotic or malicious prosecutors to charge 12-year old kids with felonies for goofing around.

According to a ZDnet article, Justice Department prosecutors have asked Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL to turn over millions of records from their databases.

This is all part of the government's attempt to defend the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). The ACLU is challenging COPA in part on the grounds that compliance is impossible. To support COPA, the federal prosecutors want information about the prevalence of pornography on the internet and its availability to children. So they've subpoenaed the four big search services for information that will help them prove their point.

This strikes me as an insane act of overreaching authority. None of the search engine companies are parties to the actual case being decided. Neither are they witnesses to any fact about the case. This is not like subpoenaing a bank to see if the defendent in a criminal case has any suspicious transactions. Rather, this is like trying to prove a transaction is suspicious by subpoenaing the records of millions of uninvolved people in order to establish what non-suspicious behavior looks like.

(The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it gets the point across.)

The government is simply gathering statistical information about the internet by trying to abuse the subpoena power to steal the information from companies that have it, rather than gathering the information at its own expense.

Yahoo and AOL have both complied, but they claim to have cleansed the data of personally identifiable information to protect their customers privacy. The Justice department isn't entirely happy with that.

Microsoft says "MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested....It is our policy to respond to legal requests in a very responsive and timely manner, in full compliance with applicable law." They offer no further elaboration, but I'm pretty sure that means they squealed like pigs.

Google alone is fighting the subpoena:

In a letter dated Oct. 10, 2005, Google lawyer Ashok Ramani objected to the Justice Department's request on the grounds that it could disclose trade secrets and was "overbroad, unduly burdensome, vague and intended to harass."

I'd like to think that Google is fighting out of firm principle. Actually, I'm pretty sure they are. I suspect, however, that they are also a little naive. They've been working in a high-tech bubble for a long time and have never had the loving attention of the Justice Department before.

I wish them all the luck in the world. Fight the Power!

Philipp Lenssen has more details.

Radley Balko has the goods on a flip-flopping former Presidential candidate.

Radley Balko points to an AP wire story about scary police-state tactics in Miami:

Miami police announced Monday they will stage random shows of force at hotels, banks and other public places to keep terrorists guessing and remind people to be vigilant.

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez said officers might, for example, surround a bank building, check the IDs of everyone going in and out and hand out leaflets about terror threats.

"This is an in-your-face type of strategy. It's letting the terrorists know we are out there," Fernandez said.

Balko sums this up nicely:

If the terrorists hate us for our freedom, then holy shit are we ever appeasing the terrorists.

First they went after the drug users, then those who drink and drive, then the gun owners, then tobacco users, then fast food... Now, behold as the Chicago Tribune's John Kass totally loses his shit:

You want a dog that weighs more than, say, 15 pounds?

Then you pay $1,000 a year in fees and licenses for the right to own one. The fee could be knocked down to, say, $200 a year if the dog is spayed or neutered and passes temperament and obedience tests at least two times a year under the supervision of state-licensed animal trainers who would certify the animal's behavior.

A thousand dollars to own a dog? Obedience testing twice a year? And I just checked and the Illinois Division of Professional Regulation doesn't license animal trainers, so there's a whole new type of business that can descend into regulatory chaos and protectionism.

This would give police the leverage necessary to immediately confiscate dogs that don't have the licenses (and shots), and the animals would be immediately destroyed.

Why destroyed? Why not simply allow the owners to pay a fine get the dog licensed? Why hurt the dog because the owner screwed up? This is simply mean-spirited.

If you don't like it, then move. Or socialize your dog. Most responsible dog owners do this. They walk their dogs outside elementary schools as pups and later as older dogs. The owners carry bits of hot dog in a bag, so kids can pet and feed animals, to establish children as a positive in the dog's mind.

I'm a 41-year old guy. If I start hanging around elementary schools handing things out to the kids and letting them play with my dog, you don't think that will attract some kind of law enforcement attention?

But if you want to keep your dogs forever isolated behind back-yard fences or tethered to posts, becoming increasingly aggressive toward children, then you don't deserve the right to have one within miles of someone else's kids.

I live in a small condo and don't own a dog, so maybe I'm missing something, but is Kass really saying that people with large and possibly dangerous dogs are behaving irresponsibly when they keep those dogs restrained in a private place?

I'm at a loss here. Somebody please explain.

If we're going to be serious about protecting children and dogs, we've got to stop the practice of backyard breeding. That's how most unwanted dogs are created. So if you want to breed dogs, you should pay a much heftier fee, say $3,000 a year, and be registered with a recognized breed club through the American Kennel Club or the International Kennel Club or other legitimate canine organization.

So now Kass wants to outlaw puppies?

At this point, if you're like me, you're waiting for the punchline where Kass reveals it's all just an analogy to gun registration or something. The gun control crowd is always trying to make it harder for individuals to get Federal Firearms Licenses for selling guns out of their private homes—what they call "kitchen FFLs"—so maybe this is a parody of that.

The other explanation is that Kass is a nutcase on this subject. Because if you add $3000 a year to the cost of dog breeding, you'll drive small home breeders out of business. That will leave only the large puppy mills—not exactly a source of safe, friendly dogs.

But no, he's not kidding or making an analogy. He just goes on and on:

The idea is to make dog ownership and breeding difficult. There is no 2nd Amendment for dogs. A large dog in a populated area is a social responsibility. And casual ownership is dangerous.

All pups would be tattooed and implanted with a microchip for identification, their hips X-rayed, with temperament testing. Animals without the identification could be immediately seized and put down. Any unlicensed breeder would be slapped with a felony and possible imprisonment.

There's Kass's creepy desire to kill dogs again. And I guess just because the United States imprisons a larger proportion of its population than any other country doesn't mean we shouldn't put a few more of them away for felony dog breeding.

I assume the ones who will shriek the loudest are those who value animal life over a child's life. They're selfish that way.

Oh yeah, that's why people would oppose such an intrusive, overbearing set of laws. Because we hate the children.

I don't have a dog in this fight—or a child either—but Kass needs a reality check. For one thing, for people with both children and dogs, the large breeds are usually considered pretty safe because playful children aren't strong enough to hurt them and provoke an attack. More to the point, it's immoral to impose punishing costs on all dog owners just because a few of them are negligent.

Stephen Gordon at Hammer of Truth (which sounds like something from the Colbert Report) worries that someday he may just have to Drive 55.

I shit you not.

I only got really interested in photography a little less than a year ago. I've taken more pictures since then, almost 9000, than in the previous 40 years. I'm especially fascinated by street photography—just wandering the streets of the city taking pictures of people and streets and buildings and how they all fit together.

Apparently, this is a bad time for it. Ever since 9/11, a lot of authoritarian types are suspicious of people taking pictures. Take a picture of a bridge or tall building or federal building and they get all excited and start yelling and threatening.

Here are some depressing stories about anti-photography zealots.

Police in Utah raided a rave attended by about 400 people. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the rave was illegal and the police broke it up with little violence.

On the other hand, Daily Kos has a different story, claiming that the police used paramilitary tactics to shut down a legal concert, complete with permits and security guards. This is consistent with accounts by some people attending the party. Police say the party organizers had some permits, but not something called a "mass gathering permit."

The Utah County Sheriff's Office said there were guns and drugs, and they busted the security guards for drug possession. Attendees say everybody was searched when the entered, so the only weapons were those brought by the police.

The ravers are clearly a crazy bunch, and some of their stories seem pretty far-fetched. Sploid, for example, is somehow linking this mess to George Bush. I doubt the rave was as innocent, legal, and drug-free as the ravers are now saying.

On the other hand, the police side of the story sounds like all the drug war hysteria I've been hearing all my life. The police reports all list terrible things that have happened at previous raves, such as drug overdoses and violence. But the same things happen at football games and fraternity parties, and nobody sends armed gunmen to break them up. If somebody is beating up somebody else, the police should arrest the guilty to protect the innocent, not just drive everybody off at gunpoint.

So, who to believe? No, that's not right. I don't believe either side completely. A better question is, "Who are the bad guys?" How can we decide that?

Fortunately, there's video.

And what I see in the video is a bunch of cops shutting down a party. The cops are dressed like soldiers—helmets and camouflage—rather than uniformed police officers, and they're armed with weapons that look like assault rifles. They throw people on the ground a lot. There are dogs barking. At the end of the video, you can hear the cops yelling at the cameraman to put down his camera.

There's also one telling detail. The cops are wearing masks.

They hide their faces and don't want someone to take pictures of what they're doing. They wear military outfits and have guns. These are not the peace-keepers of a free society. These are not the good guys.

Update: I forgot to mention it, but the security guards arrested for drug possession claim that the drugs had been confiscated from attendees as they passed through security checkpoints.

Utah County Sheriff James Tracy responds:

"[Security guards] have no legal statutory authority to take and hold controlled substances. It's against the law for them to have them," Tracy said.

I'm sure that he is technically correct, but is this really a good way to use police resources? I mean, here are some guys preventing kids from doing drugs, and the police response is to arrest them for it? (If the guards are lying, the police should say so, not stand on the legalism.)

By the way, I'll bet the same legal logic prohibits parents from taking drugs from their own children.

Just wanted to make that clear.

According to Declan McCullagh at CNET, Alberto Gonzales's Justice Department is floating around the idea that Internet Service Providers should be required to retain records of their customers' internet activities.

Under the the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act of 1996, these companies already have to preserve records of specific customers whenever requested to do so. The new proposal, however, would require them to retain all records of every customer for some as-yet-unspecified period of time.

Can you guess the justification for this? If you're familiar with how this game is played, you know there are two bogeymen regularly invoked whenever some fascist-wannabe like Alberto Gonzales wants to crush our liberties. This time, it's not terrorism. It's the other one:

Justice Department officials endorsed the concept at a private meeting with Internet service providers and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to interviews with multiple people who were present.

"It was raised not once but several times in the meeting, very emphatically," said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, which represents small to midsize companies. "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'"

That, right, it's for the children.

The scale of this is truly extraordinary. In George Orwell's 1984 the government watches and listens to literally everything that everyone does. This proposal would require monitoring and records for many Internet activities, including email, web surfing, and chat rooms. It's 1984 for the Internet.

Actually, that overstates it a bit. The idea being discussed would just require that the records be created, but not that they be turned over to the government. I'm not sure on what conditions that would happen. A few years ago, I would have assumed it would require a subpoena or warrant of some kind, but these days I'm not so sure. Some of the anti-terrorism legislation in the last decade may have made it possible for the government to get these records just by asking.

What's that you say? This proposal is about exploited children, not terrorism, right? True, but I don't believe it will stay that way. Once the records exist, they will be available for terrorism investigations as well. Then it can't be too much longer before the jackbooted thugs at the DEA get involved, followed by hundreds of anti-drug task forces, then everyone else in law enforcement.

The records will also become available to various other unsavory organizations, such as the IRS or the Department of Homeland Security. If that sounds far-fetched, note that Homeland Security is already cashing in on the child protection business with its Operation Predator.

It won't just be the government, either. Once the records are known to exist, other people will try to get at them. If you sue someone or get sued, you're only one successful discovery request away from having your email and your web surfing habits picked over by people who are essentially your enemies.

The cost alone of all this record keeping is reason to oppose this program. Supposedly in order to catch the relative handful of children being exploited on the Internet, the government wants private Internet businesses to keep records on 200 million internet users. Even if compliance only costs $1 per user per year, we're talking 200 million dollars per year. (Compliance startup costs could be much higher.) That's more than five times the annual budget of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Which do you think will do more to help children?

By the way, did you catch that part where the Justice Department is threatening to launch a smear campaign against its opponents? Anyone who doesn't want to be involved in the wholesale surveilance of internet users must be "soft on child porn." I chose my article title to maintain the same sense of fairness and accuracy espoused by the Gonzales's minions.

(Also, I've added "Alberto Gonzales Is a Fascist Pig!" to the metadata in the templates for Windypundit so if the Justice Department ever takes a look at me, they'll find it on every page. It's geeky and petty, but it makes me feel better.)

Alberto Gonzales was the guy who wrote the "terror memo" saying it wasn't against the Geneva convention to essentially torture some of the prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm on record somewhere defending him for it. I thought that as a lawyer being asked a legal question, he was bound by the ethics of his profession to describe what sort of prisoner treatment was legal, without injecting a personal opinion of the morality of it or whether it was good policy. I'm kind of sorry I wrote that now. Given the lack of respect for civil liberties he has as Attorney General, I'm starting to think that maybe he was just soft on torture.

Update: Orin Kerr has doubts about the original story. Maybe I should calm down a bit.

So there I was, eastbound on Higgins Road, crossing Nagle Avenue, when out of the corner of my eye, just down Nagle at the Foster Avenue intersection, I see a flash. I circled around to take a look:

I, for one, do not welcome our new robot overlords.

UPDATE: Here are some shots showing the camera installations in context with the street:

Here's a really nice shot of the workings, illuminated with the strobe on my camera:

Finally, here's its maker's mark:

Gotta do some research now...