Apple’s head of security indicted in Santa Clara County CCW case
morganhilltimes.com
morganhilltimes.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M&t=790
But I guess they all had a good laugh in the end, so it doesn't count?
Free wifi would be something that inures to the benefit of the city / jurisdiction, not primarily to the individual decisionmakers or their department. It may not be something legitimate that they can make planning approval dependent upon, but an elected body trying to negotiate something that sweetens the deal for their electorate is completely legitimate.
Indeed, back before California ended development controls, my city's planning department effectively ran a huge reverse auction, picking the housing developments that would make the biggest street and park improvements in excess of the statutory minimums to authorize for each year's development quota. (A bit more complicated than that: various ways that the development exceeded building code or had additional amenities also counted for points in the "competition").
Steve: I'm a simpleton I've always had this view that we pay taxes and the city should do
those things. That's why we pay taxes. Now if we can get out of paying taxes I'll be glad to put up Wi-Fi.> Steve: I'm a simpleton I've always had this view that we pay taxes and the city should do those things. That's why we pay taxes. Now if we can get out of paying taxes I'll be glad to put up Wi-Fi. reply
1) How does not having a plate let you park in the handicapped space? The regulation is probably written such that you are required to have the handicapped plate or placard, and displaying no plate would be probable cause here.
2) Why not just have Apple reserve a parking space for the CEO or Steve Jobs outright? There's no regulations against reserving parking spaces in such a manner that I'm aware of.
3) Why is there so much worship in the tech industry of complete assholes like this?
2) Agreed. This story makes no sense, although there is a picture of his car in a handicapped spot, so maybe he just did it once?
3) Lots of brilliant and successful people are assholes. Most people admire the first two qualities and not the third.
Leasing a new car every 6 months is not cheap. It literally costs 6x as much as leasing the exact same car every 3 years (the industry norm).
Jobs has a good point about "paying taxes." In the last few years, a lot of people in the Bay Area outside tech are saying things like "why doesn't tech do more to build more housing." They pay taxes, and tech workers living in the cities are paying income and property taxes. The communities should be asking themselves why they, themselves, aren't building more housing. What did they think these added tax dollars should be going it?
Unfortunately the Bay Area has that in spades.
Places like Japan don't seem to have much of a problem with it at all.
NIMBYism is a reaction to a sudden influx of newcomers to an area. As such, hot remote work spots like Bend, OR are very likely experiencing a similar NIMBYist mindset.
The comment you’re responding to is a real, important difference between Japan’s response to growth (in the Tokyo area) and other cities and regions’ responses to growth. Handwaving it doesn’t help.
NIMBYism is great if you're a somebody.
When the planning commission of a city likens housing advocacy to "an onslaught of anarchists and YIMBY Neoliberal fascists", rational process has pretty much broken down.
[0] https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issues/corporate-taxes/h...
That said, it doesn't make sense for the global profits of a company like Apple to get taxed in California or Cupertino. The accounting isn't necessarily easy, but it makes more sense to tax where was money was made (which is murky and complicated) than to funnel it all to the HQ; Apple is more than just a spaceship in one city.
This isn't to say Apple isn't doing things to avoid paying taxes, either. My point is that using corporate taxes of a company with global sales to solve local issues doesn't make sense.
Seems like it was just this individual.
Edit: Never mind. CA is super stupid.
Either of these standards would probably apply to a head of security who commits the crime as part of seeking concealed carry permits for an Apple security team.
Edit: Never mind. CA is super stupid and requires a state license to carry a firearm for employment but would then also require a license from the sheriff to conceal it.
I read the story as:
- Head of security team contacts police to get concealed carrying permits for his employees
- Police officer says “if Apple gives us 200 iPads, that can be arranged. On top of that, you’ll get $X”.
- Head of security team agrees, signs of for the Apple hardware, and receives a bribe.
If so, Apple was the only one paying, but the company probably wouldn’t have known about that (possibly, multiple employees would)
If this were the police asking for iPads in exchange for permits, I would call it extortion, not bribery.
If an Apple executive was the one running the entire thing, how is the argument that the company wasn't aware of it? What even is "the company" at this point?
Of course, that can change if it turns out Tim Cook knew about this. That would surprise me a lot, though.
Most states have separate licensing for armed employment.
Because you don't just randomly cough up a couple hundred anything from a company like Apple without it appearing on the books somewhere.
If it didn't appear on the books anywhere, then it sounds like Apple gave this department a quite significant "petty cash" fund and used this guy and department to do unsavory things so that the higher-ups can have plausible deniability.
Yeah, the company needs to get hammered, too.
A bribe like this will get buried into somebody's "untracked cash" account.
The problem is that this is "Standard Operating Procedure" for "Security" departments as they're generally ex-police themselves. That's why they didn't think anything of it.
All these big company "security chiefs" run in the same circle. It simply became known that the easiest way to get your CCW was bribery.
They already got folks at Facebook. Now Apple. They're going to get more.
And I love the quote that this is about the rivalry between "Rosen and Sheriff Smith." As we have repeatedly seen, even when the DA and Sheriff hate each other, the DA doesn't go after the police. If the DA is making a move, the Feds are already involved behind the scenes forcing the DA to move.
I suspect this fell out of some Federal security contract or a Federal security clearance background check for somebody.
All I see is the fact that the Apple employee didn't initiate the bribe, the sheriff's office demanded it (extorted it) and the employee was put in the unfortunate immediate situation of either not getting their lawfully permitted license, or paying the bribe.
At the end of the day it's bribery so of course the employee deserves to be charged (and Apple if it approved it in any way), but the sheriff's office officials deserve much harsher punishment quite clearly.
...or immediately going to the FBI.
IMO, discretion for this sort of thing should be with a judge, not a cop.
How would a judge or a cop have any impact on a situation without a conviction? They wouldn't know any better without additional data.
“Guns for Thugs - Sheriff Arms Pimp”
So that they can make an end run around the 14th amendment, deny all the blacks, deny all the mexicans, deny all the chinese while the state looks the other way, or at least that's what the tacit understanding was ~70yr ago when people were voting for politicians who supported these policies.
I simply went to court and the officer never showed up, but I didn’t see any of the other people pulled over that day in court either (while reasons could explain this away I find it hard to believe of the 7 people I observed none of them paid the fine or took a driving course from the comfort of their own home to be done with it)
Oh they just weren't "supposed" to ask for bribes. Nothing illegal here, just a honest guy going above and beyond on his job to keep America safe.
Edit: Since you wouldn't respond... denying a permit under a shall-issue scheme would require proof that they didn't meet the statutory requirements instead of providing the issuer with the ability to hide their reason behind an arbitrary excuse.
I didn't respond because I was asleep (??)
> Please explain how this same scenario would work under a shall-issue scheme?
It doesn't matter: Soliciting bribes is against the law.
Everything else is just arguments about if a particular arrangement makes bribery more or less likely.
Federal judges have consistently ruled that recording public officials in the performance of their duties is a right under the first amendment. As a member of the public, you can record your interactions with police without their consent.
It is much less clear that it applies to a private conversation with a senior officer in a police station.
> conversation with a senior officer in a police station
Are you seriously suggesting that conversing with a public official at their place of work about official business doesn't qualify as part of their official duties?
(Aside, two party consent is a genuinely broken system for a wide variety of reasons. I consider violating it to be a laudable act of civil disobedience.)
Attorneys argue things like this all the time. And Judges rule on their arguments.
What I’m asking about is whether any existing ruling makes this point clear.
I think it would be hard to argue that a conversation with a CCW applicant in which you ask for stuff in exchange for issung a CCW isn't acting in an official capacity. The only person who can issue it is the person holding that office. Not to mention, the calendar/schedule/sign-in book should have a memo a out the purpose of the visit (the pretext he was called down to the station).
You do sometimes see cases where a police union defends an officer accused of some crime, but that's usually because they're putting up some BS story about how they actually were doing their duty, eg an officer busted in possession of drugs who tries to argue it was actually an undercover investigation of the drug scene.
You can do it without their consent, but can you do it without their knowledge?
He was the chief security officer of the biggest company in the world. He absolutely had many other options.
I don't see any Apple apologists here in the comments. Who are you referring to?
You do realize that your comment here is exactly what "apologists" means, right?
The only legal option I can see is "move out of CA", which probably means get another job. Which, you know, people sometimes do if they feel strongly about the right to carry, but likely wasn't in his set of considered options.
> He was the chief security officer of the biggest company in the world.
Oh, you're suggesting he use Apple to, uh, "lean on" the sheriff? That seems much worse. One might even hope that was not one of his possible options, even as CSO...
You didn't consider "report it to the DA, state police, or FBI" as an option?
> Oh, you're suggesting he use Apple to, uh, "lean on" the sheriff? That seems much worse. One might even hope that was not one of his possible options, even as CSO...
I absolutely did not read this in the GP's post. Whether it is what he meant or not, it's an ungenerous take. A more generous take is that with the resources available to him, reporting a bribe solicitation to the appropriate authorities is much less risky than it would be for (say) a random citizen of San Jose.
> the employee was put in the unfortunate immediate situation of either not getting their lawfully permitted license, or paying the bribe
In this context, "options" mean "options to fulfill the CCW licensing goal".
Reporting it to the DA, state police, the FBI, or anyone else wouldn't further the CCW licensing goal (though it might fulfill others, and I'm certainly not arguing against it!).
Similarly, saying he had other options (for "getting their lawfully permitted license") because he was the CSO of the biggest company in the world may well have other meanings I didn't catch, but reporting bribe solicitations is not one, unless the dialogue had already veered from it's previous aim.
I think that is artificially closing the options.
Firstly, and most obviously - he could report the illegal activity by the sheriff and wait.
Secondly, he could sue, and ask the court order the licenses be granted immediately if there was a time-critical need.
There's probably other options available for relief too, and I'm pretty sure the Apple legal department could think of them!
Ah. I took the quote to be the prompt for your reply, as mentioned above.
> Secondly, he could sue, and ask the court order the licenses be granted immediately if there was a time-critical need. There's probably other options available for relief too, and I'm pretty sure the Apple legal department could think of them!
In spite of Moyer being CSO for Apple, I hadn't realized that Apple Corporation was paying the bribe!
You are right that with the company directly involved, there are more options, and it was my misreading/skimming of the article which led me to the wrong conclusions, there.
To say the least! He has the entire weight of the Apple legal department behind him, and that isn't something any sheriff's department would take on lightly.
> I absolutely did not read this in the GP's post. Whether it is what he meant or not, it's an ungenerous take.
I can confirm I didn't mean this! That's a stupid idea.
I don't really understand how randallsquared got that from what I said.
How could that possibly be the only option?
Sue the sheriff's department is an obvious one, as is contact the FBI.
> Oh, you're suggesting he use Apple to, uh, "lean on" the sheriff? That seems much worse. One might even hope that was not one of his possible options, even as CSO
What?
No of course not.
Off the top of my head:
* Get Apple's lawyers advice (which would not be "pay an illegal bribe")
* FBI
If you bribe someone to get something that you're not qualified for, that is clearly wrong on the part of both the applicant and the permit approver.
But if you're being denied something you should get, unless you bribe them, I am more sympathetic to the applicant.
You can argue that they should have gone straight to the DA, and you might even be right, but the only way for this problem to get fixed is by cleaning house at the police department, not by scolding Apple for trying to work with corrupt officials.
Keep in mind that it's incredibly rare for any DA to go against the police, so this case is already unusual. We'll have to wait and see if they actually have the evidence / wherewithal to see this one through rather than just settling out of court for a slap on the wrist.
Edit:
I actually agree with the comments suggesting that Apple and similar companies will learn from this experience and will use it as an example when trying to ensure that it doesn't happen again, and in that sense, it's important that they be punished too.
I think the point I'm trying to make is that, on a moral level, the police department comes off looking way worse than Apple here, and their punishment should be higher.
Police are given a special position in society where we essentially trust them to conduct themselves professionally and uphold the law fairly. When that trust is misplaced, the checks are slow and unreliable, and corrupt cops can cause a whole lot of mayhem while we're waiting. So if you're going to go after police corruption, you'd better hit hard. It's really, really bad for society to have police who are so comfortable asking for bribes this openly.
It's also bad for companies like Apple to feel like they can just pay the bribes to grease the wheels, but it's a different kind of bad. It's a "We should punish Apple to discourage a tragedy of the commons" kind of bad, while police openly asking for bribes is a "betraying the public trust" kind of bad.
To me this seems it would make the "or else" really difficult to think past. What can they do? If they detonate the leadership structure of some department by going on the offense, what is the likelihood they hurt their own ability to work with LEO types in the future? That would be a really hard position. But maybe there are details we just don't have here.
> Sheriff Laurie Smith, who has the authority to issue CCW permits, has not been charged with a crime.
Either i. the sheriff knew about/was in on this scheme and must be put in prison or ii. the sheriff didn't know about how her number two was soliciting bribes using her authority to grant/deny licenses and must resign because that is just gross negligence.
Which one is it?
“Sheriff Laurie Smith’s family members and some of her biggest supporters held a celebration of her reelection as sheriff in Chadha’s suite,” Rosen said.
She's definitely not painted in a good light, that's for sure.
Sadly you can't force anybody to resign for gross negligence, even if it was true.
Actually, denying the permit via an illegal action (requesting a bribe) is not a lawful denial and would result in the violation of your equal protection rights.
If you weren't propositioned with a bribe, then true, it wouldn't be apparent why you were denied.
Now, could it still end badly? Sure. If they are willing to break the law for a bribe, then why not take it further if they find out you are recording.
Therefore no matter how much you might be within the right, I would personally not be willing to record the police unless it was under the direction of another police force that was ready to barge in.
Present this to a lawyer and watch them work their magic.
Good luck!
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_2201016?guccounter=1&guce...
You're really trying very hard to downplay the risk of gathering this evidence. If you are discovered and you gathered evidence, you might have that evidence confiscated or you might just be dead. If you are discovered but didn't manage to get the evidence, you might be charged with wiretapping. (Or they might just kill you anyway.) Even if all works out in the end, you're looking at a legal battle. (Most people don't want to be the one fighting a case that sets precedence even if federal courts largely seem to rule in their favor.) And all that struggle is for evidence that might not even convince anyone to start an investigation and/or may not be admitted to court.
This type of corruption is even more endemic in other countries and I'm sure many companies would find it easier to just pay the bribe than comply with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, but that's why the act was written in the first place.
It sounds like it was the Employees alone.
So your solution is other, probably lesser-trained, individual Apple employees should be concealed-carrying so they can respond to a workplace shooting? Let's ignore that Apple probably doesn't allow this in the first place but even if they did I would not want to work in an environment where my coworkers were walking around with guns all the time. I have no problem with guns or CCW but in the workplace is a different story for me.
Which raises the question, why did it happen this time?
My best guess is that the Santa Clara DA did the math, said, "I'm in a liberal part of a liberal state where people overwhelmingly support BLM and distrust the police. How can I best generate some positive publicity for myself?"
The concealed permits mess has been well-known for ages. So it wasn't a question of the DA having just learned about it and becoming shocked. And going to the Feds wouldn't have helped much since they don't care too much (else they would have acted ages ago). The question is why the DA decided to make an issue of it.
Refusing to pay a bribe is also a refusal to participate in a racket. Local police can be extremely petty and extremely violent [1]. If a police officer told me he'd let me off for a bribe, I would probably pay it. I wouldn't be paying to get what I want. Rather, I would be paying to avoid the appearance that I disapprove of the bribery (and the possibility of resulting reprisal).
E: And, of course, I would report that bribe as soon as it was safe to do so. And, of course, I'm referring to a scenario where I, as an individual private citizen, am told to pay money to a person with a gun who controls my immediate safety... which, importantly, brings us to the second half of this comment:
But this isn't that.
A high-level exec at one of the world's most powerful companies paying off a local LEO for a permit instead of, IDK, contacting the State or the Feds, is beyond inexplicable.
[1] https://oklahoman.com/article/5666549/woman-recognizes-attac...
Knowing about public corruption, and not reporting it, is tantamount to racketeering. No matter how much power you have.
This is why things like anonymous tip lines and whistleblower laws exist. You are encouraged, in general, to report misconduct. But there are very specific situations where it's illegal to not report misconduct.
Now it is clear that reporting criminal acts to eg. the FBI is very risky; if the officer is politically aligned to the politically and societaly dominant party, and you are not, you're toast.
Especially if said person is an LEO in a country famous for above-the-law LEOs.
Principles are easy to have from the safety of a keyboard. How many of us would keep them in a real world situation?
If the sheriff said gimme the iPads or I'll blow your brains out, that's another story. But I guess that's not what happened here.
FWIW, it would be just as bad of a look if instead the head of security’s wife was engaged in this scheme at her own workplace. And Apple would be 100% correct to still terminate their relationship for fear of bad press
Your question is difficult to answer, but I ask in return: Is a general propensity to engage in an act sufficient to excuse it?
I will concede that "every person has their price". At some point we cross the line from "asking for a bribe" to "engaging in extortion" to "direct threats of violence".
Moyer ran the ethics and business conduct programs. Is there an expectation that someone in that position does have a durable set of principles, and a price higher than a CCW permit?
The appropriate consequences for the involved parties are, of course, along completely different ethical lines.
>> But this isn't that.
In many countries everyone has to pay a facilitation fee (aka bribe) for routine govt actions.
These are for things like:
obtaining permits, licenses, or other official documents to qualify a person to do business in a foreign country; processing governmental papers, such as visas and work orders; providing police protection, mail pickup and delivery, or scheduling inspections associated with contract performance or inspections related to transit of goods across country; providing phone service, power and water supply, loading and unloading cargo, or protecting perishable products or commodities from deterioration; etc
How in the WORLD to folks giving legal advice here not have even this basic understanding of the law?
But also, it seems like it's a bit of a grey area:
"As a general principle of the Foreign Corrupt Practises Act (FCPA), in the United States, firms and businesses in the US are prohibited from making any payments to foreign officials for routine governmental action. However, any payment that does not effect the decision of the foreign official is not considered a bribe. For example, a businessman in the States may make a payment to a government official to expedite a deal or transaction. Such a payment is considered a grease payment (and not a bribe), which is lawful under FCPA.
In this regard, it becomes necessary to understand when an amount paid turns from a grease payment to a bribe, which is illegal under law. This is a grey area under the law which is still to be clarified. There are numerous factors that could play a role in demarcation between the two, which include: the amount of payment, the frequency of the payment, the status/level of the foreign official to whom the payment has been made, the outcome of the case regarding which the payment was made, etc."[1]
The training at my company is pretty strict about never making any "grease payments", so certainly there's some doubt.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Act#...
Can I ask if you are an attorney - because this is absolutely 100% false. You are spreading misinformation here.
If your employer fires you for paying a facilitation fee to advance a routine govt action or travel then you should absolutely sue them.
From the usual IANAL crowd: "I saw it on the internet, so it must be true."
And if you're an actual lawyer, internet rules dictate that anything you know is trumped by a Wikipedia link.
Or, perhaps it's that those editors who distort other areas of the wiki to fit their political biases aren't interested in law. It could be either or both (or neither, but I'm biased towards myself;)
Like issuing a concealed-carry permit to a non-felon ex-Navy corporate executive.
OP describes a ransom, not a bribe. Charge the govt official who demanded the ransom, not the citizen entrapped in the scheme.
The sheriff deputies fucked up. The CCW applicants fucked up. Everyone got caught and everyone is going to suffer the consequences.
Whether it's legal or illegal is almost aside the point, someone can choose between either breaking some arcane, unenforced US law, or potentially spending months/years in some hellhole of a third-world jail or prison while the Embassy slowly negotiates a release. And in some places, that's assuming someone doesn't just "disappear" or get robbed and shot on the spot.
It'd often be better to get fired and federally charged than to risk what your company advocates. In a worst case scenario, at least you know what you're getting, at least you'll have competent legal defense, and at least there will be a high -- virtually unprovable -- standard of evidence required for a federal jury to indict.
That would be conspiracy. No, absolutely this does not happen. Now, at the micro level it does happen that individual executives rope their employees in to fraud at their direction. But absoutely no "company" anywhere "advises" its employees to pay bribes as a matter of policy.
> What is the Difference Between Bribery and Facilitation Payments?
> Facilitation payments are different from bribes in that they’re offered or solicited in return for a service a person or a company is entitled to receive. In contrast, bribes are offered in return for undue and illegal advantage. [0]
Do we know if these executives were deserving of the CCP? It would appear they were, from the post’s link:
> Sung—second in rank only to Sheriff Laurie Smith in the sheriff’s office—is accused of deliberately holding back four concealed carry weapons (CCW) permits for Apple’s security team until the Cupertino-based corporation agreed to donate 200 iPads worth about $75,000 to the Sheriff’s Office, Rosen said. Sung and Jensen allegedly worked together to solicit the exchange of CCW permits for the tech donation from Apple.
The much larger corruption seems to be on the LEO side to me. Which of the two actors swore an oath to uphold the law?
If it wasn’t for clickbait, the headline would focus on the LEO.
[0] https://www.ganintegrity.com/compliance-glossary/facilitatio...
There's little difference between bribes and highway banditry in some places, and not playing along will very likely not end well for you.
Recourse in cases of abuses of power is already hit-and-miss in so-called "civilized" countries. I wouldn't count on it in countries that can't even agree on who's in charge somewhere.
It's one thing to be a boy scout, but it's another entirely to get accused of severe, frivolous charges while abroad, or to drive up to an armed cartel/militant roadblock, and then say "I'm sorry, bribes are against corporate policy and illegal in my country" when asked for $50.
Shame on any company for creating a clause like that and risking their employees lives instead of just remaining silent on the matter. Make no mistake, bribery isn't optional in many parts of the world, it's a robbery by a uniformed official.
A bribe needed to get a lucrative contract for your company: not ok.
Paying off a local cop so he won't throw you in jail for no reason: totally ok.
The US is concerned with preventing the former, not the latter. I would be surprised if any US company is advocating people pay the first kind of bribe, at least publicly, as that's quite illegal in the US (I'm sure it happens, but as quietly as possible). But I would not be surprised if US companies tell employees to pay the second kind of bribe, as well they should.
Courtside tickets to an NBA game? Not okay.
"Your vehicle does not have the permits. You need to come with me" at gunpoint in sub-Saharan Africa? That's a matter of life and death, potentially.
So lets dial back the absolutes, huh?
Then we get pulled over in Mexico with a VP with us and it's a totally different reality on the ground.
Most companies want you to pay the cop to not take you to jail on fake charges.
The don't want you to pay the M. Resources (or at least not officially).
International Conglomerates keep 'Sunshine Funds' - i.e. money off the regular books in overseas accounts for this activity.
It's part of doing business in 1/2 the countries around the world, literally impossible to do business without it.
jbuzbee is referring to international travel training you go through if you apply to travel to/through a "red"/"restricted" country. They are not referring to the generic "don't take a bribe for a contract" training.
Not always. If the local laws don't classify it legally as bribe you can pay it and even claim it on your taxes as cost of doing business.
However, if you need to pay a "facilitation fee" to exit the country (called routine govt action) that is not about securing business or getting a competitive advantage such as a customs waiver, then paying the fee may be permitted (for a number of reasons).
What I think US folks don't realize is some dept's overseas basically pay their staff through these unofficial fees, they set some rates for service, but nothing goes through treasury and no enabling legislation exists. But they also don't get money from their treasury to operate (or its stolen by folks above them) so that's how they keep operating.
In Russia prior to USSR, facilitation fees is how all officials earned money, that was the official policy. That's only 100 years ago that is was not even considered corruption / bribery. Obviously that disease is still festering in Russia and the country as a whole is paying a grave toll for it.
Lastly, do keep in mind that as a local you can probably tell is a payment can be declined withoit repercussions, but as a foreigner you don't really know.
"Call Legal if the police officer in Nicaragua is threatening to throw you in jail without arrest until you give him cash" is a reasonably sure way to put yourself at further risk/in grave peril.
It will take one person dying because of this policy for apple to be sued to hell and back.
Oh so they are stuck somewhere during a business trip? In that case, they would contact their company for assistance.
Alternatively, it's just a job. The penalties tend to go as far as firing the employee. If it's a life and death situation that's an ok outcome. I mean, if we insist in discussing these convoluted scenarios...
American Express GBT, BCD Travel, CWT, FCM Travel, they all offer it. It's usually expensed as "Consulting" or "Advisory", however never separated in invoiced line-items.
Every single large tech organisation has made lip-service commitments publicly to not accept bribes, but also operate in countries where it's the absolute norm. How is that handled? Through an intermediary.
Tomato, tohmahtoh
I used to work for a company with a similar policy and training. "Airport tax" was how it was expensed, even if you weren't flying.
It's good that you and I both live in countries like that; but, in some countries, you report your bribes on taxes, they're so common.
From the other comments in this thread, it's suggesting that the CCW permit process in California is very bad and broken and these bribes have been an illegal method of actually getting CCW permits.
By the way Apples head of security isn’t the only one. Nanci Pelosi has had a CCW for a long time while simultaneously fighting to suppress gun ownership in her own city and state.
While I agree it sucks that some rich and powerful people seem to live by a different set of rules, it's not like she had a permit just for kicks.
I wasn't debating the merits of the CA shall issue policy.
In other words, don't pick a fight where there isn't one.
No one was arguing otherwise. The comments you were replying to were clearly about the hypocrisy of anti-gun politicians.
> In other words, don't pick a fight where there isn't one.
Indeed.
But I’m not rich and powerful, so.
I recall Sherif telling my dad if he shot someone, to make sure the body was in the house pointing toward the inside. That way he wouldn’t be arrested.
So we were under constant assault, and if we tried to defend ourselves we had to make sure everything was “perfect” so as not to get arrested.
Complete insanity.
Moved away as fast as possible.
I’m not allowed to defend myself. At least not with a big check list to ensure I don’t goto jail.
I recall advise like keep a bat and glove in car at all times. Glove is the “reason” you have something to defend yourself with.
Nonsense games to protect yourself because some Pampered people don’t think you should be allowed to.
Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.
Can you give any examples of those countries? Countries with high amount of bribing tend to also be countries with large off-the-record economies, therefore I am skeptical of that proposition.
FYI in the US, you can claim tax deductibility on bribes paid in foreign countries iff they are not legally classified as bribes in the respective local laws.
> Can you give any examples of those countries?
Germany used to be like this, but it they changed the law many years ago. I don't know if there are any such countries remaining. The article below is from 1995, when bribes were still tax-deductible.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1995-08-06/germany-w...
Extortion is mainly demanded from businesses, but local residents may also have to pay “taxes” or renta to access their homes. No business sector is spared, and goods and professional services may be demanded instead of, or in addition to money. Large businesses and transport operators have dedicated employees to negotiate extortion fees, which are built into >their financial models. Implicit risk starts as soon as someone is targeted to pay, and it rises if they are unable to pay or the renta charged increases. Those who refuse to pay are killed.
https://www.internal-displacement.org/sites/default/files/in...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Practices_Ac...
> Regarding payments to foreign officials, the act draws a distinction between bribery and facilitation or "grease payments", which may be permissible under the FCPA, but may still violate local laws. The primary distinction is that grease payments or facilitation payments are made to an official to expedite his performance of the routine duties he is already bound to perform.
Such a payment is considered a grease payment (and not a bribe), which is lawful under FCPA.
(Looks like they're Australian: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25194634)
https://www.ag.gov.au/system/files/2020-09/factsheet-2-the-f...
Upon giving it a little more thought it turns out that only 2 of the top 10 oil companies are American. So, yeah, my bad.
It was an absurd experience. The training material kept repeating that I absolutely could not bribe a non-US official. However, in my country ALL officials are non-US and bribery is also illegal so what were they trying to tell me with this "non-US" criterion?
The message I got from training course is that bribery is bad (I knew that), bribery is illegal (I knew that) but it's okay if I bribe a US official (really?).
So a new captain comes on board and first port they get in he refuses to do this - they refuse to let them in the port - they were out at sea without resupply 20 days and running out of food... the company had to fly in a different captain to relieve this guy and he told me by day 2 weeks in they were already joking around how the captain could have an accident ...
Well at one point he went on about thanking local government officials, and that he would be sure to give them gifts for approving the project.
The translator wisely left that part out.
Confused, the CEO later asked why, then was shocked to learn that bribery is a bad thing in America.
Google Fu is weak, so haven’t been able to find the original source. (May have been a Japanese language book)
Well. At least openly talking about it.
Pretending it doesn't work in Americaa is ostrich syndrome. Just the first google result to prove my point. https://www.usnews.com/news/elections/articles/2020-10-22/tr...
The State or the Feds don't issue CCWs in California. Chief local law enforcement officers only, which means sheriffs and police chiefs.
> The State or the Feds don't issue CCWs in California. Chief local law enforcement officers only, which means sheriffs and police chiefs.
No, but they do investigate other LEO agencies for corruption. See: the article.
Meanwhile Apple is short dozens of security guards to have a full detail necessary to protect the lives and wellbeing of the highest ranking executives in the country.
The head of security at Apple is charged with protecting the lives and wellbeing of the top execs.
He performed exactly as the incentive structure recommends.
Which laws were being overlooked by the bribe is not relevant.
The problem is that, at least in many jurisdictions, gun permits basically only exist as a means for police to solicit bribes. There's literally an entire industry of people whose job is bribing police departments to get gun permits. C.f.: https://www.google.com/search?q=nyc+concealed+carry+bribes
This kind of reminds me of the UC admissions bribery scandal. There are legally approved ways to bribe schools and politicians, so if one is inclined to do so, at least follow them. But in both cases the idiots in question have gone about it in a flagrantly illegal fashion. I am not condoning the practice, but merely recognizing the system as it actually functions.
That provides huge incentives for the most corrupt to rise to control the institutions they’re supposedly policing.
It would be more analogous if the donations were somehow made to the Sherriff department's budget.
In practice the may-issue policy has repeatedly proven to be an irresistible opportunity for graft. Despite this some states continue to maintain may-issue policies, including California and New York.
They implement it as a wink and nod end run around the 14th amendment. The whole purpose is so that the states can play dumb when the towns "accidentally" install sheriffs/police chiefs who turn out to be racist and deny all the irish/blacks/latinos their rights.
It's a way of allowing rich limousine liberals to get security guards with guns, while denying the common person the same right.
"The Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act (LEOSA) is a United States federal law, enacted in 2004, that allows two classes of persons—the 'qualified law enforcement officer' and the 'qualified retired or separated law enforcement officer'—to carry a concealed firearm in any jurisdiction in the United States, regardless of state or local laws, with certain exceptions."
Often those bodyguards are ex-NYPD, which is how they got the concealed permit in the first place.
The whole point is demonstrating a need for a concealed weapon, not qualification or competency.
To be clear, the argument that is being played out is not on owning weapons, that has been decided. The argument that is being played out is does the spirit of the 2A incorporate a conferred right to carry in public. History and precedent dating back to the early 1800's says it does not. But there is that tricky "bare" part in the 2A as the spirit of the law would assume that they were not just protecting the right to "bare" them on one's own private property, given the pre clause about people needed to be armed so that the militias had a good supply of armed men, to ensure a free state.
On a related note, I see magazine restrictions as a more direct affront to the 2nd amendment. If they stand, then it can be abstracted to the amount (any amount) of ammunition can be restricted, which means the most restrictive states can and will outlaw everything, but single shot weapons to comply with the letter of the 2A rather than the spirit.
Restricting CCWs in a manner that would absolutely not fly for free speech, voting, or some other right isn't the issue. The issue is that some states have set up discretionary license issuing schemes that in practice violate the 14th amendment.
There are restrictions on free speech in public, I cannot yell fire into a crowd, I cannot incite a riot, I cannot tell people to vote for Jo Jorgensen while I am waiting in line to vote. Same with voting, I cannot vote twice even if my freedom of expression wants to.
This issue at hand is with those rights, they do not logically make sense to extend the spirit of the law via allowing some of those prohibited things via privileges.
This is why the 5th is such a good parallel, because I have an inherent freedom of movement but I don't have an inherent right to do it via the public roads, using an automobile. I have the privilege to do so via a licence. Now I can own an auto, I can offroad all over my property, that is my right but as soon as I hit the public pavement it becomes a privilege.
going back to the first, I can yell fire in my house all day long that is my right, but if I pick up the phone and utilize the public networks via dialing 911 and yell fire it is a very different situation. Again, it just does not make sense for the 1st to have some of it's limitations extended into privileges.
My overarching point is the 2A issue is not settled, many tend to take one stance or the other, but it is very much in flux, that will decide if the 14A issue is really a moot point.
You can have long guns, stored properly in NYC afaik.
It's quite involved and expensive ($200 tax per round on anti-tank rounds just to start with), but it's not impossible. Just prohibitive in cost.
If that were so clear, we wouldn't have all of the litigation and laws around the 2A as we do.
So much for equal rights, some I guess are more equal than others!
Ask New Jersey. They explicitly allow retired LEO to have CCP. Meanwhile the law is so complicated and it's so unusual for even security guards to get a CCP that they sometimes get arrested anyway even with the permit: https://reason.com/2020/03/10/new-jersey-security-guard-arre...
This is phrased like a legal argument but it's missing all the important parts.
Rights are for everyone. Government privileges always end up favoring particular groups for personal or political reasons. To demote a right to a privilege is to prefer this kind of favoritism over equal protection of the laws.
If "blue" states just didn't like guns, then they would simply ban all CCW permits. But they do like guns -- as long as the "right" kind of people have them and the guns look the "right" way.
http://www.joebrower.com/PHILE_PILE/PIX/RKBA/CCW_shall_issue...
Now, that map is 18 years old and things may have changed a little since then, but I doubt it's changed much. This is why, as mentioned above, "may issue" is ripe for graft and corruption.
There's a pesky amendment that prevents that so they settle for restricting "undesirables" (a definition which is a moving target over time).
It was introduced by a Republican, garnered bipartisan support, and enacted by (then governor) Ronald Reagan, with support from the NRA, with the espoused claim of "not harming a single honest citizen."
Arguably, 1967 is not today, but even to people like myself, who try my absolute damnedest to look for non-racial motives where others ascribe racially motivated malice, it looks like it was just designed to disenfranchise Black Panthers of the same 2A right as their white peers.
Here is a picture that seems, almost, to come from am alternate reality:
https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-...
"Throughout the late 1960s, the militant black nationalist group used their understanding of the finer details of California’s gun laws to underscore their political statements about the subjugation of African-Americans. In 1967, 30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, “The time has come for black people to arm themselves.”"
...
"The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions."
And it's dubious that this is true for other regulations against "assault weapons".
One is that the AWB wasn't a racist provision of the overall bill. The gun control measure was not rooted in racism.
The second is that the bill as a whole wasn't "rooted" in racism. It certainly was a bad bill that had terrible consequences, and we should undue a lot of the damage it did, but the intent of the bill was, in part, to help the black community (and it had support from many people in the black community at the time). Horribly misguided in hindsight though.
The crime bill was designed to stop the "super predators" (to quote two democrat presidential candidates). It was a racist depiction of black men. It included a provision to outlaw scary black guns. You can't really divorce the two and pretend they're not related.
On a side note, the nice thing about sheriffs being elected is they don't have to listen to a god damn thing the state tells them to do (within confines of law obviously). They work directly for the people of their community.
The criteria should be clear and contestable in court. Like it or not, it's a constitutional right and the law should be "shall issue" (unless good reason not to -- and I'm all for reasonable "good reasons not to").
This is why even as far back as the early 1800's it was not uncommon for local sheriff's to mandate a leave your guns at the sheriffs post at the edge of town policies. Yet, the local barkeep could still have a shotgun under the counter. Town was the public square, where the local bar, while a public establishment, was a private proprietorship.
Many of these type of rights extend from the pre-US castle doctrine laws which summed up shortly basically conferred the concept, that a person is king of their castle, the states rights should be significantly curtailed, when it comes to a personal private property. More modern day utilization tends to just boil it down to self defence, in ones private property, but historically it held a view which helped shape many of the personal liberties that were incorporated into the Bill of Rights.
Since nearly the foundation of the USA public possession has always been seen as a privilege extended by the state. In earlier times this was generally pathwork local law and the local sheriff view of guns carried in their town. Now it is generally more formalized via a state based licencing scheme.
A good read on rulings that imply it is a privilege:
https://www.governing.com/topics/public-justice-safety/tns-c...
Converse to the last paragraph though is that while precedence and the lack of challenges early on to public restriction lead to the concept of public possession being a privilege, the subject is now in modern day being battled out in the courts, and there have been some rulings ignoring history policy precedence
A good read on rulings that imply it is a right:
https://reason.com/2014/12/05/is-concealed-carry-a-privilege...
With all that being said, may issue is fraught with corruption and unnecessarily restrictive, in my state we have a shall issue and it works well, especially coupled with our strong castle doctrine laws. So well, that at the entry of my state an anti-gun group put up a billboard that said "Visitor's Warning - Florida residents can use deadly force". The billboards actually has the opposite effect than the group had intended so they removed them.
I would be a proponent of each state going to a shall issue system and extending the public privilege to a national recognition and reciprocity system, much like the state's driver licence systems are. That being said, it's fairly consistent that the state has almost since the beginning seen public possession as a privilege extended and not an absolute right.
A good read on the subject and precedence for public gun carry, from a purely historic perspective is this article:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gun-control-old-west-...
on a completely tangential rant, class 3 FFL transfers, require a sheriff's signature and are just as rife with corruption and cronyism. I used to live in a county where the local sheriff was very vocal about the fact that he would not sign for class 3's, yet every deputy or buddy, cousin or uncle had one. I would love to see the local law enforcement sign off requirement, for Class 3 be removed and rather just make it a duty to inform local law enforcement that one is in possession of a class 3.
Right or privilege, it should not be conditioned by bribes. And when a LEO is involved in a bribery case their punishment should start at several times that of the other (non-authority) person because it seems like that right/privilege comes at the end of extortion.
It is also notable, that gun control also fell under that same set of "State's rights" contributing to the original Civil War, and to hell with the well soap boxed dolts who insist that the only issue the Civil War was predicated on was Slavery. It wasn't. It was only indirectly so because the framework for expansion of Slavery was seen as falling under the banner of State's rights at the time, just as much as gun control itself was also seen as falling under State's rights. It's not a dog-whistle, it's what it bloody was.
Tangent aside, it basically boils down to the fundamental division of "rural v. Urban" in the United States, and to be frank, I side with the ruralites. Just because a bunch of people gather together in one place should not generate some emergent privilege that everyone loses an explicitly granted right except law enforcement. Period. Gun control almost universally arises out of some group being uncomfortable with another group having guns, and the group that's uncomfortable tends to be fine and dandy letting the authorities strut around with them, and would be unlikely to carry anyway; much like how pro public-transit folk seem to be more than okay with onerous vehicle regulation, but balk when the same laws or tenets are applied to them. Better to just not throw anyone under the bus at all.
Call me a yokel if you want. I've seen too much flung in the way of wrapping up other folk's rights in my lifetime in the name of public safety with no signs of a return in sight. Until I see some loosening up, or some honest give and take, I"m in the "not one more inch" camp.
With all that being said, I see magazine capacities, foregrip bans, scary gun cause it is plastic and black and those kind of rulings as a direct affront to the 2A because they apply to stuff in my home, I would be a felon if I lived in those states, literally one day I would be legal and the next I am a felon. With no recourse, even the Automatic Weapons Ban in the 80's allowed for the FFL 3 classification and the tax stamp to keep the weapons one already owned and while I am not advocating for a grandfathering of reasonable capacity magazines, and black rifles I am citing that in the AWB there was at least a path to keep your existing stuff legal.
I believe that I am level headed (at least I like to believe that I am), because I am first and foremost a pacifist but I acknowledge the logic that if someone is trying to harm you, you have a right to not be harmed. I respect devout pacifist and totally understand their logic, that the principle of pacifism is more important to them than self defense because violence flows from a few wells, fear/insecurity, despair/desperation, anger and jealousy. They believe to neutralize violence you are not violent against those that are in one of those states, rather one should be merciful on their them due to their torment, and that mercy is show in love for them and all people. I honestly admire that level of pacifism but don't know if I can ever get there, I get it, I accept that these are the primary drivers of violence but it's hard to be that principled and understanding while standing down the barrel of a gun. As VanZant so aptly put it in "gimme 3 steps", "Well it ain't no fun staring straight down a 44". I may be able to in a situation involving only myself, but with my wife and kids I just cannot see myself getting there. Thus I only carry a firearm when I am with my family. I used to be anti-handgun when I was young and would have been fine with a ban on them. It was not until later in life that I realized that people will literally, pick up a stick and kill someone else, so while handguns primary purpose is human on human violence, I realize that it is just an object and ascribing the violence to the object only blurs what we all need to fix as humans and that is man's inhumanity to man.
I'm not sure what you think "bear" means in "the right to keep and bear arms."
The Constitutional right to own a firearm doesn't mean much if you're not allowed to have it outside of your home.
And that is the current arguments being made, as their is the implication that by the preamble about the state needing the people to be armed to supply the militias if needed, that if they were called into the militia they would almost certainly not be baring arms on their property. We also have to take into account history, and historically the government did not strictly control open lands they were considered open lands or communal so pre-1900's carry laws being what they where, generally only applied to entering and leaving town, pretty much everywhere else no one has beef with someone having a gun. Times have changed, federal uninhabited land is shut off from the people for the most part and rights generally don't extend there anymore, as well town is a whole lot bigger now. These are arguments being made in support that the framers actually meant the right was "in public"
It's not a matter of what I think it means, it's a matter of what the supreme court thinks it means. So far they have been a mixed bag, the inherent self defense ruling was good but honestly should have been a no brainer. Given that one of the founding fathers was killed in a dual, and duals up until the 1900's where pretty much considered mutual self defense.
I think the ninth court hosed the decision on the Federal Assault Weapons Ban as this directly affected guns of similar features but different looks one could own or features that could be placed on guns. None of that really bothered me as a Browning BAR 300 win-mag with a modified magazine for high capacity would absolutely dominate the battlefield, but the key there is the precedent because by being able to ban pieces of the gun (because they only recognize the receiver as the legal gun), they have set the path for the current bans on magazine capacity and that is concerning because if it stands based on precedent, the 7 round magazines restriction, can legally be reduced to 1 round magazines, in effect only legalizing single shot weapons and while I know in the movies and video games, everyone dies from the first shot, the reality is a higher percentage of people survive shoutouts than die from them, even after receiving multiple gunshot wounds.
I wish people had a better sense of this earlier social arrangement.
It was the most conservative of approaches to gun possession and was imposed by the town elders who wanted to regulate and order behavior in the public sphere.
Now we find ourselves in bizarro world where firearms politics are exactly flipped: a free wheeling "let-do" policy is championed by "conservatives" and a highly regulated policy is championed by "liberals".
In reality, a historical perspective shows us that the ownership of modern weapons by average citizens is off the charts liberal. That is absolutely where it sits on a political spectrum of rights. It is, historically, the prerogative of the most conservative and reactionary interests to prohibit/restrict arms.
All that to say: I prefer the conservative approach. I, too, was very young once and very excited to exercise my rights and privileges ... I open-carried regularly, had a CCW, etc., and the result was a lot of discomfort and bad feelings. Carrying a firearm is a provocative act and it makes sense that conservative actors in a community would try to keep that at bay.
I think some of that has to do with the everreal presence of government in today's day and age. In the wild west, well it was the wild west. Other than the long arm of the law there was very little government or regulation, people did not feel the need that the founding fathers did. In all reality they were pretty free.
Contrast that with today and we have moved more and more issues to the federal level, we have pretty much abandoned the republic for an empire and now we are pushing social issues and regulation to a federal level. This does not end well, it never has.
When we has 50 strong independent governments that had more to do with peoples day to day lives and the federal government just stepped into the states business or rights issues, people had 50 shots at finding a representative government. Not so today, as more and more, the states (governmentally) look like cookie cutters of one another. I think this has set the "all or nothing", "I am not giving one inch" mentality that pervades discussion today, on almost every subject and it is coming from both sides. At a certain point, one side or the other is going to believe they need to stand up to federal government, because they no longer have a representative government and the ones that have guns tend to be of the mentality that those chickens are coming home to roost for their side.
To be honest even classic liberalism is dead, both are progressives when it comes to free trade, and unification of regulations across the globe.
Driving is also a privilege, yet no one has to bribe anyone to get a drivers license.
I believe the state of the law is that either concealed carry or open carry must be available. They can't both be may-issue, but one can be if the other isn't.
And I tend to agree that that's enough to satisfy the argument "it's a constitutional right".
1.The tricky bit is knowing the right amount of the bribe to pay.
Pay a Senator or a member of the House too little and you have made a powerful enemy.
Pay too much and they figure that they have a sucker that they can keep milking. And of course, you have also wasted a couple of extra million that could have been directed to another Senator....
2.The bribes are structured as payments via "lobbyists" or as "campaign donations"
3.In every country bribes are structured just well enough to evade local scrutiny.
Thus in Indonesia it is suitcases of cash.
In the US it is directorships of companies or well paying board jobs for children of politicians or investments in a politicians son-in-laws hedge fund.
(And a difference with the CEO, that you probably missed, is that they have more likely than not done these kind of bribes themselves).
...but the bribing and the situation described (including similar calculations) goes on every day, in every single country, since forever.
So to compare it to conspiracy theory takes a lot of gullibility on the good intentions, clean hands, and lawful operating of businesses, politicians, local officials, and/or the rich. Or maybe a better word would be "naivety".
This is not "Elvis is Alive", "The KKK killed Kennedy" or "PizzaGate".
This is all too common, everyday, corruption.
In the EU it's the same situation as well. I mean this situation [0] with Neelie Kroes is quite suspect as well, isn't it?
>Taxi app Uber, which continues to battle regulatory clamp downs and legal confrontations in Europe, has appointed a former VP of the European Union’s executive arm, the European Commission, to its public policy advisory board as it looks to grease the gearbox of its regional fortunes.
The ex-VP in question, former digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes — who stepped down from her role in the European Union’s executive body in November 2014, after serving a five-year term in digital policy (and some 10 years in all as a European Commissioner) — was a vocal supporter of Uber during her time in post.
Prior to leaving office in 2014, for example, Kroes loudly condemned a ban of Uber in Belgium, publicly proclaiming that “Uber is 100% welcome in Brussels and everywhere else as far as I am concerned.”
I believe this kind of corruption is endemic in the Western world. For most "normal" voters this kind of corruption is quite invisible I believe, in contrast to people being payed directly a suitcase of money.
---
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/06/uber-appoints-former-ec-vp...
New York is a may issue state which generally/usually means a local law enforcement official will make a judgment call. Some have a blanken no issue policy, others sometimes waive that blanket no issue policy if they can be persuaded.
This sort of thing won't ever stop because of a few convictions, same deal with the college admissions scandal. It just raises the price.
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2017/04/25/nypd-gun-license-bri...
I can definitely see how some people get suckered into bribes sometimes (especially with armed, intimidating police), but it doesn't seem like that is the case here.
That isn’t a bribe, it’s extortion.
As an aside it’s hilarious that Apple wants concealed carry permits for its staff while replacing the gun emoji with a water pistol. Just goes to show a corporation’s marketing is nothing to do with what it really believes.
Personally, I chose to live in shall-issue states.
I'm in a similar situation, actually. I had a trooper lie in court and even admit to it in the complaint investigation, but the investigator (another trooper) said it must be a misunderstanding. I'm curious how intentionally lying to cover up your mistake (exculpatory evidence) is a misunderstanding as a civil rights violation under Brady v MD, but I also don't want to get 'suicided'.
The part which is subjective is deputized to instructors, and one can shop around for a willing one.
The moral hazard you're alluding to is completely absent.
(How do you tell the difference? Well, as in this case, usually people leave some sort of evidence, and the legal system has a process for demanding evidence and evaluating it. It's not perfect, but it's certainly not unenforceable.)
If they're applied in an unequal way, of course that's different.
As a stupid but illustrative hypothetical example, if the official decides each morning whether he will approve all CCW applications he sees that day or none of them based on a die roll before leaving home, and then unilaterally changes it a month later to go based on whether the last digit of the local CBS affiliate's high temperature forecast from the 7am newscast is odd or even, these stupid rules and rule changes would be completely compliant with the equal protection clause.
I don't believe the legislature has to specify the criteria used, if they explicitly give the local officials discretion, but their criteria do have to have some rational objective.
If he didn’t pay the bribe there would have been nothing to report.
It's actually pretty common for bribes to be requested by the official - the first answer at https://www.quora.com/What-should-I-do-if-the-customs-office... has a description of how this sort of thing usually works.
The only people in the wrong here are the police .
The Bay Area and New York are notorious for withholding permits because it creates artificial scarcity, and off-duty cops are the only ones able to fill the demand.
Apple or no Apple, no one in America should be deprived of their Constitutional rights. I'm more concerned that authoritarian states like California can get away with depriving the people of our explicit rights under American law than I am with people paying bribes just to exercise those rights.
I’m not following your logic.
California's gun laws are pretty blatantly unconstitutional, even without the bribery.
Even if you disagree with concealed carry, 2/3 of the counties in CA will issue you a permit no problem that allows you to carry statewide. There is no reasonable argument for not issuing permits here.
I'd argue that the state is slightly authoritarian by allowing local officials such discretion, but that's more a matter of taste. However, if I was arrogant enough to think the Bay Area, LA and San Diego were representative of the entire state in terms of their approach to gun permits and this is actually not the case, then I apologize.
> Which, I'd point out, doesn't make much sense given that it is in fact the State of California which is bringing the charges against these people in the sheriffs dept for demanding bribes in exchange for a constitutionally protected government service.
Interesting framing. But the people who should have been entitled to these services and were coerced into paying bribes are also facing charges. The state's foremost goal appears be defending its own authority zealously, and worrying about things like legal rights after the dust settles.
More people were allowed to pursue the "life" option in the Declaration of Independence. The first item of unalienable rights our forefathers stated all people had.
What do you do when two rights directly infringe upon eachother?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...
California is 23rd in homicide rate.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality...
The 'typical' murder involves people that know each other and has a motive. Loose firearm regulations enable mass shootings [1][2] which are more indiscriminate.
Everyone has the right to bear arms but what do we do when that infringes on other peoples right to life? I think it's a cogent question.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_homicid...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-looser-a-states-gun-laws-the...
Mass shootings are a rounding errors and should not be used to motivate public policy. Catering to asinine edge cases like that is why we all have to take off our shoes when we fly.
If you want people to murder each other less then you need to reduce the size of the illegal economy (mostly drug trafficking) so that those industries can settle their disputes with contracts and court orders instead of violence. Basically everything else pales in comparison to that type of violence.
Clearly the state has laws against murder. And California even has laws that "enhance" sentencing criteria for anyone guilty of using a firearm in the commission of a felony.[1] Also, "mass shootings" are also illegal and are incredibly rare.
Also, I have a right to "property"/"pursuit of happiness" (per Fifth Amendment and the Declaration of Independence). In the Bay Area, if I leave my laptop in my trunk, it'll be stolen. If you leave CA (or at least the Bay Area) and visit a state with slightly looser restrictions, laptops can peacefully spend a dinner in the trunk without being stolen. I have to imagine that criminals who know they have very little to fear from armed ordinary citizens are emboldened by the restrictions on firearm ownership. By the logic above, the correlation (note: I have no data other than the ubiquitous "BRING YOUR LAPTOP INSIDE!!!" signs all over the place in the Bay Area) must mean that the state is neglecting a right to property, therefore the fun restrictions should be relaxed. Or maybe using aggregate statistics and correlations isn't the best approach to analyzing legal-political issues in the absence of a very strong signal.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
https://ccwsafe.com/blog/danger-texas-law-on-deadly-force-de...
I'm always frustrated but amused at how uninformed many of my fellow Americans are about the gun laws here (frequently it's the ones pushing for additional laws).
One of the minor pitfalls of Federalism- I can't keep track of the laws in all 50 states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_Sta...
Just for the sake of comparison, the rule that was struck down in DC v. Heller (which firmly established that the Constitution protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for defense, subject to reasonable regulation by the state) required gun owners to keep their weapons "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" at all times.
Governments do stuff like this all the time. In fact constituents get mad when they don't. The Planning Commission is considered derelict in its duty if it just gives away a building permit without getting something good from the developer in return (park, street cleaning program, extra BMR units, promise to use union labor).
SFMTA considers corporate philanthropy, coverage of unprofitable neighborhoods, and low-income discount programs when deciding who gets the permit to run scooters in San Francisco.
If it is bribery when a government agency asks a permit applicant to spend a bit on the agency's mission, then there's a lot more to prosecute all over the Bay Area.
But at least these things happened in public, through a semi-transparent process of development permits with public consultations. The process is semi-fixed, the incentives are off, but it's not a straight up bribe behind closed doors.
You’re making up stuff about things you don’t know about. Accepting gifts is always an issue in government, and often a serious crime for the employee, regardless of who benefits. Accepting or demanding compensation for official action is corruption, regardless of the beneficiary.
Negotiating public contracts, seeking public benefit, or enforcing requirements related to permitting is not bribery or corruption. You may not like poor people, public access to urban space, or union labor, but community standards based on law are not corruption.
Officials administrating the permitting process have discretion to act. The appointing authority ultimately controls them, and the people ultimately hold them accountable.
City councils are political bodies, and within their jurisdictions are the ultimate authority on what should and should not be allowed.
LEOs are employees of the state, and are meant to follow the dictates of the legislature or other political body that governs them.
If you want to negotiate a legitimate trade of public donation in exchange for a CCW, that needs to be done publicly through democratic and legal processes.
I think both are slimy but neither are corruption, per se, both institutions are serving the public interest.
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco-accused-...
Ironically, the article also compares buses to a “$250,000 fee San Francisco charges taxi operators for a medallion”. That’s a payout to the previous owner with an initial 5% transfer tax, not a fee, and it was actually a big mistake for the city to have made it a payout rather than “value captured” rent to the city (which could be adjusted), since the city is being sued and is about to go to trial for it (https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC18565325).
Where I live building permits are basically shall issue. They're happy to have the development.
Basically every high net worth or highly visible tech CEO has a PSD (really high end folks have a counter-kidnap team on standby).
This is absolutely true. Soliciting a bribe, as a public official, however, is a much (much!) worse crime. And that seems to be what happened here.
Absent more detail, I think I'm willing to buy that Moyer was just a normal corporate executive faced with trying to work around a corrupt bureaucracy. But yeah, more detail could change that.
In some countries, seeking bribes is a crime, but giving in to a demand for bribe is not. That seems fairer. When you became a public official you agreed to perform your job dutifully. If a public official refuses to perform his job unless a citizen provides him with a bribe, then it seems like the citizen was forced into bribery by the public official. How is it then fair to hold the hapless citizen responsible for the crime?
$100K’s of dollars (>> 10% of the total project cost) have been extracted from us by various bureaucratic processes that are outside what is explicitly specified by the law.
I am confident that this would not have happened if we were well politically connected, and had friends that worked at PG&E.
I honestly don’t know if we were “just supposed to know” that we needed to make some specific charitable or political donation or something like that, because no one has explicitly solicited a bribe from us.
If it were legal to offer bribes, I could go online, and search for information on who to pay off, and to what ends.
Even better, California could fix the law to eliminate these gray areas. In the Apple case, they could move from “may issue” to “shall issue”.
In my case, there could be bounds on permit review durations, and also the cost / benefit of “environmental” regulations: if some ask is too expensive homeowners could “buy credits” by doing something else that would be more effective for the same amount of money.
To be clear, the money they extracted from us for “the environment” will substantially increase our carbon footprint, impact on local wildlife and on the watershed — we planned to voluntarily spend that money to mitigate those impacts because we’re extremely concerned about the environment. Now, we’ve been forced to waste it in low impact ways. I’m not upset that we were forced to spend the money. I’m upset it was wasted.
I too would like to erode confidence in our public servants.
Your ideas come across as pretty naive and out of touch with how bribery works in the real world. Which is okay, not everyone is an expert on everything. But your comment would come across a lot better if you had used some tentative language instead of definitive language on a topic it is clear you don't know much about in the real world.
Bribes are rarely solicited in the real world, so that's the first place you theory falls down. I've only rarely had someone say something that could even vaguely be construed as soliciting a bribe. They aren't dumb, after all. Instead what usually happens is you get a run-around for unspecified reasons until you offer the bribe. You submit the paperwork and they tell you it is filled in incorrectly but don't tell you what part is wrong or how to fill it in correctly. The nurse only checks on you once a day until you give her an envelope of cash. The accountants auditing your books ask for receipts of every single everything until take them to dinner and offer them a present for all the hard work they've done so far. The fire department finds all kinds of ways to not certify your new office for occupancy until you give them some "coffee money".
The second problem with you theory of bribery is the offering bribes changes the structure of compensation dramatically. The expectation of receiving bribes becomes part of the expected total compensation for a position. But this gray money -- the delta between official compensation and bribes -- becomes a revenue stream that everyone above you on the hierarchy can and will tap into.
In practice this means you have to pay a huge bribe to get any job. Where I live, to get a job as a police officer, or a nurse, or a flight attendant, you have to pay a bribe to whoever is hiring. Not a small bribe. Like a year of salary. Which means either you come from a family rich enough to have that kind of money laying around or borrow money from a money-lender.
How do you get the money to pay back the money-lender? By taking bribes, of course.
Your boss knows approximately how much you're making in bribes each month and will expect you to pass it along every month. After all, he borrowed a ton of money to pay a bribe to get his promotion and needs to pay off that debt.
And if you're complaining about >10% of the total project cost going to bureaucratic processes, your idea would result in 30% or more of the total project cost going to bribery. Since that's exactly what happens here.
Edit: I just noticed you are also in Vietnam. So sad for such an otherwise lovely place.
Once it became common knowledge that some officials were extracting bribes, it would be simple to jail them.
After all, if I paid a bribe, and it was legal to pay it, but illegal to receive it, I’d certainly document the payment as well as I could.
After the house was built, you can bet I’d try to recoup my funds, and also figuratively burn the county office to the ground by pursuing every option I could in the press and in court.
I don’t think I’m naive as you think. The officials in this area behave exactly as you describe. The difference in my situation is that, if there was concrete evidence of bribery at the planning office, it would be prosecuted and it would make headlines (just as the bribery case in the article did.)
Local governments that withhold building permits and corruption at PG&E have become so politically contentious that the state government has had to repeatedly intervene.
Slightly offhand, I wonder how this will alter Apple’s security approach down the line. Not whether they believe in security, but the right road to get there if there’s a shakeup.
Really? HN has been a den of Apple, Microsoft, etc worship for a while now. In another thread on the frontpage, people are encouraging people to buy Apple TV. It's partly the social media PR teams these companies hire, it's the advertising and it's also the type of people HN attracts. It's sickening but what can you do.
Oh sure, there's 0 difference between proprietary black box software and free/libre open source... give me a break.
Tech's Great-Man theory has society idolizing Silicon Valley monopolizers:
"In the movie Steve Jobs, a character asks, “So how come 10 times in a day I read ‘Steve Jobs is a genius?’” The great man reputation that envelops Jobs is just part of a larger mythology of the role that Silicon Valley, and indeed the entire U.S. private sector, has played in technology innovation. We idolize tech entrepreneurs like Jobs, and credit them for most of the growth in our economy. But University of Sussex economist Mariana Mazzucato, who has just published a new U.S. edition of her book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, makes a timely argument that it is the government, not venture capitalists and tech visionaries, that have been heroic.
“Every major technological change in recent years traces most of its funding back to the state,” says Mazzucato. Even “early stage” private-sector VCs come in much later, after the big breakthroughs have been made. For example, she notes, “The National Institutes of Health have spent almost a trillion dollars since their founding on the research that created both the pharmaceutical and the biotech sectors–with venture capitalists only entering biotech once the red carpet was laid down in the 1980s. We pretend that the government was at best just in the background creating the basic conditions (skills, infrastructure, basic science). But the truth is that the involvement required massive risk taking along the entire innovation chain: basic research, applied research and early stage financing of companies themselves.” The Silicon Valley VC model, which has typically dictated that financiers exit within 5 years or so, simply isn’t patient enough to create game changing innovation." [1]
> what has this place come to indeed
Indeed. And why a throwaway?
Well, it does make a legal difference as entrapment would invalidate the legal case against him. (I have no evidence this is what happened here--just pointing out a poor choice of words!)
What a silly thing to say.
Whether or not you initiated a bribe does not defend your participation in it. True
But ignoring the balance of power for, what appears to be, a reason to hate on Apple is just daft. Shockingly so.
A police offer demanding a bribe is not the same as a police officer accepting one. Just ignores the entire social dynamic of humans. Power dynamics are the central theme of human relationships. This is just a weird form of victim blaming, though not for a moment am I suggesting anyone is innocent here.
The Undersheriff should be crucified as a means of deterrence. You can't have positions of power occupied by those seeking to corrupt them. Which, I think, is not far off your argument, you just want to seem to needlessly drag Apple into this.
They weren't involved, beyond their employee basically stealing their stock. Is that somehow their fault? Should we charge them with criminal negligence for trusting someone? That's not going to have long term consequences for whistleblowers at all
At the end of the event, each panelist was offered a Starbucks gift card by the event organizers.
Rick gave his Starbucks gift card to me, saying, "since I'm here as a public official I can't accept this. Otherwise it would be counted as a bribe."
Wild.
He could have refused the gift. But not sure what California’s rule is, but I expect that accepting nominal gifts under a low dollar threshold is allowed.
* seem ethical by not "accepting" gift
* give the worthless gift away and make the recipient be in your debt
That seems really high to me and seems that it’s completely legal for this official to get $500 from each applicant, given that it’s done in a deniable manner.
It’s $50 for a federal employee [1].
[0] https://www.fppc.ca.gov/content/dam/fppc/NS-Documents/TAD/Pu...
[1] https://ask.fedweek.com/federal-government-policies/rules-gi...
I have an amateur radio license for no particular reason. I haven't really used it in a decade but that doesn't stop me from renewing. I could imagine folks holding a CCW mostly just because they can.
Personally. I don’t want to live in a place where people are expecting fire.
A CCW isn’t about “feeling” safe. It’s about recognizing that the police/government might not be able to protect you (and has no duty to) if you need it.
It is your civil right to keep and bear arms. I’m not sure you would buy the your own argument if it was on any other right besides guns.
2. Stopping is the goal, it’s just that sometimes that means killing... but...
3. Is killing is always wrong? Almost every society and religion has a concept of justified homicide. Sometimes people can act in a way that forfeits their right to walk among us. I don’t accept “guns can kill” is an argument against guns. It’s basically the feature that makes them so desirable for defense. When you have a life or death problem, you are going to call a cop because they will bring a gun. Some of us are skipping that middleman for efficiency.
I’ve made good in my soul that I can take a life if it meant defense of self, family, or other. If you can’t do that, then by all means don’t own a firearm, no one will force you to. We just ask you don’t try and make that decision for us.
But, none of it has to do with “feeling” safe.
That person aside... What a time for some people to hate guns and recommend how only the evil racist police should have them.
What?
Wrongful police shootings may dominate the headlines but they are a rounding error compared to asset forfeiture abuse, discriminatory enforcement, lesser forms of police violence and good ol' influence peddling. For everyone that's shot for no good reason there's hundreds of people who are unnecessarily roughed up, tazed or just have their money taken under color of law (I consider a fishing stop that ends in a BS ticket instead of a warning to be in the latter category).
0 - CA has a roster of handguns legal for private purchase and ownership. The list includes every gun that was for sale when the roster was created, plus any gun that meets CA's microstamping law. The second list is exactly 0 guns long; both because it's not clear if it's technically possible, and because gun companies have no interest in playing along. The result is that there are all kinds of arbitrary restrictions on guns based on the date, not anything even vaguely related to public safety. Oh, and guns eventually fall off the roster after a certain grace period, so eventually there will be no handguns legally for sale in CA barring a change to the law or a court case.
The most bizarre thing to me is that background checks aren't required for private firearm sales.
But yeah, no background checks on private gun sales is insane. No idea why that's legal anywhere.
Alternatively, require training + passing an exam similar to getting a drivers license for owning anything except a manual long-barrel rifle or shotgun. Semi-auto firearms especially should require licensing/training IMO. Restrictions on magazine size or appearance ("assault rifle" lol) are generally dumb and fail to address real problems. I think it's reasonable to know who probably has a gun (ie. through a license program), but I'm generally against mandatory gun registration (though voluntary registration is fine).
IIRC licensing programs for handguns typically have shown promising results in reducing firearm suicide in particular, but they're also unpopular for predictable political reasons. If you're pro-firearm, there is very little difference between "you have to register your gun" and "you have to register to buy a gun".
This assumes that people don't get rid of firearms or have changes in mental health. There doesn't seem to be much of a justifiable reason to get a gun on short notice, so why not just apply it universally?
> If you're pro-firearm, there is very little difference between "you have to register your gun" and "you have to register to buy a gun".
I'm pro firearm. I'm also vehemently pro education. If you need a license to prove you can safely operate a motor vehicle, you should need a license to purchase a semi-automatic weapon IMO.
I disagree, there is a functional difference between licensing gun owners vs registering guns. One tracks that an owner has gone through training and is authorized to purchase certain types of weapons. It doesn't concretely determine whether they own, or have ever owned a firearm, just like a driver's license does not determine that I own, or have ever owned a motor vehicle (just that I was able to borrow one for the duration of my practical exam). Further, mandatory registration of firearms would include things such as purchase date, serial number, model, location of purchase, etc., which is actually new information that could be potentially used to track and confiscate firearms under certain circumstances. I'd also like to point out that a background check gives more info about the purchase of firearms than a license would. It tells: the date of purchase, the rough type of firearm (handgun vs anything else, at least in WI), and the location of purchase.
So when we do seemingly minor things like eliminating CO in domestic gas (“head in oven” was a common suicide method due to CO), increasing the height of railings on a bridge, or even making someone purchasing their first firearm wait a few days, this can often have a significant impact on whether someone actually ends up killing themselves. Suicide isn’t at all inevitable like you say.
Mental health problems don't persist simply because people can easily buy guns and kill themselves. They continue because people are afraid their going to have their liberties taken away simply because they want help.
I actually gave a gun to the police once cause I didn't want a rifle anymore (it was just a cheap mosin) and I could tell the cop was holding back a grin of disbelief the entire time. $5 bucks says it's in his gun locker right now at home.
Do you have a source that there were no other CCW holders in SF at that time?
https://revealnews.org/article/want-to-carry-a-concealed-gun... is an article saying there were 2 in SF in 2014, and that they basically never issue them. (They apparently last for two years before being renewed). It was apparently still the case in 2019, according to the hover-map on https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article232198382.html .
I have been unable to find many other county-level statistics, short of making an FOIA request.
My neighbor had supplies and was generous enough to share them with me. While we wouldn't obviously wouldn't have died without access to the rest of the world for 3 or four days, it would have been very uncomfortable to endure without any food or water, and that's relative to the discomfort we already had without heat, wherein we literally spent large swaths of the day under every blanket we had, huddled together for heat we also didn't have without electricity.
The next house I bought had a fireplace. We stock wood to be prepared for the unlikely catastrophe of having to endure prolonged absence of electricity.
We put fire-specific extinguishers in our kitchen, our garage, and our basement to protect against the unlikely catastrophe of fire.
We keep 10 gallons of water in the basement to protect against the unlikely catastrophe of losing electricity, and the usage of our well pump.
We keep first aid kits with bandages and neosporin in the bathrooms of our house to protect against knife cuts, or puncture wounds, or glass breaks that draw blood.
We keep a few days worth of canned goods to protect against food shortage.
We keep charcoal to protect against the inability to use our stove, and I have fire-making equipment (ferro rods, a high carbon knife, flints, emergency matches, birthday candles, charcloth) for use while camping or backpacking, but I always maintain an abundance -- just in case.
Many people do much of the above: Almost everyone has a fire extinguisher, or a first aid kit, some canned goods. The government recommends these things, in fact, and there's a run on things like these (and generators, and foodstuffs) before every natural emergency. Many people also maintain gardens for sustainability.
Whether or not those things make people "feel safe" is not even in the same category, but I'd argue that it makes many people feel safe to know that they have their own food and water and heat should the system demand it. You're arbitrarily drawing a line at guns and shaming people for wanting to protect against unlikely catastrophes it may defend against.
The irony is these Apple employees previously could have sought and obtained certain out of state licenses by passing the tests and qualifications. Those licenses would have been recognized in much of the country outside of California. However, now once convicted they will be ineligible under Federal and State laws to even possess a firearm for the rest of their lives.
The equal protection argument also seems incorrect to me. If this were the case, states would be under scrutiny for basically any discrepancy between their laws. Why should voters in Texas be required to show IDs when those in California aren't? Why should drivers in Wisconsin keep getting their license back after their 5th DUI when people in another state lose it after 2?
Are you arguing that regulations and taxes on guns and accessories are LIKE a poll tax because they inhibit exercising your interpretation of the 2nd amendment? If that is the case, I would argue that it is different as the 24th amendment specifically outlaws poll taxes and there is no similar law or amendment around firearm accessories.
Today, aside from the slim chance of being caught by an unengaged police force, the cost is zero.
A well armed society is a polite society.
But hey, if you live in an ivory tower, why let the common folk have a right to bear arms? Doesn't that sound elitist to you?
A certain someone by the name of Ronald Reagan (yeah... that guy... the one worshiped by conservatives) signed the Mulford Act into law to keep Black Panthers from open carrying guns. California's history on gun control seems oddly classist and racist when you think about it.
I asked my grandfather about that. He came back with a story how one time he and his dad went into town and found out that the Pharmacist shot the Postman and killed him. said there was blood in the street. That was outside of Memphis in 1910.
So yeah all nice in thoery, in practice men kill each other over stupid things.
And your point? Murder is illegal and punishable if it's not considered "justified homicide" under a court of law. But murder being illegal never stopped some folks from committing the act anyway.
Personally, I'd rather have an insurance policy on hand if needed in case a nut decides to want to attempt to cause me undue harm. When seconds count, the police are minutes away.
If your theory is that Cali has crime cuz no guns, why do other nations in the world with stricter gun rules seem to get by without this “chaos”?
You gotta have some other variables in there for this to hold up.
Frankly, we could definitely go into comparing other countries and how they handle this compared to the US, but this is an entirely different can of worms I can't really do justice here in an HN comments section.
I may suggest checking out /r/gunpolitics on reddit, or if you're aligned with liberal or leftist ideology, I strongly recommend /r/liberalgunowners and /r/SocialistRA for more information. I frequent those spaces often.
Finally, for all the news does to point out violent crimes committed with firearms, there are numerous defensive uses of guns that occur nearly every single day that slip under the radar. /r/dgu on reddit can show you some examples there.
All this energy put into trying to say that "increasing gun ownership will somehow decrease crime" is frustrating because it clearly is missing the forest for the trees. None of the explanations seem to apply when looking at other countries in the world.
And.... like.... nobody's wallet is worth another person's life.
And of course, use of a gun, even defensively, should only be a last resort. I'm not advocating that everyone become Rambo and shoot their way through problems. Every action has a consequence, and whether you were justified in your shooting or not, the jury will decide that in their deliberation of the evidence.
This country has a long way to go... no wonders why we’re stuck with nuclear weapons.
Also all gun laws are discriminatory toward the poor and minorities disproportionately.
Here's a link to some data being combed from 2019.
https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/comments/cmzzlc/25...
Also, there are instances where suicides are being tagged as mass shootings as well.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-we-prevent-mass-sho...
Frankly, I think we could stand to increase education around the issue of guns, mental health, and personal responsibility, rather than trying to reflexively legislate away access to firearms, which primarily affects law abiding citizens and not criminals.
Just some food for thought.
So yes, if people who follow the law can equalize force with criminals, the criminals would consider more careful applying their force indiscriminately.
Whose car is so valuable that they should be allowed to shoot someone for breaking into it?
Maybe there’s some deeper statistics or like a bunch of violent crime that I’m unaware of but my wallet ain’t worth the thief getting shot.
Well, mine is. And I'm glad that we both get to decide that for ourselves.
"You're conducting some business with [public institution] and the person you're talking with would like your company to donate something to the local charity. What do you do?"
Interesting to see that those hypothetical scenarios aren't so hypothetical.
It exists so the company can say it tried to prevent this and shouldn’t be held responsible.
But, this is common practice where there are ‘may issue’ CCW permits. Either have shall issue, or no issue. Having the sheriff decide just creates a valuable commodity.
Her Majesty Laurie only bestows a few CCWs to a handful of business people and her buddies. People can apply for CCWs all they want, but she'll never issue them willingly. She's a bureaucrat and a crook keeping the populace defenseless and maintaining LE job security.
It's a situation where there are two classes, the haves and have nots. If you aren't politically connected in NJ, NY, CA, etc - good luck. If you exercise these rights, you will end up in a prison cell.
Even places like PA - a very gun friendly state - this is working its way through the courts for other reasons. For example, in Philadelphia they have closed the permitting office repeatedly for COVID, bystepping the law which requires them to issue a permit in 45 days, by simply not accepting applications.
That's America.
I can only hope the SCOTUS will take up new cases on this.
edit: I can't spell :/
I suppose we _might_ get changes to the CCW laws; but, anything more complicated than that is never returning in the United States.
Reagan did a whole lot worse than this. He signed the Hughes Amendment, which cut off the supply of new, civilian-transferrable machine guns. I just can't understand how anyone likes the guy in spite of the awful things he did to gun rights. The Republican party is only somewhat less awful for gun rights than the Democrats.
This was a HUGE deal in the PA gun community, and I simply cannot understand why.
1. PA extended the expiration date on existing permits that expired after February until Dec 31. It was only new permits requests where the delay actually effected anyone.
2. The delays weren't specific to guns. Government offices closed and then opened at reduced capacity. This also happened for DLs.
3. The remedy provided by the state was also not specific to guns. Again, e.g., expiring driver's licenses were extended.
4. The state's choice not to prioritize streamlining this paperwork was reasonable. It had huge budget shortfalls and more important things to worry about (acquiring/distributing PPE, acquiring/distributing respirators, high unemployment, evictions, running elections, finding overflow space for hospitals, moving schools to remote, figuring out how to safely open up service businesses/schools, and the list goes on...)
5. To the extent that streamlining paper work should have been a larger priority, given the severe stress on logistics networks, I'd imagine CDLs would be the place to spend those limited resources rather than CCW applications.
So, an unavoidable delay happened in LOTS of government processes -- only one of which was CCW issuance -- and the government provided uniform remediation to help partially mitigate the impact of delays in all of those processes.
No one was coming for anyone's guns.
TBH the foaming-at-the-mouth response to unavoidable reasonable delays in processing concealed carry permits during a public health emergency is the sort of thing that makes me (a gun owner) feel completely antagonistic toward the PA 2A advocacy community.
Because I currently cannot get a LCTF from the city. That's why I give a damn. It is currently effecting me. I had no need for that before corona virus, I do need one now.
Bucks county is issuing it in 15 minutes. Philly does a whole interview process which goes beyond a basic NICS check and they have chosen to be poorly staffed for a very long time.
Again, they set up a complicated process for applications, then shut it down, all of which is of their own (the cities) volition.
It's not reasonable delays. There are people who don't have their appointment until December, 2021. more than a year out.
Anyway, it's all really arguing something that should be moot - A persons right should not depend on the government service choosing to open its office.
I'm not questioning that you really do need a LTCF, but with COVID and the protests and the election suddenly everyone "needs" a gun.
So there's reduced capacity + HUGE surge in demand + severe budget shortfalls. It's not a conspiracy. It's just queuing theory.
> Bucks county is issuing it in 15 minutes. Philly does a whole interview process which goes beyond a basic NICS check and they have chosen to be poorly staffed for a very long time.
Allegheny is far less onerous than Philly but also has long wait times.
Also, these super long wait times are a relatively recent development. I expect Sheriff's offices will do what they can to address the problem in the new FY.
> Anyway, it's all really arguing something that should be moot - A persons right should not depend on the government service choosing to open its office.
Again, priorities. Tell that to the people waiting in jail for far longer than constitutionally permissible for hearings because of delays in the courts. Should we reallocate cash from judicial processes to CCW processes and have those folks wait in jail an extra few months so that folks who got all jittery a few months before the election can forget to show up to their CCW appointments?
I am uninterested in the government itself creating onerous requirements to execute basic rights and then complaining when they can't manage it in a reasonable time.
And of course, the courts have ruled there is a reasonable amount of time, that's 45 days. It's been litigated.
I guess it doesn't need saying, but government offices have no such incentive. In fact, we don't want government offices to have such an incentive, and we even make it illegal to construct such an incentive in certain ways. See: the article.
> the courts have ruled there is a reasonable amount of time, that's 45 days. It's been litigated.
Courts don't control purse strings, and the remedy you're asking for here is pretty extreme given the circumstances.
People are queuing for hours to get COVID tests, hospitals are reaching capacity, and people are rotting in prison because they can't get an appointment in front of a judge. In normal times I would be more sympathetic. There are greater injustices than waiting a few months for your LTCF, and more important forms of justice (habeas corpus) being delayed.
This is currently what is the case with shall-issue vs may-issue, at least until SCOTUS clarifies otherwise.
Seems like denying some people the right to bear arms would pretty plainly constitute an infringement, no?
2. Only SCOTUS can definitively say whether or not may-issue contradicts the 2nd.
I'm not alone in thinking that California's oppressive may-issue CCW laws deny citizens the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment, and would welcome Federal intervention in this specific instance.
Of course, concealed carry restrictions aren't the only gun laws in the country, but I have to admit I'm just not very informed on any others. I do know California's handgun registry has gotten stricter.
This is definitely not true at the state level, and not exactly true at the federal level either.
Every state to which I regularly travel is now "constitutional carry" - i.e., no permit needed at all. None of them were ten years ago.
If they do get fired, it will be as a scapegoat, probably with a large severance, and any company in the world would hire them up immediately.
> He has overall responsibility for Apple’s ethics and compliance program including Apple’s Business Conduct Policy, governing the ethical and legal obligations of Apple’s Board, executives and over 130,000 employees around the world,
A delivery of 200 iPads as a bribe to get CCW permits makes me think it's more involved. Although this may be with his discretionary power, it's shocking to me that the donation was aborted as soon as warrants went out. I'd like to better understand what happened at Apple.
Beyond the problem of "may issue" permits you raise, I'd love to remove this kind of discretion for discovery. For example, when bringing charges like this the DA must be obligated to initiate discovery of the company documents to investigate how far reaching the problem may be (settlements can't begin to be negotiated until the DA completes discovery).
What information source did you use to come to the conclusion that he was just hired?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/nov/17/twitter-h...
"He has overall responsibility for Apple’s ethics and compliance program"
The head of Ethics being involved in bribery? Yeah, that's a problem.
On the other hand, I think he’s in difficult position given that this kind of shakedown is common practice.
What’s especially absurd is that there are many people who carry concealed guns into the Bay Area legally every day, who just happen to live in counties where CCW’s are easily approved.
I wonder what the legal implications of "moving for CCW" would look like. In Florida, you just have to notify the state that you moved... do a little scoot to the right county, get the CCW, move back.
This could be a hot fangled startup, "GunCCW"... "move to where you get your rights". Wonder what the legal penalty for letting someone change their address to your house for a bit would look like.
Pretty much all gun control in the US is racist in its origins and usually in its modern implementation. "May issue" is a shining example of this.
There's a lot of black shooters at the ranges here in North Texas, and I'm happy to see them. Black people aren't my enemy - the ever encroaching desire of the state to strip us of what few freedoms we have left is.
Pity no one was listening to George Carlin...
It’s mostly just the NRA itself that doesn’t, and they control a lot of lobbying dollars. So universal background checks stay dead, despite massive bipartisan support.
The trick is that laws like this tend to contain certain types of other things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand.
A reasonable universal background check bill is not going to pass if it also comes bundled with things like red-flag laws or registries attached to them, which then leads to "but they won't compromise" from both sides of the aisle, so nothing gets done. Or you get one side ramming something through which ends up defining "transfer" such that it actually criminalizes things like letting your kid shoot your gun even under supervision, which is very difficult not to see as an intentional act to degrade the culture of gun ownership merely because it is done by the people who constantly complain about the culture of gun ownership.
It's also a privacy concern if the system isn't set up properly; while countries like Switzerland have successfully mitigated those issues in the way they run their background checks, the difference between the average Swiss and the average American when it comes to gun politics (mandatory military service helps as does being a small nation) makes it more likely both sides of the issue aren't just going to try to screw each other over at the first opportunity.
Of course, the background check law is not one that is seldom if ever pursued (until it becomes politically expedient to do so), so maybe they should just enforce the law they do have instead of declaring the situation unworkable from the start?
It's kind of like how everyone supports "better infrastructure" or "fixing healthcare" but people greatly differ on the implementation details.
We already have background checks for commercial sales. What people support is extending that to private sales but with the caveat that it preserve the privacy of private sales. When you start talking about requirements like recording serial numbers and keeping records (both of which are required for commercial sales) support drops massively.
We could have universal background checks. It's not the NRA that's standing in the way. It's the legislators that propose background checks in ways that ensure they are a backhanded means of creating a registry that ensure those bills are stillborn.
Meanwhile, in Michigan:
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/protesters-michigan-whitmer-co...
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/michigan-pro...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/cops-seize-mor...
In 2014, $4.5B of property was legally seized via civil asset forfeiture, and $3.9B of property was burgled.
But that's a weaker claim than the original, which argued 'Police are responsible for more theft in the United States (through "asset forfeiture") than "real" criminals', which I interpret to mean all thefts, rather than just burglary (a subset of '"real" criminals'). The former seems to be around 12B a year, according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/252440/property-stolen-a....
(I'd be totally okay with seizing property from convicted criminal enterprises with due process. Excusing this because it happens to mostly affect people who turn out to have been criminals seems about as defensible in my mind as excusing vigilantes who happen to be mostly accurate.)
- Anything movable (automobiles, jewelry, etc) can be seized by police and entered as evidence, but reasonable accommodations must be made (eg: if taking the defendant’s luxury car, a working car must be provided in its stead, so the defendant can still go to work, attend court, etc). If the defendant is found not guilty, the items must be returned without delay and without cost to the defendant, and the police are to be held responsible for any damage or wear during the period of the trial.
- For immovable objects (real estate), the court may block any sale or transfer of ownership of the property. The court should evaluate the condition of the property and its contents at the start of legal proceedings, and the defendant would be responsible for any damage or loss (within their control) that occurs after that date. If the defendant loses, the police may take ownership of the home.
- Cash must be placed into an escrow account. If the defendant is found not guilty, the funds must be released back to the defendant without delay, and the police should be held responsible for any money missing from the account.
Were it not theft, the property would only be confiscated at the end of legal proceedings, IF it turned out it was related to the crime in question, IF the person was convicted. If those conditions did not hold, the assets should be returned.
In actuality, no crime is required for the property to be confiscated. It can be as simple as carrying a "substantial" amount of money in your person during a road trip, and getting pulled over. Where substantial is subjective. Let's say 1k.
Then your 1000 dollars get prosecuted, in a case titled "United States VS 1000 dollars in 10 dollar bills" and your money has to defend itself. I am not joking.
This mechanism was created – supposedly – to empty the coffers of suspected drug dealers in cases police couldn't actually prove their guilt. It was designed to be used on people that haven't been convicted.
That's not limited to money. It could be a house. It doesn't matter.
All it requires is a 'preponderance of evidence' that the property is related to a crime, which is a low bar. And even if it turns out that the charges are valid, it's still not ok. Because it's related to a property, not a person, you get cases like this:
https://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hou...
The parents in that news story knew that kid was selling drugs. They smelled it; they saw the money and the clothes and the car; they got helped out on the bills. 9 times out of 10, they are guilty as hell. But it's not 10 times out of 10, so we only take the house the drugs were sold out of, not lock them up.
It's a stretch to then convert criminal penalties into civil ones via the forfeiture process. Read this passage and tell me if this sounds like anything resembling due process:
> A month-and-a-half later police came back—this time to seize their house, forcing the Sourvelises and their children out on the street that day. Authorities came with the electric company in tow to turn off the power and even began locking the doors with screws, the Sourvelises say. Authorities won't comment on the exact circumstances because of pending litigation regarding the case.
> Police and prosecutors came armed with a lawsuit against the house itself.
So a few things. One, there was no civil court judgement authorizing this. The police decided on their own to take the house. Two, the value of the judgement is literally "how ever much this house is worth." Three, the government sued the house itself. That doesn't even make sense. A house is an inanimate object.
People should be sued, not stuff.
If the government believes they have a legitimate civil complaint, they're welcome to file it in court. The defendants and the government can then argue their cases, and a judge will use the appropriate legal standards to render a decision.
In these cases, the "judgement" is enforced first, and the targets (now without financial resources) must show beyond a preponderance of evidence that they're innocent.
Edit: see e.g. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/criminal-thef...
Also, I didn't just take the cash out of his pocket, I also took his car, as I suspect he used it to drive to my house to commit the crime.
If the police take assets from you, you might think you get them back unless you're convicted of a crime. Far from it: you must prove the innocence of your seized assets to get them back, and good luck with that.
That this exists at all is a scandal and a moral hazard. Seizure should be strictly temporary until a conviction is obtained, and the burden of proof that assets are illegally obtained should be on the state, rather than the opposite, and the value of all seized goods should go into a Federal general fund, rather than retained by the local jurisdiction.
Until this is the case, and good luck with that reform, it is simply state-sanctioned theft. Nothing else.
How does it not? This is not just "a flaw", it's the way it's designed. If you're traveling with $5k in cash, a trooper somewhere on I-35 can seize it with the rationale that (1) I-35 is a notorious drug trafficking corridor, (2) your car is from out of state, (3) there's no legitimate reason to cross state lines with that amount of cash, other than illicit activity, and (4) "you appeared nervous"
They seize the cash, let you continue on your way, and never file any charges at all.
When you ask for it back, they say, "Nah, you have to prove your innocence first". Oh, and that would be a civil case, so you have to pony up for a lawyer and sue for it. No guarantee that you'll recover attorney's fees, so even if you win, you lose.
If they do charge you with a crime, you can be acquitted of the crime and still they keep the property. (It's "civil" forfeiture, your acquittal isn't enough to get your money back)
Okay, so no, it doesn't make all seizures theft, but it also has no reason to exist as a policy if you can seize assets of charged individuals anyway.
There should, 100%, never be an asset seizure without a related criminal charge. I'm usually not one for absolutes, but I am in this regard.
This isn't true. The burden of evidence in civil asset forfeiture is still on the state. The standard is preponderance of doubt, as per the norm in civil court, not the higher standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, but a civil forfeiture case still requires a judge or jury to convict your assets.
From Wikipedia:
> The government simply files a civil action in rem against the property itself, and then generally must prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the property is forfeitable under the applicable forfeiture statute. Civil forfeiture is independent of any criminal case, and because of this, the forfeiture action may be filed before indictment, after indictment, or even if there is no indictment. Likewise, civil forfeiture may be sought in cases in which the owner is criminally acquitted of the underlying crimes ...
> — Craig Gaumer, Assistant United States Attorney, 2007
Let's take one example. If the TSA finds more than $10k on you while you are traveling, unless you have proper paperwork, it is ASSUMED to be drug money and gets seized. Most people have no idea that they need this paperwork, and finding out how to fill it out is non-trivial.
From 2000, to 2016, about $2 billion was seized in this way. In an independent audit, in over half of cases the action started and ended with the seizure. In less than 1/3 was anyone arrested. Arrests drop to less than 1/10 if you eliminate arrests for the crime of failing to fill out the paperwork for the money seized. (I am willing to bet that most of those arrests are because people react badly to seeing their life savings taken from them. Cause a scene, get arrested.)
If you go to how many actually were charged with a crime, the figure drops to 0.3%. In other words in 99.7% of cases where the TSA took someone's money, nobody ever found evidence that they money was linked to a crime. (It was still not returned though.)
Now the police will tell you that they are seizing drug money. However anecdotally, they mostly are not. And the fact that they are not even trying to charge people indicates to me that they really KNOW that they are not.
But guess where the money goes? That's right, directly to the agency that seized it! (This varies for local police by state.)
If your budget is filled with money confiscated from people who you have no evidence were involved with a crime, that's theft and you should know it. But their lawyers say that they can do it, so they continue to take people's life savings on little pretext.
1. For smaller amounts, the cost to fight civil asset forfeiture often exceeds the value of the assets taken. Why spend $1k to maybe get back you $500 in cash the cops took? Best to just write it off.
2. All claims about the money being taken "from drug dealers" come from the police, which as you've mentioned have a ton of incentive here to lie. Given that police can't reliably tell us how many people they've killed, it's not clear that we should trust their statistics on civil asset forfeiture.
Reminder that in many US jurisdictions judges are also elected and may need campaign funding.
Not so long ago the US President was impeached for bribery.
If you’re curious to learn more about this kind of corruption, California has another bribe at the state level: the “11-99 Foundation” offers a license plate frame for a $2500 donation that, when placed on your car, mysteriously reduces your chances of receiving speeding and carpool tickets to near-zero — even from CHP. This is apparently legal, since traffic stops are discretionary, and no protections exist to detect or prevent discretionary bias prior to the stop. (Non-caucasians, 11-99 is not rumored to protect against racism, and may well inspire it under the guise of “heard a report of a stolen car”.)
I think it’s incredibly evil that this is tolerated and I don’t give them anything.
Or do you actually understand and it's just figure of speech to say you don't approve?
The article notes that the county/police had been doing this racket for years so it seems likely Apple/Moyer would rather pay the bribe rather than get mixed PR of being a whistle blower (e.g large news outlet runs a piece on how many CW permits Apple requests).
I am also wondering if this is essential equipment for the security team.
Also California's legal definition of a loaded gun is not what everyone thinks it means. For example, PC 25400 has extra penalties if the firearm is loaded or if, "...the unexpended ammunition capable of being discharged from it are in the immediate possession of the person or readily accessible to that person." That makes your suggestion just as illegal as carrying a loaded handgun.
> Close protection details for large US corps virtually never fire a shot in anger. It is a once-per-decade event.
The point of a concealed handgun is to react as quickly as possible to what is usually a once-in-a-lifetime event. Even if it only takes an extra second to load a magazine into a firearm, that second can mean the difference between preventing a murder or not. It doesn't matter how rare the event is. It matters what the consequences are.
1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
A determined attacker could seriously injure or kill someone in the time it takes to load your weapon and chamber a round.
Your kind of ignorance almost makes me physically ill... you sound just like those women who take a self-defense course and think they can take down a 6'4" 295 lb. guy who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger's bigger cousin.
I'd love to see the look in your eyes when someone rushes you at 10 feet and stabs you with the blue plastic prop knife 99 times out of 100. Its the same look those women get when they realize, "Oh shit... it turns out someone who's got 150 lbs. of muscle over me can fight off my puny attacks."
If guns were truly the ultimate force multiplier, military and police would never train for close quarters hand-to-hand combat. They aren't, so we do.
In addition you have to retrain all your reflexes. This is based on years of training that cannot simply be changed easily.
Having weapons for your security officers is quite essential, especially for a company as high profile as Apple.
CCW is the only option, and they were holding this guy hostage by not issuing one when it was obviously necessary and appropriate.
[1] - https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/faqs/can-i-openly-carry-a-gun-i...
Here's a decent summary from Gabby Giffords mentioning the right to carry at home and at work (requires permission of business owner but NOT necessarily landlord): https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/location-restricti...
If you wanna go straight to the source, section 26035 of the CA Penal Code is a good start:
"Nothing in Section 25850 shall prevent any person engaged in any lawful business... or any officer, employee, or agent authorized by that person for lawful purposes connected with that business, from having a loaded firearm within the person’s place of business"
25525 PC is also relevant as it reiterates the home & business exemption to concealed carry laws
Yes, sometimes you can lawfully open or concealed carry on your own property without needing a permit. But if it's open to the public, you need a permit.
http://wiki.calgunsfoundation.org/index.php?title=Unlicensed...
It sounds like we agree on the facts. Apple, and specifically Moyer, decided to pay a bribe to a government official. Bribery is a crime. Why do you find it odd that he's being charged?
> Requested $75k of Apple tech to issue a CCW permit to the head of security, etc.
So if an official solicits a bribe, you pay it, then can immediately report them with no legal repercussions. This removes the incentive to hide corruption and let it fester.
This also strongly discourages people from asking for bribes in the first place.
"May-issue" jurisdictions, such as California, give too much discretion to local officials, leading to arbitrary decisions and cases of bribery. Most states are "shall-issue" jurisdictions and do not have this type of problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_...
1) The sheriff's office initiated/required the bribe, it's not like Apple's head of security was trying to bribe, they were being extorted
2) It's Apple's head of physical security, not software security (since it's not clear at first)
I'm curious -- if a county sheriff's office demands bribes, what is the correct legal course of action in the US? Do you bring it to county court? To the governor's office? To state police? To state court?
And how would you prove that it happened? Who would you work with to legally record audio of the solicited bribe?
I imagine anything other than "pay the bribe" would suffice.
I have stacks of anecdotal interactions with local level police (both sheriff and police) that nothing surprises me anymore.
It's a serious offense on both sides, but far more serious on the part of the sheriff's department.
You could record it yourself.
I would go to the FBI since this is happening under the color of law, which is considered a civil rights violation. The ACLU should be interested too.
In my state and county the local Sheriffs office handles CCW permits. A lot of times they are elected officials and play political games, even denying CCW permits. Glad these guys were held accountable.
Of course the cops are corrupt, but this degree of corruption is something you'd have thought would happen only in Brazil. It's either more common than we know or this individual is unusually stupid.
https://abc7ny.com/nypd-police-corruption-investigation/1914...
DAs don't like investigating cops.
No surprise this is so prevalent in NYC and Santa Clara. They can deceive people that the strong requirements is under the guise of gun control or some such.
I used to dream about moving there for tech, but with the high taxes and bureaucracy glad I didn't... Still want to move somewhere with more tech than where I am now though, been flipping back and forth between Austin and Salt Lake City (which looks like I might have a opportunity lined up for early next year!). Seems like Utah is growing for tech, 2 hour flight from SV so investors like that since they could fly early in the morning, do some business deals and fly back for dinner.
On one hand the CCW permit is for the personal benefit of the person receiving it. If the company needed armed staff, they could simply hire full-time armed guards. There is no reason head of security at Apple needs to be armed using a concealed weapon. They are not going undercover to bust smugglers or whatever.
On the other hand, the payment was to the Sherriff's office, not the sheriff himself. That makes it a lot less like bribery to me because it still benefits the government.
What makes it especially tricky is that it seems as though the Sherriff asked for the payment. If they did and provided official written documentation to Apple, that feels like a professional and real agreement to provide hardware to the government.
At the end of the day, what will make this bad for Apple's head of security is that he was personally benefiting from the Sherriff's actions by receiving favorable treatment for a CCW he didn't need, and used company hardware to get that favorable treatment.
> There is no reason head of security at Apple needs to be armed
That’s up to them, they can decide what kind of arms are carried.
It also changes as new sheriffs are elected. Where I live, the previous sheriff was known to reject applications, but the current one is known for the opposite stance.
Similar things happen in the planning department and public works department in San Francisco. Supervisors will receive half-price homes laundered through their parents, that sort of thing. Pretty transparent for the Third World (where sophisticated criminal agents will extract some of the value if they know you have some ill-gotten gains) but certainly sufficient for present-day US (where rule of law is generally available).
> The Planning Department, Department of Public Health, and the City Administrator's Office have all been hit with subpoenas stemming from the sprawling federal investigation into corruption in San Francisco government.
> ...
> The City Attorney's Office's simultaneous investigation has already revealed a relationship between former Public Works director Mohammed Nuru and local entrepreneur Nick Bovis, in which Bovis appears to have taken donations from his charity (Lefty O'Doul's Foundation for Kids), given by city contractors, and funneled them to cover DPW holiday parties. Now it looks like the feds are following up on this pattern and trying to see if there are more examples of city vendors possibly disguising bribes that benefited city employees as charitable gifts.
https://sfist.com/2020/07/15/ongoing-fbi-corruption-probe-hi...
How do you know which one to choose? Are you sure the DA will side with you if you blow the whistle? Will you or your employer suffer retaliation from the county law enforcement you just outed? Maybe you're blacklisted from future security gigs by being known as someone who rats on cops.
Whenever government officials solicit bribes from private citizens, the enormous power asymmetry there should lead us to prosecuting just the government official(s).
Of course it's not always this simple. Sometimes the private citizen wields more power than the civil servant they're bribing. In other words, the Mafia or other organized crime. But I'm not ready to put Apple in that column yet.
In Apple's case, you could refer back to Apple's business conduct training program, a self directed online class which ALL of us are REQUIRED to pass ANNUALLY, and which states in no uncertain terms that NOTHING of value may be paid to a government official without prior approval from higher up, and describes precisely such "facilitation fees".
And if the article is to be believed, the Apple officer in question was in charge of CREATING that class. I'm sorry; I don't think I've ever met them, but I don't see how this could possibly be excused, unless Apple Legal signed off on that bribe (stranger things have happened — Apple's then General Counsel once created a backdated paper trail for a fictitious meeting of the executive team — but still find that exceedingly unlikely).
I forgot about this - the Apple options backdating scandal:
More on that Story?
I actually met Heinen on my first day at work — back then, Apple was small enough that it was customary for a member of the executive team to drop in to new employee orientation each Monday.
You're kidding me? You actually believe the upper management follows this shit? It's a checkbox to make sure you have a "good working environment.
You know how I know that it's some BS? Two of the Chief X Officers at a previous job both met their current partners at a job... they were pregnant at their weddings.
This is why you go directly to the FBI.
California has counties which are "may-issue" (getting your permit is decided on a case-by-case "need" basis by the local sheriff) vs. "shall-issue" (must be issued to the applicant if they have done paperwork correctly and pass background checks). Shall-issue has a very obvious flaw, which is on full display in this case.
Hah! There actually isn't any other way to get a CCW permit in most of Northern California, let alone Santa Clara County. It's basically a racket under the guise of gun control. See this article from last year[1] and this youtuber[2] who tried to chronicle the process.
> The Santa Clara County sheriff’s system for granting concealed weapons permits is so inconsistent — and the record-keeping so fragmented — that it is difficult to discern any public-safety rationale behind a process the District Attorney’s Office is investigating over allegations of political favoritism.
To apply for a CCW you need to show your life is in immediate and credible danger, and then wait... months for a permit approval that will probably never come. This state loves to make law-breakers out of good citizens. I'm really glad they're cracking down on the process, but it's the STATE and COUNTY LAW THAT NEEDS TO CHANGE! Not sending a few scabs to jail for playing the game they created.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/24/spotty-records-may-hi...
Also, CA should go to shall issue. I'm not a really big gun-guy myself, but I don't see the public benefit to being a may issue state. Especially if it creates little places like this for petty powers to solicit for bribes.
Sung and Jensen allegedly worked together to solicit the exchange of CCW permits for the tech donation from Apple."
California's may-issue policies give local officials too much discretion, leading to arbitrary decisions and bribery (apparently).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_...
To be completely fair, events in the course of this year have shown that the criminal justice system wasn't that trustworthy to begin with. I don't think there's a lot of confidence left to lose at this point.
They won't cite you for public defecation but they will cite you for jaywalking, because jaywalkers can be squeezed.
Once you are a cop, federal law allows concealed carry in all 50 states, regardless of state law.
I looked up one customer's "agency" and the town didn't exist. It was like 4 abandoned houses and it looked (from Google Maps) like no one had been through there in years.
[0] A machinegun manufactured after the passage of the 1986 Hughes Amendment is non-transferrable and can only be possessed by law enforcement agencies or dealers (SOT) with a "demo letter". Dudes effectively were LEOs in a non-existent town and bought machineguns that otherwise couldn't be owned by individuals.
I propose that persons who read that book will be less surprised by how these events will proceed than someone who has not read the book.
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4982654-police-union-pow...
A private citizen of limited means paying a bribe is somehow reasonable because there's a huge power imbalance.
Comments from this thread condoning bribery.
Bonus irony is that 2A is so broken in CA that even Apple security chief has to go through the "process".
Well, I guess I have an answer now. I wonder if this is actually much more common than I've realized.
Now, Apple HAS to protect its headquarters and people. For that you need licenses which apparently weren't given. So, close Apple headquarters down or...? 99.99% of the fault here lies with the laws /state. The problem can be solved by donating before you ask the for "favors," so no quid-pro-quo. I'd think that Apple generates quite a bit of business for the county /state so they should favor them a bit. Or at least don't try to stop them.
> A grand jury alleges that Thomas Moyer promised to donate 200 iPads worth $70,000 to the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office in exchange for four concealed firearm licenses for Apple employees.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/11/23/apple-...
He probably had a protection team, as do most individuals in similar circumstances.
Cook, Zuckerberg, et al. have private armed security.
The Defense industry isn't particularly flashy.
You're right that carry permits are not required on private property.
1. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Why not just intimidate without a permit (which wouldn't somehow make things less illegal)?
> Santa Clara County alleges that Mr Sung held back issuing concealed weapons permits to Apple's security team, until Mr Moyer agreed to donate $70,000 worth of iPads to the sheriff's office.
Armed security is common at datacenters, for example.
Edit: Reading up, you can only transport firearms in CA loaded if you have CCW. And loaded weapons is kind of needed to protect VIPs.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could all cut a $1000 check to the city to evade $1700 in State/County property tax on our homes?
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/08/apples-next-us-data-c...
This is wrong on so many levels... why does Apple need CCW security personal ? how could Apple agree to pay bribery ? who is stupid enough to ask for bribery ?
This is the reason large employers have mandatory yearly training videos on ethics, sexual harrassment, insider trading and a plethora of other topics. I used to feel severely inconvenienced every year, "wasting productive hours", until I was aware of the world out there and how frequent are problems in these areas.
What is the reasoning behind CCW vs open carry in a holster? Is it to give some kind of tactical advantage to the weapon carrier? Is it about some kind of general fear people have seeing a gun (and if so, why not police?)?
Is CCW considered to be protected by the second amendment? It says "keep and bear" which seems more related to a visible weapon to me, but I'm not sure of the history.
CC has never been held in court to be protected by the 2nd. OC has at the state level only I believe.
Still, does anyone here know of a country, where artificially limiting resources do not encourage to bribes? Better yet, if somebody names a country, where bureaucrats are by law forbidden to limit the resources artificially, I'll strongly consider immigrating.
How so? Unless you mean to claim Apple expects anyone hired for that position to knowingly break the law as part of having that position.
> Santa Clara County alleges that Mr Sung held back issuing concealed weapons permits to Apple's security team
Every other response, that argues the Apple employee had no power but to agree to this bribe, is wrong. So if China offers Apple free slave labor from Uighur camps and they accept, will people be explaining how they had no choice?
There is always a choice.
You bet Apple has arranged bribes across the world and companies. Not saying any specific FAANG is better, but there seems to be a crowd of people who repeat commercials about privacy and security despite both being disproved on a weekly basis.
It sounds like this has been going on for years. Apple's security chief was one of those applicants who paid the bribe to get the permit. But putting "Apple" in the title is more clickbaitey.
> Santa Clara County alleges that Mr Sung held back issuing concealed weapons permits to Apple's security team, until Mr Moyer agreed to donate $70,000 worth of iPads to the sheriff's office.
So they most definitely are.
Certainly, the overriding societal impact is the fact that law enforcement is corrupt, not that people pay bribes to corrupt law enforcement. No question.
> too young to exercise this "right"
Lots of rights are restricted before you reach the age of majority. I'm fine with saying that when you're old enough to vote (or join the armed forces, or drive a car, or whatever) then that's when you're allowed to carry a gun.
> conditions where it can be infringed (e.g.: a psychopath in jail)
Sure, lots of rights are denied to people in jail. I'm fine with restricting this right similarly, and to people who have been judged (with due process protections) to be insane.
> are there spaces where it can be infringed (e.g.: can a daycare forbid it)
Although I think such prohibitions are generally a bad idea, I'm fine with people having the ability to enforce them on their own private property. "Your rights end at my doorstep," etc.
You don't want bad actors to know who is - and who isn't - armed.
I don't have a gun. If someone comes in to my home with a gun, even if they are a "good guy", the odds of my dying by gunshot would instantly go up by a large multiple.
In comparison, the odds that I'm going to suffer a home invasion, that I would have been shot without the friendly gun owner, and that person successfully prevents it is vanishingly small.
I realize that not everybody lives where that calculation comes out that way, but to claim it CCW makes sense everywhere is unsupportable.
Ultimately - that's okay, so long as my rights and the safety of my family aren't subject to another's particular distaste for self-preservation.
15155, I'm sure you are a smart person, but stop for a second and really inspect what you have done here. It is obvious to me you are not making a reasoned argument, but an emotional one, but think it is reasoned.
I spelled out clearly a situation where someone entering my home with a gun increases my chance of injury or death. Your retort is to claim I have a distaste for self-preservation. You didn't apparently think about what my claim was or counter with an argument why my logical deduction was wrong, but instead just assumed I don't want to avoid death or injury.
So let me break it down. I live in a safe neighborhood. I don't have a gun. If you, a good guy with a gun, entered my home at my invitation, did my chances of injury or death just go up or down? I'm not claiming it is a significant chance, just that it a large multiple of an already minuscule probability.
Even the Wikipedia article on the topic lists numerous scientific studies showing that the effectiveness of concealed carry varies in place and time, and that there is almost no link between concealed carry and lower crime rates : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_Unite...
The homicide rate for USA is 5 per 100 000 hab in 2018. For France, it is 1.2
You are 3 times more likely to die in USA than in France from an homicide
Even if I believed your numbers, this does not take away your right to self defense from a robber or tyrant.
No. There isn't.
I used to work for a company that fielded body guards as one of their many services. Basically just have a pulse, don't have a criminal history, pass a fairly trivial interview that's designed to filter out people who think they're gonna be billy-badass or that it's gonna be an exiting job. There's a reason it doesn't pay well. Almost anyone can do it.
Driving a floor polisher was more lucrative and sucked less so I did that.
AZ 2.93
CA 2.89
ID 0.90
ME 0.97
NH 1.18
VT 1.28
WY 1.56
Aside from CA, all the other state listed here have constitutional carry, and aside from VT magazine limit, no more strict than federal law.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
It's all very well to mention that other states have some firearm homicides each year, but if you don't provide Texas' stats to compare to, it's not especially germane to the topic at hand...
The reason I pointed out the other states was to show that the looser gun laws of Texas is not necessarily the cause of higher firearm homicide rate. The other states have looser firearm laws than Texas (not in all respects).
Edit:
Some other states
CT 1.823
DC 19.27
IL 5.11
MA 1.25
MD 7.61
NY 1.53
RI 0.94
The data are from 2015, but DC is highest by far, even with its very strict gun laws. Note that California is higher than Texas despite horribly restrictive gun laws.
My point was more that people are less likely to abuse them as some exceptional item, at least as far as I've seen. Criminals will always use them; I was more talking about the likelihood of someone to draw a gun in a tense situation, which I can't measure. But people who view them as tools and know how to use them understand that one ought not to draw a gun unless he intends to use it.
All that aside, I don't support gun rights because rates of certain crimes are below some number. We would call it silly to support a right to privacy only insofar as terrorism does not exceed a certain threshold and to say that such a right disappears. In the same way, I don't believe crime rate should have any effect on our right to keep and bear arms.
Your general point- which really seemed to be "knowing that everyone is armed in TX results in less gun violence", is easily disproven by other states with totally different laws having similar or lower gun violence rates.
To your last line- I agree with you, I don't believe crime rate should have any effect on our right to keep and bear arms. I want a complete repeal of the Second Amendment, though.
I still carry a gun. You never know.
That said, California's constant fight against 2A with absolutely idiotic rules needs to die.
The marginal cost of carrying a gun is basically zero. If I ever do find myself in a situation where I need it, I’ll be glad to have it. And even if I don’t, the fact that random anonymous law-abiding citizens have guns is itself a crime deterrent.
edit: also, there is no conclusive evidence at all to support your last statement [1].
[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-....
Any risks with having a fire extinguisher ? can someone (a child) cause damage by accidentally using it?
Yes. Not on par with a gun, but that's not what you asked.
Widespread fire extinguisher use dramatically lowers the odds of you dying in a fire.
Widespread gun use - not just the presence of guns as an option, but the assumption that guns can be used on the street - dramatically increases the odds of you dying because of someone else's gun.
Proponents always seem to reduce this to an imaginary heroic encounter where Random Shooter is stopped by Heroic Armed Citizens.
That's almost never how it works in practice on the street. It's far more likely that Random Citizen is shot before they can even get their weapon out. And even if bystanders are armed they either won't have time to do anything to prevent a shooting, or they won't risk trying to shoot one of two people who are fairly close together at some range, or they'll simply decide it's not their problem and the most they'll do is call the police after it's over.
At this point someone usually says "But this one time..." And it's true there are exceptions.
But they don't change the statistics, which are completely clear - more gun use means more random gun deaths, partly because concealed guns really aren't particularly useful against attackers who already have their weapons out.
You have a far better chance of survival if you learn some distraction and confusion techniques and/or fast self-defence moves than by trying to shoot someone who is pointing a gun at you at close range.
At one point there was a court ruling saying that the waiting period was unconstitutional for people who already owned guns or had CCWs, but it was appealed