Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner
marionrecord.com
marionrecord.com
"Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home and the Marion County Record newspaper office Friday, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.
She had not been able to eat after police showed up at the door of her home Friday with a search warrant in hand. Neither was she able to sleep Friday night.
She tearfully watched during the raid as police not only carted away her computer and a router used by an Alexa smart speaker but also dug through her son Eric’s personal bank and investments statements to photograph them. Electronic cords were left in a jumbled pile on her floor.
Joan Meyer’s ability to stream TV shows at her home and to get help through her Alexa smart speakers were taken away with the electronics. "
Interestingly they appear to use javascript to disable copy-paste. I was going to copy it into a gist.
Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner
Stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief after illegal police raids on her home and the Marion County Record newspaper office Friday, 98-year-old newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer, otherwise in good health for her age, collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home.
She had not been able to eat after police showed up at the door of her home Friday with a search warrant in hand. Neither was she able to sleep Friday night.
She tearfully watched during the raid as police not only carted away her computer and a router used by an Alexa smart speaker but also dug through her son Eric’s personal bank and investments statements to photograph them. Electronic cords were left in a jumbled pile on her floor.
Joan Meyer’s ability to stream TV shows at her home and to get help through her Alexa smart speakers were taken away with the electronics.
As her home was raided, other officers descended upon the Record office, forcing staff members to stay outside the office for hours during a heat advisory. They were not allowed them to answer the phone or make any calls.
Marion police chief Gideon Cody forcibly grabbed reporter Deb Gruver’s personal cell phone out of her hand, reinjuring one of her fingers, which previously had been dislocated.
Officers seized personal cell phones and computers, including the newspaper’s file server, along with other equipment unrelated to the scope of their search.
They refused to say when the items, necessary for publishing next week’s issue of the Record, might be returned. The newspaper has obtained equipment to ensure publication and is working to re-create material for the paper.
Legal experts contacted by the Record termed the raid unheard of in America and reminiscent of what occurs in totalitarian regimes and the Third World.
The Record is expected to file a federal suit against the City of Marion and those involved in the search, which legal experts contacted were unanimous in saying violated multiple state and federal laws, including the U.S. Constitution, and multiple court rulings.
“Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” publisher Eric Meyer said, “but we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”
A two-page warrant signed by Magistrate Laura Viar was given to the Record at the time of the search.
Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel’s home also was raided at the same time.
The warrants alleged there was probable cause to believe that identity theft and unlawful computer acts had been committed involving Marion business owner Kari Newell.
A Record reporter later requested a copy of the probable cause affidavit necessary for issuance of the search warrant
District court, where such items are supposed to be filed, issued a signed statement saying no affidavit was on file.
County attorney Joel Ensey, whose brother owns the hotel where Newell operates her restaurant, was asked for it but said he would not release it because it was “not a public document.”
Police read Record staff members their rights. Cody asked officer Zach Hudlin to read Gruver her rights because he couldn’t read a business-sized card listing them as he wasn’t wearing glasses.
Denying staff access to the office and taking four computers meant that the reporters and the newspaper’s office manager could not do their jobs Friday.
Officers disconnected a computer router at the Record but did not seize it.
Law enforcement also seized a computer and a cell phone from Herbel’s home Friday morning. Herbel, 80, who does not have a land-line phone, later drove to McPherson to purchase a replacement phone so she could remain in contact in case of problems with her 88-year-old husband, who is disabled and suffers from dementia.
Newell accused the Record at a city council meeting Aug. 7 of illegally obtaining drunken-driving information about her and supplying it to Herbel.
The Record did not seek out the information. Rather, it was provided by a source who sent it to the newspaper via social media and also sent it to Herbel.
After attempting to verify that the information was accurate and had been obtained, as the source claimed, from a public website, the Record decided not to publish it.
After consulting an attorney and obtaining other information, Meyer thought the information had been intentionally leaked to the newspaper as part of legal sparring between Newell and her estranged husband over who should get title to various of the couple’s motor vehicles in divorce proceedings.
That contention later was verified by Newell during discussions with Meyer.
During attempts to verify the information, the Record accessed the same state web page that the source indicated had been used.
During the verification attempt, Record reporter Phyllis Zorn made no attempt to conceal her identity, providing her name and knowingly clicking on a consent form verifying that she did not plan to disseminate the information — because, in fact, she did not plan to and did not do so.
Afterward, Meyer consulted an attorney and, without naming Newell, on Aug. 4 notified Sheriff Jeff Soyez and Cody that the newspaper had received the information and that the source who provided it alleged that law enforcement officers knew Newell did not have a valid driver’s license and ignored her violation of the law.
After the council meeting, Newell acknowledged the accuracy of the information and said she understood that coming forward with allegations about it might expose the information rather than preserve its confidentiality.
The state suspended her license because of a drunken-driving conviction in 2008 and a series of other driving convictions.
Newell speculated about who the source was and said she thought the information had been supplied to that person by her estranged husband as part of their divorce proceedings.
She has said that she took care of her license this week. This, however, has not been verified. In the same post, she admitted driving without a license after her drunken-driving conviction.
At Monday’s council meeting, Newell accused Herbel of acting “negligently and recklessly” by sharing her personal information.
Herbel said she had received the information from the same source as the Record but had shared it with only one person — city administrator Brogan Jones — because Newell was on that day’s agenda to seek endorsement of a request for a catering liquor license, for which a drunken driving conviction in certain cases might have disqualified her. Herbel told Jones she thought the police should investigate Newell’s application.None of these police should ever be allowed power over another human being ever again. They can muck stables for the rest of their days.
Source: https://thehandbasket.substack.com/p/a-conversation-with-the...
There are many place on earth where writing such a story is itself a crime because it’s illegal to criticize the government in any way.
While the American law enforcement system is broken in a systemic and fundamental way, and there are better places, and there are worse places, there is at least a system of laws that often provides relief and redress - but most importantly there exists avenues to fix the system over time and the open ability to advocate loudly for a restructuring of the government and its powers. This is a blessing in every society that has it, including in America.
Sounds like they'd be motivated to do so now.
Once upon a time I built one of the major providers sensitive data services, and a typical artifact of a warrant for a cloud provider is a stipulation the warrant discovery be done without alerting the customer to the search. By encrypting your data with a key management service and enabling the providers audit services (aka cloudtrail) it is impossible by design to execute the warrant without the customer receiving audit trail information about the providers access of the keys and the data service. In theory the provider could make back doors, but the law actually is on their side in that they are not required to take extraordinary measures that materially impacts their business to circumvent controls.
Further there is no physical seizure possible.
I know most small newspapers this is beyond their technical ability or understanding. I challenge this community, maybe there should be an OSS cloud deployable journalism platform with strong security, information resiliency, and defense in depth and breadth against the state.
I think this is fairly complex though to avoid a potential issue that likely won’t exist. By simply instrumenting audit and using service provider encryption services like aws KMS with CMK with audit trails turned on you generally insulate yourself from most warrants. You can still be compelled to turn over data, but it would have to be done with you being aware of it and often with your direct involvement. More importantly you would retain a copy of everything and all your infrastructure. If they have convincing evidence you’re using your infrastructure to commit crimes the cloud provider may freeze your account, though, but it would have to be more than “we think you have evidence of a crime in your data” and more like “you are using ec2 instances to commit crimes actively”
In the US, if your business is on the internet, it is crossing state lines, even if all your computers are in the same state.
In fact, pretty much all business in the US is considered across state lines.
Also,
> After the council meeting, Newell acknowledged the accuracy of the information and said she understood that coming forward with allegations about it might expose the information rather than preserve its confidentiality.
> The state suspended her license because of a drunken-driving conviction in 2008 and a series of other driving convictions. [...]
lol
The slow death of local journalism is leaving local government unaccountable, and even where journalists still operate they’re at risk from those in power.
Wayback Machine is broken. Spooky.
However they're publishing now it's likely in a very ad hoc rickety manner with limited access to primary resource keys, passwords, et al.
Timely reminder for some here to look at their own work flow setups and ask themselves "what would I do tomorrow if everything I see now was burned up, flooded out, confiscated, etc."
Better for them to start with the very simple exercise of "how much of my life will 2FA make inaccessible if I lose only my phone?"
assuming the newspaper's allegations are correct, in the best plausible case, her family sues the city government for wrongful death, qualified immunity shields the thugs, the family wins the case and gets awarded a large amount of money that the government has to pay, which raises taxes on the people living in the area in order to pay it
there is essentially no chance that the district attorney's office will prosecute crooked cops; those crooked cops are their closest collaborators when they are doing what they do 99% of the time, which is prosecuting poor people who don't work for the government. the prosecution of derek chauvin was no more a matter of business as usual than the prosecution of julian assange
(First two entries on this page) https://www.justice.gov/crt/statutes-enforced-criminal-secti...
i'm guessing less than 5
it's true that federal prosecutors have the freedom to prosecute local cops without themselves becoming unemployable, in a way that non-federal prosecutors do not
There was enough criminal activity under those provisions and coordinated DOJ civil litigation (which often is a product of investigations that start as criminal investigation of a specific incident, but end up discovering systemic problems in the investigated department) against local police departments under the civil provisions of civil rights law that cutting back on both was a major and public priority of the Trump Administration when it came into office in 2017.
While I can’t think of many recent notable convictions (off the top of my head, the four MPD officers convicted related to George Floyd's murder are the only ones that jump to mind), officers involved in the Breonna Taylor shooting will be going on trial under it this year (current trial date is the end of October, IIRC; the one who reached a plea deal for helping prepare the falsified warrant application pled under a more general conspiracy statute.)
But, while its not a lot of prosecutions, its enough to show that it is more than a theoretical possibility where multiple police officers deliberately act together against a Constitutional rights and leave someone dead as a consequence.
It’s almost certain there’s no criminal case related to the death of the co-owner, even if the warrant should not have been issued. The fact is it was issued by a judge, and it doesn’t sound like the police did anything specifically outside the scope of the warrant.
If the warrant was issued illegally and there was some provable animus on behalf of the police, and/or it was done as clear harassment, a civil case is the most likely to succeed. By establishing certain facts such as these and proving the degree of distress caused, they can likely bring about a significant judgement against the city and possibly go as far as a sanction on the judge depending on how she was involved.
If it turns out it was a conspiracy between the restaurant owner and the police where they conspired to manipulate the judge into issuing an illegal warrant, the restaurant owner is the most likely to face a criminal charge.
I suspect they will also pursue a criminal or civil case on the basis of harassment of journalists doing protected work based on a false identity theft assertion to justify avoiding the legal requirement to issue a subpoena rather than a warrant. The co-owners death won’t be a material fact in that sort of case but I’m sure would be mentioned to sharpen the case.
Regardless I expect popcorn is warming all over the country among folks with an interest in law.
The death would absolutely be relevant in a criminal case (e.g., under the applicable federal statute matching the described conspiracy against protected conduct, it changes the maximum penalty from ten years to death or life in prison), in a civil case, it may also be relevant, as it would likely be among the harms forming the basis for damages. (It may even be the basis of the tort, e.g., if pursued as wrongful death, where the part you describe is the “wrongful” part.)
This is far more tenuous.
All this is, sadly, is now an emotional bullet point in a future civil rights suit.
Two problems: IIED is a civil tort, not a crime, misdemeanor or otherwise. Second, the rule you state usually doesn't exist; many states have abolished the misdemeanor manslaughter rule or limited iy to a narrow class of misdemeanors, so that death in the course of a misdemeanor isn’t automatically manslaughter, and in states that retain it the class of manslaughter it becomes is a often a wobbler (can itself be a misdemeanor, or a felony, not always a felony.)
Read about Eric Garner for "repercussions" of literal caught-on-camera homicide.
It took an entire country rioting to get justice for George Floyd.. there won't even be an investigation into this.
That said, based on the information in the comments here it sounds like the mother of the owner who lived at home with the owner at the time of the raid has died. This is incredibly sad. The use of police force always has consequences even if they're not physical.
Whenever I plugged in 1.1.1.1 I had a sneaking feeling of "maybe this is a bad idea" based on random comments claiming problems on HN, but this is the first I've been bitten by it.
Thanks!
I think I set it off initially by trying to complete the captcha using keyboard input, which I actually captured on video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmbXyP46W9I
After that, this browser's fingerprint got tagged, and I haven't been able to get past it since. But using another browser from the same computer (and connection) worked fine.