Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges
wired.com
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It turns out it wasn't Brave New World or 1984, rather it's both, each enabling the other.
I just pray America elects someone who can turn this ship around, rather than doubling down on the stupidity of it all.
By that I mean there are plenty of people who are happy to support this kind of thing so long as they believe it's only being used against people unlike them in skin color, socioeconomic background, religious or political beliefs. America is not strong on solidarity.
On the other hand, the ship is turning, slowly. The war on drugs is being de-escalated, which may provide an opportunity to de-escalate the relationship between the public and the police.
The federal gov is the worrying one. They're the only ones operating with as much secrecy as possible, over-extending executive power, and the biggest reason local police are becoming militarized (via the federal program delivering them military equipment).
What possible use could local police have for such heavily armoured vehicles that wouldn't better be handled by SWAT or some other more specialised force?
I don't relish the idea of relatively untrained police officers operating said vehicles in riots etc..
I disagree. Most of us have not been affected by this personally. We are wrapped up in our own lives, and have disengaged from news sources we don't trust, or are completely beholden to our favorite news source.
To change our thoughts, we need a high profile story of an outrageous use of this technology.
I do not see a good way to fix that since that attitude seems to directly spawn from our highly-individualistic vision of society.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
The "Those people in Party X or State Y are so dumb that they vote against their own interests" schtick really annoys me. Sometimes my own view of my interests may diverge from the author's. I have no problem voting against my immediate self-interest, if I think I will benefit from improvements to society in the long run.
One example of this is that people in non-farm states support agriculture subsidies just as much as people in farm states, when it is clear that these subsidies are simply a wealth transfer (to the farm states).[1]
[1] http://freakonomics.com/2008/07/24/the-illogic-of-farm-subsi...
Techies tend to think that the US government is off the chain, rampaging on an innocent populace who doesn't like it but can't bring themselves to fight it. Techies tend to hang out with other techies and that's how we mostly feel, so it's easy to conclude that this is how everybody feels.
But a lot of people support this stuff, and that is the real source of the problems we've been seeing since 9/11 (and before, but not as visibly).
Why is the TSA still probing everybody even though we all hate it? Because we don't all hate it. A lot of people really, really like having the TSA around and doing what they do. Why are police getting more militarized and less forgiving even though we all want them to back off and calm down and integrate better with the community? Same answer. Why hasn't the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance been brought to a halt now that everybody knows about it and wants it to stop? Again, same answer.
The American populace is, for the most part, terrified. Look at the incredible reactions to the prospect of bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the US as an example. People lose their minds at the idea. They think that bringing these people into the country, despite the fact that they've been locked up for a decade and would be held in maximum security facilities, would be extremely risky.
The government is partly at fault for this. The government's reaction to 9/11 was basically, "Be afraid! Be really afraid! Holy shit, you guys, you need fear!" Basically the opposite of FDR's approach. "The only thing we have to fear is everything everywhere." But the populace accepted it, and it feeds back on itself to where we're seriously stuck with it. Only if we can change this will we see any progress on all the problems it causes.
I wish people would leave the drama to the Young and the Restless and stop implying that the misdeeds of the NSA and other law enforcement in their current state will lead to revolution. You still have clothes, you still have food, the power structure at hand is stable, the key pieces of uncertainty that can foment a revolution are missing. More importantly, you can talk about revolution on a public forum without getting your door reduced to splinters.r
Most people value wealth and security, and they only rebel when those are threatened. And not just a little bit: they have to be threatened to the extent that it looks like a worthwhile tradeoff to risk pain, privation, and death just to improve your lot. They really couldn't care less about freedom as long as their lack of freedom doesn't impact their wealth and security too much.
If things get bad enough, people will keep kicking out incumbents until things stabilize.
That said, voter suppression is getting worse...not better. So that may slowly close off the safety valve.
Personally, I plan to stick around until/unless I think the chance of me getting arrested is greater than that of being hit by lighting. Then, I'm going to bounce and find another country.
Elections don't seem to be working very effectively. Too many incumbents are gerrymandered into unassailable districts, and are barely challenged in their primaries.
I would also like to have a contingency country, but practically every one that I would be inclined to pick is cheering the US on as it reshapes itself into a police surveillance state.
It provides enough of an escape valve that if enough people who want to revolt feel that way, things would chance before violence started.
You can also renounce your US citizenship which is what truly leaving permanently entails.
The "just leave" escape valve is thus not very effective whenever the pressure builds too quickly. Besides that, the smartest and wealthiest people leave first. Anyone left behind is less able and possibly less willing to defuse the crisis.
For most people, they have significant investment in their local community, with financial, social, and reputation capital built up over many years. Abandoning that represents a huge loss, and would require a proportionally large threat to even be worth considering.
I don't expect emigration to change anything, unless some other country miraculously changes its policy to out-freedom the US, and thereby suck all of its brains out.
Anyone capable of organizing and running an effective revolution is capable of leaving the US with less risk & effort.
That is the point you are missing. This is about a revolution & revolutionaries, not "is this easy for anyone? is this best for everyone?"
Sure it depends on how bad USA wants you to come back.
But if I got into a situation like the Goldman Sachs programmer who they are re-trying in state court? I'd say f it and leave the country.
Meanwhile people underuse the democratic avenues available. No, not street protest but the boring incrementalism of consensus, local politics.
Just last week we saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7929817 in which an ex CIA Open Source Intelligence expert shared his view. He explicitly stated, to the UK public in widely read media:
The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on. [...] Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one massive fire.
This speaks to me because personally I was physically in Tunisia for the revolution and it was a powerful feeling. As an obviously foreign anglo-Australian, isolated in the far west of the country where large scale street-level ferment began (weeks before it reached western media), I never felt threatened or unsafe at all. I have also lived in the US .. during which time I saw how much debt and fear, particularly over money and healthcare, ruled the lives of many, how pervasive the systemic imbalances were (homeless alcoholic recent war veterans at the supermarket, through 70% foreclosure rates - that's 70% of all houses in in my suburb), and how inept the response was (ask Google to close the foreclosure map, minor but media-heavy changes to healthcare, etc.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
For starters he was referring to the East German Stasi.
Nothing to do with Nazis, Hitler, or the third Reich.
In addition: Many people think that whenever Nazi (or equivalent) is mentioned you lose according to Godwin's Law.
This is not so, however, when the reference is actually related to the discussion. For example: You may bring up Nazis in a discussion about totalitarian regime, or Fascism, without falling into Godwin's Law trap.
And to conclude: In a discussion about a device, which enables snooping on a large scale a referenced to the GDR's stasi is certainly not out of line.
Americans have been predicting and preparing for civil disturbances for decades. For a long time, you had to turn over rocks and poke at the mud underneath to find the people doing it, but now you're likely to have met at least one personally. They will not tell you they are doing it. Firstly, they don't want to be perceived as a kooky crackpot. Secondly, they don't want you showing up to mooch when things go bad. Thirdly, they don't want you to be the one to rat them out to whomever they believe to be their adversary.
It's a lot like figuring out which of your acquaintances is (or are) the closeted homosexual(s).
Ironically, a lot of the increasingly paranoid and increasingly isolationist doomsayers are voting to elect the very people that will bring on the crisis that they fear.
And on the other side of the spectrum, you have people leveraging the new ubiquity of videocameras to reflect even more sunlight into the dark corners of government. They post videos of government employees behaving badly or unlawfully, and file public records requests and lawsuits at every opportunity.
The left-libertarians and the right-libertarians are natural allies against a centrist-authoritarian government, but I wish you good luck getting them to even give each other a polite hello.
And as an American familiar with Churchill quotes, I remain hopeful that we are finally running out of wrong things to try.
Or look outside of whatever cultural bubble he's in?
I knew I'd only have to wait a few hours to come across something like "mutterings". While this is about the aftermath of the ever more likely coming collapse, it's akin: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/06/22/learning-to-love-clowar...
"Yet increasingly, I have to wonder how much of a win Cloward-Piven would be for them. As things stand, those that have helped guide the decline such as Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and their accomplices such as the disgusting Lois Lerner, will never see the inside of a courtroom. Once a true collapse hits, the color of legal legitimacy that both gives them authority and makes them for the moment untouchable is washed away. With the old order’s restraints gone, whose to say those that midwifed the collapse shouldn’t swing listlessly against the backdrop of a crow-filled sky?"
There's a lot more where that comes from, from people who e.g. know Obama launched his political career in the home of a domestic terrorist who estimated that, after his '60s era revolution succeeded, a full 1/10 of the population would be so resistant to reeducation that they'd have to be killed outright. 25 million then, obviously quite a few more now.
And I'd guess most of the US residents reading this should really pay attention to the following, especially per the misattributed to Trotsky quote, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested to you"
One of the things that's on the table if the US devolves into a second civil war is the relatively simple expedient of killing Blue cities: http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/01/shock-the-system/
Or as Dean Ing put it in his 1981 novel Systemic Shock (http://www.amazon.com/Systemic-Shock-Dean-Ing/dp/0812500385), about an attack on the US by forces significantly less capable than the Soviet Union:
"The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.
The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it."
Take out enough of the really big transformers, for which there aren't many spares on hand, deprive big Blue cities of power for a few weeks, and the situation will be ... significantly changed.
I'm not looking forward to any of the above, if for no other reason than that I depend on civilization providing a reliable supply of pharmaceuticals to stay alive in the face of a chronic medical condition (and any time now that'll be true of my parents, right now it's looking like that's now going to be true for my father), but I do believe in keeping my eyes open.
a) The stated justification for why it must be secret from defense attorneys. This isn't "sources and methods" of intelligence, this is tapping cell phones, hardly something no one thought the cops can do. And more to the point, what are crooks going to do, switch to landlines?
b) The Federal LE agency involved in grabbing the records set aside for ACLU. The U.S. Marshals are, if I understand right, the law enforcement arm of the Federal courts themselves, so were they enforcing a Federal magistrate's order when they seized the records?
c) The reasoning they use to say the search is reasonable; I know the law and technology have not mixed well with digital comms, but it would seem to me that if you have to MITM or otherwise actively communicate with and interfere in the operation of a person's cell phone, that you've performed a search, even if you only end up grabbing metadata. And the Smith v. Maryland exception used for NSA wouldn't seem to apply here either, as LE is going out to grab the same metadata themselves instead of obtaining a private entity's similar records.
The Revolution hasn't happened yet because the closer one gets to putting it into practice, the more apparent all of this becomes. You don't get a revolution when things are bad. You get a revolution when things are so inhumanly awful that mass death and chaos starts to sound like a step up.
Remind me where I live again? Because when I grew up, we were the free and open society and the other guys, the bad guys, were the ones in everybody's knickers. (Recommended movie: The Lives Of Others)
Of note here is that it was the Assistant State Attorney, not the cops, that had problems with being honest with the court. There's a guy who needs to be disbarred.
Alternatively, throw out the warrant because it is the fruit of fraud, then charge the ASA with conspiracy to computer fraud and abuse (unauthorized access) with one count for each subscriber in the area, and refuse to admit the warrant as evidence because it's null and void.
The real question is why can the magic words "confidential source" be used as justification for a warrant without more clarification.
Well also the part about using the devices in the first place without warrant.
If I read the article correctly, what happened is that the police obtained information in ways they apparently weren't allowed to use (unconstitutional surveillance), and then hid this fact under the pretense of a supposed person giving that information. This is all kinds of wrong and, among other things, voids those warrants.
[1] http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/confidential-source%20/
I assume you can't get a warrant to search someone's house for drugs by saying "he looks like a junkie to me". It would be too easy to ask how claiming a "confidential source" is better than that. How is it different?
That impossible verification is what was being abused in this case.
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No, it may be true that no court has ruled explicitly if that were the case, but to claim that this is somehow unclear is just plain false.
They're quite literally constructing a fake, pre-tapped cell tower for your cell phone to connect to.
This requires a warrant by any sane interpretation of the Constitution, it requires a warrant by any reasonable understanding of how wiretaps affect our privacy rights.
If some court rules counter to what I've just said, it is reasonable to conclude that the judge(s) in question is out of his gourd. We have a few bad ones on the bench.
The law enforcement agents who do this agree with me. Why else would they seek to hide it? They know that it can only be ruled unconstitutional, else they'd go get their rubberstamp from the guy in black robes... hell, if anything they're more optimistic than I am, seeing how they feel their chances of a judge ruling in their favor are too low to risk it.
If there were a way to differentiate between a Stingray tower and then let mobile devices blacklist connecting to them...
Put a couple cops and prosecutors in jail and the system will figure itself out.
The thing that is more interesting is the dynamic where neither happens because judges are unwilling to tip the apple cart. I hope that someone is doing a review of transcripts now to see if police in those courtrooms have perjured themselves.
My concern is what exactly is being contained, and collected. The cell phone companies are already collecting the same data, but I would assume that with the Stingray it makes getting access to that data much faster versus having to request it from the cell phone network companies. The article mentions what they are collecting with the Stringray, "When mobile phones—and other wireless communication devices—connect to the stingray, the device can see and record their unique ID numbers and traffic data, as well as information that points to the device’s location. By moving the stingray around, authorities can triangulate the device’s location with greater precision than they can using data obtained from a fixed tower location." This technology could very well advance, and allow them in the future to collect much more maybe. Gathering location seems to be the biggest reasoning behind using the Stingray.