Futuristic Spider-shaped Clock ca. 2015. L’Epée in-house designed and manufactured movement, 11 jewels • black central dome with Arabic numerals and minute division, stylized and curved painted hands • 18k yellow gold-plated brass body and limbs in the shape of spider, with the regulator and oscillating balance wheel posing as head, and the other end housing the mainspring barrel, eight articulated legs • Eight day power reserve.
“This design needs a little something…I’ve got it!
I’ll make the letters reflect in the water, and…perfect!”
Sometimes you’re a little too close to your creation to see the problems with your design.
Interesting acoustic attack against the MEMS accelerometers in devices like FitBits.
Millions of accelerometers reside inside smartphones, automobiles, medical devices, anti-theft devices, drones, IoT devices, and many other industrial and consumer applications. Our work investigates how analog acoustic injection attacks can damage the digital integrity of the capacitive MEMS accelerometer. Spoofing such sensors with intentional acoustic interference enables an out-of-spec pathway for attackers to deliver chosen digital values to microprocessors and embedded systems that blindly trust the unvalidated integrity of sensor outputs. Our contributions include (1) modeling the physics of malicious acoustic interference on MEMS accelerometers, (2) discovering the circuit-level security flaws that cause the vulnerabilities by measuring acoustic injection attacks on MEMS accelerometers as well as systems that employ on these sensors, and (3) two software-only defenses that mitigate many of the risks to the integrity of MEMS accelerometer outputs.
This is not that a big deal with things like FitBits, but as IoT devices get more autonomous -- and start making decisions and then putting them into effect automatically -- these vulnerabilities will become critical.
Academic paper.
The Independent (Ireland) (Cathal McMahon) reports:
Gardaí have decided not to proceed with a blasphemy investigation against Stephen Fry after they failed to find a large group of people outraged by comments he made on an RTÉ show….
A well-placed source said: “This man [who filed the complaint] was simply a witness and not an injured party [presumably because he said that he himself was not offended by Fry’s comments — EV]. Gardaí were unable to find a substantial number of outraged people.
“For this reason the investigation has been concluded.” …
Today Health Minister Simon Harris said a referendum should be held to change the [Irish] constitution’s stance of blasphemy.
“It’s silly. It’s a bit embarrassing. It needs to be changed. I’m very pleased that the Government wishes to see a referendum in relation to this issue. It obviously does require constitutional change,” he said.
For more on the investigation, on Fry’s remarks and on Irish blasphemy law, see this post.
President Trump speaks during a news conference on Thursday in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
Sometimes, commentary is hardly necessary — the words speak for themselves. Verbum ipsa loquitur. Here, unedited — posted, appallingly enough, at the official White House website — are the remarks by the leader of the free world on the occasion of the House’s passage of the the Trumpcare bill:
And I will say this, that as far as I’m concerned, your premiums, they’re going to start to come down. We’re going to get this passed through the Senate. I feel so confident. Your deductibles, when it comes to deductibles, they were so ridiculous that nobody got to use their current plan — this nonexistent plan that I heard so many wonderful things about over the last three or four days. After that, I mean, it’s — I don’t think you’re going to hear so much. Right now, the insurance companies are fleeing. It’s been a catastrophe. And this is a great plan. I actually think it will get even better. And this is, make no mistake, this is a repeal and replace of Obamacare. Make no mistake about it. Make no mistake. (Applause.)
And I think, most importantly, yes, premiums will be coming down. Yes, deductibles will be coming down. But very importantly, it’s a great plan. And ultimately, that’s what it’s all about.
We knew that wasn’t going to work. I predicted it a long time ago. I said, it’s failing. And now, it’s obvious that it’s failing. It’s dead. It’s essentially dead. If we don’t pay lots of ransom money over to the insurance companies it would die immediately.
So what we have is something very, very incredibly well-crafted. Tell you what, there is a lot of talent standing behind me. An unbelievable amount of talent, that I can tell you. I mean it. (Applause.) And coming from a different world and only being a politician for a short period of time — how am I doing? Am I doing okay? I’m President. Hey, I’m President. Can you believe it? Right? (Applause.) I don’t know, it’s — I thought you needed a little bit more time. They always told me, more time. But we didn’t.
But we have an amazing group of people standing behind me. They worked so hard and they worked so long. And when I said, let’s do this, let’s go out, just short little shots for each one of us and let’s say how good this plan is — we don’t have to talk about this unbelievable victory — wasn’t it unbelievable? So we don’t have to say it again. But it’s going to be an unbelievable victory, actually, when we get it through the Senate.
And there’s so much spirit there. But I said, let’s go out — we have a little list of some of the people — and I think after that list goes, if they don’t talk too long, our first list, we’re going to let some of the other folks just come up and say whatever you want.
But we want to brag about the plan, because this plan really — uh oh. (Laughter.) Well, we may. (Laughter.) But we’re just going to talk a little bit about the plan, how good it is, some of the great features.
[He then continued for a bit, though he never did get to talking about all of those “great features.” Italics added.]
I’m sorry, but I cannot get used to the fact that our president cannot speak in coherent sentences. It is inexcusable — unacceptable in a 14-year-old. “Premiums will come down, and deductibles will come down”; good deal! Is there anyone — anyone — who thinks that President Trump understands health-care markets, and the impacts of this bill on those markets, remotely well enough to say that? Does anybody care anymore about little things like that? I guess that when you have a president whose campaign officials are under FBI investigation on the basis of evidence that they may have collaborated with a foreign power to disrupt the U.S. presidential election, all this is just a small blip on the radar. But it appalls just the same.
It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, and the slovenliness of our language then makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946).
“The point,” Orwell continued, “is that the process is reversible.” I hope he was correct.
This new map shows how easily white Europeans associate black faces with negative ideas. 
Since 2002, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have logged onto a website run by Harvard University called Project Implicit and taken an “implicit association test” (IAT), a rapid-response task which measures how easily you can pair items from different categories.To create this new map, we used data from a version of the test which presents white or black faces and positive or negative words. The result shows how easily our minds automatically make the link between the categories – what psychologists call an “implicit racial attitude”.Each country on the map is coloured according to the average score of test takers from that country. Redder countries show higher average bias, bluer countries show lower average bias, as the scale on the top of the map shows.Like a similar map which had been made for US states, our map shows variation in the extent of racial bias – but all European countries are racially biased when comparing blacks versus whites.
In every country in Europe, people are slower to associate blackness with positive words such as “good” or “nice” and faster to associate blackness with negative concepts such as “bad” or “evil”. But they are quicker to make the link between blackness and negative concepts in the Czech Republic or Lithuania than they are in Slovenia, the UK or Ireland.
No country had an average score below zero, which would reflect positive associations with blackness. In fact, none had an average score that was even close to zero, which would reflect neither positive nor negative racial associations.
Overall, we have scores for 288,076 white Europeans, collected between 2002 and 2015, with sample sizes for each country shown on the left-hand side.
Because of the design of the test it is very difficult to deliberately control your score. Many people, including those who sincerely hold non-racist or even anti-racist beliefs, demonstrate positive implicit bias on the test. The exact meaning of implicit attitudes, and the IAT, are controversial, but we believe they reflect the automatic associations we hold in our minds, associations that develop over years of immersion in the social world.
Although we, as individuals, may not hold racist beliefs, the ideas we associate with race may be constructed by a culture which describes people of different ethnicities in consistent ways, and ways which are consistently more or less positive. Looked at like this, the IAT – which at best is a weak measure of individual psychology – may be most useful if individuals’ scores are aggregated to provide a reflection on the collective social world we inhabit.
The results shown in this map give detail to what we already expected – that across Europe racial attitudes are not neutral. Blackness has negative associations for white Europeans, and there are some interesting patterns in how the strength of these negative associations varies across the continent.
North and west Europe, on average, have less strong anti-black associations, although they still have anti-black associations on average. As you move south and east the strength of negative associations tends to increase – but not everywhere. The Balkans look like an exception, compared to surrounding countries. Is this because of some quirk about how people in the Balkans heard about Project Implicit, or because their prejudices aren’t orientated around a white-black axis? For now, we can only speculate.
When interpreting the map there are at least two important qualifications to bear in mind.
The first is that the scores only reflect racial attitudes in one dimension: pairing white/black with goodness/badness. Our feelings about ethnicity have many more dimensions which aren’t captured by this measure.
The second is that the data comes from Europeans who visit the the US Project Implicit website, which is in English. We can be certain that the sample reflects a subset of the European population which are more internet-savvy than is typical. They are probably also younger, and more cosmopolitan. These factors are likely to underweight the extent of implicit racism in each country, so that the true levels of implicit racism are probably higher than shown on this map.
This new map is possible because Project Implicit release their data via the Open Science Framework. This site allows scientists to share the raw materials and data from their experiments, allowing anyone to check their working, or re-analyse the data, as we have done here. I believe that open tools and publishing methods like these are necessary to make science better and more reliable.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Edit 4/5/17. The colour scale chosen for this map emphasises the differences between countries. While that’s most important for working out what drives IAT scores, the main take-away from the map is that all of Europe is considerably not neutral. That conclusion is supported by a continuous colour scale, as used in this version of the map here
This picture grid brilliantly sums up the attitudes in nearly every IT office I've ever worked in. This is the oldest reference to it I can find.
CodsmackI want to see the aurora so very badly!
Keggie Carew grew up with her father's stories of parachuting into the jungle and working as a spy in Burma. She wasn't sure how much to believe until she started researching her new book, Dadland.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Grove Atlantic)
Crown of Margaret of York, an extremely rare example of English medieval metalwork is the silver gilt crown, dating from c1461. She wore this crown at her wedding to Charles the Bold in Bruges 1468, & later presented it to the altar of Our Lady in Aachen on her visit in 1475, thus sparing it from destruction in either the Reformation or English Civil War. The original leather case also survives & is displayed alongside.
Fingal’s Cave, located on the uninhabited island of Staffa, Scotland, is formed from basalt columns within a paleocene lava flow, similar to the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. Due to the large size and arched roof, the cave gives off an extremely creepy sound caused by the echoes of the waves.
The Post’s Tom Jackman has an interesting story about a criminal case pending in Los Angeles before U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney:
At a giant Best Buy repair shop in Brooks, Ky., Geek Squad technicians work on computers owned by people across the country, delving into them to retrieve lost data. Over several years, a handful of those workers have notified the FBI when they see signs of child pornography, earning payments from the agency.
The existence of the small cadre of informants within one of the country’s most popular computer repair services was revealed in the case of a California doctor who is facing federal charges after his hard drive was flagged by a technician. The doctor’s lawyers found that the FBI had cultivated eight “confidential human sources” in the Geek Squad over a four-year period, according to a judge’s order in the case, with all of them receiving some payment.
The case raises issues about privacy and the government use of informants. If a customer turns over their computer for repair, do they forfeit their expectation of privacy, and their Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches? And if an informant is paid, does it compromise their credibility or effectively convert them into an agent of the government?
Best Buy searching a computer is legal — the customer authorized it, and the law does not prohibit private searches. But if Best Buy serves as an arm of the government, then a warrant or specific consent is needed.
This isn’t a new issue. There have been cases on computer repairmen turning over computers with child pornography going back at least as far as the 1990s. See, e.g., United States v. Hall, 142 F.3d 988, 993 (7th Cir. 1998). Among those early cases is United States v. Barth, 26 F. Supp.2d 929 (W.D. Tex. 1998), in which the computer repair technician was also a confidential informant for the FBI.
Here’s the basics of how the law applies. First, if the computer repairman is not deemed a government agent, then the repairman is permitted to turn over the computer to the government. The government can then reconstruct the search of the private-party repairman and use that to get a warrant. There’s currently a 2-2 circuit split on what it means to “reconstruct” the search without a warrant, as I explained in detail here. Two circuits (the 5th and 7th) say that the government can search the entire computer without a warrant based on the repairman’s private search. On the other hand, two circuits (the 6th and 11th) say that the government can look only at the files that the private party observed. The new case is in the 9th Circuit, which hasn’t yet taken a side on the split.
I know of one opinion arguing that a private computer repairman also has independent authority to consent to a government search of a computer, which would mean that the repairman can authorize any government search he likes. See United States v. Anderson, 2007 WL 1121319 (N.D.Ind. 2007). The reasoning of that opinion strikes me as quite weak, though, for reasons I won’t bore you with here.
There is less precedent on how the law applies if the computer repairman is considered a government agent, either at the outset or over the course of handing over that particular computer to the government. I think the issue becomes the scope of the computer owner’s consent under Florida v. Jimeno, 500 U.S. 248 (1991). Under Jimeno, the question is: How would a typical reasonable person familiar with the exchange between the agent and the computer owner understand the scope of consent? Jimeno ordinarily applies when the suspect knows he is consenting to a government search, but at least off the top of my head I would think it also applies to a search when the agent is effectively undercover.
According to the Post story, the government is arguing that the computer owner waived his Fourth Amendment rights because he signed a written form stating that “I am on notice that any product containing child pornography will be turned over to the authorities.” I’m skeptical about that argument. I don’t know the full context, but that language in isolation strikes me as most naturally read as notice that any discovered images would be turned over, not as an understanding that the computer repair technicians would search everywhere on the hard drive to discover such images. Scope of consent issues are always fact-bound, however, so it’s hard to say much more on that.
Finally, you might be wondering, what’s the line between a private-party search and a government agent search? There are no bright lines. And each circuit has its own formulation. In the 9th Circuit, where this case is being litigated, the case I know of best is United States v. Miller, 688 F.2d 652, 657 (9th Cir. 1982), Miller focused the agency inquiry on “(1) whether the government knew of and acquiesced in the intrusive conduct, and (2) whether the party performing the search intended to assist law enforcement efforts or to further his own ends.”
The fact-intensive nature of the Miller test may help explain why the judge is planning a factual hearing on the details of the relationship between the government and the repair technicians. In computer cases in particular, the line between a private-party search and a government agent search can be really hard to draw and can depend on pretty fine factual distinctions. See, e.g., United States v. Jarrett, 338 F.3d 339 (4th Cir. 2003) (exploring the specifics of the relationship between an unidentified hacker and the government in deciding whether the hacker had become a government agent). As always, stay tuned.
Yesterday the Supreme Court issued a summary opinion in the White v. Pauly case. A police officer was sued for killing a man during an armed standoff during which the officers allegedly never identified themselves as police. The Supreme Court, however, concluded that the officer had “qualified immunity.” That is, he was immune from a suit for damages, because his conduct — while possibly unconstitutional — was not obviously unconstitutional.
As the court put it (with citation and quotations omitted):
Qualified immunity attaches when an official’s conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. While this Court’s case law does not require a case directly on point for a right to be clearly established, existing precedent must have placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond debate. …
This is not a case where it is obvious that there was a violation of clearly established law under Garner and Graham. Of note, the [lower court] majority did not conclude that [Officer] White’s conduct—such as his failure to shout a warning—constituted a run-of-the-mill Fourth Amendment violation. Indeed, it recognized that “this case presents a unique set of facts and circumstances” in light of White’s late arrival on the scene. This alone should have been an important indication to the majority that White’s conduct did not violate a clearly established right. . . .
(There is a little more in the short opinion, including the possibility that the other two officers, who were on the scene earlier, might still be liable. An interesting debate about the case takes place in this PrawfsBlawg thread.)
The court’s decision is a completely unsurprising turn in a long line of qualified immunity cases like this one. But I thought it was time to post a paper I have been working on for a long time on the legitimacy of this immunity doctrine. The title: “Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful?”
Here’s the abstract:
The doctrine of qualified immunity operates as an unwritten defense to civil rights lawsuits brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. It prevents plaintiffs from recovering damages for violations of their constitutional rights unless the government official violated “clearly established law,” usually requiring a specific precedent on point. This article argues that the doctrine is unlawful and inconsistent with conventional principles of statutory interpretation.
Members of the Supreme Court have offered three different justifications for imposing such an unwritten defense on the text of Section 1983. One is that it derives from a common law “good faith” defense; another is that it compensates for an earlier putative mistake in broadening the statute; the third is that it provides “fair warning” to government officials, akin to the rule of lenity.
But on closer examination, each of these justifications falls apart, for a mix of historical, conceptual, and doctrinal reasons. There was no such defense; there was no such mistake; lenity ought not apply. And even if these things were otherwise, the doctrine of qualified immunity would not be the best response.
The unlawfulness of qualified immunity is of particular importance now. Despite the shoddy foundations, the Supreme Court has been reinforcing the doctrine of immunity in both formal and informal ways. In particular, the Court has given qualified immunity a privileged place on its agenda reserved for few other legal doctrines besides habeas deference. Rather than doubling down, the Court ought to be beating a retreat.
You can read the whole thing here.
Over 1200 of my fellow law professors recently signed a petition urging the Senate to reject President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Jeff Sessions to become attorney general. Critics correctly point out that the vast majority of the signatories are liberal Democrats, and (less correctly) therefore dismiss the statement as mere partisan politics. I am not a liberal Democrat, I did not sign the statement, and I don’t agree with all of its points. But the signers are right about the bottom line: the Senate should indeed reject this nomination. It should borrow a slogan from Sessions’ beloved War on Drugs and “just say no.”
Liberals are not the only ones with good reason to oppose Sessions. His record should also trouble libertarians, conservatives, and others who care about protecting liberty, constitutional federalism, and property rights.
I. The Threat to Property Rights.
Sessions is one of the leading advocates of asset forfeiture, the law enforcement practice of seizing the property of suspects who have often not even been charged with any crime, much less convicted. In recent years, there has been growing recognition across the political spectrum that asset forfeiture poses a serious threat to the property rights of innocent people, particularly the poor and minorities. All too often, it results in a kind of legalized plunder, as law enforcement agencies get to keep the property they seize. The property is also often seized with little or no due process protections, in violation of the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Yet Sessions opposes bipartisan efforts to rein in such abuses, and is “very unhappy” that asset forfeiture has been called into question. He opposes efforts to end the “equitable sharing” program under which the federal government incentivizes asset forfeitures by state and local law enforcement – even in states that otherwise forbid police from profiting from this practice. The program was suspended in 2015, but later reinstated.
In 2015, libertarian-leaning Republican Senator Rand Paul voted against President Obama’s nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general, in part because of her support for asset forfeiture. He was right about Lynch. Paul and other supporters of property rights should oppose Sessions for the same reason.
II. The Threat to Liberty and Federalism.
Sessions’ longtime role as an extreme drug warrior is also troubling. There is now increasing bipartisan recognition that the War on Drugs is a terrible failure that has undermined civil liberties and inflicted great harm on society. Unfortunately, Sessions is an uncompromising advocate of the most aggressive forms of federal drug prohibition. Although a large majority of Americans favor marijuana legalization (including even a narrow plurality of Republicans). Many more Republicans (some 70 percent) favor leaving the issue up to the states. But Sessions opposes even the Obama administration’s relatively modest steps to reduce federal enforcement in those states that have chosen to legalize.
In his view, “good people don’t smoke marijuana,” and federal enforcement must be ramped up. If you are among the nearly 50 percent of Americans who have tried marijuana, you may want to take note of what the likely next attorney general thinks of you. Sessions’ support for ending the crack-cocaine sentencing disparity is a rare exception to his otherwise consistent record as a “drug war dinosaur.”
Sessions’ drug war agenda is not just dubious policy and a threat to civil liberties, it also undermines constitutional federalism. If, as Sessions’ preferred policies require, the federal government has the power to enforce marijuana prohibition anywhere in the United States regardless of the laws of the states, it also has the power to ban the possession or distribution of pretty much anything else. That makes a mockery of the constitutional limits on federal power that many conservatives claim to prize.
Admittedly, the Supreme Court ruled that such sweeping congressional power was permissible in its badly flawed decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which held that Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce allowed it to ban the possession of medical marijuana that had never been sold in any market or crossed state lines. But serious constitutional federalists should be opposing Raich, in line with the powerful dissenting opinions by Justice Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O’Connor, not exploiting it to impose federal prohibition on unwilling states.
In a diverse nation beset with deep partisan conflict, both liberals and conservatives have an interest in restoring constitutional federalism. Sessions’ drug war agenda would undermine it.
In addition to being one of the Senate’s most extreme drug warriors, Sessions is also perhaps its leading supporter of mass deportations and immigration restrictionism, going well beyond many other Republicans. Such measures pose a serious threat to the liberty of native-born Americans as well as immigrants.
Like his marijuana policies, Sessions’ proposals for coercing “sanctuary cities” are also likely to undermine constitutional federalism, unless invalidated by courts. Conservatives who might welcome federal coercion in this area should remember that the same power could be used by liberal presidents to coerce more conservative states in the future.
On immigration, as on marijuana legalization, Sessions is out of step with public opinion. Exit polls show that some 70% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants working in the United States.
The attorney general does not have as much power over immigration enforcement as over the War on Drugs and asset forfeitures. But Sessions could still do great harm in this field.
III. How We Can Get a Better Nominee by Overcoming Partisan Bias.
I don’t expect any president – Democrat or Republican – to appoint an attorney general as libertarian as I would ideally prefer. Far from it. But libertarians and others who care about federalism and limiting government power can reasonably expect someone with a less terrible record than Sessions. His divergence from mainstream views on so many issues does not by by itself prove that he is wrong. But it does make him potentially vulnerable.
I am not the only right of center commentator with grave concerns about Sessions. George Will, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Rep. Justin Amash, and Michael Tanner (writing in the National Review) have done so as well, among others. As Tanner puts it, Sessions “has a record that ought to worry believers in small government and individual liberty.”
The flaws in Sessions’ record are serious regardless of whether we credit claims that Sessions is a racist, that cost him a nomination to a federal judgeship back in the 1980s. Even if Sessions is completely free of racial prejudice, his agenda is still a threat to liberty, property rights, and constitutional federalism.
Sessions’ record cannot be sidestepped on the grounds that the attorney general’s job is just to “enforce the law.” Given the vast scope of federal law, a large majority of Americans have violated it at one time or another, and the AG has enormous discretion in choosing which putative lawbreakers to pursue. Being attorney general is not just a matter of technical competence. It is also about values and priorities. And many of Sessions’ priorities are deeply inimical to liberty and the Constitution. Republican senators recognized that the job is about more than professional qualifications when 43 of them voted against Loretta Lynch’s confirmation because of objections to her positions on policy and legal issues. Sessions should not be immune from such opposition either.
If, as seems likely, GOP senators rally around Sessions out of partisan loyalty, he will be confirmed. He may even be a “lock” for confirmation. Partisanship is a powerful drug that leads many people on both left and right to abandon their supposed principles. As Republican Rep. Justin Amash recently put it, “[p]artisanship remains a stronger force than ideology. Things won’t get better in politics until people care more about principles than teams.”
In this case, liberals, libertarians, and conservative advocates of property rights and federalism should join together in opposing Sessions. Despite their many other differences, these groups have a common interest in stopping his nomination. All three be better off if Trump is forced to choose a more conventional Republican, even if they still end up opposing some of that person’s decisions. Given the close 52-48 balance in the Senate, only a handful of GOP senators need to turn against Sessions in order to defeat his nomination. Now would be a good time to set aside some of the partisan bias that is helping to poison our political system.
La Conciergerie,
2 Boulevard du Palais, 75001 Paris, France.La Conciergerie is a former royal palace and prison located by the seine on the west of the Île de la Cité. It is part of the larger complex known as the Palais de Justice, which is still used for judicial purposes.
CodsmackI think this could apply to me too
CodsmackThis is cool!
CodsmackAhh the satisfied smile of watching bad people get caught hard.
This is the latest post in the Prenda Law saga.
More than three and a half years ago I started covering a copyright-troll firm called Prenda Law, which came to my attention because it was filing defamation suits against critics accusing it of wrongdoing. Rarely does the Streisand Effect so utterly annihilate a group of censorious miscreants.
Over the last three years, Prenda Law and its principals John Steele and Paul Hansmeier have met with ruin at the hands of federal courts across the country. Their scheme — to upload porn, track people downloading it from torrent sites, then engage in fraudulent and extortionate litigation against the downloaders — has been exposed. The story has involved spectacles like lawyers taking the Fifth rather than answer a judge's questions about their lawsuits, devastating sanctions orders quoting Star Trek and referring lawyers for federal criminal investigation, withering fire from federal appellate courts, and generally every bad thing that can happen to a lawyer happening to the bad men behind this case.
When people have asked me why these lawyers aren't in jail, I've answered that the wheels turn slowly.
But they turn.
Today federal agents arrested John Steele and Paul Hansmeier, the two lawyers most responsible for this nationwide debacle. They were arrested on a federal indictment brought by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota. An indictment is an accusation, not proof: it only signifies that the U.S. Attorney has persuaded a grand jury that there is probable cause, which is not one of the more difficult challenges anyone ever faced. But a federal indictment is a very grave development for any defendant. The feds' competitive advantage is their ability to pick and choose cases, to develop evidence and witnesses painstakingly over time, and to bring their case only after they've amassed what they see as overwhelming odds in their favor.
The indictment (courtesy of Fight Copyright Trolls) is here. Let's discuss it, shall we?
The indictment charges Hansmeier and Steele with a raft of federal crimes: conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to suborn perjury in federal court. As usual, if you count up the statutory maximum sentence for all of these crimes, you get a ridiculous number that bears no relation to the probable sentences they face if convicted. However, given the amounts discussed in the indictment, they are facing years in federal prison.
Having covered this story for almost four years, what's remarkable to me is how comprehensive the federal indictment is. It covers almost every sort of misconduct any judge or commentator has accused Steele and Hansmeier of committing in substantial detail. It therefore serves to demonstrate how broad and flexible federal criminal law is — how it can be brought to bear against a wide variety of conduct.
The story, as the indictment tells it, is this: Steele and Hansmeier used various entities, including Prenda Law, to commit fraud. The indictment mentions many entities familiar to followers of this story — AF Holdings, Ingenuity 13, Guava LLC, and so forth. These entities would appear in copyright cases as the nominal plaintiffs, but the indictment alleges they were actually owned and controlled entirely by Steele and Hansmeier to conduct their fraudulent scheme. According to the feds, Steele and Hansmeier uploaded their "clients'" pornographic movies to file-sharing websites intending to lure people into downloading them, then sued the people who downloaded for copyright infringement, concealing their role in uploading the movies. They used what the feds describe as "extortionate tactics" to coerce quick settlements, and dismissed cases when defendants fought back rather than risk discovery. When federal courts began limiting the number of people they could sue at once for porn copyright infringement, they changed tactics and began to file suits falsely asserting that their clients had been "hacked" and then using those allegations as a basis to subpoena ISPs for subscriber information. Eventually Steele and Hansmeier filmed their own porn to upload to support this scheme. When courts began suspicious, the indictment alleges that Steele and Hansmeier sent underlings to lie to courts, or even lied to courts themselves, to conceal the scheme. The indictment specifies 14 separate instances of perjury or lying to courts. This scheme, the feds claim, netted more than $6,000,000 in copyright settlements, of which $3,000,000 went to Steele and Hansmeier and only $1,000,000 went to sham "clients," with the rest consumed for expenses.
The feds apply these facts to the law deftly. They describe the entire thing as a conspiracy to defraud, which forms the first (and most flexible) count in the indictment. The indictment offers five counts of mail fraud tied to five settlement demand letters sent by the schemers. It offers 11 counts of wire fraud tied to uploadings of porn to file sharing site and processing of checks. That's the way mail and wire fraud works — every mailing or wire communication resulting from the scheme can be a separate count. The feds frame their conspiracy to commit money laundering charge on the theory that Steele and Hansmeier engaged in transactions (probably with the sham companies) designed to conceal that the money came from mail fraud and wire fraud. The conspiracy to commit perjury count is based on the theory that they agreed to send people across the country to lie to courts to protect their scheme. The indictment also seeks forfeiture of ill-gotten gains.
This is a devastating indictment. Its scope will make it extremely expensive and difficult to defend. The detail level suggests that the feds have amassed a vast amount of documentary evidence. Its reference to Prenda Law employees with initials like "M.L." and "P.H." strongly suggests that the feds have flipped some former employees, who are now testifying for the government.
Prenda fell years ago. But now doom has come for Steele and Hansmeier. Based on my observations throughout this case, it couldn't happen to more deserving criminals.
Steele and Hansmeier might have continued this scheme for much longer — and might have even gotten away with it — had they not gotten arrogant and vengeful. When criticized, rather than settling and dismissing some suits and moving on (the way practiced con men do), they were incensed, and decided to abuse the legal system even more by blitzing critics with multiple lawsuits. John Steele gleefully threatened opponents and Paul Hansmeier famously sneered at the defamation defendants "welcome to the big leagues." It was those actions that drew much more attention to their cases. Character is destiny. Not only are Steele and Hansmeier wanton crooks, they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall.
December 19 bail update: Paul Hansmeier made his first appearance in Minnesota District Court and was released on a $100,000 signature bond — that is, he was released on a promise to pay $100,000 if he fails to appear for trial or breaks terms of release.
That sounds fairly lenient, but bear in mind that under the Bail Reform Act bond is supposed to be set at the minimum necessary to make sure that the defendant doesn't flee and doesn't pose a danger to the community. White collar dudes — and particularly white white collar dudes — typically get pretty low bail in federal court.
John Steele was arrested in Florida. Here's the way it's supposed to work: if you get arrested on a federal warrant in a different district, you have a right to a hearing at which the feds have to show you're the same dude charged in the other district and that there's probable cause (which can be satisfied by an indictment, like they have here.) Steele — who said he would be representing himself — waived further proceedings, thus agreeing to go to Minnesota to appear, and was released immediately on a $100,000 signature bond and a promise to post an actual $100,000 bond (meaning he'll have to put up $10,0000). Again, that is not atypical.
If Steele represents himself in Minnesota, it will be spectacular.
Copyright 2016 by the named Popehat author.Today's selection -- from Drinking in America by Susan Cheever. Money, alcohol, and votes were regular companions at polling places in colonial and early America:
"George Washington, a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who loved parties and fox hunting, found out about the connection between drinking and voting for the American electorate the hard way. A rigorous military commander who drove his soldiers hard and expected much of them, he began to aspire to a government position after he did not get a command in the British military. While seeking a seat in the Virginia Assembly in 1755, he was roundly defeated.
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George Washington depicted during his French & Indian War days. |
"Two years later he ran again, but this time he delivered 144 gallons of rum, punch, cider, and wine to the polling places distributed by election volunteers who urged the voters to drink up. At 307 votes, he got a return on his investment of almost two votes per gallon. Most elections featured vats and barrels of free liquor as well as the candidate in hand to drink along with his constituency. Candidates showed off their generosity as well as their drinking capacity. Although voting while intoxicated was normal for the colonists, French traveler Ferdinand Bayard was horrified to notice, 'Candidates offer drunkenness openly to anyone who is willing to give them his vote.'
"A few years later the writer George Prentice described a Kentucky election that lasted three days. 'During that period whiskey and apple toddy flow through our cities and villages like the Euphrates through ancient Babylon.' Later, after the Revolution, some of the Founding Fathers objected to the American way of voting. James Madison, who drank a pint of whiskey daily to aid his digestion, was also running for the Virginia Assembly in 1777. Madison decided that bribing the voters with alcohol was beneath his dignity and the dignity of the new nation. The influence of liquor at the polls was 'inconsistent with the purity of moral and republican virtues,' he announced. He lost.
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Old courthouse in Philadelphia during the October 1, 1764 election |
"Later, when he became Thomas Jefferson's secretary of state, Madison's ideas about democracy began to sharpen. A Virginia aristocrat who had grown up on a plantation, he did not believe in 'excessive democracy'; democracy was too precious to waste on the common man. This belief, which may have begun with his horror at the way polling places were conducted, led him to favor a strong federal government, and he eventually helped Alexander Hamilton -- another man who was disturbed by drunkenness -- draft The Federalist Papers."
Enlarge / In the movie Children of Men, declining public health leads to extreme social inequality.
Levels of disease in the environment may be linked to gains in women's political power. That's the finding of two psychologists who pored over six decades of data, looking at connections between ecological stressors and gender equality. Arizona State - Tempe's Michael E. W. Varnum and University of Waterloo, Canada's Igor Grossmann found that declining infectious disease rates in the US were strongly correlated with a rise in gender equality. The big question is why. Writing in Nature Human Behavior, the researchers say the trend can be partly explained by looking at how pathogens "cue people to adopt faster life strategies."
Varnum and Grossman's study was inspired by the field of behavioral ecology, where scientists explore how the physical environment affects animal behavior. Obviously, social equality among humans is affected by political events such as the passage of Title IX and anti-discrimination laws. But the researchers were curious about whether environmental factors might also have an impact on whether we build societies that are more egalitarian or more authoritarian. To get an answer, Varnum and Grossmann narrowed their focus to looking strictly at gender equality between the years 1951 and 2013 in the US and the UK. They explain that they created "an index of gender equality using data on indicators of political representation (the number of women in Congress), wage inequality (male:female wage ratio based on data from the US Women’s Bureau and the National Committee on Equal Pay), linguistic representation in cultural products (use of male versus female pronouns in published books) and sexist work attitudes (percentage of respondents in Gallup polls preferring a male boss)."
They stacked this data up against changes in four environmental problems that affect humanity: infectious disease, resource scarcity, warfare, and climatic stress. Of the four, only infectious disease could predict levels of gender equality. But the effect was striking. As levels of infectious disease dropped, Varnum and Grossmann could see a similar drop in gender inequality. Making the relationship more believable was the fact that it operated at a temporal remove. Fifteen years after a decline in nine infectious diseases, we see the most noticeable uptick gender equality. Essentially, it takes almost a generation for the environmental conditions to affect social ones. The researchers got these results by looking at CDC data on the prevalence of tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, malaria, typhoid, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and polio in the US. As a point of comparison, they looked at deaths from measles and tuberculosis in the UK. In both countries, the pattern was the same. As diseases dropped, gender equality rose.
Enlarge (credit: Kelly Michals)
David Charles Hahn, who gained some notoriety in 1994 for attempting to build a homemade breeder nuclear reactor for a Boy Scout project in his mom's Michigan backyard shed, has died at the age of 39. He passed away on September 27, but his death did not draw much media attention until Monday.
Breeder reactors are a type of nuclear reactor that generate more fissile material than they consume. They have been researched extensively for decades, and a number have been built, but the approach has largely been abandoned.
Hahn’s travails were most notably chronicled in a 1998 article in Harper’s, which described his story in detail. (That article was later expanded into a book, The Radioactive Boy Scout.)
Enlarge / Dungeons & Dragons, one of this year's inductees into the Toy Hall of Fame. (credit: The Strong National Museum of Play)
For more than four decades, people looking for a bit of fun escapism have been able to turn to Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game first published in 1974. The game, currently in its fifth edition, has had a big influence on countless other tabletop games and video games, and this year The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has recognized its contributions by inducting it into its Toy Hall of Fame.
“More than any other game, Dungeons & Dragons paved the way for older children and adults to experience imaginative play,” said museum curator Nic Ricketts. “It was groundbreaking. And it opened the door for other kinds of table games that borrow many of its unique mechanics. But most importantly, Dungeons & Dragons’ mechanics lent themselves to computer applications, and it had a direct impact on hugely successful electronic games like World of Warcraft.”
D&D was inducted alongside Fisher-Price's Little People toddler toys and the swing (yes, as in swing set). The three new inductees were chosen from a list of 12 finalists and beat out Nerf, the coloring book, Transformers, the card game Uno, and Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, to name just a few.
Over at Make, Gareth Branwyn wrote about how to check the balance of your d20 dice:
Gamer Daniel Fisher used an old golf ball balancing trick to test the integrity of his D20 gaming dice. To set up the test, he mixed 6+ tablespoons of salt with 1/3 cup room temperature water in a small glass jar. By floating and spinning a die in the jar, he was able to see if it consistently rolled high, low, or was balanced.
Among other things, Fisher discovered that translucent dice tend to be more balanced, perhaps because you can easily see imperfections inside them (and wouldn’t buy or use them). Finding out that a number of his D20s regularly rolled low or high in the water, he cut into one to see what might be causing the imbalance. Inside, he found obvious manufacturing imperfections, chalky areas where the die may not have cured properly. Later in the video, he puts the cut die under a microscope to get a closer look inside.
