Brindle

After the CIA's Inspector General basically revealed that not only did the CIA spy on the network of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who were investigating the CIA, but that CIA boss John Brennan lied about it and that the breaches were much worse than originally detailed, Brennan appointed a panel to "investigate." Take a wild guess what the panel appointed by the guy who lied about the spying has concluded? If you said that it found serious problems and recommended real consequences for those involved and their leadership, you haven't been paying much attention.

Instead, if you said it would do some hand-wavy talk about "mistakes being made" but recommend no real consequences and downplay the severity of what happened, well, you get a gold star and a special tissue in which to weep about the loss of the separation of powers:

While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report, the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.

But its decision not to recommend anyone for disciplinary action is likely to anger members of the Intelligence Committee, who have accused the C.I.A. of trampling on the independence of Congress and interfering with its investigation of agency wrongdoing. The computer searches occurred late last year while the committee was finishing an excoriating report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program.

The message that we keep sending is, if you're powerful enough, there's almost nothing you can do with any actual consequences attached. Is it any wonder that the intelligence community keeps pushing the boundaries further and further?

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When it comes to trademark, the NFL has oft times seemed like it was trying to win some kind of protectionist championship. Between all of their nonsense about their restrictions on using the term "Super Bowl" to actually trying to trademark euphemisms of their other trademarks, it all just comes off as over the top. Yet, even being aware of all that, perhaps you were watching football this Saturday like me and, like me, you were quite amused that the NFL Network's broadcast was being branded as "Thursday Night Football: Saturday Edition." Pretty silly, right? Why not just call it "Saturday Night Football"? Well, because trademark, of course.

Yes, that's right, through the magic of ESPN holding a trademark on the term "Saturday Night Football", a Saturday was transformed into a Thursday. I've already contacted my nine-to-five employer to assure them that I was unaware of this sorcery and to see if I will be disciplined for not coming into work on Sathursday. They've assured me that they have no idea what I'm talking about.

And, of course, what makes all of this so damned infuriating is that ESPN's trademark is so unbelievably and obviously purely descriptive that it makes one wonder how in the world it was ever granted to begin with. The NFL's lawyers in particular appear to have been muzzled by whoever in the league is negotiating with broadcast partners, because ESPN's mark is just begging for opposition. Instead, we got "Thursday Night Football: Saturday Edition", which would make as much sense as "Thursday Night Football: Baseball Edition." Which is to say, no sense at all.

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Comcast has certainly been pulling out all the stops to get its $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable approved by regulators. That has involved calling everyone who opposes the merger ignorant and unreasonable, paying minority groups to parrot the company's positions, and generally repeatedly denying all of the competitive and monopsony concerns raised by deal critics. All while the company's top lobbyist, David Cohen, busily dodges lobbying rules by pretending he's not actually lobbying (he seriously calls himself the company's "Chief Diversity Officer").

Comcast has employed some forty lobbying firms to court DC politicians, and offered up cash donations to 32 of the 39 members of the House Judiciary Committee that recently held hearings on the merger. In a piece exploring how David Gregory lost his job on "Meet The Press," (and the rise of Comcast's David Cohen as a K Street powerhouse) the Washingtonian points out that Comcast lobbyists have also been busy handing out special "VIP cards" to DC lawmakers. These cards feature a single-use phone number that will prioritize your customer support call:

"Comcast also had an even more personal way of sucking up to Washington. Its government-affairs team carried around “We’ll make it right” cards stamped with “priority assistance” codes for fast-tracking help and handed them out to congressional staffers, journalists, and other influential Washingtonians who complained about their service. A Comcast spokeswoman says this practice isn’t exclusive to DC; every Comcast employee receives the cards, which they can distribute to any customer with cable or internet trouble. Nevertheless, efforts like this one have surely helped Comcast boost its standing inside the Beltway and improve its chances of winning regulatory approval for its next big conquest: merging with the second-largest cable provider in the country, Time Warner Cable."

Comcast's customer service is, as we've noted a few times, historically awful. As in, surveys show it's worse than nearly any other company in any other industry, which is no small feat. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts frequently complains that this is simply because the company's so large, and that statistically you're simply going to have a lot of squeaky wheels. So amusingly, in addition to throwing cash at DC lawmakers, Comcast is using actually giving a damn about your customers (or the illusion of giving a damn, as Comcast employees tell me these cards are common and don't actually do all that much) as a "special perk" you can only get if you're immeasurably annoyed with the company -- or a DC lobbyist that can help it out.

What's the over/under on a larger Comcast someday waking up and realizing that the company should focus on giving everybody decent customer service?

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Back in October we noted how the FCC had fined Marriott $600,000 for the company's decision to block cellular signals in the company's Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville. The move was pretty clearly intended to prevent people from using their tethered modems and cellular hotspots, instead forcing convention attendees to use Marriott's absurdly pricey (and frequently awful) Wi-Fi service. While Marriott agreed to pay the fine, the company tried to feebly defend itself by proclaiming it was only looking out for the security and safety of their customers (what a sweetheart):

"Marriott has a strong interest in ensuring that when our guests use our Wi-Fi service, they will be protected from rogue wireless hot spots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber-attacks and identity theft," the statement said. "Like many other institutions and companies in a wide variety of industries, including hospitals and universities, the Gaylord Opryland protected its Wi-Fi network by using FCC-authorized equipment provided by well-known, reputable manufacturers."

While Marriott is bullshitting their way around what's clearly a transparent ploy to make money, both Marriott and some observers have argued that what Marriott's actually doing may not technically be illegal under anti-jamming provisions of section 333 of the Communications Act. That's because Marriott isn't technically jamming cellular signal, it's using a deauthentication attack -- or sending packets that misleadingly disrupt communications between a client and router, making using your mobile hotspot or tethered modem impossible. Hardware vendors commonly sell gear that can accomplish this, and the practice is very common at hospitals, some corporate campuses, and events like Defcon.

Of course even if Marriott were able to successfully legally argue this defense, it doesn't mean it isn't behaving badly. The FCC also seems unlikely to listen as some very heavy hitters this week entered the conversation. In a rare show of solidarity for companies often on very different sides of key tech issues, Microsoft, Google and wireless carriers have joined forces to yell at Marriott in new filings with the FCC. All of the filings argue that yes, Marriott's behavior does violate Section 333, and yes -- it's really just about Marriott being uncompetitive to make money:

"The Commission’s authority to prohibit the interference described by Petitioners is found in the plain language of Section 333 and supported by general grants of power in Section 303, as well as other provisions of the Communications Act. Contrary to Petitioners’ allegations, moreover, the Commission’s Rule 15.5(b) does not exempt unlicensed devices from protection against intentional, harmful interference. Under its statutory authority, and consistent with its Part 15 rules, the Commission has categorically warned against the use of equipment that blocks or jams authorized communications and recently found against the exact practices described in the petition."

Given the Sisyphean feat of battling the government, public perception, and some of the most wealthy and politically powerful technology companies in the world just so you can sell some over-priced Wi-Fi, the path of least resistance for Marriott would probably be to just stop behaving like a jackass.

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It's no secret that some in the computer security world like the idea of being able to "hack back" against online attacks. The simplest form of this idea is that if you're a company under a denial-of-service attack, should you be able to "hack" a computer that is coordinating those attacks to stop them? More than two years ago, an LA Times article noted that some cybersecurity startups were marketing such services. Related to this, when the terrible CISPA legislation was being debated, one concern was that it would legalize such "hack backs" because, among other things, CISPA would grant immunity to companies "for decisions made based on cyber threat information." Some interpreted that to mean that companies would have immunity if they decided to hack back against an attacker.

A new article from Bloomberg suggests that companies are still quite eager to get involved in hacking back, and the FBI (which supported CISPA) is investigating some such cases where it may have happened. However, companies like JP Morgan still love the idea:

In February 2013, U.S officials met with bank executives in New York. There, a JPMorgan official proposed that the banks hit back from offshore locations, disabling the servers from which the attacks were being launched, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were confidential.

The article notes, of course, that such attacks likely violate the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) (which is why some want immunity for hack backs). But, it's a bad idea not just because it likely breaks the law, but because it's stupid and dangerous. First, accurately determining who is behind a hack is quite difficult -- as we're seeing lately with all the recent skepticism about the FBI's claim that North Korea was responsible for the Sony Hack. Launching a counterattack against the wrong party can have serious consequences -- even more so when those counterattacks might target actual nation states, rather than just a group of script kiddies.

On top of that, the article notes, the hack back attempt could make the situation even worse:

Efforts to retaliate can make things worse, [Kevin Mandia] said, because attackers who aren’t purged from the network could escalate the assault or ramp up attacks on other companies targeted by the same group.

And, of course, the very real possibility that the wrong party is targeted in the hack back can create all sorts of collateral damage. Remember when Microsoft took down many thousands of sites by mistargeting a court order? Imagine that without any court even being involved.

Finally, think through the obvious consequences of this. If you're a malicious hacker, it suddenly becomes a great opportunity. Pick two separate targets you want to harm -- then attack one and make it appear like the attack is coming from the other. Then sit back and watch the two of them duke it out while you laugh away.

Hacking back is a vigilante Hollywood movie-style idea that pays no attention to the realities of the technology or the consequences of the actions. Hopefully companies are smart enough not to follow through -- and lawmakers prevent it from being protected by law.

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Seen here performing two simultaneous ghost handjobs, this is a short video of everyone's favorite hotel owner Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) explaining why stupid people are too stupid to know they're stupid. Apparently you actually have to have a little intelligence to know you're stupid. I, for one, am smart enough to know how dumb I am, and I'm okay with that. I'm still smarter than all my friends. Keep going for the video. Thanks to Jeff K, who isn't stupid at all, at least not by dog standards.

Behold. The future of law enforcement.

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) held its first-ever hackathon on Friday. The event was focused on a single problem: How to redact the video streams recorded by police officers from their dashcams and (soon) body-worn video cameras.

This hackathon was inspired by a local privacy activist formerly known only by his email address (policevideorequest@gmail.com) and his FOIA request for every Seattle PD body cam recording in perpetuity. By leveraging transparency against privacy, the activist hoped to achieve a better balance of both -- but for a few moments, it looked like the only thing that would suffer damage was accountability. The expansive request caused the city to rethink its decision to put cameras on its cops. Now, the camera program is again moving forward, and with the activist's help.

No completely workable solution presented itself during the five-hour event, but progress was made towards achieving this balance. Many of the projects presented performed automatic blurring of persons encountered by police and offered rudimentary auto-transcription of recorded audio. Timothy Clemans -- the activist who is now working with the police to solve their redaction problem -- has a demonstration of his own prototype hosted at his website. He also voiced his support for police officers and suggested the default settings for FOIA'ed video.

Clemans… stated that most of the work done by police officers is saving lives through CPR or calmly working with drunken or angry citizens, yet the public rarely sees that on video. He also urged a report where all video would be initially over-redacted – essentially the whole frame is blurred – and then the news media or activists could ask for less redacted versions of the video of interest.

Although solid progress was made, there are a few caveats. First, as Marcus Womack of Evidence.com points out, the job can never be solely trusted to an automated process. Anything deemed "sensitive" would still need human review before release. Secondly, many of the tools demonstrated have their own limitations, like text-to-speech programs that only recognize English and the fact that much of the recorded audio is less than pristine.

Finally, whether privacy activists like it or not, there's not going to be a whole lot of redaction happening once the camera program is underway.

Seattle Police officials… admitted that about 90 percent of the video officers create probably needs no redaction at all. That’s because members of the public have no right to expect privacy in their interactions with police, unless they are juveniles or a witness or victim whose safety might be at risk if their identity is known.

Now, we just need the police to remember this 90 percent rule. With the police wearing body cameras and the public carrying cellphones, the playing field is as level as it's going to get. This means whatever lack of privacy the public is expected to deal with goes double for camera-wearing cops -- and this means no intimidation tactics, B.S. obstruction charges or seizing of cameras as "evidence." I only mention this because Seattle's law enforcement officers haven't proven themselves any more accepting of public recording than other PDs around the nation.

But the overall good news is that the body cam program is back on track and the Seattle PD actually seems interested in making it work for the betterment of everyone -- not just those wearing the blue.

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One of the recurring storylines from NSA defenders is that there's been "no abuse" of the surveillance programs. Except, that's not true. Leaked and released documents have shown thousands of examples of abuse including failed audits and minimal accountability. In fact, in many of the cases where abuse was found, it was only discovered thanks to employees confessing about abusing the systems years later -- meaning that it's quite likely that there are many more cases of abuse that the NSA itself doesn't even know about.

The ACLU has been seeking detailed reporting from the NSA on its abuses, filing a lawsuit against the agency for its failures to fully respond to a FOIA request. The NSA -- which has a habit of releasing important documents late on Friday evenings before a weekend -- took things one step further this time, waiting until Christmas Eve to dump a whole load of files detailing the NSA's abuse of surveillance practices. Some of the abuses appear rather egregious:

In a 2012 case, for example, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting,” according to one report. The analyst “has been advised to cease her activities,” it said.

Of course, beyond this being a rather blatant form of abuse, it seems noteworthy that this particular example was not included in the report that the NSA gave Congress in 2013 supposedly highlighting all of the examples of abuse. In fact, as you read through these reports, it appears that abuse and "mistakes" were fairly widespread. Here's opening one of the many reports at random and showing just a snippet of the listings: That's just one page out of 13 pages in that report, and the NSA just released nearly 50 such reports... on Christmas Eve. We'll be trying to dig through these in more detail as well, but it really says how badly the NSA wants to avoid discussing all these abuses, that it timed the release of these documents on Christmas Eve.

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The NYPD should know better. In August, it handed a $125,000 settlement to a man it arrested for recording officers performing a stop-and-frisk. A month earlier, the ACLU sued the NYPD in federal court to prevent the NYPD from arresting the people recording them. It's even clearly stated in the NYPD policy manual that "bystanders are allowed to film [officers] as long as they're not interfering with the officers' duties and/or police operations."

And yet, the message hasn't gotten through. A man was harassed and had his cellphone battery stolen by an officer who claimed he was interfering with an arrest occurring 30 feet away. NYPD officers have tried other tactics as well, such as laughably claiming a cellphone could be a gun. A man is choked to death by an NYPD officer -- with the whole incident being recorded -- and police officers claim the citizens who record cops are to blame.

But the message hasn't gotten through. And why should it? As some have openly stated, respecting this right has no upside for police officers. So, they continue to harass and threaten members of the public who try to exercise this right. The incident captured here is particularly chilling. As Reason's Ed Krayewski points out, the officer caught on tape here delivers an implicit threat of violence to the person wielding the camera. (The confrontation begins about 2:30 into the video.)

From the photographer:

The European cop tells me that I am making him nervous by simply speaking and not to make him fear for his safety.

The phrase "fear for my safety" has been used by cops to justify heinous actions, like the killing of unarmed members of the public, or the vindictive deployment of excessive force. A cop saying, "Don't make me fear for my safety," is a cop telling you he's ready to beat you, shoot you or otherwise do you harm. It's the baring of fangs. The rattle of snake's tail. It's a phrase no cop should deliver, especially to a person who's doing nothing illegal and poses zero threat to anyone.

This next incident, coming our way via Ex-Cop Law Student, shows multiple violations of the law, all of it by the officer in the recording.

The setup is this: an open-carry advocate is standing on a street corner carrying an AR-15 and some signs while handing out pamphlets containing open-carry law information. That's when two cops roll up and shut him down.

Not only does the officer express irritation with the open-carry law (and the person openly carrying a weapon), but he throws his sign to the ground and begins demanding that the person show him some ID. The cop can demand this all he wants, but he actually has to make an arrest before this demand carries any legal weight. Ex-Cop Law Student breaks down every legal violation the law enforcement officer performs during this 4-minute video.

[T]he arrest at 1:43 for Failure to ID because officer 4771 is “tired of you idiots coming out here.” OK. So now we know that 4771 is completely ignorant of § 38.02, Tex. Pen. Code. Not having an ID on one’s person is not an element of the offense. For that matter, refusing to identify at all is not an offense, unless you have arrested him on another charge, which you have not.

Now we get to the good part, which shows 4771 is a complete idiot. If you are going to commit a felony, don’t do it on camera.

At 1:53, idiot 4771 says that we taking the phone off and “we’re going to erase it.” Guys, there’s your felony by the officer. Texas law states that Tampering With or Fabricating Physical Evidence is:

“(a) A person commits an offense if, knowing that an investigation or official proceeding is pending or in progress, he:

(1) alters, destroys, or conceals any record, document, or thing with intent to impair its verity, legibility, or availability as evidence in the investigation or official proceeding; . . .”

Tex. Pen. Code Ann. § 37.09 (Vernon).

Fortunately for the cop (I suppose…), he couldn't actually manage to erase the recording. If he had done so, it would be a third-degree felony carrying a prison sentence of 2-10 years. But because the technology outwitted him, he's only on the hook for a second-degree felony (6 months-2 years). Of course, he likely won't be on the hook for any of this once the IA investigation is over. Cops who do this sort of thing rarely find themselves behind bars.

But, as Ex-Cop Law Student points out, this recording should be enough to damage Badge #4771's credibility in any case he's involved with.

So from now on, at each and every court appearance made by officer 4771, the defense attorney should be informed of this information. That means that the cross-examination would not be very pleasant, if it comes to that. It likely won’t because most District Attorney’s will not touch a case where one of the police witnesses is tarnished like that.   So now officer 4771 is useless as a witness.

You can argue about where exactly open-carry advocates fall on the thin line between clever and stupid but the bottom line is this: those enforcing laws should know the laws they're enforcing. They should also know that the right to record police officers is guaranteed. There is no state law that preempts the Constitution. The US government itself has handed down guidance on this very issue.

That's bad enough, but in each situation, officers went further, threatening citizens with violence and breaking laws themselves. Citizens aren't given the leeway cops are, nor are they provided with any sort of immunity for their stupid actions. Cops have both their departments and legal protection on their side and that's what leads to -- and encourages -- this sort of behavior.

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Raise your hand if you think this might be a bad idea.

Iowans will soon be able to use a mobile app on their smartphones as their official driver's license issued by the Iowa Department of Transportation.

People will still be able to stick a traditional plastic driver's license in their wallet or purse if they choose, [DOT Director Paul] Trombino said. But the new digital license, which he described as "an identity vault app," will be accepted by Iowa law enforcement officers during traffic stops and by security officers screening travelers at Iowa's airports, he said.

Nowhere in the course of the Des Moines Register article are any concerns expressed about potential abuse by law enforcement. Perhaps that's due to the sole source being Paul Trombino of the Dept. of Transportation -- a government agency that, like many others, likely views law enforcement officers as "good guys" and defers to their judgment.

But what happens where you're pulled over? The first thing an officer does is ask for license and registration and then takes both items back to his/her vehicle. How many people feel comfortable with allowing an officer to take and maintain control of their cellphone for an indefinite period of time?

Sure, we have a Supreme Court decision that states warrants must be obtained before cellphones can be searched, but how much of a deterrent is that? Let's say the officer thinks you might be some sort of drug runner. Well, now he has both your cellphone and "exigent circumstances." Even if the eventual search turns up nothing, he's still had a chance to look through your cellphone and, quite possibly, your vehicle, all without a warrant. Iowa's law enforcement officers already take advantage of the state's asset forfeiture laws. There's no reason to believe they won't take advantage of additional opportunities to root around in the contents of someone's cellphone. All it takes is a routine traffic stop.

That's only one problematic area. What about officers who like to send explicit or suggestive photos to their to their cop buddies? Are we really supposed to believe that this sort of behavior is limited to just a couple of officers in California? Human nature is universal and handing over the access and opportunity just makes it that much easier for those who would take advantage of both to do so.

Sure, the Iowa DOT app requires a pin to unlock, but your whole phone is an open book once you've unlocked it to access the drivers license app. Trombino says it's "highly secure," and maybe the app itself is, but it doesn't keep cops and TSA officers out of the rest of the contents of your smartphone. This app may be a technological step forward, taking advantage of something people carry more often than they do purses or wallets, but it's also an easy way for law enforcement and security personnel to achieve access to an unlocked phone without having to bother with Constitutional niceties.

If the app could be accessed without unlocking the entire phone, it would be a bit more useful. But there's really no way to make an app that ignores the underlying system that enables it to function -- at least not one put together by a state agency. And since you can't separate the two, it just makes more sense to carry around a slab of plastic until someone comes up with a better idea.

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Dilbert readers - Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.

Last week, we wrote about how some of the leaked emails from the Sony hack revealed that the MPAA was funding and coordinating various Attorneys General attacks on Google, even over topics that have nothing to do with copyright infringement. In response, Mississippi AG Jim Hood told the Huffington Post that he barely knows anyone at the MPAA, and has no idea who their lawyers are -- and that the MPAA has "no major influence" on what he's working on:

Hood said the MPAA "has no major influence on my decision-making," although he noted that content creators occasionally provide reports and advice to him. "They're just reporting wrongdoing. There's nothing unusual about that," he said. Hood said he has never asked MPAA a legal question, isn't sure which lawyers they employ, and doesn't think he's ever met the organization's general counsel.

Okay. Now keep that above paragraph in mind as you read the latest report from the NY Times, in which reporters Nick Wingfield and Eric Lipton (who just a few months ago had written that big article on questionable lobbying of Attorneys General) dig deeper into the Sony emails concerning the MPAA and AGs Jim Hood and Jon Bruning from Nebraska. The Times also uses some public records requests to show that the infamous letter that Hood sent to Google was almost entirely written by the MPAA's lawyers. You can see the whole thing at the link, but this thumbnail shows a pretty long letter with the only parts actually written by Hood's office being the intro at the top in green and a few minor word choices. All the rest came from the MPAA's lawyers at Jenner and Block. So... Hood claims that he doesn't even know the MPAA's lawyers, that it has no influence on what he does and that the MPAA is "just reporting wrongdoing" -- but then he takes a ~4,000 word letter that those same MPAA lawyers (that he claims he doesn't know) wrote, tosses on an intro and a few minor grammatical corrections, and sends it to Google? The letter itself is a piece of pure propaganda as well, completely misrepresenting a few things, taking others out of context, and making some bizarre legal arguments. Hood, of course, is no stranger to controversy and claims of cronyism, but this is taking things to another level.

The NY Times further uncovers that the "go-between" for the MPAA and Hood is a lobbyist the MPAA hired to run an MPAA front group. That lobbyist? Hood's predecessor and close friend:

The movie industry, through a nonprofit group it funded called Digital Citizens Alliance, picked the perfect lobbyist to squeeze Mr. Hood: Mike Moore. Mr. Moore was Mr. Hood’s predecessor as Mississippi attorney general and helped start Mr. Hood’s political career. He remains a close friend of the attorney general and travels with him frequently; he has even played a role in helping Mr. Hood get elected as the president of the National Association of Attorneys General, emails obtained by The Times show.

That front group, the "Digital Citizens Alliance," is one we discussed earlier this year, when it released a report about "evil" cyberlockers based on a misreading of two debunked studies. Certain cyberlockers have demanded a retraction of the report because of its ridiculous and shoddy methodology. In other words, the Alliance is not exactly the most trustworthy of operations -- and it's hired Jim Hood's best buddy and political mentor. But Hood wants us to believe that this group has no influence on him?

Even other Attorneys General find the situation questionable:

Peggy Lautenschlager, who served as attorney general in Wisconsin, said that the role that the movie industry had played in pushing Mr. Hood, through Mr. Moore and others, was inappropriate. “A private interest is influencing some attorneys general’s offices,” she said.

Meanwhile, others are trying to understand why Jim Hood is so close with the MPAA at all, since Mississippi doesn't even have much of a connection to the film business:

That makes his behavior all the more unusual since Mississippi has almost no economic interest in the movie industry. Indeed, the state lacks a major film school, doesn’t house production for a single scripted TV show, and has served as the main shooting location for only 5 widely released movies over the past decade. The MPAA itself says that the state has a total of 242 film-and-television-production related jobs; one of the smallest per-capita totals in the nation. All-in-all Mississippi has more people who make their living arranging flowers (460, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ databases) than in film and TV production. Maybe Jim Hood really likes hanging out with movie moguls?

Hood's stated reasoning makes even less sense:

"Google's not a government, they may think they are, but they don't owe anyone a First Amendment right," Hood told The Huffington Post. "If you're an illegal site, you ought to clean up your act, instead of Google making money off it."

[....]

Hood recalled a meeting in Boston, where a high school girl demonstrated to attorneys general how easy it was for her to find a violent version of "Django Unchained" on the Internet. "Some of the AGs were amazed at that real-time example of what Google is assisting," Hood said.

Hood has "tried to get Google to delist several sites," relating to pharmaceuticals. He said he views movies and music piracy as "insignificant" to state prosecutors, compared with more serious types of crime. But Hood said he would support a nonprofit organization coming up with a list of piracy sites that Google would remove from search results. He argued that current copyright law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, isn't adequate, because a website can get millions of takedown notices, but still do business as usual.

It appears Hood is quite confused about, well, nearly everything. No, Google doesn't "owe anyone" a First Amendment right, but the government does. And here it appears that Hood -- a government representative -- is flat out supporting a censorship list of websites that must be blocked. Furthermore, he doesn't seem to understand the difference between a search engine and actually hosting or uploading infringing content. He also doesn't seem to recognize the history of blacklists and the fact that they always over-censor. Nor does he seem to understand how Google functions. All of these things would be rather easy to find out -- but just as easy to ignore if the MPAA is the one giving you all your talking points and legal documents.

Meanwhile, the original letters revealed that the MPAA was looking for other Attorneys General it could convince to get in on the game, and the NY Times notes that a clear target is Nebraska's Jon Bruning:

The movie association and its member companies, the messages show, have assigned a team of lawyers to prepare draft subpoenas and legal briefs for the attorneys general. And the groups have delivered campaign contributions — with several movie studios sending checks — to Jon Bruning, the Republican attorney general of Nebraska, who was helping push their cause, and who made an unsuccessful bid for governor this year.

Meanwhile, the reaction to all of this has been fascinating. I've seen multiple lawyers connected to Hollywood have kneejerk reactions that paying for an investigation, coordinating all of the efforts including writing up the letters and subpoenas, is just normal, everyday "aggressive competition." Yet, these are the same people who go out there and claim that you sharing a copy of a movie you liked with someone else is morally bankrupt and evil. Some people, it seems, have a different moral compass. Frankly, private companies financing government investigations of other private companies seems a hell of a lot more morally questionable than someone sharing a copy of a film they like.

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If you're a sports fan, you have probably heard about the spate of players in several leagues sporting shirts or else protesting, via planned actions at the start of games, the recent deaths at the hands of police. Everyone from Derrick Rose and LeBron James in the NBA to several football players have gotten into the act. A few weeks back, in fact, we learned that the police in St. Louis, the area home to the Michael Brown shooting, were quite upset that members of the Rams would dare to voice their support for protesters. That story was insulting enough, but the reaction to Cleveland Browns player Andrew Hawkins' wearing of a shirt that simply read "Justice for Tamir Rice - John Crawford", both of whom also died at the hands of police, is downright insulting.

In response, Jeff Follmer Police Patrolman Union President sent newsnet5 the following statement:

"It's pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology."

If this statement from the President of a police union in a major city doesn't boil you up with anger, read it again. It's pathetic when athletes think they know the law? By implication, it's "pathetic" when ordinary citizens believe they "know" the law under which they are governed? The hubris required to insist that the same people you claim to protect and serve are pathetic for thinking they are aware of the legalities of American life runs at levels I truly didn't even think I'd see directly on display. Of course, there are nuances with the legal profession that escape the average American. That's why we have lawyers. But for the reaction to the police shooting two unarmed people (one of them twelve years old) to be to snicker at the thought that the protester knows "the law" is beyond insulting. It's downright stupid.

And what is with the thinning of skin in America's police force all of the sudden that a little protest returns calls for apologies? Grow up. You don't get to wear body armor, drive around in MRAPs, and have skin the thickness of amoeba membranes.

What this ultimately reveals is that many cities in this country have a huge problem in the disconnect between the police and the people they protect and serve. For the lead dog in a police union to snort at the public for daring to "know the law" in such a manor reveals the larger problem: the respect is only going one way, if any way at all.

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It's no secret that those most closely responsible for the CIA's torture program are pulling out all the stops to attack the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the program, trying out a variety of defenses from "it actually saved lives" to "it's just a partisan hack job." So it should come as no surprise that former Vice President Dick Cheney has been making the cable TV news appearances to help attack the report. After all, many have argued that the real person behind the torture program was Cheney and his staff -- and to date, Cheney has insisted that everything that was done was perfectly reasonable and he'd do it again. Thus there's no surprise when Cheney appears on Fox News (because, of course), to claim that the report is "a bunch of hooey" and "full of crap" and "deeply flawed" only to then admit " I haven't read the report."

Wait, what?

Even the Fox News interviewer was taken aback -- and Cheney must have realized how stupid he looked, because he then tried to backtrack, arguing that he hadn't read "all 6,000 pages," but then saying he'd read "parts of it" and "summaries." Yes, we've all read "summaries." But some of us have sat down to read the whole 500 pages (minus the redacted bits, of course). You would hope that if Cheney was going on TV to respond to questions about the report that he might have done so as well, rather than just repeating the talking points handed out to folks associated with the program. Apparently not.

From there, Cheney shifted over to his other key talking point -- one that is entirely debunked by the report itself:

“How nice do you want to be to the murderers of 3,000 Americans?”

Yeah, great. Except the report makes it fairly clear that many of the people tortured had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. In fact, the only real "revelations" from the torture program was that the CIA torturers concluded that the people being tortured really didn't have any relevant information. Furthermore, the "how nice do you want to be" line is incredibly revealing and disturbing, because it sets up an unending war. What's to stop millions of people angry at America from justifying new terrorist attacks on us based on "how nice do you want to be to torturers from America?"

No one was saying that we should buddy up with the people responsible for 9/11, but to pretend the only other option is to torture many innocent people is psychopathic.

It won't surprise anyone, really, that Cheney will defend the torture program that he oversaw. But his comments here are sickening and should be quite eye-opening about the level of cognitive dissonance from the powerful people who were responsible for this incredibly shameful period in US history.

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Back in August, we noted that Google had started adjusting its search algorithm to give a slight boost to sites that are encrypted. That is, all else equal, sites that use HTTPS will get a slight ranking boost. The company made it clear that the weight of this signal will increase over time, and this is a way of encouraging more websites to go to HTTPS by default (something that we've done, but very few other sites have done).

Now it appears that the Chrome Security Team is taking things even further: suggesting that all HTTP sites be marked as non-secure:

We, the Chrome Security Team, propose that user agents (UAs) gradually change their UX to display non-secure origins as affirmatively non-secure. We intend to devise and begin deploying a transition plan for Chrome in 2015.

The goal of this proposal is to more clearly display to users that HTTP provides no data security.

More specifically:

UA vendors who agree with this proposal should decide how best to phase in the UX changes given the needs of their users and their product design constraints. Generally, we suggest a phased approach to marking non-secure origins as non-secure. For example, a UA vendor might decide that in the medium term, they will represent non-secure origins in the same way that they represent Dubious origins. Then, in the long term, the vendor might decide to represent non-secure origins in the same way that they represent Bad origins.

This seems like it could have quite an impact in driving more sites to finally realize that they should start going to HTTPS by default. There's really no excuse not to do so these days, and it's good to see the Chrome Security Team make this push. The more encrypted traffic there is, the better.

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We recently noted that, despite it passing overwhelmingly, Congress quietly deleted a key bit of NSA reform that would have blocked the agency from using backdoors for surveillance. But this week something even more nefarious happened, and it likely would have gone almost entirely unnoticed if Rep. Justin Amash's staffers hadn't caught the details of a new provision quietly slipped into the Intelligence Authorization Act, which effectively "legitimized" the way the NSA conducts most of its mass surveillance.

For a while now, we've discussed executive order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan, which more or less gives the NSA unchecked authority to tap into any computer system not in the US. Over the summer, a former State Department official, John Napier Tye, basically blew the whistle on 12333 by noting that everyone focused on other NSA programs were missing the point. The NSA's surveillance is almost entirely done under this authority, which has no Congressional oversight. All those other programs we've been arguing about -- Section 215 of the Patriot Act or Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- are really nothing more than ways to backfill the data the NSA has been unable to access under 12333. In other words, these other programs are the distraction. 12333 is the ballgame, and it has no Congressional oversight at all. It's just a Presidential executive order.

Yet, what Amash and his staffers found is that a last minute change by the Senate Intelligence Committee to the bill effectively incorporated key parts of EO 12333 into law, allowing for "the acquisition, retention, and dissemination" of "nonpublic communications." Here's where those who slipped this bit into the law got sneaky. Recognizing that they might be called on it, they put it in with language noting that such information could only be held on to for five years -- and then claimed what they were really doing was putting a limit on data already collected:

Backers of the section argue it would actually limit to five years the amount of time communications data could be kept at intelligence agencies, certain exceptions permitting. But it is generally acknowledged that such data is already rarely kept beyond five years, which Amash characterized as a trade-off that "provides a novel statutory basis for the executive branch's capture and use of Americans' private communications."

"The provisions in the intel authorization appear to be an attempt by Congress to place statutory restrictions on the retention of information collected under Executive Order 12333, which is not subject to court oversight, has not been authorized by Congress, and raises serious privacy concerns," said Neema Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. "However, these restrictions are far from adequate, contain enormous loopholes, and notably completely exclude the information of non-U.S. persons."

This seems particularly nefarious. In trying to claim that they're putting a limit on this activity (that's already happening) they can claim that they're not really expanding the power of the NSA and the surveillance state. But, by putting it in law, rather than just having it in an executive order, they're effectively legitimatizing the practice, and making it much harder to roll back.

And they did it all quietly without any debate.

That's massively troubling. Inserting such a major power into the law at the very least deserves (and should require) a full and fair public debate about the issue and whether or not it is truly needed. Doing it in secret, at the last minute, with no public acknowledgement or discussion, and then pretending it's about "limits" rather than legitimizing what's in EO 12333 is really, really nefarious.

Unfortunately, even with Rep. Amash raising the alarm about it, the bill easily passed 325 to 100, without most in Congress probably having any idea about this issue and what it meant. Rep. Zoe Lofgren claimed that if Congress fully understood the provision, it almost certainly wouldn't have passed:

"If this hadn't been snuck in, I doubt it would have passed," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who voted against the bill. "A lot of members were not even aware that this new provision had been inserted last-minute. Had we been given an additional day, we may have stopped it."

This is the kind of crap that the intelligence community keeps pulling, and it's why there's so much that's troubling in the way they play the legislative game. Not only do they write the legislative language in sneaky ways that they can carefully interpret themselves -- they then get "friends" in Congress to quietly insert the language when no one's looking. By putting it in bills that have to pass, these things get put into the law and aren't at all easy to remove.

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UK Prime Minister David Cameron doesn't ask for much from the world's tech companies. All he wants is for them to proactively police the web for child pornography, piracy and extremist content. He's not offering to pay for these services. He just expects Google et al to do this on their own time and own dime to make the world a better place.

Now, he's enlisting Google and Yahoo into the counterterrorism battle. As if the GCHQ and its stateside partner didn't have enough tendrils intertwined with every cable and backbone between here and the UK, Cameron now wants the two search companies to be a part of an informal "search something, say something" program… all for free and all because it would be the neighborly thing to do.

Internet companies like Google and Yahoo should tell the police if possible terrorists are searching for tips to make bombs on the internet, David Cameron has said.

The Prime Minister said he wanted to apply to the internet the "principles of common sense, decency, moral responsibility as we do to real life".

It's simply not enough to index the web for searchability. Now, search engines need to act as unpaid informants for the world's law enforcement agencies, turning over information on questionable searches to the proper authorities.

Of course, Google and Yahoo have no way of knowing whether searches for bomb-making tips are originating from terrorism suspects or screenplay writers or bored youths using search engines as an Anarchist's Cookbook proxy. These prickly issues have likely never troubled Cameron's grey matter. If so, these inane soundbites never would have escaped his lips. The more he talks, the more inane his platitudes-masquerading-as-solutions sound.

Mr Cameron said he wanted internet companies to take the same moral responsibility as if someone overheard a group planning a bombing in a pub.

"See something, say something" has done little more than tie up limited resources with a mass of false positives. Putting Google and Yahoo in this position is just asking for more of the same. What Cameron is asking for is the compilation of useless information that will only snag the innocent and the inept. If these are the sorts of "terrorists" Cameron wants removed from circulation, he should just ask his local law enforcement to follow the FBI's lead. Busting handcrafted terrorists is far easier than hunting down actual threats, but it still sounds like real "wins" in press releases or politicians' mouths.

Any would-be terrorist who doesn't want to end up behind bars knows better than to plan violent acts in public, unlike the metaphorical extremists in Cameron's fantasy. Using the two largest search engines isn't much different than mapping out a bombing over a few pints at the local pub, but asking Google and Yahoo to treat their search engines like overheard conversations is guaranteed to end in futility.

Cameron compares it to child porn (because of course he does) even though there's a big difference between searching out plainly illegal content and searches that may seem ominous when observed without context. Search engines track searches to provide relevant results to users, so there's little doubt this information is retained somewhere. But it isn't something that should be turned over to law enforcement just because certain terms were used. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for researching topics that are "terrorist-related" but Cameron's request doesn't leave any room for essential nuances like these.

We expect our search providers to return search results, not subject us to additional government scrutiny simply because our searches contain a few arbitrarily-flagged terms. If search engines become just another form of direct government surveillance, more and more users will take their business elsewhere. Terrorists -- at least those with any instinct for self-preservation -- already have.

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While it could be debated to no end whether or not the Great Recession is over, a new report points out that consumers are still worth less money than they were before the bottom fell out of the economy.

A new analysis from Pew Research Center found that even as the economy has recovered, many households still face financial disparity and wealth inequality continues to widen along racial and ethnic lines.

According to the report, the net worth of American families – the difference between values of their assets and liabilities – fell 39.4% from the start of the recession to the purported end. Back in 2007, families had a net worth of $135,700, while they currently have a net worth of $81,400.

In addition to the different in wealth from year to year, Pew’s analysis of Federal Reserve data found a stark divide between the experience of different races during economy recovery.

From 2010 to 2013, the median wealth of non-Hispanic white households increased from $138,600 to $141,900, or by 2.4%, while median wealth of non-Hispanic black households fell 33.7%, from $16,600 in 2010 to $11,000 in 2013.

Among Hispanics, median wealth decreased by 14.3%, from $16,000 to $13,700.

Pew points out that difference in wealth can, in part, be attributed to difference in median income between races and the use of financial assets such as stocks.

Still, since the recovery started all families have faced the same issues, including the reduction of ownership of key assets, such as homes, stocks and business equity.

Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession [Pew Research Center]

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was a strong supporter of the SOPA/PIPA approach to breaking the internet to appease Hollywood. Even as lots of others bailed out on their support of the bills, Whitehouse refused to change his position. It appears he'd like to push such a solution again. On Wednesday, the Senate held hearings for the nominees for both the head of the US Patent and Trademark Office, Michelle Lee, as well as the new "Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator" (IPEC), Dan Marti. Marti is a bit of a wildcard, with most of his legal practice related to intellectual property being focused on trademark, rather than copyright. So it was worth paying attention to what he had to say in response to the questions. However the most bizarre and ridiculous question came from Senator Whitehouse, who proved to be rather confused about how both the internet and copyright law worked. You can see the full video here. Whitehouse begins talking around the one hour, 35 minute mark. He kicks it off by displaying his ignorance. First, he refers to Marti's predecessor, Victoria Espinel, and how he had asked her to do more to stomp out piracy, and then launches into a statement almost entirely devoid of factual statements:

I can remember Ms. Espinel coming here, some time ago to talk about the progress she intended to make in dealing with the criminal activity that steals American intellectual property, particularly entertainment content, and provides it to viewers, and that they were going to work really hard, with other American corporations that were supporting that activity to try to knock it down.

So while we were having this hearing, I picked up my iPad, and I went to Google, and I Googled "pirate movie." And Google gave me "The Pirate Bay" [holds up his iPad] which is an illegal enterprise, operating out of Sweden. And if you go to the page where you would get access to the pirate content, it says "get access now" and underneath it you have the flags of Visa, of Mastercard, of American Express, of Cirrus and of Paypal. And below that it tells you all the devices it works on and shows you the logos of Apple, Android, and so forth.

It looks to me like this criminal activity is still being wrapped around with the apparent support of a wide variety of American corporations. [Incredulous expression]. Explain to me how there's been progress made.

Almost everything Senator Whitehouse said in this statement is either wrong or totally clueless. It does not speak well of him as a Senator to be so misinformed about some rather basic things. First, there are the basics. A search engine is not and should not be illegal. Yet, Senator Whitehouse doesn't seem to understand the different role of a system like The Pirate Bay from a site that actually hosts or uploads infringing content. Second, at the time of the hearing, the Pirate Bay is down, so his claims pretending to show the site are clearly a lie. It's been in the news a lot that the site is gone. You'd think some staffer would have told Senator Whitehouse not to use that example.

Third, a Google search on "pirate movie" does not link to The Pirate Bay at all. Here's the search done on Google: Note that it actually highlights a 1982 movie, and even points people to Amazon where they can purchase it. Nowhere on the page does it point anyone to The Pirate Bay or any other site from which you can download infringing content. Not even close.

Senator Whitehouse appears to be flat out lying about what happens when you do such a search on Google, and then compounding it by lying about going to The Pirate Bay. On top of that, his description of what he claims he saw on The Pirate Bay appears to be totally false as well. And while some of my critics may find this difficult to believe, I've never used the site (other than occasionally reading some of its blog posts) so I reached out, via Twitter, to multiple people who had used the site regularly to see if his description was accurate. None could ever remember seeing credit card logos or Apple/Android logos. And, why would they, really, since the content found on The Pirate Bay was usually just pure files and available for free. So there would be no need to post credit card logos or even device compatibility, since that would depend more on the kinds of apps you used to view/listen/read the files obtained. Yes, there were tons of ads on the site, people point out, but they tended to be for crappy porn sites and the like.

In other words, almost every detail of what Senator Whitehouse describes is a lie. He may be describing some other site, but he didn't find it with the search he described and it wasn't The Pirate Bay. And even if there were logos from American companies, anyone can set up a website with such logos and it means nothing about whether they're complicit.

And then he demands that something must be done?

Marti barely gets half a robotic sentence out in response, saying that "criminal actors, criminal enterprises have no limits" when Whitehouse cuts him off with some more nonsense:

They actually do! [Holds up iPad again] There are ways in which these companies could go to court and try to knock this stuff down. There are ways in which prosecutors can have discussions with companies about aiding and abetting offenses and about being accessories to offenses. There's a lot that can be done in this area, it seems to me!

Marti points out that he was talking about something entirely different -- that sites will of course put up logos to make themselves try to look legit (though he doesn't go so far as to point out that Senator Whitehouse's suggestion that because a site puts up a logo, that doesn't mean the company whose logo was put up isn't "aiding and abetting" a damn thing).

Even more to the point, Whitehouse's claim that companies can "go to court and try to knock this stuff down" also makes no sense. Under what law? What legal issue is there in the (fake) circumstances that Whitehouse describes? At most, there might be a trademark violation, and does he really think it's worth company's time to go after such fly-by-night sites for trademark violations? And the whole "aiding and abetting" claim is ridiculous. Is Senator Whitehouse honestly claiming that if a site that offers up infringing works notes that the works can work on Apple or Android that Apple or Google are "accessories" to a crime? Isn't a Senator supposed to understand the law?

Whitehouse then turns to Michelle Lee, who used to work at Google, but on patent policy, not copyright, and asks her if Google could stop this. Though, again, he's flat out lying about what Google is supposedly doing. It's a bizarre question. And Lee just says she doesn't know the answer to that question (how could she when it makes no sense). Whitehouse gives a sarcastic "Hmm!" in response, as if he's discovered something -- other than actually revealing his astounding ignorance. He further claims that because Lee was a deputy general counsel at Google (again on patents, not copyright issues) that it shows that Google didn't really care about this issue. Really?

Finally, he appears to attack Marti for not having done anything, despite the fact he's not in the job yet, and then claims that all of this proves that the "voluntary" process that Espinel championed (like the ridiculous "six strikes" agreements between some ISPs and the legacy entertainment companies) is not enough. He seems to clearly be hinting that we need more government action, or more SOPA-type laws, based on an entirely false scenario that either he or his staffers (or some... lobbyists) made up and handed to him. Instead, all it shows is him getting angry in a manner that displays his near total ignorance of the topic at hand.

Is it really too much to ask that the people who make the laws impacting technology not be totally ignorant about both the laws and the technology? Frankly, Senator Whitehouse owes Marti, Lee and basically all internet users an apology.

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As the company that sued to overturn the FCC's wimpier net neutrality rules (to the chagrin of AT&T and Comcast, who liked the weaker rules), Verizon has of course been leading the charge against Title II, telling anyone who will listen that network investment will decline, innovation will stall, dogs and cats will live together, and mass hysteria will ensue if the FCC regulates ISPs under Title II. Of course you're to ignore the fact that the voice component of wireless networks and parts of Verizon's FiOS network (largely to get tax breaks) have been regulated for years under Title II without the slightest problem for the company.

Given Verizon's repeated assertions that Title II will just crush investment, it was a little amusing to hear Verizon CFO Fran Shammo this week clearly tell attendees of the UBS Annual Global Media and Communications Conference that Title II won't harm the company's network investments in the slightest. Shammo was asked about whether Title II would sour Verizon's interest in investing in United States broadband. Shammo's reply:

"I mean to be real clear, I mean this does not influence the way we invest. I mean we're going to continue to invest in our networks and our platforms, both in Wireless and Wireline FiOS and where we need to. So nothing will influence that. I mean if you think about it, look, I mean we were born out of a highly regulated company, so we know how this operates."

Companies (especially CFOs) tend to forget that the public has ears when speaking at these sort of events, but apparently Shammo quickly realized what he had just admitted -- so he then tries to backtrack:

"And I also think that if you look at other countries who have done this, it kind of leads you down to [a] path of total failure because it really, really slows down investment and slows down innovation."

Right. Clear as mud. Title II won't impact network investment whatsoever, but Title II will like totally impact network investment. Verizon pretty clearly wants to have its cake and eat it too, even if it makes absolutely no logical, coherent sense. Of course that's because the mega-ISPs aren't really that worried about Title II -- they're worried that the FCC will create enforceable rules that will prevent them from abusing the industry's stranglehold on uncompetitive broadband markets with all manner of "creative" pricing and content/service discrimination.

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While some will, no doubt, be embarrassed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program, as one of the staffers who helped make the case for the Committee’s investigation when it was initiated in 2009, I can tell you that was not its intention.

(For the record, all I did was help make the initial case for the investigation and maybe put out a press release or two. I am in no way taking credit for the tremendous work that Chairman Feinstein and her committee’s staff did on this report. By the way, I know those staffers did not trek out to the CIA site in Virginia — often in their free time — in search of our thanks and recognition, but I hope you will join me in giving it to them anyway. Because reports like this do not materialize from thin air.)

The dedicated SSCI staff — who spent tens of thousands of hours over the better part of five years researching, writing and editing this report — did so in order to ensure our nation’s interrogation programs would be grounded in what has, for too long, been missing from our nation’s interrogation debate: facts.

The interrogation techniques the CIA developed during the Bush Administration were not devised by behavioral experts with experience turning detainees into "long-term strategic sources of information." Rather, as the Department of Justice’s 2008 Inspector General’s report revealed, the FBI’s interrogation experts — with that experience — repeatedly refused to sign off on proposed interrogation plans, calling them "deeply flawed" and "completely ineffective."

The CIA’s interrogation program, instead, grew from the post-9/11 mentality that the U.S. would be best kept safe by those willing to go to the greatest extremes to protect it, or as former CIA agent Glenn Carle put it in his 2011 book The Interrogator, "Interrogating terrorists was no place for goddamn candy-asses."

FBI officials have described the interrogation-strategy sessions they observed as "circus-like."  I’ve personally been told by individuals who participated in high-level discussions of U.S. interrogation policy that — as disturbing as it sounds — these conversations were more often than not informed by the participants’ recollection of episodes of the TV show 24 than by an understanding of the psychology of interrogation. Meanwhile, defenders of the CIA’s Bush-era interrogation activities continue to cite the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 as justification for their actions.

As Senator Feinstein writes in her introduction to the report:

The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community's actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards. It is precisely at these times of national crisis that our government must be guided by the lessons of our history and subject decisions to internal and external review.

The SSCI’s report was written to provide those lessons.

While some have and will likely continue to argue that President Obama settled the issue when he, as the president said in his statement today, "unequivocally banned torture when [he] took office," one might have argued that George Washington actually settled the issue 234 years earlier when he ordered that any American soldier who brought "shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country" by causing injury to a British prisoner could be put to death.  Our "new country in the New World," Washington declared, "would distinguish itself by its humanity." And yet, two centuries after Washington gave that order, agents of the U.S. government subjected "at least five CIA detainees…to 'rectal rehydration' … without documented medical necessity."

President Obama’s executive order only settles the issue insofar as he remains president. As long as the belief persists that torture is an effective means of interrogation and anyone who doesn’t support ‘enhanced interrogation’ is a "candy ass" who lacks the necessary stomach to keep Americans safe, there is no assurance that a future president won’t take a different position than our current president.

Some have and will undoubtedly continue to argue that we shouldn’t discuss the efficacy of torture as an interrogation technique — even if it’s to prove that torture doesn’t work — because it suggests that if torture worked, it would be ok to torture people. I believe these people have a point.

The United States is more than a mass of land defined by geographic boundaries, it is a nation of people united by certain, principled beliefs, many of which our forefathers laid out at our nation’s founding. It is not enough to simply protect the people of the United States, one must also protect the principles that define the United States as a people; otherwise, there is no United States to protect. When the CIA and the Bush Administration sanctioned the torture of captured terrorists — regardless of their reasons — they made the United States something George Washington said we’d never be: a nation that tortures. One might argue that made us a little less American.

Some have and may continue to argue that making the CIA’s actions known puts Americans — particularly those serving overseas — in jeopardy. It’s worth noting that these arguments were made by people who know Senator Feinstein in an effort to persuade her not to make the committee report public. I say this is worth noting, because you do not need to know Senator Feinstein very well to know that there is nothing she wants less than to jeopardize the lives of American citizens, particularly those serving in harm’s way, and if there is an argument that would have given her second thoughts about releasing this report, that most likely would have been it.

If Americans are at risk, however, they are not at risk because the Senate Intelligence Committee is publicly acknowledging that the CIA tortured people during the Bush Administration. They’re at risk because the CIA tortured people during the Bush Administration.

The CIA put Americans at risk when they undermined the international agreements that protect Americans detained by foreign powers and sacrificed the moral authority we’ve long used to advocate for the humane treatment of detainees. They put Americans at risk when they made it harder — if not impossible — to prosecute known terrorists and keep them locked up. I'd also argue that defending the CIA’s actions, while refusing to come clean about what was done during the Bush Administration, not only fueled Al Qaeda’s hatred of Americans and put them at risk, it undermines the Obama Administration’s argument that the CIA no longer engages in torture.

Some have and may continue to argue that putting out this report will undermine morale at the CIA and derail its necessary work. Again, I'd argue that any hit to the CIA’s morale began when its agents were ordered to torture detainees without clear parameters and a solid legal foundation.

Some have and will no doubt continue to argue that an act taken to "prevent a threatened terrorist attack" is not as bad as an act taken "for the purpose of humiliation or abuse." I’d argue that torture is defined not by the torturer but by the person being tortured and that the laws governing torture were put in place because most people who engage in torture think they have a good reason.

There are some who have and will no doubt continue to argue — as they do about all things pertaining to national security — that this report shouldn’t have been made public. To respond to that I will quote directly from page 8 of the unclassified report:

The CIA's Office of Public Affairs and senior CIA officials coordinated to share classified information on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program to select members of the media to counter public criticism, shape public opinion, and avoid potential congressional action to restrict the CIA's detention and interrogation authorities and budget.

If the SSCI’s report demonstrates one thing, it’s that the CIA’s unfettered ability to keep information about it’s activities secret gives it virtually limitless ability to control everyone’s understanding of its activities: from the White House and Congress to Hollywood and the American people. I have no doubt they’d argue those actions were necessary to protect national security, because in their mind — it seems — national security is harmed by anything that could potentially limit their authority to do exactly what they want. Someone should really tell them that's not how we do things in the United States.

And finally there will be some who have and will continue to argue that the CIA’s actions were necessary to protect national security. Those people, I’m guessing, need to make those arguments to help them sleep at night. To them, I’d argue the path to redemption lies not in the perpetuation of that belief, but in its eradication.

Again, please thank the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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Jen Hoelzer is the former Communications Director and Deputy Chief of Staff for Senator Ron Wyden.

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Many people still have no idea that the MPAA "rating system" for movies is a totally voluntary system. Any official system like that would be unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment (which is why a legal attempt to rate video games got killed by the Supreme Court). It's pretty rare for theaters to ignore MPAA ratings -- though it does very rarely happen. Back in 2012, we noted that AMC theaters defied the MPAA by letting students see the documentary Bully, even though the MPAA wanted to rate it as "R" (which restricts anyone 17 and under from seeing the film without an adult).

Now, IFC Center (a major independent theater in New York) has decided to defy the MPAA's ridiculous rating system again -- for the documentary on Ed Snowden by Laura Poitras, Citizenfour. Tommy Collison on Twitter drew our attention to this after posting a photograph of the sign posted to the window of the theater: IFC has a bit more detail on its own website, noting that the theater believes that the MPAA is wrong in how it chose to rate both Citizenfour and the Richard Linklater film Boyhood, saying that it "feels that both films are appropriate viewing for mature adolescents" and will let them in accordingly.

The absolute ridiculousness of the MPAA's rating system is well documented. It's done in secret, using standards that make no sense, and are often broken for no clear reason. More than a couple of curses will get you an "R" even though plenty of sexual content is fine. If you giggle about marijuana? That's an R rating. The members of the rating board aren't known, and even though the MPAA insists they match a certain profile, investigations have shown that the MPAA frequently breaks its own rules for members of the panel. The ratings board regularly screws over indie filmmakers. If you really want to know how ridiculous the system is, just watch the documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which was in fact given a rating by the MPAA: an NC-17 rating, normally reserved for things like porn (which, yes, is in the film, but only to show what types of content get an NC-17 rating).

It's great to see at least some theaters standing up to this sort of ridiculousness -- and hopefully more will follow suit.

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The "Great Firewall of Britain" claims another victim. "Voluntary" (as in: under the threat of legislation) internet filtering by ISPs has blocked UK citizens from connecting to the website of one of the oldest computer hacking groups in existence.

Last Friday, Germany's Chaos Computer Club posted this statement.

A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club's (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year's Chaos Communication Congress (31C3).

The post goes on to note that while these filters are faulty and suffer from overbroad content flagging, they can be easily bypassed simply by using the site's IP address: 213.73.89.123. It also points out that this blockage could possibly be deliberate, rather than due to the inherent technical limitations of poorly-designed web filters.

However, it may very well be that the CCC is considered "extremist" judged by British standards of freedom of speech.

Could be. Governments tend to treat all hackers as criminals, no matter how much the standard definition deviates from government officials' misconceptions. The Chaos Computer Club, despite being Europe's largest hacker community, is not composed of criminals. But it has engaged in several acts that would make it less popular with various governments, including reverse engineering "lawful access" malware used by German law enforcement (which included installations on school computers), uncovering a government backdoor in Skype and filing a criminal complaint against the German government for its massive domestic surveillance programs.

As it stands now, it appears that only Three is currently blocking the main CCC website. The Open Rights Group's "Blocked" website indicates that Virgin Media and Vodafone had both blocked the site until recently, but appear to have removed CCC from their blacklists on Nov. 27th and Dec. 8th, respectively.

Blocking the CCC is just another demonstration of how internet filters don't work. The filter fails on multiple levels, going overboard with the blocking while simultaneously allowing users to bypass the system using nothing more than an IP address. The end result is the UK's passive-aggressive filter-by-proxy, one that hangs the threat of regulatory legislation over the heads of ISPs while signing off on "will this do?" filtering.

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The DOJ has just released the conclusions of its civil rights investigation of the Cleveland Police Department [pdf link]. What it's uncovered is sadly unshocking. It's the same sort of behavior that's endemic in law enforcement agencies all over the nation: routine use of excessive force and discriminatory policing.

The Cleveland PD gained recent national notoriety after a police pursuit devolved into a department-wide free-for-all -- a 23-minute chase involving nearly 100 officers and supervisors and over 50 vehicles. The pursuit began when two officers thought they heard a gunshot coming from a vehicle. It concluded in a middle school parking lot, with more than a dozen officers unloading 137 bullets into the stopped vehicle, most of them in a 20-second period. A single officer was responsible for 49 of those bullets, some of which were fired into the two "suspects" from the hood of their vehicle. In all, 47 bullets found their way into the victims' bodies. No weapons or empty casings were found in the vehicle.

The PD is back in the news again, thanks to an officer's killing of a 12-year-old boy, supposedly as he reached for his "weapon," a toy gun with the orange tip removed. This claim held until video was released, which showed officers cutting across a park and stopping within feet of the boy. The officer on the passenger's side -- a reject from another police department -- shot and killed the 12-year-old within two seconds of the officers' arrival on the scene.

The DOJ's report opens with the de rigueur statements about how dangerous policing is and how grateful the nation is that there are men and women willing to do this difficult job. But this is mercifully brief. The token belly rub doesn't even last a full paragraph. The generic praise that makes up the two first sentences is swiftly tempered by these curt sentences.

The use of force by police should be guided by a respect for human life and human dignity, the need to protect public safety, and the duty to protect individuals from unreasonable seizures under the Fourth Amendment. A significant amount of the force used by CDP officers falls short of these standards.

The next page briefly summarizes how the CPD falls short.

The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;

The unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including tasers, chemical spray and fists;

Excessive force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check; and

The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk.

That the CPD has shown a pattern of excessive force isn't even open for debate, according to the DOJ. The agency points its fingers at several deficiencies, fortunately highlighting the fact that the department's internal systems for reporting and investigating excessive force allegations are a large contributor to the problem.

If you like your police news depressing, the DOJ's report is full of handy pull quotes. Some are mere sentences while others are multi-paragraph damnations. I'm tempted to post huge chunks of the report and let them speak for themselves, but I won't. Read it for yourselves. But I don't want to let these particular paragraphs slip by without highlighting them.

First, the problems:

The pattern or practice of unreasonable force we identified is reflected in use of both deadly and less lethal force. For example, we found incidents of GDP officers firing their guns at people who do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to officers or others and using guns in a careless and dangerous manner, including hitting people on the head with their guns, in circumstances where deadly force is not justified. Officers also use less lethal force that is significantly out of proportion to the resistance encountered and officers too often escalate incidents with citizens instead of using effective and accepted tactics to de-escalate tension. We reviewed incidents where officers used Tasers, oleoresin capsicum spray, or punched people who were already subdued, including people in handcuffs. Many of these people could have been controlled with a lesser application of force. At times, this force appears to have been applied as punishment for the person's earlier verbal or physical resistance to an officer's command, and is not based on a current threat posed by the person. This retaliatory use of force is not legally justified. Our review also revealed that officers use excessive force against individuals who are in mental health crisis or who may be unable to understand or comply with officers' commands, including when the individual is not suspected of having committed any crime at all.

In addition to the pattern or practice of excessive force, we found that CDP officers commit tactical errors that endanger both themselves and others in the Cleveland community and, in some instances, may result in constitutional violations. They too often fire their weapons in a manner and in circumstances that place innocent bystanders in danger; and accidentally fire them, sometimes fortuitously hitting nothing and other times shooting people and seriously injuring them. CDP officers too often use dangerous and poor tactics to try to gain control of suspects, which results in the application of additional force or places others in danger. Critically, officers do not make effective use of de-escalation techniques, too often instead escalating encounters and employing force when it may not be needed and could be avoided. While these tactical errors may not always result in constitutional violations, they place officers, suspects, and other members of the Cleveland community at risk.

In short (the report spends 59 pages detailing what's briefly summed up here), these are the symptoms. The next paragraphs address the disease.

Principal among the systemic deficiencies that have resulted in the pattern or practice we found is the Division's failure to implement effective and rigorous accountability systems. The fact that we find that there are systemic failures in CDP, however, should not be interpreted as inconsistent with holding officers accountable in any particular incident. Individual CDP officers also bear responsibility for their own actions once afforded due process of law. Any effort to force a decision between systemic problems and individual accountability is nothing more than an effort to set up a false choice between two important aspects of the same broader issues that exist at CDP. Force incidents often are not properly reported, documented, investigated, or addressed with corrective measures. Supervisors throughout the chain of command endorse questionable and sometimes unlawful conduct by officers. We reviewed supervisory investigations of officers' use of force that appear to be designed from the outset to justify the officers' actions. Deeply troubling to us was that some of the specially-trained investigators who are charged with conducting unbiased reviews of officers' use of deadly force admitted to us that they conduct their investigations with the goal of casting the accused officer in the most positive light possible. This admitted bias appears deeply rooted, cuts at the heart of the accountability system at CDP...

Another critical flaw we discovered is that many of the investigators in Internal Affairs Unit advised us that they will only find that an officer violated Division policy if the evidence against the officer proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that an officer engaged in misconduct -- an unreasonably high standard reserved for criminal prosecutions and inappropriate in this context. This standard apparently has been applied, formally or informally, for years to these investigations and further supports the finding that the accountability systems regarding use of force at CDP are structurally flawed. In actuality, we found that during the time period we reviewed that officers were only suspended for any period of time on approximately six occasions for using improper force. Discipline is so rare that no more than 51 officers out of a sworn force of 1,500 were disciplined in any fashion in connection with a use of force incident over a three-and-a-half-year period. However, when we examined discipline numbers further, it was apparent that in most of those 51 cases the actual discipline imposed was for procedural violations such as failing to file a report, charges were dismissed or deemed unfounded, or the disciplinary process was suspended due to pending civil claims. A finding of excessive force by internal disciplinary system is exceedingly rare.

The DOJ's report notes that it previously investigated the department in 2002. Remedies were set into motion at that point, but apparently lasted only long enough to remove the DOJ's oversight in 2005. With the DOJ no longer looking over its shoulder, the CPD lapsed back into its bad habits.

In the intervening years, the CPD has allowed the problem to snowball by actively ignoring its own duty to ensure its police force is indeed "Cleveland's finest," rather than a loose consortium of passable officers and outright thugs -- both granted the veneer of respectability (and a healthy dose of power) with the donning of a uniform and badge.

Other points of interest in the report:

• The investigation began after helicopter video caught police kicking a handcuffed suspect in the head. No reports filed mentioned this use of force.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer performed its own investigation, uncovering the fact that officers deployed Tasers nearly 1,000 times in a 4-year period with only 5 instances being deemed "inappropriate" -- a rate a use of force expert said "strained credibility."
• In 2013, an officer fired at a hostage fleeing a hostage situation, later claiming that he thought the man pointed a weapon at him. No reports corroborated this version of the incident. Fortunately, the officer missed both shots.
• Despite being expressly forbidden to do so by multiple revisions to the Use of Force policy dating back to 2007, CPD officers have continued to fire weapons at suspects or vehicles moving away from them.
• In 2012, an officer's weapon discharged (yes, this time the passive voice is appropriate) when he struck a suspect's head with it. The suspect escaped while "bleeding from the face," and reports filed by the officer left it unclear as to whether the suspect had been hit with the bullet as well.
• A 6'4", 300-lb. officer sat on the legs of 5'8", 150-lb. shoplifting suspect and "punched him three or four times in the face," presumably as punishment for 13-year-old's kicking of an officer and the cruiser door while being placed in the vehicle.
• Officers tasered a man strapped to a gurney in the back of an emergency vehicle for "threatening officers."
• Five officers responding to a call concerning a suicidal man with a gun fired off 24 rounds during the incident. Four struck the suicidal man. Thirteen hit a nearby parked vehicles. And six bullets hit surrounding homes.

That the DOJ has handed down such a damning report could be viewed as encouraging, but considering it tangled with the CPD nine years ago, it's not nearly as encouraging as it should be. Bad habits are tough to break, and the CPD's habits are some of the worst. It is now on its second DOJ investigation in twelve years, and if the fixes didn't take last time, there's no logical reason to believe this time will be any different.

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Just last week I flew into JFK airport's terminal 4, and thankfully I only had carry-on luggage, because this morning I read that seven baggage handlers from JFK -- working in terminals 4 and 7 -- have been arrested for stealing stuff from people's luggage. And doing so without much fear of getting caught (even if they were, eventually):

According to the criminal complaints, between March 2012 and June 2014, the defendants stole Apple iPads, iPhones and MacBook computers; Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets; Dell, Toshiba and ASUS laptops; and other electronic items, as well as a pair of two-carat diamond-and-gold earrings. The complaint said the items were taken from passengers' checked luggage, and all but two of the defendants are alleged to have contacted a "fence," who actually was an undercover police officer.

The defendants named their prices, set up meetings on airport grounds or nearby, and even made promises about other items that they could steal, the complaint said.

Now, if this were a one time thing, it might not even be that noteworthy. But this seems like fairly common practice at airports. A few years ago, we wrote about TSA agents stealing iPads and stories of TSA agents and baggage handlers stealing stuff from luggage are not at all hard to find. In fact, reports from a few years ago noted that over 400 TSA employees have been fired for stealing from passnegers in the past decade.

And related stories are all over the place. Hell, back in March, another group of JFK baggage handlers were arrested. On nearly the same day, it looks like a similar theft ring involving baggage handlers at LAX was broken up. Even more recently, a similar theft ring at New Orleans' Louis Armstrong International Airport. Amateur sleuths were needed to bust up a baggage handler theft ring in Charleston, South Carolina. A WSJ article from a few years ago details a long list of baggage handler thefts from a wide range of airports.

And it's not just baggage handlers, but the TSA itself, who (we're told) is supposed to be protecting us from bad people. Here's $8,500 stolen from a bag. Here's a TSA officer stealing a computer. Here's a TSA agent swiping $36 from a passenger. A few years ago, a convicted TSA agent, who admitted to stealing $800,000 from passengers at Newark Airport in New Jersey, spoke out about just how common theft was among the TSA:

"It was very commonplace, very," said Pythias Brown, a former TSA officer at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey who admits he stole more than $800,000 worth of items from luggage and security checkpoints over a four-year period.

"It was very convenient to steal," he said.

Speaking publicly for the first time after being released from prison, Brown told ABC News his four-year-long crime spree came to an end only because he tried to sell a camera he stole from the luggage of a CNN producer on E-bay but forgot to remove all of the news networks' identifying stickers.

"It became so easy, I got complacent," Brown said.

All of this should raise a variety of questions about airport security. We're told that these people are there to protect us, but it seems that they're not able to do that. At all. Hell, as Amy Alkon points out, if it's so damn easy to take stuff out of people's bags, you know it's pretty easy to put stuff in as well. And, of course, this has been going on for years. Many of those links above are more recent, but plenty are from years past and it doesn't seem like anything has changed very much. Airport "security" remains security theater at the best of times, but it's even worse when it's actually putting people at more risk.

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You may recall, back in June, that there was a key House vote that took NSA supporters by surprise. An amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill pushed by a bi-partisan team of Thomas Massie, Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren passed overwhelmingly, with a plan to slam the door shut on questionable NSA "backdoor searches" (as described in detail earlier). The House voted 293 to 123, making it a pretty clear and overwhelming statement that Congress did not, in fact, support such practices by the NSA.

But, of course, the NSA gets the last laugh. As part of the big lameduck CRomnibus effort in Congress, it appears that the House leadership has agreed to drop that amendment, despite the fact it passed overwhelmingly. Apparently, this is angering many who supported that amendment, and in response, according to Cato's Patrick Eddington, Congress is going to bring up the CRomnibus under closed rule to basically block anyone attempting to add it back in as an amendment (which is what some had hoped to do).

It's basically yet another giant middle finger to the idea of any meaningful surveillance reform -- even one that the majority of Congress wanted.

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Another citizen dies at the hand of a police officer and another grand-jury-in-name-only can't be bothered to return an indictment. I won't rehash the stats, but the grand jury process exists for one purpose: returning indictments. And now a system that almost always acts as the prosecutor's rubber stamp has failed to do so. Of course, in both cases, the accused were law enforcement officers and that changes everything.

There are some similarities between the Eric Garner case and the Michael Brown case, and they are significant. In both cases, the men were large, black and unarmed. In both cases, a minor crime was allegedly involved -- petty theft in Brown's case and (very allegedly -- this narrative appeared well after the initial reports) the sale of untaxed single cigarettes ("loosies") in Garner's.

The cases diverge, as well. Brown was shot. Garner was choked. In Brown's case, there were multiple eyewitnesses, but they offered conflicting and shifting accounts of what happened. In Garner's case, there were multiple unblinking witnesses -- cellphone cameras -- that captured the entire incident.

In both cases, the grand juries spent weeks examining the evidence. Cases involving those outside of the law enforcement community are examined in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. The grand jury doesn't need a preponderance of evidence to return an indictment in 99.9% of its cases. All it needs is a prosecutor to tell it that probable cause exists and what charges it should bring. A minimum of evidence is provided for its consideration and, in almost every case, the grand jury applies the rubber stamp and the wheels of the "justice" system continue to roll.

Officer Pantaleo faced a greater challenge than Officer Wilson, though. There was videotaped evidence of his every move during the incident. At multiple points, his testimony directly contradicted what the recordings showed.

He acknowledged that he heard Mr. Garner saying, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” and insisted that he tried to disengage as quickly as he could…

Watch the video for yourself and see if Pantaleo's statements match his actions.

Pantaleo may have released the chokehold, but he didn't "disengage." Instead, he moved toward the top of Garner's body and held his face down on the pavement. These two moves, one forbidden and one possibly unnecessary, were all that was needed to kill Eric Garner.

I don't use the word "kill" lightly. That's quoting the findings of the medical examiner. "Compression of the neck and chest." "Homicide." That's from the official autopsy. Garner was killed by Officer Pantaleo.

Pantaleo defended his chokehold further by stating that Garner's audible complaints that he couldn't breathe were evidence that he could actually breathe. Fair enough, I suppose, but what Garner was saying was that he was having great difficulty breathing, using what little oxygen he had available to inform the officer of this fact. Just because he didn't phrase it more accurately doesn't change the facts. Garner had trouble breathing, thanks to Pantaleo's actions, right up until he couldn't breathe anymore.

According to his lawyer, Pantaleo justified his chokehold further -- first by stating his fear for his and the other officers' safety and second, by claiming he detached himself as quickly as he could and cleared the path for paramedics to provide assistance. Again, the video contradicts his testimony.

“That’s why he attempted to get off as quick as he could,” Mr. London said. “He thought that once E.M.T. arrived, everything would be O.K.”

The recordings show Pantaleo restraining Garner well past the point of any resistance before heading to the periphery and waving to the cameras. There's a long wait between Pantaleo's disengagement and the paramedics' arrival, during which time a variety of cops appear to believe (despite the physical evidence they're manhandling) that Eric Garner is simply unconscious -- and attempt to undo his death by shouting at him and rolling his lifeless body back and forth

This death is linked to Ferguson mostly in terms of chronology. Garner's death at the hands of a police officer bears more resemblance to the extended restraint and excessive force that brought about the deaths of Kelly Thomas and David Silva. The autopsies contain certain similarities -- like the listing of preexisting health conditions that may have contributed to their deaths. Of course, it's very likely that all three men would still be alive if not for their "interactions" with law enforcement, but medical examiners aren't really interested in pointing this out.

But Garner's was different in this respect: it was determined to be a homicide. But the grand jury viewed all the evidence provided to them by prosecutors uninterested in prosecuting and somehow managed to avoid bringing any charges at all. As Scott Greenfield states in his excellent writeup on the subject, this presents a bit of a problem. Unlike Missouri, where charges can still be pursued without a grand jury indictment, in New York it's a grand jury or nothing.

The District Attorney of Richmond County, New York, has, by the intentional sabotage of his own grand jury presentment, created the legal conundrum of a homicide without a perpetrator. It cannot be, yet it is, because he chose to make it so.

Pantaleo now resides in this impossible state. Possibly not for long, as the federal government is launching a civil rights inquiry, but for the time being, he is the recipient of one of the justice system's many "miracles." While it's true that a medical examiner's declaration of "homicide" doesn't actually denote a criminal act has taken place, it does signify that the death was neither accidental nor natural. There was a perpetrator involved and in a normal grand jury setting, this would easily have resulted in an indictment. The jury trial following the indictment would have sorted out the particulars of the death, and perhaps Pantaleo would have walked free nonetheless, but because the grand jury process resulted in "no true bill," Garner's death remains in limbo -- a homicide with no perpetrator to hold accountable or to clear of culpability.

The NYPD is readying its body cam pilot program, but that seemingly offers little in the way of reassurance in light of this outcome. We have just seen an officer who choked a man to death walk away a free man, despite three separate recordings of the incident. What good are cameras if the system continues to grant abusive officers this much leeway? What difference does damning footage make when grand juries believe cops' statements about "fear for their safety" more than their own eyes? These questions can't be answered, at least not with any degree of certainty. And they're uncomfortable questions, both for those who fear that excessive force and misconduct will remain a constant no matter what corrective measures are put in place, as well as for those who generally come down on the side of law enforcement. For those wishing to hold police accountable, each incident caught is more evidence of systemic problems. For those siding with the police, it's just one more indefensible position for them to defend.

One thing is certain, this case would never have received as much attention if cameras hadn't been present. We may not like the outcome, but the process that brought it this far was pushed along by the existence of multiple recordings.

I'm not of the belief that this wholly negates the benefits of body cameras. What it does serious damage to is the notion that they can be tools of greater accountability. The system skews heavily in favor of officers facing charges and hours of footage detailing abuse and misconduct won't change that, at least not on its own. But the gathering of evidence is important, nonetheless. So is the deterrent effect, in which the knowledge of being filmed alters behavior -- both for police officers and the people they interact with.

But using this outcome to declare police body cameras useless accomplishes nothing. We've already seen what happens without them. The alternative is to allow things to proceed as they have so far, and no one's happy with the status quo. The court of public opinion can't return indictments, but it can provoke needed changes within the system -- and that's a lot easier to do when there's footage backing up the claims. It won't be an overnight process, but it can be done.

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For a lock picker, the world is a different place. Take, for example, a typical suburban house, with a bicycle in the front yard and a five-pin Weiser bolting the front door—a basic pin-and-tumbler lock, employed by millions of home owners.

The post The International Competition Where Master Lock-Pickers Do Battle appeared first on WIRED.

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. We've written plenty about the Senate Intelligence Committee's massive $40 million, 6,000 page torture report, detailing a variety of failures related to the CIA's torture program after 9/11. While the Committee voted (overwhelmingly) to release a redacted 480 page executive summary of the document, and the White House insisted it wanted to do so as well, since then it's become clear that the White House was going to do everything to block it from actually getting out.

Yesterday it came out that an agreement had finally been reached on the redactions and that it would finally be released on Monday. Apparently, the CIA/White House won the battle over the question of redacting pseudonyms -- which was a key fight. Basically, those who have seen the report say that if you redact the pseudonyms, important parts of what happened are greatly distorted (such as who is doing what). But apparently, that's what was agreed to anyway.

However, after everyone started gearing up for the release on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry apparently called Senator Dianne Feinstein to argue that she should "delay" the release of the report, claiming that the timing is "sensitive" and that the US is worried it may mess up a variety of things:

“What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world -- including parts of the world particularly implicated -- and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. "He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue -- it’s a foreign policy issue."

To put it simply, this is a complete bullshit argument. There's always going to be "a lot going on in the world" especially in areas who are going to be upset by the report. There's never going to be a "good" time to release a report that details just how screwed up the CIA's torture program is -- but it's the only way to actually start the process of making things right and making sure that we, as a country don't do that kind of thing again.

In fact, if the government is so damn concerned about the reaction to the release of the report, here's an idea: don't let the government do stuff that leads to a report that will create such a reaction!

Furthermore, the argument that a "delay" is necessary makes no sense either. Beyond the fact that there's always something going on in the world, in this case, they've known that this report was coming for months. To argue they haven't had enough time to prepare is clearly bogus. Back in April the State Department was whining about this as well, but now it's had months to prepare and it's still whining?

Finally, the claims by the State Department that it's just asking for a delay, rather than to shelve the whole report ring hollow. One of the reasons that it's coming out next week is because, after that, the Republicans are back in control, and they've indicated that they'll bury the report entirely. At this point, if Feinstein gives in to Kerry, it seems like the only viable option for getting the report out to the world is to have outgoing Senator Mark Udall release it himself on the floor of the Senate.

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