Brindle

This is the third snow-related post in a row. That must be some sort of Geekologie record. One that will definitely won't be going down in the history books and probably won't be remembered by a single person after tomorrow. God willing, I'll drink it out of my memory before bed tonight. There are bunch of microscopic closeups of the snowflakes that fall on Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov's balcony. Clearly he has some nice quality snow. Here? Here it never gets cold enough to snow, but if it did it would be acid snow. And not the kind you could catch on your tongue to trip balls and talk to Frosty, the kind you could catch on your tongue if you really hate your tongue and want it to suffer. You know that expression, cutting off your nose to spite your face? Does that actually work? I only ask because these f***ing cheeks have really been pissing me off lately. Keep going for a bunch more. Thanks to Francis, who told me that people are like snowflakes: no two are identical. Except anonymous internet commenters, they're all dime-a-dozen jerkbags.

While TPP negotiators had hoped to finish off the negotiations in Singapore over the past few days, it appears that did not happen, though they claim to have made substantial progress and will meet again next month. From the reports of people there, the negotiators made sure that public interest groups were excluded from even the press briefing about the negotiations, which should tell you all you need to know about what the negotiators think of the public. But, in case you weren't sure, the USTR, Michael Froman, has finally explained why the TPP negotiating positions must be kept secret. Apparently, all of us in the public, are too fucking stupid to understand the important work that he's doing, and we might "misunderstand" it. Therefore, we peons must be kept in the dark, while important people like himself negotiate on our behalf. According to Jamie Love:

Froman said if the text was public, people would misunderstand "negotiating positions."

In other words, the USTR is not a fan of democracy.

If you think the public is too stupid to understand the public policy positions you're negotiating for, then you shouldn't be in that job.

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Originally I misspelled the title 'snowglove'. How embarrassing would that have been if I hadn't caught it? "Not any more so than the rest of the mistakes you make." TRUE. Remember that time I accidentally copy/pasted one of my sexy Google Chat conversations into a post and didn't realize it? People have emailed me since then saying they still read it when absolutely nothing else will get them aroused. This is the $41 Blue Sky Snowglobe available for preorder from Firebox. Unfortunately they're not due out until next year so if you were thinking of buying one for a Christmas present you're gonna have to buy it for Christmas 2014 and there is no guarantee I won't have blown up the planet by then. I'm really hoping to, I'll tell you that. Keep going for a closeup and a shot of the packaging. Thanks to tails and Dominic, who heard purple is the best colored meth.

New York City Police Chief Ray Kelly has spent years defending the harassment of minorities via the PD's stop-and-frisk program. Kelly (and Mayor Bloomberg) have constantly pointed to the decline in violent crime stats as evidence the program works (and as justification for its unconstitutional aspects).

But the city must not be safe enough. Ray Kelly's retiring, but he won't be doing it unaccompanied. According to police sources, Kelly will be taking a small battalion of personal bodyguards with him wherever he goes, post-employment.

The NYPD's Intelligence Division — with Kelly’s input — is recommending that Kelly take with him a 10-officer complement of taxpayer-funded bodyguards, up from the six-officer detail the commissioner had wanted last month.

The detail will now include a lieutenant, three sergeants and six detectives to chauffeur and protect Kelly and his family around-the-clock in the Big Apple and even out of town after he ends his 12-year run atop Police Headquarters — at an estimated cost of more than $1.5 million a year, sources estimate.

This does seem excessive, especially considering Kelly will be retiring far from the mean streets, not heading to prison. In fact, he doesn't personally put people behind bars, so it's not as though he'd be much more than a symbolic target in the big house.

On the other hand, spending a decade deploying (and championing) a questionable program that gives NYPD officers the right to stop anyone (almost exclusively minorities) for any reason didn't exactly make Kelly a whole lot of friends. If an investigator was to ask whether anyone had a motive for doing something horrible thing to ex-Chief Kelly, the list of suspects would probably rival the New York City phone book.

But that's also an abstraction. The streets won't be less safe once Kelly steps down. They'll be roughly the same as they are now. Unless Kelly's already traveling with an armed entourage, there's really no reason he'd be less safe once retired. If anything, no longer being the figurehead of the NYPD should make him safer.

Supposedly, the Intelligence Division has some solid reasoning backing up this decision. According to information dug up by Matt Sledge at HuffPo, Ray Kelly has every reason to fear for his life.

[T]his May 17 declaration from Deputy Commissioner David Cohen in one of the NYPD surveillance lawsuits may provide some insight on the perceived threats to Kelly's safety.

After the officers who shot Sean Bell were acquitted, Cohen wrote, surveillance was ramped up citywide "in response to the possibility of unlawful activity and allowed for informed decision-making on the likelihood of violence or other unlawful activity, as well as resource deployment decisions."

"The shooting and subsequent trial sparked demonstrations across New York City and widespread threats of violence against members of the NYPD, including Police Commissioner Kelly, who was the target of a murder plot motivated by the Sean Bell matter," Cohen wrote.

Frightening, except for the fact that Kelly's stalking death threat came in the form of a person not much suited for stalking/death-dealing. (Nor was he in the position to front the $65,000 needed to send a more able-bodied person to do the job.)

Sounds pretty serious. Until you learn who was behind the 2007 "plot": a 400-pound, imprisoned, impoverished wheelchair-bound "mentally ill" man with a rap sheet the length of your arm.

As it stands now, Kelly will leave office with more bodyguards than any previous police chief since Howard Safir's retirement in 2000. Safir took 12 bodyguards with him, citing "vague threats." (Presumably, the same "vague threats" law enforcement and security agencies have used to weaken policies and expand power over the past decade-plus...) Not only that, but he'll be one of the few allowing the city to pick up the tab for post-career protective services.

True, this $1.5 million will be a drop in the bucket considering the size of NYC's budget, but considering the fact that Ray Kelly seems intent on making himself the sort of example other police chiefs shouldn't follow post-retirement, this should probably be opposed on sheer principle. Or, at the very least, his request should be trimmed down to a more reasonable number of bodyguards.

If Kelly's made an enemy of the people, there's really no one else he can point the finger at. If this means he'll be living in fear for the rest of his retirement, maybe he'll develop a bit of empathy for the thousands of minority citizens who have been harassed repeatedly over the last decade under the color of law.



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Because some people will actually follow advice found on 4chan (that's your bad), a number of users have ended up bricking their new X-Box Ones by following these fake instructions to make your console backwards compatible (because it's really that easy, Microsoft just doesn't want you to know about it!). In reality you're setting your system in a perpetual boot loop. It just goes to show, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the internet, and probably nothing you read on 4chan. Geekologie? Geekologie is probably 50% believable, unless my penis is typing (he never lies). Thanks to everyone who sent this, none of which admitted to doing it even though I bet someone did (not all Geekologie readers are MENSA material like you).

Twitter is still a young medium, and it's interesting to see yet more uses being found for it. Here's a rather dubious one from South Korea:

Agents from the National Intelligence Service of South Korea posted more than 1.2 million Twitter messages last year to try to sway public opinion in favor of Park Geun-hye, then a presidential candidate, and her party ahead of elections in 2012, state prosecutors said on Thursday.

As the New York Times post quoted above goes on to explain, the whole story is rather murky and complicated. One of the curious claims being made by the Korean spy agency accused of interfering with the election process is the following:

The intelligence service said its online messages were posted as part of normal psychological warfare operations against North Korea, which it said used the Internet to criticize South Korean government policies, forcing its agents to defend them online. In a statement on Thursday, it also accused the prosecutors of citing as their evidence online postings that had nothing to do with its agents.

Even if that's true, other departments may have gone beyond simply defending the government of South Korea to attack its political rivals:

In a separate inquiry, military investigators are looking into South Korea's Cyberwarfare Command after it was revealed last month in Parliament that some of its officials had conducted a similar online campaign against opposition candidates. The Cyberwarfare Command was created in 2010 to guard South Korea against hacking threats from North Korea.

That raises a very real problem with these kinds of online operations: they can easily be misused for purely political purposes, and oversight is easy to evade, since it's all about moving bits around. Of course, exactly the same could be said about the blanket surveillance being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Apparently, there's nowhere our intelligence agencies won't go in ostensibly in search of terrorists. The latest leak from Snowden, as published by ProPublica, New York Times and The Guardian, shows the NSA and GCHQ are actively infiltrating MMOs and other online gatherings in order to fight terrorism.

Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents.

Fearing that terrorist or criminal networks could use the games to communicate secretly, move money or plot attacks, the documents show, intelligence operatives have entered terrain populated by digital avatars that include elves, gnomes and supermodels.

The spies have created make-believe characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, while also collecting data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents, disclosed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

According to the document (from 2008), online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life are potentially "target-rich environments" in which suspected terrorists "hide in plain sight." (And it's not just MMOs. Xbox Live has apparently been swept up in the surveillance efforts as well.) Despite this assertion, the documents contain no evidence that any terrorists have been uncovered by agents and analysts. In fact, experts and developers of games like these have found no evidence that terrorists are using their services to communicate or recruit new members.

Once again, the efforts of the NSA and GCHQ seem to be focusing time and energy searching locations where terrorists would be least likely to be "hiding in plain sight," much in the way that grabbing data from mainstream email services and social platforms is only going to find the most amateurish of wrongdoers.

Games “are built and operated by companies looking to make money, so the players’ identity and activity is tracked,” said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, an author of “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” “For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar.”

Not only is the effort highly inefficient, but it's also highly redundant. As ProPublica points out, there are so many agents from the Pentagon, CIA and FBI chasing targets in virtual worlds that a "deconfliction" group was created just to avoid online "collisions."

Blizzard, the developer behind World of Warcraft, has gone on record stating that if intelligence agencies are using the service to track terrorists, it hasn't been informed or given its permission. Microsoft and Linden Lab (Second Life's developer) declined to comment.

There may be a good reason Linden Lab isn't issuing a statement. Its former CTO is an ex-military officer with top secret clearance.

In 2007, as the NSA and other intelligence agencies were beginning to explore virtual games, NSA officials met with the chief technology officer for the manufacturer of Second Life, the San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The executive, Cory Ondrejka, was a former Navy officer who had worked at the NSA with a top-secret security clearance.

He visited the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., in May 2007 to speak to staff members over a brown bag lunch, according to an internal agency announcement. “Second Life has proven that virtual worlds of social networking are a reality: come hear Cory tell you why!” said the announcement. It added that virtual worlds gave the government the opportunity “to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviors of non-Americans through observation, without leaving U.S. soil.”

GCHQ, in particular, has used Second Life to track down a crime ring selling stolen credit card information. While the use of these games in discovering and tracking terrorists still remains largely theoretical, GCHQ found the online games did offer one benefit:

According to the minutes of a January 2009 meeting, GCHQ’s “network gaming exploitation team” had identified engineers, embassy drivers, scientists and other foreign intelligence operatives to be World of Warcraft players — potential targets for recruitment as agents.

The NSA, on the other hand, seems to have found little more than evidence that terrorism suspects are largely like non-terrorists when they play online games -- they do it for enjoyment.

One NSA document said that the World of Warcraft monitoring “continues to uncover potential Sigint value by identifying accounts, characters and guilds related to Islamic extremist groups, nuclear proliferation and arms dealing.” In other words, targets of interest appeared to be playing the fantasy game, though the document does not indicate that they were doing so for any nefarious purposes.

Whether or not these agencies are actually hunting down terrorists, one this is for certain: large amounts of communications are being caught in the surveillance nets.

One document says that while GCHQ was testing its ability to spy on Second Life in real time, British intelligence officers vacuumed up three days’ worth of Second Life chat, instant message and financial transaction data, totaling 176,677 lines of data, which included the content of the communications.

Not surprisingly, there's also a profit motive tied into this infiltration of online games. SAIC, a government contractor specializing in surveillance systems (and building non-functional, incredibly expensive software), may have set this online surveillance in motion back in 2007.

In one 66-page document from 2007, part of the cache released by Mr. Snowden, the contracting giant SAIC promoted its ability to support “intelligence collection in the game space,” and warned that online games could be used by militant groups to recruit followers and could provide “terrorist organizations with a powerful platform to reach core target audiences.”

ProPublica notes that there's nothing in the documents that suggests SAIC ended up with a contract (at that time) as a result of its self-promotion, but it does appear that SAIC (along with Lockheed Martin) won a multi-million dollar contract a couple of years later, shortly after it participated in a discussion about a proposed government study of the link between online and offline behavior in MMO gamers.

The question is how useful these infiltrations have been after a half-decade of use. The agencies have stated they feel these games could be used for communication and recruitment, but nothing has surfaced indicating the surveillance is effective. It largely seems to be another way to gather data, something the agencies already have too much of. If nothing else, GCHQ seems to be using it for a headhunting tool, but I'm not sure how many potential employees would be flattered to know they've been "scouted" by a questionable surveillance program. For now, it seems to be another case of the reach far exceeding the grasp, not that this lack of success ever seems to result in scaling back the "reach."

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With the latest round of TPP negotiations ongoing, the folks over at Huffington Post got a hold of two leaked documents including a very useful spreadsheet highlighting all of the positions and areas of disagreement concerning every chapter of the TPP. What's quite revealing (and very good to see, though we'll see how it holds up) is that on many of the worst proposals, it appears that the US is very isolated, with either no one agreeing or maybe just one or two other countries agreeing. Of course, the US is obviously the most powerful force in these negotiations, so never underestimate the ability of the USTR to pressure countries to agree to these harmful policies -- but so far, it appears that other governments have been willing to push back on the US's extreme view of corporate sovereignty ("investor dispute resolution settlements") which would allow companies to ignore the laws of countries and sue those countries for "lost profits" when they disagree with the legal regime (say, for example, if a patent they wanted isn't granted). These programs have been a disaster in current agreements, and hopefully it appears that other countries now recognize this.

It also appears that the US is somewhat isolated in its intellectual property proposals. Only Australia and Peru agree with the US's "patentability criteria." And no one at all agrees with the US's plans for extra protection for patents or to extend protections to new uses (such as plants, animals and surgical procedures). The US is also the only one supporting programs favorable to pharmaceutical companies around data protection. On the copyright side, it appears that everyone disagrees with the US's view of parallel importation (which, if still the same as it was from the last leaked version, disagrees with the US Supreme Court's own ruling on parallel importation). Only the US wants "establishment of criminal offenses for unintentional infringements of copyright, related rights and trademarks."

This is good to see -- but, again, the US is the most powerful voice in the room, and you won't believe the tricks that the USTR will pull to try to bend other countries to agree to these proposals. Hopefully, though, the other countries stand firm. Hell, the fact that so many other countries agree on so many other proposals suggests that perhaps they should just kick the US out and make their own agreement.

Oh, and the US isn't only isolated in pushing for bad proposals. It's also isolated in rejecting some proposals as well. For example, there's a proposal in the e-commerce chapter on "privacy obligations" which everyone has agreed to... except the US. Gee, the US not interested in privacy protections? I wonder why...

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In the latest in a long list of travesties carried out by the US government in the Megaupload case, apparently it went to the US court handling the case, and without letting Megaupload know, got an ex parte order allowing the government to share evidence from the case with various copyright holders and then to issue press releases about the case. As Megaupload's lawyers point out, the whole thing is a clear due process violation.

The defendants have been indicted, their assets have been frozen, their business has been destroyed, and their liberty has been restrained. Given these constraints, it is unclear what evils the Government fears defendants will inflict if provided notice of the Government’s submission, beyond having Defendants’ counsel come into court to make opposing arguments.

Basically, Megaupload's lawyers are asking to be a part of this process, since it appears that the government wanted (and the court allowed) to cut them out. As Megaupload's lawyers note, allowing the government to sort through and cherry-pick evidence to share, without any context or potential additional exonerating information, is a clear due process violation.

“The Government’s request also substantially prejudices the defendants in the case. Permitting the Government to widely disseminate a one-sided, cherry-picked set of facts threatens to improperly infect the jury pool before defendants are afforded any opportunity to present their side of the story.”

Apparently part of the issue for the original filing to reveal this information was that some copyright holders are getting antsy that as the case drags on, they won't also be able to file civil cases against Megaupload before the three-year statute of limitations expires. However, as Megaupload's lawyers point out, there is no urgency here since the government itself made no move to share this information over the past two years. If it really wanted to share the information it had ample time to make the request and allow Megaupload's lawyers to review and take part in the process, rather than trying to route around them entirely.

I'm guessing the recent successes against IsoHunt and Hotfile may have contributed to the timing as well. The MPAA pretty clearly thinks it can use those two cases to go after Megaupload as well, outside of the criminal case which will continue.

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The TSA undoubtedly has several problems, chief among them being charged with providing an expensive, interactive theater program aimed at putting travelers' minds at ease while simultaneously putting their nether regions through a rigorous groping regimen. The exposure of documents stating its all-important job isn't actually that important certainly doesn't help. As it stands now, the TSA is just another government institution, destined to be funded in perpetuity, even as its relevance continues to erode.

One problem it shouldn't have but does is how to deal with a vast accumulation of pocket change left behind by the nation's travelers.

Last year, the Transportation Security Administration collected $531,395.22 in change left behind at checkpoints.

Federal law requires the TSA to report the amount of unclaimed money they keep every year to Congress. The fiscal 2012 report, obtained by The Washington Post, shows the agency collected about $499,000 in U.S. currency, and another $32,000 in foreign currency, at their checkpoints.

While this amount is literally small change compared to the agency's ~$8 billion annual budget, it's still too significant an amount to ignore. This unclaimed change is earmarked for "civil aviation security" -- you know, the main thing that the TSA does. The agency is supposed to put the money back into the company, so to speak. But, if the following figure is accurate, it would appear the agency is operating at peak (in)efficiency.

[T]he TSA has only spent about $6,500 of the money it collected last year.

Well, if the agency can't use it, maybe it could pass it on to those who could.

On Tuesday, the House passed H.R. 1095, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), which would require the TSA to fork that cash over to nonprofit organizations that provide travel-related assistance to military personnel or their families.

Good idea, one would think. But that would be before hearing how expensive giving money away can be when the TSA handles the job.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated [pdf] that collecting, accounting for and transferring the money to the USO would cost $1.2 million — $700,000 more than the actual amount collected.

The CBO's two-page estimate is woefully light on details on how it arrived at its $1.2 million figure. It just sort of claims the costs will exceed $1 million, extrapolates this income/expenditure over a decade and states the whole thing will be a wash, even if the TSA's spending steadily declines. To sum up: nothing ventured, nothing lost.

It seems there would be a very inexpensive way to route this money to charity. First off, each airport's security team could designate a charity to route the funds to. Then… nothing. The TSA simply collects the change as usual and dumps it into the proper receptacle. The designated charity could pick this up quarterly (unintentional pun), count it themselves and turn over a receipt for record keeping to the TSA -- all on their own dime (slightly less unintentional pun). Total cost to the TSA: nothing more than the hourly wage it already pays to have someone scoop up and store abandoned change.

End result? PR wins all around (especially if local charities are used) and the agency won't be spending money to reroute money. In fact, donation boxes for the selected charity could be set up right past the scanners, allowing people to toss the change in themselves and restore a little faith in humanity after a trip through the TSA's dehumanizing theatrical production.



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Our founding fathers understood the problems with overly-broad warrants and the dangers posed by unreasonable searches and seizures. These were the sort of things kings did because the populace had no way to check that power. So, when they decided the US wouldn't be run like a patriarchal state, they built in protections for the new nation's inhabitants.

But they also understood that these checks on government power might be inconvenient for law enforcement and security agencies, which is why they built in extensive waivers and exceptions that would allow these entities to bypass the limits in order to pursue criminals, terrorists and whistleblowers. As the wording clearly states in the Bill of Rights, the people are guaranteed certain protections "unless, you know, we're trying to catch bad guys."

It's true.** Our founding fathers would be amazed to observe the ruckus being raised by so-called "defenders" of rights in the wake of the NSA leaks or the rising amount of evidence showing government agencies are willing to exploit every loophole (mainly the Third Party Doctrine) to seize tons of data completely unrelated to the investigations at hand.

**It absolutely fucking isn't.

Jess Remington at Reason points out another of these "non-events" being carried out under the name of law enforcement.

Police officers in Richland County, South Carolina are currently defending the use of a controversial investigation method that grants their departments access to thousands of cell phone users’ data in the search for criminals.

The technique, in which law enforcement officials rely on what are known as “tower dumps,” is an increasingly common policing tactic in local departments across the country. Following a crime, law enforcement officials locate nearby cell towers and request all of the call, text, and data transmissions that occurred during the crime from the tower’s provider. The majority of the data collected belongs to individuals with no connection to the crime.

How does one's info end up being swept up in a tower dump? Does one have a cellphone with a signal? Yeah, that's how. Checking your email? Surfing the web? Making a call? Sending a text message? It all goes in the dump. And South Carolina cops are helping themselves to all of this data because, hey, it makes capturing bad guys a little easier. (CAUTION: AUTOPLAY IN EFFECT)

The Richland County Sheriff's Department used Tower Dumps during the investigation into a string of car breakins, where weapons and computers were stolen. They combined the Tower Dump information with DNA evidence and in 2011 arrested Phillip Tate on three counts of "breaking and entering a motor vehicle" and one count of "larceny."

"He did break and enter into both of those vehicles, one of them being the vehicle of Sheriff Lott. It was parked at his house," said Fifth Circuit Solicitor Joanna McDuffy in court. "It was his sheriff department issued vehicle. Weapons were taken from that vehicle your honor."

Search warrants we found say Richland Sheriff's investigators requested dumps on two cell phone towers during their investigation.

Cops seeking to use these tower dumps just can't call up the provider and ask for them. But neither do they have to jump through the probable cause hoops a warrant entails. All they need is a court order, which is considerably easier to obtain than a warrant, thanks to the (somewhat ironically-named) Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.

The Richland PD is just one of several law enforcement entities making frequent use of these untargeted, unminimized data dumps. And the numbers keep increasing every year.

In 2011, AT&T and Verizon received 1.3 million requests for cell phone data (many of which were tower dumps) and filled more than 500,000 of them. Verizon estimates that over the last 5 years, law enforcement’s tower dump requests have increased by 15% annually. T-Mobile reported increases of approximately 12%-16%.

Thanks to the ease of obtaining tower dumps, it's becoming a go-to tool for law enforcement. Not only can they collect these without needing to show probable cause, they're also under no obligation to inform any of the millions of unrelated cellphone customers whose information they've obtained that they've swept up their data.

Oddly enough, someone from the counterterrorism community is being the voice of reason in all this.

"In recognizing that it's not just the CIA or FBI tracking a terrorist that may have flown over here, this is local law enforcement. As citizens, we sort of have a question: how often is this happening?" said Keith Pounds, president of counterrorism consulting firm Countercon…

He supports Tower Dumps, but only if a search warrant is signed, the data is purged after an investigation is complete and law enforcement notify subscribers included in the database.

"Inform us," Pounds said. "Or at least those couple of hundred or couple of thousand people, innocent people, inform them that hey we acquired your information for this particular crime. We're going to purge the data and get rid of it."

This obviously isn't being implemented anywhere at the moment, or we would have heard of it. Law enforcement agencies are understandably in no hurry to tell innocent citizens that they're sweeping up their data in order to sift through it for potential signs of wrongdoing. They seem to be taking their cues from our nation's intelligence agencies, which only begrudgingly inform the public about their data hauls, and then only after former employees splash them all over the front pages of newspapers.

Making this worse (especially for South Carolina residents) is that local laws regarding this data tie retention rates to whether the suspect apprehended using tower dumps is convicted or not.

South Carolina evidence control laws say if a suspect is convicted or pleads guilty, police could keep everything they get from a Tower Dump for up to seven years.

So, your data's stay in SC police databases isn't subject to any minimization by process of elimination. It isn't even purged once a guilty verdict (or entered plea) is obtained. Instead, SC law enforcement has nearly a decade (or longer -- no mention of what happens if the suspect is found not guilty) to play connect-the-dots with data on non-criminals.

Even worse, this is a state that at least has some sort of policy in place to deal with this data. Most states have very little in the way of guidelines or privacy protection. Usually, these are developed post-public uproar. And if no one has to inform the public about the gathering of their data, this delays the (almost inevitable) exposure of these practices and increases the chances of abuse.



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Over the past few months, I've certainly wondered quite a bit about just how bad the NSA seems to be at recognizing how the public feels concerning what it's doing. This week's revelations about tracking mobile phone locations was incredible because folks at the NSA must have known that information about this program was in Snowden's collection, and yet when they were asked about collecting location info a few months ago, they made statements that would clearly look bad, when put next to the truth:

“We don’t get any cell site or location information as to where any of these phones were located.” -- Keith Alexander

These phones. Under this program. But under this other program we collect pretty much everything. Beyond that, the various "code names" the NSA uses are somewhat revealing as well. Lots of people commented on the insanity of calling the giant database FASCIA. But, at the very least, you could argue that the NSA never expected those code names to be made public. And with the misleading statements, they were still holding out hope that maybe, just maybe, a meteor would magically flatten Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras before the info got out.

But... how about when the US intelligence community actually does something publicly. Like live tweeting the launch of a new spy satellite. Apparently, they slap the most unsubtle logo on it that you can imagine.

Here's a photo of NROL-39 being readied for launch. Check out the full gallery: http://t.co/dHrcSxXhG0 pic.twitter.com/sEHEqPYWRB

— Office of the DNI (@ODNIgov) December 5, 2013

You may not be able to see the logo used on the rocket, but here's a closeup. Yes, it's an octopus, with tentacles reaching all over the globe. And the tagline is "Nothing is Beyond Our Reach."

Sure. They're spies. This is what they do. But, somehow, you'd think that maybe, just maybe, someone with a tiny bit of sense back there at the office of the director of national intelligence would think that, "gee, a lot of people around the globe are pretty fucking angry at us for all the spying we're doing right now. maybe we shouldn't be spitting in their faces, mocking their concerns, and reminding them that we're blatantly evil people who really don't give two shits about their privacy."

Of course, that would take some actual recognition of what anyone thinks of them, and that doesn't seem to be part of the way that the US intelligence community operates.

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In an interview on Thursday, President Obama said that he's going to propose some "self-restraint on the NSA" and to "initiate some reforms that can give people more confidence." Of course, he's the boss of the NSA. He doesn't need to "propose" anything -- he can order them to stop. Furthermore, it appears that nearly everything else he talked about was supporting the actions of the NSA, so it's a bit difficult to take seriously this idea that there will be any significant decrease in NSA activity.

"The challenge is...we do have people who are trying to hurt us. And they communicate through these same systems," Obama said. "And if we're going to do a good job preventing a terrorist attack in this country, a weapon of mass destruction getting on the New York subway system, etc., we do want to keep eyes on some bad actors."

"I want to everybody to be clear: the people at the NSA, generally, are looking out for the safety of the American people. They are not interested in reading your emails. They're not interested in reading your text messages. And that's not something that's done. And we've got a big system of checks and balances, including the courts and Congress, who have the capacity to prevent that from happening," the president added.

That's misleading to inaccurate, depending on your perspective. The checks and balances are not all they're cracked up to be, with everyone pretty much reliant on the NSA telling the truth, combined with the fact that many of those responsible for "oversight" are so close with the NSA that they're more co-conspirators than actual overseers.

Separately, can we drop this whole "they're not interested in reading your emails" bullshit? All people are saying there is "look you're a peon so shut up and deal with the fact that you have no privacy." That's ridiculous. Clearly the NSA is reading lots of people's emails (and getting data about them and what they do). While they might not make use of it today to spy on you in particular, that doesn't mean that it won't change in the future when suddenly you become "a person of interest" for whatever reason. It's easy for some people to think that the government won't ever care what they're doing -- but that can always change in a hurry and by the time it does, it's too late to start "worrying" about your privacy.

On top of that, recent revelations have made it clear that the NSA has no qualms at all about using information it gathers on non-terrorists that it doesn't like to try to destroy their lives. Sure, the NSA might not want to read your email today. But, piss off the wrong person tomorrow...

Separately, if they don't want to spy on me, let's make a simple deal then: stop doing it. It's hard to square this claim from NSA defenders that it's okay to spy on all of us because they don't want to spy on all of us. The right response is to stop spying on all of us. You want to go after the so-called "bad people," okay, then target those people but not everyone in hopes you might find some bad people mixed in there.

Oh, and once again, it's incredibly insulting how completely unconcerned the President and other NSA defenders seem to be about the rest of the world. Once again the message is basically: if you're not American, fuck you.

"The N.S.A. actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance, not reading people's emails, not listening to the contents of their phone calls. Outside of our borders, the NSA's more aggressive. It's not constrained by laws," Obama said.

But it can be constrained by their boss, who happens to be the President. Will he actually do anything?

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Information recently published by the LA Times indicates it may be tougher landing a job in retail than to be employed by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. Obviously, the LASD has to hire from the human race, but considering the responsibilities inherent in these positions, you'd think the department would be a bit more selective.

What's been uncovered by Robert Fautrechi and Ben Poston ranges from collections of minor offenses to some truly troubling (and criminal) behavior.

The Times reviewed the officers' internal hiring files, which also contained recorded interviews of the applicants by sheriff's investigators.

Ultimately, about 280 county officers were given jobs, including applicants who had accidentally fired their weapons, had sex at work and solicited prostitutes, the records show.

For nearly 100 hires, investigators discovered evidence of dishonesty, such as making untrue statements or falsifying police records. At least 15 were caught cheating on the department's own polygraph exams.

Twenty-nine of those given jobs had previously had been fired or pressured to resign from other law enforcement agencies over concerns about misconduct or workplace performance problems. Nearly 200 had been rejected from other agencies because of past misdeeds, failed entrance exams or other issues.

Did I say a "bit" more selective? Make that "tons" more selective. Apparently the LASD is a firm believer in that famous bit of mutual fund boilerplate: "past performance is not an indicator of future success." The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department isn't looking for the best men and women for the job. It's just looking for warm bodies.

Here's something that apparently won't prevent you from landing an LASD job.

David McDonald was hired despite admitting to sheriff's investigators he had a relationship with a 14-year-old girl whom he kissed and groped. He was 28 at the time.

It's OK, though. McDonald has an explanation.

"I was in love," he said in an interview with The Times. "I wasn't being a bad guy."

Seems legit. Time to clear a few thousand people off the sex offender registry. "Love" is all you need.

Need more?

Linda D. Bonner, jailer - Fired a weapon at her husband who was (according to her) fortunately running in a zigzag pattern, or "things would be much different." Her response to publication was that the sheriff's office was "wrong" about her background.

David E. Esparza, jailer - Stole $2,200 worth of military equipment. This theft wasn't initially disclosed during interviews. Esparza offered no response other than to state the information was "confidential."

Edward Marquez, jailer - While working for an unnamed sheriff's department, Marquez pulled over a car in which his girlfriend was a passenger and attempted to issue a ticket to the male driver. His girlfriend filed a complaint with the department.

William Salazar, deputy sheriff - Displayed his gun during a confrontation with a park patron who approached him about walking his dog without a leash. Fired his shotgun in the air in a police department parking lot. Suspended for a day for suspicion of falsifying timecards.

Ferdinand Salgado, jailer - While serving as a county police officer, was suspended for soliciting an undercover cop.

The Sheriff's office claims it was pressured to hire several officers in the wake of the Dept. of Public Safety disbanding and dropping its duties on the LASD. Apparently, it's OK to do a lousy job if you're under pressure. The person who first vetted the applicants' files, former Undersheriff Larry Waldie, first stated there needed to be "grave reasons" to not hire potential employees. When pressed further, Waldie simply shut the conversation down.

Waldie said: "That information was not brought to me ... I don't recall any of these specifics so don't ask me anymore."

The county spokesman has, of course, denied placing pressure on the sheriff's department to hire more officers. Both narratives are non-starters considering how quickly the buck is being passed. But Waldie is likely correct about one thing: there was pressure.

Internal Sheriff's Department records reviewed by The Times show the union representing the former county officers was also lobbying Waldie to hire specific members, including some who had committed serious misconduct during their careers…

One taped recording of a background interview suggests the department made special accommodations for the county officers.

Once you're on the "inside," you're golden, especially if there's a powerful union backing you up.

In the recording, a sheriff's investigator tells an applicant who was caught cheating on his polygraph exam that normally that would have meant "goodbye, you're done, there's no second chances." The investigator then told the applicant that he and other suspected cheaters might not be disqualified "as a favor because, you know, it's law enforcement." The applicant was eventually hired.

The Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS) has fought hard to keep this information from surfacing, as Reason reports.

The Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs (ALADS), the union that represents LASD deputies, tried in September 2013 to stop the records from being unveiled, going after the Times and the reporter who had acquired the records, Robert Faturechi, saying he unlawfully possessed background investigation files containing personal information of deputies.

"What part of 'stolen property' is such a mystery to the L.A. Times?" ALADS President Floyd Hayhurst said in a statement on the ALADS website. "If any harm comes to deputy sheriffs or their families because of the stolen files, we will hold the Los Angeles Times responsible for their complete lack of journalistic integrity," Hayhurst said.

The union tried to secure a court order temporarily blocking the publication but the judge shot it down, claiming the union failed to present evidence supporting its claims that publication would cause "irreparable harm or immediate danger."

“The court declines to issue [an order] imposing a prior restraint on defendants’ free speech based on the speculative hearsay testimony of anonymous witnesses,” she wrote.

The Sheriff's Department itself opened up an investigation into the "leak" of hiring documents and ALADS followed up its temporary injunction attempt one month later with a lawsuit seeking a permanent injunction. This too was rejected by the judge, again citing the union's lack of evidence and the First Amendment's protections against prior restraint. A week after being shot down, ALADS issued its statement questioning the "journalistic integrity" of the LA Times for daring to expose the sheriff's department's shoddy hiring practices.

Rather than investigate the leaks and file lawsuits attempting to block this info, both entities would be better served throwing some time and energy into overhauling its hiring practices and working towards ensuring only the best applicants get the job -- not just those with "insider" connections.




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Stop me if you've heard this one:

An emotionally disturbed but unarmed man walks into heavy traffic near Times Square. Police officers arrive on the scene and try to apprehend him. The unarmed man reaches into his pocket, prompting police to open fire in a crowded area. Man is unwounded but two bystanders are shot.

I don't really remember the middle part of this joke but the punchline is this:

An unarmed, emotionally disturbed man shot at by the police as he was lurching around traffic near Times Square in September has been charged with assault, on the theory that he was responsible for bullet wounds suffered by two bystanders, according to an indictment unsealed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday.

While you're letting that sink in, here are some more details.

Initially Mr. Broadnax was arrested on misdemeanor charges of menacing, drug possession and resisting arrest. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office persuaded a grand jury to charge Mr. Broadnax with assault, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. Specifically, the nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday said Mr. Broadnax “recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.”

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

Here are some more details from the original coverage of the incident.

The police arrived and the crowd grew. The hulking man continued on, ignoring the officers’ commands while eluding capture. Then the man reached into his pants pocket, withdrawing his hand as if it were a gun, the police said, and pretended to shoot at some of the officers.

As Scott Greenfield points out, this descriptive wording is a prime example of Creative Writing 101 (Law Enforcement Edition).

Note the language of the article. “Hulking” man. “Withdrawing his hand as if it were a gun.” These aren’t the words of a news account, but the language of justification and excuses.

Broadnax didn't even have a gun, as officers plainly saw before opening fire. He had a Metrocard in his hand, and no matter how hulkingly he pointed it at officers, it still didn't turn into a weapon capable of wounding other people. His weaving around in traffic was potentially dangerous, but more to himself than others.

Returning once again to the "language of justification and excuses" deployed by the DA's office: someone wandering around in traffic in New York City is hardly creating a "grave risk of death." NYC has plenty of pedestrian traffic, not all of which crosses only at the corners. The man certainly created a "disturbance" but the shots fired by the responding officers created the only injuries. And yet, it will be the man shot at (and missed) who will pay for the mistakes of the officers.

The narrative being pushed (back at the time of the incident and again by the DA's office) is that the officers had no choice but to risk firing shots in a crowded area because the man wouldn't cooperate (and menaced officers with a Metrocard). But recordings of the incident suggest the cops actually had many more options are their disposal.

There are no doubt times when shots must be fired, and there are no doubt times when a bullet will strike a bystander despite the best, and most competent, efforts of police. But the video of this, taken by a bystander who was not shot, shows a great many cops in the area before the two cops shot at Broadnax, and makes it difficult to understand why the newspapers don’t question why all those cops couldn’t manage to take down one big crazy guy without shooting up the bystanders.

The video Scott Greenfield posted back in September no longer exists. But this video shows a swarm of NYPD officers attempting to apprehend Broadnax before the shots are fired.

Broadnax was finally subdued by a single officer with a Taser but not before two pedestrians had been shot in an effort to ensure their safety. Holding the arrestee responsible for the bad decisions (and worse aim) of two cops basically sends the message to officers that irresponsible gun usage is perfectly fine, as long as the intentions are pure. If in the future officers hit other bystanders by firing in crowded areas (as they have in the past), the blame will be passed along to the intended target for "forcing" the police to make unwise decisions.

[Postscript: Ken White at Popehat has more thoughts on the NYPD's resemblance to Ike "Don't Make Me Hit You" Turner.]

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There's no shortage of critics of massive trade agreements like TPP and TAFTA/TTIP, but today saw strong condemnation from a very unexpected quarter: the Holy See, often, if erroneously, equated with the Vatican. Whatever the jurisdictional differences, the statement delivered by His Excellency Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, Apostolic Nuncio, Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva at the 9th Session of the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization presumably comes with the full approval of Pope Francis himself. We can assume that because of the extremely controversial statements it contains, which would have required approval at the highest level. Things like this:

While a minority is experiencing exponential growth in wealth, the gap is widening to separate the vast majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and of financial speculation. Consequently, there is an outright rejection of the right of States, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. An even worse development is that such policies are sometimes locked in through trade rules negotiated at the WTO or in bilateral or regional FTAs.

The statement then goes on to criticize the move away from multilateral trade agreements of the kind traditionally drawn up at the WTO, to new-style "mega-regional trade agreements", routinely negotiated in secret:

Currently there is a clear tendency to further enlarge these RTAs [Regional Trade Agreements] to form mega-regional trade agreements such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Certainly, the enlargement of regional trade agreements is a step towards further trade liberalization but we have to bear in mind that these agreements inevitably threaten the desirability to reach an agreement on a truly multilateral basis. In fact, by entering a regional trade agreement a country reduces the incentives to extend its efforts on trade liberalization at a multilateral level.

Here's why the Holy See believes RTAs and mega-RTAs are problematic:

we know that only the multilateral system is a clear, equitable system that provides effective guarantees for small and poor countries that tend to be penalized in a Regional Trade Agreement where it is asymmetric. Among the most damaging concessions developing countries make in regional and bilateral agreements are those enhancing the monopolies on life-saving medicines, which reduce access and affordability and those that provide excessive legal rights to foreign investors, limiting the policy space for nations to promote sustainable and inclusive development.

"Enhancing the monopolies on life-saving medicines" is a clear swipe at TPP, which aims to do precisely that, with what are likely to be terrible and even fatal consequences for the poor in the Pacific region. And the phrase "excessive legal rights to foreign investors, limiting the policy space for nations to promote sustainable and inclusive development" is obviously a reference to the imposition of corporate sovereignty clauses in both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP.

It's unlikely that the Holy See's intervention at the WTO meeting in Bali will have any direct effects on either the TPP or TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, but it does signal two important facts. First, that Pope Francis is emerging as a passionate defender of the world's poor, and one who is not afraid to speak truth to even the most powerful nations; and secondly, that resistance to the most unjust and unjustifiable aspects of TPP and TAFTA/TTIP continues to grow.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Yesterday, we wrote about the bizarre happenings in the lawsuit filed by Rahinah Ibrahim for placing her on the no fly list without any kind of explanation or due process (and no way to get off). The focus of that post was on the government apparently placing Ibrahim's daughter -- a key witness expected to testify in the case -- on the no fly list as well to block her from coming, and then insisting it did no such thing, only to have Malaysia Airlines provide the notice from the US government telling them not to let the daughter board her flight. However, we also mentioned that the DOJ lawyers were trying to insist that all sorts of publicly available information was actually "sensitive security information" (SSI) and Judge William Alsup blew up at them, calling such a claim "ridiculous."

It appears that the DOJ lawyers didn't get the message from Alsup on Monday. On Wednesday, it continued its campaign of insisting that publicly available information was secret. While much of the testimony on Wednesday did cover secret matters, leading to the courtroom having to be cleared, Ibrahim's lawyers were able to have Jeffrey Kahn testify about how the no fly list basically violated every concept of basic due process. Kahn is the author of Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists and is clearly an expert on the subject. However, the government apparently kept objecting to his testimony, making him explain what public source provided the information he was describing.

As recounted by Edward Hasbrouck at the Identity Project:

At one point, in response to such an objection, Prof. Kahn identified the source for one of his statements as being FBI watchlist guidelines released by the FBI itself to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), and posted on the EPIC website. Those documents showed that the mere opening of an investigation was itself deemed to be sufficient grounds for placing a person on a watchlist, without the need to evaluate whether there had been any factual predicate for the opening of the investigation. This contradicted the government’s claims about the existence of threshhold evidentiary criteria for watchlist decisions.

The government’s lawyers tried to argue that despite having been released by the FBI itself in response to a FOIA request, and having been publicly available for years on the EPIC website, these documents couldn’t be discussed publicly.

Judge Alsup overruled their objection. “This is America. You can’t take something that is in the public domain and make it a secret. If you wanted to shut down that website, you should have done so.”

Well, that's never really stopped the government from trying. Still, you'd think that the DOJ lawyers would have gotten the message by now.

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We all know that Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been hinting strongly about the NSA tracking people's location via mobile phone location data. Since the Snowden documents started getting reported on, Wyden especially had ramped up his hints that mobile phone location data still undisclosed would be the real shocker. Back in October, it was revealed that the NSA had done a "pilot program" in the US to track people's locations via their mobile phones, but stopped the program and never used the data. In response to that, Senator Wyden hinted that there was much more to come:

“After years of stonewalling on whether the government has ever tracked or planned to track the location of law-abiding Americans through their cellphones, once again, the intelligence leadership has decided to leave most of the real story secret — even when the truth would not compromise national security,” Mr. Wyden said.

It would appear that "the real story secret" has started to come out via some new Snowden documents reported on in the Washington Post by Bart Gellman and Ashkan Soltani. Basically, while the NSA may not be spying on the location of Americans in the US via their mobile phones, they appear to be collecting location data of pretty much anyone all over the rest of the world to the tune of 5 billion records a day -- so much info that the NSA was having trouble storing it all (now you know what some of the Bluffdale datacenter in Utah is for).

The NSA cannot know in advance which tiny fraction of 1 percent of the records it may need, so it collects and keeps as many as it can — 27 terabytes, by one account, or more than double the text content of the Library of Congress’s print collection.

The location programs have brought in such volumes of information, according to a May 2012 internal NSA briefing, that they are “outpacing our ability to ingest, process and store” data. In the ensuing year and a half, the NSA has been transitioning to a processing system that provided it with greater capacity.

The NSA defends the program by saying that it uses the location data to find "unknown associates of known intelligence targets." Basically, it's tracking where everyone goes, just in case people end up spending time with people the NSA deems as being terrorists. However, that also means that the NSA has an astounding amount of really personal data on where pretty much everyone goes outside of the US, including who they meet with. The ability to abuse that data should be rather obvious. From that data, you can not only determine private business meetings, but you can figure out what doctors people go to, if they're cheating on their spouse, etc. And, given last week's revelations that the NSA has no qualms (at all) about using data on non-terrorists to embarrass them for the sake of embarrassing them, it's not difficult to see how the NSA might do the same over information gleaned from this vast trough of location information.

And, yes, despite the claims by the NSA, it appears to end up getting a ton of information on Americans as well, even if it's not actively collecting data within the US (ah, more "incidental" collections):

Some documents in the Snowden archive suggest that acquisition of U.S. location data is routine enough to be cited as an example in training materials. In an October 2012 white paper on analytic techniques, for example, the NSA’s counterterrorism analysis unit cites two U.S.-based carriers to illustrate the challenge of correlating the travels of phone users on different mobile networks. Asked about that, a U.S. intelligence official said the example was poorly chosen and did not represent the program’s foreign focus.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote NSA officials repeatedly saying that the program is "tuned to be looking outside the United States," but not saying it only collects info outside the US. Also, they make clear, once a person leaves the US, the NSA no longer believes the 4th Amendment applies to them, so their location is fair game in this giant database.. Asked for specific numbers, an NSA person said:

“It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers..."

And, at that point, they were cut off by an NSA spokesperson who didn't want the person to go any further. In other words, it's "awkward" for the NSA to admit that it's spying on pretty much everyone. Everyone.

Oh, and as for the methods used by some to avoid this kind of thing: getting prepaid lines, disposing of phones regularly, etc. Apparently the NSA is tracking that and it leads to greater suspicion:

Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time.

The NSA defends this program, arguing (as it always does) that there's nothing wrong with doing what it's doing. Billions of people living around the globe might disagree.

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Back in May 2012, Judge William Alsup (yes, he's popular today) issued a very good and very thorough ruling explaining why APIs could not be covered by copyright. Alsup, who claimed he learned to program in Java to better understand the technical details of the case, went into a fair bit of detail in his ruling, which looked like it was clearly designed to explain basic programming concepts to an appeals court who would surely be hearing the case -- and almost certainly with judges who had less (if any) programming knowledge. The appeal was officially heard by the Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) today and there are some reports suggesting that the judges are skeptical of Alsup's ruling and may be leaning towards overturning it. Reading through some of the details it appears that at least one judge is clearly on Oracle's side in believing that APIs can be covered by copyright, while it's not as clear where the other two judges on the panel sit.

Given CAFC's history as exceptionally supportive of locking up knowledge and information on the patent side, it wouldn't be terribly surprising if they did so as well on the copyright side (side note: while, normally, copyright cases should travel up the local appeals court route, since this case started as a patent case, even though it ended up as a copyright case, apparently the appeal still goes to CAFC, the court that hears all patent appeals). This is yet another issue with having a court like CAFC, which has long appeared to be captured by those who support a maximalist view of intellectual property.

Still, oral hearings in appeals are not always indicative of how judges are leaning. Reading the tea leaves there is often quite dangerous. The hearing sometimes focus on tangents, or involve judges really trying to test out a particular theory, and final rulings may be more strongly based on the written filings (and, sometimes, briefs from amici -- of which there were quite a few in this case). This case still has a long way to go, but hopefully the appeals court recognizes the careful level of detail that judge Alsup went into in determining that APIs do not deserve copyright protection.

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We just had an article mentioning that Germany has a ridiculous (and dangerously anti-innovation) view towards secondary liability, in which the country's courts often default to making third parties liable for actions they did not do. We noted that a court in Stuttgart had decided that the Wikimedia Foundation could be held liable for content submitted by a community member on the site, though only after the organization was alerted to the content (which still has significant problems for what are hopefully obvious reasons).

And now it appears that a court in Hamburg has gone even further, saying that the CEO of Appwork, a company that offers the open source JDownloader software can be held personally liable for "illegal" code that was submitted by an anonymous programmer, and which automatically showed up in the nightly build of the JDownloader 2 beta (not the officially released product). The code in question allowed JDownloader to record certain copy-protect streams, violating an anti-circumvention law. Appwork made it clear that it had no idea the functionality had been added, that anyone can contribute to the source and that it goes out automatically in the nightly build of the beta. Furthermore, the company carefully reviews the code and features of any official releases, and would have blocked such functionality from appearing in that code. All of this would lead most people to realize that it's crazy to blame Appwork (and even crazier to blame the CEO).

But not the court, apparently. The court relied on the bizarre argument that since Appwork offers the product commercially, that makes it automatically liable for anything that appears in the open source beta. Basically, such a ruling will make it exceptionally difficult to have a commercial open source product in Germany, since you could face liability if someone contributes code that somehow is considered illegal. If these kinds of secondary liability rulings keep cropping up in Germany, the hot startup scene in Berlin may realize that the country's outdated laws make it quite difficult to do anything all that innovative, especially if it involves any contributions from outside the company. Given how important community contributions are these days, that cuts off a huge amount of internet innovation from the German market.

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The Dallas Police Department can't seem to get its officers' statements on shootings to agree with recordings of the incidents. So, it's doing what any forward thinking law enforcement agency would do -- changing the rules.

Any Dallas officer involved in a police shooting — whether the officer fired a weapon or witnessed the gunfire — will now have the right to remain silent for 72 hours under a new department policy.

And even before they give a statement about the shooting, the officers can watch any available video before they give a statement.

Very convenient. This policy change, which was ushered in under the cover of the Thanksgiving holiday, will help ensure that DPD officers don't find their statements directly contradicted by the inconveniently unblinking eye of the camera, as happened just recently.

On October 14th, Dallas police officer Cardan Spencer shot a mentally ill man four times in the stomach. According to Spencer's partner, Christopher Watson (who wrote the report), the man (Bobby Gerald Bennett) moved "in a threatening manner" towards him and the other officer. Watson's statement even went so far as to say Bennett "lunged" at them. A statement released by the DPD a few hours after the shooting claimed the situation "escalated."

A surveillance camera caught the entire confrontation on tape. Less than 20 seconds pass before Spencer opens fire. See if you can catch a glimpse of the "lunge" or the "escalation."

Bennett never lunges. He doesn't do anything more threatening than stand up from the chair he was sitting in. Four bullets later, Bennett is on the ground. Somehow, being shot four times by a DPD officer is "aggravated assault," a charge the DPD pressed (it was later dropped) while Bennett was still in critical condition.

As a result of this, Spencer was fired and Watson suspended for making false statements. But this was only after Bennett's mother took the video to the media. Before she did this, DPD Chief David Brown watched the video and claimed his own officer's statement trumped his lying eyes.

"The unfortunate thing here is that Officer Watson's statement really overrode what the video showed," Brown said. "We had not at that point determined if the video captured the entire incident, or if the video had not been altered in any way. We put a lot of credibility on officer's statements until we have other evidence to prove otherwise."

Not so much anymore. Former DPD officer Cardan Spencer may be facing assault charges for shooting Bennett. Perhaps the saddest aspect of this whole debacle is the fact that Bennett's mother called the police because she was afraid her son (who has mental issues and was off his medication) might hurt himself.

As this has caused the DPD considerable embarrassment (not the least of which is the chief claiming a recording of the shooting is less trustworthy than statements given by an officer later suspended for making false statements), the only solution was (apparently) to buy time for officers to fix their narratives should inconvenient recordings surface.

Supposedly, this 72-hour waiting period is better for memory. Chief Brown refers to research by Alexis Artwohl which indicates recall of traumatic events increases over time. Immediate statements may be less accurate. That may be, but this report has been available since 2002 and there hasn't been a large shift in policies regarding police shootings across the nation. This looks like nothing more than someone finding the justification they need to install an insular policy that will allow bad cops to be even worse. This gives shelter to liars by allowing them to craft a plausible narrative that can't be undone by a single surveillance video.

This also doesn't explain why police insist on questioning suspects and eyewitnesses immediately after a criminal incident. But Artwohl has an explanation.

Artwohl, the memory expert, said officers treat civilian witnesses differently because officers won’t always be able to find the person again. That usually isn’t true of officers, she said.

Unsurprisingly, attorneys for the Dallas Police Association "applauded" Chief Brown's application of an additional layer of paint to the thin blue line. Anything that makes it easier to defend cops who are threatened by people standing motionless is a win for the PD's lawyers.

Defense attorney Mark Bennett flips the scenario to show just how outrageous this policy would be if it was applied to anyone else.

As a result of this incident, the Dallas Police Department changed its policy regarding gang-related shootings. Instead of pressing gang members for statements immediately after shootings, police officers will advise them that they have seventy-two hours to get together and make up a story, and will provide them, during that time, with any video the police can find, so that they can conform their stories to the video.

It makes no sense, does it, that police policy should not just permit but encourage members of a criminal street gang who witness a gang-related shooting to take three days to talk to each other and their lawyers and review the facts that are beyond dispute before making a statement?

It makes sense only if the police want the perpetrators of such shootings to walk free. The idea would be farcical if the criminal street gang were anything other than the police.

It's a farce, alright. The DPD has just ensured no one will trust the narratives constructed by its officers. And every citizen who's been paying attention will know to hang onto their recordings for at least 72 hours, rather than see it twisted into "evidence" that keeps bad cops employed.

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The trial for two of the three Fullerton police officers charged in the beating death of mentally ill homeless man, Kelly Thomas, has begun. Manuel Ramos, the officer who first approached Kelly Thomas and delivered most of the damage, is facing charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. Officer Jay Ciccinelli, who arrived on the scene moments later, is facing charges of involuntary manslaughter and use of excessive force.

Ramos' lawyer, John Barnett, sought to have charges against his client dropped last year, claiming the 10-minute-long ordeal that Thomas suffered through before lapsing into a coma (first, attempting to tell officers he couldn't breathe and, towards the end, crying out for his father) was a direct result of Thomas' reluctance to be further hassled by the officer.

When a "recalcitrant" Thomas did not comply, Ramos was entitled to use force and the threat of force to complete his arrest, Barnett contended in his 80-page motion.

"Rather than use actual force, Officer Ramos employed a lawful, conditional threat, to use force," he wrote. "The death of Kelly Thomas was not the natural and probable consequence of that lawful threat."

The recording shows Ramos relied almost exclusively on "force" rather than the "threat of force." As mentioned earlier, Ramos approached a seated Thomas before the beating commenced and said, "You see these fists? They are getting ready to fuck you up." That, I suppose, would be considered a "threat of force." Ramos wasn't kidding. His fists, along with his nightstick and additional abuse from a handful of other officers, completely "fucked up" Kelly Thomas, leaving him in an irreversible coma. Jay Cicinelli contributed in his own way, beating Thomas' face with the butt end of his Taser. (Cicinelli is captured on Ramos' mic stating that he "smashed [Thomas'] face to hell.")

[You can go to this link to see a picture taken by Thomas' father after his son's arrival at the hospital -- but we warn you that it's gruesome.]

There's really no questioning what happened. Security camera footage, synched to Ramos' mic, paints a brutally clear picture of how much Thomas went through before his body and mind gave out. Even the coroner's report notes the death wasn't accidental, listing "mechanical suppression of the thorax" as the cause of death. [The recording is 33 minutes long. The "altercation" begins about 15 minutes in. Five minutes later, there are six officers restraining Thomas. Warning: video, especially Thomas' anguished screams, is Not Safe For Life.]


John Barnett is still defending Officer Ramos. He's decided to top his earlier claims that the officer's actions were lawful and appropriate.

Ramos’ attorney… told jurors that the officers who beat Thomas on a summer night in 2011 not only didn’t use excessive force in the incident, they “weren’t using enough force.”

The officers were forced to call for backup because they could not subdue an out-of-control Thomas, John Barnett said. “They’re losing the fight,” Barnett said.

Watch that tape again (or for the first time) and see whether it appears the cops are "losing the battle." Thomas, who weighed 135 pounds, was subdued by six Fullerton officers. The recording clearly captures him telling officers he can't breathe. Thomas was homeless and suffered from schizophrenia. While he wasn't cooperative with Ramos' instructions before he was beaten, he was still pretty far from being a threat. Last year, Barnett claimed the force was "appropriate." Now, he claims it was "too little." Officer Ramos apparently has no idea how to deploy an appropriate amount of force, despite his training.

Barnett continues:

“This case is not about a homeless, helpless, harmless mentally ill guy, this case is about a man who made choices in his life, bad choices that led to his tragic death,” Barnett said.

No one's arrest should end in death -- no matter what "choices" they've made -- not when six officers are looking to control one person. And for Barnett to claim that somehow choices the mentally ill Thomas made earlier in his life contributed to his death is not only disingenuous, it's genuinely sickening. If that's the case, then bad choices made by Officers Ramos and Cicinelli in their lives led to them being charged with manslaughter and murder.

This isn't about Kelly Thomas' life choices. This is about the choices made by a handful of officers -- choices that resulted in the death of a man whose life, what there was of it, came to a sudden halt because he ran into Officer Ramos and his backup.



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You may have seen the story over the weekend that the US government had settled a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against it by Apptricity for $50 million. Basically, the Army licensed Apptricity's server and device software for $4.5 million in 2004, but with a limited number of licenses -- which worked out to $1.35 million per server and $5,000 per device. The Army completely blew through the limit and installed it on another 100 servers and 9,000 devices (the government then tried to hide this from Apptricity). Apptricity noted that, at the existing deal's terms, the Army would have owed it an additional $225 million. The government, of course, settled for $50 million, leading some to note that it appears that by infringing, the government effectively got a 73% discount. Not bad -- though that does assume that the government would have licensed the same number (and that there wouldn't have been some sort of bulk discount).

That said, what strikes me about this is that at the very same time that the Army was ignoring all of this and clearly infringing on the terms of its license, the US government has been pushing a zero tolerance approach to copyright infringement both at home and around the globe. You have Homeland Security and the Justice Department both ramping up prosecutions of intellectual property violations. You have the US State Department going around the globe pushing for stricter and stricter enforcement. And, of course, you have the USTR trying to negotiate draconian criminal penalties into international agreements for copyright infringement.

Hell, if we count each excess installation as a separation copyright violation (and, for what it's worth, there's a reasonable argument that under copyright law multiple installations of the same file only counts as a single violation, rather than multiple -- but the DOJ itself has argued that each copy should count as an individual infringement), and then multiply by the $150,000 that's the top of the line for statutory damages for willful infringement (which this appears to be), the government would have had to pay somewhere around $1.4 billion. And, again, the DOJ itself has regularly argued in court that $150,000 per infringement is perfectly reasonable.

And yet, here, when the US government itself has to pay up, suddenly it gets to do so at a great discount? And this won't change a damn thing in how the rest of the government goes around the globe pushing for extreme punishment for infringement, insisting super high statutory rates are needed to "teach a lesson." Apparently, though, it's a lesson that doesn't apply to the US government itself.

This is part of what's so ridiculous with statutory damages. Copyright holders and maximalist defenders insist they're reasonable... until they realize that they're also infringers. And then suddenly they think it's reasonable for a much, much, much lower number. What a bunch of hypocrites.

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Another incident that highlights the troubling aspects of placing cops in schools has surfaced. The sheriff's office's (which supplies the deputies to the school) story has changed several times in the space of few days, but the end result is inarguable: a 17-year-old student is in a medically-induced coma as the result of its officer's actions.

At one Texas high school, the use of a Taser by Randy McMillan, a sheriff’s deputy/school resource officer, on 17-year-old Noe Niño de Rivera has resulted in the student being put in a medically induced coma. The family has filed a lawsuit against McMillan, the school district, and the county, and alleges Rivera was tased after trying to break up a fight.

According to the court documents, the teen was walking backwards from school officers who were trying to break up a fight when he was tased, falling backwards and suffering a brain hemorrhage. The sheriff's office maintains that the student acted aggressively and refused to back off when ordered to by officer Randy McMillan.

The narrative is cloudy, even when restricted to just the sheriff's office's statements. The original report of the incident on Nov. 20th said this:

A Bastrop County sheriff deputy assigned to Cedar Creek High School as a resource officer used a Taser on a 17-year-old student during a fight on Wednesday, according to officials.

The student and two other boys were involved in a fight in the hallway when the deputy used the stun gun on him, according to the Bastrop school district and Sissy Jones, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office.

The next day, the office's statement added this:

A 17-year-old Cedar Creek High School student was acting aggressively before a Bastrop County sheriff’s deputy Tased the teen Wednesday, officials said Thursday.

Thus making the deployment of the Taser more justifiable. But it also added this:

Sissy Jones, a spokeswoman for the Bastrop County sheriff’s office, said that two deputies who work at the Bastrop school district as resource officers were trying to stop a fight Wednesday between two female students in the high school’s hallway when the 17-year-old male student approached.

The original report stated the tased student was involved in a fight with two other boys and the deputy. This new statement shows the student wasn't even involved in the fight and had only "approached" the scene.

The student tried to interfere with the deputies and didn’t listen to their commands, Jones said. “He looked as though he was ready to fight.”

"Looked." This still doesn't explain the office's statement that the student was "aggressive" or the implication that he posed a threat to the officers.

The family's lawyer claims to have cell phone footage of the incident that contradicts the statements made by the officers.

"They're completely lying, they're completely lying because they're very worried about this officer being indicted for a criminal charge, which he should be," said attorney Adam Loewy, who is representing the family…

"Noe was being a good Samaritan, a good citizen, he broke up the fight. Then there was some stoppage to everything, and he was standing there. You see these police officers go up to him and tase him," Loewy said.

Whatever this footage shows likely won't make an appearance until the case goes to trial, but it would seem the school itself should have footage of the incident. According to its parent's handbook, the school has cameras in use (p. 70).

For safety purposes, video and audio recording equipment is used to monitor student behavior, including on buses and in common areas on campus. Students will not be told when the equipment is being used.

A "high school hallway" would presumably be a "common area." If there is footage, no one has made any mention of it. Even stranger, no one has even offered to review the recordings or even deny such footage exists.

The lawsuit would obviously limit the school from talking about the incident (as would the student's age), but the school issued nearly no statements in the days preceding the filing, other than its original joint statement with the sheriff's office (above) and this boilerplate isued on the day of the incident.

“The safety and security of all students is the number one priority at Cedar Creek High School and Bastrop ISD,” the district said in a statement. “When law enforcement officers intervene and take action, they do so based on their training and protocol, as they deem warranted.”

The sheriff's office has gone on record as stating the student wasn't involved in the fight, but yet somehow, the uninvolved student is the one who was tased and hospitalized for nothing more than appearing "aggressive." Fights have occurred in schools as long as there have been schools, but only in recent years has it been assumed that only law enforcement officers are capable of handling combative students. When you use law enforcement officers to handle routine disciplinary problems, you greatly increase the odds of severe injuries. Officers have certain training and tools and applying them to situations that don't require severe responses puts LEOs in the awkward place of either doing nothing or approaching students as though they were dangerous, hardened criminals.

If this school had no "resource officers," it's nearly guaranteed that this situation would have ended with nothing more than routine disciplinary action, rather than with a 17-year-old in a coma and the filing of a federal lawsuit.

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Cardinal Richelieu's famous line is:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

It's easy to twist almost anything to be used against you if someone cares enough. And with a legal code that means people are committing, on average, three felonies a day (at least according to one estimate), it can be even worse.

That's worth keeping in mind any time someone writes off the NSA as not being an issue for them because they've "done nothing wrong." Driving home that point is an excellent short "Op-Doc" in the NY Times by filmmaker Brian Knappenberger, which has brief interviews with a bunch of great people (many of whom you'll hopefully recognize) explaining in very clear terms why you should absolutely care about the NSA. There are many reasons discussed, but a simple one, highlighted by David Sirota, goes back to that quote above. You can claim that you've done nothing wrong all you want. However, if someone really powerful decides they want to railroad you, you'd be surprised at how much it can be made to look like you've "done wrong." And when the NSA (or the FBI) can readily access all sorts of data about your life, their ability to build such a story increases tremendously. The video has people answering a few different questions, beyond just why the "I haven't done anything wrong" mindset is a mistake. It also discusses how corporations tracking individuals is quite different from the government doing so and a variety of other issues. The short film is actually from outtakes that Knappenberger put together from the documentary he's been working on about Aaron Swartz. It just so happened that he's obviously interviewing a ton of people who were familiar with both Aaron's work and the NSA stuff (the Venn diagram of people knowledgeable about both would include quite a lot of overlap), and so he asked some NSA questions, leading to this video. Check it out.

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The city of Miami has no "stop and frisk" program, but you'd be forgiven for assuming it does after hearing this amazing (in all the wrong ways) story.

Earl Sampson has been stopped and questioned by Miami Gardens police 258 times in four years.

He’s been searched more than 100 times. And arrested and jailed 56 times.

Despite his long rap sheet, Sampson, 28, has never been convicted of anything more serious than possession of marijuana.

Miami Gardens police have arrested Sampson 62 times for one offense: trespassing.

Almost every citation was issued at the same place: the 207 Quickstop, a convenience store on 207th Street in Miami Gardens.

FDLE records show that Sampson was stopped at least once a week for the past four years, and sometimes several times a week and even as many as three times in one day. The stops are often conducted by the same police officers, who have arrested him time and time again.

The problem here isn't just the endless harassment of one resident who doesn't seem to be a threat to anyone. The problem here is the fact that Sampson works for the 207 Quickstop. It's pretty hard to "trespass" on property when you have the explicit permission to be there. It would be shady enough if the cops were just picking up Sampson every time he visited the store, but they've been patting him down, questioning him and sometimes arresting him for trespassing during his shifts.

One video, recorded on June 26, 2012, shows Sampson, clearly stocking coolers, being interrupted by MGPD Sgt. William Dunaske, who orders him to put his hands behind his back, and then handcuffs him, leads him out of the store and takes him to jail for trespassing.

Another video posted at the Miami Herald website shows Sampson being arrested for trespassing when he returns to the store after taking out the trash. (That arrest report says Sampson was "loitering" outside the store, but the video clearly shows he left, threw trash in the container, and went back in followed by the police officer who arrested him.)

Sampson's not the only one being harassed by the MGPD, although he is the main concern of the owner of the 207 Quickstop, Alex Saleh. Saleh fought back, though, installing 15 cameras to catch the endless harassment of Sampson and customers of his store.

The videos show, among other things, cops stopping citizens, questioning them, aggressively searching them and arresting them for trespassing when they have permission to be on the premises; officers conducting searches of Saleh’s business without search warrants or permission; using what appears to be excessive force on subjects who are clearly not resisting arrest and filing inaccurate police reports in connection with the arrests.

Saleh pins this invasion by Miami Gardens PD on his unfortunate decision to mark his store as part of the PD's "zero tolerance zone."

Almost immediately after Saleh put the “zero-tolerance” sign in his window, he regretted it.

Miami Gardens police officers, he said, began stopping his patrons regularly, citing them for minor infractions such as trespassing, or having an open container of alcohol. The officers, he said, would then pat them down or stick their hands in citizens’ pockets. But what bothered Saleh the most was the emboldened behavior of the officers who came into his store unannounced, searched his store without his permission and then hauled his employees away in the middle of their shifts.

The "zero tolerance zone" turns over a whole lot of power to the Miami Gardens PD. Here's part of the description from the MGPD's website (which hasn't been updated in more than 5 years...).

This simple program asks local business owners to complete a simple affidavit, and post a sign on their properties, which allows MGPD officers to act on behalf of the business owners in their absence. The program also gives MGPD officers the authority to direct unauthorized personnel to leave private property or risk enforcement action from the officers…

This program is designed to reduce the number of individuals who are sometimes seen trespassing and loitering on private property without legitimate business.

This would explain all the "trespassing" charges. The affidavit gives the MGPD permission to patrol the store and surrounding area and make arrests/question citizens as officers see fit. This lowers the bar for police officers, removing anything resembling probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

But even as limitless as this is, the MGPD went even further when "patrolling" the 207 Quickstop. You'll note that the agreement gives the PD permission to act on behalf of business owners "in their absence." Saleh was present for a great many of these "interactions." Not only that, but the officers' idea of acting on Saleh's "behalf" was to harass and arrest many of his customers, which is a strange way of construing this relationship. Stores need customers to purchase their goods, something that occurs less frequently when the patrons are being detained, questioned or arrested.

Saleh regretted this decision after seeing what "zero tolerance" (as applied by the MGPD) actually entailed. But Miami Gardens PD doesn't take "no" for answer.

He finally told them he no longer wanted to participate in the program and removed the sign.

The officers, however, continued their surveillance of his store over his objections. The officers even put the sign back on his store against his wishes, he said.

Things got worse when Saleh took copies of his video to MGPD Internal Affairs.

One evening, shortly after he had complained a second time, a squadron of six uniformed Miami Gardens police officers marched into the store, he says. They lined up, shoulder to shoulder, their arms crossed in front of them, blocking two grocery aisles.

“Can I help you?” Saleh recalls asking. It was an entire police detail, known as the department’s Rapid Action Deployment (RAD) squad, whom he had come to know from their frequent arrest sweeps. One went to use the restroom, and five of them stood silently for a full 10 minutes. Then they all marched out.

Saleh also details a recent incident where an MGPD officer pulled him over for having a tag light out. By the time it was all done, six officers had arrived on the scene and one searched Saleh's vehicle without his permission. Saleh's recordings show him leaving the store that night in his vehicle. His tag lights were working.

As is usually the case in incidents like these, the police department has not offered a comment on this story. Police Chief Matthew Boyd did apparently issue a boilerplate statement about the PD's "commitment" to "serving and protecting citizens and businesses," but didn't address any specific complaints.

Violent crime, particularly murder, has spiked in Miami Gardens in recent months, but this application of "zero tolerance" policies will do very little to bring those numbers down. What it will do, however, is fill activity logs and ledgers that will show the PD is very busy keeping Miami Gardens free of "trespassers" and handing out open container citations. Even if this story hadn't broken, a few years of skyrocketing arrests and tickets without a corresponding drop in violent crime would have exposed the MGPD's superficial, shoddy and ultimately unconstitutional efforts.

Saleh's filing a lawsuit against the city for this non-stop harassment, including warrantless searches of his premises. Not unsurprisingly, the announcement of his litigation has led to a sharp drop in police presence at the 207 Quickstop. Sampson himself hasn't been arrested since this announcement, either. If the MGPD sincerely believed they were helping curb violent crime by questioning/arresting Sampson and other Quickstop employees and customers, discussion of a lawsuit wouldn't have deterred those efforts. This withdrawal indicates the cops patrolling Saleh's store were, to put it most generously, padding arrest numbers. The reality is that they've been called out for their harassment of Miami Gardens' residents and are now making themselves scarce in order to prevent adding to the evidence against them.



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Maybe all these politicians and activists who want tough-on-crime leadership are looking at the wrong side of the thin blue line. The cure is worse than the disease, as the saying goes, and these officers seem to be going out of their way to prove that adage.

First up, following on the heels of the multiple rectal violations committed by a New Mexico doctor at the behest of police officers in search of drugs that just weren't there is this story, which features more New Mexico law enforcement members violating someone's lower regions -- again, in search of drugs.

Cops in New Mexico repeatedly sprayed a woman’s vagina with mace after she was arrested for drugs. They allegedly did this to “punish” her.

The woman, Marlene Tapia, was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center after her arrest. Next, officers stripped her to search for drugs. They made her bend over and then claimed she had a plastic bag containing drugs in her vagina.

Officers should have subsequently had medical staff remove the bag from Tapia — but they did not do this.

Instead, officers “punished” the woman by spraying her vagina with mace. They allegedly did this several times in a row.

To be clear, these were corrections officers at a detention center, not police officers. Tapia apparently actually had a baggie of drugs inserted in her vagina, but as is pointed out in the lawsuit, spraying her with mace wasn't going to dislodge it, and she wasn't offering the officers any resistance. As is also pointed out, corrections officers are supposed to refer anyone they suspect of hiding drugs to the medical center for examination. Obviously, they do things differently in New Mexico, especially if the "problem area" happens to be below the waist.

There is little doubt this incident actually occurred. According to the filing, the officer (Blanca Zapater) was both instructed to stop spraying mace on Tapia's genitals by her supervisor and was later punished for her actions. Tapia is now seeking damages and court fees for Zapater's clearly stupid actions.

This next case is much, much worse on every level, further underscoring the fact that those charged with enforcing laws often seem to be at least as dangerous as those who break them.

A 40-year-old police officer in San Antonio, Texas is facing charges of felony sexual assault after a 19-year-old woman accused him of handcuffing and raping her during a traffic stop over the weekend.

According to an arrested warrant obtained by the San Antonio Express-News, Officer Jackie Len Neal pulled over the teen, telling her that her car was reported stolen.

Even though the woman produced a sales slip for the vehicle, Neal insisted on patting her down. The woman told him she felt uncomfortable with the pat down and asked for a female officer, but he ignored her, the warrant said. The woman was allegedly groped, placed in handcuffs and then taken to the back of his patrol car.

Neal was accused of raping the woman and instructing her to keep it a secret.

Neal's dashboard cam and mike weren't working as his system was missing its hard drive. This fact Neal would have been aware of, according to his police chief, William McManus. The car's GPS system confirmed that Neal's patrol car was parked at this location for 18 minutes.

Neal's past is checkered with other abuse.

McManus confirmed that Neal had been suspended in September for dating an 18-year-old, who had joined the Police Explorer program in preparation for a law enforcement career. He had also been accused of sexual assault while on duty several years earlier, but the woman refused to cooperate with a police investigation and the charges were dropped.

This may not be the end of it either. McManus must suspect his officer is a habitual offender as he's made a call for other victims to come forward. The lack of criminal charges preceding this event likely kept McManus from unloading an officer he felt was problematic. That it culminated in an alleged rape before being corrected is an indictment of the system itself.

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We've been hearing more and more reports that many folks within Google are incredibly angry over the NSA's activities, some of which has bubbled up already. There have been some questions, though, about whether those attitudes go all the way up the management chain, so it's interesting to see Google's chairman, Eric Schmidt, now claiming that the company actually considered taking all its servers out of the US in the wake of the NSA revelations.

Google, the giant of the Internet, thought about moving its servers out of the U.S. after the NSA debacle, said Eric Schmidt, the company's chairman, on Friday at the Paley International Council Summit in New York.

"Actually, we thought about that and there are many, many reasons why it's impossible for Google to leave the United States, although it's attractive," Schmidt said.

"But the reason it's an interesting idea is because American firms are subject to these rules, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] rules, Patriot Act and so forth, and this government surveillance is really a problem."

Of course, what Google probably realized is that, once out of the US, the NSA actually has more powers to spy on anything with basically no oversight. At least in the US, there are some (if minimal) restrictions, and there are at least some ways to fight back. Still, it would be quite a statement for a company like Google to make that kind of a move, and again would highlight just how much of a bad business impact all this NSA spying can have on American companies.

The real question is how much will Google continue to do in response to these revelations. Many, many people don't trust the company, and taking a strong stand to protect its users privacy and to push back against government surveillance is going to be necessary, or the company runs a real risk of driving many people to other services that promise to be more secure.

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We’ve already covered the Nexus 5′s shooting capabilities in depth, giving you guys our camera review from Google’s latest flagship. While an average shooter overall, we ultimately ruled that it was the smartphone’s camera software holding the device back from photo greatness, not necessarily the hardware. The good news? It might soon better.

A few weeks ago, some left over code discovered in AOSP hinted that new camera APIs were in the works, but were scrapped right before the release of Android 4.4 KitKat. What happened? In an interview with CNET Google spokesperson Gina Scigliano not only confirmed the existence of these new APIs, but shed a little light on exactly how they’ll work.

According to Scigliano, Google will soon allow app developers to tap into 2 new camera features already baked deep inside Android: RAW image support and burst mode. Scigliano explains:

“Android’s latest camera HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and framework supports raw and burst-mode photography. We will expose a developer API [application programming interface] in a future release to expose more of the HAL functionality.”

You can see in the above diagram developers can skip stock Android’s image processing, instead using with their own software to communicate directly with a device’s camera hardware. With support for RAW images, developers (or users) could take uncompressed images and tweak them using their own apps and editors.

Burst mode? Well, it’s used for more than capturing action shots. For those unaware, it’s actually Android’s new burst mode makes KitKat’s new HDR+ shooting mode possible, taking a quick succession of images captured at varying exposures and combining them into one. This makes for an image that’s sharper and has greater dynamic range than a single shot.

So, exactly when can we expect Google to open up these new camera features to Android developers? Just like on XDA, an ETA wasn’t given. Google said only to expect the APIs to open up in a future software update. While it’s little consolation, at least now we know they’re coming, right?