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A coroner ruled the death of Robert Saylor, who had Down Syndrome, a homicide by asphyxiation. Three off-duty cops working mall security were trying to pull him out of a movie theater after he entered without paying. They each threw a pair of handcuffs on the 290-pound man after tackling him to the ground, then removed them when Saylor became unresponsive and tried to perform CPR.

From the Washington Post:

Moments before off-duty Frederick County sheriff’s deputies tried to force a young man with Down syndrome out of a movie theater — a move that eventually led to his death —Robert Ethan Saylor’s 18-year-old aide warned them that he would “freak out” if they touched him.

“Next thing I know, there are I think three or four cops holding Ethan, trying to put him in handcuffs,” the aide told authorities, according to documents from the Frederick County Sheriff’s Department obtained Monday by the Associated Press. “I heard Ethan screaming, saying ‘ouch,’ ‘don’t touch me,’ ‘get off’ and crying. Next thing I hear is nothing.”

The aide’s statement about what happened the day Saylor died is among a package of documents released to the Saylor family’s attorney and the Associated Press by the sheriff’s department detailing its criminal investigation. The 98-page incident report and handwritten statements from 22 witnesses provide the most detailed account yet of how Saylor, 26, went from wanting to watch a movie he liked twice to dead from asphyxiation within minutes.

In March a grand jury declined to charge the deputies in relation to the homicide and the deputies are back at work with the sheriff’s department, which had continued to stonewall the investigation. An internal affairs investigation was finally completed this week, but an attorney for the department said he couldn’t comment on any specifics. He says the deputies did nothing wrong. The family is considering a civil lawsuit.

Follow these stories and more at Reason 24/7 and don't forget you can e-mail stories to us at 24_7@reason.com and tweet us at @reason247.

You'd hardly know it from the wall-to-wall coverage of the George Zimmerman case, but there's another trial going on that's at least as worthy of national attention. That's the 32-count federal racketeering indictment against James "Whitey" Bulger, a Boston mob kingpin linked to at least 19 murders, captured in 2011 after 16 years on the lam.

Bulger, a former "Top Echelon Informant" for the FBI, is a monster, but he's hardly the only villain in a story where "gangster government" leaves the realm of metaphor. As Boston Globe reporters Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy explain in their riveting new biography of Bulger, the Irish mobster ruled South Boston for nearly two decades, "protected by the arrogance and corruption of an FBI and a Justice Department that tolerated murder as an acceptable price of doing effective law enforcement."

Federal rules ban cameras in most criminal trials, which is one reason the Bulger case hasn't gotten the national attention it deserves. So Court TV junkies missed last Wednesday's explosive exchange between the Bulger and his former henchman-turned-federal-witness, Kevin Weeks, when Weeks called Bulger a "rat:"

Whitey: "You suck!";

Weeks: "F--k you!" (So much for the fabled "gift of gab.")

But the public's missing something more valuable than mob drama: "This trial is not just about organized crime," writes the Boston Herald's Margery Eagan, it involves "the corruption of the federal government — the same government banning you from this trial — in the form of a disgraced FBI. It's a civics lesson worthy of us all."

Indeed, from 1975 to 1990, in its quest to bring down the Italian mob, the FBI's Boston office became partner in crime to Bulger's "Winter Hill Gang." A 2004 House Committee on Government Reform report, "Everything Secret Degenerates," found that "a number of men were murdered because they came to the government with information incriminating informants" and the FBI tipped them off.

"When you give us information on one person and they got killed," then a second, and a third, Bulger's partner Steven "The Rifleman" Flemmi testified in 2008: "I mean, he's an FBI agent, he's not stupid."

Innocents died in the crossfire. Last week, the court heard from the widow of one of them, Pat Donahue, who was left to raise three sons on her own when her husband gave a ride to the wrong guy in 1982. Michael Donahue, who died in a hail of bullets on the Southie waterfront, "had no idea that Halloran was marked for death because he had shopped Whitey Bulger to the FBI and Whitey's corrupt FBI handler had tipped Whitey off."

That agent, John Connolly, is behind bars, but the federal government has gone to great lengths to avoid a proper reckoning for other officials who aided and abetted Bulger's reign. In 2001, the Bush administration invoked executive privilege for five months to shield FBI documents about the Bulger affair, in what then-Rep. Dan Burton called "an utterly unprecedented" attempt to drape DOJ in a "veil of secrecy."

Meanwhile, instead of promptly settling the Donahue family's wrongful death suit, "the government spent millions on 10 years of litigation, flying Justice Department lawyers up from Washington and putting them up at four-star hotels."

Cullen and Murphy quote Tommy Donahue, eight years old when his father was murdered: "Our own government, the FBI, the Justice Department, has never said to my mother, to me and my brothers, 'We're sorry.'"

President Obama continually derides "cynics" whose distrust of government stands in the way of all the good things it can do for us. It's wrong, Obama told college graduates in May, to think of government as "some separate, sinister entity."

Try telling that to the Donahues.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner.

Did you know that the incidence of cancer in the United States has been declining for nearly 20 years? That the spread of pornography correlates with a decline in rape? That average IQs are going up substantially all around the world? These are just some of the truths that are well-known to the scholars who study those subjects but generally come as a surprise to even the best-educated among us.

As reason reflects on how the world has changed since the magazine’s founding in May 1968, here are seven surprising pieces of unalloyed good news.

Cancer Rates Are Going Down

A 2007 American Cancer Society poll found that seven out of 10 Americans believed that the risk of dying from cancer is going up. In fact, not only have cancer death rates been declining steeply, age-adjusted cancer incidence rates have been falling for nearly two decades. That is, in nearly any age group, fewer Americans are actually coming down with cancer.

Advances in modern medicine have increased the five-year survival rates of cancer patients from 50 percent in the 1970s to 68 percent today. That much you might expect. More surprising is that the incidence of cancer has been falling about 0.6 percent per year since 1994. That may not sound like much, but as John Seffrin, CEO of the American Cancer Society, explains, “in recent years, about 100,000 people each year who would have died had cancer rates not declined are living to celebrate another birthday.”

Why is cancer becoming more rare? Largely because fewer Americans are smoking, more are having colonoscopies in which polyps that might become cancerous are removed, and many women stopped hormone replacement therapy in the early 2000s, all behaviors that prevent the onset of cancer. Advances in genetic screening for cancer risks will further reduce cancer incidence as empowered patients take preventive actions like actress Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy, which reduced her lifetime risk of heritable breast cancer from around 90 percent to 5 percent.

 The news is not all good. Rising levels of obesity have been associated with increases in cancers of the kidneys, esophagus, pancreas, and elsewhere. But falling mortality and incidence rates do indicate real progress in the War on Cancer.

More Porn, Less Rape 

Over the past two decades, as pornography has become much more easily accessible over the Internet, the rate of rape and sexual assault has declined by about 60 percent, according to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). 

The BJS conducts an annual National Crime Victimization survey of more than 100,000 households, asking if anyone has been the victim of various crimes in the past year. In 1995, the rape/sexual assault rate was reported as 5 per 1,000 American women over age 12. In 2011, the rate had fallen to 1.8 rapes/sexual assaults per 1,000. 

Meanwhile access to pornography has dramatically increased. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast Internet connection must be in want of some porn,” the journalist Sebastian Anthony joked last year on the website Extremetech. Dozens of porn platforms are among the top 500 sites in terms of traffic, according to Google’s Doubleclick Ad Planner. The largest, Xvideos, draws 4.4 billion page views per month—three times more than CNN or ESPN, and twice as many as Reddit.

A comprehensive 2009 review in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior by the Texas A&M International University psychologist Christopher Ferguson and the University of Texas at San Antonio criminologist Richard Hartley concluded that easy access to porn does not cause rape. “Considered together, the available data about pornography consumption and rape rates in the United States seem to rule out a causal relationship,” Ferguson and Hartley wrote in their summary of the academic literature. “One could even argue that the available research and self-reported and official statistics might provide evidence for the reverse effect; the increasing availability of pornography appears to be associated with a decline in rape.”

The Clemson economist Todd Kendall, in a 2006 study supported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that “Internet access appears to be a substitute for rape; in particular, the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape victimization of around 7.3 percent.” Kendall found that “there is no statistically significant relationship between internet access and any individual FBI index crime (other than rape), including murder, robbery, aggravated assault, robbery, larceny, and auto theft.” Crime rates are plummeting all over, but it’s only rape that appears to be pegged to online connectivity.

Longer Life Expectancy Stops Population Growth

An exciting convergence between demography and evolutionary theory is shedding considerable light on why people the world over are having fewer children. It turns out that the longer people can expect to live, the fewer children they have. In fact, if current fertility trends continue, world population could well top out in the middle of this century at between 8 and 9 billion, then begin to decline.

A fascinating study by the University of Connecticut anthropologists Nicola Bulled and Richard Sosis looks at life expectancy and fertility rates in 193 countries. In the October 2010 issue of Human Nature, they report that “when life expectancy is high, educational attainment is also high, reproductive timing is delayed, and overall reproduction reduced.”

The University of Michigan ecologist Bobbi Low and her colleagues have found that once women can expect to live past age 60, they begin to have their first child later in life and have fewer children overall. Longer life expectancy is also correlated with more education for women.

Bulled and Sosis report a similar finding: Women who live in countries where life expectancy is below 50 years bear an average of 5.5 children. When life expectancy is between 50 and 60, they bear an average of 4.8 children. The big drop occurs when they can expect to live between 60 and 70 years, in which case women have about 2.5 children on average. The decline continues if women expect to live between 70 and 75 years to 2.2 children, and falls to just 1.75 children if they can expect to live older than 75.

The United Nations World Population Prospects 2010 Revision reported that world average life expectancy for women is now 70 years. Global average life expectancy in 1960 was 52 years and the total fertility rate was about 5 children per woman. As life expectancy keeps rising, average total fertility today has fallen to a world average of 2.36 children per woman, just slightly above the 2.1 replacement rate.

People Everywhere Are Getting Smarter

About half of Americans two generations ago would have been diagnosed as mentally retarded based on today’s IQ tests.

In 1980, the New Zealand political scientist James Flynn discovered that average IQs in many countries have been drifting upward at about 3 points per decade over the past couple of generations. In fact, the average has risen by an astonishing 15 points in the last 50 years in the United States. In other words, a person with an average IQ of 100 today would score 115 on a 1950s IQ test, and a person of average IQ today would have been in approximately the top 15 percent of same-age scorers 50 years ago. If the average American kid were to take the first Stanford-Binet IQ test from 1932, she would score about 124 points today.

“This means that on an IQ test made in 1930 the average score of the entire population would give an IQ between 120 and 130 according to the original standardization,” the Hungarian technologist Kristóf Kovács explains. So “instead of 2 percent, 35–50 percent of the population would have an IQ above 130. And vice versa; if the current standard was applied to people living in 1930, average IQ would be between 70 and 80, and instead of 2 percent, 35–50 percent would be diagnosed with mental retardation.” 

What accounts for this massive increase in IQ scores? Researchers have suggested a panoply of causes, including better nutrition, exposure to more mentally challenging media, and more formal schooling, but my favorite is the reduced load of infectious childhood diseases.

A fascinating study published in the June 2010 Proceedings of the Royal Society by the University of New Mexico biologist Christopher Eppig and his colleagues finds an intriguing correlation between the average IQ of a country’s citizens and the intensity with which they suffer from parasites and infectious diseases. The authors note that the brains of newborns burn up 87 percent of infants’ metabolic energy; 5-year-old brains use 44 percent; and adult brains consume 25 percent of the body’s energy. Mobilizing the immune system to fight off diseases and parasites is very metabolically expensive, diverting nutrients and energy that would otherwise be used to fuel the building and maintenance of the human brain. If this analysis is substantially correct, then promoting public health also promotes higher IQs.

The new study reports, “Infectious disease remains the most powerful predictor of average national IQ when temperature, distance from Africa, gross domestic product per capita and several measures of education are controlled for. These findings suggest that the Flynn effect may be caused in part by the decrease in the intensity of infectious diseases as nations develop.”

The converse of this research should find a correlation between higher average IQs and increasing allergy and asthma rates. Allergy and asthma rates are hypothesized to be on the rise because children’s immune systems, no longer challenged by infections, have become oversensitive, attacking the bodies they are supposed to protect. Myopia also correlates with higher IQ scores; U.S. myopia rates in people ages 12 to 54 increased from 25 percent in 1971–72 to 41.6 percent in 1999–2004. But higher IQ correlates with better health and longer lives, less propensity to commit crimes, and higher income (although not greater than average personal wealth). 

Trade Creates Jobs and Makes People Richer

Benjamin Franklin once declared, “No country was ever ruined by trade.” Franklin believed that the free exchange of products across borders was good for everybody, “even seemingly the most disadvantageous.” But in the 21st century, many voters and the politicians they elect believe the opposite. Being open to trade, people fear, allows rapacious corporations to “ship jobs overseas.”

A March 2011 European Economic Review study forthrightly asks the question: Does exposure to international trade create or destroy jobs? The answer strongly backs Franklin’s observation. “A 10 percent increase in total trade openness reduces aggregate unemployment by about three quarters of one percentage point,” the authors conclude. Simply put: Trade creates jobs. 

Trade openness is generally measured by adding together the value of a country’s exports and imports, then dividing that sum by total gross domestic product (GDP). In other words, the higher a country’s volume of international trade, the higher its degree of trade openness. So the U.S. GDP in 2010 was roughly $15 trillion in 2010; exports and imports combined totaled just over $4 trillion, yielding a trade openness index figure of around 27 percent.

Why does free trade create more jobs? The European Economic Review study suggests that freer trade boosts overall productivity, enabling companies to hire more workers. Trade enhances competition, which weeds out inefficient firms and allows more productive ones to expand. As the average efficiency of firms in a country increases, they can earn more revenues by boosting production. And that leads to hiring additional workers. 

Trade openness also improves the lives and livelihoods of women. A 2012 study by two German economists, Niklas Potrafke of the University of Munich and Heinrich Ursprung of Konstanz University, examined the relationship: “Observing the progress of globalization for almost one hundred developing countries at ten year intervals starting in 1970, we find that economic and social globalization exert a decidedly positive influence on the social institutions that reduce female subjugation and promote gender equality.”

A 2005 study in World Development by the London School of Economics economists Eric Neumayer and Indra De Soysa found that “countries that are more open towards trade and/or have a higher stock of foreign direct investment also have a lower incidence of child labor.” Openness to trade also correlates with higher school attendance rates. This finding suggests that legislation such as the recent bill proposed by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) restricting imports made using child labor would actually backfire, forcing kids to work at less secure and less well-paying jobs in the informal sector. 

Trade openness is additionally coupled with higher per capita incomes. In 2009, economists Vlad Manole of the Conference Board in New York and Mariana Spatareanu of Rutgers devised a trade restriction index to probe the degree of trade protection in the economies of 131 countries using data between 1990 and 2004. They found that “a 1 percent decrease in trade restrictiveness leads to an approximately 0.3 percent increase in income per capita.”

So why do people, especially politicians, believe that freer trade increases unemployment, hurts women and children, and reduces incomes? The 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat explained this sort of disheartening policy myopia in his brilliant essay, “What is Seen and What is Not Seen.” People tend to focus on the seen consequences of a policy, such as competition from trade eliminating some jobs at relatively inefficient companies. And they miss the unseen benefits, such as the new jobs that result from increased average productivity.

The protectionist politics that follow from this misdiagnosis mean that a few seen workers get to keep their jobs while a much larger number of unseen jobs never get created in the first place. Meanwhile, the same laws make other Americans worse off by forcing them to spend more, because they are denied access to less expensive imports.

Local Biodiversity Is Increasing

Ascension Island is about as isolated as a piece of land can get, sitting in the Atlantic Ocean about midway between Africa and South America. When the British claimed authority over the uninhabited, barren hunk of stone in the early 19th century, it was frequently likened to a “cinder” or a “ruinous heap of rocks.” The new owners named Ascension’s central peak White Mountain, after the color of the bare rocks of which it was composed.

In 1846, botanist John Hooker from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew visited and decided to try transplanting a wide variety of plants onto the island. A century and a half later, the result has been an “accidental rainforest.” White Mountain, now renamed Green Mountain, is covered with an extensive cloud forest consisting of guava, banana, wild ginger, bamboo, the Chinese glory bower and Madagascan periwinkle, Norfolk Island pine, and eucalyptus from Australia. Because of the man-made micro-climate, what used to be a desert island now features several permanent streams.

Ascension Island undercuts the conventional ecological wisdom that tropical rainforests are supposed to take millions of years to form. And what happened on Ascension has been happening all around the world, as people have moved thousands of species from their native habitats to new locales, increasing species richness. Wherever human beings have gone in the past two centuries, we have increased local and regional biodiversity.

Yet “the popular view [is] that diversity is decreasing at local scales,” the Brown biologist Dov Sax and the University of California–Santa Barbara biologist Steven Gaines report in a 2003 article for Trends in Ecology and Evolution. Sax and his University of New Mexico colleague James Brown point out in a 2007 roundtable in Conservation that “North America presently has more terrestrial bird and mammal species than when the first Europeans arrived five centuries ago.”

While some introduced species do outcompete natives and contribute to their extinction, that phenomenon is relatively rare. On the whole, the actual number of species in any given area has tended to increase. For example, New Zealand’s 2,000 native plant species have been joined by 2,000 from elsewhere, doubling the plant biodiversity of its islands. Meanwhile, only three species of native plants have gone extinct. In California, an additional 1,000 new species of vascular plants have joined the 6,000 native species in the Golden State, while just 40 species have gone extinct. Similar increases in plant diversity can be seen around the globe.

The species that have become extinct and are most in danger of extinction are those that dwell in isolated habitats such as oceanic islands or freshwater streams. In a 2008 article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Sax and Gaines note that thousands of oceanic bird species went extinct as Polynesians spread across the Pacific bringing not only themselves but hungry rats. Nevertheless, they point out, the overall species richness of the plant life on Pacific islands has increased considerably, and bird species richness has remained about the same, since the number of extinctions has been balanced by a number of new species moving in.

Mammalian and freshwater species richness has dramatically increased on Pacific islands as well—it was much harder for animals like rats, pigs, deer, lizards, frogs, catfish, and trout to colonize islands on their own. In addition, while some freshwater species in continental streams and lakes have gone extinct, most now harbor more species than they did before. Hawaii is, for example, home to more than 2,500 new species of invertebrates.

In many cases, the newcomers may actually benefit the natives. In a 2010 review article in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, the Rutgers ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld reported that rapidly accumulating evidence from many introduced species of plants and animals shows that they improve ecosystem functioning by increasing local biomass and speeding up the recycling of nutrients and energy. For example, zebra mussels are very effective filter feeders that have helped clear up the polluted waters of the Great Lakes enough to permit native lake grasses and other plants to flourish.

“Imagine that an alien scientist from outer space were to visit both New Zealand and Great Britain,” write Sax and Gaines. “Would this individual be able to distinguish which species are native and exotic, and would it be able to demonstrate that invaders have caused more damage or disruption to ecological processes than natives?” The answer to both questions is no.

Markets Make People Nicer

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx thundered that the bourgeoisie and the markets that allow them to prosper “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ ” In other words, markets destroy fellow-feeling, turning human beings into cold, cruel calculators. But recent research on how 15 small-scale societies play certain canonical economic games suggests that simply isn’t so.

The societies investigated by the economists and anthropologists organized as the MacArthur Foundation’s Norms and Preferences Network ranged from hunter-gatherers to slash-and-burn horticulturalists on five continents. To probe these societies’ attitudes toward sharing and fairness, the researchers had their members play several games. One of these is called the Ultimatum Game. In it, researchers provisionally allot a divisible pie ($10, say) to one player. This player, the “proposer,” offers a portion of the pie to the second subject, the “responder.” The responder, who knows both the offer and the total amount of the pie, chooses to either accept or reject the offer. If the responder accepts, he or she gets the amount offered and the proposer gets the remainder. If the responder rejects the offer, neither player receives anything.

Rationally speaking, one might expect that the proposer would offer as little as possible ($1, say) and that the responder would never reject an offer because, after all, one dollar is better than nothing. Yet in hundreds of experiments in nearly two dozen countries, subjects rarely act in that purely self-interested way. In modern societies, the most frequent amount offered by proposers is 50 percent, and responders commonly reject offers under a third. After examining a number of different explanations, most researchers have concluded that those choices are based on the players’ sense of what is fair. Since these experiments are usually conducted using western undergraduates, the Preference Network researchers wondered if the results would hold true across societies.

The experimenters offered participants the equivalent of a day or two’s wages in their societies. The researchers found that the average offers from proposers ranged from a low of 26 percent to a high of 58 percent and that the most frequent offers ranged from 15 percent to 50 percent. Some groups, such as the Machiguenga and Quichua in South America and the Hadza in Africa, offered around 25 percent of the pie. The most frequent offer from the Machiguenga proposers was 15 percent. Only one Machiguenga responder rejected such a low offer.

Societies like the Machiguenga and Hadza, which deal with few outsiders and are not economically dependent on people other than close kin, turn out to be the stingiest players. The Orma in Africa and the Achuar in South America, who are more integrated into markets, tend to play more like the western undergraduates. “The higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs of cooperation, the greater the level of prosociality found in experimental games,” the researchers found.

Herbert Gintis, co-director of the Preference Network team, speculates that markets bring strangers into contact on a regular basis, encouraging people to develop more concern for others beyond their family and immediate neighbors. Instead of parochialism, being integrated into markets encourages a spirit of ecumenism. “Extensive market interactions may accustom individuals to the idea that interactions with strangers may be mutually beneficial,” the researchers theorize. “By contrast, those who do not customarily deal with strangers in mutually advantageous ways may be more likely to treat anonymous interactions as hostile, threatening, or occasions for opportunistic pursuit of self-interest.”

Markets teach participants the habits of cooperation, trust, and fairness. Based on his research, Gintis argues that history traces humanity’s ascent from tribal selfishness to more cosmopolitan liberality. “Market societies give rise to more egalitarianism and movements toward democracy, civil liberties, and civil rights,” Gintis argues. “Market societies and democratic societies are practically co-extensive.” And they are more generous too.  

Not that most of us have been inclined to trust Skype as a conduit for confidential information in recent years, but the latest treasure trove of revelations published by The Guardian reveal that Microsoft has given the National Security Agency the means to bypass encryption in its products, including Skype and Outlook. We can probably assume that other American companies have similar arrangements with the NSA, raising the likelihood that American software products and online services will rapidly lose popularity around the world as a consequence of their cozy relationship with the snoops.

Reports Glenn Greenwald and fellow journalists at The Guardian:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

Skype once had a reputation as a secure channel for communicating, but rumors have circulated ever since its acquisition by Microsoft that the company collaborated with the feds. The Guardian report would seem to confirm those rumors — and to suggest that to use a Microsft product is to share a party line with snoops employed by the United States goverment.

But other governments also spy, to a degree rivaling American efforts, and they probably lean on corporations based in their countries. Ultimately, commercial software with proprietary code might become anathema for anybody concerned about security. The greatest winner from these spying revelations may be open source products that can be scrutinized for backdoors and compromises by independent observers.

Dustin Theoharis, who has had 12 surgeries since police shot him 16 times in 2011, is suing the Washington Department of Corrections for its involvement after agreeing to a $3 million settlement from Kings County in lieu of litigation. Both the King County Sheriff’s Office and the Washington DOC previously ruled the shooting justified, and both officers involved appear to remain employed. Via KING5, Seattle’s NBC affiliate:

Cole Harrison, who was at the house, described it this way:  "They (the officers) rushed into that room like they were going to get somebody.  I mean they rushed down there and then all of a sudden. Boom, boom, boom, boom.”

It’s estimated that the two officers fired more than 20 bullets; 16 hit Theoharis, who was lying in bed.  The officers said they thought Theoharis was reaching for a gun.  They later told investigators they weren’t sure how many bullets they fired.

"I thought he was going to try to kill us, there is no greater level of threat,” King County Deputy Aaron Thompson told investigators during an interview months after the shooting.

Theoharis didn’t have any weapons, but both the Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Corrections ruled the shooting justified and in compliance with policy.

A new civilian watchdog at the Sheriff’s Office, meanwhile, released its report on problems with the shooting. Its findings may be shocking but they’re unfortunately not surprising: the union contract, for example, allowed a 72 hour delay of any request for a written statement. The police officers involved refused to make statements at the scenes, while a written statement came a month later. No one from the internal affairs unit showed up at the shooting, and an investigation wasn’t opened until six months later. The Sheriff’s Office appeared more concerned in defending its officers than investigating the incident. The report noted that the first responding sergeant was in charge of the crime scene before becoming a supervisor, a neutral party, and finally an advocate for the officer, acting as one of his representatives in an internal affairs interview.

None of these issues are unique to King’s County, but unlike your constitutional right to bear arms, national lawmakers aren’t likely to be targeting police brutality as a national issue any time soon.

There’s a book out about how we got here.

It's from a few weeks back but just came to my attention this week, and alas the story it tells is timeless: a lengthy New York magazine profile of disgrunted NYPD office Pedro Serrano. 

Here's some of what it's like for a cop on the beat in NYC:

“Every now and then, we would have to be put in a van and hunt, basically. Drive around, and the sergeant or whoever would say: ‘That guy there—write him.’ ‘That guy—write him.’ ”

Cops wrote summonses for all sorts of minor offenses: “unreasonable noise,” “bicycle on sidewalk,” “unlawfully in park after hours.” And when they saw someone they suspected of criminal activity—if they spied a bulge in somebody’s pocket where a gun might be and saw that person touching that spot—they stopped and frisked him. This blitz of activity was part of the NYPD’s “hot spots” strategy: By flooding crime hot spots with cops—and ordering them to give out summonses and perform stop-and-frisks—the NYPD could prevent more serious crimes.

....from Serrano’s perspective, many of the summonses seemed to make no sense. “This happened to me—they rolled up to this poor Mexican guy sitting on the stairs and said: ‘Write him.’ I’m looking at Sarge, like, ‘What am I writing him for?’ ” The sergeant said, “Blocking pedestrian traffic.”

Later, back at the precinct, Serrano read what exactly constitutes “blocking pedestrian traffic.” “This guy was sitting on the stairs, and there is room for someone to walk by,” he says. “If a person is trying to enter the building and cannot because you’re blocking them, that’s blocking pedestrian traffic. But he was not blocking pedestrian traffic.”

This next point is very key to those who say, hey, big deal, just getting a ticket, huh? But getting a ticket for those unable to promptly pay it--for whatever reason--is serious indeed:

Sure, the guy would only have to pay a small fine, but if he never went to court—if he forgot, or couldn’t scratch together the money, or was an undocumented immigrant afraid to enter a courthouse—the court would put out a warrant for his arrest. And the next time the police stopped him, they’d take him to jail.....

It's a makework job, NYPD policing:

When it comes to street stops, one of Serrano’s former co-workers says, “We can’t just stop everybody. And that’s what they’re teaching the new guys to do: Just stop everybody … Just to get the numbers. That’s it. Doesn’t matter: Just get the numbers.”

Once, when Serrano’s supervisors didn’t think he’d written enough summonses or UF-250s (the form cops are supposed to fill out for every stop-and-frisk), a sergeant put him in a car and drove him around until he found two guys standing by a wall.

According to Serrano, the sergeant said, “250 them.” When Serrano resisted the order, the sergeant said, “Summons them.”

“For what?” Serrano asked.

“Blocking pedestrian traffic.”....

Serrano and his fellow officers understood why their bosses pressured them to write so many summonses and 250s. As one cop put it, “The more 250s, the better it makes the commanding officer look.” They knew the stress their bosses were under when they went to CompStat meetings...."

Once a commander returned to the station house, of course, he passed down that pressure to everyone else: to the lieutenants, the sergeants, down to the officers. For every crime hot spot, the precinct commander had to show that he was on top of the situation, that his cops were taking action. He had no way of counting exactly how many crimes he’d prevented—how do you count robberies and shootings before they happen?—but he could offer up the next best thing: high numbers of 250s and summonses.

Serrano went on to begin taping his bosses giving orders he thought were illegitimate, and then became a witness agaisnt NYPD in a Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit against NYPD's stop-and-frisk practices.

Jacob Sullum from Reason's July issue on New York's stop-and-frisk policies.

Do you remember when French government officials approached Titan Tires in an attempt to convince the U.S. firm to purchase an ailing Goodyear factory in Amiens, and the company's CEO, Maurice Taylor, replied with a broadside about the French "work" ethic that sparked a miniature international incident? Yeah. Good times. Well, that factory is still operating, much to Goodyear's chagrin and despite the company's strongly voiced intentions to close the place. Rebuffed in its efforts to restructure the money-hemorrhaging plant by a seemingly crazed union, the Confederation Generale du Travail, which severed its formal links with the Communist Party only in the 1990s, Goodyear attempted to shutter the facility, and then ran into France's peculiar laws that seem to require employers to operate at a loss until given permission to expire with some residual degree of dignity.

From BBC:

For years tyre giant Goodyear has been trying to stem losses at a plant in northern France, but has failed to persuade unions to agree to its plans. Now it wants to close the factory, and the battle has moved to the courts. How much longer can the struggle continue? ...

From the company's point of view the struggle looks very different. The factory is losing $80m a year, it says, and producing goods there is no market for.

The battle began back in 2007, when Goodyear announced plans to stop making cheap car tyres at the plant and focus on tyres for tractors and other farm vehicles.

Restructuring was urgently needed, it said. Along with new investment, it wanted to introduce a new shift pattern called quatre huits or four times eight, with four teams working eight-hour shifts.

Overall, employees would still have a 35-hour week - in accordance with French law - but they would work rotating six-day and four-day cycles, including nights and weekends.

Unions refused. The next year they went to court to prevent the company laying off 400 staff, and won. Last year they helped scuttle Goodyear's plan to sell the factory to Titan, an agricultural tyre producer, in a deal that would have seen many more job losses (including voluntary redundancies).

It was in January that Goodyear finally announced its decision to close the factory, describing this as "the only possible option after five years of fruitless discussion". Cue another legal battle.

"French law says if you want to put all these workers on the dole, you have to have a good reason," says Fiodor Rilov, the CGT union's lawyer. "This may be an American company, with a headquarters in the US but they are operating on French soil and they have to respect our social rules."

The situation is amusingly French (if you're not a Goodyear stockholder). But it thoroughly explains Maurice Taylor's explosive, "How stupid do you think we are?” when asked if he'd be interested in purchasing the Amiens facility. Such vampiric regulations, wielded by an insane labor union, represent a strong disincentive to investing in any project in France that might involve unionized labor, semi-permanent structures, and an inability to electronically transfer all assets across the border to someplace a bit more sane.

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You don't often hear about lawsuits based on the Third Amendment, the one that says "no soldier shall in time of peace be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war but in a manner to be prescribed by law." That usually overlooked provision is cited in a federal lawsuit recently filed by Anthony Mitchell and his parents, Michael and Linda Mitchell—an oddity for which we can thank the Henderson, Nevada, police department. The Mitchells, who live in separate houses near each other in the Las Vegas suburb, were forcibly evicted from their homes on July 10, 2011, by police officers responding to a domestic violence report involving one of their neighbors. Here is how it all started, according to the complaint:

At 10:45 a.m. defendant Officer Christopher Worley (HPD) contacted plaintiff Anthony Mitchell via his telephone. Worley told plaintiff that police needed to occupy his home in order to gain a "tactical advantage" against the occupant of the neighboring house. Anthony Mitchell told the officer that he did not want to become involved and that he did not want police to enter his residence. Although Worley continued to insist that plaintiff should leave his residence, plaintiff clearly explained that he did not intend to leave his home or to allow police to occupy his home. Worley then ended the phone call.

The cops did not take no for an answer:

[Henderson police officers] banged forcefully on the door and loudly commanded Anthony Mitchell to open the door to his residence. Surprised and perturbed, plaintiff Anthony Mitchell immediately called his mother (plaintiff Linda Mitchell) on the phone, exclaiming to her that the police were beating on his front door.

Seconds later, officers, including Officer Rockwell, smashed open plaintiff Anthony Mitchell's front door with a metal ram as plaintiff stood in his living room. As plaintiff Anthony Mitchell stood in shock, the officers aimed their weapons at Anthony Mitchell and shouted obscenities at him and ordered him to lie down on the floor. Fearing for his life, plaintiff Anthony Mitchell dropped his phone and prostrated himself onto the floor of his living room, covering his face and hands.

Addressing plaintiff as "asshole," officers, including Officer Snyder, shouted conflicting orders at Anthony Mitchell, commanding him to both shut off his phone, which was on the floor in front of his head, and simultaneously commanding him to 'crawl' toward the officers. Confused and terrified, plaintiff Anthony Mitchell remained curled on the floor of his living room, with his hands over his face, and made no movement.

Although plaintiff Anthony Mitchell was lying motionless on the ground and posed no threat, officers, including Officer David Cawthorn, then fired multiple "pepperball" rounds at plaintiff as he lay defenseless on the floor of his living room. Anthony Mitchell was struck at least three times by shots fired from close range, injuring him and causing him severe pain.

The cops pepperballed Mitchell's dog for good measure, even though she was "cowering in the corner when officers smashed through the front door." They charged Mitchell with...wait for it..."obstructing an officer." His father, Michael, faced the same charge after he tried to leave a police command center to which he was lured under false pretenses while the police took over his house as well. The two men were jailed for nine hours before making bail, and the charges ultimately were dismissed with prejudice. The lawsuit argues that police filed the unjustified charges "to provide cover for defendants' wrongful actions, to frustrate and impede plaintiffs' ability to seek relief for those actions, and to further intimidate and retaliate against plaintiffs." In addition to Third and Fourth Amendment violations tied to the warrantless occupation of their homes, the Mitchells say the police are guilty of assault and battery, conspiracy, defamation, abuse of process, malicious prosecution, negligence, and infliction of emotional distress.

[Thanks to Johnny Cook for the tip.]

There's a reason why "we're from the government and we're here to help you" has become a cynical joke, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a big part of the punch line. Supposedly established "to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans," the CFPB apparently interprets its mission the way every other government agency interprets its mission: as a carte blanche to build massive databases and wield the stored information as a key to power. The CFPB uses its authority to force American businesses to surrender data on their customers, which is then compiled and shared with the bureau's very special friends.

From Investors Business Daily:

Big Brother is watching you — in even more ways than previously known. It turns out the National Security Agency and Internal Revenue Service aren't the only federal agencies gathering sensitive information about you.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform, is collecting reams of data on your bill-paying and spending habits.

In fact, the Obama administration is compiling a massive database of personal information, including monthly credit card, mortgage, car and other payments.

The data will be warehoused by private contractors and shared with other federal agencies and Congress, as well as researchers in the field.

You can trust the CFPB to be careful with all of that sensitive information, right? Except ... Except, "CFPB's own inspector general recently cited 'weaknesses' in its security program. His findings were corroborated by a Government Accountability Office report that expressed concerns about CFPB's data security."

Whoops.

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Much of the debate over NSA surveillance of telephone communications and Web activity over the past few weeks has hinged on the alleged tradeoffs between safety and security in such snooping. "[Y]ou can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.  We're going to have to make some choices," insists President Obama. But those "choices" presuppose that the U.S. government's virtual Panopticon actually provides some degree of security in return for lost privacy and liberty. In an interesting piece at Bloomberg, Russian writer Leonid Bershidsky argues that NSA surveillance seems peculiarly targeted at the general population, not terrorists. "The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America’s largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use," he argues.

Bershidsky cites a 2012 report from Holland's General Intelligence and Security Service, Jihadism on the Web: A breeding ground for jihad in the modern age, that asks the seemingly key question, "Where do the cool terrorists hang out online?" The report finds that terrorists may meet in well-known social media sites, but these areas are in the small part of the Internet that is indexed and commonly trafficked by regular people. For exactly that reason, that's not where plotting and planning takes place.

They meet in ‘public’ virtual places, for example on social media, on Internet forums and in chat rooms, but also in semi-public or private virtual places. This is where jihadist activities and processes unfold that constitute the greatest threat. These more private virtual places make up an important part of the Invisible Web (by scientists also referred to as the Deep Web, Da knet or Unde net). Unlike the visible part of the Internet, also called Surface Web or Indexable Web, this invisible Web refers to a part of the World Wide Web that has not (yet) been indexed and that cannot be found by readily accessible search engines such as Google. Scientists estimate that the invisible Web is 550 times larger than the visible Web.

The Dutch report goes on to say that "Just like criminals and hackers, jihadists use the invisible Web as a hiding place and do their utmost to keep activities from being tracked. Virtual gathering places constructed, administered and secured by fanatical jihadists are hidden inside this invisible Web."

But the NSA's Prism specifically targets Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, with promises of more high-profile companies to come. Is there value in that? "The AIVD has found that radicalising persons erase their social media accounts sooner or later. They consider the (mostly American) social media to be kuffa (infidel) sites, and therefore unacceptable and unsafe."

Instead of transmitting information in the clear through high-profile social media, Dutch intelligence finds terrorists to be pretty cagey and security conscious.

This security awareness manifests itself in an aggressive promotion of safe behaviour online and an increased use of usually free software to encrypt technical access to and communication on the Internet. As a result, more and more jihadist actor groups are capable of concealing their identity, their location and the content of their communications.

So, justifying a surveillance net that focuses on Facebook and Google by uttering the magic word "terrorism" is like rationalizing a wide network of license-plate recognition cameras on the grounds that you may take a snap of a "Honk if You Love Jihad" bumpersticker.

We may be trading off privacy for something, but it doesn't seem to be security.