Homeless in Arizona

Will Arpaio finally become a sheriff?

Will Arpaio finally become a sheriff?

Joe Arpaio has never been a sheriff, but he has played one on TV.

His five terms in office represent the longest running drama/sit-com/soap opera/cartoon in Arizona history.

From the moment he was elected for the first time in 1992 Arpaio scripted a role for himself that was much more colorful, much more controversial and much more filmable than that of an actual sheriff. Since then he has starred in his own movie, a tragicomic cowboy fantasy that those of us in the media willing put on video and that was transformed by audiences throughout the world into a personal and political blockbuster for Arpaio.

He declared himself the “toughest sheriff in America” and for the past 20 years much of America (and a majority of voters in Maricopa County) actually took that claim seriously.

But things have changed.

Even though the recall effort against him will not end up forcing an election it has managed to force an element of the real world into the Arpaio fairy tale.

And the storyline is straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

Perhaps, finally, the Arpaio story will morph into a reality show.

I was here in 1993 when the newly elected sheriff announced that he wanted to “surround the county” with roadblocks so that his deputies could check every vehicle for drugs.

The county attorney at the time, Rick Romley, gently reminded the sheriff of a little thing called the U.S. Constitution, which conflicted with that particular episode of the Joe Arpaio show.

So he scripted a new story line.

Arpaio became an instant folk hero by opening Tent City and forcing inmates to wear pink underwear and black- and white-striped uniforms.

His publicity stunts not only attracted world-wide attention and thrilled local voters, but generated more interest than local news reports about inmates who died in the jail of abusive treatment.

Lawsuits filed against his office didn’t get nearly the attention than, say, the introduction of chain gangs.

Or the purchase of an armored vehicle.

When Arpaio joined the anti-immigrant crusade of disbarred former county attorney Andrew Thomas the sheriff’s star temporarily shone even brighter.

A few years ago then-Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon urged a gathering of the national press to investigate the sheriff immigration sweeps.

“Come to Phoenix and stop this madness,” Gordon said. “Let’s turn the eyes of the nation on this.”

Arpaio scoffed.

“He doesn’t have to call (on the media), because they’re here every day,” the sheriff said. “I’ve been on 3,000 national shows as sheriff.”

He got tremendous exposure for his Tea Party-instigated investigation into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate at a time there were reports of hundreds of sexual-abuse cases involving children that were not properly handled by his department.

He announced (then decided against it) that he would parade a chain-gang of DUI offenders who were not legal citizens outside Chase Field during Major League Baseball’s all-star weekend.

And yet he seemed puzzled by those who called his antics and policies racist.

On the night of his last re-election Arpaio told me, “My job hasn’t changed at all. I still have the same policies. Illegal immigration was a big change five years ago. I didn’t know it would be that controversial. I would like to get together with the Latino community, but they scream at ya.”

It wasn’t the screaming that finally got to him, however.

It was the quiet, reasoned decision of U.S. District Judge Murray Snow, who issued a 142-page ruling that found Arpaio’s office has engaged in racial profiling.

Because of this the sheriff’s deputies are banned from using race as a factor in detaining people for suspected immigration violations and from arresting suspected illegal immigrants who are not accused of committing state crimes.

The sheriff said he will appeal the judge’s decision.

That’s too bad.

While he awaits another ruling, however, Arpaio could occupy his time by overseeing the operation of the county jails, the enforcement of warrants, the protection of the courts and the policing of unincorporated areas in the county.

In other words, the sheriff might temporarily give up his acting career in order to become a sheriff.

AZ Governor Jan Brewer drug war hypocrite!!!!!!

What a lying hypocrite. At the same time Jan Brewer is trying to send people who commit the victimless crime of using medical marijuana to prison she pretends she is happy because Mexico released another victimless drug war criminal.

Source

Gov. Jan Brewer 'thrilled' by mother's release from Mexico jail

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Fri May 31, 2013 12:53 PM

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said today she is “thrilled” Yanira Maldonado, the Goodyear mother who was detained for nine days in a Mexico jail on suspicion of marijuana smuggling, has been released and is on her way home.

During a news conference at the state capitol, the governor said she has tried to reach Maldonado’s family but the line has been busy.

“What’s most important this morning is that Yanira is back in Arizona, home safely with her family and her friends who love her,” Brewer said. “As Americans, we all know that our precious constitutional rights don’t extend beyond our nation’s border. It’s this kind of case that once again illustrates how blessed we are in this country. [Of course Jan Brewer seems to forget she is trying to flush both the Arizona Constitution and the US Constitution down the toilet with her frivolous lawsuits trying to nullify Arizona's medical law, which is Prop 203!!!]

“Most of all, I’m so happy for the family, that they can now put this chapter of their life behind us,” she said.

Brewer is scheduled to make a previously scheduled appearance today with Sonora Governor Guillermo Padrés Elías at the 2013 AMC Manufacturer of the Year Summit and Awards Luncheon in downtown Phoenix. Brewer said she expects to speak with Padrés Elías about the Maldonado case.

Asked by The Arizona Republic if she is concerned how the Maldonado case might affect tourism between Arizona and Sonora, Brewer said it’s important Arizonans exercise caution while traveling abroad.

Mexico is Arizona’s largest trade partner, with visitors from Mexico spending an average of $7.3 million a day in Arizona stores, restaurants, hotels and other businesses, according to recent figures from the Arizona-Mexico Commission.

During Maldonado’s ordeal, Brewer said her staff was in contact with Mexican and American authorities. Brewer said she does not know if Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto had a role in Maldonado’s release.

“I tried to reach out to her family this morning … the phone is really busy and so we either can’t get through or I can’t leave a message,” the governor said.

Maldonado, 42, was in Mexico with her husband for a funeral and was detained after soldiers found 12 pounds of marijuana taped under her seat on a bus she was taking back to the United States. She was detained on drug charges last week and was released just before midnight Thursday, after a judge reviewed security footage that showed her boarding the bus carrying only blankets, bottles of water and her purse.

Maldonado has said she believes drug smugglers were responsible for hiding the marijuana found under her bus seat and she just happened to be the unlucky passenger who sat there.

Following her Friday morning news conference, Brewer told The Republic she could not assess how Mexican authorities handled Maldonado’s case.

“It’s always a difficult thing to say because you’re not down there, and you get all your information from staff and third hand, or from the news,” Brewer said. “My heart was breaking for her and her family. Today, I think we’re just all rejoicing that it worked out great for them. Unfortunately, she had to spend nine days down there, but she’s home safely now and she can go on with her family and her life.”

Medical marijuana ingredient prevents brain damage in mice

Medical marijuana ingredient prevents brain damage in mice

By Geoffrey Mohan

May 31, 2013, 6:10 a.m.

The words “marijuana” and “brain damage” usually go in that order in medical literature. An Israeli researcher has flipped them around, finding that THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, may arrest some forms of brain damage in mice.

The loco weed already is favored by those who suffer from chronic diseases, not to mention fans of Cypress Hill, Bob Marley and the Grateful Dead.

But pharmacologist Josef Sarne of Tel Aviv University found that a minuscule amount of tetrahydrocannabinol may protect the brain after injuries from seizures, toxic drug exposure or a lack of oxygen.

The amounts wouldn’t qualify as much more than a second-hand whiff of kine bud – the quantity of THC is an order of 1,000 to 10,000 lower than that in a whole spliff.

The new dope on marijuana was published in Behavioural Brain Research and Experimental Brain Research, which are professional journals, not nicknames for HempCon or Burning Man.

Other researchers didn’t tend to Bogart the joint as much. They suggested using high -- their word -- doses within about half an hour after such injury. Sarne would spread a smaller dose over as much as a week.

The chemical is thought to jump-start biochemical processes that protect brain cells and preserve cognitive function.

Researchers injected mice with a low dose of THC either before or after exposing them to brain trauma. Fellow rodents in a control group got their brains bonked without the dose.

About a month or two later, the mice that got the THC treatment performed better in behavioral tests measuring learning and memory and showed they had greater amounts of neuroprotective chemicals than the control-group mice.

Oddly, it may be brain damage on a small scale that causes the brain to shift into protective mode. Researchers theorize the THC causes minute damage to the brain that helps build resistance and triggers protective measures in the face of more severe injury.

The low dose and long window for administering it would have obvious benefits after an injury, but it also could mean that THC can be given prior to a procedure that may carry risk of brain injury, including interruption of blood flow to the brain during surgery. Sarne believes it also could be safe for regular use among epileptics.

Medical marijuana will cause the downfall of Western Civilization???

But for some reason the authors fail to mention that there is not one documented case of a person dying from a marijuana overdose. Maybe it's because they want to demonize marijuana???

The authors also fail to mention that there are probably 100's if not thousands of cases of children being poisoned by drinking alcohol every year in the USA every year. Hey, lets not rain on their parade of demonizing marijuana by talking about the facts!!!

And I suspect every year there are also thousands of other cases of kids who either accidentally or intentionally overdose on other prescription medicines their parents have. But of course the authors strangely forgot to mention that. Maybe because they want to demonize marijuana.

Source

Cases of children accidentally ingesting pot on rise, study says

By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times

May 28, 2013, 7:18 p.m.

As legalized marijuana appears in an increasing number of American homes, so too does evidence of a dark side: accidental ingestion of pot and pot-infused food by young children.

The results can be frightening to such children, who often suffer anxiety attacks when they start to feel unexpected symptoms of being high: hallucinations, dizziness, altered perception and impaired thinking.

And the trend should prompt equal concern among adult caregivers and public health authorities, since ingestion of highly potent marijuana by young children can suppress respiration and even induce coma, according to a study published online this week in JAMA Pediatrics. [Huh??? How many kilos of weed would a small child have to eat to induce a coma???]

"You talk to people about the secondary consequences of marijuana legalization and they say, 'Oh, I never thought of that,'" said Dr. Jeffrey Galinkin, a professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the University of Colorado-Denver, who was not involved in the study. "This is a public health disaster that's just waiting to happen."

The JAMA Pediatrics study was conducted by researchers from the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center and Children's Hospital in Denver. Team members tallied visits to the center's emergency department for accidental marijuana ingestion between Oct. 1, 2009 and Dec. 31, 2011 — a period during which there was a sharp increase in medical marijuana cards issued to Coloradans, as the U.S. Justice Department relaxed its policy of enforcing federal laws against marijuana in states that allowed its use.

Doctors confirmed that 14 children 12 years old or younger had accidentally eaten pot. In nearly five years leading up to the study, the same emergency department had seen not a single lab-confirmed case of marijuana ingestion by young children.

The children affected ranged from 8 months to 12 years old. Though one child was discharged from the emergency department without delay and five were released after observation, eight were admitted to the hospital — two, to pediatric intensive care.

Eight of the children ingested marijuana when they ate food products — cakes, brownies, candies, drinks and other treats — made with the drug. And seven of the food-based cases involved medical marijuana, which packs an intense dose of marijuana's active ingredient — tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. [Give me a break, for all practical purposes medical marijuana is the same stuff as marijuana you buy on the street. The only difference is that medical marijuana is legal and street marijuana isn't!!!]

Despite the recent legalization of pot for recreational purposes in two states — Colorado and Washington — and legalization of medical marijuana in a growing number of states, there are no requirements on states' books that marijuana products be dispensed in child-proof containers, nor that packaging bear warnings about the products' effects if accidentally ingested by children.

In an accompanying editorial, Drs. William Hurley and Suzan Mazor, who were not involved in the primary study, called for stepped-up tracking of accidental marijuana ingestion and suggested that dispensaries and retail establishments selling marijuana and marijuana-infused food products warn customers about the dangers to children. [When you are paying $200+ an ounce for medical marijuana, that is one very good financial reason for parents to keep the kiddies out of their stash!!!!]

Establishments could consider using child-proof containers as well, wrote Hurley, a physician with the Washington Poison Center, and Mazor, an emergency department pediatrician at Seattle Children's Hospital.

Galinkin said that accidental ingestion was only one of many medical effects that were not thought through as medical marijuana use has expanded.

Standards defining impairment for drivers under the influence of marijuana have not been set, he said, and the safety of prescribing opioid painkillers to patients who smoke marijuana for pain is not well understood.

For adolescents at risk of developing schizophrenia, Galinkin cited strong evidence that early marijuana use accelerates the age of the first symptoms of psychosis.

In a state with a weak mental health infrastructure, surging marijuana use among teens could be catastrophic, he said.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

Mandatory DUI tests unconstitutional????

The article doesn't come out and say it like I just did, but I think that is the effect of the ruling.

From a historical perspective I think that the royal rulers of Arizona said that driving is not a right but a privilege that the state can give you.

And if you wish to accept the privilege of driving you must give up your 4th Amendment right against the government searching you. And that by signing your drivers license you give up your 4th Amendment right.

Some back ground on this would the the Northwest Ordinance.

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the first laws passed by the US Congress and I think it was passed on July 13, 1787.

The Northwest Ordinance says that for any new states to enter the Union they must agree not to tax people who travel on public roads for noncommercial purposes.

Back in those days the main public roads were rivers, which were kind of like the freeways of those days.

Some legal scholars says that that the Northwest Ordinance makes it illegal for states to require you to get a drivers license for non-commercial travel on government highways.

One key point here is that states can't tax people who travel on public highways for non-commercial reasons. But the Northwest Ordinance does allow states to tax people who travel on public highways for commercial reasons.

It was called the Northwest Ordinance because it covered the Northwest Territories which included Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

Source

Arizona Supreme Court bars DUI blood tests without warrant

HOWARD FISCHER Capitol Media Services

PHOENIX -- Police cannot use the state's traffic laws to draw blood from suspected drunk drivers without a warrant absent their specific permission at the time of the test, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

In a unanimous decision, the justices rejected the contention by the Pima County Attorney's Office that all Arizona motorists give "implied consent" to having blood, breath or urine tests as a condition to be licensed to drive. They said that means, absent a clear -- and voluntary -- consent immediately prior to the blood draw, it is an illegal search without a warrant.

In a wide-ranging ruling, the high court also said that the ability of juveniles to give that voluntary consent is not absolute -- and not the same as an adult. Justice Scott Bales, writing for the court, said a trial judge must consider all the factors, including the age of the suspect and the failure to notify parents.

But the justices refused to rule that the absence of a juvenile's parents automatically means any consent is not voluntary.

Thursday's ruling most immediately means that charges of driving under the influence of drugs will be dropped against the youth, identified in court records only as Tyler B. because he was 16 at the time of the arrest.

But he is not out of the legal woods yet. Deputy County Attorney Nicolette Kneut said Tyler, who has since turned 18, still faces charges of possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia in justice court as an adult.

Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall said Thursday's ruling will complicate the job that police statewide are required to do. She said the high court has provided no guidance.

"How is the officer supposed to know whether or not it's been an express consent," she said. "It just makes it really, really tough because there isn't any bright line." [Duh, the 4th Amendment you idiot!!!!]

LaWall said the ruling means that her office will advise police to get a court-ordered warrant whenever possible before drawing blood, even when a motorist -- and now, especially a juvenile -- gives approval for a blood draw. That, she said, eliminates any possibility of having that consent later ruled involuntary.

According to court records, Tyler and two friends arrived late to school. A school monitor smelled marijuana on the boys and also saw drug paraphernalia in Tyler's car.

The boys were detained in separate rooms while sheriff's deputies were contacted.

A deputy read Tyler his Miranda warnings against self-incrimination and the right to an attorney. But the court files said that Tyler, in the presence of several school officials, admitted he had driven his car to school after smoking marijuana and that he owned some of the paraphernalia in the car.

When the deputy placed Tyler under arrested, the youth became agitated and was placed in handcuffs while the deputy retrieved a blood-draw kit from his car.

On returning, he saw Tyler had calmed down and he removed the cuffs. He then read Tyler from the law which says that Arizona motorists must consent to blood or other tests and that refusal will result in automatic suspension of driving privileges.

Tyler agreed verbally and in writing to the blood draw. But when the case went to court, Tyler argued his consent was not voluntary and that, as a minor, he lacked capacity to consent.

When the court commissioner agreed and suppressed the evidence, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Bales said the issue has never been decided in Arizona.

Bales rejected arguments by prosecutors that "implied consent" law means there is no need to determine whether a consent at the time of the blood draw is voluntary.

"A compelled blood draw, even when administered pursuant to (the implied consent law) is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment's constraints," he wrote for the court. "Such an invasion of bodily integrity implicates an individual's most personal and deep-rooted expectations of privacy."

He said the law says only that an officer must ask a suspect to submit to the test -- and that if a person refuses, a warrant is needed and the suspect's licenses is suspended.

Bales said a motorist can allow a warrantless search "provided the consent is voluntary." But that, he said has to be decided by a court based on all the circumstances, including the suspect's age -- and even whether a parent is present.

In this case, Bales wrote, the court commissioner was correct in ruling that, based on the evidence she had, Tyler's consent was not voluntary.

He said Tyler was detained for about two hours in a room in the presence of school officials and a deputy, without his parents.

"Tyler initially was shaking and visibly nervous," Bales wrote, and placed in handcuffs until he calmed down. And he said that the law read to him about "implied consent" ended with the statement, "You are, therefore, required to submit to the specified tests."

It was only then, Bales said, Tyler consented to the blood draw.

Thursday's ruling drew a special comment from Justice John Pelander. He said his own review of the evidence leads him to believe Tyler did voluntarily consent.

But Pelander said Arizona law requires he and the other justices not to reweigh the evidence but only to consider whether the court commissioner abused her discretion in suppressing the evidence.

Ruling will change DUI enforcement

Sadly over the years the DUI laws have changed from allegedly protecting us from drunk drivers to being a way for the government to raise money by shaking down people who are not even close to drunk.

When the DUI laws were first invented the legal limit was .15. It takes me about 5 beers to get to .15 and I think I am pretty damn drunk after that many beers.

Over the years the Federal government bribed the state governments with cold hard cash to get the states to lower the legal limit to .10, then to .08 and now is considering again bribing the states to get them to lower the legal limit to .05.

At the .08 legal limit a 100 pound person is legally drunk after 1 beer. At the .08 limit I am legally drunk before I can finish my third beer.

In both cases I seriously doubt that is enough alcohol to impair a person driving and think the DUI laws are mainly designed to raise revenue for the government.

In Arizona the DUI fines used to start at $1,000 for a simple DUI ticket. I think that was recently raises to $2,000. An extreme DUI for .15, which was the first DUI level will probably set you back $5,000 to $10,000 in fines.

When you read about holiday weekend DUI arrests in Arizona the cops routinely arrest 500 or more people for DUI, which under the new laws is at least $1 million dollars in DUI fines.

Source

Ruling will change DUI enforcement

Arizona has some of the toughest DUI laws in the nation, but a new state Supreme Court ruling could complicate how those laws are enforced.

In an opinion issued, the court ruled that blood draws are voluntarily and must be done with a suspect’s consent — that is, unless officers get a warrant to draw the blood first.

The ruling throws up further roadblocks to complete the tests on juveniles. As Capitol Media Services reports, some departments will be advised to just get the warrant, anyway, even if suspects consent to the test.

That could make it difficult to get accurate blood-alcohol results. Warrants take time that the body can use to process what’s in the system. Or, it could result in a greater focus on people who are clearly drunk, not necessarily those that are on the borderline.

The ruling is even more interesting in light of the national debate to lower the legal blood-alcohol limit to .05.

Judge: Google must give user info to FBI

Judge: Google must give user info to FBI

By PAUL ELIAS, Associated Press

Updated 10:44 am, Saturday, June 1, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google must comply with the FBI's demand for data on certain customers as part of a national security investigation, according to a ruling by a federal judge who earlier this year determined such government requests are unconstitutional.

The decision involves "National Security Letters," thousands of which are sent yearly by the FBI to banks, telecommunication companies and other businesses. The letters, an outgrowth of the USA Patriot Act passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, are supposed to be used exclusively for national security purposes and are sent without judicial review. Recipients are barred from disclosing anything about them.

In March, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston sided with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in a lawsuit brought on behalf of an unidentified telecommunications company, ruling the letters violate free speech rights. She said the government failed to show the letters and the blanket non-disclosure policy "serve the compelling need of national security" and the gag order creates "too large a danger that speech is being unnecessarily restricted."

She put that ruling on hold while the government appeals to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In the latest case, Illston sided with the FBI after Google contested the constitutionality and necessity of the letters but again put her ruling on hold until the 9th Circuit rules. After receiving sworn statements from two top-ranking FBI officials, Illston said she was satisfied that 17 of the 19 letters were issued properly. She wanted more information on two other letters.

It was unclear from the judge's ruling what type of information the government sought to obtain with the letters. It was also unclear who the government was targeting.

Kurt Opsah, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he was "disappointed that the same judge who declared these letters unconstitutional is now requiring compliance with them."

Illston's May 20 order omits any mention of Google or that the proceedings were closed to the public. But the judge said "the petitioner" was involved in a similar case filed on April 22 in New York federal court.

Public records obtained Friday by The Associated Press show that on that same day, the federal government filed a "petition to enforce National Security Letter" against Google after the company declined to cooperate with government demands.

Neither Google nor the FBI would comment.

The letters issued by the FBI can be used to collect unlimited kinds of private information, such as financial and phone records. The FBI sent 16,511 letters requests for information regarding 7,201 people in 2011, the latest data available.

Critics contend the government is overly zealous in using the letters, unnecessarily infringing on privacy rights of American citizens. In 2007, the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread violations by the FBI, including sending demands without proper authorization. The FBI has since tightened oversight of the system.

Mexican President Vicente Fox backs pot legalization in US

Video: Former president of Mexico Vicente Fox backs marijuana legalization in US

By jakeellisonseattlepi-com-jake-ellison@blog.timesunion.com

At a press conference in Seattle today the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, backed plans in Washington and Colorado to make a legal market for marijuana in the United States.

Citing the loss of human life in his country due to the failed war on drugs and the black market that grew up in its shadows to feed the massive market for marijuana in the U.S., Fox said he hoped for an orderly and tightly regulated marijuana market here.

“We all understand that we human beings perform best in scenarios of peace and harmony. A new responsible society will bring this peace and harmony. About the loses? We cannot be worse than where we are. The war [on drugs] has been lost all along and it has been lost again and again. It’s time for a new start. It’s time for a new vision. That’s why I applaud this group,” Fox said.

The conference was organized by former Microsoft manager and now marijuana advocate Jamen Shively to announce his company’s plans to create a national brand and business out of the legal marijuana markets coming online in Washington and Colorado.

Check out the videos for the rest of the story: Above Fox expresses his support and concerns and below Jamen Shively, CEO of Diego Pellicer Inc., lays out his company’s plan to become a major player in an international and national marijuana market.

Border technology remains flawed

Think of it as a government welfare program for the corporations in the military industrial complex. And a jobs program for cops or CBP officers as the article calls them (21,394 now, plus 3,500 to be hired).

The $106 billion spend in the article amounts to $350 for each of the 300 million men, women and children in the USA, or about $700 for every adult.

Remember the money is mainly being spend to keep Mexicans from entering the USA. If you look at it in those terms, the $106 billion spent amounts to $960 for each of the 110 million people in the Mexico, or about $1,900 for every adult in Mexico.

This is also pretty much proof that the American war on drugs is a dismal failure. Despite spending these billions of dollars any high school kid in America knows where to buy a bag of marijuana.

One thing that surprised me in the article was that the high tech drones the American government uses to murder people in Afghanistan and Iraq cost more to operate then the old fashioned planes flown by humans.

The second article says the P-3 AEW Orion Surveillance aircraft which are flown by humans cost less to operate then the Predator B drones which cost $3,234 an hour to operate.

Source

Border technology remains flawed

$106 billion has been spent on border security over the past 5 years

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Jun 2, 2013 9:19 AM

TUCSON - A long, sharp, high-pitched beep sounds every 30 or 40 seconds at the Border Patrol’s windowless sector-control room.

Agents here monitor a vast array of video screens and sensors linked to cameras, radar and other surveillance equipment along 262 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border — including hundreds of ground sensors that beep loudly whenever one detects something.

That something might be a drug smuggler or a migrant — but far, far more often, it’s a cow, or the wind, or some other false alarm, which may be why the agents seem to pay these constant beeps little mind.

To complement the 651 miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexican border, Customs and Border Protection deploys drones, tethered radar blimps, P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, thermal-imaging devices, towers with day and night video cameras, ground surveillance radar and much more.

But, as the ceaseless beeping of the sensor alarms illustrates, many pieces of that technology are flawed: Some produce frequent false alarms, some suffer detection failures or leave gaps in coverage. Then, too, CBP — despite spending more than $106 billion over the past five years militarizing and securing the border — struggles to mesh these pieces smoothly together so it can make good use of the data they provide.

The flaws, the gaps and the challenges in analyzing the data have left CBP, of which the Border Patrol is a part, unable to answer such seemingly basic questions as how well all of this technology works and how many of the people and how much of the drugs coming across the border make it through.

Many border-security analysts see that lack of answers as problematic, given current plans in Congress.

The comprehensive immigration-reform bill being debated in the Senate would boost border-security spending by as much as $6.5 billion over the next five years. That would roughly quadruple the more than $2 billion in Customs and Border Protection’s existing budget plans for more technology and to fix what’s in place.

In a nutshell, the bill would require the Border Patrol to build more fencing, more stations and more remote “forward-operating bases” near the border; to increase surveillance to cover the entire border 24 hours a day, seven days a week; to deploy more planes, helicopters and drones; to increase horse patrols; and to improve radio equipment and communication with other federal, state and local law enforcement.

The bill also mandates hiring another 3,500 CBP officers (who work at ports of entry, versus Border Patrol agents, who work the rest of the border), a 16-percent increase, among other provisions. And it would require the Border Patrol to apprehend or turn back 90 percent of would-be border crossers.

Within Congress, tighter border security has been treated as a precondition for any reform of immigration policy, but many analysts and academics who study the border express doubts about the need for more fences, agents and surveillance.

The number of Border Patrol agents nearly doubled over the last seven fiscal years, to 21,394. But over that time period, the number of migrants heading north plunged — mostly because of the U.S. economic downturn, most analysts say, but also in part because of the increasing dangers of going north as more fences and surveillance pushed crossers into more remote areas. Border Patrol apprehensions fell 69 percent over those years, from nearly 1.2 million to fewer than 365,000.

In 2005, Border Patrol agents apprehended an average of 106 people a year apiece. Last year, each agent apprehended an average of 17 people, or about one person every three weeks. In the Tucson Sector, each agent averaged 28 apprehensions a year, or about one every 13 days. In Yuma, each agent averaged one every two months. In the El Paso Sector, the least busy, each agent averaged 3.5 apprehensions a year.

“On a lot of parts of the border, it’s gotten to the point that every person we put out there makes less and less of an additional difference,” said Eric Olson, associate director of the Latin American program at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank that seeks to connect academic research to public-policy discussion.

Complicating this picture is the fact that over the six months ending in March, Border Patrol apprehensions along the Southwest border climbed 13 percent from a year earlier, to just over 189,000. Most of that increase is happening in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Even with this rebound, apprehension numbers over that period are still the third lowest since 1972, above only last year and the year before.

Looking at the current state of border security, most analysts agree on some needs — such as improving radio communications — but some say CBP really should focus on what it has in hand.

“It’s not just putting a surveillance camera somewhere and you’re done; the challenge is integrating the data into Border Patrol operations. ... The Department of Homeland Security (which includes CBP) needs to step back ... and integrate the technology they have now before they get any new technology,” said James Lewis, director of the technology and public-policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative D.C. foreign-policy think tank focused on political, economic and security issues.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said what is “really needed is a serious management effort to see what works and what doesn’t.” The lack of such an assessment “is at some level an irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars, given that we spend $18 billion a year on immigration enforcement,” added Alden, one of the authors of a recent study on the effectiveness of border enforcement.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, one of the “Gang of Eight” promoting immigration reform in Washington along with Arizona’s other Republican senator, John McCain, said Saturday that the issues of added border security and technology snafus have been thoroughly discussed.

“We believe the situation clearly is better on the border than in times past; the frustration with all of us is with conflicting information out of DHS. Within the same report, they’ll use increased apprehensions to signal success, and decreased apprehensions to signal success,” Flake said.

“We haven’t had a comprehensive plan by the Border Patrol to reach certain metrics of effectiveness. We did come to the conclusion that more barriers in certain places, more manpower where they need it and more technology would help ... but in combination with employer enforcement, and a legal framework for people to come in.”

The Republic made several requests to interview Mark Borkowski, the CPB’s assistant commissioner in charge of technology and acquisition. DHS and CPB did not make him or other agency officials available.

Faulty ground sensors

The ground sensors offer one example of the challenge of making sure technology works properly. About 13,400 have been deployed piecemeal along the border over several decades. They are typically placed along known or suspected migrant or smuggler routes, and may detect vibrations (for foot traffic), metal (for vehicles) or have acoustic or infrared sensors. Sensors from the Vietnam War era remain in use.

A possible false alarm from a ground sensor, and faulty radio communications, may have contributed to the death of Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie in a friendly-fire incident Oct. 2. As is often the case with sensor alarms, agents didn’t detect anyone but each other when they arrived. Ivie, responding separately, apparently mistook the other agents for smugglers and opened fire. One of the agents shot and killed him.

But false alarms are nothing new.

In 2005, Homeland Security’s inspector general reported that only 4 percent of the alarm signals detected migrants or smugglers (34 percent were confirmed false alarms, 62 percent couldn’t be determined). The sensors, which run on batteries, frequently fail because of corrosion or bugs eating through wires.

They were supposed to be replaced as part of the $1.1 billion Secure Border Initiative, a massive 2006 effort to boost security at the border. But most of the money was spent on a problematic network of high-tech towers, known as SBInet.

The towers, to be equipped with video and infrared cameras and radar, were to cover the whole border. By the time Homeland Security pulled the plug in 2010, after a host of problems, the contractor, Boeing, had completed only 15 towers covering a 72-mile stretch of Arizona’s border. Most of the old ground sensors — with their false-alarm problems — remained.

In January 2011, Homeland Security launched another initiative, the Arizona Border Surveillance Technology Plan.

That plan called for spending $1.5 billion over 10 years to integrate the SBInet towers, build new camera towers, buy trucks loaded with surveillance gear — and replace 525 ground sensors in Arizona with more sophisticated military models. The military sensors use a combination of technologies that can distinguish more accurately between, say, a four-legged coyote and the two-legged kind, and can even detect the direction of travel.

But CBP confirmed this past week that — eight years after the problems were identified — the sensors still had not been replaced.

However, under the new technology plan, Arizona agents have received:

Twenty-three hand-held thermal-imaging devices (like night-vision binoculars).

Two “scope trucks” – modified Ford 150 4x4 trucks with day and night cameras mounted on retractable poles.

Twelve “agent portable surveillance systems,” which include radar, video and infrared video sensors and can be carried in a box and set up on tripods.

Drone problems

Drones, too, have proven problematic. So far, CBP has acquired 10 drones, all versions of the Predator B made by General Atomics, for about $18 million apiece. CBP’s unarmed drones carry radar, video and infrared sensors.

Theoretically, the drones can fly for up to 20 hours at a time. But last year, according to CBP, the drones flew an average of 94 minutes a day. The main problem: CBP spent so much of its budget buying the drones that it hadn’t set aside enough to operate them.

“They’re on the ground most of the time for lack of funding,” said Adam Isacson, a regional security-policy analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America, a human-rights organization that studies the effects of U.S. policies on Latin America. “They cost $3,234 an hour to operate. They haven’t had the budget for maintenance or crews.”

Last year, Homeland Security’s inspector general found that, because of poor planning, CBP not only flew the drones less than one-third the number of planned hours in 2011, but also had to use $25 million from other budgets pay for the hours the drones did fly.

CBP also didn’t have enough operational support equipment at the airfields where the drones are based, and didn’t prioritize missions effectively, the inspector general found — all findings with which CBP concurred. Flight hours last year rose 30 percent from the year before, to 5,700, but were still well below half the target hours. Budget cuts this year because of the congressional sequester are likely to further limit flight hours, Isacson said.

The drones are sensitive to high winds and thunderstorms. They face Federal Aviation Administration flight restrictions because they are less able than manned aircraft to detect other aircraft and avoid collisions. And their use raises privacy concerns.

At a Senate hearing in March, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., cited reports that “DHS has customized its drone fleet to carry out domestic surveillance missions such as identifying civilians carrying guns ...” that fly in the face of civil liberties. “We must ask whether the trade-off in terms of border security is worth the privacy sacrifice.”

But CBP officials have said they believe FAA concerns and other issues can be addressed, and that drones can help increase surveillance wherever it’s most needed.

More coordination

In practice, every piece of technology at the border has limitations:

Eight aerostats, or tethered radar blimps, that CBP is taking over from the military, can’t be flown in high winds, and the line-of-sight radar makes them less effective in rugged, mountainous areas, which is much of the Tucson Sector. In May 2011, an aerostat crashed in a Sierra Vista neighborhood after coming loose in 50-mile-an-hour wind gusts.

CBP limits the use of its 16 Blackhawk helicopters because the high rate at which they guzzle fuel makes them very expensive to operate, according to pilots; and CBP budget documents confirm plans to temporarily ground nine of the 16 Blackhawks next year pending enough money for renovations.

The 16 workhorse P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft are, on average, 42 years old. Refurbishing costs $28 million apiece.

But the bigger issue is a lack of coordination in fitting all of the pieces together and making effective use of the data they provide, said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “It’s still hard for CBP to figure out what we get out of all these billions that have been spent,” he said, which hampers planning for the future.

Others argue that focus now should be on the ports of entry rather than on the vast spaces between them.

By some estimates, as many as 40 percent of undocumented migrants are people who entered legally through ports of entry and overstayed their visas, said Eric Olson, at the Wilson Center. And, according to CBP data, most hard drugs are smuggled through the ports.

“A strong case can be made now that the biggest risks are at the ports of entry,” Olson said.

Olson supports the bill’s call to add 3,500 more CBP officers, which he said also potentially “has a huge benefit, which is making the ports more efficient and reducing wait times for business and for legal travelers between the U.S. and Mexico.”

Outside analysts aren’t the only ones suggesting Congress reconsider its focus on more security.

A May 3 Congressional Research Service study invited members of Congress to consider that “certain additional investments at the border may be met with diminishing returns.” Some lawmakers, the report said, “may question the concrete benefits of deploying more sophisticated surveillance systems across ... vast regions in which too few personnel are deployed to respond to the occasional illegal entry that may be detected.”

For their part, Homeland Security, CBP and Border Patrol officials in recent months reiterated Secretary Janet Napolitano’s insistence that the border is more secure than ever before. And Assistant Commissioner Borkowski earlier this year made it clear CBP learned one lesson from its past struggles with technology: He said CBP won’t even consider buying technology unless it has been proven to work in the field.

But Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., sees the push for border security as political. “Without it, you don’t have a path to citizenship or any real compromise” in the immigration bill, he said.

“But if we’re going to put more resources on the border, we should modernize the ports of entry, to expedite trade and travel,” Grijalva said. More drones, towers and sensors “may have symbolic value. But it’s fighting a perception, rather than a reality.”

Source

Border technology tools: Pros, cons and cost

By Bob Ortega The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Jun 1, 2013 11:29 PM

U.S. Customs and Border Protection currently relies on a variety of technological tools to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border. In addition to nearly 651 miles of barriers, the agency deploys drones, tethered radar blimps, P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft, thermal-imaging devices, towers with day and night video cameras, ground surveillance radar and much more.

But many pieces of that technology are flawed: Some produce frequent false alarms, some suffer detection failures or leave gaps in coverage.

An immigration-reform bill being debated in the Senate would boost border-security spending by as much $6.5 billion over the next five years.

Here's a look at the current tech tools used by CBP, including pros, cons and cost of each.

Border technology tools

What: MQ9 Predator B and Guardian Drones

Pros: Has capacity to fly for 20 hours at a stretch.

Cons: High cost, lack of trained pilots and FAA regulations limit use; sensitive to strong winds; can’t detect and avoid other aircraft.

Cost: $24 million each, plus $3,234 per hour to fly each drone

Number: 10 deployed, CBP plans to have 17 by 2017

What: P-3 AEW Orion Surveillance aircraft (four-engine turboprop)

Pros: Cheaper to fly per hour than drones, has wide-range radar.

Cons: Aircraft are 42 years old on average

Cost: $28 million each to refurbish.

Number: 14 of 16 deployed are being refurbished.

What: MQ9 Predator B and Guardian Drones

Pros: Has capacity to fly for 20 hours at a stretch.

Cons: High cost, lack of trained pilots and FAA regulations limit use; sensitive to strong winds; can’t detect and avoid other aircraft.

Cost: $24 million each, plus $3,234 per hour to fly each drone

Number: 10 deployed, CBP plans to have 17 by 2017

What: P-3 AEW Orion Surveillance aircraft (four-engine turboprop)

Pros: Cheaper to fly per hour than drones, has wide-range radar.

Cons: Aircraft are 42 years old on average

Cost: $28 million each to refurbish.

Number: 14 of 16 deployed are being refurbished.

What: KA-350 CER Multi-Role Enforcement aircraft (twin-engine turboprop)

Pros: Wider field of view/radar search area than drone, can carry more gear.

Cons: Shorter range, flight time limited to 7 hours.

Cost: $21.5 million each

Number: 2 deployed, 2 more being acquired; plans call for 30 more

What: UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters

Pros: All-weather capability, large, powerful engines.

Cons: CBP planning temporary grounding of 9 of 16 Blackhawks because of high fuel consumption and operating costs. Noisy in flight, so smugglers can hear it coming.

Cost: $17.5 million each to convert, upgrade existing craft

Number: 16

What: Unattended ground sensors

Pros: Relatively inexpensive.

Cons: Deployed older units, some from Vietnam era, have high rate of false alarms (a DHS study found only 4 percent of alarms actually detected migrants or smugglers). New, more accurate units not yet deployed and integrated into sensor systems.

Cost: Base price for new units, also used by military, ranges from $5,000 to $7,000 for the basic sensor, to about $15,000 per unit fully deployed with relays, accessories.

Number: 12,800 (mostly older units)

What: Remote Video Surveillance Systems (day/night cameras mounted on 80 –foot pole)

Pros: Already in place, offer surveillance in remote areas.

Cons: Require frequent repair, hot or cold weather can cause cameras to get stuck; can’t automatically detect movement or activity; vulnerable to power outages; aren’t mobile.

Cost: $224 million contract planned.

Number: 337 currently deployed

What: SBInet Sensor Towers

Pros: Cameras and radar provide surveillance in remote areas

Cons: No mobility, line-of-sight gaps in coverage, proprietary software

Cost: $11 million per tower to erect, plus $1.2 million per tower per year to operate and maintain.

Number: 15 towers (plus 10 communications towers)

What: Integrated Fixed Towers

Pros: Using off-the-shelf technology making them more reliable, easier to integrate than SBInet towers

Cons: Purely theoretical at this point; contract expected to be issued by early 2014.

Cost: $1.1 billion contract planned

Number: 67 planned

What: Aerostats

Pros: Can stay aloft for days at a time.

Cons: Can’t be used in high winds (one crashed in Sierra Vista in May 2011 in 50 m.p.h. wind gusts); line-of-sight radar makes them less useful in mountainous areas, such as southeastern Arizona.

Cost: $4.7 million a year to maintain and operate

Number: 8

What: Aerostats

Pros: Can stay aloft for days at a time.

Cons: Can’t be used in high winds (one crashed in Sierra Vista in May 2011 in 50 m.p.h. wind gusts); line-of-sight radar makes them less useful in mountainous areas, such as southeastern Arizona.

Cost: $4.7 million a year to maintain and operate

Number: 8

Letter: Alcohol part of why pot still illegal

Letter: Alcohol part of why pot still illegal

Posted: Saturday, June 1, 2013 9:01 am

Letter to the Editor

Regarding the story, “Mathieu enters NFL drug testing program” from May 26:

So why does the NFL care weather Tyrann Mathieu or any other player uses marijuana instead of alcohol during their off time? Money. And lots of it.

What industry spends the most on TV advertising for sporting events? The beer industry.

As marijuana use increases, beer consumption goes down. The beer industry knows this. And this is one of the major reasons marijuana remains a criminalized substance.

Kirk Muse

Mesa

I should also note that Senator John McCain's wife owns Hensley & Co which is a major distributor of liquor in the Phoenix area.

I suspect it would be very hard for Senator John McCain to vote to legalize marijuana when it would cut into his family's liquor sales.

Make marijuana and cars illegal to protect the children????

Source

Child deaths in hot cars soar in May

Jayne O'Donnell, USA TODAY7 p.m. EDT May 31, 2013

Summer hasn't even arrived and the number of children who died when left in hot cars is nearly double the average for May, the advocacy group Kids and Cars said Friday

Summer hasn't even arrived and the number of children who have died after being left in hot cars is nearly double the average for May, the advocacy group Kids and Cars said Friday.

Seven children died in hot cars during a 16-day period in four states. All but one was left by a family member, the group says.

Among the deaths:

• A five-month-old girl died May 10 in El Paso after her mother left her in her SUV without realizing it.

• A boy, 4, died May 15 in Transylvania County, N.C. His grandmother forgot to drop him off at his daycare facility.

• A boy, 18 months, and a 2-month-old girl died May 26 in Glen Allen, Va., when they were left in the car while their mother was at work.

"The worst thing any parent or caregiver can do is think that this could never happen to them, that they are not capable of inadvertently leaving their child behind," says Kids and Cars founder Janette Fennell. "This can and does happen to the most loving, responsible and attentive parents.

Fennell recommends putting something in the back seat so you have to open the back door when leaving the vehicle. Another option: Put a stuffed animal in the child seat when it's not in use and move it to the front seat when your child is in the car. It will serve as a reminder that the child seat is in use.

Chicago terror case sparks debate about undercover stings

Of course in all of them when you read the fine print the FBI created the terrorist plots themselves and then suckered young Muslim Americas into becoming participants in the terrorist plot.

NONE of these so called terrorist plots would have existed in FBI agents had not created them.

As I always do I say the FBI agents are creating jobs for themselves, by creating these imaginary terrorist plots and then suckering naive, patriotic Muslim kids into becoming participants in them.

And in all of the cases I can remember the young Muslim kids were not arrested until after they had been given dummy explosive devices by the FBI and tried to detonate them.

Last I should say these imagainary crimes which are created by the FBI are not limited to terrorist cases. They do it all the time with other things such as drug war crimes, money laundering, gambling andguns.

Source

Chicago terror case sparks debate about undercover stings

By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporter

June 1, 2013

To the federal government, Sami Samir Hassoun was a determined terrorist with dangerous plans for Chicago — explosive devices, biological attacks and sniper shootings on police. His family and defense team say he was nothing more than a shameless storyteller who did not possess the sophistication to execute his outlandish and violent ideas.

He was arrested in an undercover sting run by FBI agents, charged, convicted and, on Thursday, sentenced to 23 years in prison for planting what he thought was a bomb near Wrigley Field.

Undercover stings like the one that led to Hassoun's arrest have long been employed by law enforcement, but over the past five years, their use and the use of informants have become more established tools in terrorism investigations across the country. In Chicago, three such terror plots, including Hassoun's, have been interrupted in recent years, authorities said.

But the use of such sting operations, particularly on younger targets, does not come without controversy. Defense attorneys and other critics say the government almost promotes criminal behavior by keeping would-be terrorists engaged, and comes dangerously close to entrapment — when law enforcement authorities coax someone who has not shown a predisposition to commit a crime to follow through.

Prosecutors say the undercover stings are critical to their battle against terror plots, especially those that are homegrown.

Hanging in the balance, they say, is the frightening possibility that law enforcement will miss the chance to stop an attack like the one at this year's Boston Marathon, where two brothers allegedly planted explosives near the finish line of the nation's most famous running race, killing three people and injuring more than 260.

"You can't ignore the potential threat. You have to see how serious it is," said Chicago attorney Dan Collins, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw one of the city's most serious terror cases. "Whether you are a bragger or the shyest person on the planet, you do have the ability to present a threat."

In Hassoun's case, authorities learned of his plans from an informant. Undercover agents told Hassoun, who then was 22, that they were religious radicals and even paid him to carry out the bombing, later providing him with a phony explosive device.

Prosecutors said Hassoun was already committed to his plan when agents got involved.

In the two other local cases, the FBI also used covert operations to draw out targets; in those cases, the suspects were teenagers.

Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, of Aurora, was accused of going online at age 18 to join what he thought was a violent militant group with ties to al-Qaida in war-torn Syria. In reality, it was an FBI-run Internet site.

Tounisi's close friend Adel Daoud, also 18, came under the scrutiny of the FBI after posting messages online about killing Americans, authorities said. Undercover FBI analysts exchanged messages with him, ultimately arranging to meet.

As with Hassoun, they provided Daoud with a phony explosive device, this one a car he thought was rigged with a bomb, authorities said.

Tounisi and Daoud cut young and sympathetic figures in court that contrasted with the violent plans at the center of the charges against them. Their alleged exchanges with the government on the Internet also hint at their youth and immaturity, with Daoud using phrases like "LOL" and Tounisi allegedly wondering if his small stature would leave him ill-equipped for a fight. Both defendants have pleaded not guilty.

Daoud's attorney, Thomas Anthony Durkin, said last week that he is considering an entrapment defense.

"Adel Daoud was a very impressionable young kid, an immature 18-year-old who got involved in a school project on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida," he said.

While the cases are unique in many ways, the ages of the people swept up in them is a cause for concern, said Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University.

"The youth of these kids is very troubling," she said. "We need to begin to understand these young men who begin to show evidence of violence and willingness to break the law earlier in their lives … directing that, not in terms of law enforcement, but in other social services."

The stings are also a concern for Muslim-Americans. Dr. Zaher Sahloul, former chairman of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, said the stings play on the vulnerabilities of disaffected, immature youths.

"I am very uncomfortable with these tactics," he said. "It touches on a very raw, open wound in the community."

FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde said officials appreciate the desire of Muslim community leaders to intervene with youths who exhibit violent inclinations, and even encourage it. But she stressed the need for law enforcement to move quickly when a potential threat emerges.

"The challenge we are facing is that so much of this is going on online," Hyde said. "And the radicalization is occurring at a relatively fast rate."

At Hassoun's sentencing last week, his age and the prospect that he was entrapped by the government were key points of discussion. Hassoun's attorneys criticized the undercover agents for "moving the ball forward" in the plot, saying Hassoun would never have accomplished it without them.

Prosecutors devoted much of their argument to rebutting that notion, saying he had formulated concrete terror plans and was determined to see them through to fruition. He never wavered, the prosecutors said, and he ignored opportunities to back out. They said they were not giving Hassoun ideas but testing his commitment to his own notions.

"How is the FBI supposed to know that Mr. Hassoun might not engage in this kind of chatter with someone else, someone who can really build a bomb?" Assistant U.S. Attorney Tinos Diamantatos said in court.

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman, in sentencing Hassoun, acknowledged the tension in these cases. He noted Hassoun's troubled youth and said the FBI had "led" him during its undercover investigation. But the judge, who also mentioned the Boston Marathon bombings, took pains to say Hassoun never took advantage of the chances the agents gave him to abandon the plot. He gave the agents credit for thwarting Hassoun's plans.

"This is the type of law enforcement we should all applaud," he said.

asweeney@tribune.com

DUI suspect: I was driving in my sleep

DUI suspect: I was driving in my sleep

Associated Press Fri May 31, 2013 5:17 PM

SALEM, Ore. — The Oregon Supreme Court has thrown out a drunken driving conviction on grounds the man should have had a chance to tell the jury he was actually driving in his sleep, and not responsible for his actions.

The Oregonian reports the ruling Friday could set a new standard for drunken driving cases by requiring prosecutors to prove the driver voluntarily got behind the wheel.

The high court ordered a new trial for 51-year-old James Robert Newman of Portland, saying Oregon law requires someone to commit a voluntary act to be held responsible for a crime.

Newman got a ride home after drinking at a restaurant, and later got into his car and started driving. When he was pulled over his blood alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.

Supreme Court - Cops can take DNA samples from arrestees

Sadly the Supreme Court didn't agree with that and now the police routinely force people to give them their fingerprints, which are put into police databases and used to identify people.

It looks like the same path is going to be taken with DNA according to this Supreme Court decision.

Source

Supreme Court upholds Maryland law, says police may take DNA samples from arrestees

By Robert Barnes, Monday, June 3, 8:08 AM E-mail the writer

A divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that police may take DNA samples as part of a routine arrest booking for serious crimes, narrowly upholding a Maryland law and saying the samples can be considered similar to fingerprints.

“DNA identification represents an important advance in the techniques used by law enforcement to serve legitimate police concerns for as long as there have been arrests,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in the 5 to 4 ruling.

The decision overturned a ruling by Maryland’s highest court that the law allows unlawful searches of those arrested to see whether they can be connected to unsolved crimes. The federal government and 28 other states allow taking DNA samples.

The court split in an unusual fashion. The dissenters were three of the court’s liberals, and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who amplified his displeasure by reading a summary of his dissent from the bench.

“The court has cast aside a bedrock rule of our Fourth Amendment law: that the government may not search its citizens for evidence of crime unless there is a reasonable cause to believe that such evidence will be found,” Scalia said from the bench.

He added: “Make no mistake about it: Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

Scalia was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Kennedy wrote that the decision was more limited than that: DNA can be taken from those suspected of “serious” crimes. He said that police have a legitimate interest in identifying the person taken into custody and that the DNA samples could make sure that a dangerous criminal is not released on bail.

“By comparison to this substantial government interest and the unique effectiveness of DNA identification, the intrusion of a cheek swab to obtain a DNA sample is a minimal one,” Kennedy wrote. He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

The challenge to the Maryland law was brought by Alonzo Jay King Jr., whose DNA was taken after a 2009 arrest for assault and used to connect him to an unsolved rape.

Barrons article - Should Pot Be Legal?

Source

Should Pot Be Legal?

By THOMAS G. DONLAN | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR

Legalizing marijuana will hurt drug lords, help cash-strapped states, and ease burdens on police and prisons. Yet D.C. dithers.

America's 40-year crawl toward legalization of marijuana is picking up speed. Twenty-six states have taken steps toward legalization, some quite bold. Just last week, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper made one of the biggest moves yet, signing a package of bills addressing how marijuana will be grown, sold, taxed, and used. The measures, which follow Colorado voters' approval of legalization last fall, form the cornerstone of the nation's first fully legal market for pot. Come Jan. 1, Colorado residents over 21 will be allowed to buy marijuana at retail stores and smoke it for their pleasure. The state of Washington, where voters also passed a referendum to legalize marijuana, will be next. If all goes well with those pioneering efforts, it may be only a matter of time before more states follow.

Proponents say Americans should be allowed to smoke cannabis as a matter of basic personal freedom, adding that a society that enjoys legal whiskey, beer, wine, and tobacco has no business outlawing a recreational drug like pot that has fewer unhealthy side effects. After all, tens of millions of Americans enjoy smoking marijuana, if illegally.

It's Prohibition all over again. That Gatsby-era law gave rise to the Mafia, rampant crime, and in the end, increased drinking. As Rep. Steve Cohen (D., Tenn.) put it recently, "This is the time to remedy this prohibition."

Plenty of people agree. The Pew Research Center recently found that 52% of Americans support legalized possession of small quantities of marijuana. It was the first time a national poll produced a majority against pot prohibition, although the Gallup Poll and other national polls are coming close. The Pew survey found that nearly every group in the country is part of the gradual change in public attitudes -- men, women, whites, blacks, rich, and poor.

It's not just about the right to light up. With the nation's retail marijuana market estimated at about $30 billion, legalization also would bring some important economic benefits. It could lead to sharply lower prices, striking a blow to the Mexican drug cartels and American street gangs. Pot could be produced in the U.S. for much less than Mexican pot produced illegally. By some estimates, illegality adds 50% to marijuana's prices. If both countries legalized the drug, Mexicans might grow a lot of it and sell it to American consumers, but the inexpensive legal product would not draw the attention of the ultraviolent Mexican drug traffickers any more than Mexican tomatoes do.

Legalization also could bring some relief to cash-strapped states. Marijuana taxes would join levies on liquor, tobacco, gambling, and other pursuits that once were banned. A report prepared for the libertarian Cato Institute suggests states could raise a total of about $3 billion from marijuana taxes, and other estimates are even higher. California alone could pull in $1.4 billion a year, a state tax authority has projected. That may seem minor compared with a state budget approaching $100 billion, but it would top the $1.3 billion that California now gets from alcohol and tobacco taxes combined.

Colorado may get about $100 million a year in tax revenue, and Washington could get $310 million. But there is wide disagreement on appropriate tax rates for marijuana. Colorado will be asking voters to approve two sales taxes totaling 25%, while Washington is looking to tax producers, sellers, and buyers -- for a total haul of 75%. That might be so high that it keeps the underground market alive. [Of course if states tax the krap out of marijuana and charge black market prices for legal marijuana with the state governments getting the profits that used to go to the drug cartels, the crime that is caused by black market drugs will continue. The reason the drug war causes crime is because of the black market it creates.]

Unquestionably, a loosening of marijuana laws would ease burdens on law enforcement. Some 663,000 people were arrested for marijuana possession in 2011, up 32% since 1995. In New York, according to the pro-legalization Drug Policy Center, a pot bust typically requires 2.5 hours of a policeman's time. [And cops LOVE that because it means OVERTIME PAY!!!!!] Until Mayor Michael Bloomberg changed the policy in February, the arrested automatically spent a night in the police lockup. Nationwide, some 128,000 people are in state or federal prisons for marijuana offenses. That's 8% of all U.S. prisoners.

Norm Stamper, former chief of the Seattle Police Department, thinks Washington's new law will be a big help. "It will give the police an opportunity to focus much more time, energy, and imagination on going after predatory criminals," he says. Legalization, he adds, also has "opened the door to a much more positive relationship between young people and police."

LITTLE WONDER that more than half of the states have loosened their marijuana rules. Starting with Oregon in 1973, 15 states have decriminalized possession of small amounts of the drug, which means it's illegal but lightly punished, typically with a $100 fine; 18 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana possession and sale for medical purposes, such as easing the pain of cancer. In all, the number of states taking at least one step to liberalize their pot laws is 26. Two more got ready to join last month: The Illinois legislature passed a medical-marijuana bill, and the Vermont legislature passed a decriminalization bill. Both bills await signing by the states' governors.

The federal government, however, has not moved toward legalization, not one bit. [Liar in Chief President Obama has said a number of times he wasn't going to arrest people for medical marijuana, but he continues to send his DEA thugs to California to shake down people for victimless medical marijuana crimes] In fact, the states with medical-marijuana laws are defying or ignoring the federal government, which classifies marijuana as a drug with a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and a lack of acceptable safety, even for use under medical supervision. Efforts to persuade regulators to change the classification of marijuana have been rejected over and over, as recently as 2011.

Emboldened by a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that allows federal prohibition to trump state legalization, the feds have arrested owners of some of the medical dispensaries in California, a state that has permitted dispensaries to operate since 1996. It's entirely unclear how Uncle Sam is going to react when retail sales go into full swing in Colorado and Washington. Attorney General Eric Holder has been promising to produce a policy, but nothing has yet emerged from the Justice Department.

To eliminate the conflicts, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, last month introduced a bill to require the feds to respect state laws on marijuana. "The Herculean effort undertaken by the federal government to prevent the American people from smoking marijuana has undeniably been a colossal failure," he says. Lacking a groundswell of bipartisan support, however, Rohrabacher's bill is considered to have no chance of passage.

"It is likely that we are going to proceed state by state, and that Congress will be unlikely to touch this issue with a pole of any length," says William Galston of the Brookings Institution. "We may very well be a patchwork nation for the next generation."

OTHER STATES WILL JOIN the patchwork as more state officials take a cue from Gavin Newsom, lieutenant governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco. "I was a coward a couple of years ago," he says, referring to the days when he opposed legalization. He switched positions after concluding that legalization would be an important step in his vision for criminal-justice reform.

Newsom, who owns a collection of bars, restaurants, and wineries, also has a more fundamental issue with pot prohibition. "When I'm watching a guy do shots of Jack Daniel's at my bar, I'm thinking, 'That's legal, but a guy at home with his wife on a weekend smoking marijuana is illegal?' It's absurd."

Though he hopes to guide California to legalization, Newsom says the state will first have to improve the regulation of its medical-marijuana dispensaries: "So many of us have had the experience where you're stuck at a traffic light, and you look across the street at a dispensary, and you see a lot of young folks running in and out, and you may even turn the corner and see folks reselling the drug." Until that problem is fixed, he says voters may not believe the state can monitor full legalization.

Another prerequisite: stronger spines in politicians. Many legislators, in California and elsewhere, are fearful of backlashes from antilegalization groups, which warn of increases in crime and harm to youths and families. But eventually, elected officials may come around. Newsom, who is up for re-election in November, hopes to set an example: "If I win and these groups don't come after me, I've got to think some other people will say, 'Hey, they didn't come after him -- maybe it's not as politically toxic as we thought.' "

PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT hurdle for the legalization movement will be the experiences in Colorado and Washington state. If other states are to move toward legalization, these two pioneers will have to demonstrate that legal pot markets can function smoothly and safely.

Though the details of the states' regulations have yet to be hammered out, the bottom line for consumers in both states is similar: If you are over 21, you'll be able to freely buy pot at licensed retail outlets. Already, you can possess as much as an ounce of marijuana, so long as you don't use it in public.

The bills signed by Colorado's governor last week included provisions for curbing drugged driving: You can't get behind the wheel if your blood contains more than five nanograms per milliliter of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, marijuana's key component. A pot smoker can get to that level with as little as one puff, but the numbers decline rapidly over the next three hours, says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Colorado also took steps to prevent marijuana use among youths, making it a crime to share pot with someone under 21 and banning marketing that seems aimed at kids. It's easy to see why the state is worried. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 2.6 million Americans had tried marijuana for the first time in 2011, and their average age was 17. The new pot smokers were more numerous than the 2.4 million Americans who smoked tobacco cigarettes for the first time in 2011, whose average age was also 17. Alcohol was still the most popular among recreational substances, with 4.7 million Americans estimated to have taken their first drink in 2011 -- 83% of them younger than age 21.

The push for marijuana legalization can't afford any slip-ups by Colorado or Washington in dealing with the youth population or anything else. "You're one tragedy away in Colorado and Washington from it not being an inevitability," says California's Newsom. On the other hand, he says, success in those states would bode well for legalization in his state and others.

Last month, the legalization movement got a lift from beyond U.S. borders. The Organization of American States, a consortium of nations in North, Central, and South America, released a report suggesting the legalization of marijuana be considered as a step in the war on drugs.

The last president of Mexico, Felip Calderón, had done something of the same. He was the first Mexican president to broach the idea of drug legalization while still in office. And he wasn't just talking about Mexico. "Our neighbor is the largest consumer of drugs in the world," Calderón said in 2011. "And everybody wants to sell him drugs though our doors and windows. If the consumption of drugs cannot be limited, then decision makers must seek more solutions -- including market alternatives -- in order to reduce the astronomical earnings of criminal organizations." [And just last week, probably after this article was released former Mexican President Vicente Fox who now lives in the US said that American should legalize marijuana]

Calderón left office last year, and his successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, flatly opposes legalization of drugs. Marijuana use, he says, often leads users to harder drugs. Nieto's position is no doubt heartening to drug lords, whose money makes them very powerful in Mexican politics. Legalization in Mexico, it's fair to say, faces formidably long odds.

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, for its part, should at least move to eliminate the widespread confusion between state and federal laws over marijuana use, which has been reaching absurd proportions. Banks in California, for instance, are so unclear about where things stand that they won't let medical-marijuana dispensaries open accounts. As a result, many of the stores are run as cash businesses, inviting robberies. To pay taxes, some are showing up at the state's revenue department with bags of cash.

Whether Congress realizes it or not, a good number of citizens want the problem fixed. The same Pew study that found a majority of people favoring legalization also found that 60% of Americans think the federal government should not enforce its prohibition in states that permit marijuana use. And 72% agreed with the proposition that federal enforcement of marijuana laws is not worth the cost.

Rep. Rohrabacher's plan is as good a fix as any. It's straightforward and sensible: The federal government can help enforce antipot laws in states that want them, but it must mind its own business in states that don't want marijuana to be criminal.

Eventually, the federal government may repeal all of its laws against pot use, pot production, and pot dealing.

They could be replaced by laws no tougher than those that apply to liquor. Just as it was with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Congress could allow states to continue pot prohibition by local option, or to draft their own regulatory systems.

Given the unwillingness of many in Congress to even talk about marijuana, the day of full repeal is probably far off. But tending to the clumsy conflicts between state and federal governments is something that can and should be addressed right now.

MICHAEL D. VALLO assisted in reporting this story.

Video of racist Mesa police beating up Black man????

If you look closely another cop seems to be having some stun gun fun on the man, again, while the man is on the ground and under control of the police. The cop seems to be placing his stun gun on the mans bare back and shocking him. According to the spokesperson from the Mesa Police Department in the following article this type of police stun gun fun is 100 percent acceptable under the Mesa Police policies.

Towards the end of the video the camera takes a shot of a truck that appears to have crashed into a traffic light. That may have been the cop that caused the crash mentioned in the article.

Source

Mesa police arrest video going viral online

The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jun 3, 2013 1:18 PM

A spokesman for the Mesa Police Department says the YouTube video of a fight between an officer and suspect during an arrest doesn't show anything outside of protocol. [So I guess punching, kicking and having a little stun gun fun on a person that has been arrested and is under control is 100 percent OK under the Mesa police policy. I wonder if this is just for Black folks, or if the Mesa police are equal opportunity *sshole and beat up all races equally well.]

Mesa Sgt. Tony Landato said the officer followed procedure when the suspect resisted arrest outside a Circle K near Center Street and McKellips Road.

The video, posted on YouTube on Saturday, shows a Mesa police officer attempting to arrest a man who then resists. The two go off camera for a moment then get into a struggle that appears to include a security guard jumping in to help the officer. A Mesa police officer is seen shooting the man with a stun gun while officers have the man on the ground.

Also heard during the altercation is a loud crashing sound that involved a second officer getting into a car crash while responding to the Circle K.

Information on the intial arrest attempt and the accident involving the officer is not available

Linda Valdez comments on the beating

Beating video is powerful teaching tool

It’s hard to watch. It’s important to see.

The YouTube video of Mesa Police pummeling and stun gunning a suspect who was resisting arrest isn’t easy to judge, though.

The guy provoked things. He wouldn’t comply with the cop. But once he was down, he was beaten by a number of officers who had him under enough control that one cop administered a stun gun shot with the cool precision of a surgeon.

This is police work the way the public doesn’t usually see it. Asphalt hard. Ugly.

Was it mean, too? Was it police brutality?

Clearly the suspect would have been better off if he hadn’t resisted. He got several chances to comply. He didn’t.

But still.

One can’t tell from the video how hard he continued to resist as cops held him down. He’s a big guy. A spokesman for the Mesa Police Department say the video of the incident shows nothing outside protocol. [Have EVER heard a police spokesperson admitting the police committed crimes???]

The officers followed procedure.

Well.

Many things will be said about the fact that the suspect is Black and the cops are White. Many questions will be raised about whether the violence inflicted on him after he was down was excessive – and, if so, was it because of his race.

But this is not just about race.

It’s about the price of a civil society.

Maintaining the kind of order we all want and the kind of freedom we expect involves a delicate balance.

Police need the ability to keep themselves safe and enforce the laws. But our freedom-loving society has to be on guard against the natural, human temptation of police to go too far in the heat of a dangerous moment. Police work would be easier if cops didn’t have to worry about people’s civil rights. [I can assure you the police rarely worry about a persons civil rights!!!!! It's usually only with high profile suspected criminals who can afford lawyers that the cops worry about there rights. Mainly because they know if they violate the rights of somebody that can afford a lawyer the case might get thrown out]

But they do. I don’t want to live in a society where the police are not held to an extremely high standard. Do you? [That is rubbish!!! Even when the police are caught red handed violating people civil rights they rarely get more them a slap on the wrist for punishment, if that much!!!! Around Nov. 24, 2004 a News 12 helicopter caught some Phoenix Police beating up a suspected carjacker who and surrendered and was laying on the ground. The Maricopa County Attorneys Office didn't even charge the cops with a crime because they claimed they probably would not be convicted. That article follows this article]

Did these cops go too far? If so, that’s a problem. A big problem.

This video probably won’t be used for calm discussion about how to preserve that balance.

But it could be a valuable tool to do that.

It also provides insight into what goes on out there between cops and suspects in the public spaces that you want kept safe. It shows things that are hard to watch, important to think about.

Source

Original Article

Police in scuffle with carjack suspect

David J. Cieslak

The Arizona Republic

Nov. 24, 2004 12:00 AM

Phoenix police are investigating the actions of several officers involved in a scuffle Tuesday afternoon with a handcuffed carjacking suspect.

The officers were arresting a 23-year-old man, one of two suspects accused of assaulting and robbing a pregnant woman at gunpoint outside a supermarket near 43rd Avenue and Thomas Road, Phoenix police Sgt. Randy Force said. The woman was not seriously injured in the attack.

After assaulting the woman, the gunman forced her into the vehicle and led police on a high-speed pursuit that ended at Thomas and 27th Avenue, authorities said. The suspect then jumped out of the vehicle and began running from officers.

When police caught up with the suspect, a crew from 12 News inside the television station's helicopter videotaped officers striking the handcuffed suspect several times.

Among the actions shown on the unedited tape:

An officer throws his body into the suspect, who was facing a wall and did not appear to be resisting.

Once the suspect is on the ground, an officer strikes him twice in the torso with his hand. Officers then drag the suspect in the dirt before an officer places a foot on his midsection.

An officer talks to the suspect with his hand on the man's head and neck, clearly placing a large amount of weight on him.

The officers roll the man onto his back and begin searching his pockets. A short time later, an officer punches him in the groin. They flip the man back over and an officer stands on the back of the suspect's left knee for a few seconds.

As police walk the suspect to a patrol car, an officer strikes the suspect's face with his elbow.

Force said the officers will not be investigated for criminal misconduct, but an administrative review of the incident was under way Tuesday night.

"It's believed the officers' conduct constitutes an issue with our policies, but not a violation of law," Force said. "Looking at the tape, there are concerns about the officers' actions and whether the force used was reasonable under the circumstances. That is going to be the focus of the internal investigation."

Force and members of the department's Professional Standards Bureau and Special Investigations Detail reviewed the tape Tuesday night at 12 News. The officer who initially tackled the suspect declined to comment when contacted at the scene by 12 News.

Police also took the other robbery suspect into custody.

More on that Mesa police beating

Mesa police deny accusations of excessive force raised by YouTube video

By Jim Walsh The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jun 4, 2013 7:39 AM

Mesa police considered the recent arrest of an uncooperative man outside a convenience store a life-threatening incident after an officer was punched in the face and a second officer’s gun was flung to the pavement nearby.

But a bystander using a cellphone recorded a video and posted it this weekend on YouTube, accusing police officers of excessive force and forcing them to defend their actions.

The video showed a police officer taking the man to the ground, wrestling with him as additional officers joined the melee. A gun flew through the air and lands in the parking lot. An officer delivered several blows to the man before he is eventually subdued and handcuffed.

Kameron Babbitt, who recorded the video, said police were brutal and were guilty of excessive force: using a Taser repeatedly in attempts to subdue the man, punching him and slamming his face to the pavement on Thursday afternoon.

“They went straight to the dogfight,” Babbitt said.

But Sgt. Tony Landato, a Mesa police spokesman, said officers were fighting for their lives. A officer was punched in the face and the gun was loose. He denied police used excessive force and said they followed police protocols properly.

In the end, police arrested Matatangi Sentituli Tai on suspicion of aggravated assault on a police officer, resisting arrest, criminal trespassing, criminal damage and refusing to provide his name when lawfully detained.

A court document filled out by the arresting officer said Tai has been arrested 17 times since 1999, including a charge of aggravated assault on a police officer in September. The report said he has seven convictions since 2000. [So what!!!! The real question is did he commit any crimes to allow the police to arrest him, and then beat him up???]

The incident began at about 1p.m. on Thursday when a clerk at a convenience store called police to report that Tai was acting strangely, saying he was there to pick up a prescription even though the store is not a pharmacy.

The clerk wanted Tai to leave the store, according to a court document.

After Tai stepped outside, he refused commands from the officer to sit down on a curb and provide his identification, Landato said. [OK, so it looks like Tai obeyed the clerks request to leave the store, so I don't think the cops had a case to charge him with trespassing. And per the case of Hiibel v Nevada, you are NOT required to provide the police with with identification, although in some cases, per Hiibel v Nevada the police can demand that you verbally tell them your name. I don't think that applied here, because under Arizona law for Hiibel v Nevada to kick in the police have to have "reasonable suspicion" to do that]

He said Tai would have been cited on suspicion of trespassing and released if he had cooperated with the officer.

The officer decided to arrest Tai, but the officer’s attempt to subdue Tai with a Taser did not work and Tai punched the officer in the face, Landato said.

An off-duty officer’s gun was stripped from his waistband by Tai during the fracas and fell to the ground, police said.

Landato said the gun lying in the parking lot posed an imminent threat to the officers’ lives, and that four officers were required to subdue Tai.

Tai was subdued with a blast of pepper spray to his face, Landato said. [And after he was punched, kicked and tasered by the cops, which is all very clear in the video]

“We had a suspect who fought our officers,” he said. “We used appropriate force to arrest him.”

The video ignited a debate between police, the man who recorded it and viewers online about whether officers were defending themselves or used excessive force in arresting Tai.

Police released their own video taken with a tiny Axon camera mounted to an officer’s glasses, but the video ended when the camera flew off the officer’s head during the melee.

Police reviewed the video posted on YouTube and the Axon camera video, and have determined that officers followed proper procedure and an Internal Affairs investigation is unnecessary, Landato said.

Medical pot dispensaries seek mainstream acceptance

Aiming for legitimacy

Medical pot dispensaries seek mainstream acceptance

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jun 3, 2013 10:31 PM

In a very different kind of Memorial Day deal, a Phoenix business celebrated its grand opening by giving veterans deep discounts.

On medical marijuana.

Phoenix Relief Center, a medical-marijuana dispensary tucked into a shopping center at 35th and Southern avenues, sold marijuana to former servicemen and -women at a discount — 20 percent off — and gave away free pot cigarettes to treat illnesses and pain. Dozens of veterans with cancer, chronic pain and other illnesses have since flocked to the center for one-eighth-ounce bags of Tokyo OG, Hawaii Five-0 and other strains of marijuana.

“We didn’t want to focus our grand opening on ‘Hey, look at us, we’re open, and we want business,’ ” said Patrick Romo, a principal officer and Phoenix Relief Center board member. “We wanted to say, ‘Hey, we’re open, and we’re here to serve the community.’ ”

The dispensary’s strategy to market to veterans and the broader community illustrates an effort among dispensary operators, patients and others in the medical-marijuana industry to shake the stigma associated with medical cannabis and gain mainstream legitimacy.

Arizona voters in 2010 by a narrow margin legalized marijuana for medicinal use, and 38,500 people participate in the program.

The medical-cannabis industry is growing: 21 dispensaries are operating statewide, a number that could swell by 100 more, spawning other businesses alongside them — cultivation sites, smoke shops, testing labs, grow consultants, and insurance companies and physicians who cater to the niche.

Yet a victory at the ballot box and early success in the marketplace haven’t changed the common perception that many chronic-pain patients are faking illnesses to get recreational pot.

But industry advocates counter that they are businesspeople who deliver a legal product to clients, pay taxes and obey the law.

As part of an image-improvement effort, advocates have formed a chamber of commerce, testified before and met with lawmakers at the state Capitol, and are gathering unlikely supporters — most notably a former federal prosecutor — to help reshape the perception of the industry.

Other supporters point to polls that indicate that most Americans and Arizonans favor legalizing marijuana altogether.

“We have no agenda other than to promote a healthy industry and tell people about it,” said Doug Banfelder, an independent insurance broker who markets to the medical-marijuana industry. “The bottom-line message is this: Marijuana is the most widely consumed illicit drug in the world. In an unregulated market, anybody can sell it to anyone and they can sell anything.”

Arizona is one of 18 states, plus Washington, D.C., that permit medical marijuana.

The Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., a national legalization-advocacy group, predicts that, over time, based on the number of dispensaries projected to open, Arizona will have the third-largest medical-marijuana industry after California and Colorado.

Karen O’Keefe, the group’s director of state policies, said medical-marijuana advocates in other states have launched similar campaigns to legitimize their industry.

“Some have organized together and made it clear that they are good, responsible businesspeople, who operate in a professional way that is consistent with the fact that they’re delivering medical goods to patients,” O’Keefe said. “In Colorado, there’s been an effort to name medical-marijuana dispensaries using language like ‘wellness centers’ and to get away from language associated with non-medical marijuana.”

The Arizona Wellness Chamber of Commerce, the trade association for medical-marijuana businesses, formed in spring 2012. Made up of dispensary operators, pot cultivators, doctors and others, the group meets regularly to talk about issues confronting the industry.

Members of the group — and others not associated with it — spoke out in January after an Arizona Criminal Justice Commission study found teens were getting pot from medical-marijuana cardholders.

Medical-marijuana advocates came out in full force at the state Capitol this session to oppose attempts by Republican lawmakers to repeal Arizona’s medical-marijuana law and pass legislation to require labeling of medical-marijuana edibles and require police to destroy medical marijuana seized in criminal investigations.

The effort to repeal the law has gone nowhere, and the other bill is all but dead.

Some of the dispensary owners hired a lawyer, lobbyists and a local public-relations firm to coordinate their message to the media and arrange meetings with lawmakers.

Mel McDonald, Arizona’s former U.S. attorney who served under President Ronald Reagan and helped lead the war on drugs in the 1980s, has become an unlikely supporter who offers a credible voice in the debate, advocates say.

A Mormon Republican, former judge and now a criminal- defense attorney, he says he has devoted his life to honoring the law.

Earlier this year, McDonald, 71, came out in support of medical marijuana as the effort to repeal was afoot.

In 1997, his then-14-year-old son was hit by a car going 45 mph. He suffered a serious brain injury that left him with a severe form of epilepsy.

Over the years, McDonald’s son has taken 30 epilepsy medications. All nauseated him and “knocked him for a loop,” McDonald said.

His son, now 30, would go five days at a time without food, too sick to eat.

Marijuana was the only drug that helped. Until medical cannabis became available, McDonald said his wife, Cindy, obtained the drug illegally.

“She always lived with this sick pit in her stomach,” McDonald said. “But when faced with the choice of her child or the law, she’s going to give him life.”

McDonald decided to go public about his family’s experience in the hope it would change people’s minds.

“There are tens of thousands of people that benefit from this drug — I have seen it with my own eyes,” he said. “I have decided that I not only want to educate the public, but members of my own faith. I’m speaking as a father and as a former U.S. attorney and as a former judge. We’ve got to leave the dark ages — this really helps people.”

Attorney Ryan Hurley said stories like the McDonalds’ have helped advocates reshape the image of medical marijuana in Arizona.

“The fruits, I think, are still being harvested,” said Hurley, who earlier in the session arranged meetings with lawmakers and industry lobbyists to explain the difference between regulated dispensaries and medical-marijuana “clubs,” which are unregulated.

As a freshman lawmaker, Rep. Ethan Orr, R-Tucson, had not given much thought to medical marijuana until he met with advocates.

“I walked away thinking these were very good, professional business owners that simply wanted to provide a service within the framework of the law,” Orr said.

Will Phoenix City Council call a halt to (illegal?) pension padding?

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton also lied to us when he ran for election saying he would repeal the Phoenix sales tax, which mostly goes to the police.

Source

Will Phoenix City Council call a halt to (illegal?) pension padding?

The Phoenix City Council will huddle privately on Wednesday to puzzle out what to do about those perennial pests over at the Goldwater Institute.

The conservative think tank has long been a thorn in the city’s side, having twice sued to stop illegal giveaways of taxpayer money.

Now it’s threatening to do it again – this time to end an obviously illegal scheme that allows some high-level police and fire officials to not just feather their retirement nests but to gild the things.

“It seems to me the state law is pretty clear on this,” Goldwater attorney Jon Riches told me. “It’s fascinating to me that the practice has happened at all.”

Clearly, Riches hasn’t spent much time hanging around Phoenix city hall. This is the city that sent City Manager Frank Fairbanks into retirement a few years ago with a pension larger than that of any U.S. president. This is the City Council that quietly handed City Manager David Cavazos a 33 percent pay raise last year – a move that boosted his base pay by $78,000 and his deferred compensation by another $8,580 a year.

This, even as Phoenix residents continue paying a 2 percent “emergency” tax on food that once upon a time the mayor promised to repeal.

Then again Mayor Greg Stanton also called for an end to pension spiking during his 2011 campaign.

Sweet maneuver, the spike.

City workers get a generous amount of leave time – 40.5 days a year for entry-level employees – and if they don’t use it all, they are paid for a portion of it when they retire. That cash-out, along with deferred compensation and other fringe benefits, is then counted as “salary” in order to boost their pensions with a little – no, a LOT – of help from taxpayers.

Phoenix cut back on spiking by civilian employees last year though it still allows them to artificially inflate their pensions with unused vacation as well as sick leave accrued before July 2012.

But city leaders have been unwilling to touch spiking by police and firefighters.

State law says members of the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System can’t boost their pensions using “payment for unused sick leave, payment in lieu of vacation, payment for unused compensatory time or payment for any fringe benefits.”

So the city struck a deal with police and fire unions to allow “monthly pay in lieu of sick or vacation accrual” in the final years before retirement.

“These are not payments for sick leave or vacation earned but not taken,” the city’s legal department reasoned, in an e-mail explaining the policy. “Rather, they are bargained-for salary increases in exchange for accepting a lessened benefit package.”

Nicely danced, don’t you think?

The Goldwater Institute, in a letter warning the city to cut it out, calls such reasoning “at best erroneous, at worst dishonest.”

And certainly painful for Phoenix taxpayers, who have seen public-safety pension costs rise from $7.2 million in fiscal 2003 to $129 million in the coming year.

To be fair, much of that is due to sizable investment losses in recent years. And most rank-and-file police and firefighters see only a modest increase in their pensions due to spiking.

But some in the top echelons have turned the spike into the fine-art of a slam dunk, earning more in retirement than while actually doing the job. Republic reporter Craig Harris reports that one former fire captain padded his pension by $40,000 a year by spiking his “salary” with an array of fringe benefits.

Stanton wasn’t available to answer questions about why the spiking continues given his call to end it, or what he plans to do now that the practice has landed on the newspaper’s front page.

Shocking, I know.

He’s called an executive session on Wednesday to discuss the Goldwater threat.

His PR flack did e-mail me a statement, noting that the city has passed “sweeping pension reform” on Stanton’s watch and curtailed future civilian sick leave spiking.

“We also have to make sure the abuses in the system do not continue and that is what we will deliver,” she quoted Stanton as saying. “To the extreme cases where people have taken advantage of the system, we have to stop that. But any changes to the system must ensure that police officers and firefighters who risk their lives every day for us are compensated in a competitive manner that allows us to attract and retain top talent.”

Surely, you can do that, mayor, without breaking the law – not to mention the public’s trust.

Pot laws make no sense

Pot laws make no sense

Mon Jun 3, 2013 6:31 PM

The truly sad part about the Yanira Maldonado story is that anyone anywhere would ever be incarcerated for possession of a dried-up plant.

—Craig Pratt, Tempe

Horne uses Jodi Arias verdict to keep his plea bargain out of the news????

If they want to get one of their press releases well covered they will put it out an a slow news day so the media doesn't have much else to cover and will give their press release more attention.

On the other hand when they don't want the public to know something they will usually do it on a day when the media has lots of other important stories to cover, hoping their negative news won't get much coverage.

And of course that is what the media is accusing Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne of doing in this case where he copped a plea to his hit and run case.

Tom Horne is one of the government tyrants that have been trying to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne along with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer are the folks who filed frivolous lawsuits in Federal court attempting to flush Prop 203 down the toilet.

Source

Horne re-election campaign e-mail attacks media, Obama to raise money

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jun 3, 2013 10:24 PM

Republican Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s campaign is attacking the media and President Barack Obama as it tries to raise money for Horne’s re-election.

In an e-mail to supporters late last week, Horne accused the “liberal media” of comparing him to murderer Jodi Arias, calling it “a new low and a disgusting attack” that cannot be allowed to stand.

“Tom Horne has taken conservative stands that have made enemies — including the media,” the e-mail said. “So the media is fighting back. One news report compared a $300 traffic fine to Jodi Arias, a cold-blooded murderer. Its (sic) disgusting. As conservatives, we need to FIGHT BACK and FIGHT BACK HARD.”

The e-mail appears to refer to a story by a local TV station that suggested Horne timed entering his no-contest plea to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge on the same afternoon the verdict was to come down in the closely watched Arias trial.

A Phoenix court official told the station that Horne’s attorney called him several times on May 8 to get on a judge’s calendar that day; Horne’s case originally was scheduled for May 28.

Horne denied to the TV station that he used the Arias verdict to try to bury news of his plea — which resulted in a $300 fine. The plea is tied to a March 2012 fender-bender in which Horne, along with subordinate Carmen Chenal, backed into another vehicle, then left without leaving a note. They were under surveillance by the FBI as part of an investigation involving the campaign-finance case.

Authorities concluded that Horne, a married man, did not leave a note so that he could hide a relationship with Chenal.

Horne is running for re-election in 2014. It is unclear if he will face another Republican in the primary.

Mark Brnovich, director of the Arizona Department of Gaming, on Monday said he is “seriously considering” a run for the attorney general’s post.

Brnovich, a former state and federal prosecutor, said he has been approached “by a number of prominent and well-respected people in the community” about running.”

“I think it’s important we have the strongest Republican we can running next November,” he told The Arizona Republic. “I believe that, with my experience, my temperament, my qualifications, that I would make an excellent attorney general.”

On the Democratic side, attorney Felecia Rotellini, whom Horne narrowly defeated in 2010, is gearing up for another run.

Attacking “liberal media bias” and Obama are tried-and-true Republican fundraising tactics.

In the e-mail, the Horne campaign says Horne has also fought against “Obamacare, against drugs and for protecting our border.”

“Look at what the liberals are up to lately,” the e-mail says. “They have the IRS go after the tea party, they blame Bengazi (sic) on an internet video and go after Fox News.”

An e-mail link takes supporters to Horne’s campaign website

Obama signs bill on lying about military medals

Obama lied to us several times when he said he wouldn't send his DEA thugs to arrest medical marijuana users in California.

Obama also lied about supporting gay marriage.

And of course Obama has told us a whole slew of lies about ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yea, I know, the American Empire won both wars but if that is true why do we have tens of thousands of military troops in both countries. OK, most of them are not American military troops, but they are mercenaries hired by the American government to replace the military troops.

Source

Obama signs bill on lying about military medals

3:21 p.m. EDT June 3, 2013

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Obama has signed a bill making it a crime to lie about receiving a military medal.

The Stolen Valor Act cleared both chambers of Congress last month. The White House said Obama signed it Monday.

The measure revives a law struck down by the Supreme Court in 2006. The court said it may be disreputable to lie about receiving a medal, but it's protected under the First Amendment.

The new law is narrower, making it a crime to lie about being decorated with the intent to profit personally or financially. That could include those who claim medals in order to receive veterans benefits, land a government contract or get a job reserved for veterans.

Violators could face up to a year in prison.

Drug War judge's daughter arrested

Source

Drug court judge's daughter among 10 arrested on pot charges in Wilmette

By Gregory Trotter Tribune reporter

7:10 a.m. CDT, June 4, 2013

The 20-year-old daughter of a Cook County judge who presides over a drug court was among those arrested in a police raid in Wilmette stemming from a marijuana and ecstasy investigation, authorities said.

Wilmette police and officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s North Gang Team executed a search warrant at the home of Oskar Vahtra, 18, in the 1500 block of Forest Avenue in the north suburb around 5:30 p.m. Friday.

Vahtra and four others were arrested at the home, police said. Later that night, between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. at the Edens Plaza on Lake Avenue, five more people were arrested on charges related to the selling and purchasing of marijuana.

The five arrested at the home included a 17-year-old boy, two 17-year-old girls and a 16-year-old girl, according to a police press release. All of them live in the New Trier Township area.

Vahtra was charged with a felony count of possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver and a misdemeanor charge of firearm possession without valid identification. Police confiscated marijuana, ecstasy and Vicodin at Vahtra’s home, police said. There was also paraphernalia including grinders, baggies, empty capsules and a portable scale.

At the Edens Plaza, police arrested Robert Kyle, 19, of Winnetka; Claire Axelrood, 20, of Wilmette; Andrew Cahill, 20, of Winnetka; Dylan Brennan, 19, of Chicago; and one 17-year-old boy.

Axelrood was charged with felony possession of marijuana. Sources said she is the daughter of Cook County Circuit Court Judge Larry Axelrood, who helped bring a drug specialty court program to the Skokie courthouse. Larry Axelrood declined comment when reached by phone. His daughter could not be reached.

Larry Axelrood has been involved with the specialty drug court in Skokie for about three years. In a recent Tribune story, he explained that it lasts between 18 months and two-and-a-half years, during which enrollees are treated for drug and alcohol abuse where needed, get therapy, receive vocational training, adhere to curfews, and comply with a slew of other court ordered mandates.

Among the others arrested, Kyle was charged with a felony count of marijuana possession with intent to deliver. Cahill and Brennan were charged with the local ordinance citation of less than 10 grams of marijuana.

Freelance writer Brian L. Cox contributed.

gtrotter@tribune.com

Latin American countries want to end failed American "drug war"???

Source

OAS to seek fresh ways to combat illegal drugs

By Tracy Wilkinson

June 4, 2013, 10:21 a.m.

MEXICO CITY -- Drug policy and the need to substantially change the way countries tackle the issue will take center stage at a major regional meeting of nations of the Americas that starts Tuesday.

Representatives of several Latin American countries are expected to pressure U.S. officials to find alternatives to what is seen as an approach to fighting drugs that leans heavily on law enforcement -- a strategy that has cost tens of thousands of mostly Latin American lives.

The meeting, being held in Antigua, Guatemala, is the annual general assembly of the Organization of American States, the region’s leading political body, which 2 1/2 weeks ago issued a groundbreaking report that urged governments to consider decriminalizing some drug use.

The OAS report is part of a growing movement to find new drug strategies, including those recently advocated by the OAS as well as former presidents, human rights organizations, citizens and even the current president of this meeting’s host nation, former army Gen. Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala.

“This is an important step,” Perez Molina said on the eve of the general assembly.

The report made no specific recommendations but suggested that decriminalization could be one of many “transitional methods” in a new public health strategy. It was significant because it helps consolidate what many Latin Americans see as the need to alter policies as their countries -- chief among them Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras -- have been torn apart by violent drug wars.

In a series of speeches on the eve of the meeting, a parade of community activists and small-town officials complained about the way drug traffickers have terrorized their home areas.

Yet the U.S. is likely to remain odd man out in the search for alternatives. President Obama has said he welcomes discussion but does not consider legalization to be a solution. In Antigua, the U.S. is to be represented by Secretary of State John F. Kerry.

"Our goal going into Antigua is to ensure that we can convey as clearly as possible what this administration's position on drugs has been both at home and abroad," Roberta Jacobson, U.S. assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in Washington. "We want to make sure that administration strategy is understood. We want to have a conversation about what is working."

Kerry “needs to respond constructively to the Latin American presidents who are demanding a new dialogue about alternatives to failed U.S. prohibitionist policies,” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports liberalizing drug laws, said in a statement issued Monday.

A consortium of 50 activist groups from North, Central and South America signed an open letter to the general assembly, urging members to “place human rights at the center” of the drug-policy debate.

"This week’s summit represents an unprecedented opportunity for governments to rethink failed drug policies,” Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program, said in a separate statement. “For too long governments thought they could arrest and jail their way out of this problem.”

It was not clear how much consensus there would be among the 34 delegations at the assembly. Guatemalan Foreign Minister Fernando Carrera said discussions would focus on issues such as dealing with money-laundering, gun-smuggling and related security matters as ways to diminish violence, but that the member states would not be debating legalization of marijuana

Drug stop in Tonopah justified search warrant in Ahwatukee???

How can a car with drugs in it which was stopped in Tonopah, justify a search warrant being issued on a home in Ahwatukee which is probably 40 or 50 miles away???

I suspect these was no evidence whatsoever of the home having drugs in it.

I suspect the cops got a judge to rubber stamp a search warrant on the home simply because the car was registered at that address or because one of the people arrested lived at that address.

Source

More than 100 marijuana plants found in Ahwatukee home, DPS says

By Erin O’Connor The Arizona Republic-12 News Breaking News Team Tue Jun 4, 2013 10:55 AM

Authorities found more than 100 marijuana plants at a Ahwatukee Foothills home Tuesday morning, according to the Department of Public Safety.

This investigation began on Monday with a traffic stop near Tonopah. Johnny Lee, 24, of Ahwatukee and another person was arrested after a DPS Canine Unit found 9 pounds of marijuana in his car. A follow up investigation lead officials to the residence in Ahwatukee

A search warrant was served on the home near 17th Avenue and Pecos Road. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office SWAT team entered the residence and found an elaborate growing operation, several handguns and an AK-47, according to authorities.

Marijuana laws are racist laws????

Pot arrests more likely for Blacks, study says

Associated Press Tue Jun 4, 2013 11:36 AM

WASHINGTON — Black people are arrested for possessing marijuana far more often than White people, even though marijuana use by both races is about the same, the American Civil Liberties Union reports in a new study.

The ACLU’s analysis of federal crime data, released Tuesday, found marijuana arrest rates for Black people were 3.73 times greater than those for White people nationally in 2010. In some counties, the arrest rate was 10 to 30 times greater for blacks. In two Alabama counties, 100 percent of those arrested for marijuana possession were black, the ACLU said.

When it comes to marijuana use, about 14 percent of Black people and 12 percent of white people reported in 2010 that they had used the drug during the previous year, according to data that the ACLU obtained from the National Drug Health Survey, a Health and Human Services publication. Among younger people ages 18-25, use was greater among whites.

An overall increase in marijuana possession arrests from 2001 to 2010 is largely attributable to drastic increases in arrests of black people, the ACLU said.

Blacks were arrested at a rate of 537 per 100,000 people nationally in 2001. In 2010, their arrest rate rose to 716 per 100,000. The 2001 number for White people was 191 per 100,00 and rose to 192 per 100,000 in 2010, the ACLU said. Despite the disparate rates, far more whites were arrested for marijuana possession in 2010, 460,808 compared to Blacks, 286,117.

Ezekiel Edwards, lead author of the ACLU study, attributed the disparate arrest rates to racial profiling by police seeking to pad their arrest numbers with “low-level” arrests in “certain communities that they have kind of labeled as problematic.”

“While this country moves in some ways in a more progressive direction on marijuana policy in a lot of places, in other places, people are getting handcuffed, jailed and getting criminal records at racially disparate rates all around the country,” Edwards said.

Police simply operate from the standpoint that “the use of marijuana is a crime,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

“We will try to educate our membership, to the extent the statistics are valid, to be aware (that) people other than Blacks are smoking marijuana and to arrest them too,” said Pasco, who had not yet seen the ACLU report.

Arthur Burnett Sr., a retired judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, said his 40 years on the bench showed him that police concentrate their numbers in black communities. It’s easier to catch people with marijuana in communities where there are “open-air” drug markets, rather than looking in homes, basements or country clubs, said Burnett. He is the CEO of the National African American Drug Policy Coalition based in Washington.

Burnett said some black defendants, distrustful of authorities, may lash out, use profanities or be rebellious — behavior that makes it more likely that an officer will make an arrest. Burnett said his coalition supports forming a commission to look at scientific evidence on the effect of marijuana use and “overcriminalization” of it.

The commission would determine whether to treat marijuana like tobacco, in which people are warned about consequences of its use. It would also examine the harshness of penalties for using pot.

“We don’t need to treat it like heroin and cocaine,” Burnett said.

The ACLU supports legalization of marijuana and regulation through taxation and licensing. It also supports eliminating criminal and civil penalties for marijuana possession. If those two options are not possible, the ACLU supports punishment for marijuana possession with only civil penalties, which is often referred to as decriminalizing marijuana possession.

The unequal arrests rates are not confined to a single region of the U.S. or in urban areas with larger black populations, the ACLU said. That discrepancy is found throughout the country, regardless of the size of the black population of the location and at all income levels, the data shows.

For example, in Morgan County, Ala., where African Americans represent 12 percent of the population and Pike County, Alabama, where 37 percent of the population is black, all those arrested for marijuana possession were black, the ACLU found.

African Americans living in counties with the highest median household incomes, $85,000 to $115,000, are two to eight times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. In counties with median household incomes of $22,000 to $30,000, the arrest rate for blacks is 1.5 times to five the rate as for whites, the report said.

The largest disparities were found in: Iowa, where blacks were 8.34 times more likely to be arrested than whites; Washington, D.C., 8.05 times greater; Minnesota, 7.81 times; Illinois, 7.56; Wisconsin, 5.98; Kentucky, 5.95 and Pennsylvania, 5.19 times greater.

Blacks face these greater chances for arrest for marijuana possession at a time when Colorado and Washington have legalized adult possession of small amounts of nonmedical marijuana, while a number of states and Washington, D.C. allow medical marijuana. Federal law still prohibits its use. Some states and some cities have eased punishments for possession of smaller amounts.

The findings are hardly surprising to the African American community.

Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, said arrest disparities like those for marijuana possession have led to mass incarceration and criminalization of African Americans, which in turn, has become the new Jim Crow, referring to laws that sanctioned racial segregation in schools and public facilities.

“Any arrest, even for marijuana, is a blot on someone’s record and an impediment to future jobs and opportunities,” Jealous said. “For these reasons, a number of NAACP state conferences (chapters) have supported the decriminalization of marijuana.”

Man wants $75K for ruined pot plants

Man wants $75K for ruined pot plants

Joe Ferguson Arizona Daily Star

A 56-year-old man wants Pima County to give him $75,000 after forcing him to destroy the medical marijuana plants he was growing in his garage last December.

An attorney representing James Merkle has filed a notice of claim with Pima County, asking for damages after Pima County sheriff's deputies forced him to uproot 12 small marijuana plants after responding to a report of a domestic disturbance at the home.

Merkle was issued a medical marijuana card by the state to treat osteoarthritis in his knee.

His attorney, Paul Gattone, said deputies found the plants locked inside the garage while performing a routine search of Merkle's home.

Gattone said the deputies misunderstood the state's guidelines for handling medical marijuana when they forced his client to destroy them.

Under Arizona law, medical marijuana cardholders can grow up to 12 plants indoors so long as they are in an enclosed, locked facility. This is defined as "a closet, room, greenhouse or other enclosed area equipped with locks or other security devices that permit access only by a cardholder."

The only keys to the garage, Gattone said, were in his client's possession.

The deputy, he alleges, cited the laws from growing marijuana outdoors instead of indoors.

"He was greatly mistaken," he said.

Merkle was not arrested nor was he charged with any crime after a search of the home.

A spokesperson for County Attorney Barbara LaWall had no immediate comment.

A letter of claim is a precursor to a formal lawsuit against the county.

In January, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled a Border Patrol officer improperly seized marijuana last year from a California woman who had a legal prescription for medical marijuana.

The court ruled the woman was entitled to get her marijuana back.

Contact reporter Joe Ferguson at jferguson@azstarnet.com or 573-4346.

Cops are paid very well and have cushy jobs????

First any job that required driving an automobile is a dangerous job. Thousands of Americans die every year in auto accidents. Thus any jobs that requires driving an automobile is usually more dangerous then one that doesn't.

And police officers like mailmen, taxi cab drivers, ice cream sales truck drivers, bus drivers, pizza delivery guys, UPS and FEDEX delivery guys and meter readers drive automobiles, which makes their job a dangerous job.

But cops don't risk their lives to protect us everyday any more then mailmen, taxi cab drivers, ice cream sales truck drivers, and pizza delivery guys risk their lives for us to bring us packages and junk food.

The really dangerous jobs in American are fishermen, loggers or lumberjacks and constructions workers. Year in and year out these three jobs are usually in the top 3 most dangerous jobs according to statistics compiled by the US government.

I have only seen the job of a police officer in the top 10 once and they were seventh.

And when it comes to people being murdered on the job, again cops are not even close to the top of the list.

The jobs with the highest chance of being murdered while at work are convenience store clerks like at Circle Ks and 7/11s, along with liquor store clerks.

Yes, every now and then a cop gets murdered, but not any where near the rate that store clerks do. Criminals are usually smart enough only to rob unarmed people that can't defend themselves and for that reason avoid robbing armed police officers who can defend themselves.

Last I think Bill Richardson is also a little biased when he sings the blues on how underpaid cops are.

The police and fire unions are very powerful unions and have done an excellent job in getting police and firemen very high pay rates along with excellent retirement benefits.

In the Phoenix area most police forces start their entry level cops at about $50,000 a year. That is comparable to the starting pay of a computer science engineer who is just getting out of college. But cops in Arizona don't need a college degree.

If you look at the public databases which list the salaries for cops in Phoenix, Mesa and Tempe and other valley city there are a very large number of cops making $100,000 or even $150,000 a year.

And of course the retirement benefits for cops are fantastic.

I believe that a cop can retire after 20 years and get 80 percent of his highest pay for the rest of his life.

How many other jobs can you be hired as a 21 year old rookie at $50,000 and after 20 years retire at 41 and make $80,000 a year for the rest of your life.

Source

Richardson: ‘Selective scrutiny’ over police, fire pension programs a dangerous game

Posted: Friday, May 31, 2013 5:47 am

Guest Commentary by Bill Richardson

‘Selective scrutiny’ over police, fire pension programs a dangerous game

May 2013 will go down as one of the worst periods in Arizona history when it comes to the loss of first responders.

On May 6, Department of Public Safety officer Tim Hoffman was murdered while investigating an accident near Yuma. Twelve days later, Phoenix firefighter Bradley Harper was killed at a fire scene. The next day, Phoenix Police officer Daryl Raetz was murdered while arresting a drunk driver.

Three dead in two weeks.

The last time this kind of tragedy struck Arizona was in 1970-71, when two Phoenix police officers died on Dec. 28, 1970, two Maricopa County Sheriff’s deputies died Jan. 18, 1971, and two DPS officers Feb. 5 and Feb. 7. Five were murdered and one died while responding to a dying officer’s call for help. One of the murdered deputies was the father of one of the Phoenix officers who died.

Many widows and orphans were made in that five-week period.

No one ever told us being a cop or firefighter was going to be without risk or danger. Doing police work or fighting fires right is dirty, dangerous and where there’s always a chance of dying and leaving behind a widow and orphans. We just expected that our families would be taken of as promised if anything ever happened to us. Sadly promises were broken and contracts breached by the Arizona State Legislature.

Over the last two years the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System, Arizona’s police and fire pension plan, has come under selective scrutiny by powerful media interests and the Legislature.

Tales of a handful of pension abuses and a few double and triple dippers made headlines and became the catalyst for the legislature to climb onboard the pension reform train following years of plumping up their own pension plan, part-time elected officials get better pensions than police officers and firefighters, the same elected officials giving their retirement fund administrator a nearly quarter million dollar annual pension all while failing in their fiduciary and legislative responsibilities that threw the once nationally heralded public safety pension fund into mismanagement and underfunding.

Following a series of newspaper stories, the legislature led by its own in-house double and triple dippers looked more like cats covering up feces in a sand box than a responsible elected body trying to fix a broken pension system.

In its zeal and fear of being targeted by the media as against pension reform, the legislature enacted drastic changes in a few short months instead of taking a long and hard look at what had worked exceptionally well until its members fell asleep at the switch. Their repair effort looked more like using duct tape to fix a failed bridge instead of studying the problem and fixing it right once they had good advice and all the facts. Already their patch is showing signs of failure.

While the legislative leadership and their minions can boast to the media of taking on the pension abusers and pro-labor forces, you don’t hear them bragging about cutting survivor’s benefits to the widows and orphans of police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty. You see that the legislature wiped out the paltry annual cost living adjustments given to widows and orphans — many of who are unable to obtain Social Security survivor’s benefits because their spouse’s employers didn’t enroll public safety employees in Social Security.

As usual legislators will tout their support for police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty following the recent deaths of Huffman, Harper and Raetz. If they supported them so much then why did create a situation that would hurt their survivors?

It’s time for the state legislature to fix what they broke and restore benefits to the widows and orphans of those fallen police officers and firefighters our legislator’s profess to the cameras and newspapers they respect so much and thank for their service.

Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

MCSO seizes 3,000 pounds of marijuana

Source

MCSO seizes 3,000 pounds of marijuana

By Matthew Longdon The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 5, 2013 8:06 AM

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office found 3,000 pounds of marijuana stacked inside the garage of a west Phoenix home Tuesday night.

A 24-year-old man is in custody while another person believed to be connected to the drugs fled the scene, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities found the dozens of bales of marijuana in a home near 91st Avenue and Thomas Road. The estimated street value of the marijuana is $1.5 million, said Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The drug bust was part of an undercover operation. The Sheriff’s Office received the tip Tuesday and got a search warrant to check the home, Arpaio said.

Initial reports indicated the 24-year-old man and the second suspect lived in the home. Arpaio said the owners may have paid for the house with cash.

Arpaio said the marijuana came from Mexico.

“We’ll do what we can to stop this from coming across the border,” Arpaio said.

The bust comes the same day the Sheriff’s Office announced they seized 51 pounds of methamphetamine but is unrelated.

Marijuana deaths 0 - zero - Tobacco deaths 6 million

Source

Razones para dejar de fumar

La epidemia mundial de tabaquismo mata cada año a casi 6 millones de personas, de las cuales más de 600 mil son no fumadores que mueren por respirar humo ajeno.

Cada año, el 31 de mayo, la OMS y asociados de todo el mundo celebran el Día Mundial Sin Tabaco, dedicado a resaltar los riesgos para la salud asociados al consumo de tabaco y promover políticas eficaces para reducir ese consumo. El tema del Día Mundial Sin Tabaco 2013 es la prohibición de la publicidad, la promoción y el patrocinio del tabaco.

Sin embargo, ¿por qué fumar? Cuando el cigarro daña el organismo y perjudica a quien convive con el fumador, pues a pesar de ser un vicio muy común entre las personas, éste no aporta nada positivo.

Para muchos fumar relaja, quita la tensión, o simplemente es un hábito mal adquirido. No obstante, una encuesta realizada por Gabinete de Educación Estratégica (GCE) reveló que la mayoría de los mexicanos fuman por buscar aceptación social; la segunda razón fue para "calmar los nervios", por sueño y por imitación de artistas de cine.

Sin embargo, el humo de tabaco contiene más de 4 mil sustancias, entre ellas irritantes tóxicos como el amoniaco, folmaldehído, monóxido de carbono, mentol, nicotina, tolueno y dióxido de nitrógeno, que dañan tu salud.

Pero las anteriores no son todas las razones negativas que conlleva el hábito de fumar, por lo que el sitio Feminis enlistó 10 puntos más que debes tomar en cuenta:

1. Fumar produce resequedad en la piel, arrugas prematuras y pérdida de piezas dentales, además de un horrendo color amarillento en uñas y dientes.

2. Incrementa las molestias durante la menstruación y de acuerdo con estudios, las mujeres que fuman y toman anticonceptivos al mismo tiempo, están más expuestas a sufrir embolias y problemas cardio y cerebrovasculares. Incluso se han relacionado casos de esterilidad o concepción retardada.

3. De acuerdo con el Consejo Nacional contra las Adicciones, el consumo de tabaco es una de las causas más frecuentes de disfunción sexual y de abortos repetitivos.

4. Los bebés de mujeres fumadoras nacen con bajo peso y están expuestos al síndrome de muerte súbita. Además, aumenta la probabilidad de tener hijos con trastornos de déficit de atención e hiperactividad.

5. Las enfermedades que produce el tabaco son infartos al corazón, padecimientos pulmonares como bronquitis y enfisema pulmonar, cáncer de pulmón, de próstata, de esófago, de vejiga, de colon, de estómago, páncreas, riñón y de mama.

6. Según la OMS, el consumo de tabaco es directamente responsable de enfermedades y dolencias que cada año le causan la muerte a 6 millones de personas cada año.

7. Considera que el humo del cigarro no sólo afecta a quienes consumen el tabaco, también a quienes los rodean. Y simplemente el siglo pasado, el tabaco provocó la muerte de 100 millones de personas y se pronostica que en el siglo XXI puedan llegar a mil millones de fallecimientos.

8. Podrás ahorrar dinero. ¿Cuánto? Si tomas en cuenta que una cajetilla cuesta 40 pesos y suponiendo que fumas dos cajetillas a la semana, estarías ahorrando 320 pesos mensuales, unos 3,840 pesos al año.

9. La nicotina es una droga poderosa y psicoactiva que penetra en tu cerebro en tan sólo siete segundos después de fumar. Por ello es una droga más difícil que dejar que la heroína y la cocaína, y provoca múltiples recaídas.

10. Las personas que dejan de fumar antes de los 35 años, reducen 905 de los riesgos atribuidos al tabaco.

Phoenix police union sues city over uniform change

Source

Phoenix police union sues city over uniform change

By Cecilia Chan The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 5, 2013 7:14 PM

A Phoenix police union has filed a lawsuit against the city seeking compensation for its 2,500 members who were forced to toss out a patrol uniform.

The union, the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, claims in the lawsuit filed in Maricopa County Superior Court in April that patrol officers’ compensation package was reduced because, over the years, they spent the money on clothing that is now banned.

“We are asking for class action and whatever the determined value is, which we think is upwards of $2 million,” said Joe Clure, union president.

The suit, also asks for reasonable costs and attorneys’ fees and any other relief deemed just and proper by the court.

The lawsuit claims the city breached the union contract, which allowed a black, cotton-blend polo shirt and cargo pants uniform, popular with the rank-and-file for nearly 15 years. Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia banned that uniform last year.

City officials denied they broke the contract, saying in the city’s response they never promised to allow patrol officers to wear the black uniform.

The city asks the court to dismiss the union’s suit and award it attorney fees.

Garcia banned the uniform in October, saying they offered a greater opportunity for criminals to impersonate officers. All patrol officers now wear the dark blue button-down shirts and dress-style pants.

Garcia’s decision effectively rendered useless officers’ collection of the black uniform and accompanying equipment, the union suit said.

“We think it’s a topic of bargaining,” Clure said Wednesday. “He failed to confer and negotiate about it and made an unilateral decision that ultimately cost our people money. He should have negotiated about the loss use of uniforms and the value of that.”

The annual uniform allowance is part of an officer’s wage-and-benefits package.

The allowance helps officers buy clothing and equipment for the job, but they are not obligated to spend the money on uniforms. This fiscal year each officer received $1,150.

A union survey released in May showed most officers— 78 percent of the 1,722 polled— support Garcia’s ban on the more casual police uniform. [Sorry guys, when you get a job, it isn't a democracy where you are allowed to vote and tell your employer what to do. You are an employee and supposed to do what your employer tells you to do. But hey, I guess somebody who has a badge and gun and thinks that means they can force their will on anybody else doesn't understand that concept of being required to do what your employer says]

Obama officials defend collecting phone records

Source

Obama officials defend collecting phone records

Associated Press Thu Jun 6, 2013 7:17 AM

WASHINGTON — A British newspaper reported that the United States has been collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans under a top secret court order. The Obama administration on Thursday defended the government’s need to collect telephone records of American citizens, calling such information “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats.”

While defending the practice, a senior Obama administration official did not confirm the report Wednesday in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The disclosure was likely to bring questions from both Republicans and Democrats of how far the Obama administration’s surveillance policies go, following the government’s tracking of Associated Press journalists’ phone records in a leak investigation.

The White House has been on the defensive against Republicans who claim the administration is too intrusive in Americans’ lives, citing the federal tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups for extra scrutiny as proof.

Republicans also claim Obama aides manipulated the government’s response to last year’s deadly attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, to remove any links to terrorism in the heat of a presidential election, which the White House denies.

The controversies collectively could erode the American people’s trust in Obama and derail his second term agenda.

The court order to collect phone records was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, the newspaper reported. The order requires Verizon, one of America’s largest telecommunications companies, on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the National Security Agency information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The newspaper said the document, a copy of which it had obtained, shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press could not authenticate the order because documents from the court are classified.

The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly discuss classified matters.

Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday the company had no comment. The NSA had no immediate comment.

Verizon Communications Inc. listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. The court order didn’t specify which type of phone customers’ records were being tracked.

Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as are location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered, The Guardian said.

The administration official said, “On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls.”

The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was very controversial.

The secret court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of “all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls,” The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the “business records” provision of the USA Patriot Act, which passed after Sept. 11, 2001.

There’s no hooking Tom Horne

Source

There’s no hooking Tom Horne

Attorney General Tom Horne could make a fortune in the self-help business by putting out a series of instructional videos under the title: “How to Wriggle Off a Hook.”

The man is a master.

Evidence of this surfaced again this week when the State Bar of Arizona dismissed a charge against Horne that involved alleged campaign-finance violations.

The reason the State Bar dismissed the charge is that Horne had previously wriggled off another hook.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Secretary of State Ken Bennett thought Montgomery could pursue a civil case against Horne for campaign hanky-panky but Horne wriggled out of it on a technicality when a judge ruled that Montgomery and Bennett acted incorrectly.

The court actually said the complaint against Horne should first have been forwarded to the office of … Horne.

All of this was preceded by Horne wriggling off yet another hook.

This one involved a minor fender bender witnessed by FBI agents who were tailing the attorney general. (That’s correct. The person we elected as the top law enforcement officer in the state was being tailed by the FBI.)

The agents, who supposedly were working on the campaign violations case, spotted Horne and a woman who works with him leave the AG’s office separately. The couple eventually wound up in the same car with Horne driving. While the attorney general was attempting to park near the woman’s residence the FBI agents said Horne backed into another vehicle and didn’t report it. He and the woman then went into the building where she lives.

I know – ick.

Horne has since pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge and paid a $300 fine.

The campaign finance case Montgomery was pursuing involved Horne’s 2010 run for attorney general. The allegation is that Horne improperly coordinated efforts with an independent-expenditure committee that attacked Horne’s opponent in the general election. That would be illegal.

But, owing to the technicality over procedure, that case has gone nowhere.

And all of this represents only Horne’s most recent hook wriggling.

As a young man, Horne got snagged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The incident has been reported a number of times in this and other publications. Horne is barred by the SEC from associating with brokers, dealers, investment advisers and investment companies.

Why?

Among other things the SEC alleged that a company Horne ran “violated the record-keeping, anti-fraud, and broker-dealer net capital provisions of the federal securities laws and filed false financial reports with the commission.”

The SEC said Horne’s firm “attempted to induce the purchase and sale of securities when it did not have the required net capital” and misrepresented its financial condition to its customers.

Without admitting guilt Horne agreed to the lifetime trading ban.

Also, The Arizona Republic reported back in 2010 that Horne checked “no” on a report filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission asking if he had ever been a partner in a business that went bankrupt. It turns out the company for which he’d gotten into trouble with the SEC had gone belly up.

Horne told the Republic’s Casey Newton, “I didn’t think about it because it was 40 years ago.”

Horne’s then-Republican primary opponent, former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who himself was later disbarred, said at the time, “The attorney general is the chief defender of the public when it comes to fraud and white-collar financial crimes. I’ve prosecuted plenty of con artists, and Tom Horne unfortunately falls on the other side of that list.”

Through it all, Horne was elected to the Arizona legislature. He was elected Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction. And he was elected is Attorney General. And he is running for re-election.

Like I said, he’s a master.

When I mentioned my “How to Wriggle Off a Hook” idea to a long-time Arizona political observer Wednesday he told me:

“We’ve had a lot of politicians in Arizona who could write that book. But the thing you have to remember about wriggling is — no matter how successful you are at it you’re still a worm.”

Police union leaders don't like to be called "union bosses"

If you look at the letter from the "union bosses" to the city of Phoenix at the end of the article half of the unions have the term police or fire as part of their names.

Source

Phoenix labor leaders asking for a ban on the term “union bosses”

In the latest bizarre twist over at Phoenix city hall, the city’s public employee unions are going after Phoenix Councilman Sal DiCiccio for name calling, asking for “an immediate censure and sanction” against him..

It seems they don’t like being referred to as “union bosses” and they want Mayor Greg Stanton and the rest of the City Council to tell him to cut it out.

“Councilman DiCiccio’s language is truly inflammatory and insulting,” the presidents of the city’s public employee unions wrote, in their letter sent Monday to the council. “His continued use of the word ‘union bosses’, a phrase with both historical and racially bigoted overtones, is deliberately and repeatedly chosen by him because it’s (sic) very meaning can be nothing other than offensive and derogatory to anyone who hears it.”

The letter goes on to ask the Phoenix City Council to “make a public declaration that such conduct among its members is not condoned by them, is unacceptable and that an immediate end to the use of this offensive and deliberately inflammatory phrase shall ensue.”

No seriously, that’s what they’re asking.

The unions have good reason to despise DiCiccio. He has questioned employee pay raises. He has loudly and repeatedly called for an end to the food tax that coincidentally is roughly equal to the general-fund amount needed to fund those raises during the recession. He’s no fan of public pensions and he is gearing up for the next big fight at city hall – over the longstanding and probably illegal practice of pension spiking.

I’ve long suspected that one or more of the unions are the moneybags behind the Campaign for Better Neighborhoods, a stealth group that, from the cover of darkness, is attempting to unseat DiCiccio in this year’s council race. They desperately want him gone.

What I can’t figure out is why they think that decrying his use of the union boss label would hurt DiCiccio in his district, which covers Ahwatukee, the Biltmore and Arcadia. If anything, I’m guessing their complaint will wind up in DiCiccio’s campaign ads this summer.

DiCiccio, in a statement e-mailed over this afternoon, sounds delighted by the labor leaders’ letter.

“I will not be bullied into silence by labor representatives of the City of Phoenix (a.k.a. union bosses),” he wrote. “The letters and the social media posts will not deter me from doing the right thing for the taxpayers. … These Chicago-style intimidation tactics are clearly why Mayor Stanton is afraid to keep his campaign promises of repealing the food tax and stopping pension spiking.”

Any bets on how many of the union groups will join Stanton in supporting DiCiccio’s opponent, Karlene Keogh Parks?

–

Below is the full text of their letter:

Mayor Greg Stanton and Council,

This is a joint letter from labor representatives of the City of Phoenix [ie. police and firemen union bosses] requesting an immediate censure and sanction against Councilman Sal DiCiccio for his continued use of offensive and derogatory language towards elected labor representatives of the City.

It is one thing to disagree on the course of the city and its finances, and to debate the merits of a budget proposal or tax. However, it should never be acceptable for any one of us speaking at a public Council meeting or other public arenas to use offensive language towards one another, employees or elected officials.

Councilman DiCiccio’s language is truly inflammatory and insulting. His continued use of the word ‘union bosses’, a phrase with both historical and racially bigoted overtones, is deliberately and repeatedly chosen by him because it’s (sic) very meaning can be nothing other than offensive and derogatory to anyone who hears it. Elected labor representatives are as much ‘bosses’ over their unions as Mr. DiCiccio is a ‘boss’ over District 6.

It is as much an honor to serve as a democratically elected representative of workers in this city as it is for Mr. DiCiccio to serve as an elected councilperson. His continued attempt at degrading both the leadership and members of our city’s [police and firemen] unions with inflammatory rhetoric is beneath the dignity and the office of Councilperson and shows ignorance of the true purpose of our associations.

The long history of defending workers rights and safety, establishing FMLA, Social Security, Medicare, ending child labor, establishing sick days, minimum wage laws, bringing the 40 hour work week to fruition and above all bringing dignity to workers is well established. [Give me a break, most police officers in the Phoenix metro area START at around $50,000 a year which is about $25 and hour. Arizona police officers can retire after 20 years at 80 percent of their highest pay which is far better then most of the taxpayers who pay their wages]

Perhaps Mr. DiCiccio is not aware that it was in Memphis, Tennessee that sanitation workers, aspiring to become labor union representatives and members picked up signs and declared proudly, ‘I Am a Man,’ and that this moment was the backgrop for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech.

While we can disagree and debate on the many financial [Bingo - It's about MONEY. The unions always want more money, and calling them unions bosses makes them sound like money grubbing thieves, which is why they don't like to be called union bosses] and other issues affecting our city a basic decorum f respect and civility should be the norm. The council deserves it, we deserve it, and certainly those citizens who have elected all of us deserve it.

Therefore, we request that the Mayor and council make a public declaration that such conduct among its members is not condoned by them, is unacceptable and that an immediate end to the use of this offensive and deliberately inflammatory phrase shall ensue.”

Signed:

Frank A. Piccioli, president, AFSCME 2960

Ran Ramirez, president, Administrative Supervisory Professional & Technical Employees Association

Joe Clure, president Phoenix Law Enforcement Association

Sean Mattson, president, Phoenix Police Sergeants and Lieutenants Association

Luis Schmidt, president, AFSCME 2384

Bill Higgins, chapter president, Laborers International Union of North America Local 777

Pete Gorraiz, president International Association of Firefighters 493; and Rebekah Friend, executive director, Arizona AFL-CIO

Rebekah Friend, executive director, Arizona AFL-CIO

Cop hating camera?????

From this letter to the editor by Connie Cushing it is pretty obvious the camera used to film that recent police beating in Mesa is a biased cop hating camera that intentionally made the cops look like bad guys.

I bet a DNA test on the camera would prove it is genetically related to the camera that filmed the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles!!!!

Source

Don’t smear selfless officers doing their jobs

Wed Jun 5, 2013 8:34 PM

Regarding “Police video stirring controversy” (Valley & State, Tuesday):

I’m concerned about the sliming of the police by people with cameras and anyone else who feels that all police are bad, while all people taken down by force are good.

The suspect in the Mesa incident had a long history with the law, and the fact that he fought the officers is very telling.

I am a police supporter. Most officers are doing the job they are paid to do. They put the public first, themselves second — often becoming a sad statistic. Most of them are decent, hardworking people faced every day with people who feel they are above the law. The rest of us appreciate the work they do.

One man with a camera does not make a totally credible witness, not knowing all the facts. There are better ways to portray the law than by vitriolic pictures and rhetoric. Without these officers, our streets would be running amok.

Shame on The Republic for printing this article.

— Connie Cushing, Sun City

50% of inmates were arrested for victimless drug war crimes???

Source

Leahy and Paul plan on mandatory sentencing makes sense

By George F. Will, Published: June 5 E-mail the writer

Libertarians believe government should have a compelling reason before it restricts an individual’s liberty. Today’s liberals believe almost any reason will do, because liberty is less important than equality, fraternity, fighting obesity and many other aspirations. Now, however, one of the most senior and liberal U.S. senators and one of the most junior and libertarian have a proposal that could slow and even repair some of the fraying of society.

Seven-term Democrat Pat Leahy’s 38 Senate years have made him Judiciary Committee chairman. Republican Rand Paul is in his third Senate year. They hope to reduce the cruelty, irrationality and cost of the current regime of mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.

Such crimes are multiplying at a rate of more than 500 a decade, even though the Constitution explicitly authorizes Congress to criminalize only a few activities that are national in nature (e.g., counterfeiting, treason, crimes on the high seas). The federal government, having failed at core functions, such as fairly administering a rational revenue system, acts like a sheriff with attention-deficit disorder, haphazardly criminalizing this and that behavior in order to express righteous alarm about various wrongs that excite attention.

Approximately 80,000 people are sentenced in federal courts each year. There are an estimated 4,500 federal criminal statutes and tens of thousands of regulations backed by criminal penalties, including incarceration. There can be felony penalties for violating arcane regulations that do not give clear notice of behavior that is prescribed or proscribed. This violates the mens rea requirement — people deserve criminal punishment only if they intentionally engage in conduct that is inherently wrong or that they know to be illegal. No wonder that the federal prison population — currently approximately 219,000, about half serving drug sentences — has expanded 51 percent since 2000 and federal prisons are at 138 percent of their supposed capacity.

The Leahy-Paul measure would expand to all federal crimes the discretion federal judges have in many drug cases to impose sentences less than the mandatory minimums. This would, as Leahy says, allow judges — most of whom oppose mandatory minimums — to judge. Paul says mandatory minimum sentences, in the context of the proliferation of federal crimes, undermine federalism, the separation of powers and “the bedrock principle that people should be treated as individuals.”

Almost everyone who enters the desensitizing world of U.S. prisons is going to return to society, and many will have been socially handicapped by the experience. Until the 1970s, about 100 per 100,000 Americans were in prison. Today 700 per 100,000 are. America has nearly 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of its prisoners. African Americans are 13 percent of the nation’s population but 37 percent of the prison population, and one in three African American men spends time incarcerated. All this takes a staggering toll on shattered families and disordered neighborhoods.

The House Judiciary Committee has created an Over-Criminalization Task Force. Its members should read “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” by Harvey Silverglate, a libertarian lawyer whose book argues that prosecutors could indict most of us for three felonies a day. And the task force should read the short essay “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime” by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. Given the axiom that a competent prosecutor can persuade a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and given the reality of prosecutorial abuse — particularly, compelling plea bargains by overcharging with “kitchen sink” indictments — Reynolds believes “the decision to charge a person criminally should itself undergo some degree of due process scrutiny.”

He also suggests banning plea bargains: “An understanding that every criminal charge filed would have to be either backed up in open court or ignominiously dropped would significantly reduce the incentive to overcharge. . . . Our criminal justice system, as presently practiced, is basically a plea-bargain system with actual trials of guilt or innocence a bit of showy froth floating on top.”

U.S. prosecutors win more than 90 percent of their cases, 97 percent of those without complete trials. British and Canadian prosecutors win significantly less, and for many offenses, the sentences in those nations are less severe.

Making mandatory minimums less severe would lessen the power of prosecutors to pressure defendants by overcharging them in order to expose them to draconian penalties. The Leahy-Paul measure is a way to begin reforming a criminal justice system in which justice is a diminishing component.

The NSA tracking phone calls of millions of Verizon customers???

Source

Not just Verizon? Secret NSA effort to gather phone data is years old

By Richard A. Serrano and Kathleen Hennessey

June 6, 2013, 8:54 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- The massive National Security Agency collection of telephone records disclosed Wednesday was part of a continuing program that has been in effect nonstop since 2006, according to the two top leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been in place for the past seven years," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) told reporters Thursday. The surveillance “is lawful” and Congress has been fully briefed on the practice, she added.

Her Republican counterpart, Saxby Chambliss, concurred: "This is nothing new. This has been going on for seven years,” he said. “Every member of the United States Senate has been advised of this. [Which means every member of the Senate approved of it???] To my knowledge there has not been any citizen who has registered a complaint. It has proved meritorious because we have collected significant information on bad guys, but only on bad guys, over the years."

The statements by the two senators, whose committee positions give them wide access to classified data, appeared to rule out the possibility that the court order directing Verizon to turn over telephone records was related to the Boston Marathon bombings. The order was effective as of April 19, shortly after the bombings, which had sparked speculation about a link.

Instead, the surveillance, which was revealed Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, appears to have been of far longer duration. Although the senators did not specify the scope of the surveillance, the fact that it has been in place since 2006 also suggests that it is not limited to any one phone carrier.

The Obama administration defended the program Thursday, saying the data collection “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States.” [So every one of these millions of Americans the NSA spied on is a terrorist according to Obama???]

A senior administration official released a statement which did not confirm the existence of the court order authorizing the surveillance, which, according to the copy released by the Guardian, is marked "Top Secret." It was issued in late April by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court that meets in Washington, and allowed the government to collect the bulk data until July 19.

"The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the name of any subscriber," the official said. "It relates exclusively to metadata, such as a telephone number or the length of a call.

The court order was authorized under a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that allows the government to collect business records in bulk if its requests are approved by the court. [I think that is a big word for the police state Patriot Act]

The official said telephone data allow "counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

The official requested anonymity to discuss the counterterrorism program.

In defending the data collection program, the administration official sought to spread responsibility, noting that “all three branches” of government were tasked with review and oversight of surveillance. [So all three branches of government are spying on us???]

"There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act," the official said. He said that involves oversight by the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FISA court.

Separately, the Justice Department released a letter defending the administration’s handling of the FISA law that they had sent in 2011 to two senators who had objected to it.

“We do not believe the Executive Branch is operating pursuant to ‘secret law’ or ‘secret opinions of the Department of Justice,’ “ said the letter, signed by Assistant Atty. Gen. Ronald Weich. The “Intelligence Community is conducting court-authorized intelligence activities pursuant to a public statute, with the knowledge and oversight of Congress and the Intelligence Communities of both Houses.”

“Many other collection activities are classified,” Weich added, saying that “this is necessary because public disclosure of the activities they discuss would harm national security and impede the effectiveness of the intelligence tools that Congress has approved.”

Weich further defended the program by saying intelligence officials have “determined that public disclosure of the classified use” of the law “would expose sensitive sources and methods to our adversaries and therefore harm national security.”

He said collection of records, as now underway with Verizon phone logs, was different than material obtained through grand jury subpoenas. Grand jury subpoenas, he said, can be obtained by prosecutors without court approval. In contrast, he said, the intelligence collections can be done only with approval from a federal judge sitting on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Most importantly, he noted that FISA courts require a showing by officials that the records sought “are relevant to an authorized national security investigation.”

The Weich letter was sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-0re.).

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. is testifying Thursday morning before the Senate Appropriations Committee, and is expected to address the matter further.

Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook

kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com

Rick.Serrano@latimes.com

Twitter: @khennessey

Here's Exactly Who to Blame in Congress for Authorizing Government Spying

Source

Here's Exactly Who to Blame in Congress for Authorizing Government Spying

The Atlantic WireBy Philip Bump | The Atlantic Wire

The National Security Agency and the FBI don't bear all the responsibility for the revelation that Verizon is turning phone records over to the government. That responsibility lies with the members of Congress who voted for the PATRIOT Act, as well as extensions of it and the provisions related to collecting those records. Over 100 people currently serving in the House and Senate voted for the original Act in 2001. Last year, over 300 voted to extend a key provision.

We looked at seven Congressional actions generally and five in particular to assess how the government's power to collect data has evolved. From October 2001 to last December, Congress continually voted to expand or continue the government's power to collect private data, ostensibly to bolster efforts to stop terrorist activity. In addition to the PATRIOT Act, Congress has also renewed provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA — the law that established the court which issued the Verizon order.

President Obama’s Dragnet

Source

President Obama’s Dragnet

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: June 6, 2013

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

That is a vital goal, but how is it served by collecting everyone’s call data? The government can easily collect phone records (including the actual content of those calls) on “known or suspected terrorists” without logging every call made. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was expanded in 2008 for that very purpose. Essentially, the administration is saying that without any individual suspicion of wrongdoing, the government is allowed to know who Americans are calling every time they make a phone call, for how long they talk and from where.

This sort of tracking can reveal a lot of personal and intimate information about an individual. To casually permit this surveillance — with the American public having no idea that the executive branch is now exercising this power — fundamentally shifts power between the individual and the state, and repudiates constitutional principles governing search, seizure and privacy.

The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching, was absurd. She said today that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future. Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the vice chairman of the committee, said the surveillance has “proved meritorious, because we have gathered significant information on bad guys and only on bad guys over the years.”

But what assurance do we have of that, especially since Ms. Feinstein went on to say that she actually did not know how the data being collected was used?

The senior administration official quoted in The Times said the executive branch internally reviews surveillance programs to ensure that they “comply with the Constitution and laws of the United States and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.”

That’s no longer good enough. Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

We are not questioning the legality under the Patriot Act of the court order disclosed by The Guardian. But we strongly object to using that power in this manner. It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, have raised warnings about the government’s overbroad interpretation of its surveillance powers. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” they wrote last year in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when the public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by issuing a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans. “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

This stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

What You Should Know About NSA Phone Data Program

What You Should Know About NSA Phone Data Program

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 6, 2013 at 4:04 PM ET

WASHINGTON — The government knows who you're calling.

Every day. Every call.

Here's what you need to know about the secret program and how it works:

___

Q: What happened and why is it a big deal?

A: The Guardian newspaper published a highly classified April U.S. court order that allows the government access to all of Verizon's phone records on a daily basis, for both domestic and international calls. That doesn't mean the government is listening in, and the National Security Agency did not receive the names and addresses of customers. But it did receive all phone numbers with outgoing or incoming calls, as well as the unique electronic numbers that identify cellphones. That means the government knows which phones are being used, even if customers change their numbers.

This is the first tangible evidence of the scope of a domestic surveillance program that has existed for years but has been discussed only in generalities. It proves that, in the name of national security, the government sweeps up the call records of Americans who have no known ties to terrorists or criminals.

Q: How is this different from the NSA wiretapping that was going on under President George W. Bush?

A: In 2005, The New York Times revealed that Bush had signed a secret order allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without court approval, a seismic shift in policy for an agency that had previously been prohibited from spying domestically. The exact scope of that program has never been known, but it allowed the NSA to monitor phone calls and emails. After it became public, the Bush administration dubbed it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was a critical tool in protecting the United States from attack.

"The NSA program is narrowly focused, aimed only at international calls and targeted at al-Qaida and related groups," the Justice Department said at the time.

But while wiretapping got all the attention, the government was also collecting call logs from American phone companies as part of that program, a U.S. official said Thursday. After the wiretapping controversy, the surveillance continued, albeit with court approval. That's what we're seeing in the newly released court document: a judge's authorization for something that began years ago with no court oversight.

Q: Why does the government even want my phone records?

A: They're not interested in your records, in all likelihood, but your calls make up the background noise of the global phone system.

Look at your monthly phone bill, and you'll see patterns: calls home as you leave work, food delivery orders on Friday nights, that once-a-week call to mom and dad.

It's like that, except on a monumentally bigger scale. Armed with the nation's phone records, the NSA's computers can identify what normal call behavior looks like. Abnormal call behavior begins to stand out.

When the computers spot something out of the ordinary, the government can identify what are known in intelligence circles as "communities of interest" — the networks of people who are in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers.

Over time, the records also become a valuable archive. When officials discover a new phone number linked to a suspected terrorist, they can consult the records to see who called that number in the preceding months or years.

Once the government has narrowed its focus on phone numbers it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

___

Q: So a judge approved this. Does that mean someone had to show probable cause that a crime was being committed?

A: No. The seizure was authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates under very different rules from a typical court. Probable cause is not required.

The court was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and is known in intelligence circles as the FISA court. Judges appointed by the president hear secret evidence and authorize wiretapping, search warrants and other clandestine efforts to monitor suspected or known spies and terrorists.

For decades, the court was located in a secure area at Justice Department headquarters. While prosecutors in criminal cases must come to court seeking subpoenas, the FISA judges came to the Justice Department. That changed in 2008 with the construction of a new FISA court inside the U.S. District Court in Washington. The courtroom is essentially a vault, designed to prevent anyone from eavesdropping on what goes on inside.

In this instance, Judge Roger Vinson authorized the NSA to seize the phone records under a provision in the USA Patriot Act, which passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and vastly expanded the government's ability to collect information on Americans.

___

Q: If not probable cause, what standard did the government use in this case?

A: The judge relied on one of the most controversial aspects of the Patriot Act: Section 215, which became known colloquially as the "library records provision" because it allowed the government to seize a wide range of documents, including library records. Under that provision, the government must show that there are "reasonable grounds to believe" that the records are relevant to an investigation intended to "protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

Exactly what "relevant" meant has been unclear. With the release of the classified court order, the public can see for the first time that everyone's phone records are relevant.

The Justice Department has staunchly defended Section 215, saying it was narrowly written and has safeguarded liberties.

Some in Congress, however, have been sounding alarms about it for years. Though they are prohibited from revealing what they know about the surveillance programs, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall or Colorado have said the government's interpretation of the law has gone far beyond what the public believes.

"We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act," the senators wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year.

___

Q: Why don't others in Congress seem that upset about all this?

A: Many members of Congress have known this was going on for years. While Americans might be surprised to see, in writing, an authorization to sweep up their phone records, that's old news to many in Congress.

"Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday. "It's been going on for some seven years."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss issued a similar statement:

"The executive branch's use of this authority has been briefed extensively to the Senate and House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and detailed information has been made available to all members of Congress."

___

Q: What does the Obama administration have to say about this?

A: So far, very little. Despite campaigning against Bush's counterterrorism efforts, President Barack Obama has continued many of the most controversial ones including, it is now clear, widespread monitoring of American phone records.

The NSA is particularly reluctant to discuss its programs. Even as it has secretly collected millions of phone records, it has tried to cultivate an image that it was not in the domestic surveillance business.

In March, for instance, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, emailed an Associated Press reporter about a story that described the NSA as a monitor of worldwide internet data and phone calls.

"NSA collects, monitors, and analyzes a variety of (asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)FOREIGN(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) signals and communications for indications of threats to the United States and for information of value to the U.S. government," she wrote. " (asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)FOREIGN(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) is the operative word. NSA is not an indiscriminate vacuum, collecting anything and everything."

___

Q: Why hasn't anyone sued over this? Can I?

A: People have sued. But challenging the legality of secret wiretaps is difficult because, in order to sue, you have to know you've been wiretapped. In 2006, for instance, a federal judge in Detroit declared the NSA warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional. But the ruling was overturned when an appeals court that said the plaintiffs — civil rights groups, lawyers and scholars — didn't have the authority to sue because they couldn't prove they were wiretapped.

Court challenges have also run up against the government's ability to torpedo lawsuits that could jeopardize state secrets.

The recent release of the classified court document is sure to trigger a new lawsuit in the name of Verizon customers whose records were seized. But now that the surveillance program is under the supervision of the FISA court and a warrant was issued, a court challenge is more difficult.

Suing Verizon would also be difficult. A lawsuit against AT&T failed because Congress granted telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for cooperating with warrantless surveillance. In this instance, Verizon was under a court order to provide the records to the government, making a lawsuit against the company challenging.

Uncle Sam reads your email and listens to your phone calls

Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports

Sure the jackbooted thugs in the FBI, Homeland Security, DEA, BATF, and ICE who created this program are the problem, but the real problem is the members of the US Congress and US Senate who passed the unconstitutional laws such as the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allow the police thugs in those government agencies to do this.

The article didn't mention this but in addition to monitoring our phone conversations and reading our emails the government at both the Federal, state, county and city levels routinely monitor our websites, chat rooms, Facebook, Tweeter and other internet activities.

Every day some of my web pages get a visit from an IP address in Shady Grove, Maryland, which I suspect is the home of some Federal police agency. On a map Shady Grove, Maryland looks like a suburb in the Washington, D.C. metro area and I suspect it is the home of one branch or another of the US Department of Homeland Security.

I have read a number of articles in the Arizona Republic about people who have been arrested by police from the cities of Tempe, Phoenix and the Arizona Department of Public Safety who troll the internet pretending to be horny underage girls who want to have sex with older men.

Source

Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports

Associated Press Fri Jun 7, 2013 7:42 AM

A leaked document has laid bare the monumental scope of the government's surveillance of Americans' phone records — hundreds of millions of calls — in the first hard evidence of a massive data collection program aimed at combating terrorism under powers granted by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.

At issue is a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries. Intelligence experts said the government, though not listening in on calls, would be looking for patterns that could lead to terrorists — and that there was every reason to believe similar orders were in place for other phone companies.

Some critics in Congress, as well as civil liberties advocates, declared that the sweeping nature of the National Security Agency program represented an unwarranted intrusion into Americans' private lives. But a number of lawmakers, including some Republicans who normally jump at the chance to criticize the Obama administration, lauded the program's effectiveness. Leaders of the House Intelligence Committee said the program had helped thwart at least one attempted terrorist attack in the United States, "possibly saving American lives."

Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported Thursday the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans.

The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Post said PalTalk has had numerous posts about the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It also said Dropbox would soon be included.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple said in statements that they do not provide the government with direct access to their records.

"When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law," the company said.

The leaks about the programs brought a sharp response from James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. In an unusual statement late Thursday, Clapper called disclosure of the Internet surveillance program "reprehensible" and said the leak about the phone record collecting could cause long-lasting and irreversible harm to the nation's ability to respond to threats.

Clapper said news reports about the programs contained inaccuracies and omitted key information. He declassified some details about the authority used in the phone records program because he said Americans must know the program's limits. Those details included that a special national security court reviews the program every 90 days and that the court prohibits the government from indiscriminately sifting through phone data. Queries are only allowed when facts support reasonable suspicion, Clapper said.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said of the phone-records collecting: "When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we're going to have a real debate."

But Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Americans have no cause for concern. "If you're not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you've got nothing to worry about," he said. [Yea, and if this were Nazi Germany, I am sure Sen. Lindsey Graham would have said the Jews shouldn't be alarmed at some of the things Hitler was doing, after all they were aimed at Jews, but rather at helping the Nazis catch bad criminals.]

A senior administration official pointed out that the collection of communication cited in the Washington Post and Guardian articles involves "extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court [FISA courts, secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are normally not open to the public, and which don't keep records of their decisions that are open to the public, and which meet in location which the public is not allowed], to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons." The official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and requested anonymity, added that Congress had recently reauthorized the program.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said the order was a three-month renewal of an ongoing practice that is supervised by federal judges who balance efforts to protect the country from terror attacks against the need to safeguard Americans' privacy. The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011.

While the scale of the program might not have been news to some congressional leaders, the disclosure offered a public glimpse into a program whose breadth is not widely understood. Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee, said it was the type of surveillance that "I have long said would shock the public if they knew about it."

The government has hardly been forthcoming.

Wyden released a video of himself pressing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the matter during a Senate hearing in March.

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Wyden asked.

"No, sir," Clapper answered.

"It does not?" Wyden pressed.

Clapper quickly softened his answer. "Not wittingly," he said. "There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect — but not wittingly."

There was no immediate comment from Clapper's office Thursday on his testimony in March.

The public is now on notice that the government has been collecting data — even if not listening to the conversations — on every phone call every American makes, a program that has operated in the shadows for years, under President George W. Bush, and continued by President Barack Obama.

"It is very likely that business records orders like this exist for every major American telecommunication company, meaning that if you make calls in the United States the NSA has those records," wrote Cindy Cohn, general counsel of the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and staff attorney Mark Rumold, in a blog post.

Without confirming the authenticity of the court order, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said such surveillance powers are "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats," by helping officials determine if people in the U.S. who may have been engaged in terrorist activities have been in touch with other known or suspected terrorists.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., stressed that phone records are collected under court orders that are approved by the Senate and House Intelligence committees and regularly reviewed.

And Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada played down the significance of the revelation.

"Everyone should just calm down and understand that this isn't anything that's brand new," he said. "This is a program that's been in effect for seven years, as I recall. It's a program that has worked to prevent not all terrorism but certainly the vast, vast majority. Now is the program perfect? Of course not." [Yea, and Harry Reid probably would have said the same things to the Jews in Nazi Germany. Trust your government, these laws are not aimed at murdering Jews, but at catching criminals. Trust the government, we are here to help you, not harm you!!!]

But privacy advocates said the scope of the program was indefensible.

"This confirms our worst fears," said Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. "If the government can track who we call," he said, "the right to privacy has not just been compromised — it has been defeated."

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who sponsored the USA Patriot Act that governs the collection, said he was "extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation." [Another government liar who will say anything to get elected??? If this tyrant is so concerned about the Patriot Act he created why doesn't he pass a law to repeal it??? Probably because he is getting money from the special interest groups in the FBI and other Homeland Security agencies]

Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.

House Speaker John Boehner called on Obama to explain why the program is necessary.

It would "be helpful if they'd come forward with the details here," he said.

The disclosure comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Obama administration. The president already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists' phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead. [I have always said Obama is a carbon copy clone of George W. Bush, now it seems like Obama is also a clone of Richard M. Nixon!!!]

At a minimum, it's all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.

The Verizon order, granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, according to The Guardian.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA's computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify "communities of interest" — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

Rogers said once the data has been collected, officials still must follow "a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number." [From what I have read these FISA courts are secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are normally not open to the public, and which don't keep public records of their decisions. So that really isn't a system of checks and balances to prevent government abuses, in fact it's an invitation to government abuses]

But Jim Harper, a communications and privacy expert at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, questioned the effectiveness of pattern analyses to intercept terrorism. He said that kind of analysis would produce many false positives and give the government access to intricate data about people's calling habits.

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company isn't allowed to comment on any such court order.

"Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard its customers' privacy," he wrote. "Nevertheless, the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply."

The company listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. [That is about one third of American's population of 310 million people]

The NSA had no immediate comment. The agency is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency "is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans' civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability."

Under Bush, the NSA built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown, but one aspect was to monitor massive numbers of incoming and outgoing U.S. calls to look for suspicious patterns, said an official familiar with the program. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

After The New York Times revealed the existence of that wiretapping program, the data collection continued under the Patriot Act, the official said. The official did not know if the program was continuous or whether it stopped and restarted at times.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Seizing cellphone records abuses liberty

Source

Seizing cellphone records abuses liberty

Our View: Data mining is legal, useful - but not a blank check

By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jun 7, 2013 7:44 AM

There is a rich vein of irony in Wednesday’s revelation by a London newspaper that the National Security Agency is collecting millions of telephone records from Verizon every day and has a court’s approval to do it.

This is the Obama administration’s NSA, after all. The administration that arrived in 2008 on a mission to repudiate and abandon all the “war on terror” transgressions of its predecessor.

And it is led by a president who just two weeks ago in a major national-security speech expressed concerns about the “expanded surveillance” brought about by the war on terror. He spoke of the need to re-establish balance “between our interests in security and our values of privacy.”

This current NSA “data mining” of millions of phone records is a practice indistinguishable from those conducted at the height of the Patriot Act-authorized war on terror — unchanged except in the scope of the surveillance, which appears far more sweeping than any snooping authority sought by the George W. Bush administration.

Not a lot of “balance” there.

Still, there needs to be some balance struck regarding the meaning of the NSA data-mining story itself. It is not the horrifying, new intrusion on privacy it appears to be.

First, the practice is legal and has been for a long time. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1979 concluded in Smith vs. Maryland that because phone records are held by phone companies, the data about those phone records (as opposed to the content of the phone calls) is not privileged information. The government’s right to access the data for national-security purposes is explicitly authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Just as during the Bush administration’s post-9/11 pursuit of terror suspects, the Obama administration’s interest in acquiring the data is almost certainly an effort to prevent terrorist attacks.

We can say “almost certainly” with fair confidence. The court that approved the data mining was the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in 1978 precisely for this purpose.

Further, the court orders, however sweeping, appear to have been witnessed by (and tacitly approved by) congressional Intelligence Committee members.

That hasn’t made the government’s habit of gathering the data any less controversial. For many civil libertarians and critics of the Bush administration, data mining of phone records was evidence of the unconstitutional, unchecked power of the “unitary executive.”

That concern continues today.

Two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have been cryptically expressing grave concerns for years about what they saw as the administration’s overuse of its surveillance powers. This widespread phone-snooping story is at least part of what they were hinting at.

But it is especially troubling for this administration, given the recent revelations about its willingness to use — which is to say, abuse — the enormous powers of government against political enemies.

The Internal Revenue Service treatment of conservative non-profit organizations may not have been explicitly ordered by the administration. But there is ample evidence the IRS was enthusiastically encouraged by the president and his aides to single out “tea partyers” for special scrutiny.

And the Obama Justice Department’s grim labeling of a Fox News reporter as a suspected espionage co-conspirator underscores the view that the administration is not shy about using its power politically.

There most certainly is a necessary “balance” to be struck between national security and individual liberty. President Barack Obama has not found that balance. He needs to.

Obama defends phone data collection program

F*ck you Obama, I will take 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience any day of the year over having your police thugs spy on me to protect me from enemies which YOUR foreign policies created!!!!

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Obama defends phone data collection program

Josh Lederman and Donna Cassata Fri Jun 7, 2013 10:08 AM

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama vigorously defended sweeping secret surveillance into America’s phone records and foreigners’ Internet use, declaring “we have to make choices as a society.”

Taking questions Friday from reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif., Obama said, “It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”

It was revealed late Wednesday that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of U.S. phone customers. The leaked document first reported by the Guardian newspaper gave the NSA authority to collect from all of Verizon’s land and mobile customers, but intelligence experts said the program swept up the records of other phone companies too. Another secret program revealed Thursday scours the Internet usage of foreign nationals overseas who use any of nine U.S.-based internet providers such as Microsoft and Google.

In his first comments since the programs were publicly revealed this week, Obama said safeguards are in place.

“They help us prevent terrorist attacks,” Obama said. He said he has concluded that prevention is worth the “modest encroachments on privacy.” [Yea, and modest violations of the Bill of Rights, as if a modest violations are OK]

Obama said he came into office with a “healthy skepticism” of the program and increased some of the “safeguards” on the programs. He said Congress and federal judges have oversight on the program, and a judge would have to approve monitoring of the content of a call and it’s not a “program run amok.” [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he said. “That’s not what this program’s about.”

He said government officials are “’’looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”

“They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata they might identify potential leads of people who might engage in terrorism,” Obama said. [per the 4th Amendment you have to have "probable cause" to spy on people and when you say "might" you don't have "probable cause"]

The president’s remarks followed an unusual late-night statement Thursday from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who denounced the leaks of highly classified documents that revealed the programs and warned that America’s security will suffer. He called the disclosure of a program that targets foreigners’ Internet use “reprehensible,” and said the leak of another program that lets the government collect Americans’ phone records would change America’s enemies behavior and make it harder to understand their intentions.

“The unauthorized disclosure of a top secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” Clapper said of the phone-tracking program.

At the same time, Clapper offered new information about the secret programs.

“I believe it is important for the American people to understand the limits of this targeted counterterrorism program and the principles that govern its use,” he said.

Among the previously classified information about the phone records collection that Clapper revealed:

—The program is conducted under authority granted by Congress and is authorized by the Foreign intelligence Surveillance Court which determines the legality of the program. [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

—The government is prohibited from “indiscriminately sifting” through the data acquired. It can only be reviewed “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” He also said only counterterrorism personnel trained in the program may access the records.

—The information acquired is overseen by the Justice Department and the FISA court. Only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed, he said. [Yea, oversights by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

—The program is reviewed every 90 days. [Yea, by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

The Obama administration’s defense of the two programs came as members of Congress were vowing to change a program they voted to authorize and exasperated civil liberties advocates were crying foul, questioning how Obama, a former constitutional scholar who sought privacy protections as a U.S. senator, could embrace policies aligned with President George W. Bush, whose approach to national security he had vowed to leave behind.

Clapper alleged that articles about the Internet program “contain numerous inaccuracies.” He did not specify.

Senior administration officials defended the programs as critical tools and said the intelligence they yield is among the most valuable data the U.S. collects. Clapper said the Internet program, known as PRISM, can’t be used to intentionally target any Americans or anyone in the U.S, and that data accidentally collected about Americans is kept to a minimum. [Yea, and secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records will guarantee that!!!]

Leaders of Congress’ intelligence panels dismissed the furor over what they said was standard three-month renewal to a program that’s operated for seven years. Committee leaders also said the program recently helped thwart what would have been a significant domestic terrorist attack.

The NSA must collect the phone data in broad swaths, Clapper said, because collecting it narrowly would make it harder to identify terrorism-related communications. [Why not just add a section to the Patriot Act that requires every American to give the keys to their home so an FBI agent can stop in any time and spy on them just to make sure they are not up to no good??? Hey, it's not flushing the 4th Amendment down the toilet any more then the rest of the Patriot Act does!!!!]

But the widespread notion of a government dragnet ensnaring terror suspects and innocent Americans pushed typical political foes to stand together against Obama as he enforces what many likened to Bush-era policies.

“When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call from is private information,” [yea, between them the FBI, NSA and only a few thousand other people in the government] said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “As a result of the disclosures that came to light today, now we’re going to have a real debate in the Congress and the country and that’s long overdue.”

Officials from Clapper’s office, the Justice Department, NSA and FBI briefed 27 senators for some two hours late Thursday at a hurriedly convened session prompted by severe criticism and uncertainty about the program.

“The National Security Agency’s seizure and surveillance of virtually all of Verizon’s phone customers is an astounding assault on the Constitution,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. “After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters’ phone records, it would appear that this administration has now sunk to a new low.”

Paul said he will introduce legislation ensuring that the Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to government search of phone records. [Well at least he actually admits the Patriot Act has made the 4th Amendment null and void and he will pass legislation to un-repeal the 4th Amendment for a few purposes]

The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011. Republicans who usually don’t miss a chance to criticize the administration offered full support.

“I’m a Verizon customer. I could care less if they’re looking at my phone records. … If you’re not getting a call from a terrorist organization, you got nothing to worry about,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. [So if I associate with somebody the government considers a terrorist I have something to worry about??? Like my cousin who is an immigrant from Syria???]

The disclosures come at a particularly inopportune time for Obama. His administration already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service’s improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists’ phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.

At a minimum, it’s all a distraction as the president tries to tackle big issues like immigration reform and taxes. And it could serve to erode trust in Obama as he tries to advance his second-term agenda and cement his presidential legacy.

The Verizon order, granted by the secret FISA court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, The Guardian reported.

It does not authorize snooping into the content of phone calls. But with millions of phone records in hand, the NSA’s computers can analyze them for patterns, spot unusual behavior and identify “communities of interest” — networks of people in contact with targets or suspicious phone numbers overseas.

Once the government has zeroed in on numbers that it believes are tied to terrorism or foreign governments, it can go back to the court with a wiretap request. That allows the government to monitor the calls in real time, record them and store them indefinitely.

House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said that once the data has been collected, officials still must follow “a court-approved method and a series of checks and balances to even make the query on a particular number.” [Yea, checks and ballances by secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records!!!!]

The steps are shrouded in government secrecy, which some lawmakers say should change.

“The American public can’t be kept in the dark about the basic architecture of the programs designed to protect them,” said Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn. [Yea and secret FISA courts that meet in secret locations and keep secret records are part of the architecture designed to protect us!!!!]

Verizon Executive Vice President and General Counsel Randy Milch, in a blog post, said the company can’t comment on any such court order. He said Verizon take steps to protect customers’ privacy, but must comply with court orders. Verizon listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April.

The NSA is sensitive to perceptions that it might be spying on Americans. It distributes a brochure that pledges the agency “is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and Americans’ civil liberties — and its commitment to accountability.”

Emerging from the briefing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Intelligence committee, said the government must gather intelligence to prevent plots and keep Americans alive. “That’s the goal. If we can do it another way, we’re looking to do it another way. We’d like to.”

She said Congress is always open to changes, “but that doesn’t mean there will be any.”

A simple DUI ticket will cost you $10,000

I was talking to a woman who was somehow involved with the ASU college of law and she said that a simple DUI ticket will cost your $10,000 when you throw in all the costs, before an attorney.

She said in addition to the fine they will charge you to install a breathalyze interlock on your car to prevent you from driving when you have drank.

She said they even charge you a couple of hundred dollars every couple of months to re-calibrate the breathalyze interlock.

She said they will also shake you down for money to attend the silly driver safety classes.

She said that an attorney she knows started up a business installing and maintaining the breathalyze interlock devices on cars because it is so profitable.

She said he makes a lot more from the breathalyze interlock business then he does with his law degree. e said.

You expect a fair trial? Don't make me laugh!!!

Fraud probe vs. Phoenix officer may hurt DUI cases

Of course prosecutors routinely hid information because they are more interested in carving another notch in their gun by getting a conviction then giving a person a "fair trail".

In the 300+ cases where DNA testing has freed people framed by the police from death row, many of the people were convicted because the prosecutors hid information from the defense lawyers that would have proved the accused person didn't commit the crime.

Source

Fraud probe vs. Phoenix officer may hurt DUI cases

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jun 7, 2013 11:36 PM

Dozens of drunken-driving cases in Phoenix could be altered or dismissed because city prosecutors are refusing to disclose in court that there is a criminal investigation against a Phoenix officer who handles DUI cases, according to defense attorneys.

Phoenix police have spent the past nine months investigating allegations that Officer Jerry Schuiteboer burned his pickup in the desert and collected more than $14,000 in an insurance settlement, according to court documents.

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office is reviewing criminal-fraud charges submitted by Phoenix investigators.

The failure to disclose information to defense attorneys that could raise doubts about the officer’s truthfulness and reliability prevents suspects from having the opportunity to challenge Schuiteboer’s credibility in court and leaves them making ill- informed plea deals, according to attorney Lawrence Koplow, whose practice focuses on DUI defense.

But few outside a small circle of prosecutors and defense attorneys know of the felony allegations, and city prosecutors have resisted attempts from DUI attorneys to disclose Schuiteboer’s potential truthfulness issues in court.

Phoenix prosecutors declined to comment because the matter is ongoing.

Police investigators have known about the theft-by-fraud, forgery and insurance-fraud allegations against Schuiteboer since early September, and they served a search warrant on his home in December, according to court records.

Schuiteboer took about a month’s leave beginning Feb. 27. Since he returned in April, he has been working on “administrative duties,” according to Phoenix police.

But many of his cases are still making their way through the court system. Defense attorneys contacted Friday estimated that there are as many as 40 active cases in Phoenix Municipal Court and an additional 10 in Maricopa County Superior Court in which Schuiteboer played a role in stopping or arresting the suspect or collecting physical evidence through his work as a certified phlebotomist.

The fact that prosecutors refuse to disclose the allegations against Schuiteboer during pretrial proceedings could jeopardize those cases and others in which defendants have pleaded guilty because prosecutors argued that Schuiteboer and his work can be trusted, said Cliff Girard, a longtime Phoenix defense attorney.

“There’s a conscious effort to prevent anybody from knowing any of this stuff,” Girard said.

The allegations against Schuiteboer are contained in the criminal search warrant investigators served at his Peoria home late last year.

Schuiteboer claimed he walked out of a Glendale hardware store at about 3:15 on a Friday afternoon in January 2011 and found that his 12-year-old Ford pickup was missing, according to court records. Schuiteboer called Glendale police and asked the responding officer to meet him at a Westgate Entertainment District bar, where he could fill out the stolen-vehicle report.

Buckeye police found the truck nearly two weeks later in the desert, burned, stripped of valuables and with damage to the steering column as if it had been stolen, according to the records.

Schuiteboer claimed the truck was worth about $16,000 and received an insurance payment of more than $14,000, according to the records.

Phoenix police began investigating Schuiteboer in September, when a man claimed he picked Schuiteboer up in January 2011 from a desert area near where the truck was discovered.

The man gave investigators information that hints at a dispute between himself and Schuiteboer but also provided details that detectives attempted to verify through physical evidence and phone records.

“Jerry told (him) he just dumped his truck in the desert. He was tired of it because it was not worth much money,” according to court documents. “Jerry stated he damaged the dash, the ignition and removed the back seat so it would appear it was stolen by drug traffickers.”

Investigators got information about Schuiteboer’s phone calls and confirmed that he was making phone calls in the Buckeye area from about 1:20 to about 2:30 p.m., not a Glendale hardware store, on the afternoon his truck was stolen.

“This contradicted the information Jerry reported to Glendale police,” according to court documents. “Jerry’s phone records confirmed on Jan. 21, 2011, he called his wife at 3:36 p.m. and called Glendale police at 3:49 p.m.”

Investigators then requested a search warrant for Schuiteboer’s home, where they discovered a number of items matching the description of those the Phoenix officer had reported stolen, including a flashlight, a CD player and a police jacket.

Schuiteboer on Friday said there are two sides to every story, before declining to comment further and referring questions to his attorney, David Michael Cantor, a DUI and criminal-defense lawyer.

Cantor did not return calls for comment.

Phoenix prosecutors have stated in court filings that it is premature for attorneys to try to bar Schuiteboer’s testimony in DUI cases.

One filing from late May argues that Schuiteboer is facing an ongoing internal police investigation, which is neither a public record nor admissible in court.

“Because it is pending, it has not (at least yet) been found that Officer Schuiteboer did anything wrong which would reflect negatively on his character,” Phoenix prosecutor Andrea Gutiérrez wrote.

The defense attorneys who want the allegations against Schuiteboer to be disclosed as part of their clients’ cases take a different view, citing U.S. Supreme Court decisions. They argue that information that could be favorable to the defense or cast doubt on a verdict is information that prosecutors are obligated to disclose. The need is particularly acute in DUI cases where officers like Schuiteboer, who is certified to draw blood, can act as the arresting officer or serve as the expert on how physical evidence was handled, Koplow said.

“There’s a distinction between disclosure to attorneys and admissibility at trial. We’ll fight the admissibility part later. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to make the disclosure,” he said. “What if their case is based on whether the guy followed procedure and his word is everything? Most of the time, you have the officer’s testimony as to what they saw, and then the blood-test results, his testimony can affect both.”

The frustration among defense attorneys increased Friday as they learned of the search warrant, which The Arizona Republic printed from a court computer open to the public.

Girard said he delivered a letter to Phoenix Police Chief Daniel V. Garcia and the Phoenix prosecutor’s office on Friday reminding both agencies of their obligations to disclose information such as the allegations against Schuiteboer to defense attorneys.

The public disclosure of the allegations against Schuiteboer may change how prosecutors handle active cases he was involved with in the future, Girard said, but the information could also impact prior DUI prosecutions that already went through the system.

“If this guy wasn’t a police officer, they’d disclose this real fast,” he said. “Now that the cat’s out of the bag, they’re going to have to do something. This guy was arresting people right up until recent times.”

Anti-medical marijuana measure off November ballot

Political winds keep anti-medical marijuana measure off November ballot, lawmaker says

Posted: Thursday, June 6, 2013 4:08 pm

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

The state's more than 38,000 medical marijuana users are in no danger of losing their medication, at least not at the ballot box.

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said Wednesday he cannot drum up enough support among legislative colleagues for his bid to ask voters next year to rescind Arizona's 2010 Medical Marijuana Act. That not only kills the plan for this year but also makes it unlikely to be resurrected next year.

The problem, Kavanagh said, is political.

"The majority of the members oppose medical marijuana,'' he told Capitol Media Services.

"But there are a lot of people who have expressed concern that that (ballot measure) would bring out people who would not vote Republican in the November election,'' Kavanagh said. And he said some GOP lawmakers feel that could result in Democrats picking up strength in the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Kavanagh was clearly miffed at the injection of politics into what he sees as a public health and safety matter.

"I think that is a cold, calculating and, from a policy perspective, poor criteria for supporting something,'' he said. "But that's the political reality.''

The 2010 law allows those with a doctor's recommendation to get a state-issued card allowing them to obtain up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks from a state-licensed dispensary. The most recent report from the state Department of Health Services showed 38,506 cardholders as of April 16.

Kavanagh, a former police officer, called it bad public policy to allow voters and not the Food and Drug Administration to decide what is medicine.

He also pointed out that the measure was approved by a narrow margin -- just 4,340 votes out of more than 1.6 million votes cast. Kavanagh argued the results would have been different had foes had the time and finances to mount a proper campaign -- the kind of campaign he was trying to engineer for 2014.

Kavanagh said there is one way of killing the Arizona law: Have the federal government enforce the Controlled Substances Act which makes the possession and sale of marijuana a federal felony.

So far, though, the position of the U.S. Department of Justice is that going after medical marijuana users where that is legal under state law is not a high priority given the government's limited resources. Kavanagh sniffed at that excuse.

"One raid on one clinic and Phoenix would shut the whole operation down, especially if they seized the building from the owner,'' he said. But Kavanagh said he's not holding his breath that will happen.

"I guess the federal government is too busy bugging news reporters and distributing guns to Mexican cartels to actually enforce the law within their borders,'' h

Five myths about legalizing marijuana

Source

Five myths about legalizing marijuana

By Doug Fine, Published: June 7

Doug Fine is the author of “Too High to Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution,” in which he followed one legal medicinal cannabis plant from farm to patient.

With 16 states having decriminalized or legalized cannabis for non-medical use and eight more heading toward some kind of legalization, federal prohibition’s days seem numbered. You might wonder what America will look like when marijuana is in the corner store and at the farmers market. In three years spent researching that question, I found some ideas about the plant that just don’t hold up.

1. If pot is legal, more people will use it.

As drug policy undergoes big changes, I’ve been watching rates of youth cannabis use with interest. As it is for most fathers, the well-being of my family is the most important thing in my life. Whether you like the plant or not, as with alcohol, only adults should be allowed to partake of intoxicating substances. But youth cannabis use is near its highest level ever in the United States. When I spoke at a California high school recently and asked, “Who thinks cannabis is easier to obtain than alcohol?,” nearly every hand shot up.

In Portugal, by contrast, youth rates fell from 2002 to 2006, after all drugs were legalized there in 2001. Similarly, a 2011 Brown University-led study of middle and high school students in Rhode Island found no increases in adolescent use after the state legalized medical marijuana in 2006.

As for adult use, the numbers are mixed. A 2011 University of California at Berkeley study, for example, showed a slight increase in adult use with de facto legalization in the Netherlands (though the rate was still lower than in the United States). Yet that study and one in 2009 found Dutch rates to be slightly lower than the European average. When the United States’ 40-year-long war on marijuana ends, the country is not going to turn into a Cheech and Chong movie. It is, however, going to see the transfer of as much as 50 percent of cartel profits to the taxable economy.

2. Law enforcement officials oppose legalization.

It is true that many law enforcement lobby groups don’t want to end America’s most expensive war (which has cost $1 trillion and counting), but that’s because they’re the reason it’s so expensive. In 2010, two-thirds of federal spending on the drug war, $10 billion, went toward law enforcement and interdiction.

But law enforcement rank and file know the truth about the drug war’s profligate and ineffective spending, says former Los Angeles deputy police chief Stephen Downing, one of 5,000 public safety professionals who make up the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Most law enforcers find it difficult not to recognize the many harms caused by our current drug laws,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. Those harms include, according to a new ACLU report, marijuana-possession arrests that are skewed heavily toward minorities.

Since marijuana prohibition drives the drug war, these huge costs would end when federal cannabis law changes. Sheriff Tom Allman in Mendocino County, Calif., helped permit, inspect and protect local cannabis farmers in 2010 and 2011. When I asked him why, he said: “This county has problems: domestic violence, meth, poverty. Marijuana isn’t even in the top 10. I want it off the front pages so I can deal with the real issues.”

3. Getting high would be the top revenue generator for the cannabis plant.

I called both of my U.S. senators’ offices to support inserting a provision into this year’s farm bill to legalize hemp for domestic cultivation. Based on my research on industrial cannabis, commonly called hemp, I’m staggered by the potential of this plant, which is not the variety you smoke.

In Canada, where 90 percent of the crop is bought by U.S. consumers, the government researches the best varieties for its hemp farmers, rather than refusing to issue them permits, as the United States tends to do. In a research facility in Manitoba, I saw a tractor whose body was made entirely of hemp fiber and binding. BMW and Dodgeuse hemp fibers in their door panels, and homes whose insulation and wall paneling are made partially of hemp represent a fast-growing trend in the European construction industry.

Jack Noel, who co-authored a 2012 industrial hemp task force report for the New Mexico Department of Agriculture, says that “within 10 years of the end of the war on drugs, we’ll see a $50 billion domestic hemp industry.” That’s bigger than the $40 billion some economists predict smoked cannabis would bring in.

Foods such as cereal and salad dressing are the biggest U.S. markets for hemp today, but industrial cannabis has the brightest future in the energy sector, where a Kentucky utility is planning to grow hemp for biomass energy.

4. Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol would control the legal cannabis industry.

In 1978, the Carter administration changed alcohol regulations to allow for microbreweries. Today the craft-beer market is worth $10.2 billion annually. The top-shelf cannabis farmers in California’s Emerald Triangle realize this potential. “We’re creating an international brand, like champagne and Parmigiano cheese,” says Tomas Balogh, co-founder of the Emerald Growers Association in Humboldt, Calif. Get ready for the bud and breakfast.

When America’s 100 million cannabis aficionados (17 million regular partakers) are freed from dealers, some are going to pick up a six-pack of joints at the corner store before heading to a barbecue, and others are going to seek out organically grown heirloom strains for their vegetable dip.

As Balogh puts it: “When people ask me if the small farmer or the big corporation will benefit from the end of prohibition, I say, ‘Both.’ The cannabis industry is already decentralized and farmer-owned. It’s up to consumers to keep it that way.” So Big Alcohol might control the corner store, but not the fine-wine shop or the farmers’ market.

5. In the heartland, legalization is a political nonstarter.

President Obama, in an interview last December, for the first time took seriously a question about the legalization of cannabis. He said that he didn’t yet support it but that he had “bigger fish to fry” than harassing Colorado and Washington.

In Colorado in 2012, 40 percent of Republican voters chose to legalize cannabis, and a greater share of Coloradans voted for legalization than voted for Obama.

In Arizona, a pretty conservative and silver state, 56 percent of those in a poll last month supported regulating cannabis for personal use. Maybe fiscal conservatives know about the $35 billion in annual nationwide tax savings that ending prohibition would bring. In Illinois, 63 percent of voters support medicinal marijuana, and they’re likely to get it. Even 60 percent of Kentuckians favor medical cannabis.

I’m not surprised. I live in a conservative valley in New Mexico. Yet as a woman in line at the post office recently told me: “It’s pills that killed my cousin. Fightin’ pot just keeps those dang cartels in business.”

fine@well.com

Obama has declared war on the Bill of Rights, not terrorists

According to this article: arrests for Patriot Act violations are 1,618 for drug war crimes, 122 for fraud and 15 for terrorist crimes

According to this article: 62 percent of Patriot Act arrests were for drug war crimes, less then 1 percent were for terrorist crimes

DEA reactivates controversial informant

Source

DEA reactivates controversial informant

By Dennis Wagner The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 5, 2013 7:29 AM

A government informant who was terminated by the Justice Department years ago amid accusations of serial perjury has been reactivated and is working an undercover drug case with DEA agents in Phoenix, prompting allegations of government misconduct by a defense lawyer in a pending case.

Andrew Chambers Jr., once labeled in court records as “the highest-paid snitch in DEA history,” gave false testimony under oath in at least 16 criminal prosecutions nationwide before he was exposed in the late 1990s, according to U.S. District Court filings.

Chambers was an informant from 1984 to 2000 for the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies in at least 280 cases. The sting operations, which sent dozens of suspects to prison, took place in 31 cities across the nation.

During his first career as an informant, Chambers, 56, reportedly received up to $4 million in government money, nearly half of that from the DEA. He also was a paid informant of the FBI, customs-enforcement officers, postal inspectors, the Secret Service and other police agencies. He was credited with a role in 445 drug arrests.

The DEA conducted an internal probe in 2000 documenting Chambers’ dishonesty after defense lawyers and the media criticized the pattern of perjury and a lack of federal oversight. The Republic has obtained a copy of the 157-page Management Review, which says the DEA deactivated Chambers indefinitely as a confidential source on Feb. 2, 2000.

Yet, somehow, he resurrected his career and surfaced in Phoenix about three years ago in a sting that targeted defendant Luis Alberto Hernandez-Flores, accused as the kingpin in a major drug-trafficking organization.

Cameron Morgan, an attorney for Hernandez-Flores, filed a motion to dismiss charges or suppress testimony after uncovering the informant’s background.

“The DEA rehired Mr. Chambers, is using him in investigations all over the country, is again paying him exorbitant amounts of money and refuses to provide discovery about what he’s up to,” Morgan wrote in a petition under consideration by U.S. District Judge Stephen McNamee. “If Chambers were nothing more than a run-of-the-mill criminal, that would be one thing. But both Chambers and his defenders in the DEA brag that he is a con man extraordinaire.”

Chambers could not be reached for comment. It is unclear if he has a lawyer.

Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, expressed shock when told that a known perjurer is again working in the justice system.

“Wow! That’s pretty outrageous,” said Sterling, former assistant counsel to the House Subcommittee on Crime. “It’s just inexcusable. ... This is really a breakdown in the management of the DEA and the Department of Justice.”

Dawn Dearden, a DEA spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said she cannot discuss ongoing investigations or Chambers’ activities. “However,” she added, “I can say that DEA follows very strict and rigorous guidelines and protocols when handling all informants.”

Public-affairs officers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix and the Justice Department did not respond to interview requests.

During a 2000 appearance on the PBS show “Frontline” about his controversial career, Chambers said he helped bust criminals not for the money but because he didn’t want them selling drugs to his kids. “You need more people like me out there to deal with these guys.”

Chambers also was featured in 2000 on the ABC News broadcast “20/20.” He admitted giving false testimony about his criminal history, saying, “I just lied about it. I didn’t think it was that important what I did.”

Richard Fiano, then chief of operations at the DEA, told reporter Connie Chung that repeated, court-documented perjuries by Chambers “fell through the cracks” at his agency. “Would DEA use him (again)?” Fiano said. “No.”

Past misrepresented

The DEA’s internal investigation of Chambers in 2000 generally exonerated federal agents and prosecutors.

It said the informant was not urged to lie by agents or prosecutors. It asserts that his dozens of handlers were unaware of the deceit because of communication failures within the agency. Among those handlers was current DEA Director Michele Leonhart, who worked with Chambers as a field agent in St. Louis and as an administrator in Los Angeles. There is no public record of any DEA employee receiving discipline.

The DEA management review, a detailed inquiry conducted by the Office of Inspections, said Chambers misrepresented his past to sanitize his image and credibility. It asserted that his fibs were not germane to guilt or innocence of defendants.

The report listed numerous cases in which he gave false testimony about his criminal history. In at least a half-dozen trials and depositions, he denied any arrests or convictions even though he has been arrested 13 times and has a conviction for soliciting prostitution.

Chambers also testified falsely about his education and taxes, the report alleged: In a Florida case, for example, he swore that he had attended Iowa Wesleyan College for three years; he was there only one semester. He testified that he paid taxes on $60,000 of informant earnings during the previous year even though he filed no return.

When confronted with his contradictions on the witness stand during the 1990s, Chambers admitted under oath that he had repeatedly given false testimony. In the “Frontline” interview, he said he was accused of lying “because I didn’t say that I had been arrested for traffic tickets.” He added that he solicited a hooker to further his undercover role.

Federal prosecutor Stephen Wolfe described Chambers in a 1999 appellate case before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as “undefendable” because of his deceit and said the DEA’s repeated failure to confront and disclose the perjury was “carelessness, recklessness and probably deliberate,” according to a transcript.

Yet Chambers was not not charged with perjury or with tax evasion. Justice Department officials declined to explain the lack of prosecution. In 2000, federal attorneys in Miami and South Carolina threw out criminal indictments because of Chambers’ damaged credibility. News accounts at the time predicted a flurry of appeals nationwide by prison inmates seeking to have their convictions overturned; it is unknown how many appeals were filed or how many of those efforts were successful.

The DEA report said all of Chambers’ interactions with suspects were recorded except for first contacts. Defense attorneys view those initial meetings as critical to establishing whether Chambers entrapped their clients — inducing them to commit crimes that would not otherwise have occurred.

The DEA sought to conceal records of Chambers’ work from attorneys who filed a request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act. A federal court in the District of Columbia ordered the release of the materials, noting that the plaintiffs provided “compelling evidence ... suggesting massive government misconduct.”

After revelations about Chambers became public in 2000, then-Attorney General Janet Reno suspended his use as an operative.

Nevertheless, federal court records in Arizona show that Chambers was quietly reactivated about five years ago and took on a controversial role in the Hernandez-Flores case now being litigated in Phoenix.

‘Serial perjurer’

Informants, also known as confidential sources, are undercover operatives used by law-enforcement agencies to infiltrate criminal organizations. Some are criminals who accept the work to avoid prosecution or severe sentences. Others are paid for their services, usually under contracts.

The job, often perilous, requires courage, stealth and skilled deceit. Drug informants typically gather intelligence and in many cases orchestrate sting operations — phony narcotics deals — that are monitored by agents who sweep in and make arrests. In addition to payments for service, informants may be eligible for rewards and a percentage of seized cash from criminal enterprises.

A specialist in sting operations, Chambers typically poses as an out-of-town narcotics trafficker, often flashing bling and driving fancy cars. The Missouri native is said to be bold and street-savvy, using multiple aliases, able to convincingly portray a slum gangster or a Mercedes-driving entrepreneur. Once he identifies suspects, transactions are filmed or recorded by agents.

That’s what allegedly transpired with Phoenix defendant Hernandez-Flores, who was indicted in March 2012 on charges of narcotics possession and conspiracy. A DEA search-warrant affidavit identified Hernandez-Flores as the kingpin in a trafficking organization that deals in marijuana, heroin and cocaine.

In his May 21 motion to dismiss charges, defense attorney Cameron Morgan ripped the government for employing a “serial perjurer” who was previously banished from informant work.

Morgan declined to be interviewed for this story but confirmed this week that he forwarded information about Chambers to justice committees of the U.S. Senate and House.

In court papers, Morgan said federal officials provided an “open-ended grant of immunity” and paid a lot of money for testimony from a confessed perjurer. “At some point, the danger to the integrity of the court system is too great,” he wrote, arguing that charges should be thrown out or that testimony should be precluded because of “outrageous government conduct.”

Terry Rearick, a private investigator who years ago helped expose Chambers’ pattern of false testimony, said re-employing him for drug stings shows “a blatant, arrogant disrespect of justice from the government.”

“He was supposed to be out of business,” Rearick added. “I can’t believe it.”

Duping criminals

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Jan. 16, 2000, described Chambers as a high-school dropout who became an informant after failing to qualify as an agent. The story, headlined, “Top U.S. drug snitch is a legend and a liar,” also said he was an expert at duping criminals as well as the federal agents who employed him.

Chambers’ rap sheet contains at least 13 arrests on suspicion of assault, forgery and other crimes, according to public records. There is one conviction: In 1995, he was snared in a Denver sting operation in which undercover female officers posed as prostitutes. He also was charged with impersonating a federal agent at the time of that arrest, according to multiple published reports.

Federal authorities today refuse to divulge who authorized the 2008 reactivation of Chambers as an operative or why.

It is unknown when he started doing cases in Arizona. Morgan’s motion says a supervising federal prosecutor in Phoenix endorsed the decision. Former U.S. Attorney Diane Humetewa, who served in 2008, said she has no recollection of Chambers. Her successor, Dennis Burke, could not be reached.

Hernandez-Flores, scheduled for trial this summer, became the target of a DEA task force at least three years ago — suspected of drug-dealing and money-laundering. A federal search-warrant affidavit says the racehorse owner was investigated along with his wife, Alma Ramos, who was not charged, and associate Saul Sandoval, a co-defendant in the criminal case.

The federal indictment was a sort of do-over by DEA task-force members after an earlier state prosecution of the alleged drug ring fell apart.

In March 2010, Hernandez-Flores and 42 others were rounded up on a Maricopa County Superior Court indictment.

Hernandez-Flores was charged with 34 drug-related counts, but a judge ruled that a Glendale police detective who was working with the DEA provided “false and misleading statements” in a wiretap affidavit regarding her confidential informant.

Phone-surveillance records and derivative evidence got thrown out. Prosecutors were forced to dismiss charges against nearly all the defendants, including Hernandez-Flores, who walked out of jail in June 2011.

One month later, according to a search-warrant affidavit sworn out in federal court by DEA Agent Dustin Gillespie, Chambers bumped into Hernandez-Flores outside the suspect’s store, LJH Carniceria/SuperMercado, in southwest Phoenix.

The affidavit says Chambers parked at the business while taking a break from another investigation. It asserts that his contact with Hernandez-Flores occurred “by happenstance and was unplanned by law enforcement and the CS (confidential source).”

As a result, Chambers was not wearing a wire when Hernandez-Flores is accused of telling a complete stranger about his narcotics operation that included 80,000 pounds of marijuana available for distribution.

Within weeks, the affidavit says, a deal was struck: Chambers agreed to pay $90,000 for a kilogram of heroin, with half of the cash up front. On Dec. 21, 2011, DEA agents gave their informant a box of “simulated bulk currency.” The fake money was paid to Sandoval, who moments later crashed his vehicle trying to escape police.

Hernandez-Flores and Sandoval were indicted in March 2012.

Morgan, the defense lawyer, notes in his motion for dismissal that the previous case was thrown out based on an officer’s false statements related to an informant. Then, in the federal affidavit, Gillespie swore that Chambers was “a reliable DEA CS (confidential source)” despite the informant’s history of false testimony.

“These misrepresentations point out the danger of dealing with Chambers,” Morgan wrote. “His penchant for perjury is infectious to law enforcement.”

According to Morgan’s motion, Chambers was reactivated by the DEA in 2008, but the agency has refused to give defense lawyers any information on his role since that date.

“Here we are, again dealing with the horrific Chambers record and the DEA cover-up that has been going on since 1985 when it first rescued him from felony charges,” Morgan wrote.

Brian Russo, an attorney for Sandoval, said he also will seek dismissal. He said that Gillespie’s affidavit falsely labeled Chambers as reliable and that it defies belief to claim the case started by “happenstance.”

“Come on, I don’t believe in that much coincidence,” he added. “It’s just not plausible.”

Russo said the DEA refuses to supply defense counsel with basic information on Chambers’ investigations during the past five years, but a federal prosecutor recently disclosed in court that, since 2008, the informant has been paid an additional $1.8 million for undercover work.

“They won’t even tell us who made the decision (to reinstate him as an operative),” Russo said. “Somebody knows they’ve got serious problems.”

‘One in a million’

A review of the Nexis database for U.S. media articles shows no coverage of Chambers’ resurrection during the past five years. He is mentioned only in a 2010 news release that criticized the Obama administration for appointing Leonhart as DEA director despite her “close professional relationship” with the tainted informant.

Leonhart worked with Chambers as a drug investigator in Missouri during the 1980s and then as special agent in charge of the DEA’s Los Angeles office.

The Post-Dispatch report in 2000 quoted her as saying Chambers was “very credible, an outstanding testifier.” She also bemoaned the possibility that his undercover work would end.

“That would be a sad day for the DEA,” she told the newspaper. “He’s one in a million.”

Leonhart was confirmed by the Senate in 2010 as DEA administrator, overseeing 10,000 employees and a $3 billion budget. She had been deputy director since 2004 and was in that post when Chambers was reinstated as an operative.

Leonhart declined an interview request.

H. Dean Steward, a Southern California defense attorney who helped expose Chambers in 1999, said it is obvious who revived Chambers’ undercover career: “Michele Leonhart, head of the DEA. She was his handling agent. ... I’m convinced he’s back in business because of her.”

Steward said Chambers routinely fails to record introductory meetings with suspects, as happened in the Hernandez-Flores case in Phoenix.

That practice, he said, allows for possible entrapment with lies to suspects and for fabricated accounts in court. Defense lawyers, unable to disprove Chambers’ testimony, attack his credibility. Judges and jurors must decide whether to believe the informer.

“The significance is, he can say anything he wants,” Steward said. “He can lie. ... Supporting criminal cases with an admitted liar and perjurer perverts the entire system. To do it twice over 20-plus years is shocking.”

Reach the reporter at dennis.wagner@arizona republic.com.

Source

Case built on informer falls apart

By JJ Hensley and Dan Nowicki The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 5, 2013 11:03 PM

The concerns with federal drug informant Andrew Chambers Jr. have existed for years. They have been the subject of national TV news programs, newspapers around the country chronicled his activities, and a report from the Drug Enforcement Administration documented his lies and betrayals.

Those concerns did not discourage federal agents in Phoenix from using Chambers as an informant in a heroin-smuggling case in which DEA investigators labeled him as reliable.

But federal prosecutors on Tuesday asked a federal judge to dismiss the charges against Luis Hernandez-Flores and Saul Sandoval, accused of smuggling in a case in which Chambers was the key informant. The motion was filed at 6:16 p.m. Tuesday just hours before The Arizona Republic published a story on the DEA’s use of Chambers on the front page and on azcentral.com.

The dismissal does not detail what information was recently discovered that led to the move, and federal authorities declined to discuss it Wednesday.

The DEA indefinitely deactivated Chambers as an informant in 2000, following extensive coverage and an internal investigation that raised questions about his work for the agency. The DEA quietly reinstated Chambers as an informant in 2008.

The Republic’s story Wednesday caught the attention of watchdog groups, who were aware of Chambers’ history of giving false testimony in federal drug cases and his alleged non-payment of taxes on the millions of dollars the federal government paid him through the years. But the move to dismiss the case has prompted at least one member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the DEA, to raise the issue of a federal investigation into the decision to use Chambers in the first place.

Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday called the DEA’s use of Chambers “concerning” and suggested that the agency’s inspector general look into the matter.

“Using criminals to catch criminals is a dangerous game, but one that is at times required,” Grassley, R-Iowa, told The Republic in an e-mailed statement. “The federal government must take the utmost care and consideration when using informants. Too often the agencies operate in silos and fail to talk to their counterparts at the federal, state and local levels. Reactivating an informant with such a troubled history is concerning, and something the Inspector General should look into.”

A spokesperson for Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who also sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, declined to comment until Flake gets more information on the case.

The defense attorney for Hernandez-Flores last month filed a motion to dismiss the case against his client, arguing Chambers’ testimony as an informant could not be trusted. The motion detailed information about Chambers over the years.

Some of those issues came up last week in federal court, said Brian Russo, a defense attorney representing Sandoval.

Russo said the federal prosecutor assigned to the case, Karen McDonald, expressed her concerns at a hearing after she conducted a briefing with Chambers in preparation for the trial set for later this summer.

Chambers’ alleged failure to pay taxes was among the issues McDonald raised in court, Russo said. “She told the judge on the record that she had debriefed him, and new information came up, specifically these unpaid taxes, that she felt obligated to disclose,” Russo said.

The only thing surprising about the government’s move to dismiss the case was the timing, Russo said.

“Karen had discussed her desire to have a meeting with her bosses and push toward this, so it’s not totally unexpected,” Russo said.

A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Administration declined to comment because U.S. District Judge Stephen McNamee has not yet signed the government’s motion to dismiss the case.

There is no indication that the agency would elaborate on the decision to reinstate Chambers as a paid informant if the order is signed.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix declined to comment on the decision to drop the smuggling case, but said federal prosecutors still plan to respond to the defense’s motion to dismiss despite filing the very same motion on Tuesday.

“We still intend to file that response,” said Cosme Lopez, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.

If the judge grants the motion to dismiss, it would mark the second time that a case involving Hernandez-Flores fell apart. He was among 43 people named in a 2010 indictment in Maricopa County Superior Court where Hernandez-Flores was charged with dozens of drug-related counts. A judge ruled that a police officer working with the DEA provided misleading statements in order to get a wiretap, and the related evidence was thrown out, forcing prosecutors to dismiss the case.

Hernandez-Flores walked out of jail in June 2011. One month later, Chambers paid a visit to the suspect in southwest Phoenix, launching the second investigation.

Russo said that given the amount of money the government has spent to bring a case that relied on a questionable informant, someone should answer for the decision to employ Chambers.

“Somebody at the DEA obviously should be held accountable,” he said. “Taxpayer dollars are spent on these prosecutions, and now they have to just throw it out.”

Sadly the Arizona Republic is painting this case as a shocking abuse of power that has never happened until now. That is a lie.

Federal, state, county and city cops routinely pay snitches to frame people.

As of now 300+ people have been freed from death row when DNA testing proved they were framed by the police. Many of these cases relied on paid government snitches to frame the innocent person.

Source

A suspected drug kingpin is free, thanks to the DEA

Our View: Shortcuts, toxic informant thwarted justice

By Editorial board The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Jun 6, 2013 7:49 AM

In the annals of crime and punishment in America, prosecutors sometimes have been persuaded by the sheer force of a news reporter’s newfound evidence that their case against the accused wasn’t as dead-bolt certain as they thought.

Prosecutors are human. Sometimes they err.

But the now-collapsed federal case against suspected heroin smugglers Luis Alberto Hernandez-Flores and Saul Sandoval is a different matter. It does not appear to have fallen apart because of procedural error by prosecutors. Nor does any newly discovered evidence exonerate the suspects.

No, this case collapsed because of the boneheaded and indefensible use of a tainted informant.

As reported by The Arizona Republic’s Dennis Wagner, the star witness for the prosecution in the drug-smuggling case — paid informant Andrew Chambers Jr. — is not merely problematic to the pursuit of justice. He is a living nightmare. The revelation of his association with the case appears to have rendered it toxic and unwinnable.

How toxic is Chambers?

Early Wednesday, as Wagner’s story exposing Chambers appeared online and on readers’ doorsteps, federal prosecutors scrambled to get a motion before U.S. District Court Judge John Leonardo to dismiss the case.

According to Wagner, Chambers was dropped by the Justice Department as an informant in 2000 after the Drug Enforcement Administration alleged he committed perjury in 16 cases he worked undercover for the DEA while earning a reported $4 million.

Prosecutors acknowledged that Chambers’ testimony was so thoroughly drenched in lies that his presence in a case was “undefendable.” Federal prosecutor Stephen Wolfe said in 1999 that the DEA’s repeated failure to confront and disclose his perjury was “carelessness, recklessness and probably deliberate.”

Banished in 2000, Chambers resurfaced as a DEA informant in 2008, and has been paid at least $1.8 million since then, according to Wagner’s reporting.

Whether coincidence or not, Chambers’ resurrection coincides with the rise of his former DEA handler, Michele Leonhart, to the top of the agency’s management.

Prosecutors and law-enforcement investigators should be aggressive and undaunted in the pursuit of justice. But the operative word here is “justice.” Those entrusted with enforcing the law must follow the law to the letter. There are no shortcuts.

With a lightning rod like Chambers holding their case together, it is incomprehensible how federal prosecutors expected to win this case, much less see justice served. [It is not incomprehensible how federal prosecutors expected to win this case!!! This is rather routine. Federal, state, county and city cops routinely pay snitches to lie and frame people they suspect to be criminals. To date 300+ people have been freed from death row when DNA testing proved they were framed by the police. In many of these cases lies from paid government snitches like Andrew Chambers Jr. were used to frame these people.]

Sadly, the DEA is not alone in flouting justice in pursuit of convictions. Zealotry is too easy to find.

The conviction of Debra Jean Milke in 1990 for arranging the murder of her 4-year-old son was overturned based on evidence of disturbing practices by the lead investigator in the case. [Again, it is not incomprehensible how federal prosecutors expected to win this case!!! This is rather routine. Federal, state, county and city cops routinely pay snitches to lie and frame people they suspect to be criminals. To date 300+ people have been freed from death row when DNA testing proved they were framed by the police. In many of these cases lies from paid government snitches like Andrew Chambers Jr. were used to frame these people.] And as a federal judge concluded, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s notion of justice depends on the color of the driver of the car.

Whoever at the DEA authorized rehiring the undefendable Andrew Chambers Jr. has much explaining to do.

Those explanations should include that person’s understanding of the meaning of the word “justice.”

Narcs raid wrong apartment and murder dog

Iraq veteran with no criminal record claims police shot his dog dead in botched drug raid

By Beth Stebner / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Wednesday, June 5, 2013, 2:13 PM

An Iraq war veteran is reeling after cops busted through his door and fatally shot his rescue dog in what he says is a botched narcotics raid.

Adam Arroyo, who does not have a criminal record, told The Buffalo News that the narcotics division targeted the wrong apartment in the city's West Side, which resulted in the tragic death of his two-year-old pit bull, Cindy.

The rescue dog was in the apartment on Monday when police knocked down his front door with a battering ram.

"They came in, and within a few seconds of entering the apartment, they murdered my dog … they had no reason to do that," he told The Buffalo News, adding that they trashed the rest of his home looking for possible narcotics.

Arroyo, who is Hispanic, said that the search warrant was for a black man living in the apartment complex, and told the newspaper that there are two other apartments with the same address in the complex.

"I saw the carnage when I came in the door," he told 9News.com. "They murdered (her), it was like my daughter," the veteran told the station.

Arroyo is now demanding an apology and restitution from the Buffalo police, saying that aside from the emotional turmoil he's faced, he had to pay for Cindy's cremation and has significant damage in his apartment.

Chief of Detectives Dennis J. Richards said that an internal review is being conducted in the matter. [And you can count on the cops to find some lame excuse to justify their botch raid on the WRONG apartment, along with murdering the guys dog. ]

Police said that the pit bull, a rescue, had not been restrained in any manner. [What did you expect? The dog was in the guys HOME. But hey, lets not let that get in the way of the cops demonizing they guy to justify their botched raid on the wrong home, in addition to murdering the guys dog. And of course you can expect the cops to find more reasons to demonize this guy to justify their mistakes. ]

bstebner@nydailynews.com

Narcs raid wrong house and murder owners dog!!!

None of the police spokesmen in these articles even admitted that they f*ckup up royal. And they even seem to blame the owner of the apartment for the death of his dog because they claim it was not chained up.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that the cops didn't make up a bunch of bogus charges and arrest Adam Arroyo for animal cruelty and neglect because they murdered his dog.

In Arizona when the cops make a drug bust, they are usually followed in the the messy yard cops, or zoning inspectors who write up the folks they raided with a bunch of messy yard tickets or zoning violations in an attempt to demonize them more.

I am also surprised the Buffalo cops didn't sick the messy yard cops on Adam Arroyo in an attempt to demonize him.

Source

Owner of dog killed in drug raid says police targeted wrong apartment

By Gene Warner | News Staff Reporter

on June 4, 2013 - 8:15 PM

A West Side resident and Iraq War veteran with no criminal record is mourning the loss of his rescue dog who was fatally shot during a Buffalo police narcotics raid that apparently targeted the wrong apartment Monday night.

Cindy, a chocolate-brown 2½-year-old pit bull, was shot multiple times while chained up in the kitchen of Adam Arroyo’s apartment on Breckenridge Street near Grant Street, he said in a phone interview.

The search warrant that police left for Arroyo, who was not at home at the time of the raid, lists the upper apartment at the Breckenridge Street address, but there are two upstairs apartments at that address, and Arroyo insists that police targeted the wrong apartment.

The search warrant also states that the apartment is occupied by a “black male.” Arroyo is Hispanic.

After talking with neighbors, Arroyo has pieced together the sequence of events that occurred at about 8:30 p.m. Monday.

“They busted the door down, with a battering ram or whatever,” he said. “They came in, and within a few seconds of entering the apartment, they murdered my dog. They shot her multiple times. They had no reason to do that.”

Police late Tuesday said they would investigate any such claim.

“We’ll conduct an internal investigation into any allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Police Department,” Chief of Detectives Dennis J. Richards said.

Richards confirmed that a search warrant was executed at that address by narcotics officers and that a dog was shot there.

“They went to the correct location for which the warrant was issued,” he added.

Richards later said detectives who were at the scene insisted that the dog was not chained or leashed in any manner before it was shot.

Arroyo’s landlord called him while he was at his job as a security officer to tell him that his apartment was being raided. He immediately rushed home.

“I saw all the blood and the bullet holes in the wall,” he recalled Tuesday. “I collapsed, and I just started crying. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I’ve been crying all day.”

Arroyo’s copy of the search warrant lists the names of Narcotics Unit detectives who were looking for crack cocaine in his apartment.

“They trashed the place,” he said. “It looks like a tornado hit it.”

One neighbor who was outside prior to the raid said she saw about half a dozen unmarked police cars, before roughly seven to eight officers entered the house.

“All I heard was gunshots. ‘Boom. Boom. Boom,’ ” said the woman who gave only her first name, Jen.

“Then I heard my friend say, ‘Wow, they shot his dog.’ ”

“I fought for this country,” he said. “I put my life on the line for this country. I got shot at so this could be a free country. And this is how I’m treated afterward?”

Arroyo said his dog had a great temperament and was a favorite of neighbors. Kids in the neighborhood used to come by to pet her.

Tuesday, he took Cindy to the SPCA Serving Erie County.

“I’m going to have her cremated, so she can always be with me,” he said.

email: gwarner@buffnews.com

Source

Neighbors: We Told Police They Had Wrong Apartment

By Rachel Elzufon

June 5, 2013 Updated Jun 5, 2013 at 10:40 PM EDT

Buffalo, NY (WKBW) - It was a story you first saw here on Eyewitness News. There are new developments in the case of a man who says police raided the wrong apartment and killed his dog.

Buffalo Police say there is an internal investigation underway. If the officers entered the wrong address, there will be ramifications. [Yea, big ramifications. If it is discovered they did something wrong, and that is a BIG IF, they will get a slap on the wrist, at MOST]

Adam Arroyo contacted Eyewitness News on Tuesday. He says that Buffalo Police raided his apartment Monday evening, shooting and killing his beloved pit bull, Cindy.

However, Arroyo says the search warrant left behind is for the “upper” apartment. He lives in the upper rear apartment -- on the other side of the house.

Marco Torres, who lives two homes down from Arroyo, says he told police officers that they had the wrong apartment.

As police broke down the door at 304 Breckenridge Street, raiding Arroyo's apartment, Torres says, "I kept telling them over and over that it was the wrong house -- but they weren't listening."

Marco Torres watched the whole thing from outside, and says he warned officers that they may have broken into the wrong apartment.

"When I heard it, it wasn't just one gunshot. It was multiple gunshots," Torres says.

Arroyo, who was at work at the time, showed Eyewitness News the damage and blood left behind.

Even without seeing the search warrant, Torres says he knew it could not be Arroyo.

"He works everyday, he's the coolest kid you can ever meet. He don't do none of that," Torres says, referring to the drugs listed on the search warrant.

Arroyo says he understands police have a job to do. However, he is still upset.

Arroyo is a military veteran, and says he served for 16 months in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He recently took his Corrections Officer test. [So it sounds like Adam Arroyo has some experience terrorizing people in Iraq, like the Buffalo cops did to him here in the USA. Of course two wrongs don't make a right. ]

"I mean, I'm doing the right thing," Arroyo says. "I'm doing good. They had no reason to come to my house and kill -- and murder my dog."

The military veteran says everyday in his apartment; he walks by the bloodstains and bullet holes from the raid that killed Cindy.

Torres says Cindy was "the sweetest dog you'll ever meet -- everybody knows that around the block."

"I want (Buffalo police) to change the policies,” says Arroyo. [Don't make me laugh. The police almost never admit doing anything wrong, and at the most they will get a slap on the wrist the damage and destruction they caused] “If they know a dog is in the residence, to have animal control out there, or have a taser -- why go and use deadly force? That was my family member."

Arroyo says he also wants Buffalo police to pay for the damage done to his apartment during the raid.

Derenda says, "in the case of a dog being in the apartment, if he was attacking the officer and he was self-preservation -- stopping the dog from attacking would be justified." However, the department is looking into their policy on how to handle dogs when a search warrant is executed. [Shoot them is how they do it now. Trigger happy cops need a way to let off steam and dogs are almost as good as humans]

The police commissioner has not spoken with the officers involved. However, Derenda says, "There are proper procedures in place. We should not get the wrong apartment. We are looking into what took place and we will investigate." [Yea, and nothing will change, and at the most the guilty parties will get a slap on the wrist. If that much]

Police would not comment on any potential policy changes, because the case is under investigation.

Source

Iraq veteran with no criminal record claims police shot his dog dead in botched drug raid

By Beth Stebner / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Published: Wednesday, June 5, 2013, 2:13 PM

An Iraq war veteran is reeling after cops busted through his door and fatally shot his rescue dog in what he says is a botched narcotics raid.

Adam Arroyo, who does not have a criminal record, told The Buffalo News that the narcotics division targeted the wrong apartment in the city's West Side, which resulted in the tragic death of his two-year-old pit bull, Cindy.

The rescue dog was in the apartment on Monday when police knocked down his front door with a battering ram.

"They came in, and within a few seconds of entering the apartment, they murdered my dog … they had no reason to do that," he told The Buffalo News, adding that they trashed the rest of his home looking for possible narcotics.

Arroyo, who is Hispanic, said that the search warrant was for a black man living in the apartment complex, and told the newspaper that there are two other apartments with the same address in the complex.

"I saw the carnage when I came in the door," he told 9News.com. "They murdered (her), it was like my daughter," the veteran told the station.

Arroyo is now demanding an apology and restitution from the Buffalo police [don't count on it sucker! The cops will make up every lame excuse possible to blame THEIR mistakes on YOU], saying that aside from the emotional turmoil he's faced, he had to pay for Cindy's cremation and has significant damage in his apartment.

Chief of Detectives Dennis J. Richards said that an internal review is being conducted in the matter. [And you can count on the cops to find some lame excuse to justify their botch raid on the WRONG apartment, along with murdering the guys dog. ]

Police said that the pit bull, a rescue, had not been restrained in any manner. [What did you expect? The dog was in the guys HOME. But hey, lets not let that get in the way of the cops demonizing they guy to justify their botched raid on the wrong home, in addition to murdering the guys dog. And of course you can expect the cops to find more reasons to demonize this guy to justify their mistakes. ]

bstebner@nydailynews.com

Source

New York veteran says police killed dog during botched drug raid

Published June 06, 2013

FoxNews.com

A New York veteran is mourning the loss of his rescue dog who was fatally shot during a police narcotics raid that apparently targeted the wrong apartment.

The Buffalo News reports that Cindy, a 2-year-old pit bull, was shot multiple times while chained in the kitchen of Adam Arroyo’s Buffalo apartment late Monday.

According to a search warrant left for Arroyo, an Iraq War veteran who was not home at the time of the raid, lists the upper apartment at the Breckenridge Street address, but two upstairs apartments exist – and Arroyo insists police searched the wrong residence.

The search warrant also states that the apartment is occupied by a “black male,” the Buffalo News reports. Arroyo is Hispanic.

“They busted the door down, with a battering ram or whatever,” he told the newspaper. “They came in, and within a few seconds of entering the apartment, they murdered my dog. They shot her multiple times. They had no reason to do that.”

Police officials said they will investigate Arroyo’s claims.

“We’ll conduct an internal investigation into any allegations of wrongdoing on the part of the Police Department,” Chief of Detectives Dennis Richards said.

Richards confirmed a search warrant was executed at the Breckenridge Street address by narcotics officers and that a dog was shot there.

“They went to the correct location for which the warrant was issued,” Richards told the newspaper.

Detectives at the scene, however, insisted that the dog was not chained or leashed in any manner before it was shot.

Arroyo said the dog, whose remains were cremated, had a great temperament and was friendly with children in the neighborhood.

“I fought for this country,” he said. “I put my life on the line for this country. I got shot at so this could be a free country. And this is how I’m treated afterward?”

Source

ohmidog!

Buffalo man says police were searching wrong apartment when they shot his dog

An Iraq War veteran says police were raiding the wrong apartment when they shot and killed his pit bull, Cindy.

Adam Arroyo was at work Monday when his apartment in Buffalo was searched by police, who shot and killed the dog he says he left tied up in the kitchen.

Arroyo rushed home when his landlord called to tell him police were searching his apartment.

“I got here as fast as I could and I saw the carnage. I saw what happened. My house was flipped upside down, my dog was gone,” he told News 4 (WIVB). He said he always tied Cindy up in the kitchen when he left for work because she tended to chew on his clothes and shoes.

Buffalo Police said officers were searching for drugs when they encountered the dog, who they said was aggressive and unchained. They believe they had the correct address, though no drugs were found in the search.

Arroyo says there are two upper apartments at his address. He showed the search warrant to News 4, and it described the suspect as black. Arroyo is Hispanic.

“They had no right, no evidence, because if that was the case they would have found stuff here and I would be in jail,” he said.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Daniel Derenda said an investigation will be conducted by the Internal Affairs Division. [And you can count on it saying the cops did NOTHING wrong]

Source

Dog Killed In Police Raid

11:11 PM, Jun 5, 2013

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- An Iraq War veteran claims that Buffalo Police targeted the wrong apartment when they kicked in his door and killed his dog Monday searching for drugs.

Adam Arroyo says he did nothing wrong, and now he wants an apology.

"I saw the carnage when I came in the door," he says.

Arroyo showed us bullet holes and blood left behind after he says Buffalo Police raided his apartment and killed his two-and-a-half-year-old pit bull Cindy.

"I would like an apology. They murdered, it was like my daughter, you know. That was my baby. Everybody knew that was my little girl. I took care of her so well. You know, that was my love," he says.

Around 8:30 Monday night, Arroyo, who works security at a bank, says he got a call from his landlord telling him police had just raided his apartment and killed his dog.

"I suddenly just started crying. I'm at work. People are like, what's wrong, what's wrong," says Arroyo.

By the time Arroyo made it back to the west side, police, and his dog were already gone. He did find a trashed apartment and a search warrant.

He says that while the search warrant is for 304 Brekenridge "upper," his apartment is the "upper rear." Also, Arroyo points out a striking difference in who police were searching for.

"They were looking for a black male. I'm Hispanic. Puerto Rican. And, they were looking for crack/cocaine," he says showing us the search warrant.

So what did the raid turn up?

Arroyo says no drugs, just a military baton and pepper spray.

"This is stuff that I use for my safety because there are people on this block that get hurt, that get killed, and I've been here for three years and I've heard stories," he says.

He says he called 911 but that didn't help, then went to a police substation where he was given a number to call the narcotics division. He left a message Tuesday afternoon.

Police told us that the Buffalo Police Commissioner has opened an internal investigation into the case with the Internal Affairs Division in Charge.

We asked if police raided the wrong apartment, and we are told they believe they had the proper address and apartment.

Commissioner Daniel Derenda did speak with reporters on Wednesday about the case. When asked about the verification process for addresses in a search warrant, Derenda said "There are proper procedures in place. We should not get the wrong apartment. I can't justify getting the wrong apartment and as I said...we are looking into what took place."

"People make mistakes, but this is something, it was a very big mistake, you know, especially coming in here and killing an innocent dog that is chained up. I could understand it if the dog was loose and it charged, then you know that gives them probable cause because they fear for their life, but to shoot an innocent dog that doesn't pose a threat," says Arroyo.

Right now, detectives do not think Cindy was chained or leashed Monday night. Derenda says police officers have the right to use lethal force against a dog if it attacks them but adds "I'm a dog lover. I have three of them at home. You hate to see it happen to any animal but you don't want to see an officer get injured." We asked "But you don't know if that's definitely the case here yet ? Derenda replied "I...I'm telling you right now it's under investigation."

Arroyo had to go to the SPCA to claim Cindy's body and pay for her cremation. They gave him a discount and charged him $20 instead of the usual $100+, he says.

Arroyo also told us that he has plans to sign up for the National Guard, but those plans are now on hold as he sorts out this mess.

Source

Police Raid Wrong Apartment, Kill Owners Dog

6/5/2013 11:12 AM ET

A drug raid allegedly at the wrong apartment, went awry when police in Buffalo, New York killed the dog of an Iraq War veteran.

The incident happened earlier this week when the tenant received a call from his landlord who told him what had just happened. The landlord told Adam Arroyo that Buffalo Police raided his place and killed his dog, WGRZ.com reports.

Arroyo, who was at work at the time of the call, instantly started to cry and rushed home. He returned to his place trashed, with a search warrant and no police or his almost 3-year-old pit bull Cindy to be found.

There were bullets left on the ground inside, with visible blood stains.

The search warrant was for the "upper" apartment of the complex. But according to Arroyo, his residence is considered the "upper rear," WGRZ.com reports. Arroyo additionally said "They were looking for a black male. I'm Hispanic. Puerto Rican. And, they were looking for crack/cocaine."

Officials who executed the warrant found nothing inside but a baton and pepper spray the victim said he uses for safety.

Arroyo said, "People make mistakes, but this is something, it was a very big mistake, you know, especially coming in here and killing an innocent dog that is chained up. I could understand it if the dog was loose and it charged, then you know that gives them probable cause because they fear for their life, but to shoot an innocent dog that doesn't pose a threat," WGRZ.com reports.

An internal investigation is underway.

by RTT Staff Writer

For comments and feedback: editorial@rttnews.com

Source

Army Vet Says Police Raided Wrong Apartment, Killed His Dog

By Allen Leight

June 4, 2013 Updated Jun 5, 2013 at 12:47 PM EDT

BUFFALO, NY (WKBW) - Adam Arroyo has lived in his Breckenridge apartment for three years but has never experienced a day like this past Monday; when police busted down his door in search of drugs, shooting and killing his dog in the process.

"She's over here, chained up, and look at all these bullet holes man. Look at the blood right here," Arroyo explained as he showed Eyewitness cameras where his pit bull mix Cindy had been shot.

"She was tied up in the kitchen like I tie her up every single day, and they shot her for no reason."

When Arroyo returned home Monday evening he found his apartment torn apart, door busted down and several bullet holes in his kitchen wall.

He also found a search warrant for 304 Breckenridge, upper apartment.

The suspect named in the warrant was described as a black male and was wanted on suspicion of dealing crack.

Arroyo is Hispanic and lives at 304 Breckenridge, upper-rear apartment, which has a completely separate entrance and is clearly marked on his mail box.

Reporter: "You have never used or sold drugs in this apartment?" Arroyo: "Never. Never. I don't do drugs. I'm a United States veteran. I work everyday. I'm just trying to live my life."

Arroyo is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and plans to join the National Guard. This incident, however has left him heart-broken and angry.

"For police to wrongfully come into my house and murder my dog... It wasn't that they felt threatened. No. They murdered my dog," said Arroyo, beginning to tear up.

"That was my dog, man. That was my dog. They didn't have to do that, you know. They didn't have to do that."

Arroyo now has to pay to have Cindy cremated. He also had to repair his door at his own cost and has had to miss work.

He plans now to press charges against the City of Buffalo.

Buffalo Police spokesperson Michael DeGeorge says Internal Affairs has launched an investigation into the case, but that police believe they had the proper address.

He also says detectives "don't believe the dog was chained or leashed" when they executed the raid. Adding that if any wrong doing is found in the investigation that officers will face consequences.

DeGeorge could not comment on whether officers found any drugs inside the apartment.

Phoenix coach arrested on suspicion of drug use

Of course all of these folks are not evil criminals, they are just committing a victimless crime that should be legal.

And again, while the drug marijuana has never caused any recorded deaths, the laws agaist marijuana have caused many people to be killed or hurt when government thugs attack people for committing victimless drug war crimes.

In this case Adam Yazzie is still in the hospital with injuries caused by the Tempe police thugs who arrested him for the victimless crime of smoking marijuana.

Source

Phoenix coach arrested on suspicion of drug use

By Matthew Longdon The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jun 4, 2013 11:20 AM

A Phoenix high-school wrestling coach and another man are facing charges of drug possession, aggravated assault and resisting arrest after they were caught smoking marijuana Saturday in Tempe’s entertainment district and tried to flee officers, police say.

Cory Watson, 26, a coach at Phoenix Christian High School, and Adam Yazzie, whose age was not available, scuffled with officers as they tried to evade arrest, according to police. Officers said they had to use Tasers to subdue Watson and Yazzie before the two were taken into custody.

A third person fled the scene and wasn’t found, police said.

Authorities said two officers spotted the group smoking marijuana near Sixth Street and Mill Avenue on Saturday night. When the three were confronted, Watson began to resist one officer as another officer tried to handcuff Yazzie.

According to the report, Watson threw an officer to the ground and was punched twice in the face by an officer.

Yazzie fled the scene with a handcuff around one wrist, according to police. Officers found him about a half-mile away, where he was Tasered and arrested, police said.

A bag of marijuana was found in Watson’s pocket, according to the police report.

Yazzie suffered injuries to his back and the back of his head from the Taser prongs, the report said. He was still in the hospital Monday.

Both officers suffered minor injuries, the report said.

In a police interview after his arrest, Watson said he saw Yazzie, whom he did not know, smoking a cigarette. Watson told police he asked to smoke the cigarette, which contained marijuana, and he was handing the cigarette back, just as police arrived, because he does not smoke marijuana.

According to police, both men have outstanding warrants for their arrest, but it was unclear what the warrants were for.

Lt. Scott Smith of the Tempe Police Department said Watson’s behavior was unfortunate.

“The fact that Mr. Watson is a wrestling coach and is charged with teaching our community’s youth about health and fitness and good citizenship, for him to be involved with this kind of conduct is disappointing,” he said.

DWB - Driving While Black

If the cops have to stop people who are driving perfectly normal and run them thru a battery of tests before they can prove they are drunk, the people they stopped are probably NOT to drunk or stoned to drive.

And sadly the criminal injustice system is also racist system and Blacks and other people with the wrong color skin routinely get harassed by cops, prosecutors and judges who are racists.

Source

How to Get Arrested in Arizona for DUI With a BAC of 0.00: Be Black

Takepart.com

Drunk driving is a serious problem in the United States, impacting many thousands of Americans every year, and so is racism. The two issues converged recently during a routine traffic stop of 64-year-old retired firefighter Jessie Thornton by police officers in Surprise, Arizona.

The motorist was handcuffed and taken into custody. Thornton submitted to a Breathalyzer sobriety test and blew a 0.000 blood alcohol content (BAC).

Thornton was eventually free to go, but not before his car had been impounded and the Arizona MVD had been notified of the DUI charge.

Despite the seeming exoneration of the test, the suspect was charged with a DUI, an assessment that led Thornton’s attorney to quip that the real crime was, “D-W-B. Driving While Black.”

Thornton told the local ABC News affiliate that he has been pulled over 10 times and issued four tickets since moving from Ohio to the retirement community of Surprise. This latest stop was the first time he’d been taken to the Surprise lockup.

The arresting officer cited the retiree’s red eyes as grounds for the arrest. Thornton credits chemicals in the neighborhood L.A. Fitness’s lap pool for the redness, a theory in line with Surprise law enforcement’s resident DRE—drug recognition expert.

According to Thornton: “After he did all the tests, he says, ‘I would never have arrested you; you show no signs of impairment.’ ”

A blood test that revealed no trace of alcohol or drugs validated this perception.

Thornton was eventually free to go, but not before his car had been impounded and the Arizona MVD had been notified of the DUI charge, which resulted in a notification that his driver’s license was being suspended and he would be required to attend “some sort of drinking class or something.”

Rather than attend the drinking class, former firefighter filed a claim against the city of Surprise seeking $500,000.

The National Education Association, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union, OneAmerica and the Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center of Northeastern University are among the many credible and able organizations working to heighten the awareness of and eradicate racial profiling from U.S. law-enforcement policy and practice.

Though harassed, inconvenienced and caused physical distress, Jessie Thornton can count himself among the luckier victims of racial profiling. He has the maturity and resources to fight back. His lawsuit is not about the money, he told ABC News: “I just don’t want any of this to happen to somebody else.”

One third of San Jose's budget goes to the police

According to this article one third of San Jose's budget go to the cops. The fire department gets the next 17 percent, with a total of about 50 percent going to the cops and firemen.

In Phoenix the last time I checked I think about 40 percent of the Phoenix budget goes to the cops. The fire department gets the next 20 percent. With a total of about 60 percent going to the cops and firemen.

If you use my figure that two thirds of the people are in American prisons for victimless drug war crimes the police budgets could easily be cut by two thirds by legalizing drugs. One article I recently posted said that half of the people in American prisons were there for victimless drug war crimes. Another article I posted said that 8 percent of the people in prisons are there for victimless marijuana crimes.

Any way you cut it legalizing drugs could save us a huge amount of money in police costs and let the cops hunt down real criminals instead of harmless pot smokers.

San Jose's $934 million general fund includes $307 million for police, $163 million for the fire department, $52 million for parks and recreation, $27 million for transportation, $26 million for libraries and $96 million in reserves.

Source

San Jose's budget at a glance

By John Woolfolk

jwoolfolk@mercurynews.com

Posted: 06/07/2013 04:01:51 PM PDT

San Jose officials will hold a hearing at 7 p.m. Monday on the city's fiscal year 2013-14 budget and vote on the mayor's budget recommendations Tuesday.

After a decade of budget deficits, this year is the second year in a row in which the city has avoided shortfalls and cutbacks in programs and services. That is due both to rising tax revenues due to the economic recovery and pay, benefit and job cuts to the city workforce that have lowered costs.

A key concern is bolstering public safety, particularly a police department that has seen waves of retirements and resignations in the past year. The city and police union remain at odds over how much of a raise San Jose can afford to give the police department. But Mayor Chuck Reed as urged $16.4 million set aside for police raises.

San Jose's total budget of $2.6 billion includes the general fund for basic services including the police, fire and library departments, separate funds for the airport, utilities and other programs, and funds for capital improvements.

San Jose's $934 million general fund includes $307 million for police, $163 million for the fire department, $52 million for parks and recreation, $27 million for transportation, $26 million for libraries and $96 million in reserves.

San Jose has $1.5 million budgeted from funds dedicated to specific programs including the airport, convention center and utilities providing trash collection, wastewater treatment and storm drains and water service.

San Jose has a $748 million budget for capital improvements to the airport, parks, roadways, wastewater treatment, libraries and police and fire stations.

War on drugs: The 'wobbler' option

Source

War on drugs: The 'wobbler' option

By The Times editorial board

June 9, 2013

Simple possession of small amounts of methamphetamine — enough for personal use but presumably not for dealing — is a "wobbler" in California, meaning that offenses can be charged as either felonies or misdemeanors. It's different with possession of cocaine, opiates such as heroin and many other addictive drugs; they currently can be charged only as felonies.

The state Senate has now passed a bill to bring criminal handling of those drugs into line with methamphetamine, and the measure is before the Assembly. SB 649, by Democrat Mark Leno of San Francisco, is good policy and should be adopted.

The bill is an improvement over a version Leno offered last year to convert possession to a misdemeanor, with no felony option.

True, there is something perverse about locking people up for any period for possessing highly addictive drugs for their own use. Most offenders have the stuff on hand because they are hooked. For years California sent such addicts to prison, where little or no treatment was available. They were released on parole, which they were practically fated to violate by using drugs again — because they were, after all, addicted.

This foolhardy approach gave California a steady supply of unrecovered addicts shuttling between prison and the streets. That meant continuing damage to neighborhoods dealing with the addicted, plus overcrowded prisons. At the end of last year, for example, there were more than 4,000 inmates in state prison for possessing drugs for personal use.

It would be better to divert addicts from the criminal justice system entirely if they could be successfully treated without ever going to jail or even to court. But for many addicts, there remains a role for punishment, or at least the threat of punishment. Addiction may be a disease, but the afflicted include families, neighborhoods and, ultimately, all of society, and they all have a stake in successful rehab. When the carrot of a clean life is insufficient to keep an addict in recovery, the stick — the prospect of a criminal sentence — remains there for backup.

Some argue that these drugs ought to be decriminalized altogether, as California has done with marijuana. Simple possession of cannabis for personal use is now not even a misdemeanor here but a traffic-ticket-like infraction, punishable by a fine.

The key distinction, though, is the addictive nature of cocaine, heroin and the other drugs covered by current felony laws. Addiction affects the user's behavior — and thus imposes its damage on society and not just on the user — well past the period of intoxication. There is room for a conversation about whether decriminalization is nevertheless a more rational approach for addictive drugs, but it's not the conversation, or the bill, at hand. Either SB 649 is a smart reform, or it's a good first step in a more far-reaching sentencing revamp. Either way, it's better than the status quo.

Opponents of the bill offer a number of arguments against the measure, but they fall flat. Reducing the penalties doesn't make a drug any less dangerous or addictive, they say. True enough, but so what? The existing law doesn't keep users from getting hooked in the first place. There is little point in locking up addicts for as long as three years if it's not part of a larger program to get them clean.

Misdemeanor convictions mean a year in county jail instead of up to three years in state prison, prosecutors argue, and jails are already filled to capacity. But this argument practically answers itself. Prisons too are filled well past capacity and have been under orders from a panel of federal judges to reduce their inmate populations.

And the point is moot anyway for people convicted of simple possession since October 2011, when the public-safety realignment program went into effect. They already are spending their 18 months (and up to three years) in county jail, not state prison. That's not some unforeseen and unfortunate consequence of realignment but is instead the essence of the program's design: Counties have the opportunity and now the incentive to offer treatment and alternative monitoring, and inmates and outpatients alike are treated closer to the neighborhoods to which they will (one way or another) soon return. They can begin the process right away of reconnecting with family and other positive influences in their lives, but they do so while they are still being supervised, so that the negative influences of their old neighborhoods can be monitored and mitigated. Offenders housed and treated closer to home show greater continuing success than those isolated in prisons hundreds of miles from home.

What if prosecutors and judges see a pattern of resistance and antisocial behavior in the addict? What if there is evidence, although not a record, of earlier crimes? That's one of the smart parts of this bill — the felony option is still available.

Moving from a straight felony to a wobbler is not without its hazards. The change would grant additional discretion to prosecutors and judges, and where there is discretion, there can be discrimination — by race, by class, by geography. Will African American defendants be more likely to be tried on felony charges than whites? Will district attorneys in one county file only misdemeanors and in another only felonies?

If the last three decades of criminal justice policy have taught California anything, it's that there can be no autopilot when it comes to sentencing. There must be constant vigilance — and in the modern era, that means arrest and sentencing data must be collected and available for public scrutiny. It should fall to the state attorney general to pick through those numbers, see to it that wobbler charges are not unfairly targeting any particular group and flag problems when laws need to be adjusted to ensure equal justice.

Libertarianism is in vogue

Libertarianism is in vogue. Again.

By Chris Cillizza, Sunday, June 9, 10:52 AM E-mail the writer

Looking for the hot new(ish) thing in American politics? Try libertarianism.

Yes, that long-dismissed political philosophy that eschews government intervention in favor of individual liberty is again coming into vogue, particularly among young voters.

Two issues highlight the growing libertarian strain in the country.

The first is legalizing marijuana. For the first time in more than four decades of polling on the subject, a Pew Research Center survey found in April that a majority of Americans (52 percent) favored legalizing it. Among millennials — those born after 1980 — the numbers were significantly higher, with 65 percent supporting legalization.

The second is same-sex marriage. In a March Washington Post-ABC News poll, 58 percent of all respondents said that gay marriage should be legal, including a whopping 81 percent of those ages 18 to 29.

Polls aside, an analysis of actual votes in the 2012 presidential election also suggests that libertarianism is on the rise. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s 2012 presidential nominee and the former Republican governor of New Mexico, received nearly 1.3 million votes on Election Day — the first time the party’s nominee had ever taken more than a million votes. (Johnson won 0.99 percent of the overall votes cast, the all-time second highest for a Libertarian candidate, behind Ed Clark in 1980, who took 1.06 percent.)

More telling, however, was then-Rep. Ron Paul’s showing in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Paul, who was the Libertarian Party’s 1988 presidential nominee and continued to espouse the party principles in 2008 and 2012 despite running as a Republican, was the fourth-highest vote-getter in last year’s primary process, winning more than 2 million votes in a campaign fueled by the active support of young voters. Perhaps as importantly, the Texas congressman raised $41 million for his campaign, the vast majority of that total coming from online donations.

Now, consider all of those data points in light of the still-breaking news of the widespread collection of phone records and Internet data by the National Security Agency, a series of programs that President Obama and his top advisers have described as a necessity to combat terrorism. Combine the growing libertarian strain in the country with the controversy over the government’s encroachment into all aspects of our lives and you begin to see the potency of the message heading into 2016.

All of which brings us to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), son of Ron and the elected official who most clearly embodies the rising tide of libertarianism within the country and within his party.

Paul is responsible for the single most memorable moment in politics this year when he took to the Senate floor in March to filibuster John Brennan’s nomination as CIA director. Paul’s goal was to highlight the U.S. policy on drones and to raise questions about the possibility of the government targeting U.S. citizens on American soil.

Before it was all over, roughly 13 hours after it had begun, Paul had been joined on the Senate floor by a who’s who of Republican Party luminaries, including Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), the party’s 2016 favorite for president; Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), the Republican leader in the chamber; and Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), the most recent head of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm. Libertarianism had won a victory on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

For his part, Paul has been careful to avoid being labeled as a flat-out libertarian — a categorization that badly hurt his father’s chances at actually being a contender in 2012, considering his strongly stated noninterventionist foreign-policy beliefs. Instead, Rand Paul has sought to create a sort of Republicanism with libertarian principles that fits more comfortably within the bounds of the GOP.

“The way we’re going to compete is by running people for office who can appreciate some issues that attract young people and independents: civil liberties, as well as a less aggressive foreign policy, not putting people in jail for marijuana, a much more tolerant type of point of view,” Paul told Spencer Ackerman during an interview for Wired magazine late last month. (Paul went on to predict that embracing such a view would make Republicans politically competitive in California, which seems a bit far-fetched, at least at the moment.)

Paul’s 2016 candidacy — and he will run for president in three years’ time — will test just how much libertarianism Republicans want in the Grand Old Party. But for a party badly in need of finding new voters open to their message, embracing libertarianism — at least in part — might not be a bad avenue for Republicans to explore.

Go NSA - N S A

Arizona recreational marijuana use initiative launched

Arizona recreational marijuana use initiative launched

By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 12, 2013 10:44 PM

A north Phoenix man has launched an initiative to legalize marijuana for recreational use in Arizona.

Dennis Bohlke, the 59-year-old computer programmer who is leading the effort, said the Safer Arizona initiative is modeled after Colorado’s newly enacted law, which taxes and regulates marijuana.

“The intent of the initiative is to legalize marijuana in Arizona and to treat it as we treat alcohol,” said Bohlke.

The effort would amend the state Constitution to allow people 18 and older “to consume or possess limited amounts” of marijuana. The initiative would allow state officials to license grow facilities, marijuana stores and other facilities.

The initiative needs 259,213 valid signatures by July 3, 2014, to qualify for the November 2014 ballot.

Bohlke said he has no major financial backing to fund signature gathering. He said he has spoken with Republican, “tea party” and Democratic lawmakers about his effort and that while they would not support him, they “were very receptive” of his effort. [I am sure that if he would ask the Libertarian Party they would support him 100 percent for legalizing marijuana - well with the exception of wanting to tax it.]

Bohlke acknowledged it will be challenging to gather the signatures necessary to place the initiative on the ballot without major funding.

In addition, law enforcement and prosecutors would likely mount a strong opposition campaign.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who has made the fight against medical marijuana a signature issue, said any effort to legalize pot “even through the initiative process, would run afoul of the same supremacy clause issues that Arizona’s medical-marijuana program faces.” [[Oddly the royal rulers of the state of Arizona invoke the 10th Amendment for their laws like racist SB 1070 which counters Federal law, but seem to forget about the 10th Amendment when it comes to marijuana and the drug war. The 10th Amendment says if a power isn't given to the Feds, or forbidden to the states, the power is reserved for the states and the people. ]

But Karen O’Keefe of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., a national legalization-advocacy group, said the proposed initiative “makes sure the state wouldn’t waste any more money arresting people for using a substance that’s objectively safer than alcohol and tobacco.

“It would also allow the state to regulate and control the industry and to generate substantial revenue” that would benefit Arizona residents “instead of drug dealers,” she said.

Bohlke said he is motivated by his pot-related brushes with the law. He was arrested twice in Scottsdale in 2010 on drug-related charges. Bohlke was stopped in February 2010 on suspicion of crossing the white line with his car, according to police records, and when the officer walked up to the vehicle he claimed he could smell marijuana. A search of the car turned up a small amount of marijuana stored in a mint box and a package of rolling papers, according to police. The case was dismissed last year after Bohlke’s defense raised questions about when the arresting officer gave Bohlke his Miranda warning.

“That is part of the motivation for doing this,” said Bohlke, who said he was stopped and searched by police without cause.

Bohlke was arrested again in July 2010 after a Scottsdale police officer said he failed to stop at a red light and initiated a DUI investigation, according to police records. Lab test results showed the presence of the metabolite associated with marijuana and Bohlke was convicted of being impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs, according to court records. The conviction is on appeal.

“It’s a very bad thing for people to get arrested for marijuana — especially for young people going to college and going to school,” he said. “It has a very bad impact on their life and I just think it’s time that we do something about it.”

Arizona voters approved the use of medicinal marijuana in 2010 for conditions such as chronic pain and cancer. More than 35,000 Arizonans participate in the program, which is overseen by the Department of Health Services.

Colorado and Washington are the only states to have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Lawmakers in 10 states have introduced bills to legalize marijuana for recreational use. All of those efforts have failed, O’Keefe said.

An April Pew Research Center poll found that for the first time since the 1960s, most Americans favor legalizing marijuana. The national survey found that 52 percent say marijuana should be made legal while 45 percent say it should not. Pew reported that support for legalizing marijuana has risen 11 points since 2010.

Republic reporter JJ Hensley contributed to this article.

Police Agencies Are Assembling Records of DNA

Why not just tattoo every new born babies Social Security number on it's forehead and inject a RFID chip with the kids Social Security number into the kids forehead too. Probably at the same time you are fingerprinting the baby and taking DNA samples to put in a police database.

And while we are turning Amerika into a police state why not require every American to file a "trip plan" with the police every time you leave your home. Just so the police know where you are in case they think you are a criminal. Kind of like the NSA keeps a log of every phone call you made.

I am just joking, but I suspect any cops that are reading this think it's a great idea.

And don't laugh you pot smokers. I bet cops are trying to get DNA samples from discarded marijuana roaches in an attempt to use the DNA to prove a person used marijuana. Same for you underage drinkers who put a beer can to your lips. I wouldn't put it past the piggies from grabbing a DNA sample from a beer can to prove you took a swig of beer.

Source

Police Agencies Are Assembling Records of DNA

Mark Makela for The New York Times

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Published: June 12, 2013

Slowly, and largely under the radar, a growing number of local law enforcement agencies across the country have moved into what had previously been the domain of the F.B.I. and state crime labs — amassing their own DNA databases of potential suspects, some collected with the donors’ knowledge, and some without it.

And that trend — coming at a time of heightened privacy concerns after recent revelations of secret federal surveillance of telephone calls and Internet traffic — is expected only to accelerate after the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding a Maryland statute allowing the authorities to collect DNA samples from those arrested for serious crimes.

These local databases operate under their own rules, providing the police much more leeway than state and federal regulations. And the police sometimes collect samples from far more than those convicted of or arrested for serious offenses — in some cases, innocent victims of crimes who do not necessarily realize their DNA will be saved for future searches.

New York City has amassed a database with the profiles of 11,000 crime suspects. In Orange County, Calif., the district attorney’s office has 90,000 profiles, many obtained from low-level defendants who give DNA as part of a plea bargain or in return for having the charges against them dropped. In Central Florida, several law enforcement agencies have pooled their DNA databases. A Baltimore database contains DNA from more than 3,000 homicide victims.

These law enforcement agencies are no longer content to rely solely on the highly regulated network of state and federal DNA databases, which have been more than two decades in the making and represent one of the most significant developments in the history of law enforcement in this country.

The reasons vary. Some police chiefs are frustrated with the time it can take for state crime labs to test evidence and enter DNA profiles into the existing databases. Others want to compile DNA profiles from suspects or low-level offenders long before their DNA might be captured by the state or national databases, which typically require conviction or arrest.

“Unfortunately, what goes into the national database are mostly reference swabs of people who are going to prison,” said Jay Whitt of the company DNA:SI Labs, which sells DNA testing and database services to police departments. “They’re not the ones we’re dealing with day in day out, the ones still on the street just slipping under the radar.”

The rise in these local databases has aroused concerns among some critics, worried about both the lax rules governing them and the privacy issues they raise.

“We have been warning law enforcement that when public attention began to focus on these rogue, unregulated databases, people would be disturbed,” said Barry Scheck, a co-director of the Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners. “Law enforcement has just gone ahead and started collecting DNA samples from suspects in an unregulated fashion.”

For their part, law enforcement officials say that the crime-solving benefits of local databases are dramatic.

“Our take is that it’s good for law enforcement and good for the community,” [well great for the law enforcement police state, but horrible for the community] said Doug Muldoon, police chief of Palm Bay, a city of about 100,000 in Central Florida, about its database, which has produced 1,000 matches. He said his officers could now use DNA to address the crime conditions “in our community — property crimes and burglaries.” State crime labs can take months to analyze evidence from low-level felonies like that, he said.

As local authorities devise their own policies, they are increasingly taking DNA from people on the mere suspicion of a crime, long before any arrest, and holding on to it regardless of the outcome. Often detectives get DNA samples simply by asking suspects for them.

Other times, investigators take DNA surreptitiously, from discarded trash. Or the DNA might originate from a warrant issued in a specific case, authorizing the authorities to compare it against crime scene evidence — with the resulting profile then stored in a database for future use.

In some jurisdictions, it is not only suspects whose DNA goes into the database, but occasionally victims, too.

“If an officer goes to your house on a burglary, they will swab a door handle and then they will ask, ‘Can we get a sample from the homeowner so we can eliminate them as the source?’ ” Chief Muldoon said. “They say, ‘Sure.’ ”

The homeowner’s sample goes into the database, too, Chief Muldoon said. In many jurisdictions, so would samples from others even briefly considered potential suspects.

“That’s so profoundly disturbing — that you would give DNA to the police to clear yourself and then once cleared, the police use it to investigate you for other crimes, and retain it indefinitely,” said Stephen B. Mercer, the chief attorney of the forensics division of the Maryland public defender’s office and one of the lawyers involved in the case that resulted in the recent Supreme Court decision on DNA. “If that doesn’t strike at a core value of privacy, I don’t know what does.”

The Supreme Court’s decision last week, in Maryland v. King, was its first to squarely address DNA collection and databanking. While that decision said nothing explicit about the authority of local law enforcement to keep DNA databases, it could well encourage local jurisdictions to push ahead, several experts said.

“In light of the Supreme Court decision, more and more organizations are going to be doing this,” said Frederick Harran, the public safety director in Bensalem Township, a Philadelphia suburb that is aggressively building its own DNA database.

The court’s decision readily accepted the utility of DNA collection as a routine station house booking procedure, comparing it to fingerprinting.

“King is a green light,” said Erin E. Murphy, a New York University law professor who has written about DNA databases and DNA profiling. “It’s a ringing endorsement of DNA testing, and many law enforcement agencies would see this as a dramatic opportunity to expand DNA collection.”

It is not clear how many local jurisdictions maintain DNA databases. DNA SI Labs provides databanks for nine police departments, including those in Bensalem and Palm Bay, Mr. Whitt said, and has contracts with a dozen other departments to build more.

Palm Bay shares its database of 15,000 profiles with nearby departments, creating a regional pool. It is more common for prosecutors, the police and local crime labs to maintain their own DNA data, typically from suspects, which may be ineligible for upload to the national database.

Few states have laws regarding local DNA databases. Alaska prohibits them. California and Hawaii are explicit in not precluding them. In many states, including New York, the law is silent on the issue. And there is little consensus about what DNA retention policies are appropriate at the local level.

“There really are no rules as to what you can specifically keep,” said Jill Spriggs, who runs the Sacramento district attorney’s crime lab. “The forensic community is all over the board.”

The issues raised by these local databases include what type of DNA testing should be permitted. In Denver, which keeps a local database, the district attorney, Mitchell R. Morrissey, is a leading proponent of familial DNA searching. The technique uses special software not to identify matches, but for clues as to whether a relative of a person whose DNA is on file may be the source of crime scene DNA.

Because local databases operate without the stricter rules governing federal and local ones, local authorities have been able to set the pace for how DNA is collected and used in criminal investigations. That pace, experts say, could accelerate if rapid DNA testing devices capable of quickly developing DNA profiles from samples are deployed in station houses.

The ability to very quickly generate DNA profiles, experts say, could provide a greater incentive for local authorities to build and maintain their own database.

Mentioned in last week’s Supreme Court opinion, such technology is not yet generally in the hands of law enforcement, although the Palm Bay Police Department is field testing one such device.

We "MUST" be able to trust our Valley law enforcement officials

Source

Richardson: We must be able to trust our Valley law enforcement officials

Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

Posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 11:15 am

Guest Commentary by Bill Richardson

You can’t pick up the paper or turn on the news without hearing about yet another Arizona police officer being fired or investigated for a crime or violating their department’s rules of conduct. [And you never hear about the hundreds more that commit crimes against the people they pretend to serve and don't make it to the news]

Last Saturday’s Arizona Republic told about a member of the Phoenix Police Department’s DUI unit being investigated for filing a false police report and insurance fraud. He reportedly lied about his stolen truck. Last July a Phoenix sergeant was caught on video stealing cash from a business during a burglary investigation.

On Friday the Republic reported an ex-con who was friendly with deputies at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office obtained a sheriff’s badge and access to county vehicles, uniforms and was impersonating a deputy. The list of misconduct at MCSO is lengthy. Last April a deputy pled guilty to stealing $5,000. Another deputy just pled guilty to beating a man and faces prison.

Last week an ex-Tempe officer was jailed for stealing city property. Earlier in the year a Tempe detective pled guilty to stealing evidence from the police station. A few weeks ago a Tempe officer was allowed to retire after he lied to get a search warrant. [Instead of being fired like he should have been, and slapped with criminal charges of perjury like a civilian would have been.] In December a Tempe detective reportedly violated internal policies and procedures, lied to a murder victim’s mother and botched a murder investigation along with several other serious felonies. He still has his job.

A Mesa police sergeant was indicted last summer. A Coolidge sergeant was arrested for beating his wife and a Pinal deputy was investigated for homicide.

In December it was reported a police motorcycle gang was involved in a drunken melee that sent a citizen to the hospital. Criminal charges are pending. [Yea, but don't count on it. Crooked cops are rarely charged with crimes. Of course if a civilian had committed the same crime he would still be in jail waiting to go to trial]

For whatever reason Arizona seems to be plagued with excessive police misconduct. The problems aren’t just with lower ranking officers. [You forgot to mention Sheriff Joe, he is the biggest criminal in Maricopa County]

In my April 20, 2012 column (Arizona lacking in good, honest law enforcement leaders,” evtnow.com/5ju) I wrote about the reported integrity and conduct issues of two sheriffs, the MCSO ex-chief deputy, the ex-Glendale, Quartzite and Glendale police chiefs, the current Tempe chief, the Arizona Attorney General and the head of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Since I wrote that column a Glendale assistant police chief has been demoted for intimidating a business owner.

Law enforcement officers are only as good as their leadership. Weak and corruptive leadership can trickle down and negatively affect an agencies organizational integrity and effectiveness.

The Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, or AZPOST, is the agency that licenses officers and operates under the wing of DPS. AZPOST has no standards for what it takes to be a police chief and has been hit and miss when it comes to holding some officers accountable for their conduct. In many cases new police chiefs and command officers aren’t required to submit to a polygraph or a new background investigation. [Look Bill, even though I hate corrupt cops, a lie detector test or polygraph test is a subjective tool that is worthless in rooting out corrupt cops. That is why it's not allowed to be used as evidence in courts]

AZPOST allowed a fired Chandler officer who cost the city millions after his negligence resulted in the deaths of two people to keep his officer’s license. They refused to take action against the Tempe detective who botched the murder case I mentioned above. Lying by a police officer in Arizona is no longer sure grounds to lose your license. Lying by an officer can’t be tolerated in any form. [But of course it is a crime for us civilians to lie to cops and people who do it are routinely arrested and punished. On the other hand the Supreme Court has said a number of times it is OK for cops to lie to civilians to trick them into confession to crimes. And the "9 Step Reid Method" which is used by most police departments across the USA and world is based on using LIES to get suspects to confess!!!!]

With the serious corruptive influences from Mexican Drug Cartels ever present in Arizona, the integrity of our police should be of utmost concern.

Several officers who work for a department with a history of problems told me they’re proud to wear the badge, but ashamed of the departmental patch.

Just one bad officer can cause the public to distrust the police. [Sadly it ain't just ONE corrupt cop, the police have more corrupt cops then honest ones] It’s not fair to the officers who serve honorably to be painted with the same brush as the crooked officers who continually make the news. It’s also not fair to us. If we want a safe community to live in we must be able to trust the police and their leadership unequivocally. [And that isn't going to happen. So if you want to keep the system from screwing you you should figure out right now that the police are corrupt to the core and can't be trusted for ANYTHING]

• Retired Mesa master police officer Bill Richardson lives in the East Valley and can be reached at bill.richardson@cox.net.

Effort to legalize marijuana launched in Arizona

Effort to legalize marijuana launched in Arizona

Posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 8:04 am

By Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Voters who have seen how medical marijuana works in Arizona may get a chance to extend the ability to use the drug to all other adults.

Proponents of legalization filed the necessary paperwork Wednesday to start gathering the 259,213 signatures they need to put the issue of legalization on the 2014 ballot. They have through July 3, 2014.

The proposed constitutional amendment would do more than allow both the possession of marijuana and its sale at retail outlets.

It also would alter drunk-driving laws so that the mere presence of a metabolite of the drug in a motorist's system is not, by itself, proof the person was legally impaired. Instead, it would be one bit of evidence that could be offered -- but legally insufficient without a video of any field sobriety tests.

Robert Clark, chairman of the Safer Arizona Committee which is pushing the measure, said this is particularly important, as metabolites of marijuana remain in the blood for a long period after someone has used the drug.

Dennis Bohlke, treasurer of the campaign, tried a similar campaign for the 2010 ballot, proposing to make the possession of up to four ounces of marijuana a petty offense, punishable by only a $300 fine. But he gave up after his plan wound up in competition with the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act which eventually was approved by voters.

This new measure is actually far more expansive than Bohlke's 2010 effort, with marijuana possession and sale to adults actually legalized. The only role of the state and local governments would be to regulate it, as it does alcohol, with Arizona entitled to collect a 15 percent excise tax on purchases as well as state and local sales taxes.

Bohlke acknowledged that the medical marijuana initiative was approved by just a narrow margin, actually going down to defeat in 12 of the state's 15 counties. But he said even his far more expansive proposal for outright legalization should have no problem getting approved.

"Three years has made a big difference,'' he said, saying polls show more people support legalizing marijuana now than when he made his first proposal. And Bohlke pointed out that voters in Colorado and Washington have since made marijuana possession legal.

All that, however, presumes Clark and Bohlke can get the measure on the ballot.

At this point they are waging what they say is a "grassroots'' efforts, meaning they have no money for paid circulators. But Clark said they have been promised financial support from national groups for the actual campaign if he can manage to get the necessary signatures.

The change in drunk-driving laws alone would be significant.

In a ruling earlier this year, the Arizona Court of Appeals upheld existing laws which say the presence of any metabolite of marijuana in a motorist's blood, in any amount, is sufficient to sustain a charge of driving under the influence of drugs, a variant of state DUI laws. Clark said that's not fair.

"There's no correlation between the amount of cannaboids in your system and impairment,'' he said. Clark said it can vary among individuals based on how much they've used and how long they have been using the drug.

"We're not advocating for people to go out there and smoke cannabis while they're driving and endanger somebody else,'' he said. "But we want to also be fair and not set up ways for the state to continue to fill our jails up and our prisons up with people that are using cannabis.''

For Bohlke, the issue is more than academic. He said he has charged by Scottsdale police with driving under the influence of drugs based on the presence of metabolites in his blood.

PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - Use it to encrypt your data

Personally I suspect that if you can encrypt it the government can decrypt it. The only question is how long will it take for the government to decrypt it and how much will it cost the government to decrypt it.

When Phil Zimmermann first invented PGP the US government threatened to put him in jail if he gave people outside of the USA copies of the software. The government says PGP is a munition and therefor subject to the governments control.

Phil Zimmermann got around that problem and put the source code on the internet and the cat has been out of the bag since then. The government didn't carry out it's threat to put him in jail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a data encryption and decryption computer program that provides cryptographic privacy and authentication for data communication. PGP is often used for signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, e-mails, files, directories and whole disk partitions to increase the security of e-mail communications. It was created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991.

http://www.gnupg.org/

The free version of PGP

http://www.pgpi.org/

More free PGP software

http://www.symantec.com/encryption

The commercial version of PGP

http://cryptography.org/getpgp.htm

Where to get PGP

http://www.openpgp.org/

http://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/

Presidente Vicente Fox, defendió su propuesta para la legalización de la mariguana

Source

Fracaso total, guerra de Calderón: Fox

Por: EL UNIVERSAL/México, DF

El ex presidente de la República, Vicente Fox, defendió su propuesta para la legalización de la mariguana y señaló que la estrategia en contra del narcotráfico emprendida por su predecesor, el panista Felipe Calderón, fue un fracaso "absoluto y total".

Propuesta. El ex presidente de la República, Vicente Fox, defendió su propuesta para la legalización de la mariguana.

Entrevistado en el canal "Foro TV", Fox reiteró que el enfoque de enfrentarse frontalmente contra los narcotraficantes es errado:

"Hay que distinguir (la) guerra contra las drogas de Nixon, (y la) guerra contra los cárteles y los criminales de Calderón, ambas fracaso absoluto y total".

Recordó que en el último año de su gobierno, el índice de homicidios y de crímenes en México tuvo su nivel más bajo en toda la historia del país, con nueve delitos por cada 100 mil habitantes.

"Y hoy estamos en 24. Algo que me mueve a tomar la postura que he tomado es lo que ha sucedido a partir de entonces".

El pasado miércoles, Fox avaló la legalización de las drogas e incluso dijo que de ser legal, él mismo cultivaría mariguana.

Dijo que las muertes ocasionadas por el crimen organizado han ocasionado una pérdida de turismo en el país, así como una disminución de inversión extranjera directa.

"Hoy se ve a México lleno de sangre y tratamos de ocultarlo pero esa es la cruda realidad en las mesas de los inversionistas, en las mesas de los turistas, el precio es ya demasiado y si encima ponemos la pérdida de esperanza que es lo que al final esto representa para los jóvenes, es urgente buscar salidas", dijo.

Obama Africa trip to cost $60 to $100 million

I think this article shows that modern American Presidents are royal rulers that live in luxury with police state protections that far surpass anything a royal Roman Emperor could have dreamed about.

Source

Source: President Obama Africa trip could cost $60 million

By Carol D. Leonnig and David Nakamura The Washington Post Fri Jun 14, 2013 10:22 AM

When President Obama makes his first extended trip to sub-Saharan Africa this month, the federal agencies charged with keeping him safe won’t be taking any chances.

Hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents will be dispatched to secure facilities in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship, with a fully staffed medical trauma center, will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.

Military cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet­proof glass to cover the windows of the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts, giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace, so they can intervene quickly if an errant plane gets too close.

The elaborate security provisions — which will cost the government tens of millions of dollars — are outlined in a confidential internal planning document obtained by The Washington Post. While the preparations appear to be in line with similar travels in the past, the document offers an unusual glimpse into the colossal efforts to protect the U.S. commander in chief on trips abroad.

Any journey by the president, such as one scheduled next week for Northern Ireland and Germany, is an immense and costly logistical challenge. But the trip to Africa is complicated by a confluence of factors that could make it one of the most expensive of Obama’s tenure, according to people familiar with the planning.

The first family is making back-to-back stops from June 26 to July 3 in three countries where U.S. officials are providing nearly all the resources, rather than depending heavily on local police forces, military authorities or hospitals for assistance.

The president and first lady had also planned to take a Tanzanian safari as part of the trip, which would have required the president’s special counterassault team to carry sniper rifles with high-caliber rounds that could neutralize cheetahs, lions or other animals if they became a threat, according to the planning document.

But officials said Thursday that the safari had been canceled in favor of a trip to Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner.

When The Post first asked White House officials about the safari last week, they said no final decision had been made. A White House official said Thursday that the cancellation was not related to The Post’s inquiries.

“We do not have a limitless supply of assets to support presidential missions, and we prioritized a visit to Robben Island over a two-hour safari in Tanzania,” said spokesman Josh Earnest. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t do both.” [Well $60 to $100 million for a stinking trip to Africa is close to a limitless supply of assets]

Internal administration documents circulated in April show that the Obama family was scheduled to go to both Robben Island and the safari park, according to a person familiar with the plans.

Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also made trips to multiple African nations involving similarly laborious preparations. Bush went in 2003 and 2008, bringing his wife on both occasions. Bush’s two daughters went along on the first trip, which included a safari at a game preserve on the Botswana-South Africa border.

“Even in the most developed places of Western Europe, the level of support you need for mass movements by the president is really extraordinary,” said Steve Atkiss, who coordinated travel as special assistant for operations to Bush. “As you go farther afield, to less-developed places, certainly it’s more of a logistical challenge.”

White House and Secret Service officials declined to discuss the details of the security operations, and administration aides cautioned that the president’s itinerary is not finalized.

Obama’s overseas travels come as government agencies, including the Secret Service, are wrestling with mandatory, across-the-board spending cuts. The service has had to slice $84 million from its budget this year, and this spring the agency canceled public White House tours to save $74,000 a week in overtime costs.

Many details about foreign presidential trips are classified for national security reasons, and there is little public information about overall costs. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that Clinton’s 1998 trip to six African nations cost the U.S. government at least $42.7 million. Most of that was incurred by the military, which made 98 airlift missions to transport personnel and vehicles, and set up temporary medical evacuation units in five countries.

That figure did not include costs borne by the Secret Service, which were considered classified.

Obama’s trip could cost the federal government $60 million to $100 million based on the costs of similar African trips in recent years, according to one person familiar with the journey, who was not authorized to speak for attribution. The Secret Service planning document, which was provided to The Post by a person who is concerned about the amount of resources necessary for the trip, does not specify costs.

“The infrastructure that accompanies the president’s travels is beyond our control,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. “The security requirements are not White House-driven, they are Secret Service-driven.”

Current and former government security officials involved in presidential trips said White House staff also help determine what’s required, because they plan the visits and parameters. The Secret Service and military respond to that itinerary by providing what their agencies consider the required security.

White House officials said the trip was long overdue, marking Obama’s first visit as president to sub-Saharan Africa aside from a 22-hour stopover in Ghana in 2009. The emerging democracies on the itinerary are crucial partners in regional security conflicts, Rhodes said.

Obama will hold bilateral meetings with each country’s leader and seek to forge stronger economic ties at a time when China is investing heavily in Africa. He also will highlight global health programs, including HIV/AIDS prevention.

The first lady, who toured South Africa and Botswana without the president in 2011, will headline some events on her own during the week. The stops will add to the logistical challenges, because she will require her own security detail and vehicles, the planning document shows.

Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan declined to discuss details of the journey. “We always provide the appropriate level of protection to create a secure environment,” he said.

According to the Secret Service document, Obama will spend a night in Dakar, Senegal, two nights in Johannesburg, a night in Cape Town and one night in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Among the 56 vehicles for the trip are parade limousines for the president and first lady, a specialized communications vehicle for secure telephone and video connections, a truck that jams radio frequencies around the presidential motorcade, a fully loaded ambulance that can handle biological or chemical contaminants and a truck for X-ray equipment.

The Secret Service transports such vehicles, along with bulletproof glass, on most trips, including those inside the United States, White House officials said. But with quick stops in three countries, the agency will need three sets of each, because there is not enough time to transfer the equipment, according to the planning document.

One hundred agents are needed as “post-standers” — to man security checkpoints and borders around the president — in each of the first three cities he visits. Sixty-five are needed to meet up with Obama in Dar es Salaam. Before the safari in Mikumi National Park was canceled this week, an additional 35 post-standers had been slated to protect the Obamas and their two daughters there, according to the document.

In addition, 80 to 100 additional agents will be flown in to work rotating shifts, with round-the-clock coverage, for Obama’s and his family’s security details, counterassault teams and logistics coordinators.

The planning document does not provide a total number of how many individual agents will be involved in the trip; some will work in more than one location.

Officials said the Secret Service does not want the president traveling anywhere without a top-rated trauma center nearby. The White House medical unit makes decisions about which foreign hospitals meet its standards when it makes advance visits to the locations for planned trips, officials said.

In much of the developing world, the U.S. Navy provides a “floating hospital” on an aircraft carrier or amphibious ship nearby, officials said.

“This is what you need to support the American presidency,” Atkiss said of the requirements, “regardless of who the president is.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Happy Herbs

Using herbs for cannabis addictions

Used to relax, improve mood & interrupt the addiction

• Damiana (turnera aphrodisiaca) is a relaxing and mood enhancing herb that can be smoked or drunk as a tea.
• Passionflower (passiflora incarnata) is a sedating herb that can be drunk as a tea before bed or smoked as an alternative
• Motherwort (leonorus sibiricus) is often called "marijuanilla" for its relaxing effect when smoked.
• Scullcap (scutelaria lateriflora) can be smoked or drunk as a tea to ease symptoms of withdrawal and tension
• Mugword (artemesia vulgaris) can be smoked as an alternative for a relaxing dreamy effect or drunk as a tea.
• California Poppy (eschscholzia californica) can be smoked as an alternative, or drunk as a tea as a mild sedative.
• Catnit (pepata cataria) is smoked as a cannabis alternative or drunk as a tea for relaxation.
• Mulungu (erythrina mulungu) is a strong sedative tea that assists with insomnia. NOT SMOKED - DO NOT SMOKE
• Rhodiola (rhodiola rosea) is an adaptogen that as a tea or extract assists with cravings. NOT SMOKED - DO NOT SMOKE

Fears of National ID With Immigration Bill

Fears of National ID With Immigration Bill

By ERIC LIPTON

Published: June 15, 2013

WASHINGTON — Driver’s license photographs and biographic information of most Americans would be accessible through an expanded Department of Homeland Security nationwide computer network if the immigration legislation pending before the Senate becomes law.

The proposed expansion is part of an effort to crack down on illegal immigration by requiring all employers to confirm the identity and legal status of any new workers by tapping into a Homeland Security Department system called E-Verify, which is now used voluntarily by about 7 percent of employers in the United States.

But the proposal already faces objections from some civil liberties lawyers and certain members of Congress, who worry about the potential for another sprawling data network that could ultimately be the equivalent of a national ID system.

The questions are being raised while a debate takes places over access to domestic phone records and Internet files of foreigners.

“Over time, this could become a single, national, searchable database of vital biographic information and photographs of nearly every American,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. “I want to make sure we embed privacy protections in the system, both in how it is built and administered so that data cannot easily be stolen, and also that the information is only used for legitimate purposes.”

Homeland Security Department officials consider such fears unwarranted because E-Verify simply reaches out to other existing government computer systems, like Social Security records or passport records, to confirm a person’s identity and work eligibility.

“It is not a stand-alone database that collects and stores,” said Christopher Bentley, a spokesman at the department’s Citizenship and Immigration Services division, which runs E-Verify. “It pings the other databases that are already established for confirmation, and once that process is complete the information disappears.”

E-Verify would have to be greatly expanded if the immigration bill is passed, because within four years all employers would have to electronically submit information gathered from new employees, including citizens, to confirm that they are eligible to work in the United States.

Alex Conant, a spokesman for Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, whose staff helped write the language in the Senate bill, said the E-Verify changes would make it harder for someone who has entered the country illegally to find a job and would accomplish this without creating a national identification card.

“The system we currently have is full of fraud and contributes to illegal immigration,” Mr. Conant said. “This proposed system protects individual civil liberties while giving employers the tools to make sure their employees are legal.”

To prevent a job applicant from using fraudulent credentials — as often occurs with illegal immigrants — the legislation mandates the expansion of a photo-based confirmation system. It would allow employers to compare a photo on a driver’s license or a passport with what should be a replica of that photo maintained by the agency that issued the identification document.

Since late 2010, the Homeland Security Department has had access to the 113 million State Department passport records and photos to help prevent abuse. But the Senate bill would direct the department to expand the photo program by offering grants to states if they allow the department to tap into their driver’s license photo records, and also makes it clear that allowing such access would not represent a violation of a federal privacy law.

Currently, only Mississippi allows the department into its motor vehicle database, Mr. Bentley said, and only for biographic information, like name and date of birth, not photographs.

But several civil liberties lawyers and lawmakers have said they were concerned that an expanded E-Verify — if it had access to all 212 million driver’s license records in the United States — would soon be tapped by other federal agencies, like the Transportation Security Administration at airport checkpoints or the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a search for suspects.

Just as Social Security numbers became adopted for identification uses never intended, E-Verify, they say, would draw many unexpected uses.

“We are wary of giving the federal government this kind of centralized power over our daily lives,” Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, wrote in an opinion article in The Washington Times, opposing the plan for expanding the E-Verify system.

The Senate legislation makes it clear that the proposed law should not be interpreted to “permit or allow” any other government agency to use the E-Verify data for any purpose other than employment verification. But it does not explicitly prohibit such a use, as the law governing the census does, critics said.

In fact, privacy guidelines issued by the Homeland Security Department governing E-Verify say it may, on a case-by-case basis, “give law enforcement agencies extracts of information on potential fraud, discrimination or other illegal activities.”

Mr. Bentley said this provision was intended to prevent individual cases of wrongdoing, and not to allow broad searches of the data that are linked together by the E-Verify system.

Mr. Conant said Senator Rubio would consider amendments to the legislation to address privacy concerns about the proposals.

“Given the justified concerns that many Americans have with the current administration’s overreach,” Mr. Conant said in a statement, “we are open to refinements that would further restrict the government’s use of this technology, without undermining the ability of employers to ensure undocumented immigrants are not illegally obtaining employment.”

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

Don't count on the secret courts created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to protect our Constitutional rights.

Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected by the secret FISA courts, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters. National security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence.

Source

Secret Court Ruling Put Tech Companies in Data Bind

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: June 13, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional.

The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law.

So Yahoo became part of the National Security Agency’s secret Internet surveillance program, Prism, according to leaked N.S.A. documents, as did seven other Internet companies.

Like almost all the actions of the secret court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the details of its disagreement with Yahoo were never made public beyond a heavily redacted court order, one of the few public documents ever to emerge from the court. The name of the company had not been revealed until now. Yahoo’s involvement was confirmed by two people with knowledge of the proceedings. Yahoo declined to comment.

But the decision has had lasting repercussions for the dozens of companies that store troves of their users’ personal information and receive these national security requests — it puts them on notice that they need not even try to test their legality. And despite the murky details, the case offers a glimpse of the push and pull among tech companies and the intelligence and law enforcement agencies that try to tap into the reams of personal data stored on their servers.

It also highlights a paradox of Silicon Valley: while tech companies eagerly vacuum up user data to track their users and sell ever more targeted ads, many also have a libertarian streak ingrained in their corporate cultures that resists sharing that data with the government.

“Even though they have an awful reputation on consumer privacy issues, when it comes to government privacy, they generally tend to put their users first,” said Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst studying technological surveillance at the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s this libertarian, pro-civil liberties vein that runs through the tech companies.”

Lawyers who handle national security requests for tech companies say they rarely fight in court, but frequently push back privately by negotiating with the government, even if they ultimately have to comply. In addition to Yahoo, which fought disclosures under FISA, other companies, including Google, Twitter, smaller communications providers and a group of librarians, have fought in court elements of National Security Letters, which the F.B.I. uses to secretly collect information about Americans. Last year, the government issued more than 1,850 FISA requests and 15,000 National Security Letters.

“The tech companies try to pick their battles,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at American University who has challenged government counterterrorism surveillance. “Behind the scenes, different tech companies show different degrees of cooperativeness or pugnaciousness.”

But Mr. Vladeck added that even if a company resisted, “that may not be enough, because any pushback is secret and at the end of the day, even the most well-intentioned companies are not going to be standing in the shoes of their customers.”

FISA requests can be as broad as seeking court approval to ask a company to turn over information about the online activities of people in a certain country. Between 2008 and 2012, only two of 8,591 applications were rejected, according to data gathered by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research center in Washington. Without obtaining court approval, intelligence agents can then add more specific requests — like names of individuals and additional Internet services to track — every day for a year.

National Security Letters are limited to the name, address, length of service and toll billing records of a service’s subscribers.

Because national security requests ban recipients from even acknowledging their existence, it is difficult to know exactly how, and how often, the companies cooperate or resist. Small companies are more likely to take the government to court, lawyers said, because they have fewer government relationships and customers, and fewer disincentives to rock the boat. One of the few known challenges to a National Security Letter, for instance, came from a small Internet provider in New York, the Calyx Internet Access Corporation.

The Yahoo ruling, from 2008, shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry “overblown.”

“Notwithstanding the parade of horribles trotted out by the petitioner, it has presented no evidence of any actual harm, any egregious risk of error, or any broad potential for abuse,” the court said, adding that the government’s “efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts.”

One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named.

Google filed a challenge this year against 19 National Security Letters in the same federal court, and in May, Judge Illston ruled against the company. Google was not identified in the case, but its involvement was confirmed by a person briefed on the case.

In 2011, Twitter successfully challenged a silence order on a National Security Letter related to WikiLeaks members.

Other companies are asking for permission to talk about national security requests. Google negotiated with Justice officials to publish the number of letters they received, and were allowed to say they each received between zero and 999 last year, as did Microsoft. The companies, along with Facebook and Twitter, said Tuesday that the government should give them more freedom to disclose national security requests.

The companies comply with a vast majority of nonsecret requests, including subpoenas and search warrants, by providing at least some of the data.

For many of the requests to tech companies, the government relies on a 2008 amendment to FISA. Even though the FISA court requires so-called minimization procedures to limit incidental eavesdropping on people not in the original order, including Americans, the scale of electronic communication is so vast that such information — say, on an e-mail string — is often picked up, lawyers say.

Last year, the FISA court said the minimization rules were unconstitutional, and on Wednesday, ruled that it had no objection to sharing that opinion publicly. It is now up to a federal court.

Nicole Perlroth and Somini Sengupta contributed reporting from San Francisco.

How to avoid snooping by the NSA Prism program

How to avoid snooping by the NSA Prism program

By Raphael Satter

Associated Press

Posted: 06/14/2013 09:29:47 AM PDT

LONDON -- Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.

But given the revelations spilling out into the media, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying by the U.S. agency.

For some, it's a matter of indifference who or what is rifling through their electronic records. Others, mindful of spy agencies' history of abuse, are more concerned.

Here are some basic tips to avoid having your personal life turned into an intelligence report:

------

ENCRYPT YOUR EMAILS

Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your Internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe -- not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the world.

To beat the snoops, experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the U.S. government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.

Disadvantages: Encryption can be clunky. And to work, both parties have to be using it.

[The government probably can still decrypt and read your emails, but the only question is how long will it take them to decrypt the data, and how much will it cost them. If you are committing a victimless less crime that should be legal, play it safe and don't send it over the internet. On the other hand it's a great idea to use PGP to encrypt your weekly grocery shopping list and useless chit chat you talk to friends about. Make it expensive for the government to spy on you an collect useless information.]

------

USE TOR

Like emails, your travels around the Internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.

Originally developed by the U.S. military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local Internet service provider. And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.

Disadvantages: Browsing the web with TOR can be painfully slow. And some services -- like file swapping protocols used by many Internet users to share videos and music -- aren't compatible.

[If you ask me TOR sounds pretty useless. The data you send on the internet is already split into packets and some times the packets travel different paths to get to the final destination]

------

DITCH THE PHONE

Your everyday cell phone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cell phone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims' voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cell phone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.

An even bigger issue is that cell phones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give the NSA a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cell phones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home. [And remember cell phones are just RADIO TRANSMITTERS. Everything you say is broadcast on the radio, and ANYBODY can listen in. Grab one of those old TV sets with 81 channels and tune in to the high end of the dial. Hear that junk. It's cell phone calls. If you can hear it on an old TV set, the government can also listen in.]

Disadvantages: Not having a cell phone handy when you really need it. Other alternatives, like using "burner" phones paid for anonymously and discarded after use, rapidly become expensive.

------

CUT UP YOUR CREDIT CARDS

The Wall Street Journal says the NSA is monitoring American credit card records in addition to phone calls. So stick to cash, or, if you're more adventurous, use electronic currencies to move your money around.

Disadvantages: Credit cards are a mainstay of the world payment system, so washing your hands of plastic money is among the most difficult moves you can make. In any case, some cybercurrency systems offer only limited protection from government snooping and many carry significant risks. The value of Bitcoin, one of the better-known forms of electronic cash, has oscillated wildly, while users of another popular online currency, Liberty Reserve, were left out of pocket after the company behind it was busted by international law enforcement.

------

DON'T KEEP YOUR DATA IN AMERICA OR WITH AMERICAN COMPANIES

U.S. companies are subject to U.S. law, including the Patriot Act, whose interpretations are classified. Although the exact parameters of the PRISM data mining program revealed by the Guardian and The Washington Post remain up for debate, what we do know is that a variety of law enforcement officials -- not just at the NSA -- can secretly demand your electronic records without a warrant through an instrument known as a National Security Letter. Such silent requests are made by the thousands every year.

If you don't like the sound of PRISM, National Security Letters, or anything to do with the Patriot Act, your best bet is to park your data in a European country, where privacy protections tend to be stronger.

Disadvantages: Silicon Valley's Internet service providers tend to be better and cheaper than their foreign counterparts. What's more, there's no guarantee that European spy agencies don't have NSA-like surveillance arrangements with their own companies. When hunting for a safe place to stash your data, look for smaller countries with robust human rights records. Iceland, long a hangout for WikiLeaks activists, might be a good bet.

------

STEER CLEAR OF MALICIOUS SOFTWARE

If they can't track it, record it, or intercept it, an increasing number of spies aren't shy about hacking their way in to steal your data outright. Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, warned the Guardian that his agency had been on a worldwide binge of cyberattacks.

"We hack everyone everywhere," he said.

Former officials don't appear to contradict him. Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden described it as "commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries' network." In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he boasted that "we are the best at doing it. Period."

Malicious software used by hackers can be extremely hard to spot. But installing an antivirus program, avoiding attachments, frequently changing passwords, dodging suspicious websites, creating a firewall, and always making sure your software is up to date is a good start.

Disadvantages: Keeping abreast of all the latest updates and warily scanning emails for viruses can be exhausting.

------

SO WILL ALL THIS KEEP MY DATA SAFE FROM SPYING?

Safer, maybe.

Using anonymity services and encryption "simply make it harder, but not impossible for a dedicated investigator to link your activities together and identify you," Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said in an email.

"Someone can always find you ---- just depends on how motivated they are (and how much information they have access to)."

Pushing the envelope, NSA-style

Pushing the envelope, NSA-style

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: June 13 E-mail the writer

Thirty-five years ago in United States v. Choate, the courts ruled that the Postal Service may record “mail cover,” i.e., what’s written on the outside of an envelope — the addresses of sender and receiver. [I have to disagree with that decision. If I pay a private company to provide me with mail service I think it would be wrong for them to tell everybody on the plant who I was sending and receiving letters to and from. And I would switch companies if I found out they were blabbing that information all over the planet]

The National Security Agency’s recording of U.S. phone data does basically that with the telephone. It records who is calling whom — the outside of the envelope, as it were. The content of the conversation, however, is like the letter inside the envelope. It may not be opened without a court order. [Again I disagree with that logic. My phone company should not be telling everybody on the planet who I make calls to and who I receive calls from. And I would switch companies if I found out they were giving out this information]

The constitutional basis for this is simple: The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for what’s written on an envelope. It’s dropped in a public mailbox, read by workers at the collection center and read once again by the letter carrier. It’s already openly been shared, much as your phone records are shared with, recorded by, and (e-)mailed back to you by a third party, namely the phone company. [Again I disagree with the Supreme Courts definition of a "reasonable expectation of privacy"]

Indeed, in 1979 the Supreme Court (Smith v. Maryland) made the point directly regarding the telephone: The expectation of privacy applies to the content of a call, not its record. There is therefore nothing constitutionally offensive about the newly revealed NSA data-mining program that seeks to identify terrorist networks through telephone-log pattern recognition.

But doesn’t the other NSA program — the spooky-sounding James Bond-evoking PRISM — give you the willies? Well, what we know thus far is that PRISM is designed to read the e-mails of non-U.S. citizens outside the United States. If an al-Qaeda operative in Yemen is e-mailing a potential recruit, it would be folly not to intercept it.

As former attorney general Michael Mukasey explained, the Constitution is not a treaty with the rest of the world; it’s an instrument for the protection of the American citizenry. And reading other people’s mail is something countries do to protect themselves. It’s called spying. [Again I have to disagree with that. The American government should not be SPYING on ANYONE, including foreign countries. If we declare war on a county I see no problems with spying on them as part of the war effort, but spying on a country we are not at war with is wrong]

Is that really shocking?

The problem here is not constitutionality. It’s practicality. Legally this is fairly straightforward. But between intent and execution lies a shadow — the human factor, the possibility of abuse. And because of the scope and power of the NSA, any abuse would have major consequences for civil liberties.

The real issue is safeguards. [The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the safeguards here, and they both have been flushed down the toilet by Congress and the President!!!] We could start by asking how an Edward Snowden — undereducated, newly employed, rootless and grandiose — could have been given such access and power. We need a toughening of both congressional oversight and judicial review, perhaps even some independent outside scrutiny. Plus periodic legislative revision — say, reauthorization every couple of years — in light of the efficacy of the safeguards and the nature of the external threat.

The object is not to abolish these vital programs. [Again I disagree, these programs should be ABOLISHED] It’s to fix them. Not exactly easy to do amid the current state of national agitation — provoked largely because such intrusive programs require a measure of trust in government, and this administration has forfeited that trust amid an unfolding series of scandals and a basic problem with truth-telling.

There are nonetheless two other reasons these revelations have sparked such anxiety. Every spying program is a compromise between liberty and security. Yet here is a president who campaigned on the proposition that he would transcend such pedestrian considerations. “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals,” he declared in his first inaugural address, no less.

When caught with his hand on your phone data, however, President Obama offered this defense: “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy. . . . We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

So it wasn’t such a false choice after all, was it, Mr. President? [OK, now it looks like we can agree on something??? Emperor Obama is a tyrant and hypocrite!!!]

Nor does it help that just three weeks ago the president issued a major foreign-policy manifesto whose essential theme was that the war on terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.”

Now it turns out that Obama’s government was simultaneously running a massive, secret anti-terror intelligence operation. But if the tide of war is receding, why this vast, ever-expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is an outside threat — that you assure us is receding?

Which is it, Mr. President? Tell it straight. We are a nation of grown-ups. We can make choices. Even one it took you four years to admit is not “false.”

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Five myths about privacy

Five myths about privacy

By Daniel J. Solove, Published: June 13

Daniel J. Solove is a law professor at George Washington University, the founder of the privacy and data-security training company TeachPrivacy and the author of “Nothing to Hide.”

The disclosure of two secret government surveillance programs — one involving phone records and the other personal data from Internet companies — has sparked debate about privacy and national security. Has the government gone too far? Or not far enough? How much privacy should we sacrifice for security? To discuss these issues productively, some myths must be dispelled.

1. The collection of phone numbers and other “metadata” isn’t much of a threat to privacy.

Don’t worry, argue defenders of these surveillance programs: The government is gathering innocuous data, not intimate secrets. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama declared. Intelligence agencies are “looking at phone numbers and durations of calls; they are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”

But “metadata” about phone calls can be quite revealing. Whom someone is talking to may be just as sensitive as what’s being said. Calls to doctors or health-care providers can suggest certain medical conditions. Calls to businesses say something about a person’s interests and lifestyle. Calls to friends reveal associations, potentially pointing to someone’s political, religious or philosophical beliefs.

Even when individual calls are innocuous, a detailed phone record can present a telling portrait of the person associated with a telephone number. Collect millions of those records, and there’s the potential to trace the entire country’s social and professional connections.

2. Surveillance must be secret to protect us.

The administration and intelligence agencies have been quick to defend the classified status of the phone and Internet surveillance programs. “Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection,” said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander went further: “Grave harm has already been done by opening this up.” Presidents Obama and George W. Bush have both perpetuated this myth.

Of course, if the government is trying to gather data about a particular suspect, keeping the specifics of surveillance efforts secret will decrease the likelihood of that suspect altering his or her behavior.

But secrecy at the level of an individual suspect is different from keeping the very existence of massive surveillance programs secret. The public must know about the general outlines of surveillance activities in order to evaluate whether the government is achieving the appropriate balance between privacy and security. What kind of information is gathered? How is it used? How securely is it kept? What kind of oversight is there? Are these activities even legal? These questions can’t be answered, and the government can’t be held accountable, if surveillance programs are completely classified.

With the phone and Internet programs, it isn’t clear that sufficient protective measures are in place. The president and security officials assure us there are, but without transparency, we can’t really know.

3. Only people with something to hide should be concerned about their privacy.

In the wake of the leaks about government surveillance, writer and privacy supporter Daniel Sieradski started a Twitter account with the handle @_nothingtohide and has been retweeting variations on this myth. A typical tweet: “I don’t care if the government knows everything I do. I am fully confident that I will not be arrested.”

When privacy is compromised, though, the problems can go far beyond the exposure of illegal activity or embarrassing information. It can provide the government with a tremendous amount of power over its people. It can undermine trust and chill free speech and association. It can make people vulnerable to abuse of their information and further intrusions into their lives.

Even if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.

4. National security requires major sacrifices in privacy.

Obama invoked this myth this month when he said, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” The implication is that those upset about surveillance fail to recognize that we must trade some privacy for security.

But usually it’s not either-or. As Obama himself said in his 2009 inaugural address: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Protecting privacy doesn’t need to mean scuttling a security measure. Most people concerned about the privacy implications of government surveillance aren’t arguing for no surveillance and absolute privacy. They’d be fine giving up some privacy as long as appropriate controls, limitations, oversight and accountability mechanisms were in place.

This sentiment was evident in the public outcry over the Transportation Security Administration’s use of full-body X-ray scanners that displayed what looked like nude images of airline passengers. No one wanted to end airport security checks. They wanted checks that were less intrusive. Congress required the TSA to use less-revealing software, and the agency ended up switching to different machines.

5. Americans aren’t especially bothered by government intrusions into their privacy.

“The public is just fine with government snooping in the name of counterterrorism,” read one Washington Post headline this past week. Indeed, a Post and Pew Research Center poll found that a majority of Americans prioritized the investigation of possible terrorist threats over the protection of personal privacy and considered it “acceptable” for the NSA to use secret court orders to access phone records to investigate terrorism.

Yet the same poll showed that the public was more closely divided on whether “the U.S. government should be able to monitor everyone’s e-mail and other online activities if officials say this might prevent future terrorist attacks.” And a Gallup poll found that only 37 percent of Americans approved of the NSA obtaining phone records and Internet communications as part of efforts to investigate terrorism, while 53 percent disapproved.

I would expect polls to show even more support for privacy if it weren’t falsely pitted — in public debates and in poll questions themselves — against stopping terrorist attacks. We don’t have to choose between preserving privacy and preventing terrorism. We do have to decide how much oversight and accountability there should be when the government conducts surveillance of its citizens.

Read more from Outlook, friend us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.

Golpea monitoreo a gigantes de la red

Golpea monitoreo a gigantes de la red

NUEVA YORK, EU.- Envueltos en el escándalo de vigilancia en internet del Gobierno de Estados Unidos, Facebook y Google, dos íconos de la era digital, sufren un golpe a su reputación que los ha dejado en una posición cuando menos incómoda frente a sus usuarios.

Ambas compañías, al igual que Microsoft, dueña de Skype; AOL; Yahoo!; PalTalk y Apple, desmintieron rotundamente su colaboración con el programa PRISM, a través del cual la Agencia Nacional de Seguridad (NSA, por sus siglas en inglés) monitorea las conversaciones en la red de redes.

En días recientes, el diario británico The Guardian reveló la existencia de PRISM gracias a un subcontratista de la agencia, Edward Snowden, quien filtró los documentos a la prensa y que huyó a Hong Kong.

Pero las desmentidas de Larry Page, CEO de Google, y Mark Zuckerberg, líder de Facebook, en las que afirman que no brindaron acceso directo a sus servidores, estuvieron lejos de despejar las dudas que azotan la credibilidad de ambas empresas.

“Es más probable que no estén autorizadas a revelar su participación, a confirmar una cosa o la otra”, afirmó a REFORMA Dave Naass, vocero de Electronic Frontier Foundation, un grupo que pelea por la privacidad de los usuarios de internet.

Naass dijo que la semántica de los comunicados de ambos empresarios fue escogida para evitar reconocer la participación en un programa clasificado, y que lo más probable es que las compañías estaban al tanto del monitoreo.

La otra alternativa es que los servicios de Inteligencia vulneraron la seguridad de las empresas sin que estas se enteraran, algo que también sería perjudicial para la reputación de ambos gigantes.

Muchos usuarios descargaron en las redes sociales el malestar con ambas compañías. En Twitter, que se negó a participar del programa de monitoreo, circulaba ayer una fotografía que mostraba a nueva “política de seguridad de Facebook”. Una de las nuevas opciones para compartir información incluía un nuevo grupo: “Amigos y la CIA”; o “Sólo yo y la CIA”.

“Facebook es una sucursal del FBI”, se quejó Phil Wang, en uno de los cientos de comentarios que los usuarios de la red social dejaron en el mensaje que Zuckerberg publicó luego de puntillosos reportes periodísticos, uno de ellos en The New York Times, en los que se explicaba cómo se tejió la colaboración de las compañías con el Gobierno.

Con todo, aún es una incógnita si las empresas deberán enfrentar consecuencias más severas como un menor tráfico. Gracias a la penetración de los celulares inteligentes, los estadounidenses pasan en promedio 32 minutos al día en Facebook, según un informe de la consultora IDC. Google es el principal motor de búsqueda del mundo.

Ilya Shapiro, del Instituto Cato, un centro de estudios libertario de Washington, dijo que no se puede descartar que las empresas enfrenten reclamos por colaborar con Washington y entregar información privada de sus usuarios.

“Pero eso depende del acuerdo de privacidad, ese contrato que nadie lee”, matizó Shapiro a REFORMA.

NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

Personally I wouldn't bet that NSA proof encryption exists. I suspect that NSA if it wants to spend lots of money and time can decrypt just about anything.

If you are going to encrypt your emails using the longest possible keys to make NSA work a little bit harder and longer to crack your emails.

Also encrypt everything you send. Make the folks at NSA spend lots of money to read that grocery list you sent to your boy friend or girl friend. Encrypt the chit chat you email your friends about the Super Bowl or what ever. Make NSA spend big bucks to learn useless details of your private life.

Also remember that the more emails that your friends send to you using the same public key makes it easier for NSA to crack your code. So change your public and private keys frequently.

The best policy to follow is that if you don't want the government to read your messages don't put them on the internet. And remember the government also listens to our phone calls. If you don't want the government to hear it, don't say it on a telephone.

Source

NSA-proof encryption exists. Why doesn’t anyone use it?

By Timothy B. Lee, Published: June 14, 2013 at 10:50

Computer programmers believe they know how to build cryptographic systems that are impossible for anyone, even the U.S. government, to crack. So why can the NSA read your e-mail?

Last week, leaks revealed that the Web sites most people use every day are sharing users’ private information with the government. Companies participating in the National Security Agency’s program, code-named PRISM, include Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. During the 1990s, a “cypherpunk” movement predicted that ubiquitous, user-friendly cryptographic software would make it impossible for governments to spy on ordinary users’ private communications.

The government seemed to believe this story, too. “The ability of just about everybody to encrypt their messages is rapidly outrunning our ability to decode them,” a U.S. intelligence official told U.S. News & World Report in 1995. The government classified cryptographic software as a munition, banning its export outside the United States. And it proposed requiring that cryptographic systems have “back doors” for government interception.

The cypherpunks won that battle. By the end of the Clinton administration, the government conceded that the Internet had made it impossible to control the spread of strong cryptographic software. But more than a decade later, the cypherpunks seem to have lost the war. Software capable of withstanding NSA snooping is widely available, but hardly anyone uses it. Instead, we use Gmail, Skype, Facebook, AOL Instant Messenger and other applications whose data is reportedly accessible through PRISM.

And that’s not a coincidence: Adding strong encryption to the most popular Internet products would make them less useful, less profitable and less fun.

“Security is very rarely free,” says J. Alex Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan. “There are trade-offs between convenience and usability and security.”

Most people’s priority: Convenience

Consumers have overwhelmingly chosen convenience and usability. Mainstream communications tools are more user-friendly than their cryptographically secure competitors and have features that would be difficult to implement in an NSA-proof fashion.

And while most types of software get more user-friendly over time, user-friendly cryptography seems to be intrinsically difficult. Experts are not much closer to solving the problem today than they were two decades ago.

Ordinarily, the way companies make sophisticated software accessible to regular users is by performing complex, technical tasks on their behalf. The complexity of Google, Microsoft and Apple’s vast infrastructure is hidden behind the simple, polished interfaces of their Web and mobile apps. But delegating basic security decisions to a third party means giving it the ability to access your private content and share it with others, including the government.

Most modern online services do make use of encryption. Popular Web services such as Gmail and Hotmail support an encryption standard called SSL. If you visit a Web site and see a “lock” icon in the corner of your browser window, that means SSL encryption is enabled. But while this kind of encryption will protect users against ordinary bad guys, it’s useless against governments.

That’s because SSL only protects data moving between your device and the servers operated by Google, Apple or Microsoft. Those service providers have access to unencrypted copies of your data. So if the government suspects criminal behavior, it can compel tech companies to turn over private e-mails or Facebook posts.

That problem can be avoided with “end-to-end” encryption. In this scheme, messages are encrypted on the sender’s computer and decrypted on the recipient’s device. Intermediaries such as Google or Microsoft only see the encrypted version of the message, making it impossible for them to turn over copies to the government.

Software like that exists. One of the oldest is PGP, e-mail encryption software released in 1991. Others include OTR (for “off the record”), which enables secure instant messaging, and the Internet telephony apps Silent Circle and Redphone.

But it’s difficult to add new features to applications with end-to-end encryption. Take Gmail, for example. “If you wanted to prevent government snooping, you’d have to prevent Google’s servers from having a copy of the text of your messages,” Halderman says. “But that would make it much harder for Google to provide features like search over your messages.” Filtering spam also becomes difficult. And end-to-end encryption would also make it difficult for Google to make money on the service, since it couldn’t use the content of messages to target ads.

A similar point applies to Facebook. The company doesn’t just transmit information from one user to another. It automatically resizes users’ photos and allows them to “tag” themselves and their friends. Facebook filters the avalanche of posts generated by your friends to display the ones you are most likely to find the most interesting. And it indexes the information users post to make it searchable.

These features depend on Facebook’s servers having access to a person’s private data, and it would be difficult to implement them in a system based on end-to-end encryption. While computer scientists are working on techniques for creating more secure social-media sites, these techniques aren’t yet mature enough to support all of Facebook’s features or efficient enough to serve hundreds of millions of users.

Other user headaches

End-to-end encryption creates other headaches for users. Conventional online services offer mechanisms for people to recover lost passwords. These mechanisms work because Apple, Microsoft and other online service providers have access to unencrypted data.

In contrast, when a system has end-to-end encryption, losing a password is catastrophic; it means losing all data in the user’s account.

Also, encryption is effective only if you’re communicating with the party you think you’re communicating with. This security relies on keys — large numbers associated with particular people that make it possible to scramble a message on one end and decode it on the other. In a maneuver cryptographers call a “man in the middle” attack, a malicious party impersonates a message’s intended recipient and tricks the sender into using the wrong encryption key. To thwart this kind of attack, sender and recipient need a way to securely exchange and verify each other’s encryption keys.

“A key is supposed to be associated closely with a person, which means you want a person to be involved in creating their own key, and in verifying the keys of people they communicate with,” says Ed Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton University. “Those steps tend to be awkward and confusing.”

And even those who are willing to make the effort are likely to make mistakes that compromise security. The computer scientists Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar explored these problem in a famous 1999 paper called “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt.” They focused on PGP, which was (and still is) one of the most popular tools for users to send encrypted e-mail.

PGP “is not usable enough to provide effective security for most computer users,” the authors wrote.

Users expect software to “just work” without worrying too much about the technical details. But the researchers discovered that users tended to make mistakes that compromise their security. Users are supposed to send other people their “public key,” used to encode messages addressed to them, and to keep their private key a secret. Yet some users foolishly did the opposite, sending others the private key that allowed eavesdroppers to unscramble e-mail addressed to them. Others failed to make backup copies of their private encryption keys, so when their hard drives crashed, they lost access to their encrypted e-mail.

Using PGP is such a hassle that even those with a strong need for secure communication resist its use. When Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the details of the PRISM program, first contacted Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian in February, he asked the journalist to set up PGP on his computer so the two could communicate securely. He even sent Greenwald a video with step-by-step directions for setting up the software. But Greenwald, who didn’t yet know the significance of Snowden’s leaks, dragged his feet. He did not set up the software until late March, after filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was also in contact with Snowden, met with Greenwald and alerted him to the significance of his disclosures.

Going with the flow

Felten argues that another barrier to adopting strong cryptography is a chicken-and-egg problem: It is only useful if you know other people are also using it. Even people who have gone to the trouble of setting up PGP still send most of their e-mail in plain text because most recipients don’t have the capability to receive encrypted e-mail. People tend to use what’s installed on their computer. So even those who have Redphone will make most of their calls with Skype because that’s what other people use.

Halderman isn’t optimistic that strong cryptography will catch on with ordinary users anytime soon. In recent years, the companies behind the most popular Web browsers have beefed up their cryptographic capabilities, which could make more secure online services possible. But the broader trend is that users are moving more and more data from their hard drives to cloud computing platforms, which makes data even more vulnerable to government snooping.

Strong cryptographic software is available to those who want to use it. Whistleblowers, dissidents, criminals and governments use it every day. But cryptographic software is too complex and confusing to reach a mass audience anytime soon. Most people simply aren’t willing to invest the time and effort required to ensure the NSA can’t read their e-mail or listen to their phone calls. And so for the masses, online privacy depends more on legal safeguards than technological wizardry.

The cypherpunks dreamed of a future where technology protected people from government spying. But end-to-end encryption doesn’t work well if people don’t understand it. And the glory of Google or Facebook, after all, is that anyone can use them without really knowing how they work. trained to follow specific procedures in dealing with passengers and fare issues. “

Current, former officials back secret surveillance

And of course that is why the Founders gave us the 4th, 5th and most importantly the Second Amendments to keep these government tyrants in check.

But sadly the Bill of Rights and Constitution doesn't work that well and our current royal government masters have pretty much flushed the 4th Amendment down the toilet and have used the Patriot Act along with a bunch of rhetoric on terrorists to justify their spying on us.

As H. L. Mencken said:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

Current, former officials back secret surveillance

Associated Press Sun Jun 16, 2013 1:00 PM

WASHINGTON — Current and former top U.S. officials on Sunday defended the government’s collection of phone and Internet data following new revelations about the secret surveillance programs, saying the operations were essential in disrupting terrorist plots and did not infringe on Americans’ civil liberties.

In interviews on Sunday television talk shows, guests ranging from President Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to former Vice President Dick Cheney and former CIA and National Security Agency head Michael Hayden said the government’s reliance on data collection from both Americans and foreign nationals was constitutional and carefully overseen by executive, legislative and court authorities.

All three branches of government, using “aggressive internal checks inside the administration, from inspectors general and routine audits, are overseeing how we do these programs,” McDonough said. He added, “I think that the American people can feel confident that we have those three branches looking.”

The latest reassurances came as a new Washington Post report Sunday described the massive intertwined structure of four major data collection programs that have been set up by the government since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Post report follows earlier stories based on documents provided by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Two secret programs, the Post reported in its new disclosures, are aimed at phone and Internet metadata, while two more target contents of phone and Internet communications.

Metadata includes logs and timing of phone calls and lists of Internet communications, but does not include the actual contents of communications. Even without knowing those contents, intelligence officials can learn much from metadata, including likely locations and patterns of behavior.

A previously reported surveillance program aimed at the phone logs and location information of millions of Americans is called Mainway, the Post reported. A second program targeting the Internet contact logs and location information of foreign users is called Marina.

A third program, which intercepts telephone calls and routes their contents to government listeners, is called Nucleon.

A fourth program, Prism, exposed recently by Snowden, forces major Internet firms to turn over the detailed contents of Internet communications. Prism is aimed at foreign users but sometimes also sweeps up the content of Americans’ emails and other Internet communications, officials have acknowledged.

“The metadata story does touch upon Americans in a massive way with phone records but not the content. The Prism story is about foreigners and it is about content,” Hayden told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, said that any phone metadata from Americans swept up in the surveillance is held under careful safeguards, kept in a “lockbox” that can only be accessed if it becomes relevant to terror investigations. U.S. officials also said Saturday that gathered data is destroyed every five years.

“This is a lock box with only phone numbers, no names, no addresses in it, we’ve used it sparingly,” Rogers said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

But one Congressional critic of the secrecy surrounding the government’s surveillance raised doubts about the effectiveness of the widespread collection of Americans’ phone metadata.

“I don’t think collecting millions and millions of Americans’ phone calls — now this is the metadata, this is the time, place, to whom you direct the calls — is making us any safer,” said Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat. Udall said he would introduce a bill this week to narrow the reach of that collection to only “those who have a link to terrorism.”

Hayden said he worried that news reports about the programs have often provided erroneous information, “much to the harm of a rational national debate.” He did not specify those concerns.

The disclosures, provided in recent days by both the Post and The Guardian newspaper, came from classified documents exposed by Snowden, 29, who was working as a private contractor with the NSA and later said he grew disenchanted by what he saw as a growing secret American surveillance apparatus. After working with the two newspapers, Snowden turned up in Hong Kong, prompting concern that he might cooperate with Chinese authorities.

“I am very, very worried that he still has additional information that he hasn’t released yet, the Chinese would welcome the opportunity and probably be willing to provide immunity for him or sanctuary for him, if you will, in exchange for what he presumably knows,” Cheney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Cheney added that he has “trouble believing” Snowden had access to all the materials he has disclosed, suggesting the possibility that Snowden had an accomplice inside U.S. security circles.

“I think you have to ask that question,” Cheney said.

McDonough, speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” declined to speculate on Snowden’s dealings with China or his access to secret documents, citing a law enforcement investigation. But he cautioned against “some of the hyperbole that now is being thrown around from him and from others involved in this debate that would somehow cast a pall on the intelligence community.”

But McDonough also disputed Snowden’s claim that he had the ability to listen in on any phone conversation, including the president’s.

“That’s incorrect,” McDonough said.

Uncle Sam wants to know more about your Facebook page

Facebook reveals number of requests under government Internet surveillance program

By Brandon Bailey

Mercury News

Posted: 06/14/2013 08:45:50 PM PDT

MENLO PARK -- For the first time, Facebook late Friday disclosed the number of requests it received for user data from all government entities, and became the first Silicon Valley company to include in that figure the number of ultrasecret national security requests.

In a blog post, Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot revealed that for the six months ending Dec. 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. -- including local, state, and federal authorities, and including criminal and national security-related requests -- was between 9,000 and 10,000.

run the gamut -- everything from a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat.

The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9,000 to 10,000 requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts, he noted.

But with more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, Ullyot added, "this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S., state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months."

Reports surfaced last week that government officials were collecting huge amounts of private Internet and telephone data -- disclosures enabled by leaks from a former National Security Agency contractor. Since then, Ullyot said, Facebook has been in discussions with U.S. national security authorities, urging them to allow more transparency and flexibility around national security-related orders the company is required to comply with.

Google (GOOG) followed up Tuesday by announcing it has asked the FBI and Department of Justice for permission to begin reporting how many data requests the company receives from the government under the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. FISA, the authority used by the government for its secret PRISM program aimed at tracking online activities of some Internet users, requires companies to keep those requests secret.

"We're pleased that as a result of our discussions, we can now include in a transparency report all U.S. national security-related requests (including FISA as well as National Security Letters) -- which until now no company has been permitted Facebook on Friday became the first Silicon Valley company to disclose how many requests for user data it has received under the U.S. government's ultrasecret foreign-intelligence surveillance laws. (Robert Galbraith / Reuters) to do," Ullyot wrote. As of Friday, he said, the government will only authorize Facebook to communicate about these numbers in aggregate, and as a range.

Ullyot called the initial step "progress," and said the company is continuing to push for even more transparency, "so that our users around the world can understand how infrequently we are asked to provide user data on national security grounds."

Civil liberties groups that have criticized the government's data-gathering efforts say that such disclosures are helpful, but they have also complained that the broad ranges that the companies have reported are too vague and do not provide a full picture of government surveillance.

Until now, Facebook has not disclosed any data about government information requests, saying it was not allowed to provide a complete picture of those requests because of government secrecy rules.

Google has previously disclosed certain types of requests, including so-called "National Security Letters" issued under the Patriot Act, but it has not been allowed to say anything about requests issued under FISA.

Facebook's move revealed a split within the tech industry: Microsoft issued a similar report Friday that also provided a total number of government data requests that included an unspecified number of FISA requests. But Google criticized that approach, saying it was not helpful for the government to require the companies to provide only a single total for all types of requests.

"We have always believed that it's important to differentiate between different types of government requests. We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters," Google said in a statement reported by several tech blogs. "Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately."

Another tech company, Twitter, echoed Google's concern. Twitter legal director Benjamin Lee posted a tweet on his personal account late Friday, saying "We agree with @google: It's important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests -- including FISA disclosures -- separately."

Mercury News Staff Writer Tracy Seipel contributed to this report. Contact Brandon Bailey at bbailey@bayareanewsgroup.com. Follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.

Facebook now can say more on U.S. user surveillance

Facebook now can say more on U.S. user surveillance

Associated Press Fri Jun 14, 2013 9:32 PM

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s top attorney said Friday night that after negotiations with national security officials the company has been given permission to make new but still very limited revelations about government orders to turn over user data.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s general counsel, said in a statement Friday that Facebook is only allowed to talk about total numbers and must give no specifics. But he said the permission it has received is still unprecedented, and the company was lobbying to reveal more.

Using the new guidelines, Ullyot said Facebook received between 9,000 and 10,000 government requests from all government entities from local to federal in the last six months of 2012, on topics including missing children investigations, fugitive tracking and terrorist threats. The requests involved the accounts of between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook users.

Facebook was not allowed to make public how many orders it received from a particular agency or on a particular subject. But the numbers do include all national security related requests including those submitted via national security letters and under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which companies had not previously been allowed to reveal.

Ullyot said the company wanted to reveal the information because of “confusion and inaccurate reporting” on the issue, and to show that only “a tiny fraction of one percent” of its 1.1 billion users have been affected.

In a rare alliance, Facebook, Google and Microsoft Corp. have been pressuring the Obama administration to loosen their legal gag on government surveillance orders.

The companies have sought to distance themselves from the Internet dragnet code-named “PRISM” that was revealed in leaks last week.

“We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a statement from Google said. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.”

Facebook repeated recent assurances that the company scrutinizes every government request, and works aggressively to protect users’ data. Facebook said it has a compliance rate of 79 percent on government requests.

“We frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested,” Ullyot said.” And we respond only as required by law.”

Previous articles on Medical Marijuana and the evil Drug War.

More articles on Medical Marijuana and the evil Drug War.