Joe Arpaio supporters pooh pooh judge’s ruling
This article make me think of one of Ben Franklin's quotes:They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.There are a whole bunch of slightly different versions of the quote on the internet.
Also I suspect if this were Nazi Germany instead of Arizona, the same folks that blindly support Sheriff Joe and is racist and illegal treatment of Mexicans and Latinos would be the nut jobs that blindly supported Hitler and his murdering of the Jews.
Joe Arpaio supporters pooh pooh judge’s ruling
A federal judge’s ruling that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office systematically violated the constitutional rights of Latinos was met with cheers from both the right and the left this week.
From Latino activists, who are urging the six-term sheriff to resign, and from Joe Arpaio’s supporters, who are urging him to carry on.
And from officials in the Republican Party, the one that talks about reaching out to Latinos?
Cue the crickets.
Last week’s ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow has had an immediate effect, with Arpaio calling a halt to his immigration patrols even as he vowed to appeal.
Sadly, though, it doesn’t appear to have changed any minds about what has been going on around here.
“It seems the so-called conservative label the judge espoused under Bush was just a “Snow job” as he seeks to appease those who can protect and feather his nest in the Obama administration,” wrote Gary, one of many Arpaio supporters who contacted me after my Wednesday column on Snow’s ruling. “He knows which side his bread is buttered on. Just like you.”
Gary, by the way, acknowledged that he hadn’t read the 142-page ruling.
But then he, like many others who called, e-mailed and posted to my Facebook page and azcentral.com blog, didn’t need to read what Snow wrote in order to dismiss it as the work of an activist judge doing the devious bidding of the open borders crowd.
Some blame Immigration and Customs Enforcement, noting the judge’s observation that ICE improperly trained deputies to believe that ethnicity or race could be a factor in immigration enforcement. They were silent, however, on Snow’s observations that MCSO’s trampling of the constitution went well beyond that ICE training.
Others simply disagreed with the underlying point in Snow’s ruling — that it’s not OK to pull people over because their skin is brown or to make them to make them wait on the side of the street longer than the rest of us.
“Joe is doing the ‘profiling’ the job requires,” wrote Richard of Goodyear, who asked that his last name not be used. “If the TSA did the same job – you & I wouldn’t have to endure strip searches at our airports when we know damn well what these terrorists look like!!”
While I can appreciate Richard’s frustration – certainly, it would be easier to combat illegal immigration if police could just stop every Latino and demand his or her papers – there is that inconvenient restraint called the U.S. Constitution.
So I asked Richard and several other Arpaio supporters this question: does the end justify the means? Is it OK to sideline the Constitution — the parts that shield us from unreasonable police actions and guarantee that the law protects us equally — in order to rid the country of people who are here illegally?
“Short answer? YES!” Richard replied. “When we have 11 million ‘gatecrashers’ here – to inconvenience a few Latinos with traffic stops/job checks/etc suits me just fine. Twice this year I’ve been inconvenienced/fondled/searched/slowed down/stressed out needlessly because a few Muslims think blowing up infidels like me is just fine. Our laws & tactics are not perfect but I’ll back Joe on this one.”
Fortunately, the judge and others in the community see the danger in sacrificing the constitution for convenience or expediency.
“When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, Justice Robert Jackson dissented, warning that upholding such an order on the basis of a perceived ‘emergency’ would give law-enforcement officials a dangerous weapon to violate the rights of citizens …,” said the Goldwater Institute’s Clint Bolick, who previously worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “When police stop Arabs or Hispanics—or members of any group—not because they have committed a crime but because of their race or ethnicity, it profoundly offends the rule of law.”
“This is eerily similar to what the Obama IRS did to conservative groups, singling them out for adverse treatment not because of wrongdoing but because the IRS concluded that conservative groups were more likely to abuse their non-profit tax status. Anyone who condemns that practice also should condemn the practice of stopping Hispanics because they are Hispanic.”
He’s right, of course. What IRS did to the tea parties – singling them out for special scrutiny because they are conservative — is wrong.
Just as what Arpaio did to Latinos – singling them out for special scrutiny because they are brown – is wrong.
Yet the silence is startling.
Mandatory DUI tests unconstitutional????
From this article it sounds like the Arizona Supreme Court has said that the Arizona law which makes it mandatory for people who are suspected of drunk driving to submit to a breath, urine, blood or other test is 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.
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
If the police can't tell if you are stoned or drunk without getting a blood test you are are almost certainly sober enough to drive.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.
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
SourceJudge: 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.
Supreme Court - Cops can take DNA samples from arrestees
When fingerprints first started being used by law enforcement to identify people civil libertarians, freedom fighters and legal experts said that allowing the police to take fingerprints from people and use the prints against them was a violation of the 5th Amendment because it forced people to testify against themselves.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.
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.
El dictamen contra Arpaio deberá tener repercusión
Source
El dictamen contra Arpaio deberá tener repercusión
por Eduardo Bernal - May. 31, 2013 10:53 AM La Voz
Luego de ocho meses de espera un juez federal dictaminó que, Joe Arpaio y la agencia policiaca que encabeza, incurrieron en prácticas de discriminación racial enfocada en la comunidad inmigrante, sentando un precedente legal en contra de esa agencia.
El juez federal Murray Snow dictaminó, el pasado viernes 24 de mayo, en conexión con una demanda entablada por la Unión Americana de Libertades Civiles (ACLU, por sus siglas en inglés) en nombre de diversos individuos, que Arpaio y sus agentes en los últimos años habrían realizado ilegalmente perfil racial en contra de latinos durante sus redadas.
La decisión revelada en un documento de 142 páginas respalda las acusaciones que la Oficina del Sheriff del Condado Maricopa (MCSO, por sus siglas en inglés) ha recibido durante años por parte de organizaciones que abogan por los derechos civiles.
El fallo llega después de más de 5 años desde que fue impuesta la demanda y ocho meses después que se realizo un juicio de 7 días en julio-agosto del 2012.
Expertos declaran que aunque este fallo no representa una victoria rotunda (los demandantes no buscaron retribución económica o cargos criminales en contra de Arpaio), sí sienta el precedente de que Arpaio ya no podría operar de la misma forma como hasta antes de la decisión del juez Snow.
Pese a que esta fue una demanda relativamente pequeña, en comparación a la colección que MCSO ya tiene en su haber, es significativa porque de acuerdo con Cecilia D. Wang, abogada de ACLU, Arpaio por mucho tiempo ha victimizado y discriminado a la gente que se supone debe servir y que este fallo reafirma que las practicas discriminatorias de MCSO al mando de Arpaio son una realidad.
No obstante, el que se haya dictaminado que Arpaio y su agencia incurrieron en prácticas discriminatorias, infringiendo leyes federales en cuanto a derechos civiles, no le costarán a Arpaio, ni su puesto ni cargos criminales.
Petra Falcón, de la organización Promise Arizona, menciona que este es un paso positivo porque hasta ahora no se había constatado en una corte federal que Arpaio es culpable de prácticas discriminatorias y que este es un mensaje para todos los servidores públicos que tengan una agenda discriminatoria.
Chad Snow, miembro de la organización Citizens for a Better Arizona, menciona que el fallo del juez es uno de los análisis más completos y detallados de las prácticas de MCSO.
"Arpaio siempre dice que 'la ley es la ley' y que los que la quiebran deben ser castigados. El fallo es bien claro y estipula que Arpaio violó la ley y la Constitución al discriminar y criminalizar a hispanos", declaró Snow en un comunicado.
¿Cuáles son las consecuencias?
"A simple vista las consecuencias no son visibles", comenta Valeria Fernández, periodista y directora de uno de los documentales que ilustran precisamente "la metodología Arpaio". "Este fallo lo único que hace es reafirmar todas las acusaciones que esa entidad policiaca ya ha venido experimentando desde hace años", añadió Fernández.
En sí la decisión del juez de declarar que Arpaio y su agencia discriminan a personas por su perfil racial, expone los problemas serios en lo que respecta a programas gubernamentales como Comunidades Seguras y 287(g) y el entrenamiento que se les otorga a policías.
Aunque no haya una consecuencia tangible a la colección de abusos que han sido generadas por la prácticas de MCSO, el fallo del juez emite un mensaje claro al movimiento antiinmigrante en todo el país, ya que desacredita a un sheriff que proyecta una imagen de alguien que hace cumplir las leyes, cuando es él quien las viola.
En los días siguientes a la decisión del juez Snow, quien es conservador y fue nombrado por George W. Bush, muchas organizaciones tanto locales como nacionales han pedido su inmediata renuncia.
Organizaciones comunitarias como Recall Arpaio, Citizens for a Better Arizona y Promise Arizona han mencionado que presionarán a miembros de la Mesa de Supervisores, para que estos pidan la renuncia de Arpaio.
Tim Casey, abogado de Arpaio, mencionó que ya se está preparando para una apelación en los próximos 30 días.
La demanda Melendres Vs. Arpaio, sometida por ACLU, incluye los casos de Manuel Ortega Melendres, detenido junto a otros durante una redada ejecutada por agentes de Arpaio en septiembre del 2007. Melendres tenía autorización para estar en el país y fue encarcelado por horas.
También incluye a Manuel Nieto y Velia Meraz, quienes fueron agredidos por agentes de MCSO durante otra redada realizada en marzo del 2008. Tanto Nieto como Meraz son ciudadanos estadounidenses.
Video of racist Mesa police beating up Black man????
In this video one cop seems to be punching and kicking the man a number of time while he is tackled and on the ground. According to the spokesperson from the Mesa Police Department in the following article this type of police beating is 100 percent acceptable under the Mesa Police policies.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.
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
SourceBeating 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.
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.
Cops are paid very well and have cushy jobs????
In this article Mesa Police officer Bill Richardson tries to sell us the myth the being a police officer is a very, very, very dangerous job.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.
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.
And of course it will probably take another 4 more years of lawsuits for the Feds to order him to stop.
Sadly there isn't much difference between how Sheriff Joe violates the rights of alleged criminals and that of most other police departments across America. The only real difference is that Sheriff Joe brags about his civil rights violations, while most other police departments pretend to honer the civil rights of people they abuse.
Kind of like that video tape of the Mesa police beating up a Black man last week. The spokesperson for the Mesa police said the beating conformed to the policies of the Mesa police and the Mesa cops did nothing wrong.
Arpaio nailed but not corralled
Those who believe that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has finally been nailed and corralled on the issue of racial profiling shouldn’t be so confident.
The decision by federal Judge G. Murray Snow certainly nailed Arpaio on the question of whether he unconstitutionally targeted Latinos with his immigration sweeps.
During these sweeps, Arpaio’s deputies targeted cars with Latino drivers and occupants to follow. The deputies claimed that virtually any car could be found in violation of some traffic law in a matter of minutes. When a car with Latino occupants was pulled over, all Latinos were questioned about their legal status. Arpaio’s position was that if a pretext were found for the initial stop, there was no racial profiling.
Simply put, Arpaio was targeting certain residents for special scrutiny because of their race. That’s a disgraceful violation of fundamental American principles and the U.S. Constitution.
The problem with Snow’s decision is in its attempt to corral Arpaio through injunctive relief.
According to Snow, illegal presence in the United States is a civil offense. And when the federal government stripped Arpaio’s office of its ability to act as federal immigration enforcement agents, Arpaio lost the right to take action regarding civil violations.
Snow explicitly enjoined Arpaio’s office from prolonging a traffic stop except to investigate other state or federal criminal law violations, which according to Snow doesn’t include illegal presence.
In the first place, the claim that illegal presence is just a civil offense is far from clear-cut. It is true that there is no federal crime for illegal presence. But it is a federal crime for foreign citizens to remain in this country without registering with the federal government. Illegal immigrants are obviously in violation of that criminal statute.
Perhaps more importantly, it’s hard to square Snow’s decision with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of the stop provisions of SB 1070. That Arizona law requires local law enforcement, in the course of a lawful stop for some other reason, to make a reasonable attempt “to determine the immigration status” of those reasonably suspected of being “unlawfully present in the United States.”
The court said this provision didn’t per se violate the U.S. Constitution. So, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, local law enforcement can seek, during a traffic stop, to determine “immigration status,” irrespective of whether it is a civil or a criminal matter.
While the court acknowledged that prolonging a stop solely to determine immigration status would raise a constitutional question, obviously following up on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence requires some expenditure of time. The court reserved the question of how long a stop could reasonably be prolonged and under what conditions.
So, Snow is saying that Arpaio can’t do what the U.S. Supreme Court has said not only that local law enforcement can do but that state law can require them to do.
Now, it’s important to point out that Arpaio’s sweeps also violated SB 1070. There is no evidence that Arpaio’s deputies established reasonable suspicion before trying to determine the immigration status of Latinos detained.
Snow’s remedy is vulnerable on appeal. If he seeks to impose a court monitor, as the decision hints he’s inclined, the decision becomes more vulnerable. The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear its dislike of federal courts micromanaging the day-to-day operations of local governments.
There’s a non-judicial remedy that would be, in some respects, more satisfying. That Arpaio unconstitutionally violated the rights of Latino residents during his immigration sweeps is now unarguable. That should offend the conscience of the entire body politic.
An appropriate expression of condemnation would be a resolution by the Board of Supervisors forbidding any county money from being expended on such sweeps in the future. Arpaio might sue, saying that the board doesn’t have the authority to tell him how to spend his budget.
But it’s hard to imagine more favorable, or appropriate, circumstances for the board to attempt to expand its powers of the purse.
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.
So why are the cops suing if they are not required to buy clothing with the uniform allowance??? I suspect they are greedy b*stards and want to shake the taxpayers of Phoenix down for every cent they can get out of our wallets.
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]
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.
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:
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
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!!!!
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
In this editorial George Will says about 50 percent of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes.
I recently posted another article from Barrons that said about 8 percent of the people in American prisons are there for victimless marijuana drug war crimes.
I usually say about two thirds or 66 percent of the people in Federal prisons are there for victimless drug war crimes. I think I got that figure from Reason Magazine.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.”
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.
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.
The free version of PGP
More free PGP software
http://www.symantec.com/encryption
The commercial version of PGP
http://cryptography.org/getpgp.htm
Where to get PGP
http://philzimmermann.com/EN/findpgp/
Don't count on it. It's about politics, not good government or human rights.
Sure Sheriff Joe is a thug that would make Hitler or Stalin proud, but despite that he is THE most popular politician in Arizona and it is highly unlikely that the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors will shut off his funding for that reason.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeal funding questioned
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Jun 8, 2013 8:35 PM
Dozens of Latino legislators and anti-Sheriff Joe Arpaio demonstrators are calling on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors to pick a side in a public ultimatum: Deny funding the sheriff’s appeal of a federal judge’s ruling that his office engaged in racial profiling, or concede that the supervisors condone racial profiling.
But the board refused to take a public stance on the issue last week, with the majority of supervisors saying the issue is not so black-and-white, and there are outstanding questions over legalities and logistics of the appeals process.
U.S. District Judge Murray Snow issued a ruling late last month that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in racial profiling against Latinos. In his 142-page ruling on Melendres vs. Arpaio, Snow outlined the constitutional violations sheriff’s deputies committed when they targeted Latino drivers and detained them on the side of the road longer than other drivers. Arpaio’s attorney, Tim Casey, denied Snow’s findings and said he would appeal the ruling.
Casey said the sheriff should determine how the case moves forward as the elected official named in the lawsuit.
“It is my understanding that, because this case does not involve a claim for money damages and only involves a claim for declaratory and injunctive relief that relate to the operations of MCSO, that the elected sheriff as policymaker for MCSO and its operations determines whether to appeal,” Casey said.
Maricopa County was named in the 2007 lawsuit, but administrators made the decision in 2009 to sever the county from the case. State statutes dictating the powers and duties of elected officers give the Board of Supervisors the authority to “direct and control the prosecution and defense of all actions to which the county is a party.”
The decision to remove the county from the litigation also could remove the board’s authority to have a say in the litigation, according to one reading of the statute, but there is not widespread agreement.
The board last Monday held a closed-door meeting on the ruling with Casey and Deputy County Attorney Tom Liddy. It was the first of what is expected to be a series of private board meetings on the issue. State law allows public bodies to meet behind closed doors in limited circumstances, such as to obtain legal advice by invoking attorney-client privilege.
County Attorney Bill Montgomery is reviewing whether, or how much, the board has a say in a potential appeals process.
The newly elected supervisors have wanted to resolve outstanding legal cases involving conflict among elected offices from recent years of political fights. In the past five months, the board settled three long-standing lawsuits involving the Sheriff’s Office and former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, agreeing to pay $3 million in an effort to move past lingering legal conflicts.
The Melendres case is the first major legal case that would test the new supervisors’ political leadership and how they would shape the course of a high-profile case that has brought national attention to county leaders.
A group of 33 Latino legislators from the House and the Senate wrote a letter urging the board not to fund the appeal of Snow’s ruling and to instead implement a remediation plan. The legislators proposed their own remediation plan for the board to consider.
To date, Maricopa County has spent $1,025,241 to defend Arpaio in the Melendres case.
The board is not a party to the lawsuit, so it is unclear how much of a say it has on whether to appeal. But the board oversees the budget and typically makes the final funding decisions for settlements and appeals in lawsuits against the county and elected officials.
“As such, you play an important role in mending the rift in this county that was caused by the illegal racial profiling by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office,” legislators wrote in the joint letter.
About two dozen Arpaio protesters descended on last week’s board meetings, calling on supervisors to pick a side: Latinos or the sheriff. At times, the protesters’ demands became heated, leading board Chairman Andy Kunasek to forcefully ask them to maintain a civil discussion.
Kunasek said while he is not happy about paying for lawsuits the board was not named in, it is too early in the process to say whether he would support an appeal, and the board has not yet explored its options.
“(They’re) still ongoing matters, and the time for consideration isn’t even here yet,” Kunasek said.
While the sheriff has rights as an independently elected county official, Kunasek said the board would need, and want, to have a say in some part of the decision to appeal Snow’s ruling. Supervisors would need to review which, if any, parts of Snow’s ruling they are comfortable with appealing, he said.
Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, an Arpaio critic and the lone Democrat on the five-member board, opposed an appeal. She said the county would be better off spending the money on implementing remedies and monitoring the Sheriff’s Office. After reading the ruling, Wilcox said she believed there is no room to appeal.
“I really think we should move on. I think it would be a waste of taxpayer money to continue this battle,” Wilcox said. “An appeal, in my eyes, is that we support the racial profiling practices that went on.”
Wilcox said even if Arpaio were to appeal, she believes the board should deny funding and let Arpaio figure out an alternative way to pay for it that would not affect his budget.
Supervisors Denny Barney and Clint Hickman said it is too early to decide whether to appeal. Supervisor Steve Chucri declined to comment, saying that he believes he should reserve his thoughts for the board’s private meetings with attorneys for now and that the case can have implications on other pending litigation.
Hickman said he considers it the board’s job to ask questions of attorneys and find out its role in the appeals process.
“I do know that it’s up to the sheriff’s department to decide to appeal or not,” Hickman said. “They’re the ones that were involved in this lawsuit, but then we need to see what the further aspects of that are.”
Barney said he does not believe paying for an appeal would mean the board is wasting taxpayer money. Rather, the board would agree on and fund an appeal if it believes there are points in Snow’s ruling that need to be addressed so that county leaders can better understand legal constraints on future operations of the Sheriff’s and County Attorney’s offices within their mandated public-safety duties.
“The reality is, the only reason we would fund the appeal is if we felt like there was an actual point of law that needs to be addressed, if there’s an issue that relates to the police power of a municipality or a jurisdiction like the county — a subdivision of the state,” Barney said. “We’re going to spend money to do that.”
Republic reporter JJ Hensley contributed to this article.
MCSO suspends patrols for illegal immigrants
By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Thu Jun 13, 2013 11:09 PM
A federal court ruling that found that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office engaged in racial-profiling has managed to do what Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s critics have sought to do for years.
The agency no longer patrols the county looking for undocumented immigrants, and Arpaio’s work-site enforcement raids have come to an end — at least for now.
A hearing scheduled in U.S. District Court today will help determine exactly how Arpaio’s agency trains its deputies and enforces laws in the future.
But, for now, the ruling has forced the Sheriff’s Office to not only alter its approach to immigration enforcement but also change the way the agency describes its work. For the past three weeks, deputies who encountered undocumented immigrants have rescued the border crossers as part of a humanitarian effort instead of arresting them on illegal-immigration charges.
“I’m in a Catch-22 here,” Arpaio said. “I would have to lean toward saving the lives of the people here illegally in the desert. I can’t call ICE anymore.”
The ruling prohibits deputies from calling federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents if they encounter a suspected undocumented immigrant who has not violated a state law. Arpaio said that ruling leaves deputies with few options when they encounter immigrants who indicate they have recently crossed the border without authorization.
Many saw the lengthy and detailed opinion that Judge Murray Snow issued on May 24 as a thorough rebuke of the sheriff’s immigration-enforcement tactics, which were based in part on the notion that local police have the inherent authority to enforce federal immigration law.
Snow gave each side in the long-running civil-rights case six distinct areas to consider before this morning’s hearing, with many of Snow’s questions focused on areas of education and training, data collection and record retention.
The Sheriff’s Office generally agrees with the need for increased training and education, said the agency’s attorney, Tim Casey, and to having policies dedicated to addressing racial-profiling.
The challenge could be on who conducts that training and education and who gets to approve the sheriff’s policies before they are enacted.
But it is the person who will be appointed to oversee implementation of whatever remedies Snow orders who will likely cause the biggest rift between Arpaio’s camp and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, who represent the plaintiffs.
Casey said the Sheriff’s Office will oppose a court-appointed monitor because anyone with oversight of Arpaio would compromise the sheriff’s constitutional powers.
“We have to protect the constitutional rights of the people, and we have to protect the constitutional establishment of the state office,” Casey said.
And to the ACLU, a monitor is absolutely necessary to improve the public’s confidence that the agency will fully address the problems Snow identified.
Arpaio on Thursday afternoon downplayed the effect Snow’s ruling has had on sheriff’s operations, stating repeatedly that the agency is still in the business of enforcing state laws, even if deputies no longer have the authority to contact ICE agents.
But hours earlier, a scene played out in a remote area between Casa Grande and Gila Bend that might surprise longtime observers of the sheriff’s immigration-enforcement efforts.
Deputies were trying to intercept drug loads in the well-known smuggling corridor when they spotted a Hispanic man walking alongside Interstate 8 at about 5 a.m. and immediately responded to the area. Ivan Ibarra Garcia, 26, told deputies he had been walking through the desert for six days with six other men.
When deputies lifted Ibarra Garcia’s shirt, they noticed red marks on his back that they said were similar to what investigators see when people have been hiking through the desert bearing loads of pot. Smugglers frequently have couriers backpack the loads through the desert and drop them near highways, where waiting vehicles quickly pick up the drugs.
But Ibarra Garcia had no drugs, only a cellphone,, three forms of ID and the clothes on his back.
With no evidence that Ibarra Garcia had violated a state law, the deputies did not detain him. Instead, they presented him with a choice: walk back into the desert with all the water he could carry or get a ride to Gila Bend where he could discuss his immigration status with a Border Patrol agent.
Ibarra Garcia chose the ride to Gila Bend where he waited outside a sheriff’s substation until a Border Patrol agent met him and took the Mexicali resident into custody.
“It’s more of a welfare check right now,” said Deputy Brandon Uptain, who led the squad Thursday morning’s patrol. “I don’t want to send him back into the desert because I don’t want him to die.”
Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan said that approach is no different from the one that deputies took before the Snow ruling.
But if Border Patrol agents were not in a position to respond quickly, or Ibarra Garcia chose not to get a ride back to Gila Bend, he would have walked away because of Snow’s prohibition on contacting ICE.
“The judge is not permitting us to do that any longer, which is in conflict with how every other law-enforcement agency in the state is doing business,” Sheridan said.
The plaintiff’s attorneys will argue that the Sheriff’s Office lost that authority when it began to target Hispanic residents with its immigration-enforcement efforts and ended with a string of constitutional violations.
But Arpaio said he hopes for some clarity from Snow this afternoon on how the Sheriff’s Office can enforce state statutes used to target undocumented immigrants in Arizona, identity theft and human-smuggling laws.
Snow could provide that direction, but it will likely come through negotiations between the two sides and the approval of a court-appointed monitor.
Arpaio publicly resists the idea of a monitor, but the Sheriff’s Office in the past has endured court-ordered oversight to ensure compliance with a judge’s ruling.
When U.S. District Judge Neil Wake ruled in 2008 that the county’s jails continued to fall below minimum standards, the judge took a lead role in ensuring compliance with his orders. Wake also forced the Sheriff’s Office to pay for experts to help with the oversight, including a dietician who could guarantee that inmates’ meals fell within U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines.
“I think that’s a very instructive type of example in how you reconcile federal court-ruling implementation with the constitutional and statutory authorities of the county sheriff,” Casey said.
The presence of a court-appointed monitor could also begin to resolve the sheriff’s ongoing dispute with the U.S. Justice Department which filed a lawsuit against Arpaio in May 2012, after federal investigators uncovered practices they considered egregious examples of racial-profiling. The Justice Department sued the Sheriff’s Office after Arpaio broke off negotiations to correct the investigators’ findings due to the federal government’s insistence on the presence of a monitor.
Cecillia Wang, an attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the monitor was critical.
“The trial record shows that strong remedies are needed to ensure that MCSO stops violating people’s rights, and that would include an impartial monitor and reforms throughout the agency,” she said.
Wang said the community should also play a significant role in finding solutions to the problems Snow identified.
“It’s thanks to the community that these constitutional violations came to light, and it’s thanks to the community that we’ve got the results that we have,” Wang said. “They’re entitled to play a very active role in how we go forward.”
Arpaio asegura que es víctima de discriminación por su edad
El alguacil del condado de Maricopa, Joe Arpaio, dijo ser víctima de discriminación debido a su edad, ya que asegura mucha gente se cuestiona si todavía está capacitado para hacer su trabajo.
En entrevista con la cadena de televisión Fox en Arizona, Arpaio, quien la próxima semana cumplirá 81 años, dijo que se postulará nuevamente al cargo en 2016.
"Me molesta mucho que haya mucha gente que utilice mi edad como último recurso para atacarme", dijo el polémico alguacil republicano, conocido por sus operativos en contra de inmigrantes indocumentados.
Aseguró que es un "insulto" para todas las personas de edad avanzada que critiquen y hagan burla de la edad de una persona.
"Les aseguro que no me 'caeré muerto' en mi oficina, eso no pasará", dijo Arpaio.
Aseguró que así como ha sido un fuerte opositor de la inmigración indocumentada ahora luchará por aquellos que son discriminados por su edad.
"Tengo que decirles que si tengo éxito no es por todos mis estudios es porque tengo la experiencia, y la edad no me detendrá para hacer mi trabajo", afirmó el alguacil.
Arpaio, que tiene más de dos décadas como alguacil del condado de Maricopa, fue reelegido el pasado mes de noviembre por sexta vez consecutiva.
A pesar de su éxito electoral, Arpaio ha sufrido reveses por su actuación al frente de la Oficina del Alguacil del condado de Maricopa, y el pasado mes de mayo un juez federal determinó que ha discriminado en contra de residentes hispanos.
El alguacil enfrenta además una demanda por parte del Departamento de Justicia federal por acusaciones similares.
El alguacil del condado de Maricopa, Joe Arpaio, dijo ser víctima de discriminación debido a su edad.
El alguacil del condado de Maricopa, Joe Arpaio, dijo ser víctima de discriminación debido a su edad, ya que asegura mucha gente se cuestiona si todavía está capacitado para hacer su trabajo.
En entrevista con la cadena de televisión Fox en Arizona, Arpaio, quien la próxima semana cumplirá 81 años, dijo que se postulará nuevamente al cargo en 2016.
"Me molesta mucho que haya mucha gente que utilice mi edad como último recurso para atacarme", dijo el polémico alguacil republicano, conocido por sus operativos en contra de inmigrantes indocumentados.
Aseguró que es un "insulto" para todas las personas de edad avanzada que critiquen y hagan burla de la edad de una persona.
"Les aseguro que no me 'caeré muerto' en mi oficina, eso no pasará", dijo Arpaio.
Aseguró que así como ha sido un fuerte opositor de la inmigración indocumentada ahora luchará por aquellos que son discriminados por su edad.
"Tengo que decirles que si tengo éxito no es por todos mis estudios es porque tengo la experiencia, y la edad no me detendrá para hacer mi trabajo", afirmó el alguacil.
Arpaio, que tiene más de dos décadas como alguacil del condado de Maricopa, fue reelegido el pasado mes de noviembre por sexta vez consecutiva.
A pesar de su éxito electoral, Arpaio ha sufrido reveses por su actuación al frente de la Oficina del Alguacil del condado de Maricopa, y el pasado mes de mayo un juez federal determinó que ha discriminado en contra de residentes hispanos.
El alguacil enfrenta además una demanda por parte del Departamento de Justicia federal por acusaciones similares.
In fact one of the first cases on which involved a sawed off shotgun (which is subjected to the same laws a machine guns) was United States v. Miller ruled that the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) was unconstitutional at in the lower court.
That case was appealed directly to the Supreme Court by the Federal government. That was allowed in those days.
Oddly nobody showed up to represent Miller in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court reversed the decision because only the Federal government was represented in the case and the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) was constitutional.
2 sent to prison for creation, sale of machine guns
By Lindsey Collom The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Jun 26, 2013 10:33 PM
Two licensed gun dealers have been imprisoned for their roles in an illegal machine-gun manufacturing and sales operation that went undetected by authorities for nearly 15 years.
A U.S. District Court judge in Phoenix recently sentenced Randolph Benjamin Rodman, 60, of Maryland, and Idan C. Greenberg, 59, of Glendale, to prison terms of 121 months, or nearly a decade, and 33 months, or nearly three years, respectively, in connection with the bicoastal enterprise.
Authorities said Rodman, Greenberg and four other licensed dealers — three in Arizona and one in Maryland — conspired to make newly manufactured machine guns in violation of a 1986 ban and transferred them using paperwork for different firearms.
More than 30 such weapons were accounted for by agents with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, court records show.
Federal law defines a machine gun as any weapon that automatically shoots more than one bullet with a single trigger pull. In 1986, Congress banned the possession and transfer of all machine guns except for those legally owned before May 19, 1986, (meaning the firearms are federally registered) and machine guns possessed or manufactured for governmental entities.
Once the ban was implemented, the price of legally available machine guns, which stands at about 196,000 firearms, skyrocketed. Alan Korwin, a Scottsdale-based gun-law expert, said they can easily fetch $15,000 to $20,000 apiece in today’s market.
“They’re coveted by enthusiasts,” Korwin said. “You might find one for $10,000 that is in poor condition.”
George Clark, a defendant-turned-federal witness from the Kingman area, testified in November that he used a hacksaw to harvest serial numbers from less desirable, federally registered machine guns. Clark, a licensed gun maker, said he then welded the numbers onto new, custom-made, fully automatic weapons made at the request of other licensed dealers or for himself.
Clark’s advertisement for a MAC-style machine gun on subguns.com first piqued the ATF’s interest in October 2006, according to a search warrant. “MAC” stands for Military Armament Corp. The description of the MAC-style gun didn’t match what was actually being sold: a Model 1919 .30-caliber machine gun, a belt-fed firearm popular for infantry use during the 20th century.
Clark told agents he had been doing similar work since 1993, when he made his first M1919 using another serial number for a retired veteran who wanted the gun for sentimental reasons but couldn’t afford any on the market. Clark testified to having made similar guns for other licensed dealers, including Rodman and Greenberg, all of whom he claimed were in on the scheme.
Anyone who wants to own or transfer a registered machine gun must apply for a tax stamp, pay the tax and get ATF approval for the transfer or possession.
In addition to creating the new machine guns, authorities said, Clark and others failed to properly register the firearms with the ATF, instead passing them off as the originals.
Greenberg’s attorney did not return a call for comment. According to a court transcript of Greenberg’s testimony in August 2012, he has held a federal firearms license since 1980 and, in 1985, became a licensed dealer of weapons regulated by the National Firearms Act, which includes machine guns and short-barreled rifles and shotguns.
He ran his business, Firearms Adviser, from an address at 1001 S. Fifth St. in Phoenix, according to AFT licensing records. Greenberg’s attorney told the court that his client also trained members of the Israeli military and conducts firearms workshops for law enforcement.
A federal jury in December found Greenberg guilty of conspiracy, illegal possession of a machine gun, and receipt and possession of a firearm made in violation of the National Firearms Act.
The same jury convicted Rodman of 22 charges, including conspiracy; the manufacturing, possession, receipt and transfer of machine guns in violation of the act; and making false entries on applications and records.
Remember all the times we have been told that despite being a government entity the US Postal Service is run like a private business.
That is a big lie. In this article it certainly sounds like the the US Postal Service is a government entity that is helping the FBI, NSA, Homeland Security, CIA, DEA, BATF and other alphabet of police agencies spy on the American public.
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
By RON NIXON
Published: July 3, 2013
WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: A handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.
“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.
“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr. Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.
As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, but that is only a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two programs show that snail mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.
The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Actually opening the mail requires a warrant.) The information is sent to whatever law enforcement agency asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
The Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program was created after the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers. Highly secret, it seeped into public view last month when the F.B.I. cited it in its investigation of ricin-laced letters sent to President Obama and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. It enables the Postal Service to retroactively track mail correspondence at the request of law enforcement. No one disputes that it is sweeping.
“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, the former director of the Justice Department’s computer crime unit, who worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.”
Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.
“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he said.
But law enforcement officials said mail covers and the automatic mail tracking program are invaluable, even in an era of smartphones and e-mail.
In a criminal complaint filed June 7 in Federal District Court in Eastern Texas, the F.B.I. said a postal investigator tracing the ricin letters was able to narrow the search to Shannon Guess Richardson, an actress in New Boston, Tex., by examining information from the front and back images of 60 pieces of mail scanned immediately before and after the tainted letters sent to Mr. Obama and Mr. Bloomberg showing return addresses near her home. Ms. Richardson had originally accused her husband of mailing the letters, but investigators determined that he was at work during the time they were mailed.
In 2007, the F.B.I., the Internal Revenue Service and the local police in Charlotte, N.C., used information gleaned from the mail cover program to arrest Sallie Wamsley-Saxon and her husband, Donald, charging both with running a prostitution ring that took in $3 million over six years. Prosecutors said it was one of the largest and most successful such operations in the country. Investigators also used mail covers to help track banking activity and other businesses the couple operated under different names.
Other agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, have used mail covers to track drug smugglers and Medicare fraud.
“It’s a treasure trove of information,” said James J. Wedick, a former F.B.I. agent who spent 34 years at the agency and who said he used mail covers in a number of investigations, including one that led to the prosecution of several elected officials in California on corruption charges. “Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”
But, he said: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”
For mail cover requests, law enforcement agencies simply submit a letter to the Postal Service, which can grant or deny a request without judicial review. Law enforcement officials say the Postal Service rarely denies a request. In other government surveillance program, such as wiretaps, a federal judge must sign off on the requests.
The mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days. There are two kinds of mail covers: those related to criminal activity and those requested to protect national security. The criminal activity requests average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, said law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the requests. The number of requests for antiterrorism mail covers has not been made public.
Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases.
Court challenges to mail covers have generally failed because judges have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for information contained on the outside of a letter. Officials in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in fact, have used the mail-cover court rulings to justify the N.S.A.’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as a mail cover. Congress briefly conducted hearings on mail cover programs in 1976, but has not revisited the issue.
The program has led to sporadic reports of abuse. In May 2012, Mary Rose Wilcox, a Maricopa County supervisor, was awarded nearly $1 million by a federal judge after winning a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, known for his immigration raids in Arizona, who, among other things, obtained mail covers from the Postal Service to track her mail. The judge called the investigation into Ms. Wilcox politically motivated because she had been a frequent critic of Mr. Arpaio, objecting to what she considered the targeting of Hispanics in his immigration sweeps. The case is being appealed.
In the mid-1970s the Church Committee, a Senate panel that documented C.I.A. abuses, faulted a program created in the 1950s in New York that used mail covers to trace and sometimes open mail going to the Soviet Union from the United States.
A suit brought in 1973 by a high school student in New Jersey, whose letter to the Socialist Workers Party was traced by the F.B.I. as part of an investigation into the group, led to a rebuke from a federal judge.
Postal officials refused to discuss either mail covers or the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program.
Mr. Pickering says he suspects that the F.B.I. requested the mail cover to monitor his mail because a former associate said the bureau had called with questions about him. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the Postal Service, the F.B.I. and other agencies, saying they were improperly withholding information.
A spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Buffalo declined to comment.
Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out. He said he became tired of focusing only on environmental activism and moved back to Buffalo to finish college, open his bookstore, Burning Books, and start a family.
“I’m no terrorist,” he said. “I’m an activist.”
Mr. Pickering has written books sympathetic to the liberation front, but he said his political views and past association should not make him the target of a federal investigation. “I’m just a guy who runs a bookstore and has a wife and a kid,” he said.
When you create a web page and you want to keep the information private from the world you can put a tag like this in the HTML
I suspect when Google's robots gather information for the local police, FBI, Homeland Security, TSA, DEA, BATF and other alphabet soup of Federal police forces that the robots ignore the meta tag.
Or perhaps they do honor the meta tag for the information they allow the general public to search for, but give ALL the information to the American police state.
Also I have also wondered if Google's robots index and catalog the comments put on their web pages. Browsers don't display the comments in web pages but are used to document the web pages by programmers and web masters.
I suspect Google's robots index and catalog the comments in web pages and give them to Uncle Sam's spies at the NSA and other Federal agencies.
Last I suspect that NSA or other Federal agencies now has their own robots that routinely scan the internet like Google's robots do.
I know on several of my web pages I get a daily visit or two from several IP addresses in Shady Side, Maryland (76.114.149.166 and 76.114.145.234) which I suspect is a government agency spying on me. Also I get visits from several other IP address, on a less frequent basis which I also suspect are police agencies spying on me. Maybe that Shady Grove, Maryland. I always get the names mixed up.
You can put a sign on your yard and home that says
I wonder if you could put a sign like that you your web pages that said something like
Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders
By JAMES RISEN and NICK WINGFIELD
Published: June 19, 2013
WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.
Spy agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Max Kelly.
Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.
The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.
The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret N.S.A. court orders for specific data.
Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. and the rise of data mining — both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool — have created a more complex reality.
Silicon Valley has what the spy agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyze it. The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly.
“We are all in these Big Data business models,” said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco. “There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests.”
Although Silicon Valley has sold equipment to the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies for a generation, the interests of the two began to converge in new ways in the last few years as advances in computer storage technology drastically reduced the costs of storing enormous amounts of data — at the same time that the value of the data for use in consumer marketing began to rise. “These worlds overlap,” said Philipp S. Krüger, chief executive of Explorist, an Internet start-up in New York.
The sums the N.S.A. spends in Silicon Valley are classified, as is the agency’s total budget, which independent analysts say is $8 billion to $10 billion a year.
Despite the companies’ assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the N.S.A. and to make their customers’ information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure from the N.S.A. to make access easier.
Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.
Project Chess, which has never been previously disclosed, was small, limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The project began about five years ago, before most of the company was sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October 2011.
A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.
Microsoft executives are no longer willing to affirm statements, made by Skype several years ago, that Skype calls could not be wiretapped. Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment.
In its recruiting in Silicon Valley, the N.S.A. sends some of its most senior officials to lure the best of the best. No less than Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the agency’s director and the chief of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, showed up at one of the world’s largest hacker conferences in Las Vegas last summer, looking stiff in an uncharacteristic T-shirt and jeans, to give the keynote speech. His main purpose at Defcon, the conference, was to recruit hackers for his spy agency.
N.S.A. badges are often seen on the lapels of officials at other technology and information security conferences. “They’re very open about their interest in recruiting from the hacker community,” said Jennifer Granick, the director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society.
But perhaps no one embodies the tightening relationship between the N.S.A. and the valley more than Kenneth A. Minihan.
A career Air Force intelligence officer, Mr. Minihan was the director of the N.S.A. during the Clinton administration until his retirement in the late 1990s, and then he ran the agency’s outside professional networking organization. Today he is managing director of Paladin Capital Group, a venture capital firm based in Washington that in part specializes in financing start-ups that offer high-tech solutions for the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies. In effect, Mr. Minihan is an advanced scout for the N.S.A. as it tries to capitalize on the latest technology to analyze and exploit the vast amounts of data flowing around the world and inside the United States.
The members of Paladin’s strategic advisory board include Richard C. Schaeffer Jr., a former N.S.A. executive. While Paladin is a private firm, the American intelligence community has its own in-house venture capital company, In-Q-Tel, financed by the Central Intelligence Agency to invest in high-tech start-ups.
Many software technology firms involved in data analytics are open about their connections to intelligence agencies. Gary King, a co-founder and chief scientist at Crimson Hexagon, a start-up in Boston, said in an interview that he had given talks at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., about his company’s social media analytics tools.
The future holds the prospect of ever greater cooperation between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. because data storage is expected to increase at an annual compound rate of 53 percent through 2016, according to the International Data Corporation.
“We reached a tipping point, where the value of having user data rose beyond the cost of storing it,” said Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy group in San Francisco. “Now we have an incentive to keep it forever.”
Social media sites in the meantime are growing as voluntary data mining operations on a scale that rivals or exceeds anything the government could attempt on its own. “You willingly hand over data to Facebook that you would never give voluntarily to the government,” said Bruce Schneier, a technologist and an author.
James Risen reported from Washington, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle. Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
Arpaio attorneys plan to appeal racial-profiling ruling
By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jun 21, 2013 10:17 PM
Attorneys for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio have filed a notice to appeal last month’s federal court ruling that determined the agency engaged in widespread racial profiling through its immigration-enforcement efforts.
The notice is a procedural step that ensures Arpaio will have the opportunity to file an appeal, said Jack MacIntyre, a deputy chief with the Sheriff’s Office.
Some politicians and critics of the Sheriff’s Office have asked Maricopa County administrators to deny funding for the appeal of U.S. District Judge Murray Snow’s May ruling.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has researched whether county administrators or elected officials have the authority to deny Arpaio’s desire to appeal the landmark court ruling, but it appeared that issue had not been resolved as of Friday afternoon, MacIntyre said.
The county has traditionally allowed appeals on rulings like Snow’s with the potential for complex solutions, such as data-collection and -reporting systems, that can come with a significant cost, MacIntyre said.
The Sheriff’s Office signaled that it wants the circuit court, widely considered the most liberal in the country, to consider whether Snow erred when he prohibited deputies from detaining suspected undocumented immigrants while they contact federal officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and whether Snow was wrong when he barred sheriff’s deputies from detaining people suspected of violating the state laws that target illegal immigration.
The notice also indicates that Arpaio’s attorneys want the circuit court to consider whether deputies violated constitutional provisions that ensure equal protection and prohibit unwarranted searches and seizures during traffic stops related to immigration enforcement.
Snow issued a detailed ruling in late May that found sheriff’s deputies discriminated against Latino drivers during the agency’s immigration-enforcement efforts, particularly the large-scale “saturation patrols” the Sheriff’s Office conducted in the Valley from 2007 through 2010.
The lawsuit that brought the matter before Snow was filed by Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a Mexican day laborer who was in the country with a tourist visa when he was detained for more than nine hours following a 2007 traffic stop in Cave Creek.
The suit was later expanded to a class-action lawsuit that included every Latino driver sheriff’s deputies have stopped since 2007.
Critics of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement had long claimed the agency engaged in racial profiling and were vindicated by Snow’s ruling. Many of those same critics pressured the County Board of Supervisors to refuse funding for an appeal.
Supervisors, aside from Mary Rose Wilcox, refused to take a public stance on the issue, with the majority saying there were outstanding questions over legalities and logistics of the appeals process.
While we are on that subject, isn't that what government is all about POWER and MONEY. And of course that is why the Arizona legislator recently just passed laws making it almost impossible for the Libertarian Party to run candidates for office.
Posted on June 21, 2013 4:06 pm by EJ Montini
Arpaio fears loss of power, not money
It’s not the loss of a lawsuit that Sheriff Joe Arpaio is worried about.
It’s the loss of power.
The sheriff’s office has lost plenty of lawsuits.
Those lawsuits have resulted in millions and millions of dollars in settlements.
That has never bothered Arpaio.
The Sheriff’s Office said it will challenge the May ruling U.S. District Judge Murray Snow that said sheriff’s deputies had engaged in widespread racial profiling during immigration-enforcement patrols.
There was no money award.
Instead, it’s possible that Judge Snow will appoint an independent monitor to oversee what he believes to be the necessary policy changes in the department.
In other words, putting a person in place who can tell Arpaio’s people how to operate.
To Arpaio, that’s simply unacceptable.
No matter how much it costs.
Taxpayers already have paid over $1 million to defend the sheriff’s office in this case.
Who knows how much it will cost us before it’s all over.
None of that matters to the sheriff.
Why should it?
It’s not his money.
What does matter to him is … control.
Authority.
Power.
Go all the way back to 1999, when the county settled a lawsuit brought by the family of a man named Scott Norberg, who died in a restraint chair in Arpaio’s jail. The Norberg family was awarded $8.25 million.
Instead of anger, Arpaio acted positively triumphant.
His office issued a statement that tells you all you need to know about his priorities. After all, a man who had been convicted of no crime was dead. He left behind two young children. The monetary settlement was a whopping $8.25 million.
And the sheriff believed that he won.
How?
Well, his statement reads in part:
“I am relieved that this tentative agreement contains no admissions of fault or liability on behalf of our officers.”
Remember Kyrsten Sinema
is the Arizona Senator who introduced a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana.
Kyrsten Sinema
is now a US Congresswoman.
I guess the title of this article should have been "Vote for me and I will give you free stuff"
Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema
The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Jul 5, 2013 6:27 PM
The first-term congresswoman reflects on her first six months in Washington.
After six months in Congress, what’s the No. 1 thing you’ve learned about the place?
I’ve learned I can still get a lot done for Congressional District 9 even though leaders in Congress aren’t accomplishing much.
[I suspect
Kyrsten Sinema
means that she has accomplished tons of stuff while her fellow slackers have accomplished nothing. Of course if you ask me I would have said none of them have accomplished anything - well other then robbing us blind and micro-managing our lives]
In our district office, social workers help constituents solve problems every day. In our D.C. office, we help businesses access federal agencies, support local groups seeking federal grant funding, and advocate for the issues important to CD9 residents and businesses.
[Translation - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]
What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?
I’ve always believed that relationships are key to solving problems.
In the Legislature, my relationships with Republicans and Democrats alike helped me serve my constituents well. In Congress, I’m working to build bipartisan relationships as well, though it’ll take a bit longer to make friends with all 537 of my colleagues!
[Kyrsten,
you didn't answer the question. It was "What’s the biggest difference between the Legislature and Congress?" - But I guess the main purpose of this article is to tell the voters that if they vote for you, you will give them free stuff, so who cares if you answer the question]
What’s the biggest frustration? The biggest satisfaction?
Unfortunately, issues that shouldn’t be partisan, like military sexual trauma and college affordability, have been stymied by political posturing in Congress. Leaders in Congress should stop playing games and get to work solving our country’s challenges.
However, our office has been able to make a tremendous difference in the lives of CD9 residents.
For example, we recently helped Glen in Phoenix, who has a brain tumor. Last month, Glen had to choose to either buy expensive medicine to treat his tumor or buy a replacement bed for his home.
We worked with local charities and the pharmaceutical company to help him get both a bed and his life-saving medication.
[Again - vote for ME and I will give you free stuff - lots of free government pork!!!!!]
As a member of the minority party, it’s hard to get a bill passed. What have you been able to accomplish?
Congress is pretty divided right now and sadly, they’re not getting much done.
I’m proud to be one of the founding members of the United Solutions Caucus. We’re a group of 38 freshmen, Democrats and Republicans, working together to solve our fiscal crisis and reduce our debt and deficit.
[Don't make me laugh Kyrsten, when it comes to taxing and spending in the Arizona legislator you were number #1. I am sure that in the US Congress you are also the #1 Congresswoman when it comes to taxing and spending. You reduce our debt??? Again don't make me laugh!!!
Kyrsten,
as the debt goes up you will probably cause it to increase more then any other Congressperson!!!!]
We’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which cuts $200 billion in wasteful spending. Earlier this year, I helped pass the Violence Against Women Act.
Are there any issues you’re working on with other Arizona members?
[Well other then that "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]
I’m working with Reps. Matt Salmon and Raul Grijalva on a bill to prevent the NSA from gathering innocent civilians’ private data.
[Give me a break Kyrsten,
on every election sign of your you have the fact that you are supported by the police unions on the signs. I find it hard to believe that you are trying to reduce the police state, when the police unions helped you get elected!!!]
Reps. Ron Barber, Ann Kirkpatrick and I are working on legislation to help veterans get quicker and better access to VA services.
[More of the old "vote for ME and I will give you free stuff" nonsense]
You and Salmon, a Republican, have made several joint appearances. What’s the connection?
Our offices work closely together on constituent cases, and Matt and I share similar views on issues like global competitiveness, increasing foreign investment in Arizona companies, and increasing trade and exports. Plus, he’s a good guy and we get along.
What will immigration reform look like when the House is finished with it?
It’s too early to predict, but I’m committed to a bill that secures our border
[so you do support the police state - 20,000 new Border Patrol cops???],
creates a workable plan for a future flow of workers into the United States, and settles the status of “dreamers” and hard-working families living in the U.S. Compromise must be a part of any viable solution, and I hope the House is ready to get to “yes.” I certainly am!
[Kyrsten,
when a politician like you says "compromise" it means
"if you vote for my pork, I will vote for your pork".
Kyrsten with that in mind,
I suspect you know how to compromise better then any other Congressman or Senator in Washington D.C.]
Almost always the next thing that happens is the cops steal my wallet and search it looking for an ID card which I don't carry, and in the process violating my 4th Amendment rights too.
I have not been stopped yet by a pig with one of these handheld finger printing devices but I suspect when I am, and when I refuse to voluntarily submit to finger printing, I will be physically restrained then my finger prints will be forcefully taken against my will.
I won't resist because I would rather be alive, then be murdered by some pig for thinking I have "constitutional rights"
I was falsely arrested on June 25, 2013 in Chandler and videotaped about 9 minutes of the false arrest. In the video at this
URL
http://tinyurl.com/chandlerarrest
you can Chandler piggy G Pederson telling me that I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights in that case after I mentioned that in Miranda v Arizona the Supremes said that when a person takes the 5th the police must "immediately cease questioning" the person.
Valley police departments utiliizing digital fingerprinting
By Michelle Mitchell The Republic | azcentral.com Mon Jul 8, 2013 11:22 PM
A hand-held device that resembles a cellphone and taps fingerprint databases to help police officers identify people in the field is catching on with several departments in the Valley.
Officers say the devices are a valuable tool — particularly when they encounter people who aren’t carrying ID cards or who give false information.
“With these finger scanners ... you’re talking less than a minute (and) you know who you’re dealing with,” Chandler Sgt. Joe Favazzo said.
“The safety factor and the time-saving factors are just amazing.”
Not everyone is as sold on them, however, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, which has voiced privacy concerns.
The devices also raise concerns about identity theft and how that personal information is stored and transferred, particularly if a person is not charged with a crime, said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona.
The devices are not designed to store fingerprint data — although they could be modified to do that — but to transfer the information through the officer’s existing in-car computer system, said Robert Horton, spokesman for manufacturer MorphoTrak.
Police departments in Mesa, Tempe and Phoenix began a pilot program last year using the MorphoTrak scanners.
Tempe and Mesa have now expanded those pilot programs.
“We were sold on how fantastic they are,” Tempe Police Sgt. Mike Pooley said.
“It gives us a very quick response.”
Tempe had 14 scanners during the pilot and recently purchased 30 more.
Other departments have signed on, including Chandler, which bought 36 scanners; Scottsdale, which purchased 10, and Peoria, which bought five as a trial.
Chandler police skipped a smaller-scale pilot after hearing about their effectiveness from Mesa police officers through the East Valley Gang and Criminal Information Fusion Center, Favazzo said.
The cost of the scanners varies, but Valley cities paid about $1,200 to $1,800 per unit.
The devices allow officers in the field to scan a person’s fingerprints and compare them to local, state and federal databases.
The scanners will save officers time when someone does not have identification or provides false information, Favazzo said.
Without these devices, officers run variations of the name and birth date provided in an attempt to locate a driver’s license, warrant or other information about the person, Favazzo said.
If that does not work, officers will take the person to the station,
[i.e. -falsely arrest them and make them prove they are not a criminal before releasing them]
fingerprint them and wait for identity information.
“It will also let us know right away if we are dealing with a violent felon before we ever transport them,” Favazzo said.
The Tempe Police Department recently discovered by using the mobile fingerprint scanner that a man they had encountered was wanted by the FBI, Pooley said.
“We would have ended up letting this guy go,” he said.
Police departments find that the devices save them money by not having to transport people to the station and that they act as a force multiplier by keeping officers on the street, MorphoTrak’s Horton said.
The device will scan two fingerprints and the officer will receive a response in 30 seconds to several minutes, he said.
The Phoenix Police Department, which received three scanners last year as part of a pilot program, still is evaluating whether to expand the program, Sgt. Tommy Thompson said.
“Obviously as technology advances, we want to be involved in those advances, but we want to make sure they meet our needs and they’re a useful tool,” Thompson said.
Officers say they are sensitive to privacy concerns expressed by the ACLU.
[Yea, sure. Like in my case where I am always told I don't have any stinking 5th Amendment right to refuse police questioning, which is almost always followed by an illegal search of my wallet in which the cop is hoping to find my ID]
Mesa officers are not trying to collect personal information, Sgt. Tony Landato said.
[That's 100 percent BS. That is the WHOLE purpose of the fingerprint scanners - to get person information about the person - i.e. name and date of birth so the cops can search for outstanding warrants]
“We’re not taking a census,” Landato said. “We’re just trying to ensure the accuracy of the information that we’re taking down.
“If we can do this in a way that’s quicker for the officer and quicker for the citizen, then, hey, we both win.”
The state and FBI fingerprint databases that the scanners check do not contain citizenship or immigration-status information, although that could be possible in the future if the scanners are connected to Department of Homeland Security databases, Horton said.
The state ACLU’s Soler said departments should create policies that inform people who are not under arrest that they have the right to refuse submitting their fingerprints.
[Yea, sure. Like I am always lied to by the police and told I don't have any 5th Amendment right to refuse to answer police questions]
“It’s critical that we think about these things before rolling out these new high-tech systems, and more often than not that doesn’t happen,” she said. “In this day and age when the technology so far outpaces the privacy laws, the individuals end up giving up a lot in terms of their privacy.”
The use of fingerprint scanners falls under existing Mesa Police Department policy, Landato said.
“We’re not going to fingerprint somebody unless we’ve got them under arrest or we have their consent,” he said.
[Yea, I'm am 100 percent positive that is a big lie!!!!! I was also falsely arrested by the Mesa Police who also told me I didn't have any stinking 5th Amendment rights. See
false arrest by Mesa Police and
lawsuit against Mesa Police]
Tempe police are writing a policy that would require officers to get consent from a person who is not under arrest, Pooley said.
[Yea, sure. I also sure the Tempe for false arrest]
“Right now, there’s no authority that can compel a person to put their fingers on one of these gadgets, short of them being arrested,” said Sigmund Popko, clinical professor of law at Arizona State University.
[Rubbish, what are you going to do when a cop with a gun and a badge forces you to give him your fingerprints??? Resist and be killed????]
While drivers are required to provide a license if they are pulled over, a passenger or pedestrian who is not in violation of a law would not be required to provide identification or fingerprints, said attorney John Phebus, vice chair of the criminal-justice section of the State Bar of Arizona.
[Of course the police routinely lie to these people and tell them they are required to]
“Most people don’t know you can say no,” Phebus said. “When you’re in that moment, it’s awful hard to say no.”
Reach the reporter at michelle .mitchell@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-7983.
RELATED INFO
Handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners About the scanner
What it does: The MorphoIDent handheld device scans a person’s fingerprints and transfers the information to a police officer’s phone or computer via Bluetooth or USB. It compares prints with state and federal fingerprint databases and reports a name and date of birth if a match is found.
Manufacturer: MorphoTrak, based in Alexandria, Va.
Cost: Varies, but Valley departments have paid $1,200 to $1,800 per device.
Dimensions: About 5 inches by 3 inches. Weight is about 5 ounces.
Who’s using the devices
Several Valley police departments are testing or using handheld, mobile fingerprint scanners:.
Chandler: 36 scanners, expected to be in use by August.
Glendale: 2 scanners (pilot), not yet deployed.
Tempe: 44 scanners, 14 currently in use.
Peoria: 5 scanners (pilot), purchased two months ago, not yet deployed.
Phoenix: 3 scanners (pilot), in use since the fall.
Scottsdale: 10 scanners, expected to be in use by late July.
Sadly government bureaucrats do this ALL the time and come up with silly reasons on why they don't have to obey the US and State government constitutions.
An example of that is how the BATF has made an arbitrary decision that anybody that uses medical marijuana is not allowed to purchase a gun and doesn't have any Second Amendment rights. The IRS doesn't the same thing when it arbitrarily declares you to be a tax evader and assumes you are guilty till you prove your innocence, rather then the expected "innocent till proved guilty"
At the state level the police and DMV have ruled that you give up your 5th Amendment right against self incrimination when you get a drivers license and that you MUST submit to alcohol and drug tests if stopped by the police for DUI.
The good news is on that the Arizona courts have recently ruled that is a bunch of BS.
The Laws You Can’t See
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: July 8, 2013 225 Comments
In the month since a national security contractor leaked classified documents revealing a vast sweep of Americans’ phone records by the federal government, people across the country have disagreed about the extent to which our expectation of personal privacy must yield to the demands of national security.
Under normal circumstances, this could be a healthy, informed debate on a matter of overwhelming importance — the debate President Obama said he welcomed in the days after the revelations of the surveillance programs.
But this is a debate in which almost none of us know what we’re talking about.
As Eric Lichtblau reported in The Times on Sunday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom. In recent years, the court, originally established by Congress to approve wiretap orders, has extended its reach to consider requests related to nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks. Its rulings, some of which approach 100 pages, have established the court as a final arbiter in these matters.
But the court is as opaque as it is powerful. Every attempt to understand the court’s rulings devolves into a fog of hypothesis and speculation.
The few public officials with knowledge of the surveillance court’s work either censor themselves as required by law, as Senator Ron Wyden has done in his valiant efforts to draw attention to the full scope of these programs, or they offer murky, even misleading statements, as the director of national intelligence, James Clapper Jr., did before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March.
As outrageous as the blanket secrecy of the surveillance court is, we are equally troubled by the complete absence of any adversarial process, the heart of our legal system. The government in 2012 made 1,789 requests to conduct electronic surveillance; the court approved 1,788 (the government withdrew the other). It is possible that not a single one of these 1,788 requests violated established law, but the public will never know because no one was allowed to make a counterargument.
When judicial secrecy is coupled with a one-sided presentation of the issues, the result is a court whose reach is expanding far beyond its original mandate and without any substantive check. This is a perversion of the American justice system, and it is not necessary.
Even before the latest revelations of government snooping, some members of Congress were trying to provide that check. In a letter to the court in February, Senator Dianne Feinstein and three others asked that any rulings with a “significant interpretation of the law” be declassified. In response, the court’s presiding judge, Reggie Walton, wrote that the court could provide only summaries of its rulings, because the full opinions contained classified information. But he balked at releasing summaries, which he feared would create “misunderstanding or confusion.” It is difficult to imagine how releasing information would make the confusion worse.
Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently reintroduced a bill that would require declassification. It was defeated in December. In light of the national uproar over the most recent revelations, the leadership in Congress should push to pass it and begin to shine some light on this dark corner of the judicial system.
We don’t know what we’ll find. The surveillance court may be strictly adhering to the limits of the Fourth Amendment as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Or not. And that’s the problem: This court has morphed into an odd hybrid that seems to exist outside the justice system, even as its power grows in ways that we can’t see.
Coalition sues to halt electronic surveillance
Associated Press Tue Jul 16, 2013 11:10 AM
Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.
The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, and seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.
Filed in federal court in San Francisco, it challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”
The suit came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs earlier this year.
NSA public affairs deferred comment on the lawsuit to the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the lawsuit, the coalition demands that the federal government return and destroy any telephone communications information in its possession. It also wants a jury trial on the allegations contained in the suit.
The plaintiffs include the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, the Council on American Islamic Relations Foundation, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Students for Sensible Drug Policy and others.
The federal government has “indiscriminately obtained, and stored the telephone communications information of millions of ordinary Americans as part of the Associational Tracking Program,” the lawsuit states.
Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in New York asking the government to stop the phone tracking program.
Kyrsten Sinema job as a Congressman or Congresswoman gets paid a nice $174,000 a year. Something only most of the people she rules over can only dream about.
But if her current rate of campaign contributions, something the rest of us call bribes, continues she will be pulling in $1.6 million a year, almost 10 times the amount of her cushy $174,000 salary.
Last for those of you who don't keep up with the news, Kyrsten Sinema is the Arizona Senator who tried to slap a 300 percent tax on medical marijuana in an attempt to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet.
Sinema a leader in campaign donations
By Rebekah L. Sanders The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Jul 16, 2013 10:50 PM
U.S. Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., in her first year in Congress has vaulted to the top echelon of fundraisers nationwide, according to campaign-finance reports released this week.
Sinema, whose district includes parts of Phoenix and Tempe, raked in nearly $400,000 from April through June [for a year that would be $1.6 million], with major money coming from labor unions, Arizona State University employees and Democratic leadership groups. Her total surpassed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and roughly 90 percent of other House members, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Sinema ended the second quarter with $550,000 on hand.
The numbers show how important fundraising has become for incumbents like Sinema, especially those who represent competitive districts, said Bruce Merrill, a longtime political scientist and professor emeritus at Arizona State University.
Sinema’s fellow Democrats in hot seats for 2014 — Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick of northern Arizona and Rep. Ron Barber of southern Arizona — raised significant amounts as well: about $300,000 each.
Kirkpatrick ended the quarter with $452,000 on hand, while Barber kept $330,000 in the bank.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, raising money is one of the principle components of American electoral politics,” Merrill said. “It’s kind of like a poker game: Do you have the ante to sit at the table and play?”
Sinema, Kirkpatrick and Barber, whose districts are closely split between Republican and Democratic voters, are likely to face tough re-election campaigns. Lining their war chests this early could deter potential challengers and prepare them for battle. The incumbents each spent more than $2 million in their 2012 campaigns.
Incumbents in safe Arizona districts raised smaller amounts:
Rep. Matt Salmon, a Republican from Mesa, hauled in $165,000 and kept $243,000 on hand.
Rep. David Schweikert, a Republican from Fountain Hills, raised $163,000 and was left with $123,000.
Rep. Paul Gosar, a Republican from Prescott, took in $79,000 and had $83,000 in the bank.
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Tucson Democrat, and Rep. Ed Pastor, a Phoenix Democrat, each hauled in $65,000. Pastor had $1.3 million on hand compared with Grijalva’s $58,000.
The least successful fundraiser of Arizona’s delegation was Rep. Trent Franks, a Glendale Republican, who took in $25,000, even after putting out a plea for donations last month following furor over his comments regarding the incidence of pregnancy from rape.
The plea seems not to have made a ripple among pro-life activists. After his comments, only two donations came in from donors who were not corporations or from Washington political and legal firms. At the end of the quarter, he had less than $10,000 in the bank.
Only two candidates seeking to run for Congress next year spent the quarter fundraising seriously. Both are Republicans hoping to unseat Sinema in her brand-new Phoenix district.
Wendy Rogers, a retired Air Force pilot who lost last year’s Republican primary, raised $128,000 and had $206,000 on hand. Andrew Walter, a former ASU quarterback and first-time politician, pulled in $113,000 and was left with $122,000 in the bank.
Reports for Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake were not yet available.
Reach the reporter at 602-444-8096.
Arpaio nailed but not corralled
I have said this before but give Sheriff Joe 6 months and he will be back to his racist violations of Latino's rights. He will be bragging to the tune of something like "I'm Sheriff Joe, the worlds meanest cop and there ain't no federal judge that is going to tell me what to do".
Phoenix police union sues city over uniform change
The annual uniform allowance is part of an officer’s wage-and-benefits package.
Police union leaders don't like to be called "union bosses"
The term "union bosses" would be better called "police union bosses", because the money paid to police officers account for about 40 percent of the Phoenix budget. I guess the term "union bosses" could also refer to "police and fireman union bosses" because when you throw in firemen along with the cops they account for about 60 percent of the Phoenix budget.
Mayor Greg Stanton and Council,
Cop hating camera?????
The camera used to film the Mesa police beating hates cops????
50% of inmates were arrested for victimless drug war crimes???
George Will says 50% of convicts are for victimless drug war crimes
Uncle Sam reads your email and listens to your phone calls
Monumental phone, Internet monitoring laid bare in reports
At about the same time you receive this email a copy of it will have also been forwarded to a US government computer run by the American spy agency NSA or National Security Agency. There a computer will read it and search for key words and phrases like freedom, constitutional, government, Libertarian, guns, drugs, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, explosives, atheist, Muslim and Arab. If the software finds any of those key words this email will be saved in a file of emails from people the government considers suspected criminals. If the email contains any of those keywords it may be forwarded to a human FBI, Homeland Security, DEA, BATF, or ICE agent who will manually read it trying to find a lame excuse to throw the sender or recipient in prison.
Seizing cellphone records abuses liberty
Obama defends phone data collection program
“It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.”
"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."
Source
We "MUST" be able to trust our Valley law enforcement officials
Sorry Bill Richardson, the truth is we CAN'T trust our law enforcement officials. I am sure there are a few honest cops, but over all the police are just as corrupt that the criminals they pretend to protect us from!!!!
PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - Use it to encrypt your data
PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - Use it to encrypt your data and make it more difficult for the government to spy on you.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio appeal funding questioned
Board urged not to fund Arpaio appeal
MCSO suspends patrols for illegal immigrants
Source
Arpaio asegura que es víctima de discriminación por su edad
Source
2 sent to prison for creation, sale of machine guns
Many legal experts say any and all of these laws making machine guns illegal are unconstitutional per the 10th Amendment.
"Neither the defendants nor their legal counsel appeared at the Supreme Court. A lack of financial support and procedural irregularities prevented counsel from traveling. Miller was found shot to death in April, before the decision was rendered."
Source
U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement
US Post Office is spying on you for Uncle Sam
Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders
I suspect that Google gives ALL the data it's search engine cataloging robots find on the web to the Feds.
That tag tells the robots that Google and other search engine vendors sent out not to copy the information from that web page into it's database.
"No Trespassing"
while most cops arrogantly think they are above the law and ignore signs like that I suspect signs might have a legal basis to keep the police criminals from using evidence against you that they obtained illegally when trespassing on your property.
"Police keep out - No trespassing"
Sure the crooked cops will ignore the signs, but I wonder could the signs keep the police who from using any evidence they obtained on you web page against you or other people??? I don't know. I am just throwing out a question.
Arpaio attorneys plan to appeal racial-profiling ruling
Source
Arpaio fears loss of power, not money
Arpaio fears loss of power, not money
Into the mind of ... Kyrsten Sinema
Kyrsten Sinema shovels the BS???
Kyrsten Sinema shovels the BS???
Cops have hand held fingerprinting machines to ID you
Every time I am stopped by the police and take the 5th and refuse to tell the police my name or answer their questions the cops tell me that for some reason the Fifth Amendment doesn't apply in that case and I have to answer their questions.
[They never have given me a good reason on why the 5th Amendment is null and void, other then the implied reason that they got a gun and a badge and will do what they feel like]
The Laws You Can’t See
"Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has for years been developing what is effectively a secret and unchallenged body of law on core Fourth Amendment issues, producing lengthy classified rulings based on the arguments of the federal government — the only party allowed in the courtroom."
Coalition sues to halt electronic surveillance
Source
Sinema collects $1.6 million a year in bribes, no campaign contributions
Let's face it government isn't about being a public servant, it's extracting cold hard cash from the people you rule over. Campaign contributions in exchange for government pork. While officially they are called "campaign contributions" most of us call them for what they are - "bribes".
Previous Articles about Sheriff Joe
Here are some previous
articles
about Arizona's Sheriff Joe Arapio, who most folks
in Maricopa County consider the worst sheriff on the planet.
And here are even some more articles on Sheriff Joe and this thugs in Phoenix, Arizona and Maricopa County, Arizona.