Spying so easy it ought to be illegal
Should police have the power to plant a GPS device on your car and track your movements without your knowledge, without probable cause, and without a warrant? Incredibly, this question is actually being debated by the Supreme Court. I call it incredible because police power of this sort is or should be absolutely shocking to the American conscience. Only a cop could countenance it.
Fortunately, if current reporting is to be believed, the Court seems so far to have pretty solid American instincts on this matter. They’re challenging the defense pretty strongly, equating their arguments to a justification of surveillance tactics so scary that not even the Justice Department would dare propose them (yet), and accusing the government lawyers of steering our country towards something that, in the words of Justice Breyer, “sounds like 1984.” Pretty strong words.
Let’s hope their strong words and American instincts can hold out against the specious arguments of the government lawyers. They have pointed out that police are already free to observe and record a citizen’s movements in public by traditional surveillance methods, such as staking out locations he is known to frequent or even following him in person from place to place, so what, they ask, is to stop the police from using more sophisticated tools. In other words, the cops can already use binoculars and a notebook, so why shouldn’t they be permitted to use satellites, computers, and a transmitting device affixed to our personal property to track our every movement down to the second and the yard?
Two responses to this argument are appropriate. First of all, the right to observe, monitor and record the motions of others is not exclusively a right of the police. Any person at all is free to observe and even photograph other persons in public places where they have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Does anyone seriously suppose that my right to watch you walk down the sidewalk and get in your car, even my right to get in another car and follow you, could possibly give me the right to trespass on your property to affix a tracking device to your vehicle?
But secondly and more fundamentally, the government argument here is just sophistry, what McLuhan would call a basic illiteracy about media and technology. The lawyers are claiming that the addition of a GPS device to the surveillance arsenal is only a difference in quantity. They may be right, but past a certain point, a difference in quantity becomes a difference in kind.
Justice Roberts seems to understand this when he points out that the new GPS tools would let the police “push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is. They look at data from a month and find out everywhere it’s been in the past month. That seems to me dramatically different.”
It is dramatically different, and this is just the sort of thing that technology does. It makes things dramatically different. To use McLuhan’s terminology again, new technology doesn’t just enhance old technology, it creates a new world. And the new world can be so different that the old rules for the old world don’t apply any more or even make any sense.
And the feeling I get, at least, reading the arguments of the government lawyers is certainly not that they don’t see the new world created by the new technology. They see it very clearly. And misapplying the old rules, in this case, suits them just fine.
Local Cop Doesn’t Get Away with Murder
Ex-cop and convicted murderer Eugene Burrell
A onetime suburban police officer convicted in June of murder was sentenced this morning in St. Louis Circuit Court to 30 years in prison.
Are you trying to be funny, or do you just think we’re stupid?
Uh, I wasn't trying to be funny...
Alan Greenspan assures us that the credit downgrade is nothing to worry about:
Greenspan: U.S. Won’t Default Because We Can Inflate Money Supply
The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.
What an insulting evasion of the real question. It wasn’t a concern about the efficiency of Federal Reserve printing presses that led to the S&P downgrade. Nobody doubts that the US can and will print more money. The question is how long people will be willing to accept that printed money. They’ve accepted it in the past. They will tomorrow and next week too. But for how much longer will people agree to accept those pieces of paper as money? That’s the real question. That’s what needs to be discussed and debated.
However long it is—and we can debate whether it’s going to be a short time or a long time—there’s one thing we can know with certainty. It’s not going to be forever. That’s what the S&P downgrade means. It means we’re just one little step closer to the day when Greenspan’s printing plan isn’t going to work anymore.
And then what? That’s the question Greenspan won’t answer.
Like this:
The deadliest day
Everywhere I go I’m being asked to pray for the Americans recently killed in Afghanistan. It’s the deadliest ever attack on American forces. Total killed: 30.
Oh, yes, there were also seven or eight Afghans killed, but I haven’t seen much of them in recent news stories.
There are so many things I could say, but what strikes me most strongly is just the number. Thirty. That’s the deadliest day in ten years for the US? Thirty?
By comparison, the battle at LZ Albany during the Vietnam war killed 155 US soldiers. And at the battle of Gettysburg, more than 50,000 union and confederate soldiers lost their lives. Also significant is the civilian casualty count at Gettysburg: One.
I haven’t the stomach today to look up casualty figures for Afghan and Iraq forces and I doubt little that many days have seen the unprovoked slaughter of more than 30 civilians. Yet the biggest risk taken by the occupying army is no worse than the potential of an occasional freak accident. As the humans in hiding observed in The War of the Worlds:
This isn’t a war. It never was a war, any more than there’s war between man and ants.
It makes you wonder what the Martians back home thought about the whole thing.
Man falsely arrested because cop can’t read
Could there be anything more frightening than arguing with this kind of mindlessness?
Chris Adrian Smith Is the Wrong Man
When Smith answered his door that night, a deputy placed him under arrest, alleging he had not paid a $300 conviction fine for driving on a suspended license.
“I told him I have paperwork telling him he is wrong,” Smith says. “I am not the right guy.”
A deputy allowed one of Smith’s sons to retrieve the document.
“He looks at it and says, ‘This doesn’t say anything,’” recalls Smith. “I said, ‘Read it. It says not to arrest me because I am not the right guy. Somebody stole my identity.’”
Thanks for paying up, sucker!
I always think the sorriest ring of hell must be the one with all the Catholics who ate meat on Friday back in the ’50s. What a bunch of losers.
Those suffering souls now have brain-brothers here on earth. It happens recently that law-abiders in Los Angeles are being humiliated to learn that they never had to pay those red-light-camera tickets:
Who knew L.A.’s red-light camera fines were ‘voluntary’?
“Now that makes me nuts,” said [ticket-payer] Brickman, who is unemployed. “That makes me want to go get a refund, but I’ve been around long enough to know that’s not going to happen. It’s very frustrating to know that I was victimized by something that they think is not useful or a good idea…. I could truly use that $476.”
Apparently, the cameras are still clicking away like mad, but the courts don’t think highly of the program. Unlike legislators and cops, judges tend to be familiar with concepts like “reasonable doubt” and “right to confront witnesses” and things like that. The judges of LA have decided that these tickets are mostly bogus and don’t do anything to enforce them.
Unless, that is, some yahoo Angelino actually shows his face in court and provides the evidence needed to prove that he’s the dumbass who ran the light. Then they nail him. And if he doesn’t pay, they rake him over the usual coals.
So the winning strategy with the red-light cameras, at least in Los Angeles, is the one strategy every fearful statist will warn you can never, ever work. You just ignore the bastards.
Ignoring the bastards doesn’t work for most charges, which is all the more reason for being well-informed of those few charges where it does.
36 years of good behavior not good enough
A man is in jail here and facing a ten-year sentence because some probation officers screwed up their paperwork when he was released 36 years ago.
Richard Goings was sentenced to five years probation in 1974 for a robbery. Records show he completed a drug treatment program successfully, but lost track of him when he moved out of state. This year, some government worker got around to updating a warrant database and Goings’ name popped up while he was crossing the Canada/New York border.
Man jailed in St. Louis County over what may be 1974 paperwork mistake
Toronto man jailed here on 1975 warrant gets shock time, probation
“I did everything I was supposed to do. Now, this is coming back to haunt me because somebody wasn’t doing their job,” he said. “This thing is 36 years old. There’s got to be some rights that I have here.”
What’s truly sad is Goings’ continued pattern of placing naive trust in the system that continues to screw him.
First, he pled guilty to the original offense, even though the robbery victim admitted he “had no idea” whether Goings was even involved. Goings said he pled guilty so he could “move on with his life.”
How’s that working out for you?
When he tried to get his probation transferred to his new home in Ohio, the bureaucrats couldn’t find his paperwork and got tired of him coming back every week to see if they had anything yet. Finally they told him to forget it and stay out of trouble.
Then, when he was arrested this year, he waived his right to an extradition hearing, even though his public defender wanted to argue that his case had been grossly mishandled.
Idiot.
When he was originally jailed in St Louis County, the judge offered him a pretty decent bail deal. But Goings didn’t have any friends in the area to put him up, so he figured he’d just stay in jail till his trial.
The mind boggles.
Now he’s been sentenced to four months shock time. That’s, you know, to shock the criminal behavior out of him, his criminal behavior being 36 years of minding his own business.
My favorite part of all may be the tautology propounded by the St Louis Police:
“If this guy really is guilty, in a way it shows you that the system eventually works.”
In a way, it does.
In her shoes
Tell the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!
I didn’t pay much attention to the Casey Anthony trial while it was ongoing and I suppose I only became aware of the case some few weeks before it was concluded, when the internet began festering with gloating comments from armchair prosecutors reveling in the nightly rehash of the progress made that day tightening the noose around Anthony’s neck. In none of the many recent trials of the century can I recall my neighbors expressing quite that degree of relish, quite such a rabid thirst for vengeance. After so many weeks watching the news watchers work themselves into such a lather, anyone who might have dared predict an acquittal could as easily have predicted the boiling, mindless fury that has erupted in its wake. The jurors have received death threats and, most incredibly, innocent people who happen to look like the accused or share her name have been physically attacked by completely unhinged television viewers. The attackers had to have known that the actual target of their hatred was still, at that time, behind bars, but the countless hours spent watching and loathing Anthony’s face on the flickering screen have so conditioned their minds that they now froth as mechanically and irrationally as Pavlov’s dogs.
The oddest thing, to one of an anarchist bent, is the very noticeable fact that those most vociferous in their denunciation of the verdict are, almost without exception, loyal statists. Read the rest of this entry »
When a Cop Pulls You Over for DWI or DUI (or anything else)
Cop lights: What do you do?
“Do you know how to pick a lock?”
“Not in the least, I’m afraid.”
“I often wonder what we go to school for,” said Wimsey. “We never seem to learn anything really useful.”
—Strong Poison, by Dorothy Sayers
Any morning at your local courthouse you can go and watch poor slobs getting screwed in a drunk driving witch-hunt. Most of them have done no harm and are no danger to anyone. While it is certainly wrong to endanger others with unsafe driving, and while no one disputes that excessive drinking can impair your ability to drive, nevertheless safe and sober drivers are nightly persecuted by a politically popular crusade that demonizes people who drive with just a few beers under their belts as reckless, criminal maniacs.
By the time they get to court, most people are so beaten and humiliated that they submit to the inevitable with the resignation of a mortally wounded animal. Occasionally you’ll see an attorney or a public defender (truly the noblest profession in the whole rotten racket) attempt a motion to suppress or even threaten a jury trial, but it’s a desperate feint and it almost always fails. The vast majority of DWI cases are decided the night of the arrest, and the cop’s ally that night is not the law, nor the prosecutor, nor the judge. The cop’s great ally—the one who meekly builds an open-and-shut case of drunk driving—is the suspect himself.
Dress For Court
You wish you could start wearing a hat
“The sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.” —Emerson, quoting a lady of his acquaintance
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article on What to Wear to Court. An odd editorial decision, when you stop to think about it, but every day, good and upright citizens are dragged through the sewer of the legal system, so what to wear really is something you should have a plan for.
Dressing well can mean many things. In a house of worship, it denotes respect. At work, it suggests trustworthiness. At court, it says untouchable.
This is not, necessarily, the impression you should be aiming, by any wise and prudent consideration, to convey to a judge and jury who hold absolute power over your life, fortune and sacred honor and could be put off by your uppityness, but it is nevertheless an inward feeling that is absolutely necessary if you hope to get through the experience with any sense of self-worth intact. Because appearing in court to answer charges, no matter how baseless and unjust they may be, is a shattering experience. No defendant ever leaves the courtroom feeling vindicated and triumphant. Even an acquitted man knows that the whole process is nearer the experience of getting beat up than anything else you could compare it to.
Then at least you can dress well.
