Tag: hit&run

Last month, the libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) introduced along with Sen. Tom Udall (D–N.M.) the American Forces Going Home After Noble (AFGHAN) Service Act, which would pull within one year all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan with the exception of diplomatic protection and intelligence operatives. The bill, which also sunsets the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) that the war has been fought under, makes manifest a theme Paul has sounded since entering the Senate in 2011—why not, at long last, declare victory and come home?

It’s not just America’s longest war that Paul wants to end. He wants no more troops in Syria, no more support for Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen, and no more end-of-fiscal-year spending boondoggles to keep the Pentagon perennially flush. In all of these efforts, the war skeptic is attempting to bend the ear of President Donald Trump, whose foreign policy track record and roster of advisers are decidedly mixed on the questions of intervention and deployment.

I am scheduled today to ask Paul about his Trump-whispering campaign, and related efforts to get the troops home from Afghanistan, during the second of my four-day hosting stint on Sirius XM Insight’s Stand UP! with Pete Dominick program, which runs from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. ET on channel 121.

Since hair-sniffer Joe Biden had been scheduled to announce his candidacy for president Wednesday (it is now slated for Thursday, though I’ll believe it when I see it), we have prepared an otherwise Biden-tastic episode to set the campaign mood. Guests include:

* Beloved Reason contributor Daniel Drezner, who will talk about his current issue (May) cover story, “Will Today’s Global Trade Wars Lead to World War III?”

* Progressive media/politics New York character Nomiki Konst, who will talk about some of Biden’s policy and personality problems.

* Mother Jones Editorial Director Ben Dreyfuss, who will talk about how maybe Democratic Twitter isn’t exactly the Democratic Party, and what that might portend for the Biden conversation.

* CNN politics number-cruncher Harry Enten, who will divine what the numbers say about Biden and the rest of the field.

You can call throughout the program at 1-877-974-7487.

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Perrysburg, Ohio, police have charged Mehros Nassersharifi, a student at Perrysburg High School, with telecommunications harassment after he created the Twitter account “Perrysburg Girls Ranked.” The site ranked female students based on their looks and personalities and contained remarks such as “Passable with a lot of makeup, but still looks like a goblin” and “If you thought high school would change these girls’ bodies, you were wrong. She looks like an 8-year-old boy.” Nassersharifi also faces disciplinary action from the school.

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For two years Donald Trump told us the truth over and over again: Neither he nor his presidential campaign illegally conspired with Russian agents to influence the 2016 election. But Trump also lied to us over and over again, which cast doubt on his assertions of innocence.

I was never much impressed by the evidence of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, an allegation that was conclusively debunked by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which was released by the Justice Department last Thursday. The one thing that made me think there might be something to the conspiracy theory was the fact that Trump kept denying it.

The president’s habitual dishonesty justifies a rebuttable presumption that the truth is the opposite of whatever he says. That rule of thumb led many of his critics astray in this case, but it also illustrates the practical advantages of telling the truth, since Trump’s weaselly ways prolonged the Russia investigation and lent credence to the suspicion that he had something to hide.

“I have nothing to do with Russia,” Trump insisted in July 2016. Yet his lawyer, Michael Cohen, was working on a licensing deal for a Trump Tower in Moscow as late as the previous month and giving his boss regular updates on the project. When Cohen suggested to Trump that his statement was misleading, he told Mueller, Trump replied, “Why mention it if it is not a deal?”

A year later, when The New York Times reported that Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman had met in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Trump edited a public statement about the meeting, excising any reference to that offer. When his communications director, Hope Hicks, suggested that Trump come clean about the motivation for the meeting, he told her, “You’ve given a statement. We’re done.”

When Trump fired James Comey in May 2017, angry that the FBI director had refused to publicly say he was not a target of the Russia investigation, he claimed he had acted based on a recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had decided “on his own” to review Comey’s performance. As the Mueller report notes, Trump abandoned that preposterous cover story two days later, but only because Rosenstein refused to go along with it.

When Comey said the president had privately pressed him for a promise of personal loyalty and encouraged him to drop the FBI’s investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Trump flatly denied Comey’s account of those one-on-one conversations, even implying he might have “tapes” that would show Comey was lying. The Mueller report accepts Comey’s account, which is supported by documentation of the meetings, a memo that Comey wrote at the time, and his contemporaneous conversations with other officials.

The report likewise credits former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony that Trump repeatedly asked him to fire Mueller. Trump publicly denied he said any such thing, and he privately urged McGahn to recant his statements about those episodes.

The Mueller report also addresses the 2016 hacking of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, which were published by WikiLeaks, much to candidate Trump’s delight. Politico counted more than 140 occasions when Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign. Yet after WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was arrested this month, Trump claimed, “I know nothing about WikiLeaks. It’s not my thing.”

The report does not discuss the hush payments that Cohen arranged for women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump, a case that was referred to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. But Trump lied about those too, claiming he had no knowledge of them at the time.

Trump’s lawyers wisely rebuffed Mueller’s attempt to follow up on the president’s evasive responses to written questions and stopped him from sitting for an interview. Trump thereby avoided a “perjury trap” that he would have walked into just by being himself.

© Copyright 2019 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

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The Green New Deal’s goal is to move America to zero carbon emissions in 10 years.

“That’s a goal you could only imagine possible if you have no idea how energy is produced,” James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, says in my latest video.

“Renewable is so inconsistent,” he adds. “You can’t just put in wind turbines and solar panels. You have to build all this infrastructure to connect them with energy consumers.”

Because wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, “renewable” energy requires many more transmission lines, and bigger batteries.

Unfortunately, says Meigs: “You have to mine materials for batteries. Those mines are environmentally hazardous. Disposing of batteries is hazardous.”

“Batteries are a lousy way to store energy,” adds physicist Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Also, the ingredients of green energy, like battery packs, are far from green.

“You have to consume 100 barrels of oil in China to make that battery pack,” he explains. “Dig up 1,000 pounds of stuff to process it. Digging is done with oil, by big machines, so we’re consuming energy to ‘save’ energy—not a good path to go.”

Still, wind turbines and solar batteries are 10 times more efficient than when they were first introduced! That’s not good enough, writes Mills, to make “the new energy economy” anything more than “magical thinking.”

“They hit physics limits. In comic books, Tony Stark has a magic power source, but physics makes it impossible to make solar 10 times better again.”

The dream of “green” causes us to misdirect resources. Even after billions in government subsidies, solar still makes up less than 1 percent of America’s energy—wind just 2 percent. And even that energy isn’t really “clean.”

“We use billions of tons of hydrocarbons to make the windmills that are already in the world, and we’ve only just begun to make them at the level people claim they would like them to be built,” says Mills. “Pursue a path of wind, solar and batteries, we increase how much we dig up and move by a thousand-fold.”

“You gotta clear-cut the forest. These machines kill a lot of birds,” says Meigs. “I agree that we should bring down our carbon emissions…but we should also make sure we’re spending money on stuff that really works.”

There is one energy source, though, that efficiently produces lots of power with no carbon emissions: nuclear.

But people fear it. They point to the Chernobyl plant accident in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.

“The Chernobyl plant design was idiotically bad,” says Meigs. They don’t make nuclear plants like that anymore.

What about Fukushima?

“Fukushima helps prove how safe nuclear power really is. No one was killed.”

I pointed out that people were killed during the evacuation.

“Fear of radiation killed people,” responded Meigs. They evacuated older people who didn’t need to go.

People fear what they don’t understand and what they can’t see.

“A dam breaks, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Nuclear plants, their safety, ironically, is actually evident in their accidents!” says Mills.

“More people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed in the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S.,” adds Meigs.

Yet after Fukushima, Germany shut down its nuclear plants. That led to higher electricity prices and increased carbon emissions because Germany burned coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.

Likewise, “in Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont, they shut down their nuclear plant. Guess what happened? Carbon emissions went up,” recounts Meigs. “This supposedly green state, ultra-liberal Vermont, went backwards.”

If a Green New Deal is ever implemented, says Mills, it would rob the poor by raising energy costs, while “giving money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy $100,000 cars, to put expensive solar arrays on their roofs or to be investors in wind farms.”

“It’s upside-down Robin Hood,” he adds. “That’s a bad deal.”

Yet a majority of Americans—including Republicans surveyed—say they support some version of it.

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Some fourteen years after a controversial Supreme Court decision upheld the use of eminent domain to seize homes for transfer to private developers, the state where the case originated may finally pass a law that curtails such abuses.

In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that the government can take private property and transfer it to a new private owner for purposes of promoting “economic development.” Although the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment mandates that the government can only take property for a “public use,” a narrow 5-4 majority reaffirmed the rule that virtually any potential benefit to the public counts as a public use. The government does not even have to prove that the supposed benefit will  ever actually materialize. As a result, the New London Development Corporation—a private entity authorized by the City of New London—was able to condemn fifteen residential properties in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood of New London. One of them was Susette Kelo’s “little pink house,” pictured above.

Perhaps even worse, the ill-conceived development project that led to the comdemnation fell through. Even today, almost fourteen years after the litigation ended, nothing has been built on the condemned land. Feral cats are the only regular users of the properties where homes once stood.

 

The Kelo decision sparked a massive public backlash. Polls showed that over 80% of the public opposed the decision, with opposition coming from such unlikely allies as the NAACP, Ralph Nader, Rush Limbaugh, libertarian property rights advocates, and even Bernie Sanders. Widespread revulsion against the Court’s ruling led 45 states to enact new eminent domain reform laws. Some of these reforms provide strong protection for property owners. But many others are ineffective, imposing few or no real constraints on the use of eminent domain to seize property for influential private interests.

Despite being the state where the Kelo case originated, Connecticut enacted one of the weakest post-Kelo reform laws in the entire nation. I summarized it in my book on the Kelo case and its aftermath:

The new Connecticut law merely forbids the condemnation of property “for the primary purpose of increasing local tax revenue….” This restriction does not prevent condemnations for either economic development or blight alleviation [an alternative mechanism for seizing property for private development interests]. Connecticut law allows local governments to condemn property for both purposes…. Even the goal of increasing tax revenue can still be pursued so long as it is part of a more general plan
for local “redevelopment.” In practice, it is likely impossible to prove that a given property is being condemned primarily for the purpose of “increasing local tax revenue” as distinct from the goal of promoting economic development more generally.

A bill currently under consideration by the Connecticut state legislature could change that:

Now there’s a legislative push in Connecticut to finally reform the state’s eminent domain laws to prevent another situation like Kelo’s. HB 5123, introduced by Rep. Tami Zawistowski (R-Suffield) would stop the state and its municipalities from using eminent domain to take property that would be used for any project that generates income for a private commercial purpose….

The bill passed the House’s Planning and Development Committee, 15-6, but does not yet appear to be scheduled for a full House vote.

The text of the bill would ban the use of eminent domain in redevelopment areas “for any purpose that produces income from such real property for a private entity.” This would forbid takings for privately owned “economic development” (as in the Kelo case) and probably also for the alleviation of “blight” broadly defined as anything that potentially constrains economic growth. It would not, I think, forbid takings for privately owned public utilities.  But such condemnations are both more defensible and less prone to abuse than takings for “economic development,” which are easily captured by powerful interest groups and routinely fail to produce the promised economic benefits—as happened in the Kelo case itself.

Although there is some political momentum behind the bill, its passage is not a done deal. HR 5123 faces potential opposition from key members of the state legislature,  some local governments, and private interests who benefit from having governments condemn property for their businesses. State Rep. Zawistkowski, the bill’s sponsor still expects “an uphill battle.” But hopefully the political obstacles will be overcome, and Connecticut will finally get some real eminent domain reform.

In my view, the Kelo decision is based on a serious misinterpretation of the Constitution. I hope the Supreme Court will eventually overrule it. But, in the meantime, state governments should not act to curb such abuses without waiting for federal judges to do it for them. Even if “economic development” takings are not unconstitutional, they are still harmful and unjust.

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The jury has rendered its verdict: plastic is polluting our oceans, and it’s a problem. But it’s one that won’t be solved by straw bans or prohibitions on single-use plastics.

Yet California is poised to do just that with Assembly Bill 1162, which would require that hotels and miscellaneous vacation rentals phase out small plastic bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion by January 1, 2023. Instead, they’ll need to opt for refillable dispensers or containers that hold 12 or more ounces of product.

“We know we have an enormous problem with our world, we’ve become addicted to [plastic] and it’s caused a major dilemma environmentally,” Democratic Assemblymember Ash Kalra (District 27), who introduced the legislation, told ABC News.

He isn’t wrong. A great deal of the plastic panic centers around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the infamous and mammoth collection of trash floating between Hawaii and California. Its discovery in 1997 and the years-long news coverage that followed prompted a worldwide frenzy to declutter the oceans. Measuring more than 1.6 million square kilometers (and growing), it is more than three times the size of France, and more than twice the size of Texas.

But it isn’t dominated by plastic straws, bags, or erstwhile shampoo bottles. The vast majority of the debris is composed of fishing-related accessories, like nets, ropes, and baskets. An estimated 20 percent came from the 2011 Japanese tsunami.

So what about those single-use plastic items—from water bottles to straws to bags—that have drummed up such animus among environmentalists and animal lovers alike? Approximately 40 percent of plastics are produced for such purposes, according to a study by Roland Geyer, a professor of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California and supporter of California’s hotel plastic ban bill.

Precisely how much of that ends up in the ocean is unclear. But recent data show that 60 percent of mismanaged plastic waste, which often makes its way into the water, comes from East Asia and the Pacific. North America—which typically processes its waste quite efficiently—has less than 1 percent.

We do know that 8 million tons of plastic in total enters the ocean annually. A hefty chunk of that comes from microplastics: tiny pieces of debris that measure less than five millimeters long. Those are often digested by birds and fish. The thought is a queasy one, particularly when considering that those animals make it onto many a dinner plate, pushing the carcinogenic substance back up the food chain. But it’s a misconception that single-use plastics are pushing that problem—most microplastics come from the breakdown of synthetic car tires and from washing synthetic clothes.

That California’s bill will have little tangible impact is not lost on its supporters. “It’s mostly symbolic, but symbols can be powerful,” Geyer said. “Hopefully it will show consumers we can stop using plastic products and realize we won’t miss them.” But that symbol fails to capture the actual problem—which is one that has far more to do with abandoned fishing gear, synthetic fibers, and mismanaged waste in the developing world than it does with complimentary bottles of shampoo.

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“If Republicans continue to cower to the NRA,” says Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris, she will impose new gun controls by “executive action.” If Congress does not change the law, in other words, Harris will, although that is not part of the president’s constitutional job description.

The California senator’s campaign website promises that “if Congress fails to send comprehensive gun safety legislation to Harris’ desk within her first 100 days as president—including universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and the repeal of the NRA’s corporate gun manufacturer and dealer immunity bill—she will take executive action to keep our kids and communities safe.” Harris does not claim that as president she could unilaterally ban “assault weapons” or repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. But she does claim she could change the law in two other significant ways.

Harris thinks the president can “mandate near-universal background checks by requiring anyone who sells five or more guns per year to run a background check on all gun sales.” Since only federally licensed dealers are legally required to run background checks, such a rule would require dramatically expanding that category.

The problem is that federal law defines a gun dealer as someone who is “engaged in the business of selling firearms,” which in turn is defined as a “devot[ing] time, attention, and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit through the repetitive purchase and resale of firearms.” The statutory definition explicitly excludes “a person who makes occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby, or who sells all or part of his personal collection of firearms.” Under Kamala’s plan, a hobbyist or collector who sold more than four guns in a single year would be required to obtain a federal license and conduct background checks, which is plainly inconsistent with current law.

Likewise Harris’ plan to “close the ‘boyfriend loophole’ to prevent dating partners convicted of domestic violence from purchasing guns.” Under current law, people convicted of misdemeanors involving “domestic violence” are barred from possessing firearms. But crimes against dating partners count as “domestic violence” only if the perpetrator has lived with the victim or produced a child with him or her. The House version of the bill reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act would eliminate those requirements. Harris seems to think she can accomplish the same thing without new congressional action, but it’s hard to see how. Congress has defined “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence,” and only Congress can change the definition.

In trying to impose new gun restrictions by presidential fiat, Harris would be taking a page from Donald Trump, who demanded an administrative ban on “bump stocks” that required twisting the statutory definition of machine guns beyond recognition. Barack Obama also tried to expand gun control without congressional approval, although his administration did not go nearly as far as Harris proposes, and it recognized that banning bump stocks was inconsistent with existing law. It is telling that Harris believes voters who are appalled by Trump’s power grabs would welcome a Democratic president who thinks she can ignore the law as long as they like her policies.

 

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China’s Skynet and Sharp Eyes projects aim to comprehensively surveil China’s 1.4 billion people by 2020 through a network of 626 million video cameras stationed in public spaces monitored using facial recognition technologies optimized via artificial intelligence. These vast video surveillance systems will help enforce the Chinese government’s social credit system that awards points to citizens who behave and docks those who commit crimes, fail to pay bills, or criticize the communist regime. Folks who get put on the government’s “List of Untrustworthy Persons” due to their low scores are forbidden from purchasing such items as high-speed rail and air tickets or hotel rooms, among other punishments. Five million people have been barred from high-speed trains and 17 million from flights under the scheme, according to Time magazine.

Although it is hard to gauge real public sentiment in authoritarian China, there is some evidence that many Chinese citizens feel safer knowing that Big Brother is watching over them. On the other hand, The New York Times reports in an article published as part of its superb Privacy Project that the Chinese government has built out a video surveillance system designed to ethnically profile and track millions of its restive Uighur citizens. This is possible because Central Asian Uighurs in general look somewhat differently from China’s majority Han population.

“The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review,” reports the Times. “The practice makes China a pioneer in applying next-generation technology to watch its people, potentially ushering in a new era of automated racism.”

Clare Garvie, an associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law told the Times,”If you make a technology that can classify people by an ethnicity, someone will use it to repress that ethnicity.”

To see how effective facial recognition video surveillance might be in the United States, the Times ran a test using off-the-shelf Amazon facial recognition technology to filter images captured from video cameras located in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library’s main branch. The Times ran the Bryant Park images through a database it built using public photos of people who work in the area. The result:

Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of Richard Madonna, a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.

As government and private face databases expand and real time video detection accuracy improves, the cost of tracking us will fall ever lower. The Times notes that New York city police have access to 9,000 camera feeds in lower Manhattan alone. Jennifer Lynch, surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times that because of how quickly the technology has advanced, she would now support a wholesale ban on government use of facial recognition.

In the Times’ article detailing how the Chinese government uses facial recognition to monitor the Uighurs, MIT artificial intelligence researcher Jonathan Frankle warned, “I don’t think it’s overblown to treat this as an existential threat to democracy. Once a country adopts a model in this heavy authoritarian mode, it’s using data to enforce thought and rules in a much more deep-seated fashion than might have been achievable 70 years ago in the Soviet Union. To that extent, this is an urgent crisis we are slowly sleepwalking our way into.”

Yes it is.

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On Tuesday morning, Florida Judge Leonard Hanser agreed to temporarily seal the footage of New England Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft visiting Orchids of Asia spa in Jupiter, Florida.

More than two months have now passed since the headline-grabbing busts there and at several Southeast Florida massage parlors, places police insisted on national TV were dens of sexual slavery. Since then, authorities have been forced to admit that their claims were unfounded and have had their use of hidden cameras challenged by both men charged with soliciting prostitution and massage customers not accused of illegal activity.

That Kraft was one of the men charged by Florida prosecutors helped propel this story across national news and give it sticking power. But it’s also assured that there’s a defendant with resources and a reason to fight back—and in turn, that the press has remained interested in the case. (It’s a beautiful bit of irony, all told.) Kraft rejected a plea deal offered by prosecutors and has pleaded not guilty.

He’s also fighting the disclosure of footage from secret video cameras police installed for days at Orchids of Asia. And there seems to have been a ripple effect, with lawyers for other solicitation defendants fighting back, too.

Last month, 15 of the men charged with solicitation in Jupiter filed a joint motion seeking to prevent the public release of imagery from the hidden cameras. Although defendants “dispute the position of the prosecutors that there may be a ‘victim’ of any offense at issue in these cases, that mere possibility provides an additional basis for maintaining the confidentiality of the materials,” states their motion.

A court hearing on the video issue was last held April 12. At that hearing, Assistant State Attorney Greg Kridos said neither state prosecutors nor Jupiter Police opposed release of the video and in fact were planning to release pixelated versions.

Kridos also defended the use of cameras in the first place, saying that they had initially suspected human trafficking may have been at play. He admitted, however, that no such trafficking horrors had actually been found.

“There was nothing approaching the showing of necessity that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires,” argued Kraft’s lawyers in a March 28 motion. Police “did not seek (or receive) a probable cause finding regarding any human trafficking crimes under Florida law,” and “any suggestion of human trafficking being suspected was unfounded and irresponsible. Indeed, law enforcement peddled these falsehoods to try and manufacture a patina of necessity here, where none exists.” What’s more, information told to a judge to get the warrant for video surveillance relied on “descriptions of statements made by a health inspector, Ms. Herzog” that were in direct contradiction with what Herzog herself said in a signed report, they say.

Kraft’s lawyers call the video evidence “the fruits of an unlawful sneak-and-peek search warrant” and condemn authorities for resorting “to the most drastic, invasive, indiscriminate spying conceivable by law enforcement—taking continuous video recordings of private massages in which customers would be stripping naked as a matter of course—in order to prosecute what are at most (according to Florida’s own allegations) misdemeanor offenses.”

Opposing Kraft and the other defendants on this issue are the Associated Press, ESPN, Gannett Co. , GateHouse Media, ABC, the McClatchy Company, The New York Times Company, Orlando Sentinel Communications Company, Sun-Sentinel Company, and TEGNA (owner of local TV stations WTSp-TV and WTLV/WJXX).

“Defendants have made no valid justification for preventing access to records made public by [Florida’s constitution and law],” states a March 26 motion from the media companies. “The surveillance videos are no different than other records and become public once turned over in discovery. Any purported privacy concerns do not, and cannot, prevent disclosure.”

During the April 12 hearing, Kraft attorney William Burck pointed out that they have not sought to review the video evidence themselves as part of the discovery process, since that would make the videos public record.

A lawyer for the media companies fired back that that doesn’t matter, since the state did not exempt the video from public disclosure. “It’s a public record right now unless and until this court finds another reason that it should be held back,” Dana J. McElroy said.

That court did just that, at least temporarily. In his ruling today, Judge Hanser wrote that Kraft’s “right to a fair trial requires the disputed videotape be withheld…for a limited duration”—until a jury is sworn in, a pleas deal is accepted, or prosecutors drop the case.

“Law enforcement and the state have receded from [the] position” that human trafficking was involved, noted the judge. And everyone acknowledges that the events in question are described fully in police reports. “Clearly, these videotapes are not being sought for the purpose of assistance to identify and apprehend a perpetrator,” Hanser continued, finding “that preventing access at this time to the videotapes sought by the [media groups] is necessary to prevent a serious and imminent threat to justice.”

Meanwhile, men and women who visited Orchids of Asia and were not charged with any crimes have brought their own federal class-action lawsuit against Florida law enforcement. The 31 Jane and John Does are seeking unspecified damages, saying their privacy rights were violated by Jupiter Police Department’s filming them stripping down and getting massages.

Hua Zhang and Lei Wang, a massage-business owner and manager arrested as part of the operation, have also been seeking to prevent widespread release of the surveillance video. Zhang and Wang’s lawyers say some footage was already leaked and is being shopped around to media.

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When an overzealous parking enforcer chalks the tires of a car, a federal court ruled this week, that action counts as trespassing, not as law enforcement.

The ruling came in the case of Taylor v. Saginaw. In 2017, Alison Patricia Taylor sued the city of Saginaw, Michigan, and a parking enforcer named Tabitha Hoskins. Hoskins chalked the tires of Taylor’s car 15 times between 2014 and 2017. This was done to determine if Taylor had driven her vehicle away from the parking spot and later returned to it, or stayed parked for longer than the permitted time. The multiple markings resulted in numerous citations. Taylor’s suit argued that the chalking of her tires was an unreasonable search that violated the Fourth Amendment. Hoskins maintained that she had qualified immunity.

On Monday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of Taylor. According to the court’s decision, the city failed to prove how Taylor’s car being parked in a certain spot for a certain amount of time threatened an orderly parking system. Because of this, the chalking of Taylor’s car did not qualify for an exemption from the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

As for the trespassing aspect, the court maintained that the act of chalking the car fit the definition of “common-law trespass upon a constitutionally protected area.” A common-law trespass is defined here as physical contact with property that belongs to someone else.

As The Volokh Conspiracy‘s Orin Kerr has observed, the allegations in this case are pretty uncommon. But it’s likely that the court’s decision here applies broadly to all car owners, not just Taylor.

Could this ruling set a new legal precedent for otherwise run-of-the-mill city operations? Only time, and more lawsuits, will tell.

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