Tag: hit&run

Still no charges unveiled in Backpage case. As of Monday morning, the indictment that led to a federal shutdown of the classified-ads site Backpage.com, the seizure of its servers, and raids on the founders’ homes was still unavailable for public consumption. No entry exists on the Pacer.gov site (a clearinghouse of federal case data), and there’s no indication from the Department of Justice (DOJ) when it will be available.

As Scott Shackford reported, a DOJ spokesperson said late Friday that a federal court had ruled that case documents would remain sealed for now. The FBI also confirmed that agents had raided the Sedona, Arizona, home of Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey (reporters also witnessed a raid on co-founder James Larkin’s house) and that the website was seized because it was used to facilitate crime.

Notably, nothing so far has directly indicated that the charges relate to sex trafficking. It is possible that the feds built a case around money laundering or some other unrelated charge. The effort was a joint effort of the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and the U.S. Postal Service.

Some have attributed the raid and seizure to FOSTA, the new “sex trafficking bill” passed by Congress in March. But it has not yet been signed into law by President Trump.

So far, social media posts from myriad sex workers indicate that the shutdown of Backpage is having the exact opposite of keeping those in the sex trade safe and free from exploitation.

Anti-trafficking bill? My friend who was working off of backpage has gotten texts from THREE former pimps in the past FIVE hours, trying to get her back with promises of clients

— Gemma Paradise (@GemmaParadiseXO) April 7, 2018

FREE MINDS

FBI using “freedom of information” law to crack down on freedom of information. The classified documents released to The Intercept by former FBI agent Terry James Albury “should concern anyone who cares about civil liberties, ” writes Zack Kopplin, an investigator with the Government Accountability Project, in The Washington Post. The documents

…outline how the FBI can access journalists’ phone records without search warrants or subpoenas approved by a judge. This is despite a 2013 promise by former attorney general Eric Holder to reform rules about spying on reporters […] The documents also identify loopholes in FBI rules allowing undercover agents and informants to infiltrate and spy on members of churches, political organizations and universities — something, the Intercept said, even the FBI acknowledged was a “risk to civil liberties.” Additionally, they reveal the FBI was targeting surveillance based on race and religion.

But this isn’t the extent of the civil-liberties abuses revealed by Albury’s leak and subsequent arrest, asserts Kopplin. The way the FBI went after the whistleblowing agent is itself chilling: they used the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Since the FBI can see FOIA requests and who accesses documents on its network, it looked up when the Intercept had originally submitted a FOIA for the documents (a request that the FBI had not fulfilled when The Intercept published the leaked documents) and who had accessed those documents within the FBI around that time.

The Government Accountability Project “suggests news organizations protect sources when making FOIA requests by disguising insider knowledge as part of broader requests for data and documents that aren’t specifically tied to the source’s work or job responsibilities.”

FREE MARKETS

How the IRS handles cryptocurrency. As the 2018 deadline for filing income taxes looms, here’s a handy guide to how federal tax collectors will be handling cryptocurrency (which it considers property, not currency).

“If you made some money off bitcoin, ethereum, or another cryptocurrency, you need to declare your wallet,” reports Qz. “In the past, the IRS has mainly relied on the honor system for people to report their crypto earnings.”

However:

After a summons was issued in 2016, earlier this year Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange on the internet, was forced to hand over the details of around 13,000 users, including their taxpayer ID, name, birth date, address, and transaction records. These were some of the top-earning users from 2013 to 2015 who traded over $20,000 on the exchange in a single year.

Those whose crypto gains come post-2015 are off the hook for now, but that could change. “When US president Donald Trump signed his monumental tax bill into effect late last year, it more clearly defined cryptocurrency as a taxable entity,” explains Qz’s Georgia Frances King.

It included an amendment to section 1031 (a)(1), which concerns “like kind exchanges,” meaning any crypto being traded for another is now legally taxable. So even if you have never converted your crypto into fiat currency (i.e. the US dollar), but you have traded between two cryptos (like buying ethereum using your bitcoin), then you need to declare it. If you unintentionally earned money through one of your currencies forking, even though you didn’t have control over it, then that’s also a taxable event.

FOREVER WAR

Syrians see chemical weapons attack and airstrike. Syrian state news agency SANA reported that the Monday-morning bombs were dropped by Israeli fighter jets, after first calling them part of “American aggression”—a charge the U.S. Department of Defense denied. Over the weekend, Syrian forces set off toxic-gas bombs outside the city of Damascus, killing civilians including multiple children.

The attack—which produced ghastly images that quickly spread all over TV and social media—may change President Trump’s mind about pulling U.S. troops out of Syria entirely, suggests The New York Times:

Within hours, images of dead families sprawled in their homes threatened to change Mr. Trump’s calculus on Syria, possibly drawing him deeper into an intractable Middle Eastern war that he hoped to leave.

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday. He blamed Iran and Russia—even singling out President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by name—for their support of the Syrian government.

“Big price to pay,” he wrote, without providing details.

QUICK HITS

• Trump delusions on trade continue.

President Xi and I will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade. China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do. Taxes will become Reciprocal & a deal will be made on Intellectual Property. Great future for both countries!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 8, 2018

• Congress is back in session today after a two-week break.
• “It’s not every day that a press release takes 6 percent of the world’s aluminum off-line,” writes Bloomberg’s David Fickling. But “that’s what the U.S. Treasury Department’s announcement Friday of sanctions on United Co. Rusal Plc and its co-founder Oleg Deripaska did.”
• Paul Manafort’s lawyers are weighing how strongly to build a defense around allegations of political bias at the FBI and from other federal investigators.
• Facebook said it will notify users if their data was shared with Cambridge Analytica.
• Longtime Atlantic staffer Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the publication’s hiring and quick firing of former National Review opinion writer Kevin Williamson (whose only column while at The Atlantic declared the death of any “libertarian moment”).
• South Carolina is getting dramatic.
• The fall of Milo Yiannopoulos.
• So much winning:

The CBO is about to report that there will be trillion dollar-plus budget deficits for every year of Trump’s presidency. https://t.co/8G18oyvG50

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) April 9, 2018

Just as one effective end-run around the Fourth Amendment is to ask private companies for data they slurped up on their own, the First Amendment can be sidestepped when officials pressure the private sector into self-censorship. The end result can be rules more restrictive than the companies would impose on their own—and more intrusive than the government could get away with if it tried to impose them directly.

Jesse Walker looks at how this has been done in the past to Hollywood, broadcasters, cartoonists, musicians, and video game designers, and why we should worry about it being done to social media now.

View this article.

How many times have you heard someone defend a president’s decision by saying he knows many things we don’t and must have sound reasons?

Alas, writes Steve Chapman, that theory doesn’t apply to Donald Trump. He has access to facts that others lack, but they are wasted on him. Trump can’t be bothered to read his top-secret daily intelligence briefing (or anything else) because he’s too distracted by Fox & Friends. Trying to load his brain with verified data is like trying to pound a wooden peg through a steel plate.

View this article.

Both the boys admit they did it. Horsing around, two New Jersey 14-year-olds pulled down their pants and sat on the faces of two 12-year-old boys. As one of them later explained, “I thought it was funny and I was trying to get my friends to laugh.”

For that act, he and his buddy are on the sex offender registry for life. This was, after all, “sexual contact done for sexual gratification or to degrade or humiliate the victim.” The boys lost an appeal in 2011, with a three-judge panel writing that “although we are not unsympathetic to the arguments criticizing the application of the lifelong registration requirements…we are bound to uphold such application because that outcome is mandated by the Legislature.”

This is what our sex offender laws have done: Today, your child is more likely to end up on the registry than to be molested by someone on it, writes Lenore Skenazy.

View this article.

Auditors have found, once again, that the city of Baltimore does a lousy job of tracking how it spends state and federal grant funds. The city gets about $448 million in grants. Previous audits have come to the same conclusion, and each time, city officials vow to correct the problems.

Daron Acemoglu is no ally of robotkind. The MIT economist is one of the most prominent advocates of the theory that automation depresses employment and wages, at least for low-skilled workers.

In a 2017 paper, Acemoglu and his Boston University colleague Pascual Restrepo produced a series of maps of “robot exposure” and its economic effects in the United States. The results look awfully similar to maps of the districts that tilted Republican in the last election, with a thick red band stretching through the Rust Belt and the Deep South. As Acemoglu later told The New York Times, “The swing to Republicans between 2008 and 2016 is quite a bit stronger in commuting zones most affected by industrial robots. You don’t see much of the impact of robots in prior presidential elections.”

In other words, the white, non-college-educated, disproportionately male Americans whose old jobs are now performed by machines were especially likely to embrace Donald Trump’s form of economic populism and protectionism, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward.

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Shelli Eng lives in Erie, Illinois, a village about 100 miles due west of Chicago. For years, Eng, known as the “Bread Lady,” has sold baked goods at a local farmers market and two other locations. But then county regulators, red tape in hand, came calling. Now her business is in jeopardy.

But it really shouldn’t be, because Illinois has a law that’s meant to protect folks like Eng. Adopted in 2011, and later expanded, the state’s “cottage food” law allows home cooks to make and sell low-risk foods without using a commercial kitchen. These laws lower the barriers to entry for countless home cooks. As I noted in 2013, they “help budding culinary entrepreneurs escape often crushing regulations faced by restaurants and other food sellers.”

But the true potential of these laws haven’t been realized almost anywhere in the country, writes Baylen Linnekin. And that leaves folks like Eng vulnerable to the biases of local bureaucrats.

View this article.

You might not recognize the name Gary Gygax. But even if you’ve never rolled a critical fail on a d20, you have almost certainly consumed some movie, TV show, book, comic, computer game, or music influenced by Gygax’s most famous creation: Dungeons & Dragons, the world’s first and most popular role-playing game.

The FBI certainly knew who he was. Between 1980 and 1995, agents compiled a dossier on the gaming company TSR Inc. and Gygax, its founder. In 1980, a note on TSR stationary about an assassination plot drew the FBI’s attention, leading to a search of the company’s offices in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. The note turned out to be materials for an upcoming espionage game.

In 1983, an FBI field report about an investigation into a cocaine trafficking ring in Lake Geneva cryptically references Gygax—but whatever his alleged role was, it has since been heavily redacted by the Bureau.

The company appears again in FBI reports from 1995, as part of the agency’s sprawling investigation into the Unabomber. The FBI was apparently looking into a possible tie between the string of then-unsolved bombings and a bitter legal dispute between TSR and a rival gaming company in Fresno, California.

In an FBI field report describing the convoluted history of TSR, one source at the company describes the father of role-playing games as “eccentric and frightening,” a “drug abuser” who is “known to carry a weapon and was proud of his record of personally answering any letter coming from a prisoner.” He would be extremely uncooperative if the FBI tried to interview him, the source warned.

The report also claims Gygax set up a Liberian holding company to avoid paying taxes and “is known to be a member of the Libertarian Party.”

The FBI’s source could have been any number of professional and personal enemies Gygax made in the turbulent decade between the debut of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 and his eventual ouster from the company—once one of the fastest-growing in the United States—as it foundered under mismanagement.

But D&D survived, write C.J. Ciaramella.

View this article.

Relying on certain stated or implied limitations on the weapons to which the Second Amendment applied in Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in D.C. v. Heller (2008), U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young this week granted summary judgment to Massachusetts in a lawsuit challenging a 1998 state law that emulated the federal government’s 1994 ban on certain weapons it characterized as “assault weapons.” The federal ban expired in 2004 but the Massachusetts version remained in effect.

In their original complaint, plaintiffs David Worman et al argued that a 1998 Massachusetts state law that banned certain types of semi-automatic rifles and certain sized magazines violated their Second Amendment rights (and that a later attempt to apply the ban to other weapons not specifically listed originally but now considered to be illegitimate “copies or duplicates” constituted a 14th Amendment violation of due process)

In his decision in Worman v. Baker, Judge Young declared that “assault weapons and LCMs [large capacity magazines] are not within the scope of the personal right to ‘bear arms’ under the Second Amendment.”

Why does Young think this? Because Scalia said in Heller that some weapons of primarily military use would not necessarily be covered by the Second Amendment (“weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned…”). Young believes that qualities of the weapons and magazines covered by the challenged law mark them as of primarily military use.

That phrase in Heller that Young relies on so much, echoing the 4th Circuit’s Kolbe decision, may not bear as much weight as he thinks. The context makes it clear that Scalia is discussing what he considers “dangerous and unusual weapons” and the M16, which he names specifically in the next paragraph after mentioning “dangerous and unusual weapons,” unlike civilian “assault weapons,” in some varieties has a full-automatic firing mode.

Scalia was making an aside and not breaking down analytically the specific qualities of weapons he meant to mark as bannable. That’s not the strongest phrase on which to lay the weight of an assault weapon ban, to my read. By no means can the weapons at issue in the Massachusetts ban be considered “dangerous and unusual.”

Young grants that “assault weapons” under the Massachusetts regulations certainly are commonly used in America; nonetheless, such “present day popularity is not constitutionally material.” Young holds hold tight to Scalia’s aside about how “M-16 rifles and the like” that are “most useful in military service” may presumably be banned. He holds so tight to them that he grossly misrepresents that aside of Scalia’s as representing “the words of our constitution” which are “not mutable.”

What he’s really relying on is by no means “the words of our constitution” but an interpretation, a questionable one I’d say, of Scalia attempting to not be overly disruptive of already existing gun bans while thinking through Heller. (Besides, “assault weapons” were not at issue in the specific facts Scalia had to consider in Heller, involving D.C.’s complete ban on any readily usable weapon for self-defense in the home.)

Scalia wrote elsewhere in Heller, while attempting to reconcile his opinion with the 1939 Miller precedent, that “We therefore read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns. That accords with the historical understanding of the scope of the right.”

That statement—though no more “the words of our constitution” than Scalia’s aside about the ability to ban guns “most useful in military service”—gives weight to the plaintiffs belief that a weapon like the AR-15, for example, which is very much “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purpose” and is not “dangerous and unusual” should be protected, despite Judge Young’s interpretation.

Young’s attitude toward the Heller decision and so-called “assault weapons” has been shared by other courts in the past, including the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals the 2nd Circuit, and the 7th Circuit, though other lower court judges have disagreed. It is an issue that should be eventually considered by the Supreme Court. However, up until now, the Supreme Court has continued to avoid cases that would require them to decide whether certain rifles classified by certain states as “assault weapons” require Second Amendment protection.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued a rare (first since 2005) “national advisory” yesterday that said “For patients currently taking high doses of opioids as prescribed for pain, individuals misusing prescription opioids, individuals using illicit opioids such as heroin or fentanyl, health care practitioners, family and friends of people who have an opioid use disorder, and community members who come into contact with people at risk for opioid overdose, knowing how to use naloxone and keeping it within reach can save a life.”

It’s an encouraging sign in a culture often all too ready to believe that anyone using opioids in a risky way just deserves to die that the federal government is giving its imprimatur to one of the most realistically efficient ways to limit deaths (which can be administered as a nasal spray or via injection) associated with opioid abuse.

Some of the points the Surgeon General made in his advisory include that:

Research shows that when naloxone and overdose education are available to community members, overdose deaths decrease in those communities.² Therefore, increasing the availability and targeted distribution of naloxone is a critical component of our efforts to reduce opioid-related overdose deaths….

In most states, people who are or who know someone at risk for opioid overdose can go to a pharmacy or community-based program, to get trained on naloxone administration, and receive naloxone by “standing order,” i.e., without a patient-specific prescription.³ ….most states have laws designed to protect health care professionals for prescribing and dispensing naloxone from civil and criminal liabilities as well as Good Samaritan laws to protect people who administer naloxone or call for help during an opioid overdose emergency.^{3, 5}

“Naloxone is increasingly being used by police officers, emergency medical technicians, and non-emergency first responders to reverse opioid overdoses. There are two FDA-approved naloxone products for community use that are available by prescription, but too few community members are aware of the important role they can play to save lives.

Past Reason coverage on naloxone includes Jacob Sullum debunking the “moral hazard” argument against widespread naloxone availability; reports on widening legal availability in Pennsylvania, Maine, and California; and Ronald Bailey explaining how naloxone is one part of a general policy approach to opioids far smarter than Trump’s general “get tough” bluster.

A useful state-by-state breakdown of laws regarding naloxone access and use.