Tag: hit&run

Believe it or not, despite all the press and debate surrounding a judge’s order that Apple should create tools to help the FBI break into the iPhone owned by dead San Bernardino Terrorist Syed Farook, the company hasn’t yet actually formally replied to the order.

We know the company is resisting, arguing to the public that it’s not possible for Apple to create a device that would help bypass the security of just one phone. Their public position is that any tool Apple creates to help break the security of a phone could be subsequently replicated, either by government demand or if it somehow got out of Apple’s control and were reverse-engineered.

But the judge in the case gave Apple time to give its actual formal response to the court, and the Los Angeles Times just heard from one of Apple’s lawyers. The attorney told the Times that they are going to argue that the judge overreached in the application of the All Writs Law in her order and violated Apple’s rights to free speech:

“The government here is trying to use this statute from 1789 in a way that it has never been used before. They are seeking a court order to compel Apple to write new software, to compel speech,” [Theodore] Boutrous said in a brief interview with The Times.

Boutrous said courts have recognized that the writing of computer code is a form of expressive activity — speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment.

He indicated that Apple would argue that Congress, not the courts, is the proper venue for a debate about “the security and privacy of citizens and law enforcement needs.”

“It is not appropriate for the government to obtain through the courts what they couldn’t get through the legislative process,” he said.

People have been comparing the case to a 1977 Supreme Court decision that allowed the courts to compel phone companies to provide technology to help authorities track phone calls in an investigation. But Boutrous noted that the phone company was a heavily regulated government utility at the time and that the technology the company was being ordered to provide already existed. The phone company didn’t have to create it at the government’s demand.

Read more here. And our coverage of this encryption fight is here. 

Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed reports from Nevada, where Ron Paul fans have had an outsized influence on the state Party, to find that it seems many of his old supporters can’t see fit to go to Cruz (as many of them seemed to in Iowa) or Trump (as many seemed to in New Hampshire).

Many of them, she reports, are in fact still working hard to get voters to caucus for Rand Paul, even though he’s suspended his campaign.

Gray did find one ex-Paul operative, Carl Bunce, who is for Cruz now. He told Gray

that he was trying to get others on board, but that it was slow going; loyalty to the Paul family is still high, and many say they won’t back another candidate.

“The liberty movement is a bit fractured at the moment,” Bunce said.

Cruz’s campaign manager didn’t want to say they are going out of their way to pick up Rand’s leftovers:

“I don’t know that we fundamentally change our strategy that much more,” Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe told reporters on Saturday, the night of the South Carolina primary, when asked if libertarians were the linchpin of the campaign’s Nevada strategy. “It’s a lot different race now because of tonight and because of people getting out of the race and who’s actually invested in that state.”

Lacking real rigorous polling, we are only making educated guesses as to where the “Paul vote” went. If it’s true as one poll indicated that New Hampshire saw only around 15 percent of first-time GOP primary voters, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that many people who voted for Ron Paul in 2012 inexplicably (from a libertarian mindset) went for Trump.

However, it is always worth keeping in the front of your mind when talking about where any potential vote goes that for the majority of potential voters in a primary, the most popular choice is to not vote at all.

In my rough empiricism from communicating with hundreds of serious Paul fans in 2008 and 2012, from the ranks of the previously non-voting is where a lot of “the Paul vote” came.

It could well be that in Nevada at least, Ted Cruz is not a strong enough force to keep them from returning there.

Bunce hopes that’s not the case, and wants the liberty minded to keep themselves in the GOP game:

“It’s important for us to participate so we can retain that influence within the party,” Bunce said. “If we step out for two years, it’s a bunch of Trumpholes taking over. If we back out and don’t find someone to support and participate in the county conventions, in the state conventions, we will be left out in the cold.”

Former Brooklyn police officer Michael Dowd spent the late 80s and early 90s working out of the Seventy Fifth precinct, ripping off drug dealers and reselling their drugs, before being convicted in 1994 and spending 11 years in jail.

Dowd is back in the news in New York City. The New York Post reports:

Now he’s teaming with a former drug cohort, gang leader Adam Diaz, to sell cigars from the Dominican Republic under the brand name The Seven Five—after Dowd’s old precinct.

Diaz lives in the Dominican Republic after a prison stint in United States.

The cigars’ bands feature the men’s names along with a photo of Diaz and a silhouette of Dowd in uniform.

Printed on their wooden boxes are the phrases, “Nobody can touch me. Nobody can touch my crew,” and “The King of Brooklyn.”

At his 1994 sentencing, Dowd said he wanted to “apologize to each and every police officer that has had to work under the guise I left them two years ago.” He continued: “It’s a very difficult job and I made it much more difficult, and for that I apologize.”

Cops are upset about Dowd’s latest move.

“It’s a disgrace that he’s in business with a drug dealer,” said a former detective with the 75th precinct who is now a narcotics prosecutor told the New York Post. “But that’s probably the only friend that he has. Drug dealers will probably be the ones who buy these cigars.”

For now, the cigars are only available at one cigar outlet in Long Island. Its owner said he ordered 75 boxes as a publicity stunt, but negative reactions from his clientele have convinced him not to re-order.

The cigars are not yet available for sale online. Tabacalera Palma decided to make the cigars in part because of a 2014 documentary about Dowd and Diaz called The Seven Five.

Not to be outdone by Williams College—a private institution that recently prohibited students from bringing a controversial conservative to campus—California State University in Los Angeles has taken the brazen step of forbidding its students from hosting conservative journalist Ben Shapiro. 

Shapiro was invited by the campus’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, but Cal State administrators have delayed his appearance—so they can find a liberal speaker to debate him, they claim. 

CSULA President William Covino justified the decision on the grounds that he was actually honoring the university’s “dedication to the free exchange of ideas”: 

After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity. Such an event will better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas and the value of considering multiple viewpoints.” 

This is pure Doublespeak. The free exchange of ideas on campus is best served when people are, um, free to exchange ideas. Students should feel welcome to invite additional speakers if they wish, but must be free of institutional pressure to share the platform they are providing. 

Covino’s suggestion that a conservative speaker must be balanced by a liberal speaker is also stunningly hypocritical. As The Daily Caller‘s Blake Neff points out, on Wednesday—one day before the planned Shapiro event—CSULA will have an event featuring Angela Davis and Tim Wise. Davis is a far-left feminist and member of the Communist Party. Wise is best described as anti-racism activist who thinks all white people are, to varying degrees, racist. The subject of their lecture is “the U.S.’s uncritical embrace of individualism, myth of meritocracy, unchallenged white supremacy, and entrenched institutional inequity in our society.” I can’t imagine there will be much diversity of thought at this event. Does this not violate Corvino’s supposed dedication to “multiple viewpoints”? 

Shapiro has vowed to go to campus anyway. In a piece for Breitbart—where he is a senior editor—he described CSULA administrators as “fascists” and “jackbooted thugs.” I disagree with Shapiro on plenty of things, but in this case, the hyperbole seems well-deserved. 

A state can’t make it illegal to call oneself a psychologist or to enforce laws “limiting the ability of individuals to dispense personal advice about mental or emotional problems based on knowledge gleaned in a graduate class,” according to an interesting opinion from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas. (The decision is from last month, but just came to my attention this week.)

Mary Louise Serafine sued Tim F. Branaman and Darrel D. Spinks, the heads of Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, over their official demand that, while she was running for state Senate as a Republican in 2010, she cease describing herself as a “psychologist” and that she “desist from offering or providing psychological services.” (She described herself as an attorney and psychologist on her campaign website.)

Serafine insisted that this demand violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. She is not an officially licensed psychologist by Texas law, nor does she have a degree in psychology. She did do a four-year post-doc fellowship at Yale (where she got her law degree) in psychology and was, for a time, a member of the American Psychological Association.

In January 2011 the state Attorney General’s office, in response to the Board’s complaint, sent Serafine a threatening letter about her illicit use of the term.

Serafine claimed that the relevant state law the Board was enforcing “infringed her political speech, commercial speech, equal protection rights, and right to earn a living. She also challenged the Act as vague, overbroad, and a prior restraint.”

A district court rejected all her claims, and she appealed.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld some of her arguments. In doing so, they presented some interesting thoughts on the whole “professional speech doctrine” that the Board wanted to use to quash Serafine’s expression, and helped limit the overbearing enforcement of professional licensing laws.

The Firth Circuit points out that “the extent to which a state can use its licensing power to restrict speech is unsettled. The Supreme Court has never formally endorsed the professional speech doctrine” and that “Assuming that the professional speech doctrine is valid, its application should be limited.”

Further, “Where the personal nexus between professional and client does not exist, and a speaker does not purport to be exercising judgment on behalf of any particular individual with whose circumstances he is directly acquainted, government regulation ceases to function as legitimate regulation of professional practice with only incidental impact on speech; it becomes regulation of speaking or publishing as such, subject to the First Amendment…”

The Fifth Circuit concludes, then, that:

 Serafine’s speech on her campaign website was far removed from the context of professional speech. She was not providing advice to any particular client but communicating with the voters at large, so the professional speech doctrine is inapplicable. Serafine’s campaign statements are entitled to full First Amendment protection….[and since] Serafine was seeking votes, not clients…the inclusion of “psychologist” on the website was not commercial speech, and therefore the decisions involving a state’s legitimate power to restrict the use of titles in the commercial context are inapplicable.

The Fifth Circuit also considered her claim that the statues she challenged, Sections 501.001 through 501.505 of the Texas Occupational Code, were unconstitutionally overbroad, and agreed.

It concluded, after noting that the giving of psychological advice, even if paid for it, is not in and of itself “commercial speech” which is properly constured as speech which merely proposes a commercial interaction, that aspects of the statute as written are indeed overbroad.

Why? While the law “certainly includes professional psychologists, it also applies to other professionals and citizens. Besides leaders for AA, Weight-Watchers, or other self-help groups, someone who has taken graduate classes in psychology, fitness, or counseling and has written a marriage-advice column or parenting blog could conceivably be within the ambit of” the law.

The Court refers to a previous case I reported on in which occupational licensing laws in Kentucky regarding psychology were literally used to censor a newspaper advice column, until the columnist, John Rosemond, won his suit.

A press release from Serafine points out that the precedent in her case could, and likely should, affect other existing state-level psychology licensing schemes.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is publishing two new studies on global sea level trends and their effects. The first study led by researchers at Rutgers University is based on their analysis of a new data set of regional relative sea level reconstruction that takes into account things like glacial rebound and so forth. They report, as the Rutgers press release notes:

Global sea level rose faster in the 20th century than in any of the 27 previous centuries, according to a Rutgers University-led study published today.

Moreover, without global warming, global sea level would have risen by less than half the observed 20th century increase and might even have fallen.

Instead, global sea level rose by about 14 centimeters, or 5.5 inches, from 1900 to 2000. That’s a substantial increase, especially for vulnerable, low-lying coastal areas.

“The 20th century rise was extraordinary in the context of the last three millennia – and the rise over the last two decades has been even faster,” said Robert Kopp, the lead author and an associate professor in Rutgers’ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Of particular note, the study also reports that “global sea level declined by about 8 centimeters [3 inches] from 1000 to 1400, a period when the planet cooled by about 0.2 degrees Celsius [0.4 degrees Fahrenheit].” This suggests that sea level fluctuations, largely due to melting or expanding glaciers and icesheets, is fairly sensitive to relatively small changes in global average temperature. It bears keeping in mind that the Last Glacial Maximum, about 21,000 years ago, was 3°C to 5°C cooler than the present. At that time sea level was about 400 feet lower than now. Average global temperature has increased about 1°C over past century or so.

The researchers calculate that “it’s very likely that global sea level will rise by 1.7 to 4.3 feet in the 21st century if the world continues to rely heavily upon fossil fuels. Phasing out fossil fuels will reduce the very likely rise to between 0.8 and 2.0 feet.”

Another just released report found that the number of nuisance high tide floods in American seaside communities has been considerably exacerbated by the last century’s rise in sea level. In fact, the researchers report, according to the New York Times, that “roughly three-quarters of the tidal flood days now occurring in towns along the East Coast would not be happening in the absence of the rise in the sea level caused by human emissions.” 

For example, in the period between 1955 and 1984 the number of flood days experienced by Boston, Atlantic City, Philadelphia, Washington, Charleston, La Jolla, and San Francisco were 51, 83, 96, 265, 132, 32, and 169 respectively. In the most recent period between 1985 and 2014, the number of flood days in those cities increased to 90, 414, 199, 568, 496, 133, and 286 respectively.

Interestingly, a study from researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported earlier in February that thirsty continents were absorbing more water and thus marginally slowing the rate of sea level rise. However, they also report that as the continents’ absorptive capacities fill up, the rate of sea level rise will accelerate.

• Marco Rubio will not attend the Conservative Political Action Conference.
• Trump supporters are a bunch of authoritarians, says Vox.
• GOP Senate leaders holding firm on not having Supreme Court nominee hearings… for now.
• Everything you need to know about President Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo.
• Fourteen new Zika investigations in the U.S.
• Another university bans a conservative speaker from campus.

Hoo boy. Via the Twitter feed of Mike Hewlett comes news of a recent court ruling that should worry us all.

Fields vs. City of Philadephia concerns two people photographing and filming the police in public areas. Each had their cameras confiscated. From a Legal Intelligencer account of the action:

U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued his ruling in two consolidated cases filed against the city of Philadelphia by citizens whose cellphones were confiscated after they either photographed police activity or were barred from filming police activity.

Neither of the plaintiffs, Richard Fields nor Amanda Geraci, were filming the police conduct because they had a criticism or challenge to what they were seeing. For Fields, he thought the conduct was an interesting scene and would make for a good picture, Kearney said. And for Geraci, she was a legal observer trained to observe the police, Kearney said.

“The citizens urge us to find, for the first time in this circuit, photographing police without any challenge or criticism is expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment,” Kearney said.

Fields was taking pictures of cops outside a house party they were looking to bust. When he wouldn’t leave or answer questions about what he was doing, he was arrested and cited for obstructing “public passages.” Geraci was at an anti-fracking rally and about to film the police but was prevented from doing so. Both claimed in court that they were retaliated against for exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

The court didn’t agree. The good news? Most courts have upheld the right to photograph the po-po as long as they’re in a public place. The decision is being appealed and will likely be overturned. At The Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Eugene Volokh writes,

Whether one is physically speaking (to challenge or criticize the police or to praise them or to say something else) is relevant to whether one is engaged in expression. But it’s not relevant to whether one is gathering information, and the First Amendment protects silent gathering of information (at least by recording in public) for possible future publication as much as it protects loud gathering of information.

Your being able to spend money to express your views is protected even when you don’t say anything while writing the check (since your plan is to use the funds to support speech that takes place later). Your being able to associate with others for expressive purposes, for instance by signing a membership form or paying your membership dues, is protected even when you aren’t actually challenging or criticizing anyone while associating (since your plan is for your association to facilitate speech that takes place later). The same should be true of your recording events in public places.

Volokh predicts a reversal of ruling on appeal. Here’s hoping.

Related: 2011 Reason TV video on “the war on cameras”:

Adelanto is a small town (population: 31.000) in the deserts of inland Southern California where they send people to prison. That’s what it’s known for—though for residents of the Inland Empire, it’s also known for being worse-off than all the other towns in the area. (During my time living in nearby Barstow, this became a reoccurring joke for us at the newspaper, as Adelanto was always just below Barstow as being worse off in every single economic, crime, and demographic indicator. “At least we’re not Adelanto,” was the refrain.)

It’s a fairly poor community, with an average media household wage of $37,000, much lower than the state average of $60,000.

These desert communities were also hit very, very hard by the housing collapse. Home construction boomed in these places, fed by a bubble that put people in freshly built houses they really couldn’t afford. After the bubble burst, it was just about ground zero for the worst parade of foreclosures, nearly turning blocks into ghost towns.

But when California citizens voted to loosen marijuana laws and allow for medical use, most of these communities resisted and passed ordinances to prohibit pot dispensaries in their neighborhoods. Blame it on the culture of the drug war: Citizens of these desert communities sometimes directly experience the effects of drug addiction by people that they actually know and end up concluding that the problem is that we’re not fighting hard enough. The economic arguments in favor of allowing for sale of marijuana held little sway. Too many people thought it was just bad news.

Now, call it desperation or an enterprising spirit: Adelanto is embracing the future of marijuana legalization. What these desert towns have to offer is lots of geography, and Adelanto has decided to open it up for legal, commercial marijuana cultivation. Adelanto, which once flirted with bankruptcy, is now seeing a land rush and people willing to spend millions to secure property and permits to grow marijuana legally, considering a future where millions of Californians will legally be permitted to enjoy weed recreationally.

Steven Greenhut briefly mentioned Adelanto recently when he wrote about the complex politics and legal issues when drafting and implementing marijuana regulations in California. Brooke Edward Staggs of the Orange County Register trekked over to Adelanto to see what the town was hoping for. It’s only the second city in Southern California to permit commercial marijuana growing and they’re predicting that being ahead of the curve will pay off:

Joseph Brady, president of the commercial real estate firm the Bradco Companies, said that before Adelanto voted to allow cultivation he’d get one call a week with people interested in buying land or buildings. Since the September vote, he’s been averaging five calls a day.

“I’ve had a broker’s license since March 1980,” Brady said. “I have never in my life seen anything like this happen.”

One plot was valued at $1.5 million before the zoning changed to allow cultivation, he said; now it’s in escrow for $4 million.

[Elizabeth] Brown, who’s with Lee & Associates, said land that was going for 50 to 90 cents per square foot is now going for $12 to $14.

But is this going to be a boom or another bubble? That is the question. Edwards Staggs doesn’t talk about the housing bubble, but she does mention another bubble that followed out in the California desert. For a couple of years, solar energy plants were going to save everybody from the recession. Bolstered by money potentially available from the federal economic stimulus, dozens of solar projects were proposed for the desert last decade. In reality, most of those proposals went nowhere and nothing happened. Only a small fraction of those projects ever came to fruition, and people discovered that solar plants actually were not big job generators.

In this case, given the lack of competition, the city has to figure out how much it wants to milk from growers for its own coffers. The reporter notes that a tax plan similar to nearby Desert Hot Springs (the other town to permit cultivation) could net Adelanto $6 million per year if all goes well, equal to nearly half of the city’s entire annual budget. But they’re discussing having even higher rates to try to get even more money. The big unknown is whether other cities might change their minds and decide to allow pot growers in, something that is bound to happen if Adelanto succeeds and sloughs off its reputation as the poorest small town in the High Desert. So they have to consider in advance what other towns might potentially do and what incentives they might create to draw away this new industry.

In the meantime, it’s nevertheless interesting to note that a town that once focused on its role in America’s obsession with incarceration may find its economic survival in the winding down of the drug war. (And as an interesting touch, it could end up driving out the local representation from General Atomics Aeronautics Systems, the manufacturers of the Predator drone, because their landlords can get more money from the marijuana growers.)

President Obama has again proposed a plan to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, more than seven years after first signing an executive order mandating its closure.

Obama’s proposed plan involves the “careful” transfer of 35 detainees to other countries, expediting the review process for the possible transfer of the other 56 detainees to other countries, use of “all of the legal tools” to resolve remaining detainee cases before military commissions, and transferring detainees who cannot be sent overseas to an undetermined facility in the United States.

Obama promised to keep working on closing Guantanamo at his last State of the Union, but nothing in this proposal appears like anything that couldn’t have proposed last month or last year. Critics of the closure of Guantanamo Bay, like Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), say they want to know more about the “terrorist activities and affiliations” of detainees before approving any plan on closing Gitmo.

Obama’s first attempt to close Guantanamo, in 2009, was thwarted in large part by then Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Before announcing the current plan, the White House started a feud with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Reid’s likely replacement as Senate Democratic leader, over terror funding (and/or?) the Iran deal. Schumer had complained, as New York politicians are wont to do, that the federal government was not sending New York enough taxpayer money for counter-terrorism.

“At some point, Sen. Schumer’s credibility in talking about national security issues, particularly when the facts are as they are when it relates to homeland security, have to be affected by the position that he’s taken on other issues,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said last week, referring to Schumer’s opposition to the Iran deal rather than attempting to make some kind of principled case for smarter federal spending on counter-terrorism. That failure, and Obama’s apparent relish in bucking Congress on issues ranging from foreign policy to immigration, don’t bode well for the Obama administration’s prospects of success on closing Guantanamo.

Meanwhile, Republicans like the presidential candidate Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, worry that closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay would be just a worrying step toward something they consider even worse. “He is releasing terrorists that our soldiers bled and died to capture,” Cruz told a CNN town hall last week, misrepresenting the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo. “And the next president is going to have to send soldiers out to capture them again or kill them when they return to waging jihad.”

Cruz continued: “And I fear that by the end of this year President Obama plans to give the Guantanamo Navy Base back to Cuba, which would be undermining U.S. national security interests profoundly.”

At least he’s a defender of the Constitution and not a neo-con?