Tag: posts

How is it
possible that a motorist pulled over for a rolling stop could end
up being forcibly subjected to two X-rays, two digital probes of
his anus, three enemas, and a colonoscopy, none of which discovered
the slightest trace of the drugs that police claim to have thought
he was hiding inside himself? That is the question raised by
a federal lawsuit that received wide
attention last week after it was highlighted by KOB,
the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque. The answer, Jacob Sullum
writes in Forbes, says a lot about the outrageous
indignities we have come to tolerate in the name of the war on
drugs, which has undermined our civil liberties to the point that
what happened to David Eckert after he was stopped in Deming, New
Mexico, seemed perfectly justified to the cops who detained him,
the prosecutor who approved their application for a search warrant,
the judge who granted it, and the doctors who helped execute
it.

Read the whole article.

How is it
possible that a motorist pulled over for a rolling stop could end
up being forcibly subjected to two X-rays, two digital probes of
his anus, three enemas, and a colonoscopy, none of which discovered
the slightest trace of the drugs that police claim to have thought
he was hiding inside himself? That is the question raised by
a federal lawsuit that received wide
attention last week after it was highlighted by KOB,
the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque. The answer, Jacob Sullum
writes in Forbes, says a lot about the outrageous
indignities we have come to tolerate in the name of the war on
drugs, which has undermined our civil liberties to the point that
what happened to David Eckert after he was stopped in Deming, New
Mexico, seemed perfectly justified to the cops who detained him,
the prosecutor who approved their application for a search warrant,
the judge who granted it, and the doctors who helped execute
it.

Read the whole article.

It’s no secret that customers
hate how airlines treat them. According to the latest ratings by
the American Customer Satisfaction Index,
airlines rank lower than post offices. The only companies
customers hate more are cable/satellite television and Internet
providers.

Case in point: US Airways kicked a blind man off a flight from
Philadelphia to Long Island Wednesday because he couldn’t stow his
service dog to their satisfaction while the plane was still stuck
on the tarmac. Here’s how Long Island Newsday
described the incident:

US Airways spokeswoman Liz Landau said [Albert] Rizzi was
removed — and the flight later canceled — after he became “verbally
abusive” with the unnamed attendant.

“Mr. Rizzi became disruptive and refused to comply with crew
member instructions when the flight attendant asked him to secure
his service dog at his feet,” the airline said in a statement. “As
a result of his disruptive behavior, the crew returned to the gate
and removed Mr. Rizzi and his service dog from the flight.”

But Rizzi said his last-row seat aboard the de Havilland Dash-8
turboprop plane had no under-seat area, and his request to move to
an open seat was ignored.

He said his dog, Doxy, was first placed under the seat of a
nearby passenger, but when Flight 4384 experienced a departure
delay of more than 1 1/2 hours, the dog wandered out to the aisle —
and lay on the floor with his head under Rizzi’s legs.

Rizzi said the attendant told him curtly about 9:45 p.m. that
the dog needed to be “stowed.”

Rizzi received support from several passengers against the
attendant. The crew responded by returning the plane to the gate
and kicking all of them off to take a bus instead.

We’re all familiar with airline safety theater – the pretense
that when the plane is obviously stuck on the tarmac for lengthy
delays everybody is supposed to stay seated with everything stowed
as though the plane was going to leap up into the air suddenly and
begin its flight. The dog didn’t need to be “stowed” while the
plane was just sitting any more than anybody else needed to be
sitting with their seat belts fastened, seat backs up and all
gadgets turned off.

Now that the FAA is going to ease rules on gadget use on
flights, will we start seeing passenger-recorded videos of these
incidents the way people record police? And if so, what impact will
it have on the way airlines treat customers? As Ron Bailey
noted, when Rialto, Calif., required police officers to wear
cameras, complaints dropped 88 percent and use of force dropped 60
percent.

If imperious behavior by flight crew starts getting called out
with video footage, maybe the public response will force better
behavior. On the flip side, maybe Rizzi and his dog were being
disruptive jerks after all, and if so, footage would vindicate
their treatment.

Jonathan Rauch revisits his
book, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought,
in which he defended what he called “liberal science”-liberal
societies’ open-ended, decentralized system for developing
knowledge by subjecting ideas, and often their proponents, to
public criticism-from then-newfangled attacks by those who sought
to protect minorities from excoriating or discriminatory speech. He
believes that today the case for restricting speech in the name of
tolerance is weaker than ever.

View this article.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican Congressman from Wisconsin
and a chief architect of the Patriot Act, has made headlines for

criticizing the NSA’s domestic spying. He considers the spying
– and Dianne Feinstein’s recently
proposed legislation to codify it into legal legitimacy – a

“scary” overreach of federal powers that undermines civil
liberties. Earlier this week, Sensenbrenner met with members of the
European Parliament to discuss his plan for reining the agency
in.

The meeting took place at the Parliament’s
Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs’ hearing on
the United States’ mass surveillance of EU citizens. According to

the Guardian, it is likely the first time a
US congressman has delivered testimony before a European parliament
committee.

Sensenbrenner, who was the chairman of the House Judiciary
Committee during the 9/11 attacks, told the committee that while he
continues to support the intentions and effectiveness of the
Patriot Act, he believes it has been used misused and abused by the
NSA.

Sensenbrenner’s testimony, from
PJ Media:

Congress knew the country needed new tools and broader
authorities to combat those who meant to harm us, but we never
intended to allow the National Security Agency to peer
indiscriminately into the lives of innocent people all over the
world.

I firmly believe the Patriot Act saved lives by strengthening
the ability of intelligence agencies to track and stop potential
terrorists, but in the past few years, the National Security Agency
has weakened, misconstrued and ignored the civil liberty
protections we drafted into the law,” he said, adding that the NSA
“ignored restrictions painstakingly crafted by lawmakers and
assumed a plenary authority we never imagined.

Worse, the NSA has cloaked its operations behind such a thick
cloud of secrecy that, even if the NSA promised reforms, we would
lack the ability to verify them.

Sensenbrenner then discussed has proposed legislation. The

USA Freedom Act, which he co-introduced with Senator Pat Leahy
(D-VT), aims to end
metadata collection and create several other “privacy
protections” for citizens. It has so far
garnered more than 100 co-sponsors as well as endorsements from
groups like the ACLU and the NRA. 

Although Sensenbrenner informed the committee members that there
was little his bill could realistically do to curtail overseas
spying on their citizens, the Guardian
reports that his testimony was still “well received.”

Writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, Case Western
Reserve Law Professor Jonathan Adler is
skeptical:

According to the President’s announcement, insurance companies
will be allowed to renew policies that were in force as of October
1, 2013 for one additional year, even if they fail to meet relevant
PPACA requirements. What is the legal basis for this change? The
Administration has not cited any. (See, e.g., this
letter to state insurance commissioners explaining the
change.) According to various press
reports, the Administration argues it may
do this as a matter of enforcement discretion (much as it
did with immigration). In other words, the Administration is not
changing the law. It’s just announcing it will not enforce federal
law (while simultaneouslythreatening
to veto legislation that would authorize the step the
President has decided to take).

Does this make the renewal of non-compliant policies legal? No.
The legal requirement remains on the books so the relevant health
insurance plans remain illegal under federal law. The President’s
decision does not change relevant state laws either.  So
insurers will still need to obtain approval from state insurance
commissioners. This typically requires submitting rates and plan
specifications for approval. This can take some time, and is
disruptive because most insurance companies have already set their
offerings for the next year. It’s no wonder that some insurance
commissioners have already indicated they
have no plans to approve non-compliant plans.

Yet even if state commissioners approve the plans, they will
still be illegal under federal law. 

We’ve already seen resistance from state insurance
commissioners, who have argued that the president’s proposed tweak

simply isn’t feasible. And the health insurance industry
doesn’t seem particularly thrilled with the plan either. Insurers
have a meeting at the White House today, so we’ll presumably have a
better idea of where health plans stand by the end of the
day. 

Writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, Case Western
Reserve Law Professor Jonathan Adler is
skeptical:

According to the President’s announcement, insurance companies
will be allowed to renew policies that were in force as of October
1, 2013 for one additional year, even if they fail to meet relevant
PPACA requirements. What is the legal basis for this change? The
Administration has not cited any. (See, e.g., this
letter to state insurance commissioners explaining the
change.) According to various press
reports, the Administration argues it may
do this as a matter of enforcement discretion (much as it
did with immigration). In other words, the Administration is not
changing the law. It’s just announcing it will not enforce federal
law (while simultaneouslythreatening
to veto legislation that would authorize the step the
President has decided to take).

Does this make the renewal of non-compliant policies legal? No.
The legal requirement remains on the books so the relevant health
insurance plans remain illegal under federal law. The President’s
decision does not change relevant state laws either.  So
insurers will still need to obtain approval from state insurance
commissioners. This typically requires submitting rates and plan
specifications for approval. This can take some time, and is
disruptive because most insurance companies have already set their
offerings for the next year. It’s no wonder that some insurance
commissioners have already indicated they
have no plans to approve non-compliant plans.

Yet even if state commissioners approve the plans, they will
still be illegal under federal law. 

We’ve already seen resistance from state insurance
commissioners, who have argued that the president’s proposed tweak

simply isn’t feasible. And the health insurance industry
doesn’t seem particularly thrilled with the plan either. Insurers
have a meeting at the White House today, so we’ll presumably have a
better idea of where health plans stand by the end of the
day. 

Senior Editor Peter Suderman
reviews the new zombies-on-Mars movie, The Last Days on
Mars:

Zombies, once the exclusive province of low-budget horror, seem
to be just about everywhere in pop-culture these days — on popular
TV shows, in big budget movies and teen-targeted comedies and
interspersed with classic literature. I suppose it was only a
matter of time until they made it to Mars.

No one ever says the word “zombie” in “The Last Days on Mars,”
but there’s no question that it is a zombie movie. And aside from
the extraterrestrial location, it’s really a rather conventional
one, in which a small group of people in a remote area must fight
for their lives when a viral outbreak starts turning them into
power-tool-wielding undead menaces.

The future undead and their victims are near-future astronauts
on an early, six-month manned mission to the Red Planet. It’s a
lonely gig in an inhospitable world, but they’ve got only 19 hours
left (really, the movie could have been called “The Last Day on
Mars”) in their inflated Martian living habitat. Mission
specialist Vincent Campbell (Liev Shreiber) longs for the
blue sky and green grass of Earth, and wants to start the six-month
commute home as fast as possible.

But some of the team wants to work until the very end. One of
the scientists (played by Goran Kostic) gets special
permission from mission leader Charles Brunel (Elias
Koteas) to make a last minute run to fix a sensor. Or so he says.
He’s actually off to collect a specimen he believes could prove the
existence of microbial life on Mars.

Life on Mars! Do undead zombie astronauts count? The movie
lumbers forward in standard zombie-pic fashion, pitting man against
walking dead in a familiar array of sterile corridors, pitch-black
exteriors and strobe-lit hallways. It’s paint-by-numbers sci-fi
monster movie stuff, and it borrows a lot from both the original
“Alien” and John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of “The Thing.”

Read the whole review in The Washington
Times. 

Perhaps a little late to the game, the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has joined its
counterparts in
Austria, Germany, and elsewhere in purchasing 3D printers to
see what this fuss about what Reason’s Brian Doherty calls
“the
unstoppable plastic gun” is about. Like everybody else, the
folks at the all-you-need-is-a band-and-it’s-a-party agency
discovered that 3D-printed guns do, in fact, go bang, though
whether they do so in the intended way depends on the material you
use to build them.

The ATF chose the Liberator, the first successfully fired model,
to test. Innovators have since moved on to
rifles,
pepperboxes,
semiautomatics, and even a
Model 1911 printed from stainless steel.

Videos posted online on the ATF’s YouTube channel (yes, really)
show a Liberator built from ABS plastic firing without drama, while
a model printed in translucent VisiJet
shatters in spectacular fashion. (Pro tip: Don’t use VisiJet
when printing your own gun.)

A helpful
fact sheet posted online promises that “ATF makes every effort
to keep abreast of novel firearms technology and firearms
trafficking schemes.” It also outlines the strict regulations
governing firearms manufacture and sale and vows that “ATF
investigates any cases in which technological advances allow
individuals to avoid complying with these laws.”

Of course, the whole advantage of 3D printing technology, and
other innovations that enable DIY manufacture of restricted and
forbidden objects, is that they render the law largely
unenforceable, since the activity takes place away from officious
eyes. You can put any statute you want on the books, but there’s
not much you can do to regulate what goes on in home workshops.

Which is why the Department of Homeland Security has
pronounced 3D-printed guns “impossible” to control.

Perhaps a little late to the game, the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has joined its
counterparts in
Austria, Germany, and elsewhere in purchasing 3D printers to
see what this fuss about what Reason’s Brian Doherty calls
“the
unstoppable plastic gun” is about. Like everybody else, the
folks at the all-you-need-is-a band-and-it’s-a-party agency
discovered that 3D-printed guns do, in fact, go bang, though
whether they do so in the intended way depends on the material you
use to build them.

The ATF chose the Liberator, the first successfully fired model,
to test. Innovators have since moved on to
rifles,
pepperboxes,
semiautomatics, and even a
Model 1911 printed from stainless steel.

Videos posted online on the ATF’s YouTube channel (yes, really)
show a Liberator built from ABS plastic firing without drama, while
a model printed in translucent VisiJet
shatters in spectacular fashion. (Pro tip: Don’t use VisiJet
when printing your own gun.)

A helpful
fact sheet posted online promises that “ATF makes every effort
to keep abreast of novel firearms technology and firearms
trafficking schemes.” It also outlines the strict regulations
governing firearms manufacture and sale and vows that “ATF
investigates any cases in which technological advances allow
individuals to avoid complying with these laws.”

Of course, the whole advantage of 3D printing technology, and
other innovations that enable DIY manufacture of restricted and
forbidden objects, is that they render the law largely
unenforceable, since the activity takes place away from officious
eyes. You can put any statute you want on the books, but there’s
not much you can do to regulate what goes on in home workshops.

Which is why the Department of Homeland Security has
pronounced 3D-printed guns “impossible” to control.