Month: August 2014

Connecticut cops can detain citizens for no
other reason than the suspicion they hold for another person, all
in the name of “officer safety.” According to a recent ruling from
the state’s highest court, if you are in a public place with a
person who the cops want to arrest, they can detain you also—even
if they have no reason to suspect you of doing anything wrong. On
its face the ruling is not all that grandiose, but in a
passionately written dissenting opinion Justice Eveleigh explains
why this verdict tramples on citizens’ Fourth Amendment
rights:

I agree with the majority that the police have a legitimate
interest in protecting themselves. There must be, however, some
restrictions placed on the intent. In my view, there are several
potential unconscionable ramifications to the majority opinion. For
instance, if a suspect with an outstanding warrant is talking to
his neighbor’s family near the property line, can the police now
detain the entire family as part of the encounter with the suspect?
If the suspect is waiting at a bus stop with six other strangers,
can they all be detained?

If the same suspect is observed leaving a house and stopped
in the front yard, can the police now seize everyone in the house
to ensure that no one will shoot them while they question the
suspect? What if the suspect is detained in a neighborhood known to
have a high incident of crime, can the police now seize everyone in
the entire neighborhood to ensure their safety while they detain
the suspect? There simply is no definition of who is a
”companion” in the majority opinion. I would require more than
mere ”guilt by association.” Ever mindful of Franklin’s
admonition, we cannot use the omnipresent specter of safety as a
guise to authorize government intrusion.

As Techdirt.com notes, such expanded power for the police could
allow them to “use spurious reasons to detain people they just
don’t want around—like
eyewitnesses and photographers.”

The verdict comes from the case
State of Connecticut v. Jeremy Kelly, where the
defendant was seeking to have evidence thrown out of his trial
because he claims that he was unlawfully detained by police and,
therefore, his fourth amendment right against unreasonable search
and seizure was violated. 

In 2007, Kelly was walking alongside another man into a driveway
when two undercover officers determined that his walking companion
fit the description of a guy they were looking for who had violated
his probation. The officers stopped their car in front of the
driveway, one of them displayed a badge and said, “I’m a police
officer.” The officer then told both men to come over to the
vehicle, even though the cops at that point in time really only had
a particular interest in one of the men. 

Both men did not comply with the officer’s command and
attempted to run away. The cops eventually caught up with the two
of them and that is when they discovered Kelly was carrying
cocaine.

So, he got nine years in prison. And the man that he was with?
He wasn’t the guy police were looking for.

• Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is finally
  being interviewed by the Army today regarding the manner by
  which he left post in Afghanistan and ended up in the clutches of
  the Taliban five years ago.
• A panel of federal appeals court judges in Cincinnati is
  hearing arguments about
  four separate states’ gay marriage recognition bans today. The
  cases come from Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, and Kentucky.
• Deaths attributed to the Ebola virus have
  topped 900. Saudi Arabia is now investigating a potential
  case.
• Missouri
  executed its seventh death row inmate for the year today. It’s
  the first execution since it took two hours for Arizona to drug a
  guy to death.
• Everybody is worrying that Russia is going to
  invade Eastern Ukraine any minute now, though they’ve been
  worried about this happening for quite some time.
• The Republican National Committee is
  siding with Uber against regulators as a fundraising
  effort.

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Back in January, the new administration of Honduran President
Juan Orlando Hernandez was hyping the possibility of what
were now officially called Zones for Economic Development and
Employment, or ZEDEs. The concept has been known by many names:
charter cities, LEAP (for “Legal, Economic, Administrative,
Political”) zones, free cities, and startup cities. The
general idea is creating zones within a country that can experiment
with different economic, regulatory, and legal systems than the
rest of the country—with the hope that these innovations might lead
that sector to prosper more than the country at large.

Honduras is—again—a step closer to creating such zones. As
interviews in July with many people involved in the process or
watching it eagerly for signs of real progress showed, it’s still
many steps away from them becoming real. 

It’s not surprising that the kind of radical, perhaps even
desperate, experimentation that ZEDEs represent would get the most
traction not in some place like Switzerland or Sweden, but a place
exactly as troubled as Honduras, as a sort of Hail Mary pass to
create some legal safety and economic sanity.

As Brian Doherty explains, the ZEDE concept has to fight against
local hostility, government corruption, and a possible turn toward
being merely business-friendly and not radically innovative on its
way to reality.

View this article.

Back in January, the new administration of Honduran President
Juan Orlando Hernandez was hyping the possibility of what
were now officially called Zones for Economic Development and
Employment, or ZEDEs. The concept has been known by many names:
charter cities, LEAP (for “Legal, Economic, Administrative,
Political”) zones, free cities, and startup cities. The
general idea is creating zones within a country that can experiment
with different economic, regulatory, and legal systems than the
rest of the country—with the hope that these innovations might lead
that sector to prosper more than the country at large.

Honduras is—again—a step closer to creating such zones. As
interviews in July with many people involved in the process or
watching it eagerly for signs of real progress showed, it’s still
many steps away from them becoming real. 

It’s not surprising that the kind of radical, perhaps even
desperate, experimentation that ZEDEs represent would get the most
traction not in some place like Switzerland or Sweden, but a place
exactly as troubled as Honduras, as a sort of Hail Mary pass to
create some legal safety and economic sanity.

As Brian Doherty explains, the ZEDE concept has to fight against
local hostility, government corruption, and a possible turn toward
being merely business-friendly and not radically innovative on its
way to reality.

View this article.

As Scott Shackford
noted on Monday, enforcement of “the right to be forgotten”
continues apace in the European Union. The Guardian

reports that as of July 18, Google had received 91,000
requests that it remove links to embarrassing or inconvenient
content from its search results. Those requests become legally
enforceable demands when a country’s privacy protection agency
sides with a complainant, based on a subjective, amorphous standard
established
by the European Court of Justice last May. So far Google has
granted most requests (53 percent) upon receiving them, refused
about a third, and asked for additional information about the rest.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who has emerged as a prominent
and passionate critic of this censorship,
condemned it again today as he released Wikimedia’s first
annual transparency report:

History is a human right, and one of the worst things that a
person can do is attempt to use force to silence another….I’ve
been in the public eye for quite some time. Some people say good
things; some people say bad things…That’s history, and I would
never use any kind of legal process to try to suppress it.

Wales provided
additional information about 60 or so Wikipedia pages that
Google has agreed not to include in its E.U. search results. Here
are four of them, which are related to four requests:

http://ift.tt/1svb85v
(photo of a guitarist)

http://ift.tt/1zTwqx0
(article about “an Irish criminal, said to have been one of
Ireland’s most successful bank robbers”)

http://ift.tt/1zTwrkw
(article about “a criminal group active in the 70’s in robberies,
kidnappings, drug trafficking and weapons in the northern area
of Milan”)

http://ift.tt/1zTwrky
(article about “a notorious Italian mobster from Milan who was a
powerful figure in the Milanese underworld during the 1970s”)

I found English-language versions of the latter two items, which
is how I know what they’re about. The rest of the pages, all
related to one request, seem limited to the Dutch version of
Wikipedia. My Dutch is not so good, so I’m not sure what was
offensive about those pages, but they seem to have something to do
with
Guido den Broeder, whoever that might be.

All of these pages can still be viewed directly at the various
Wikipedia sites, or via non-E.U. versions of Google, so this memory
hole is not very deep. But eliminating the E.U.-directed links
certainly makes the information less accessible, which is the whole
idea. The government-ordered expurgation of search engine results
is an especially insidious and cowardly form of censorship,
stopping short of erasing information completely yet having much
the same impact as far as most Internet users are concerned.

Since search engines are not obligated to disclose censorship
requests to affected individuals or organizations, the full impact
of this policy may never be recognized. “We find this type of
veiled censorship unacceptable,” said Lila Tretikov, executive
director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “But we find the lack of
disclosure unforgivable. This is not a tenable future. We cannot
build the sum of all human knowledge without the world’s true
source, based on pre-edited histories.”

As Scott Shackford
noted on Monday, enforcement of “the right to be forgotten”
continues apace in the European Union. The Guardian

reports that as of July 18, Google had received 91,000
requests that it remove links to embarrassing or inconvenient
content from its search results. Those requests become legally
enforceable demands when a country’s privacy protection agency
sides with a complainant, based on a subjective, amorphous standard
established
by the European Court of Justice last May. So far Google has
granted most requests (53 percent) upon receiving them, refused
about a third, and asked for additional information about the rest.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, who has emerged as a prominent
and passionate critic of this censorship,
condemned it again today as he released Wikimedia’s first
annual transparency report:

History is a human right, and one of the worst things that a
person can do is attempt to use force to silence another….I’ve
been in the public eye for quite some time. Some people say good
things; some people say bad things…That’s history, and I would
never use any kind of legal process to try to suppress it.

Wales provided
additional information about 60 or so Wikipedia pages that
Google has agreed not to include in its E.U. search results. Here
are four of them, which are related to four requests:

http://ift.tt/1svb85v
(photo of a guitarist)

http://ift.tt/1zTwqx0
(article about “an Irish criminal, said to have been one of
Ireland’s most successful bank robbers”)

http://ift.tt/1zTwrkw
(article about “a criminal group active in the 70’s in robberies,
kidnappings, drug trafficking and weapons in the northern area
of Milan”)

http://ift.tt/1zTwrky
(article about “a notorious Italian mobster from Milan who was a
powerful figure in the Milanese underworld during the 1970s”)

I found English-language versions of the latter two items, which
is how I know what they’re about. The rest of the pages, all
related to one request, seem limited to the Dutch version of
Wikipedia. My Dutch is not so good, so I’m not sure what was
offensive about those pages, but they seem to have something to do
with
Guido den Broeder, whoever that might be.

All of these pages can still be viewed directly at the various
Wikipedia sites, or via non-E.U. versions of Google, so this memory
hole is not very deep. But eliminating the E.U.-directed links
certainly makes the information less accessible, which is the whole
idea. The government-ordered expurgation of search engine results
is an especially insidious and cowardly form of censorship,
stopping short of erasing information completely yet having much
the same impact as far as most Internet users are concerned.

Since search engines are not obligated to disclose censorship
requests to affected individuals or organizations, the full impact
of this policy may never be recognized. “We find this type of
veiled censorship unacceptable,” said Lila Tretikov, executive
director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “But we find the lack of
disclosure unforgivable. This is not a tenable future. We cannot
build the sum of all human knowledge without the world’s true
source, based on pre-edited histories.”

I’ll be appearing on Huffpost Live today at 5p ET
for their “Cocktail Chatter” segment where subjects ranging from collective punishment
in Gaza to the
whitewashing of characters in movies set in ancient Egypt will
be discussed. And yes, there will be booze. 

Also scheduled to appear are host Josh Zepps, Elizabeth Plank of
PolicyMic and comic Nadia Manzoor.

Full segment will be posted later this
evening.