Tag: news

Look too calm, you’re
suspicious. Look too nervous, you’re suspicious. These
contradictory assumptions are just several transportation
guidelines on “reporting suspicious activity,” revealed by an
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request.

They comes from an
employee document for Amtrak, which is publicly funded. These
are signs that you should be paranoid of your fellow Americans, and
call the police on them:

• Evasive path through train station
• Carrying little or no luggage
• Last minute reservation
• Traveling by an unusual itinerary (multi-changes in
  reservations)
• Carrying unusually large amount of currency
• Purchase of tickets in cash
• Purchase tickets immediately prior to boarding
• Unusual nervousness of traveler
• Unusual calmness or straight ahead stare
• Looking around while making telephone call(s)
• Position among passengers disembarking (ahead of, or lagging
  behind passengers)

So, Amtrak travelers, make sure you walk straight, travel
straight, look straight ahead but don‘t look
straight ahead, keep pace with the rest of us, carry just the right
amount of clothes, and wipe that look of fear or curiosity or
contentment off your face, or else the terrorists win.

The ACLU
explains that it made this FOIA request because it “has
received reports from individuals wrongfully searched and arrested
on Amtrak trains,” and wanted to know what policies led to these
arrests.

Amtrak has a “See Something, Say Something” campaign like the
Department of Homeland Security, and like the Transportation
Security Agency, Amtrak’s “broad categories of ‘suspicious’
behavior is problematic because it almost always results in racial
and religious profiling, as well as the targeting of perfectly
innocent activity. Most importantly, building mountains of
irrelevant data is ultimately an ineffective law enforcement
tactic.”

The ACLU points out several stupid cases that make no one safer:
one woman was arrested for talking to loudly, and a photographer
was arrested while participating in Amtrak’s annual “Picture our
Train” competition. 

On October 21, 2014 Reason.com published “Sex,
Spice, and Small-Town Justice: The Purple Zone Raid,” my
article and video that showed how “a rogue prosecutor makes the
drug war personal.” 

Brewster County (TX) District Attorney Rod Ponton took issue
with the piece and wrote us a letter listing what he characterizes
as the “top ten reasons” the article is “a blatant lie.”

Click here or below to read Ponton’s letter in its original
form, followed by my point by point rebuttal. 

View this article.

Remember when Democrats were going to run on
Obamacare?

In March of 2010, just a few days before the final version of
the law passed in the House, a triumphant White House
Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer told The
New York Times that, “if and when this is passed,
Democrats will run aggressively on this.” The law would be a hit,
well-liked and broadly popular, and Democrats would use it to their
advantage.

The law passed, but the aggressive campaign never happened.
Later that year, in fact, several Democrats ran ads against the
health law. Even still, writes Reason Senior
Editor Peter Suderman, Democrats kept promising that the
pro-Obamacare campaigns were soon to come. 

View this article.

The National Security Agency’s
(NSA) snoopy ways with our phone calls is headed to
no less than three federal appeals courts, but long before mass
electronic surveillance was a glimmer in a bureaucratic voyeur’s
eye, the
Post Office was already skimming and scanning through our mail
to track our communications. Unshockingly, it turns out that the
folks who manage to lose your mail and deliver your lingerie
catalogs well-thumbed aren’t so good at respecting even the shaky
privacy protections intended to regulate when and how
correspondence is supposed to be monitored.

Little known by most Americans, the Post Office has been
tracking mail for a century. These days, it photographs and stores
images of the outside of every piece of mail sent as a
matter of course, and can target specific individuals for “mail
covers”—special scrutiny of the outside of their correspondence,
including recording names and return addresses of the people with
whom they exchange mail. But that scrutiny is supposed to
abide by certain rules.

Yeah…well. In a
May audit, the United States Postal Service Inspector General
revealed:

responsible personnel did not always handle and process mail
cover requests in a timely manner and documents relating to the
covers were not always returned to the program files as required.
Of the 196 external mail cover requests we reviewed, 21 percent
were approved without written authorization and 13 percent were not
adequately justified or reasonable grounds were not transcribed
accurately. Also, 15 percent of the inspectors who conducted
[redacted] mail covers did not have the required nondisclosure form
on file.

After examining three fiscal years worth of mail covers, with
49,000 conducted in 2013 alone, the inspector general cautioned
that, “Insufficient controls could hinder the Postal Inspection
Service’s ability to conduct effective investigations, lead to
public concerns over privacy of mail, and harm the Postal Service’s
brand.”

No doubt. The New York Times
points out that the Post Office has been sufficiently sloppy
about checking justifications for surveillance that it has been
sucked into political espionage.

Interviews and court records also show that the surveillance
program was used by a county attorney and sheriff to investigate a
political opponent in Arizona — the county attorney was later
disbarred in part because of the investigation — and to monitor
privileged communications between lawyers and their clients, a
practice not allowed under postal regulations.

That’s a reference to the
shenanigans of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas, who did
their best to turn Maricopa County into a banana republic (Arpaio
is still hard at it). They used information gleaned, in part, from
the mail surveillance to determine targets for police raids
intended to destroy a county supervisor who was a thorn in their
sides.

The tactic didn’t work, but not for lack of trying.

Defense attorneys’ snail mail communications with defendants
have also been targeted for scrutiny, in a way that potentially
stacks the deck in favor of prosecutors.

Basically, it’s all the concerns you have about intrusive NSA
snoopiness, applied to an older form of communications, by a
perhaps less competent bureaucracy.

Whether rape happens on U.S. college campuses at
rates similar to elsewhere in America or to rates in Tanzania and
South Africa has been a major subject of dispute recently. Folks
from President Obama to
swearing 5-year-olds princesses have been citing a statistic
that 20 percent of women on college campuses, or one in five, will
be sexually assaulted while there—a stat that has also
been routinely debunked. However, a new sexual assault
survey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT)—one of the first schools to release broad data on campus sex
crimes—seems to corroborate everyone’s favorite sketchy
stat. 

Or does it? Media are reporting that
one in six female undergraduates at MIT have been
sexually assaulted (with this translating in some headlines and
social media shares to “one in six have been raped“). But
the MIT survey suffers from the same issues that plague previous
studies on campus sexual assault. 

First, the survey’s methodology: In April, MIT emailed its
sexual assault survey to all 10,831 undergraduates and graduate
students. Students could then opt to take the survey or not.
Ultimately, 35 percent of MIT students did. But whenever you have
an opt-in survey, those who self-select to take it are not
necessarily representative of a given population. Or, as MIT
researchers put it, “response bias is expected in virtually any
voluntary survey, particularly one focused on a narrow topic. …
the rates based on those who responded to the survey cannot be
extrapolated to the MIT student population as a whole.” 

It’s also worth noting that the definition of sexual assault—in
both the MIT survey and previous campus sexual assault studies—is a
broad one, including forced sexual penetration, forced oral sex,
and unwanted “sexual touching” or kissing. Of course there are all
sorts of levels of sexual assault, and just because something
doesn’t approach the level of forced intercourse (i.e., rape)
doesn’t mean it’s not a serious violation. But let’s be clear that
MIT’s “1 in 6” stat is decidely not about the
number of students who are rape victims, nor is the much
bandied-about “1 in 5” college women stat. 

So!, now that we’ve cleared up what the MIT study did not find,
let’s look at
what it did, starting with intriguing student
attitudes toward sexual assault. Contra the affirmative
consent crowd, it doesn’t seem that a lack of respect or enthusiasm
for obtaining sexual content is a big problem: 98 percent of
females and 96 percent of males agreed or strongly agreed that it’s
important to get consent before sexual activity. 

But students are confused about how alcohol
and intoxication affect consent, which perhaps speaks to increasing
progressive activism around the idea that drunk people can’t give
consent. Only about three-quarters of respondents said they feel
confident in their own ability to judge whether someone is too
intoxicated to consent to sex. And more than half agreed that “rape
and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if
alcohol is involved.” 

I just want to repeat that one more time: Half of
MIT students think it’s possible to “accidently” rape
someone. When you consider undergraduates
alone, this rises to 67 percent.

This is what we get when people push an idea that rape is really
often a matter of consent confusion or a drunken misunderstanding
and not something that one person (the rapist) intentionally does
to another. This is exactly what those of us opposed
to affirmative consent standards mean when we worry about it
muddying the waters of consent and confusing
the definition of rape. About a fifth of female undergraduates
and a quarter of male undergraduates surveyed agreed that “when
someone is raped or sexually assaulted, it’s often because the way
they said ‘no’ was unclear or there was some
miscommunication.” 

When it comes to experiences of sexual assault since starting at
MIT:

• 1 in 20 female undergraduates, 1 in 100 female graduate
  students, and zero male students reported being the victim of
  forced sexual penetration
• 3 percent of female undergraduates, 1 percent of male
  undergraduates, and 1 percent of female grad students reported
  being forced to perform oral sex
• 15 percent of female undergraduates, 4 percent of male
  undergraduates, 4 percent of female graduate students, and 1
  percent of male graduate students reported having experienced
  “unwanted sexual touching or kissing”

All of these experiences are lumped together under the school’s
definition of sexual assault.

When students were asked to define their own experiences, 10
percent of female undergraduates, 2 percent of male undergraduates,
three percent of female graduate students, and 1 percent of male
graduate students said they had been sexually assaulted since
coming to MIT. One percent of female graduate students, one percent
of male undergraduates, and 5 percent of female undergraduates said
they had been raped. 

For undergraduates, most of these “unwanted sexual experiences”
(the umbrella term MIT uses) occured while on campus, while
graduate students were more likely to report incidents that took
place away from MIT. A little under three-quarters (72 percent) of
respondents said the perpetrator was a fellow MIT student. For
women, all but 2 percent of perpetrators were males; for male
victims, 35 percent of the perpetrators had been male and 67
percent had been female.