Finally

Meet the New Boss………

Robert Mugabe has resigned as Zimbabwe’s President:

Robert Mugabe, who ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980 and once proclaimed that “only God will remove me,” resigned as president on Tuesday shortly after lawmakers began impeachment proceedings against him.

The speaker of the Parliament, Jacob Mudenda, read out a letter in which Mr. Mugabe said he was stepping down “with immediate effect” for “the welfare of the people of Zimbabwe and the need for a peaceful transfer of power.”

Lawmakers erupted into cheers, and jubilant residents poured into the streets of Harare, the capital. It seemed to be an abrupt capitulation by Mr. Mugabe, 93, the world’s oldest head of state and one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders.

“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to Zimbabwe,” Perseverance Sande, 20, said in central Harare minutes after news of the resignation began spreading, as crowds of people started singing around her. “I’ve been waiting so long for this moment.”

It is widely expected that Emmerson Mnangagwa, his former VP, whose firing precipitated the coup, will succeed him, so I'm not expecting much in the way of political change.

Mnangagwa was, after all, hip deep in the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland in the early 1980s.

Fabulous!

Australia just had an official postal poll on gay marriage. The bigots lost decisively:

Australia has taken a decisive step towards legislating marriage equality by Christmas after 61.6% of voters in an unprecedented national postal survey approved a change to the law to allow couples of the same sex to marry.

The result, announced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, will lead to consideration of a same-sex marriage bill in parliament with the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, promising marriage equality should be law by Christmas.

With a turnout of 79.5% the result in the voluntary survey is considered a highly credible reflection of Australian opinion and gives marriage equality advocates enormous momentum to achieve the historic social reform. Australia’s chief statistician, David Kalisch, announced the results at a press conference in Canberra at 10am on Wednesday, revealing 7,817,247 people voted in favour and 4,873,987 voted against.

Two snaps up!

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

Juli Briskman, who shot to fame flipping off Donald Trump's motorcade, has been fired:

A woman whose picture went viral after she raised her middle finger at Donald Trump as his motorcade passed her on her bicycle has been fired from her job.

A woman whose picture went viral after she raised her middle finger at Donald Trump as his motorcade passed her on her bicycle has been fired from her job.Juli Briskman was cycling in Virginia last month when she offered the gesture in a gut reaction to Trump’s policies, she said.

“He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she told the Huffington Post. “I’m thinking, Daca recipients are getting kicked out. He pulled ads for open enrollment in Obamacare. Only one third of Puerto Rico has power. I’m thinking, he’s at the damn golf course again.

“I flipped off the motorcade a number of times.”

A photographer traveling with the presidential motorcade snapped Briskman’s picture and the image quickly spread across news outlets and social media. Many hailed Briskman as a hero, with some saying she should run in the 2020 election. Late-night comedy hosts also picked up the story.

Briskman had been working as a marketing and communications specialist for a Virginia-based federal contractor, Akima, for six months. She thought it best to alert the HR department to the online fuss. Bosses then called her into a meeting, she said.

“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,’” Briskman told the Huffington Post. “‘Basically, you cannot have lewd or obscene things in your social media.’ So they were calling flipping him off obscene.”

You dissed the Dear Leader, of course you were fired

Just be glad that he didn't send you to Guantánamo.

Not really. 

I just wish that we lived in a first world nation with meaningful job protections.

Guantánamo is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

It's always been clear that the military tribunals have as their primary goal the creation of the illusion of due process.

Most recently, defense attorneys involved in a capital case from withdrew from the case because their attorney-client communications were monitored.

The judge in the case has now sentenced the remaining lawyer for contempt after they refused to order the existing attorneys back to work.

Kangaroo court much?

The military judge presiding over the Guantánamo military commissions prosecution for the 2000 USS Cole attack confined the chief military defense attorney to his quarters for three weeks for disobeying orders, according to The Miami Herald.

The military judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, held Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker in contempt for refusing to rescind his decision permitting the three non-military defense attorneys in the death penalty case against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri to quit for ethical reasons related to secret government eavesdropping on their communications. Baker was also held in contempt for refusing to testify about his decision.

The military judge said that Baker did not have the authority to make the decision and rejected Baker’s effort to explain that the military court has no jurisdiction over him.

“The contempt finding and confinement of General Baker is unlawful and an outrage,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “General Baker was continuing the honorable military defense counsel tradition of trying to act ethically, despite being part of a system rigged against the rule of law. The military judge’s unprecedented contempt ruling against General Baker shows just how difficult that is. The military judge’s decision needs to be reversed and General Baker released immediately.”

The military judge has ordered the three civilian attorneys — Rick Kammen, Rosa Eliades, and Mary Spears — to participate in a hearing on Friday, setting the stage for another legal showdown.

Also today, in Washington, other attorneys for al-Nashiri asked a federal district court to stop the prosecution from going forward without an attorney specially qualified for capital cases, which is required by the rules of the Guantánamo military commissions themselves. The attorneys made two filings in court today, and a hearing is scheduled for tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The whole prosecution of Mr. al-Nashiri has again gone off the rails, this time because of ethical violations caused by the government itself,” Shamsi added.

We really need to end this charade.

It servers neither the interests of justice, due or of due process, and it harms US security.

To quote George Clemenceau (Not Groucho Marx as is often erroneously attributed), "It suffices to add "military" to a word for it to lose its meaning. Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

Item Number 1033 of Things that I Thought I Would Never Say*

David Petraeus seizes the moral high ground.

Yeah, I cannot believe that I just said that, but everyone's favorite philandering self-important martinet just slapped down the Trump administration for saying that reporters should not fact check Trump's chief of staff, John Kelly, on his the lies that he spewed a few days back.

ABC's THIS WEEK host Martha Raddatz began her interview by asking Gen. Petraeus about this incident.

"I want to start with what the White House said, about it being highly inappropriate to debate a four-star general," she said.

Petraeus replied, "Well, I think we're all fair game." He continued, "We, in uniform, protect the rights of those to criticize us, frankly."

We live in strange times.

^*The number one thing that I thought I would never say remains, as always, "It’s not buffet time at the Wildebeest."

I Did Not Expect This

Warning, graphic video

The officers who brutalized David Dao on a United Airlines flight a few months ago have been fired:

According to the initial police report, Dao was said to have pushed away an officer's arm, causing "the subject to fall, hit, and injure his mouth on the armrest on the other side of the aisle." Another officer corroborated that account, but none of this is visible on the videos passengers posted online.

Thomas Demetrio, Dao's attorney, said video evidence is what doomed the officers.

"Do not state something that is clearly contrary to video viewed by the world," he said in a statement. "Our cell phones are the best deterrent to ensure mistreatment becomes a rarity."

The inspector general inquiry said that officers had "deliberately removed material facts from their reports." Aviation officials fired the security official who had "improperly escalated the incident" as well as an official involved in removing facts from a report on the incident.

You have the constitutional right to tape LEOs in action.  Use it.

As the counselor notes, "Cell phones are the best deterrent to ensure mistreatment becomes a rarity."

ACLU is ACLUing

ACLU Tells High School to Allow Students to Protest ACLU at Football Game

I like their consistency.

A Mixed Day for Voter Suppression

First, a Federal judge has ruled that Trump's voter suppression commission is not required to do a privacy review, allowing them to request data and make no real effort to protect personal data from hackers or other nefarious entities.

It appears that the judge found it irrelevant that the commision had already doxxed people who had made comments.

A federal judge on Monday allowed President Trump’s voting commission to go forward with seeking voter data from 50 states and the District, ruling that the White House advisory panel is exempt from federal privacy review requirements, whatever additional risk it might pose to Americans’ information.

The ruling averted a public setback for a president who has claimed that widespread fraud cost him the popular vote in November. The commission’s request for the voting information of more than 150 million registered voters remains controversial, with many state leaders from both parties voicing objections about its potential to reveal personal information, suppress voter participation and encroach on states’ oversight of voting laws.

The panel’s June 28 letter to the states requested that they turn over “publicly-available voter roll data,” including names, addresses, dates of birth, party registrations, partial Social Security numbers and voting, military, felony and overseas histories, among other data.

In related news, another Federal Judge just just approved sanctions against commission co-chair Kris Kobach for lying to the court:

A federal judge on Tuesday denied Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s request to reconsider a magistrate judge’s sanctions, finding Kobach has shown a pattern of misleading the court in a voting-rights case.
In a ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson refused Kobach’s request to reconsider a $1,000 fine issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge James O’Hara, as well as O’Hara’s order that Kobach submit to a deposition in an ongoing case between the secretary of state and the American Civil Liberties Union over Kansas’ requirement of proof of citizenship for registered voters.

O’Hara sanctioned Kobach for misleading the court regarding the nature of voting-policy documents he was photographed with in a November meeting with President Donald Trump. The top sheet of the documents visibly showed suggested policy changes to the National Voter Registration Act which had been requested by the ACLU. After a review, O’Hara ordered Kobach to hand over the documents after finding them relevant to the case.

Kobach fought the order, arguing they were protected by Trump’s executive privilege and attorney-client privilege since an attorney in Kobach’s office had seen them. When he did hand them over, he marked the documents as confidential, a classification the ACLU is currently trying to overturn in an effort to make them public.

In her ruling, Robinson used three examples of Kobach’s previous behavior to chide him for habitually making misleading statements.

Heck of a commission there, huh.

Fail

While I oppose boycotts of Israel, and I think that many in the BDS movement are objectively antisemitic, the proposal in the Senate to criminalize boycotts against Israel is an assault on the very idea of civil rights:

Both of New York's Senators have signed on to a bill that would criminalize any attempt by Americans to boycott Israel, according to a new report.

According to The Intercept, Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are among 43 U.S. Senators who have co-sponsored the Anti-Israel Boycott Act, a bill that the ACLU wote is "antithetical to free speech protections enshrined in the First Amendment" in a letter to lawmakers urging them to oppose the bill.

The Senate bill appears to target the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement that seeks to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip through economic isolation. Under the terms of the bill, a pair of U.S. laws that prohibit U.S. citizens from supporting a boycott request from a foreign government against an ally of the United States would be updated to specifically prohibit Americans from supporting international boycott efforts against Israel.

Violators of the law "would be subject to a minimum civil penalty of $250,000 and a maximum criminal penalty of $1 million and 20 years in prison" according to the ACLU's letter.

Seriously, it's embarrassing to have to go all Schoolhouse Rock on members of the US Senate.

This full metal pander crap needs to end.

A letter from the ACLU clearly describes just how flagrantly unconstitutional this bill is.

Not Sure How to Read This

I am referring, of course to the Supreme Court's decision on the Trump Muslim/Travel Ban.

They allowed limited parts of the injunction to continue, but allowed the ban to come into effect for refugees (without family in the US) and tourists.

Since Trump's latest executive order is time limited, any final decision might largely be moot, and I am wondering if this is an exercise of judicial kick the can:

Today the Supreme Court agreed to review rulings by two lower courts blocking the implementation of President Donald Trump’s March 6 executive order, popularly known as the “travel ban.” Citing national-security concerns, the order imposed a freeze on new visas from six Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen). But the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit had put the order on hold last month, concluding that – although it did not specifically say so – the order likely violated the Constitution because the president intended to discriminate against Muslim travelers. Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit also blocked the order, but on a different ground: It concluded that the order exceeds the authority that Congress has given the president to regulate immigration. The court’s announcement today means that the justices will review both of those decisions. The justices also granted the Trump administration’s request to allow the ban to go into effect, at least for would-be travelers who don’t already have some connection to the United States.

The announcement came in a brief, unsigned opinion issued by the justices when they took the bench this morning to release opinions in cases argued on the merits earlier this term. The court’s opinion focused primarily on the government’s request to reinstate the ban while the cases are before the Supreme Court. Emphasizing that the purpose of temporary relief like this is “to balance the equities as the litigation moves forward,” the court made clear that it had the authority to “tailor” its ruling so that it applied to some, but not all, of those affected.

That is precisely what it did. The lower courts had considered the hardships that the ban would create for the named plaintiffs in the case: two men with family members who want to come to the United States from the affected countries; and the state of Hawaii, whose state university had admitted students from those countries. But, the court explained today, the lower courts’ orders barring enforcement of the ban “reach much further than that,” because they also apply to people living overseas “who have no connection to the United States at all.” When those people are unable to come to the United States, the court reasoned, their constitutional rights are not violated – because they have no right to come to the United States – and their exclusion from the country does not harm anyone in the United States.

The justices therefore upheld the lower courts’ orders blocking enforcement of the ban with regard to the named plaintiffs and others like them – people who “have a credible claim” of a genuine relationship with someone or an institution in the United States. When that relationship is with an individual, the court made clear, it must be a close family member. And when the relationship is with an institution, the relationship must also be a genuine one, rather than one created just to get around the travel ban.

I think that it was basically a punt, with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch writing a concurring opinion that goes full black shirt, which should surprise no one who has followed their careers.

Yeah, This is Reassuring

The developer of a Russian secure messaging app has revealed how elements of the U.S. state security apparatus attempted to threaten and bribe him into putting a back door in his application:

The founder of chat app Telegram has publicly claimed that feds pressured the company to weaken its encryption or install a backdoor.

"During our team's 1-week visit to the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies + pressure on me from the FBI," Pavel Durov said on Twitter. "It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure cryptoapp based in the US," he added.

Durov's comments follow earlier unsubstantiated claims that arch-rival Signal was compromised.

"The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now," Durov claimed.

 Live in obedient fear, citizen.

Well What Do You Know. Obama May Have Spied on Trump………

And thousands of other Americans as well, as is revealed in a recent FISA court decision excoriating the practices of the NSA under the Obama administration:

U.S. intelligence agencies conducted illegal surveillance on American citizens over a five-year period, a practice that earned them a sharp rebuke from a secret court that called the matter a “very serious” constitutional issue.

The criticism is in a lengthy secret ruling that lays bare some of the frictions between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and U.S. intelligence agencies obligated to obtain the court’s approval for surveillance activities.

………

The document, signed by Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, said the court had learned in a notice filed Oct. 26, 2016, that National Security Agency analysts had been conducting prohibited queries of databases “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the court.”

It said a judge chastised the NSA’s inspector general and Office of Compliance for Operations for an “institutional ‘lack of candor’ ” for failing to inform the court. It described the matter as “a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”

The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, and is a constitutional bedrock protection against intrusion.

Parts of the ruling were redacted, including sections that give an indication of the extent of the illegal surveillance, which the NSA told the court in a Jan. 3 notice was partly the fault of “human error” and “system design issues” rather than intentional illegal searches.

………

Data captured from both upstream and downstream sources are stored in massive databases, available to be searched when analysts need to, often months or as much as two years after the captures took place.

The prohibited searches the court mentioned involved NSA queries into the upstream databanks, which constitute a fraction of all the data NSA captures around the globe but are more likely to contain the emails and phone calls of people in the United States.

Federal law empowers the NSA and CIA to battle foreign terrorist actions against the United States by collecting the electronic communications of targets believed to be outside the country. While communications of U.S. citizens or residents may get hoovered up in such sweeps, they are considered “incidental” and must be “minimized” – removing the identities of Americans – before broader distribution.

The court filing noted an NSA decision March 30 to narrow collection of “upstream” data within the United States. Under that decision, the NSA acknowledged that it had erred in sweeping up the communications of U.S. citizens or residents but said those errors “were not willful.” Even so, the NSA said it would no longer collect certain kinds of data known as “about” communications, in which a U.S. citizen was merely mentioned.

The NSA announced that change publicly on April 28, two days after the court ruling, saying the agency would limit its sweeps to communications either directly to or from a foreign intelligence target. That change would reduce “the likelihood that NSA will acquire communications of U.S. persons or others who are not in direct contact with one of the agency’s foreign intelligence targets.”

The court document also criticized the FBI’s distribution of intelligence data, saying it had disclosed raw surveillance data to sectors of its bureaucracy “largely staffed by private contractors.”

This is a particularly scathing ruling when one considers the generally lackadaisical approach to the 4^th amendment taken by the FISA court.

There is a reason why I call Barack Obama, "Worst Constitutional law professor ever.^™"

This is why we need checks and balances.

This Would Never Happen Without the Video

Roy Oliver, former of the Balch Springs Police Department, who gunned down Jordan Edwards has been charged with murder:

Roy Oliver, the fired Balch Springs police officer who shot and killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards as he was driving away from a party, was arrested on a murder charge Friday night.

Oliver, 37, turned himself in at the Parker County Jail. Bond was set at $300,000. If convicted of murder, he faces up to life in prison. His attorney could not be reached for comment.

Oliver, who lives in Combine, fired a rifle into a car of teenagers as they drove away from a party Saturday night, striking Jordan, a passenger, in the head, police said. The six-year veteran of the department was fired Tuesday.

He was the second of two officers who responded to a report of underage drinking. After gunfire was heard in the area, Jordan and four other teenagers got in their car to leave.

Police originally said Oliver fired on the car because it was backing up aggressively toward the officers. But the department revised its account after reviewing body-cam footage, saying the car was driving away when Jordan was shot.

It wasn't a cell phone video this time, it was a body cam, but it reveals a truth:  Cops lie, a lot, and without video evidence, they almost never get caught.

Every body cam, and every cell phone camera, is a tool to keep law enforcement honest.

Without the video, Oliver would probably have gotten a commendation.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

In today's United States, a judge could sentence you to jail based on a software generated risk report which the defendant has no right to review.

There is already anecdotal evidence that these programs will show higher risk for non-white defendants:

When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last month, he was asked a startling question, one with overtones of science fiction.

“Can you foresee a day,” asked Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the college in upstate New York, “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?”

The chief justice’s answer was more surprising than the question. “It’s a day that’s here,” he said, “and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things.”

He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison based in part on a private company’s proprietary software. Mr. Loomis says his right to due process was violated by a judge’s consideration of a report generated by the software’s secret algorithm, one Mr. Loomis was unable to inspect or challenge.
Continue reading the main story

In March, in a signal that the justices were intrigued by Mr. Loomis’s case, they asked the federal government to file a friend-of-the-court brief offering its views on whether the court should hear his appeal.

The report in Mr. Loomis’s case was produced by a product called Compas, sold by Northpointe Inc. It included a series of bar charts that assessed the risk that Mr. Loomis would commit more crimes.

The Compas report, a prosecutor told the trial judge, showed “a high risk of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” The judge agreed, telling Mr. Loomis that “you’re identified, through the Compas assessment, as an individual who is a high risk to the community.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Loomis. The report added valuable information, it said, and Mr. Loomis would have gotten the same sentence based solely on the usual factors, including his crime — fleeing the police in a car — and his criminal history.

At the same time, the court seemed uneasy with using a secret algorithm to send a man to prison. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, writing for the court, discussed, for instance, a report from ProPublica about Compas that concluded that black defendants in Broward County, Fla., “were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher rate of recidivism.”

………

In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that a Florida man could not be condemned to die based on a sentencing report that contained confidential passages he was not allowed to see. The Supreme Court’s decision was fractured, and the controlling opinion appeared to say that the principle applied only in capital cases.

Mr. Schimel echoed that point and added that Mr. Loomis knew everything the court knew. Judges do not have access to the algorithm, either, he wrote.

There are good reasons to use data to ensure uniformity in sentencing. It is less clear that uniformity must come at the price of secrecy, particularly when the justification for secrecy is the protection of a private company’s profits. The government can surely develop its own algorithms and allow defense lawyers to evaluate them.

This is why the privatization of an essential state function is a bad thing.

This is as about a perfect example of a Kafkaesque situation as is possible:  Condemned with a secret report using a secret method.

Clearly Got His Law Degree Out of a Cracker Jack Box

Acting New York State Supreme Court Justice John Galasso, who never read the Constitution through completely: He stopped before the first amendment.

A note of reassurance here: The New York Supreme court is just what they call the trial court there, a rather different application of the term than the common usage.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

It looks like Jeff Sessions will be seeking to press charges against Julian Assange, in a move that many are calling a direct assault on the practice of journalism:

In an unprecedented and dangerous move that threatens the press freedom rights of all journalists, the US Justice Department has indicated it is preparing to charge WikiLeaks with a crime and may attempt to arrest its founder Julian Assange. The charges may stem from the publication of US State Department cables in 2010 and their more recent of disclosure of CIA hacking tools.

Whether you like or dislike WikiLeaks – especially if you dislike them – it’s important to understand just how dangerous this potential prosecution is to the future of journalism in the United States. Newspapers publish classified information all the time, and any prosecution of WikiLeaks puts journalists of all stripes at risk of a similar fate. Even WikiLeaks’ harshest critics need to denounce this potential move as a grave threat to the first amendment.

People may not realize it, but not a week goes by without classified information on the front pages of the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Without the right to publish secret information, as New York Times reporter Max Frankel put it more than 40 years ago in the landmark Pentagon Papers case: “There could be no adequate diplomatic, military and political reporting of the kind our people take for granted, either abroad or in Washington and there could be no mature system of communication between the government and the people.” 

This is a profoundly chilling prospect.  As Marcy "Emptywheel" Wheeler notes, "Jeff Sessions’ DOJ could pick and choose which publishers’ speech gets curtailed."

This is a natural outgrowth of Barack Obama's jihad against leakers, and it was a foreseeable development, but because he saw himself as a good person, he thought that everything was Ok.

Worst Constitutional law professor ever.^™

Good News in Florids ……… Wait ……… What? Florida?

Actually it is good news, not another Florida Man story.

A court in Florida has ruled that, unlike a physical examination of brakes and tires of a vehicle, authorities need a warrant to extract data from vehicle black boxes:

An interesting decision has been reached by the Florida Appeals Court as to Fourth Amendment protections for vehicle "black boxes." The black boxes -- which are a mandatory requirement in new vehicles -- record a variety of data in the event of a crash. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

Charles Worsham Jr. was the driver in a crash in which his passenger was killed. His vehicle was seized and impounded by police. Twelve days later, police accessed the data in the black box without obtaining a warrant. Worsham challenged the lawfulness of the warrantless search. The police maintained the black box was full of third-party records which required no warrant or consent from the vehicle's owner.

The court sees the issue differently. In a relative rarity, the state Appeals Court decides [PDF] to get out ahead of the issue, rather than wait for precedential decisions to trickle down from the federal courts. It looks at the data harvested by the black box and suggests the amount gathered will only increase in the coming years. Rather than wait until then to make a call on the Fourth Amendment merits, it draws the line now.

Citing the Supreme Court's Riley decision (which introduced a warrant requirement for cell phone searches), the court concludes the crash data contained in the black box has an expectation of privacy.

A car’s black box is analogous to other electronic storage devices for which courts have recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy. Modern technology facilitates the storage of large quantities of information on small, portable devices. The emerging trend is to require a warrant to search these devices.
[...]
Although electronic data recorders do not yet store the same quantity of information as a cell phone, nor is it of the same personal nature, the rationale for requiring a warrant to search a cell phone is informative in determining whether a warrant is necessary to search an immobilized vehicle’s data recorder. These recorders document more than what is voluntarily conveyed to the public and the information is inherently different from the tangible “mechanical” parts of a vehicle. Just as cell phones evolved to contain more and more personal information, as the electronic systems in cars have gotten more complex, the data recorders are able to record more information.

Also of importance is the difficulty of extracting the information from the black boxes.

Extracting and interpreting the information from a car’s black box is not like putting a car on a lift and examining the brakes or tires. Because the recorded data is not exposed to the public, and because the stored data is so difficult to extract and interpret, we hold there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information, protected by the Fourth Amendment, which required law enforcement in the absence of exigent circumstances to obtain a warrant before extracting the information from an impounded vehicle.

Not only that, but recent legislation (the Driver Privacy Act of 2015) specifically states that the contents of data recorders belong to the vehicle's owner, not the manufacturer or any other third party.

Outstanding.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

It turns out that the DEA data mines your travel data to see if it is worth it to steal your money:

Federal drug agents regularly mine Americans’ travel information to profile people who might be ferrying money for narcotics traffickers — though they almost never use what they learn to make arrests or build criminal cases.

Instead, that targeting has helped the Drug Enforcement Administration seize a small fortune in cash.

DEA agents have profiled passengers on Amtrak trains and nearly every major U.S. airline, drawing on reports from a network of travel-industry informants that extends from ticket counters to back offices, a USA TODAY investigation has found. Agents assigned to airports and train stations singled out passengers for questioning or searches for reasons as seemingly benign as traveling one-way to California or having paid for a ticket in cash.

The DEA surveillance is separate from the vast and widely-known anti-terrorism apparatus that now surrounds air travel, which is rarely used for routine law enforcement. It has been carried out largely without the airlines’ knowledge.

It is a lucrative endeavor, and one that remains largely unknown outside the drug agency. DEA units assigned to patrol 15 of the nation’s busiest airports seized more than $209 million in cash from at least 5,200 people over the past decade after concluding the money was linked to drug trafficking, according to Justice Department records. Most of the money was passed on to local police departments that lend officers to assist the drug agency.

“They count on this as part of the budget,” said Louis Weiss, a former supervisor of the DEA group assigned to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. “Basically, you’ve got to feed the monster.”

There may be times that seizure is justified, but by allowing those executing the seizures to keep the money for themselves, they end up becoming little more than mobsters running a protection racket.

Good Point

Marcie "Emptywheel" Wheeler gives us a bright side to the Trump administration:

I have a confession.

There’s something I like about the Trump Administration.

It’s the way that his unpopularity taints long-standing policies or practices or beliefs, making people aware of and opposed to them in a way they weren’t when the same policies or beliefs were widely held under George Bush or Barack Obama. Many, though not all, of these policies or beliefs were embraced unquestioningly by centrists or even avowed leftists.

I’ve been keeping a running list in my mind, which I’ll begin to lay out here (I guess I’ll update it as I remember more).

• Expansive surveillance
• The presumption of regularity, by which courts and the public assume the Executive Branch operates in good faith and from evidence
• Denigration of immigrants
• Denigration of Muslims
• Denigration health insurance

As an example, Obama deported a huge number of people. But now that Trump has expanded that same practice, it has been made visible and delegitimized.

In short, Trump has made things that should always have been criticized are now being far more widely so.

It's true.  Obama's war on whistle-blowers is unprecedented, he was the deportation president, he terrorized half a dozen with drone strikes, and he expanded surveillance beyond Dick Cheney's wildest dreams.

The so-called left never had an objection to what Obama was doing, but now, even the far right is wondering about things like the surveillance state.

Obama normalized a lot of bad things, and now Trump is abnormalizing those same excesses.

It's kind of like watching your mother-in-law going over a cliff in your brand new car.

ICE Needs to Be Burnt to the Ground and Rebuilt from Scratch

A federal magistrate judge has revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been deliberately, and likely illegally, retaliating against cities with sanctuary policies.

Recent incidents related to Trump's Muslim ban indicated that that there was some rot, but this shows that there is nothing but rot.

This is the sort of abuse of law enforcement power that would give J. Edgar Hoover a hard on:

Federal agents privately alerted two magistrate judges in late January that they would be targeting the Austin area for a major operation and that the sting was retribution for a new policy by Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez that dramatically limited her cooperation with them, according to one of the judges.

The revelation — made Monday in open court by U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin — conflicts with what Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told local leaders after the sweep, when ICE characterized the operation as routine and said the Austin area was not being targeted. It also provides evidence after weeks of speculation that Hernandez’s policy triggered ICE’s ire.

“We had a briefing … that we could expect a big operation, agents coming in from out of town, that it was going to be a specific operation, and at least it was related to us in that meeting that it was the result of the sheriff’s new policy that this was going to happen,” Austin said.

“My understanding, what was told to us, is that one of the reasons that happened was because the meetings that had occurred between the (ICE) field office director and the sheriff didn’t go very well,” he said.

In case you wondering, these folks are clearly feeling empowered by the Trump administration, and are revealing themselves to be people who should be kept far, far, FAR, away from anything resembling law enforcement.

Live in obedient fear, citizen.