The Other Death Sentence

By James Ridgeway

William "Lefty" Gilday had been in prison 40 years when the dementia began to set in. At 82, he was already suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease and a host of other ailments, and his friends at MCI Shirley, a medium security prison in Massachusetts, tried to take care of him as best they could. Most of them were aging lifers like Lefty, facing the prospect of one day dying behind bars themselves, so they formed an ad hoc hospice team in their crowded ward. They bought special food from the commissary, heated it in an ancient microwave, and fed it to their friend. They helped him to the toilet and cleaned him up. Joe Labriola, 64, tried to see that Lefty got a little sunshine every day, wheeling his chair out into the yard and sitting with his arm around him to keep him from falling out.

But Lefty, who was serving life without parole for killing a police officer during a failed bank heist in 1970, slipped ever deeper into dementia. One day he threw an empty milk carton at a guard and was placed in a "medical bubble," a kind of solitary confinement unit with a glass window that enables health care staffers to keep an eye on the prisoner. His friends were denied entrance, but Joe managed to slip in one day. He recalls an overpowering stench of piss and shit and a stack of unopened food containers—Lefty explained that he couldn't open the tabs. Joe also noticed that the nurses in the adjoining observation room had blocked the glass with manila folders so they wouldn't have to look at the old man.

Lefty had been popular among the prisoners, though. A minor-league ballplayer turned 1960s radical—his southpaw, not his politics, earned him the nickname—he was the subject of one of the most infamous manhunts in Massachusetts history. He had already been in and out of prison several times on robbery offenses when he fell in with a group of Brandeis University students who decided that stealing guns and money could help them foment a black revolution. They held up a bank in 1970, and when Boston police responded, guns drawn, a patrolman named Walter Schroeder was shot dead. Lefty claimed that he never meant to shoot the guy—that it was a warning round that ricocheted—but the jury didn't buy it, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. (The students got no more than seven years.)

In 1972, after the Supreme Court briefly banned capital punishment, Lefty became a lifer. Over time, he also became a jailhouse lawyer—a inmate paralegal who puts together legal cases for fellow prisoners—settling disputes and eventually gaining a rep as something of an elder statesman. When Lefty died last September, his friends were denied permission to hold a memorial service in the prison chapel, so they ended up holding it in a classroom. The service culminated in some 80 men sailing paper planes into the air as a tribute. "We loved the old man,'' Joe Labriola wrote me in a letter.

Lefty Gilday was no ordinary inmate, but in one regard he typified a growing segment of America's inmate population—geriatric prisoners. The United States leads the world in incarceration, with more than 2.2 million people in its prisons and jails, and the graying of this population is shaping up to be a crisis with moral, practical, and economic implications for cash-strapped governments. In recent years, a growing number of advocates—and even a handful of corrections officials and politicians—have dared to suggest that we consider setting some of these old-timers free.

As of 2010, state and federal prisons housed more than 26,000 inmates 65 and older and nearly five times that number 55 and up, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report. (Both numbers are significant, since long-term incarceration is said to add 10 years to a person's physical age; in prison, 55 is old.) From 1995 to 2010, as America's prison population grew 42 percent, the number of inmates over 55 grew at nearly seven times that rate. Today, roughly 1 in 12 state and federal prison inmates is 55 or older.

The trend is worsening. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union estimates that, by 2030, the over-55 group will number more than 400,000—about a third of the overall prison population. (See chart.) "It's huge," says Bob Hood, the former warden of the mammoth federal correctional complex in Florence, Colorado. "We're behind the eight-ball on this."

From ACLU report: "At America's Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the Elderly
The boom in geriatric prisoners is the inevitable result of legislation from the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, which extended sentences and slashed parole opportunities, both dramatically so. According to a June report by the Pew Center on the States, drug offenders released in 2009 had spent 36 percent longer behind bars, on average, than those released in 1990. One in ten state prisoners nowadays is a lifer, and about the same proportion of federal prisoners over 50 are serving 30 to life. In short, more than 100,000 prisoners are currently destined to die in prison, and far more will remain there well into their 60s and 70s. Many of these men—as most of them are men—were never violent criminals, even in their youth. In Texas, for example, 65 percent of the older prisoners are in for nonviolent acts such as drug possession and property crimes.

Keeping thousands of old men locked away might make sense to die-hards seeking maximum retribution or politicians seeking political cover, but it has little effect on public safety. By age 50, people are far less likely to commit serious crimes. "Arrest rates drop to 2 percent," explains Hood, the retired federal warden. "They are almost nil at the age of 65." The arrest rate for 16-to-19-year-olds, by contrast, runs around 12 percent.

From ACLU report: "At America's Expense: The Mass Incarceration of the ElderlyOnce released, therefore, the vast majority of the older prisoners never return. Data from New York state, for example, tracked 469 inmates who were originally sentenced for violent crimes and were later released as senior citizens—over a 13-year period, just 8 of those former inmates went back to prison, and only 1 went back for a violent offense. "The mass incarceration of the elderly is an example of our criminal justice system at its most heartless and its most irrational," says David Fathi, director of the ACLU's National Prison Project. "Most such prisoners are long past their crime-prone years and pose little to no public safety risk."

Beyond any questions of efficacy or mercy lies the looming issue of the price tag. According to the ACLU, caring for aging prisoners costs American taxpayers some $16 billion annually. We shell out roughly $68,000 a year for each inmate over 50, twice what it costs to keep a younger person locked up. And the older the inmate, the greater the cost. "I've had inmates where a total cost of $100,000 a year is on the low side," Hood says.

Even when you factor in post-incarceration expenses—for parole, housing, and public benefits such as health care—the ACLU projects that taxpayers save $66,000 a year, on average, for each inmate over 50 our prisons set free. "States are confronting the complex, expensive repercussions of their sentencing practices," notes a 2010 report from the Vera Institute for Justice.

It's not difficult to see why it costs so much. "The medical conditions that present themselves to long-term elderly inmates run anywhere from dialysis to cardiac treatment to dementia," says Carl ToersBijns, who worked his way up from guard to deputy warden during his 30 years in the New Mexico and Arizona prison systems. "It is staff intensive," he says. And the number of elderly inmates "is outgrowing the ability of corrections officers to handle and manage them—they're not medically trained."

Nor are prison facilities designed for people with mobility problems. Their assisted-living and hospice units are often chock full, Hood says, leaving the unlucky elders stuck in the general population without the services they need. Unless states start releasing them, Hood says, we will need to "retrofit every prison in America to put assisted living-units in it, wheelchair accessibility, handicapped toilets, grab bars—the whole nine yards."

In recent months, I have been corresponding with several older men in Massachusetts state prisons, and have visited one of them in person. They are all lifers with murder convictions, which makes them atypical even among the long-termers. These men will never be paroled, and they are unlikely to qualify for early release no matter how rehabilitated they might be or how aged and decrepit they become. They have accepted this, and have generally tried to make something of their lives in prison—serving as jailhouse lawyers, organizing against abusive conditions, and helping their friends survive.

I am 75, so we share a camaraderie of sorts as we compare notes on our aches and pains and medication regimens. They know I understand what it's like to be getting old and facing illness and death. They also know I have no idea what it's like to deal with these things behind bars. Their letters tell of lives filled with daily indignities—trying to heave an aging body into the top bunk, struggling to move fast enough to get a food tray filled or get a book at the library, fighting off younger troublemakers. But worst of all is the pervasive nothingness and isolation.

Prison officials tend to discourage close friendships, and they dislike anything that smacks of organizing, which is considered a security threat. So they routinely transfer inmates between prisons and deny them the right to communicate with friends in other facilities. The activities available—which are few, since lawmakers wiped out most rehabilitative programming during the 1980s and 1990s—are accessible only to inmates who can walk long prison hallways or climb stairs. For some old-timers, a cell is their entire world; doing time simply means awaiting death.

Joe Labriola is a former Marine combat hero. Now 66, he joined the Marines at 17 and served two tours in Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart and Bronze Star with Combat "V" for valor. After returning home, he was convicted of killing a drug dealer who was an FBI informant and got life without parole. So far he has served 38 years—18 in solitary.

Labriola has chronic breathing problems that he attributes to Agent Orange exposure. He says it's hard to for him walk more than 10 steps without help from an oxygen machine, so he's in a wheelchair a lot of the time. At least 75 prisons in 40 states now have hospices, but you won't find any in Massachusetts. At MCI Shirley, Labriola lives in a ward called Assisted Daily Living, which he describes in his letters as a clutch of hospital beds in a corridor. "We live in an 11-man ward with all the beds side by side," he says. "No ventilation or windows that can open. We do have hospital beds and standing wall lockers, something the general population does not have." Unlike most assisted-living facilities, this setup provides little actual assistance, he says, other than what "the prisoners who clean the floor and bathrooms render us when we ask." Residents get to move around outside the ward for just 10 minutes every hour, which means the person pushing Joe's wheelchair must race from place to place—the prison library, he estimates, is a quarter mile away.

From his window, Labriola has a view of the prison hospital. "I see men coming up for medication and insulin at least three to four times per day," he says. "They come in chairs, Canadian canes, geriatric walkers. In one week alone we had three deaths." The hospital's inpatient facilities consist of a series of five small wards with five beds in each. Men in various stages of bad health or terminal illness lie in bed all day long with nothing to do but watch soap operas. "What they need is mental, spiritual, and human stimulation in the form of a one-to-one care provided by trained prisoners who would be first cleared for drug usage and sex crimes as there are female nurses in the area," Labriola suggests in one of his letters. "There are many men willing to volunteer their time and energies into making this a reality."

Lifer John Feroli told the following story in one of his letters: "A guy in his 70s I knew personally was in the [solitary confinement] unit because he failed to stand for the afternoon count. He was on the third floor of the housing unit, he was partially paralyzed from a stroke and the batteries in his hearing aid were dead and he never heard the announcement for Count Time."

Another convicted murderer, 73-year-old Billy Barnoski, wrote me in April to report that he was in solitary after a younger cellmate jumped him and beat him up. His friends came to his aid, there was a melee, and four people were thrown in the hole. Barnoski suffers from a heart condition called atrial fibrillation, which is treated with a blood thinner called coumadin. He also has high blood pressure, high cholesterol, shingles, and severe arthritis in his back and neck. He takes 25 pills daily. "There have been many times, so many, that they simply say, 'We haven't got that med today,'" he writes. "Mind you it has been heart meds just last week. Locked in this hole without necessary meds is torture."

Then there's Frank Soffen, also 73. Sentenced to life for second-degree murder, he has spent more than half of his life in prison. Nowadays he is confined to a wheelchair. He has kidney and liver disease and has suffered four heart attacks. He currently stays in the assisted living wing of Massachusetts' Norfolk prison. And because of his failing health and his clean record during 40 years behind bars—which included rescuing a guard being threatened by other prisoners—he has been held up as a candidate for compassionate release.

Soffen is physically incapable of committing a violent crime. He cannot even hold a pen, in fact, so I had to rely on the other prisoners' accounts of his situation. They told me has already participated in prerelease and furlough programs, and has a supportive family and a place to live with his son. One member of the state parole board recommended his release. But the board has denied him parole twice—in 2006 and again in January 2011. He won't be eligible for review for another five years—if he lives that long. These days he's warehoused in a medical observation bubble, bedridden, clad in adult diapers, unable to wash.

Gordon Haas, 68, is in better health, but he too has been in prison the better part of four decades, ever since his 1975 conviction for murdering his wife and children. While inside, Haas earned a master's degree from Boston University, but such opportunities are exceedingly rare nowadays. Ever since Willie Horton—the furloughed Massachusetts prisoner who went AWOL and committed murder only to become the bane of Michael Dukakis' 1988 failed presidential run—Haas has witnessed the rollback of parole and the end of programs that once allowed inmates to work outside prison gates and further themselves on the inside.

This past May, I visited Haas at Norfolk Prison, about 45 minutes outside Boston. Norfolk was designed for 750 men and holds 1,500. Built in during the 1920s to mimic a college campus, its buildings look more like dormitories than cell blocks, if you ignore the razor wire.

Haas tells me his advocacy for prison reform has earned him the scrutiny of the prison's Inner Perimeter Security force, an internal police unit. They read his letters, he says, and monitor his phone calls. So rather than make a formal media request, I simply go in as a regular visitor.

Once I pass through the metal detectors—presenting ID, taking off my shoes and showing the bottoms of my feet, the underside of my collar, and the inside of my waistband—I proceed across the campus into a large visiting room filled with rows of chairs. Prisoners and visitors may sit next to, but not opposite, one another. They must keep their feet flat on the floor at all times and their backs against the chair backs. Guards posted at stations at either end of the room roam about and escort visitors to the toilet. Prisoners are strip searched before they enter and after they leave.

Haas enters wearing a short-sleeve button down, pressed blue jeans, and thick glasses. With his neatly combed gray hair, he reminds me of an IBM executive on a visit to the factory floor. He is affable, and a keen storyteller. In addition to leading the Lifers Group, a collection of men unlikely to ever get out, Haas is chairman of the Store & Finance Committee of the Norfolk Inmate Council. He takes a big interest in Project Youth, which teaches younger prisoners to speak to students and youth groups about what led them to prison.

As of June, according to its own figures, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections had 11,679 inmates. About 19 percent of them were 50 or older and 6 percent were at least 60. Last year, Haas used the DOC's figures to produce his own report, which notes that the 60-plus contingent is the fastest-growing demographic in the state's prisons.

Haas says he has been urging the state to adopt a hospice program for more than 15 years. "Our contention is that since lifers will probably be in need of such care, we are a resource for others now," he says. But "the DOC does not sanction prisoners helping other prisoners. There is one outlet, and that is prisoners can volunteer to take those who can go outside out for programs and fresh air, even those in wheelchairs. That is good, but it is all there is."

The DOC confirms that it has neither prison hospices nor immediate plans to build any. By 2020, according to the state's DOC Master Plan, Massachusetts will need three "new specialized facilities" to house an estimated 1,270 prisoners with medical or mental health issues that would preclude them being housed in "regular" prisons. "We don't have have a position on compassionate, geriatric, or any other type of release," a DOC spokeswoman told me via email. "That's up to the Legislature." And while Massachusetts legislators have introduced a bill "establishing criteria for the compassionate release of terminally ill inmates," it has yet to make it past the "study" stage.

By 2010, according to the Vera Institute, 15 states and DC had approved some form of "geriatric release," while others had medical- or compassionate-release programs that could potentially apply to frail, aging prisoners. But "the jurisdictions are rarely using these provisions," its report notes, thanks to fearful politicians, a less-than-sympathetic public, narrow eligibility criteria, and red tape that discourages inmates from applying and can draw out the process indefinitely. Nobody has aggregated the state-to-state data, but it appears that the number of prisoners released under these programs totals no more than a few hundred.

Jack Donson, who spent 23 years as a case manager for the federal Bureau of Prisons, points to the shortcomings of the Elderly Offender Pilot Program, part of 2008 federal legislation called the Second Chance Act. The law made the criteria for early release so strict, and the paperwork so extensive, Donson says, that it applied to only a few dozen inmates nationally. "I actually referred the first offender in the country" to the program, he notes on his website. "The bureaucrats deemed this offender dangerous to the community," because of a record of violence 30 years earlier, "yet he had been incarcerated in a camp setting (without a fence), was a model inmate with an outstanding work ethic who even participated in unescorted medical furloughs in the community."

Little has changed in the interim. But Hood believes America is approaching a politically expedient moment. "You spend $68,000 to watch an inmate who is truly hospital-bound? I think most people would get that. They would understand that if there's another way to do it—let's do it outside the prison," he says. "Sixteen billion a year. Think about that number. It has to wake up some people."

"States just can't support the burden anymore," agrees former state warden Carl ToersBijns. "The only solution will be to release them or to ignore them." If we choose the latter, he cautions, prison death rates will skyrocket.

Of course, ignoring elderly prisoners after release could be just as devastating. The ACLU's Fathi emphasizes that institutionalized old folks will require plenty of help transitioning back into the community and getting the services they need. "For many elderly prisoners," he says, "particularly those with serious medical needs, simply pushing them out the prison door will be tantamount to a death sentence."

Intelligence, Uplift, and Our Place in a Big Cosmos

"A balanced and well-researched Wired article by Jason Kehe reveals the latest "yoo-hoo transmission to aliens" stunt. Of course I consider these things to be at-best dopey, with a small but significant chance of being thoughtlessly dangerous for all of humanity. Above all, to cast such noises outward, based on untested assumptions, without at least offering to discuss it first with our planet's population and its greatest sages? That is simply rude. Arrogant rudeness on an unprecedented scale. See my article for the Lifeboat Foundation, Shouting at the Cosmos: how SETI has taken a worrisome turn into dangerous territory.

Put it in perspective? A cute interactive graphic lets you test out four different assumptions in the Drake Equation to estimate the number of communicating civilizations in our galaxy. (I've seen better... but still, this one is fun and a good introduction.)

== Gettin Smarter all the time... ==

But I promised to appraise one of those Drake Equation factors today -- intelligence. Is it rare? Can it be enhanced? Or possibly bestowed upon others?

Let's start with a recent science news item. By placing a neural device in the brains of monkeys with disrupted cognitive function, researchers were able to recover and even improve the monkeys' ability to make decisions, overcoming the effects of cocaine in select regions of the brain. Moreover, when duplicating the experiment under normal conditions, the monkeys' performance improved beyond their previous 75% proficiency level. In other words, a kind of cognitive enhancement appears to have happened.

This got big play in the press. But, now let's not get carried away. The prosthesis was designed to bypass a very specific type of temporary chemical debilitation in a specific region. That’s a far cry from the general brain boost proclaimed by florid news reports. Still...

... that raises the possible prospect someday of brain boosting some of the critters around us. A topic we have discussed here several times before. Now an excellent iO9 article by George Dvorsky indicates we may be at the dawn of the Uplift Era. Should we upgrade the intelligence of animals?

From Pierre Boule to H.G. Wells, nearly all tales about ‘uplift’ of other species (to our level of intelligence) assumed that it would be done stupidly – because stupidity leads to errors and conflict, which transform any concept into an action plot! Mistakes create peril, so those authors portrayed the uplifters being callous, unwise, even vicious slave-masters. When writers do this, the plot almost writes itself.

What's more challenging is to write a story that shows humanity doing something well, or at least openly, with good intentions — and yet still crafting a story filled with action and excitement, where Crichtonian errors can get discovered through vibrant criticism.

That was the premise behind my popular series of six novels in the "Uplift Universe"... soon to be re-issued in two omnibus volumes by Orbit Books. And yes, I am aiming to re-enter that cosmos in a big way, with that long-awaited "progenitors" tale. Pretty soon I reckon.

== The Mental Ecology of Intelligence and Uplift ==

These issues are (at long last) getting serious (if rather shallow) attention from the scientific community. For example, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Caltech's Christof Koch. It declares the following:

“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

The authors go on to imply that they do not perceive a stark, decisive, qualitative difference between the consciousness of humans and of many higher animal species. Their implication is that we should consider new proposals for vesting such creatures with some level of sapient rights and respecting their current mental achievements as different, but of equivalent value to our own.

Alas, while I lean toward their general side of the spectrum, wanting more empathy toward the natural world, I find how they express that empathy to be fantastically myopic. Overblown, their declaration says nothing new. The threshold abilities of cetaceans, simians... and yes parrots, corvids, pinnipeds, even cephalopods... have all been investigated recently and we’ve been delightfully astonished by evidence showing how many animals possess impressive-if-basic mental skills.

Fascinating, indeed! Nevertheless dwelling on this positive trend is to miss the starkly deeper significance of all this.

What's interesting is not how many somewhat-smart species there are on this planet, but how they cluster! With some variation (dolphins and chimps seem to be ahead by a margin) these dozens or so of elite "pre-sapient" species all bump against roughly the same glass ceiling of commonly shared capabilities -- at problem solving, tool use, linguistic comprehension, and so on. The more you watch crows, sea lions, parrots, octopi -- and dolphins and apes -- the more this confluence of similar abilities comes across as the striking salient feature.

That ceiling is what's interesting! It's as if Darwin himself stepped up and told all these diverse species and genuses: "this high you may climb, because it helped you to be agile and clever in your natural environment. But no higher! The reproductive and survival rewards for getting much smarter than that simply aren't sufficient to drive selection across an expensive and dangerous gap. You may not cross."

What a fascinating topic for research! Comparing creatures across such a wide range and mapping the breadth and depth and nature of that ceiling. And possibly thereby shedding light on the greatest puzzle of all. Why are we the one exception? The one breakthrough to a whole 'nother level? We sappy sapiens?

Was it a confluence of experiences, trials and selections endured by bands of gregarious apes, squeezing through evolutionary bottlenecks, one after another? Or our bipedal gait, freeing hands for full time manipulation? Our complex mating and alliance habits? Or was it something like my own hypothetical process, Neoteny and two-way sexual selection?

Could some rare fluke -- in one factor of the Drake Equation -- explain us... and thereby help shine light on our apparent loneliness in the cosmos?

Even more thought-provoking; suppose it truly was a fluke that let just one race of bright sub-sapients crash through the ceiling. Well, in that case, what kind of horrible bastards would we be, if we then refused to share our good fortune? If we churlishly disdained to turn around and help others make it across the gap?

Oh, both the left and the right will come up with rationalizations not to even try. Either because Uplift would insult other species or stomp into the creative realm of God. But in the end, these will simply be excuses for selfishness.

== A longer life through self-starvations? ==

Oh but what about ourselves? Can we make ourselves smarter? Perhaps even becoming bright and wise enough to solve our vexing problems? Brilliant enough to turn this internet thing into a blessing, instead of a lobotomizing curse? Well, it's a topic we've covered before and will do so again! (One tracking tool? What fraction of humanity reads this blog? Clearly we could be smarter (in aggregate) than we currently are!)

One route to transcendence might be to live longer. After all, doesn’t experience make you wiser?

But how? Calorie restriction (CR), a 10–40% reduced intake of a nutritious diet, is often reported as the most robust non-genetic mechanism to extend lifespan and healthspan. Effects on bacteria, fruit flies and even mice have encouraged many in the Life-Extension or Transhumanism movements to embrace CR as a personal lifestyle, hoping for the doubling effect they perceive in animal studies. You can recognize the type, at conferences, by their "lean and hungry look."

I have been a skeptic; not only because humans are already the Methuselahs of the mammalian order, having picked all the longevity low-hanging fruit in order to get three times the average number of heartbeats used by most mammals… but also because caloric restriction has been practiced in hundreds of ascetic monasteries across the last 4000 years. (Do you see any 300 year old monks capering around?)

I portray all of this a bit in my new novel EXISTENCE.

Now news from a study of CR done for the first time on a primate species. "A CR regimen implemented in young and older age rhesus monkeys at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) has not improved survival outcomes." Oops. Did I call that? Sorry fellows.

== More Problems With “Intelligence” ==

Certainly, in order to get smarter, we’ll not only have to process information faster and better. We'll also be behooved to overcome or toss out lots of baggage we picked up during those epochs in the caves. "The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American -- they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others." (From Evolutionary Psychology Primer, by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby).

People who ordinarily cannot detect violations of if-then rules can do so easily and accurately when that violation represents cheating in a situation of social exchange.

"Everywhere it has been tested (adults in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, France, Hong-Kong; schoolchildren in Ecuador, Shiwiar hunter-horticulturalists in the Ecuadorian Amazon), people do not treat social exchange problems as equivalent to other kinds of reasoning problems. Moreover, they do not behave as if they were designed to detect logical violations per se; instead, they prompt choices that track what would be useful for detecting cheaters."

Well, well, were we speaking of getting rid of excess baggage? And did I mention “sexual selection?” Then consider this, published in The New York Times: Men, Who Needs Them? An amusing (I hope) rumination on how unnecessary the male half of the human race is becoming. A pondering that has long been mused-upon in both radical feminist science fiction and more moderate versions, like my own novel Glory Season.

Or might the new “Maker Movement” lead to building replicants, even better than we near-perfect natural specimens?

How to create cyborg flesh. According to Harvard researchers, you start with a three-dimensional scaffold that encourages cells to grow around them. These scaffolds are generally made of collagen, which makes up the connective tissue in almost every animal. (Elsewhere I describe recent advances in re-growing complex tissues like a whole esophagus.) The Harvard engineers basically took normal collagen, and wove nanowires and transistors into the matrix to create nanoelectric scaffolds (nanoES). The neurons, heart cells, muscle, and blood vessels were then grown as normal, creating cyborg tissue with a built-in sensor network. Next? Go beyond sensing to communicate 2-way with the cells. ALL the cells. Directly. Yipe.

== Intelligence in the Future? ==

Hailed as the biggest breakthrough in genomics in a decade, swathes of DNA once thought to have no purpose, actually form a complex “control panel” for our genes. Turns out the “junk DNA” had some purposes, after all! The non-gene sections are regulatory, and crucially important.

Oh but then it gets mind-blowing. Big Brain futurist singularity guy John Smart has just posted a 45 min video about Chemical Brain Preservation, which might challenge cryonics among those looking for a better storage medium, to wait out the temporary hiatus between "death" and -- er -- a second life. That is, if it gets validated by neuroscience in coming years.

Will this make post-death preservation less expensive, less environmentally wasteful and more within plausible reach of those who have been skeptical, till now? I guess I'd prefer being a pickled-plasticized brain on my grandkids' mantel to using up kilogallons of liquid nitrogen in a fragile, frozen ossuary, never being talked about (as you would be, now and then, as a plasticized keepsake on the mantel!) After all, isn't that just a step removed from traditional embalming?

Emplace the brain/head in a unit with holo display and simple voice-response unit. (“Hey you kids! It’s getting dusty over here!") Add some oracular statements that get released by time (a la Hari Seldon). Fun for the whole (extended) family. You can leave comments at John's blog.

Oh, John added the following personal note: "I will do my best to get the price down to where the mantlepiece fossil is an irresistible choice for the Brin household. Then if the Universe allows me a bit more longevity than you (cross fingers), I'll come by and pay my respects. I hope to see a holoBrin pop out, identify me biometrically, and then ask me if I'm working sufficiently hard to get you back out!!"

Hrm. I will have more fierce ways of haunting than just that!

And finally, the ultimate theory… OUR LIFE AS AVATARS.... My friend Rich Terrille is interviewed about the now familiar notion that we all dwell within a simulation. Rich is a very bright guy. We've discussed his version of this concept and I consider it a step forward. Earlier versions by Hans Moravec in the 1990s and Stanislaw Lem in the 1970s, are of interest along the way, going back to Lao Tse's parable of the butterfly and the Emperor. My own contributions include an essay, Could our Universe be a Fake? and a novelette from the 1990s called "Stones of Significance" which folks might find both amusing and boggling. (A Hugo nominee.)

Evidence for this notion includes the fact that we have a minimum temperature and a maximum speed and a limit to how finely you can sub-divide nature. All of those “universal traits” strike one as attempts to skimp on computational needs by the stingy owners of this simulation... I mean the handsome, intelligent, generous, kind and wonderful owners who would never think of reaching over and flicking the switch that says reboot.

Seven Examples of a "Police State," and How They Are Appearing in the US

By Will Potter

“Has the United States become a police state?”

That’s the stark question I was asked at the beginning of a recent radio interview.

Framing the current political climate in these terms is quite blunt, and can be jarring to some people because it automatically conjures images of, for example, Nazi Germany. That’s clearly different than what is occurring right now in the United States. So how do we conceptualize the current state of government repression, and how do we put it in a historical context?

Is this a police state? If not, what is it?

The image that most people hold of a “police state” is a representation of extreme power dynamics, and repressive tactics to maintain them, at specific points of history. The current political climate in the United States is unique in many ways, and distinct from those eras. However, it shares core attributes that we generally associate with a “police state”:

1. Raids, Harassment, and Intimidation of Dissidents by Police

When FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents raided multiple activist homes in the Northwest recently, they were in search of “anti-government or anarchist literature.”

2. Militarization of Domestic Law Enforcement

As Arthur Rizer wrote for The Atlantic:

In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a “soldier’s mentality” among their ranks.

3. Disproportionate Prison Sentences for Political Activists

The reason Marie Mason, who destroyed property, received a prison sentence twice as long as racists, who harmed human beings, is because of her politics.

Likewise Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for non-violent disrupting an illegal oil and gas lease auction because he cost corporations thousands of dollars.

4. Creation of New Laws for People Because of Their Political Beliefs

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was created solely to prosecute activists who threaten the “loss of profits” for corporations.

And now 10 states have considered “Ag Gag” bills that go so far as to criminalize non-violent undercover investigations. The new bills have passed in two states, Utah and Iowa.

5. Creation of Special Prison Units

In addition to Guantanamo Bay, which Obama has refused to close, there are now two experimental prison units on U.S. soil for “domestic terrorists.” These Communications Management Units are for political prisoners that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons describes as having “inspirational significance.”

6. Pervasive Use of Surveillance

Spy drones are being used by domestic law enforcement for surveillance, artificial intelligence, and monitoring social movements (here’s a great overview from Salon).

Recently, Tampa police wanted to use them against RNC protesters.

This is in addition to widespread surveillance measures such as TrapWire.

7. Criminalization of Ideology

In my opinion this is the hallmark of any police state: the targets of the state have little to do with criminal activity, and everything to do with their perceived subversive ideology.

For example, consider these FBI “domestic terrorism” training documents which say that anarchists are “criminals seeking an ideology to justify their activities.”

There Is No "Tipping Point"

A final, more nebulous characteristic of a police state is the extent to which all of the tactics above take place. It’s a question of degree and intensity, and some would argue that, even though these tactics are occurring with increasing frequency, they are not at the level that would merit this kind of “police state” language. I think that’s completely reasonable.

But no matter how you feel about the characterization of what is occurring right now, the most important point is this: if we’re not a police state already, we are marching closer and closer every day.

In the following interview, I try to dispel some of the myths about police states and how they are created, including the flawed idea of a “tipping point” leading up to extreme states of repression.

Listen to the full interview here (starting at 55:43) or download it from iTunes (it’s the 8/23/12 show)

Working Around The World

Americans already detained under NDAA?

The plaintiffs that are suing US President Barack Obama over his insistence on keeping the National Defense Authorization Act on the books said Thursday that they fear Americans are already being held indefinitely and without trial under the NDAA.

US President Barack Obama refrained from even once commenting on his efforts to keep his power to indefinitely detain Americans without charge when he appeared on Reddit.com recently and urged users to “Ask Me Anything.” His opponents in the matter aren’t shying away from speaking up online, though.

The plaintiffs in the case to ban the White House from imprisoning Americans indefinitely without trial or due justice took to Reddit on Thursday to answer questions involving the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2012, or the NDAA, and blamed corrupt media and a broken governmental establishment for letting the Obama administration maintain its to book Americans in military prisons without charge.

On December 31, 2011, President Obama authorized the NDAA, and with it he approved a controversial provision that permits the government to indefinitely detain US citizens without trial for mere allegations of ties to suspected terrorists. Journalists and activists filed a lawsuit against the president earlier this year over the provision, Section 1021, which US Federal Judge Katherine Forrest in turn agreed was unconstitutional. Last month Judge Forrest decided that an earlier, temporary injunction on the clause should be made permanent, but the Obama Justice Department pleaded for an emergency stay only hours later. A lone federal appeals judge has since heard that plea and has momentarily blocked Judge Forrest’s injunction. Now pending the results of an appeals panel’s formal investigation, the NDAA’s indefinite detention provision remains on the books.

On Thursday, the plaintiffs in the case — journalist Chris Hedges, activist Tangerine Bolan, Pentagon Papers leaker Dan Ellsberg, their attorneys and others — told users of Reddit to ask them anything.

“The Obama DOJ has vigorously opposed these efforts, and immediately appealed her ruling and requested an emergency stay on the injunction – claiming the US would incur ‘irreparable harm’ if the president lost the power to use Section 1021 – and detain anyone, anywhere until the end of hostilities on a whim. This case will probably make its way to the Supreme Court,” the plaintiffs acknowledged in their introduction.

From there, President Obama’s opponents in federal court combed through hundreds of posts to answer questions regarding the NDAA over the course of several hours. And although the plaintiffs have not exactly been silent with the status of their fight since suing the White House earlier this year, the insight they offered on Reddit provided a fresh update on the case against the NDAA amid some of the government’s most unusual legal maneuvers yet.

Offering his take on the case, Hedges said that he even believes the NDAA’s indefinite detention clause is already being used to imprison Americans, “because they filed an emergency appeal.”

“If the Obama administration simply appealed it, as we expected, it would have raised this red flag,” Hedges added. “But since they were so aggressive it means that once Judge Forrest declared the law invalid, if they were using it, as we expect, they could be held in contempt of court. This was quite disturbing, for it means, I suspect, that US citizens, probably dual nationals, are being held in military detention facilities almost certainly overseas and maybe at home.”

“The signing statement is the most ridiculous part to this for me. He writes this statement saying he's not happy about the power existing, but then his administration fights so hard to keep that specific power in place,” Reddit user devilrobotjesus responded.

“If Obama didn't want it to happen, he would not have signed it, especially after stating that he would veto it,” co-counsel Carl Mayer explained. Mayer has represented the plaintiffs in the case of Hedges v. Obama and said that he plans on continuing his pursuit to take indefinite detention off the books.

“We will do whatever it takes,” Mayers added. “We are prepared for a Supreme Court battle.”

Activist and journalist Tangerine Bolan is also insistent on prevailing over the Obama administration, but says “The biggest obstruction to our winning this case . . . is our broken systems.” Bolan blames a lack of media coverage, insufficient public awareness “and the government behaving very badly, even in court, on the record,” for the difficulties the plaintiffs have had to endure, adding that the Obama administration’s constant missteps have been noticed by no one except “seven plaintiffs, four attorneys, one federal judge and the activists who have been following this case.”

“Amazing,” she added.

Journalist Chris Hedges extrapolated on Bolan’s opinion, singling out “a corporate-owned system of information” for not informing Americans that they can be imprisoned without trial at this very moment.

“MSNBC, which is a propaganda arm of the Democratic establishment, just as Fox is a propaganda arm of the Republican establishment, is not going to raise this as Obama is as guilty as Romney. If we had a healthy press this would have gotten more coverage, although the print media, and in particular my old paper the NY Times, finally did good coverage,” Hedges wrote.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department employee who achieved notoriety a generation earlier by leaking what became known as the Pentagon Papers, agreed that the system is severely in fault in this instance.

“Virtually every public institution has failed us gravely. Not only the executive, but the courts, congress, most of the media and most of the churches,” Ellsberg wrote on Reddit. “Radical reform is needed, even to the point of non-violent revolution. “

Elsewhere, the panel touched on why they believe the Obama administration is so adamantly fighting to keep the NDAA legal.

“It is quite possible that the NDAA is . . . a way to get Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,” Bolan claimed. “While the USG has tried to paint us as irrational, delusional and ridiculous, you see the slippery slope here.”

On his part, Hedges said that emails hacked by Anonymous and released by Wikileaks show that the US government has attempted to "tie a legitimate dissident group to terrorism and strip them of their right of dissent,” to which Bolan follows up with an explanation that supports the ramped up attempts from the White House to persecute whistleblowers and leakers under President Obama

“Yes, of course, if [Assange] is an enemy of the state, then yes, [The New York Times] could be considered to have communicated with the enemy. And perhaps the NDAA is a way to finally nail him,” Bolan said.

A three-judge appeals panel is expected to soon weigh in on the stay placed on Judge Forrest’s injunction, in the meantime keeping Section 1021 and the rest of the NDAA applicable to every American.

Calling U.S. Drone Strikes 'Surgical' Is Orwellian Propaganda

By Conor Friedersdorf

A moment's reflection is enough to understand why intellectually honest people should shun the loaded metaphor.

The Obama Administration deliberately uses the word "surgical" to describe its drone strikes. Official White House spokesman Jay Carney marshaled the medical metaphor here, saying that "a hallmark of our counterterrorism efforts has been our ability to be exceptionally precise, exceptionally surgical and exceptionally targeted." White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan attributed "surgical precision" and "laser-like focus" to the drone program. He also spoke of "delivering targeted, surgical pressure to the groups that threaten us." And a "senior administration official" told The Washington Post that "there is still a very firm emphasis on being surgical and targeting only those who have a direct interest in attacking the United States."

They've successfully transplanted the term into public discourse about drones.

I've been told American drone strikes are "surgical" while attending Aspen Ideas Festival panels, interviewing delegates at the Democratic National Convention, and perusing reader emails after every time I write about the innocents killed and maimed in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

It is a triumph of propaganda.

The inaccuracy of the claim fully occurred to me as I played back a recent interview I conducted with Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution. (His book Wired for War is a fascinating read.) "You used to measure a surgeon by how still could he hold his hand," Singer told me. "How precise could he make the cut? Well, robotic systems, it isn't a matter of shaking at minute levels. It doesn't shake. You are amazed by a surgeon doing a cut that is millimeters in precision. With robotics it is in nanometers." He was explaining why unmanned systems make sense in a variety of fields, not commenting on the Obama Administration's rhetoric in its ongoing, multi-country drone war.

But that is how we think of surgeons, isn't it?

They use a scalpel. Their cuts are precise down to the millimeter. Once in a great while there is a slip of the knife, a catastrophic mistake. In those cases, the surgeon is held accountable and the victim lavishly compensated. Oh, and there's one more thing about surgical procedures: While the person being cut into is occasionally victimized by a mistake, there is never a case where the scalpel is guided so imprecisely that it kills the dozen people standing around the operating table. For that reason, orderlies and family members don't cower in hospital halls terrified that a surgeon is going to arbitrarily kill them. And if he did, he'd be arrested for murder.

So no, drone strikes aren't like surgery at all.

"As much as the military has tried to make drone pilots feel as if they are sitting in a cockpit, they are still flying a plane from a screen with a narrow field of vision," Mark Mazzetti reports. "Then there is the fact that the movement shown on a drone pilot's video screen has over the years been seconds behind what the drone sees -- a delay caused by the time it takes to bounce a signal off a satellite in space. This problem, called 'latency,' has long bedeviled drone pilots, making it difficult to hit a moving target." That's one more way drones strikes are unlike surgery.

Are they "surgical" compared to an H-bomb?

Er, no, they're less destructive and more precise. To conjure a surgeon with a knife is to lead the listener astray. And it is a downright dishonest metaphor when invoked by an administration that could make their strikes more like surgery but doesn't. For example, the Obama Administration could make certain of the identity of the people it is "operating on." Instead it sometimes uses "signature strikes," wherein the CIA doesn't even know the identity of the people it is killing. It could also attempt autopsies, literal or figurative, when things go wrong. Instead, it presumes sans evidence that all military-aged males killed in drone strikes are "militants."

Said George Orwell in 1946:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

The phrase "surgical drone strike" is handy for naming U.S. actions without calling up images of dead, limb-torn innocents with flesh scorched from the missile that destroyed the home where they slept or burned up the car in which they rode. The New America Foundation, which systematically undercounts these innocents, says there have been at least 152 and many as 192 killed since 2004. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism puts the civilian death figure at between 474 and 881 killed. Either way, would "surgical" strikes kill innocents on that scale in a region with just 2 percent of Pakistan's population? Using data that undercounts innocents killed, The New America Foundation reports that 85 percent of Pakistanis killed in drone strikes are "militants," while 15 percent are civilians or unknown. What do you think would happen to a surgeon that accidentally killed 15 in 100 patients? Would colleagues would call him "surgical" in his precision?

Unlike the Democratic politicians and former Obama Administration officials I heard speak in Aspen, retired Brigadier General Craig Nixon didn't say that American drone strikes were surgical.

He was asked to explain how a farmer was accidentally killed.

And he used a different metaphor when recounting his field experience:

A drone or another intelligence device is sorta like being at a football game sitting on the 50-yard line and looking through a soda straw. I mean you see what you see. But there's a lot of other context that you don't see.

As technology improves, he said, it's a little better, like looking through multiple straws, but there's still a lot of missing context.

It's a very different image than a "surgical drone strike," isn't it?

Prosecutors charge Idaho woman with felony, say she mailed threatening stick-figure drawing

BOISE, Idaho — A woman who was about to be released from an Idaho prison will stay behind bars a while longer because federal prosecutors say she mailed a threatening stick figure drawing to a relative.

Linda Joyce Lakes was serving time at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center on probation violations stemming from a 2007 grand theft sentence, and she was scheduled to be released last Friday. But earlier this month, the U.S. attorney’s office charged her with mailing threatening communications, a felony.

Prosecutors say that in 2010, Lakes mailed a drawing that apparently depicted a battered stick figure alongside threatening phrases such as “No tears,” ‘’No hiding,” and “No more you.”

Kyle Wright, an FBI agent in Pocatello who investigated the case, described the drawing in a court document.

“One stick figure appeared to be lying down with his face smashed. The baseball bat was lying nearby with damage that appeared to be consistent with its use on the first stick figure. The second stick figure appeared to be walking away with a smile,” Wright wrote.

Wright also said in his affidavit that Lakes sent a letter with the drawing that indicated her prison sentence was coming to an end and that the recipient should be prepared for his final moments.

The FBI agent also said that Lakes told the FBI her drawing symbolized her hate for a man who had abused her in the past, and that one day she wanted to beat and possibly kill him.

Lakes was released from the state prison and taken into federal custody. She waived her preliminary hearing on the charge and has not yet entered a plea.

Lisa Tolle, a paralegal with Federal Defender Services of Idaho in Pocatello, said her office had just been assigned the case and attorneys had not yet fully reviewed it.

Do you have a poor sense of smell? Could you be a psychopath?

Psychopaths have a remarkably poor sense of smell, according to a study published on Thursday.

Researchers in Australia tested a theory that psychopathy – a severe personality disorder characterised by lack of empathy, antisocial behaviour and callousness – may be linked to impaired smell ability.

Both phenomena have been independently traced to dysfunction in part of the brain called the orbito-frontal complex (OFC).

Mehmet Mahmut and Richard Stevenson of the Department of Psychology at Sydney’s Macquarie University trialled the olfactory skills of 79 individuals, aged 19 to 21, who had been diagnosed as non-criminal psychopaths and lived in the community.

Using “Sniffin’ Sticks” – 16 pens that contain different scents, such as orange, coffee and leather – they found the participants had problems in correctly identifying the smell, and then discriminating it against a different odour.

Those who scored highest on a standard scorecard of psychopathic traits did worst on both counts, even though they knew that they were smelling something.

The finding could be useful for identifying psychopaths, who are famously manipulative in the face of questioning, says the paper, published in the journal Chemosensory Perception.

“Olfactory measures represent a potentially interesting marker for psychopathic traits, because performance expectancies are unclear in odour tests and may therefore be less susceptible to attempts to fake ‘good’ or ‘bad’ responses.”

The OFC is a front part of the brain responsible for controlling impulses, planning and behaving in line with social norms.

It also appears to be important in processing olfactory signals, although the precise function is unclear, according to previous research.

Odour molecules bind to specific nerve cells in the base of the nose, which then send signals via the lateral olfactory tract to the primary olfactory cortex.

From there, the signals go to OFC via a brain organ called the mediodorsal nucleus, located in the thalamus.

The study makes clear that a poor sense of smell does not by itself mean that someone is a psychopath. Olfactory dysfunction can also occur in schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, it notes.

Shooting the Messenger: The Misfortunes of Google Brazil and the Need for Intermediary Protections

"Judge orders arrest of president of Google's operation in Brazil"

The headline was bizarre enough, but what followed seemed to come straight out of The Onion: "... for failure to remove YouTube videos that attacked a mayoral candidate." And the cherry on top: the judge also ordered "a statewide, 24-hour suspension of Google and YouTube."

In other words, after someone had posted questionable videos, the law came down on none other than the middleman. Simply for hosting an allegedly defamatory video, it seems absurd for a judge to order Google to be shut down for a day—and on top of that for an executive to get arrested. Brazil proves once again why countries around the world need strong intermediary safe harbor laws like those in the United States.

Judge Flavio Peren from the Brazilian state Mato Grosso do Sul ordered for the arrest of Google Brazil's president after the company refused to take down two videos that targeted a mayoral candidate. The critical videos, according to the judge, were insulting and defamatory, therefore violating Brazil's severe election laws. The judge ruled that Google had committed the crime of "disobedience" (see Art. 330) by not taking down the videos. Google appealed the ruling, which had also ordered the company to shut down its site for twenty-four hours in the state. This isn't the first time Google was hit with such charges; earlier this month, a court in the state of Paraná issued a similar arrest order on another Google exec for not taking down a YouTube clip aimed at a separate mayoral candidate. This ruling, however, was overturned.

Brazil has a notably strict election code. The videos in question were found to violate the law's Article 326, which criminalizes the violation of one's "dignity" during an election. (Despite the stringent law's focus on "dignity," Brazilian elections are currently host to dozens of people running under assumed superhero and celebrity names.) Though Google served as merely a platform for the videos in question, it was nonetheless the target of the election court's orders.

Google's recent Transparency Report, which exposes the number of government takedown requests, ranks Brazil at the top of the list, with 194 content removal requests in the second half of 2011. As Google's notes show, a number of those requests were defamation charges around election season.

Apart from the absurdity of the judicial orders in the last month, these cases highlight the need for strong intermediary protections around the world. Governments and individuals have often shot the messenger in order to curb speech, especially when speakers are anonymous. Like many countries outside the United States, Brazil does not have any strong laws to protect online service providers that host third-party speech and content. When hosts are held liable for their user's actions, incentives to host speech are dampened, legal costs rise, and innovation is chilled.

In the United States, we have a crucial law that protects online services that host speech: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230). Though most of the CDA harmed speech and was found to be unconstitutional, Section 230 survived, relieving sites of liability for their users' content. In other words, under CDA 230, only users have legal responsibility over what they post.1 This not only allows sites to innovate and scale without spending hoards of money on vetting all of their content (or, worse, automatically censoring it), but it also prevents critics from sending improper notices to the content host in an attempt to censor.

Brazil has been trying to address this issue through Marco Civil, a sweeping law that aims to promote Internet freedom, protect speech and privacy, and establish much-needed safe-harbor protections for intermediaries. Both Google and Facebook spoke out in support of the bill, though a vote on the bill was recently postponed. While there are a number of ways that Marco Civil could be improved to be more in alignment with international standards for protecting freedom of expression, it would at least provide some legal shield for internet intermediaries that host controversial content.

Wave of reaction to the arrest of the "Elder pasticcio"

Severe reactions caused by the arrest of a 27 years old because they had Facebook page titled "Elder Pastitsio." The page was 27 years old and referred satirical father Paisios and the faithful who follow his teachings. The 27 year old was arrested following an interpellation of the Golden Dawn MP Christos Pappas and having found the traces of the Office of Electronic Crime.

Immediate reaction was political, but also at the social media response came on twitter, which created a 'movement' with hashtag # free geron pastitsios.

In its announcement of the Police stated: "From the Electronic Crime file formed Flagrant process against domestic 27 years old, who is accused of blasphemy and malicious kathyvrisi religions, through the known social networking sites Facebook.

"Specifically, the Electronic Crime spotted recently in the famous social networking site Facebook, with data page ( www.facebook.com / gerontas.pastitsios ), which contained blasphemies and insults against Elder Paisios and Orthodox Christianity. " The 27 year old was arrested at his home in Psachna Euboea, where the police found and confiscated a laptop. Formed against the file and will be directed to apologize to the prosecution.

Feature is that a few 24-hour MP Chr.Pappas Golden Dawn had tabled a question in Parliament arguing that "user abuse, mocks and tries to humiliate the sacred form of orthodox Elder Paisios."

The member of the Golden Dawn asked the ministers of Education and Public Order "if you take the necessary steps immediately, through the prosecuting cybercrime to directly remove that profile from the internet, or do you remain deaf and tolerate the shameful this Elder Paisios of ridicule. "

"It took fire 'to Twitter

In the Twitter hashtag # FreeGeronPastitsios, user feedback is very pointedly: "Now that the court strike, the chance to take the Inquisition cases", "What time is stoning in the Constitution?", "Non-Waiver of Notice kakourgimatiki act for the sake of the Golden Dawn. How far from the witch hunt? "," The neo-Nazis who called for the arrest of the creator of the satirical page freely advocate for euthanasia of disabled Internet ',' jealous Putin; @ primeminister »,« sleeping in Athens, wake up in Islamabad '.

Reactions parties

Strong were the reactions from Left parties which caused the arrest of 27 years old.

In its communication, the Committee on the Rights of SYRIZA-CCL notes that freedom of expression comes under attack from the extreme right theocracy.

"Today's arrest eikosieptachronou Evia on charges of blasphemy is a top act of violation of freedom of expression and even the veracity of that normally would have to protect a pupil. It is unacceptable to Greece in 2012 due to citizen arrested satirical commentary on a personal page on social networking medium, something that only happens in Iranian theocratic regime type.

"The troika interior not only flattens social rights and democratic freedoms. And it's really sad that this is done on minister Antonis Roupakiotis.

It should therefore be noted the obvious:

"First, the freedom of speech includes the satire as" disrespectful "and" offensive "and if you find some. Like, exactly, you can not ban the film about Muhammad, so he can not banish the page because "Blessed Pastitsio."

"Second, the very same judicial and police authorities condone the daily racist attacks, rushed to meet the request of Nazi Golden Dawn prosecuted page builder. In Greece in 2012, one can find in jail if he makes fun of bigotry, but not prosecuted anyone's website calls the annihilation of immigrants and the mentally ill.

"Third, fully vindicated by the recent installation of MCM-SYRIZA for immediate abolition of the anachronistic and undemocratic provision on blasphemy. Equally timely proves our position on State-Church separation. " Moreover, the MP of SYRIZA Peter Tatsopoulos stressed that the case of Father Paisios reminds Immortality Egaleo, but the state has not reacted to charlatanism.

The SYRIZA parliamentary spokesman Dimitris Papadimoulis expressed his desire to appear as a defense witness in the trial of 27 years old. As noted on Twitter: "When the law equates pedophilia with blasphemy is unjust." Also, he asked: "What does the Minister of Justice, Mr. Roupakiotis ischyousanomothesia for blasphemy and the arrest of 27 years old, why silent? Dimaratos This?"

H PASOK spokesman Fofi Gennimata said: «O observance of Christian and every other known religion is an essential element of a modern open society.
Another respect, however, and other criminal charges.

"The young man who was arrested could simply think that the act offends many of his fellows. But from this point, up to one 27 year old led the courts and with incredible speed, there is a gap.

"This gap can not be opened with the encouragement of the Golden Dawn. It can be closed through calm action of the State, and the Church, constantly fighting against fanaticism and intolerance. The protection of religious and national identity is not a criminal matter. Those that bother us when we are seeing in other countries, does not have to happen in Greece. "

The KPS adopted a communication which refers to "state ready to respond quickly to the requirements of the Golden Dawn" and characterizes the arrest "fundamentalist character, not peculiar to European democratic state, but a theocracy" and stresses that "challenge the freedom reasons, but also to all its citizens, as it is intolerant, medieval practices. "

The KPS believes that the blasphemy law should be repealed, while sounding the alarm about the phenomena obscurantism, religious fanaticism and intolerance, that multiply nowadays, whereas satire was born in ancient Athens.

Action in a statement said: "The Internet offers new possibilities to commit very serious offenses. Thousands of illegal transactions are done electronically, multifarious forms of fraud, threats to personal data of everyone, child pornography, and coordination to carry out crimes in the real world.

"It is, therefore, strong policing, to such offenses either prevented or sanctioned. But, man, money and other resources wasted on asteiotites, for the arrest of the manager of a satirical website on facebook.

"The Action believes that satire should not be criminalized. Even when satire stochopoiei religious sentiment should be left free. As an acute form of criticism is necessary for dialogue in any civilized society. Repression is profoundly undemocratic step and leads to a substantial reduction of individual liberties. "

Modesty be damned. If you've got it, you've got every right to flaunt it

Shrinking violet or braggart? I know which one I'd choose every day of the week

Julie Burchill

Some are born modest (and have much to be modest about), some achieve modesty (when the nipples go south, the nose goes north and women who would previously disrobe at the drop of a prop get all censorious about younger women stripping off – be my witness, Annie Lennox) and some have modesty thrust upon them (those billions of the world's women lucky enough to be born Muslim.)

From KateGate to the end of "naked" scanners to the banning of men from working in Saudi Arabian lingerie shops, this apparently Victorian value stubbornly refuses to go the way of smelling salts and the antimacassar. Despite the occasional mavericks of I-Love-Meism such as Simon Cowell (who now, I see, is being credited with having a nervous collapse by his biographer, Tom Bower, no doubt in order to rebrand him as less of a show-off), modesty and self-deprecation remain in Britain what mom and apple pie have traditionally been to our American cousins. Who but an ocean-going loony would admit to being against them?

But just think what a boring, bread-and-milk world this would be without the boastful. At worst, they (us) give us (you) something to be appalled by, and to mock, and to feel smugly superior in your self-deprecation to – and at best they are brave, especially if they are women. Modesty, on the other hand, is the bog-standard buzz-kill at the great cocktail party of life.

Look at breasts. Who'd have thought the Duchess of Cambridge had them? Not from seeing her dressed, you wouldn't. (This is a fat broad's joke.) Honestly, if she'd had three, now that would have been a story. When I think about KateGate, I can almost physically feel myself become two people – like nutty Jan in the film of The Brady Bunch, when her good and evil sides vied over whether or not she should scalp her snooty sister. The Feminist Me says that a woman's right to her own body should be inviolate at all times, free from fear of peeping paps. But the republican side says that this woman is supported generously from the public purse and exists basically to have her photograph taken and raise the profile of this country abroad: business as usual, then.

And the anti-Islamist heckler, which tends to yell the loudest in most of my internal debating groups these days, says that the British people should feel far more aggrieved that she was recently photographed covering her head to show "respect" to a religion some of whose adherents show no respect whatsoever to women, homosexuals, Christians and Jews than over the fact that she was photographed with her kit off. Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

Shame, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. As a frequent flyer, and a fat one, do I feel a burst of sheer molten relief that "naked" scanners are to be phased out and that hilarious image of my roly-poly self may no longer be passed around among airport staff in their tea break for cheap laughs? No, I don't give a stuff and anyone who does is just too precious to live. And certainly too precious to fly to scary foreign countries when they would surely be better employed sitting at home on a silken cushion, sewing a fine seam and being frightened by spiders.

Of course, our old mate A Spokesman For The Muslim Community popped up – who needs Mrs Whitehouse and Malcolm Muggeridge with these curtain-twitching spoilsports among us? – at some point during the trials of the naked scanners and predicted that some Muslim women would be too modest to submit to the shady screen and, sure enough, a few forfeited their flights rather than put the greater good before personal peeves. That's an interesting thing about modest women – they actually seem more up themselves than immodest ones in their insistence that they have something special that no one's ever seen before.

The ever-surprising Saudis' take on this has just been to close 100 lingerie shops that dare to have men on their staff. Last month, the Wahhabi Islamist government announced plans to build the modern world's first women-only city, construction to begin next year, creating around 5,000 jobs in the textiles, pharmaceuticals and food-processing industries. And also creating an awful lot of lady-loving, surely, in a classic own goal by rulers who, like Queen Victoria, must believe that homosexuality is simply physically impossible for women. In seeking to impose modesty upon women by taking the gender apartheid wing of Islam to its crazed, logical conclusion, the Saudis will inadvertently create a colony that will make the isle of Lesbos look like the Playboy mansion.

Modesty used to be like juvenile delinquency; in men, it could refer to a varying array of behaviours – personal modesty, professional modest – but in women, it referred to sexual conduct. In the west, as women have moved out of the home and into the workplace, they have crossed the line and now boast about other things – looks, wealth, talent. When they do, though, they are reviled with a fury that would not seem out of place in ducking stool-era England, as the recent attacks on the likes of Samantha Brick and Edwina Currie have demonstrated. Of course, we are liable to be ridiculed if we see something in ourselves which others do not. But sometimes, especially when we are young and lovely, showing off is simply the correct response to the wonder of being alive.

This is why I am one of the very few old, plain female journalists who consistently refuses to get on my high horse about the modern habit of being surprised by sex tapes. To hear the harpies harrumph, you'd think they'd never looked in a mirror when in their prime and smirked: "Whoah! Get a load of that!" I know I did, to the point of, as a teenager, frequently piping at my reflection before I put on my school uniform: "You're gonna get it tonight!" If we'd have had cameraphones back then, we'd have been plastering dirty pictures of ourselves all over the show.

So I cheer when Tulisa, or whoever, brazens it out rather than running off to cover herself in sackcloth and ashes, as other columnistas seem to believe she should. "Craft must have clothes, but truth loves to go naked," said Thomas Fuller. "Why? Because I'm beautiful," said the young Ursula Andress when asked why she stripped for Playboy. Let us leave modesty to those who have much to be modest about and put our best boast forward in these most fearful of times.

ACLU Sues CIA Over Drone Killings

By Stephen Lendman

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been around since the Vietnam era. They were used as reconnaissance platforms. In the 1980s, Harpy air defense suppression system radar killer drones were employed. In the Gulf War, unmanned combat air systems (UCAS) and X-45 air vehicles were used.

Others were deployed in Bosnia in 1995 and against Serbia in 1999. America’s new weapon of choice is now commonplace in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, elsewhere abroad, and domestically for law enforcement and surveillance. Escalated domestic and foreign use is planned.

A previous article called drone warfare remote control killing like sport. From distant or nearby command centers, operators wage virtual war.

They dismissively ignore human carnage. It shows up as computer screen blips. They look no different from video game images. The difference, of course, is people die.

They’re mostly noncombatants. Studies show militants are successfully hit about 2% of the time. Others are wrongly targeted or happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

On January 13, 2010, the ACLU petitioned Washington under the Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA). It requested legal justification claimed for conducting predator drone targeted killings abroad.

In March 2010, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. As part of its challenge, it collected about 200 on-and-off the record public statements. Former and current US officials made them.

It “demand(ed) that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas.”

“In particular, the lawsuit asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, the number and rate of civilian casualties and the other basis information essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to conduct targeted killings.”

In court briefs, Justice Department lawyers claimed revealing sensitive documents would compromise national security. How many times before have we heard that? It doesn’t wash.

The same excuse is given in political prosecution cases. Secret evidence is used to convict. Defense attorneys and defendants can’t contest it. Who knows if it exists?

On September 13, ProPublica.org headlined “How the Gov’t Talks About a Drone Program it Won’t Acknowledge Exists,” saying:

Drones are Washington’s weapon of choice. They’re used for targeted assassinations. No one anyway is safe. Eye in the sky predator drones spot victims, aim, fire and kill.

Administration officials claim drone warfare works. It does so sans details, often staying anonymous, yet claiming “tacit credit” at the same time.

“A White House spokesman declined to comment to ProPublica on the FOIA suit or on the CIA’s drone program.” Silence is official policy on what’s widely acknowledged.

Vagueness substitutes for specifics. For example, in October 2011, former CIA director/current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said:

“I have a hell of a lot more weapons available to me in this job than I had at the CIA, although the Predators aren’t bad.” Did he acknowledge predator drone killings or their use to surveil and gather intelligence?

Months earlier he said Pakistan-based Al Qaeda elements were beaten back in part from “the most aggressive operation the CIA had been involved in in our history.” Did he mean by drones or other means?

At the same time, The New York Times reported in May that the CIA considers all military-aged males killed combatants. Targeting them is fair game. Rule of law principles don’t apply. Killers and higher-up superiors aren’t prosecuted.

In his book titled “The ‘Good Soldier’ On Trial: A Sociological Study of Misconduct by the US Military Pertaining to Operation Iron Triangle, Iraq,” Professor Stjepan Mestrovic discussed violations of US and international law.

He documented “hundreds of instances” of lawless and other “dubious behavior on the part the government.”

US brigade commander Col. Michael Steele was one of many examples. He ordered every military-aged Iraqi killed on sight. Doing so also violates the US Army Field Manual (FM) 27-10.

Paragraph 498 says any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime under international law is responsible for it and may be punished.

Paragraph 499 defines a war crime. Paragraph 500 refers to a conspiracy, attempts to commit it, and complicity with respect to international crimes.

Paragraph 509 denies the defense of superior orders in the commission of a crime, and paragraph 510 denies the defense of an “act of state” to absolve them.

These provisions apply to all US military and civilian personnel. They include top commanders, the Secretary of Defense, his subordinates, CIA and other intelligence officials, as well as the president and vice president of the United States.

In other words, no one is exempt on this or other fundamental rule of law principles. Target killings are lawless. Habeas and due process still apply. Exemptions are prohibited.

The ACLU sued the Defense, State, and Justice Departments. They stonewalled information requests. “(N)or have they given any reason for withholding documents. The CIA answered the ACLU’s request by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents.”

At the time, the CIA wasn’t sued. At first, the ACLU appealed its non-response to the Agency Release Panel. In June 2010, it filed suit. It argued that CIA’s response wasn’t lawful “because the CIA Director and other officials….publicly acknowledged the existence of” the Agency’s drone program.

After the lower court ruled for CIA, the ACLU appealed to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. Oral arguments were scheduled for September 20, 2012. The DC Circuit is notoriously conservative.

Expect ACLU lawyers to face stiff headwinds. Supreme Court justices are no better. Like political Washington, federal courts represent absolute power corrupting absolutely. Don’t bet on ACLU prevailing against odds that long.

On September 18, a press release headlined “ACLU in Appeals Court Thursday Arguing Against CIA’s Secrecy Claim on Targeted Killing Documents.”

The Agency refused to respond to FOIA requests. Its killer drones operate daily in numerous countries. It makes public statements about its program.

Former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US drones kill Americans. He added that targeted killing “is the only game in town.” It reminded him of body counts in Vietnam.

At the same time, few details about the drone program are discussed. Comments are made in broad terms. Necessity and legality are claimed. “Military operations” outside “hot” battlefields are acknowledged.

Government and CIA officials don’t formally admit the Agency’s involvement, let alone details.

Obama prioritizes drone killing. They’re the “one tool we use,” he said. He usurped the power of life and death, including over US citizens. He’s got final “kill list” authority. He can order drone or other attacks to kill anyone, anyway, based on his say alone.

ACLU wants information on “when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the US ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killings.”

According to ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer:

“The notion that the CIA’s targeted killing program is a secret is nothing short of absurd.” Everyone paying attention knows it exists.”

“For more than two years, senior officials have been making claims about the program both on the record and off. They’ve claimed that the program is effective, lawful and closely supervised.”

“If they can make these claims, there is no reason why they should not be required to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.”

On June 13, 2012, ACLU v. CIA requested a DC Circuit expedited hearing. “This case concerns (CIA’s) refusal….to confirm or deny the existence of records responsive Plaintiff’s (FOIA) request (concerning) the CIA’s use of drones to conduct targeted killings.”

“Plaintiffs filed their FOIA request on January 13, 2010 and commenced this suit on March 16, 2010. After the district court (Collyer, J.) granted summary judgment to the CIA on September 9, 2011, Plaintiffs filed a timely appeal.”

“The only issue on appeal is whether the CIA’s refusal to confirm or deny the existence of the drone program….is lawful given that senior government officials have repeatedly discussed (it publicly).”

“Plaintiffs have argued that government officials have officially acknowledged the program in those contexts and that the CIA’s refusal to confirm or deny the existence of the program here is unlawful.”

Expedited resolution was requested because of “immense public interest – namely, the lawfulness, effectiveness, strategic wisdom, and morality of the CIA’s use of drones” to kill.

A Final Comment

Last July, America’s “newspaper of record” moralized drone use. Its article headlined “The Moral Case for Drones,” saying:

“….moral philosophers, political scientists and weapons specialists believe armed, unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare.”

The article stands in stark contrast to a May one titled “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” saying:

Obama “placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”

In other words, he appointed himself judge, jury and executioner. Despot authority is official administration policy. Diktats decide who lives or dies.

Anyone called Al Qaeda or accused of terrorist connections gets marked for death.

What “moral and legal conundrum” could he face, asked The Times? None whatever. On day one in office, he spurned rule of law principles. It’s been downhill ever since.

The New York Times and other media scoundrels march in lockstep. They’re comfortable with imperial lawlessness.

Killing by any means has no moral basis whatever. Claiming it makes supporters complicit. Because of its global reach and influence, NYT bosses, editors, and contributors have the greatest cross to bear. Expect no mea culpas or apologies.

How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

By Rick Perlstein

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I just downloaded it last night.") It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that's not what they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

To see how, travel with me to rural Florida, and another arrest that occurred at almost exactly the same time. On April 28, members of American Front, a white-supremacist group labeled "a known terrorist organization" in the affidavit justifying the arrest, took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake "Occupy" signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida. No script, no choreography for maximal impact on sensation-hungry news broadcasts, no melodramatic press conference with a U.S. attorney and FBI Special Agent in Charge; this arrest only went down after an informant working with state law enforcement fled in fear for his or her life after being threatened by the group's leader Marcus Faella with a 9mm pistol. And though the media reported the involvement of a "joint terrorism task force of FBI and local law enforcement" the arresting affidavit does not even mention federal law enforcement; the charges filed were state, not federal. A circuit court judge scrawled a bail amount of $51,250; that was accidentally knocked down to $500. The Cleveland anarchists were held without bond.

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat. That is unconstitutional, because law enforcement’s criterion for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged plotters hold – not their observed violent potential.

Who else are we supposed to be afraid of? Certainly animal-rights and environmental radicals. In 2006, when FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the indictments of Animal Liberal Front activists who burned down a horse-rendering plant in 1997, harming no humans, he called such property destruction one of the agency's "highest domestic terrorism priorities." We're supposed to be afraid of Muslims, of course – though not even necessarily Muslim militants. In a sting stunningly anatomized on a Pulitzer-worthy This American Life episode from 2005 the target, British citizen Hemant Lakhami, known as "Habib," was an Indian-born Willy Loman, so dumb he referred to night-vision goggles, which he’d never heard of, as "sunglasses" and so broken down and desperate for attention he told the federal informant he had full-sized submarines to sell. He was egged by the informant into selling him Stinger missiles (Lakhami had approached him hoping to sell him mangoes). Upon Lakhami's terrorism conviction then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie stepped up to the press conference microphones to announce, "Today is a triumph for the Justice Department in the war against terror. I don't know that anyone can say that the state of New Jersey, and this country, is not a safer place without Hemant Lakhani trotting around the globe attempting to broker arms deals."

But don't worry your pretty little heads over the epidemic of far-right insurrectionism that followed the election of Barack Obama: all told, according to a forthcoming data analysis by Neiwert, there have been 55 cases of right-wing extremists being arrested for plotting or committing alleged terrorists acts compared to 26 by Islamic militants during the same period. The right-wing plots include the bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane and the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009. Neither of their perpetrators, it goes without saying, had been arrested before they attempted their vile acts; neither required law enforcement entrapment to conceive and carry them out. It's just too bad for their victims they did not fit the story federal law enforcement seeks to tell.

I use the word "story" advisedly. Entrapment is the most literary of abuses of power: Investigators and prosecutors become as unto little Stephen Kings, feeding into, and feeding, the fear centers of our lizard brains in order to manipulate their audience. Unsurprisingly, the tactic crops up whenever the powers that be are themselves most frightened for their power, such as during the 1960s, when instigation of criminal acts by agents provacateurs infiltrating the anti-war movement became extremely prevalent. When one of the accused Chicago 7 left the courtroom just as a witness for the prosecution left the stand, the other six became horrified when it became clear that the guy who had just got up (actually to go to the bathroom) was a plant about to testify against them.

The antiwar movement soon learned whom to be afraid of: people who don’t quite fit in, who always seemed ready to volunteer for anything (if you’re on the FBI payroll, you don’t need a job), people pressing violence when everyone else in the room preferred peace. In the 1972 "Camden 28" trial of Catholic left conspirators who tried to steal and destroy registration records from a local draft board, the star witness got his breaking-and-entering training from the FBI and swore in court that the accused never would have raided the building absent his leadership. Although the people the FBI preferred to recruit were the sort who had trouble keeping jobs anyway. They were frequently mentally unstable: the agent provocateur whose recordings got twenty-three members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War indicted for supposedly conspiring to attack the 1972 Republican National Convention with "lead weights, 'fried' marbles, ball bearings, cherry bombs ... wrist rockets, slingshots, and cross bows" had received a psychological discharge from the Army. And they were usually criminals. In the Harrisburg 7 trial of in 1972 (in which the feds fantastically claimed that a pacifist priest, some nuns, and their confreres intended to blow up the steam tunnels beneath Washington, D.C.) the prosecution's star witness had offered himself to the FBI as an undercover New Lefty from the jail cell where he was serving time for so many crimes the U.S. Attorney had classified him as a "menace to society."

The entrapment game still works the same. In the case documented on This American Life, informant "Habib" was such a notorious liar, thief, and con man that the feds deactivated him – until after September 11, when suddenly "different FBI bureaus were fighting" for his services. The key informant in the Animal Liberation Front arrests was a truck thief and heroin addict. The dude in the Cleveland anarchist case, identified by thesmokinggun.com as a Donald Trump fan named Shaqil Azir, had convictions for cocaine possession, robbery, and passing bad checks – and was also under a current check-fraud indictment the FBI covered up in its affidavit. They also neglected to mention his frequent appearances in bankruptcy court.

Such choices are a feature, not a bug: Criminals with cases pending are able to act more convincingly as, well, criminals, and will do anything the government asks to reduce their sentences; sociopaths are better able to manipulate the emotions of macho young men. The play's the thing. Although sometimes the play becomes too convincing: In the Watergate hearings in 1973, some of the witnesses testified that hearing about VVAW's violent plans to disrupt the Republican convention were what convinced them it was OK to break laws on behalf of their president.

Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course. The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of the Camden case, "We have come to expect such tactics from totalitarian nations that have no respect for individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government." You don’t see that sort of language much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all. "Such tactics" are just not a very big deal any more.

You know what else has changed? You and I – to our shame. Entraptment is illegal – but the question of whether law enforcement set up a legal sting or illegal entrapment is for a jury to decide. Entrapment was why juries acquitted the defendants in the Camden, VVAW, and Harrisburg cases. "How stupid did those people in Washington think we were?" a Harrisburg juror told a reporter. The feds don’t have to worry about folks like that any more. Not a single "terrorism" indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them with offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said "the government made them terrorists.")

The civil liberties of the Florida white supremacist Marcus Faella, at least, have been honored. He was out on bail the day he was arrested. There’s no police informant to monitor his activities any more, but not to fear. His experiments in attempting to produce the deadly toxin ricin, according to the Florida affidavit, have not so far been successful. And Connor Stevens, heard on the menacing video shown on Cleveland news saying that his favorite part of Occupy protests " is meeting people walking down the street, average people, talking to them, hearing about how they're affected by the economy, by the justice system, things like that"? He is safely behind bars. So, for the rest of his life, is Hemant Lakhami, the hapless Stinger missile salesman. The man who put him there, Chris Christie, is now the celebrated governor of New Jersey, and was all but begged by his fellow to run for president. Republicans think he tells a good story.