Cat People Are Smarter Than Dog People, New Study Shows

By Rachael Rettner

SAN FRANCISCO — "Dog people" and "cat people" really do have different personalities, according to a new study.

People who said they were dog lovers in the study tended to be more lively — meaning they were more energetic and outgoing — and also tended to follow rules closely. Cat lovers, on the other hand, were more introverted, more open-minded and more sensitive than dog lovers. Cat people also tended to be non-conformists, preferring to be expedient rather than follow the rules.

And in a finding that's sure to spark rivalries among pet owners, cat lovers scored higher on intelligence than dog lovers. [Here, Kitty, Kitty: 10 Facts for Cat Lovers]

Part of the reason for the personality differences may be related to the types of environments cat or dog people prefer, said study researcher Denise Guastello, an associate professor of psychology at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin, who presented the findings here at the annual Association for Psychological Science meeting.

"It makes sense that a dog person is going to be more lively, because they're going to want to be out there, outside, talking to people, bringing their dog," Guastello said. "Whereas, if you're more introverted, and sensitive, maybe you're more at home reading a book, and your cat doesn't need to go outside for a walk."

The researchers surveyed 600 college students, asking whether they would identify themselves as dog lovers or cat lovers, and what qualities they found most attractive in their pets. Participants also answered a slew of questions to assess their personality.

More people said they were dog lovers than cat lovers: About 60 percent of participants identified themselves as dog people, compared with 11 percent who said they were cat people. (The rest said they liked both animals, or neither animal.)

Dog lovers found companionship to be the most attractive quality in their pet dogs, while cat people liked the affection from their cats.

It's possible that people may select pets based on their own personality, Guastello said. For example, cats are often seen as independent animals that keep to themselves, and are cautious of others.

"If you're like that, you appreciate that in an animal, it’s a better match for you," Guastello said.

Studying the reasons people identify as cat or dog lovers may also improve pet therapy, leading to better matches between owners and pets who participate in pet therapy, the researcher said.

Because the study involved college students, it's not known whether the results apply to other age groups, Guastello said. But previous studies have had similar findings. A 2010 study of more than 4,500 people found that dog lovers tend to be more extroverted (or outgoing), and conscientious (or rule-following).

Secret Law is Not Law

In the week leading up the first year anniversary of the 13 Necessary and Proportionate Principles, EFF and the coalition behind the 13 Principles will be conducting a Week of Action explaining some of the key guiding principles for surveillance law reform. Every day, we'll take on a different part of the principles, exploring what’s at stake and what we need to do to bring intelligence agencies and the police back under the rule of law. As part of this campaign, we'll be featuring several articles of this year Global Information Society Watch, a ground-breaking report on communication surveillance published by APC and Hivos. You can read the complete set of posts at: https://necessaryandproportionate.org/anniversary. Let's send a message to Member States at the United Nations and wherever else folks are tackling surveillance law reform: surveillance law can no longer ignore our human rights. Follow our discussion on twitter with the hashtag: #privacyisaright

The Secrecy of the Legal Justifications for NSA Surveillance Violates International Human Rights Law

One of the many ways that the NSA’s mass surveillance violates the human rights of both Americans and others around the world is that it teeters on a huge pile of secret law.

Let’s be clear. Under international human rights law, secret “law” doesn’t even qualify as “law” at all.

The Human Rights Committee confirms that law is only law if people know it exists and can act based on that knowledge. Article 19 of the ICCPR, protecting the freedoms of opinion and expression, requires that “to be characterized as a “law,” [a law] must be formulated with sufficient precision to enable an individual to regulate his or her conduct accordingly and it must be made accessible to the public. . . . “1 This same conclusion applies to Article 17, the right to privacy. The European Court of Human Rights similarly notes in the context of surveillance:

[T]he law must be sufficiently clear in its terms to give citizens an adequate indication as to the circumstances in which and the conditions on which public authorities are empowered to resort to this secret and potentially dangerous interference with the right to respect for private life and correspondence.2

This includes not just the law itself, but the judicial and executive interpretations of written laws because both of those are necessary to ensure that people have clear notice of what will trigger surveillance.

This is a basic and old legal requirement: it can be found in all of the founding human rights documents. It allows people the fundamental fairness of understanding when they can expect privacy from the government and when they cannot. It avoids the Kafkaesque situations in which people, like Joseph K in The Trial and the thousands of people on the secret No Fly Lists, cannot figure out what they did that resulted in government scrutiny, much less clear their names. And it ensures that government officials have actual limits to their discretion and that when those limits are crossed, redress is possible.

Just how far has the US strayed from this basic principle in its mass surveillance practices? Very far. The existence of the mass surveillance was kept officially secret from the world for over a decade, from when it started in earnest in 2001 until June of 2013 after the Snowden revelations. The surveillance at first had no judicial authorization whatsoever. Various pieces of it were brought under judicial authority -- email records in 2004, U.S. domestic telephone records in 2006 and backbone and other content collection in 2007 -- but these court decisions also happened entirely in secret, so the public still didn't know. Even today, large amounts of both the caselaw and the Executive Branch’s internal legal guidance have been kept from the public. To the extent we know anything about what the government is doing, this has been based on the piecemeal (and often highly fragmented) release of information as the result of dogged FOIA work and the legal cases brought by EFF plus our friends at the ACLU and EPIC.3

The breadth of the secret law is astonishing. For instance, only after the Snowden revelations did the government first admit its legal theories -- that its mass spying relied on outrageous secret interpretations of section 215 of the PATRIOT ACT and section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- neither of which even mentions mass surveillance much less authorizes it. We also now know about the NSA’s domestic telephone records collection and a past program that collected cell location information but we still don’t know the NSA’s full use of section 215. In fact, on September 2 the government sidestepped questions from the Second Circuit about whether its legal arguments in support of its telephone records collection could also support the mass collection of all credit card or bank records of Americans (hint: it could).

Nor are these secret, often extremely weak interpretations of otherwise public laws the only problem. Sometimes there’s no “law” at all. The NSA’s foreign collection processes, which are much more extensive than their domestic collections, are only ostensibly justified by an Executive Order, currently Executive Order12333. While E.O. 12333 is public, it’s not law at all and it certainly does not mention mass surveillance of millions of innocent people around the world. None of the government’s legal interpretations of it are public either. We've now seen evidence that this non-law with secret interpretations is the basis for the NSA's mass surveillance of communications not just in one place, but at nearly every step of their journey: from remote access to computers, to man-in-the-middle attacks on messages in transit, to attacking direct service providers like Google, to tapping into the undersea cables. Yet the legal basis for these unprecedented intrusions into privacy remains opaque.


To bring the U.S. in line with international law, it must stop the process of developing secret law and ensure that all Americans, and indeed all people who may be subject to its surveillance have clear notice of when surveillance might occur. Terrorists and other criminals already well understand that they can be subject to surveillance during an investigation, so the people who are hurt are the innocent. Some operational details can and should remain secret, of course, but the law must be sufficiently clear to allow innocent people to understand when and how they may be subject to surveillance and, as they wish, take steps to regain their privacy. Only then will the U.S. fulfill its obligations under international law.

• 1. See UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment no. 34 on freedoms of opinion and expression (Article 19 ICCPR), available at: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrc/docs/gc34.pdf. The European Court of Human Rights applied the principles developed under Article 10 ECHR (right to freedom of expression) in Sunday Times in the case of Silver and others v. the United Kingdom, nos. 5947/72; 6205/73; 7052/75; 7061/75; 7107/75; 7113/75; 7136/75, 25 March 1983, paras. 85-86, which concerned the right to privacy of prisoners under Article 8 ECHR.
• 2. Malone v. the United Kingdom, no. 8691/79, 2 August 1984, para. 67.
• 3. All too often the Intelligence Community shamefully elides the fact that its public releases were due to pressure from our work and even then only releases what it decides to release, likely skewing what the public learns.

Bill Introduced in Congress to Let You Actually Own Things, Even if They Contain Software

We’ve written before about how copyright is chipping away at your right to own devices you’ve bought and paid for—from e-books to toasters and even your car. Time and again, people who want to modify their own property or sell it to others are told that they can’t, because their property comes saddled with copyrighted code they’re not allowed to modify or give away when they are done with the device.

At last, someone in Congress has noticed how “intellectual property rights” are showing up in unexpected places and undermining our settled rights and expectation about the things we buy. Today, Representative Farenthold announced the introduction of the You Own Devices Act (YODA). If a computer program enables a device to operate, YODA would let you transfer ownership of a copy of that computer program along with the device. The law would override any agreement to the contrary (like the one-sided and abusive End-User License Agreements commonly included with such software). Also, if you have a right to receive security or bug fixes, that right passes to the person who received the device from you.

It’s reassuring to see some pushback against abusive contract terms that consumers have no opportunity or leverage to negotiate. YODA is an important first step towards addressing the problem with restrictive licenses on embedded software.

Let’s hope it’s just the beginning. Legal fixes are also needed to protect digital first sale and the right to access and modify software in devices you own. First sale refers to the idea that you can re-sell or lend a copyrighted work that you obtained lawfully without needing the permission of the copyright owner. This is what lets you borrow a book or CD from a friend or library, buy used DVDs, and so on. Unfortunately, a federal district court in New York decided that first sale was too narrow to apply to digital music files in most normal circumstances. If other courts follow that ruling, we may need a legislative fix to preserve the ownership rights people have traditionally had when purchasing copyrighted works.

The right to access and modify software in your own devices is also under siege. Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits you from breaking (or working around) digital locks on copyrighted works —including software—even if you own that copy of the work and the device on which it rests, even for lawful purposes such as fair use! This law has stifled security research, prevented people from tinkering and improving on technology, inhibited remix culture, and denied blind and deaf people access to knowledge and culture. Further examples abound.

So we have real work to do—but it’s great to see legislators taking important steps in the right direction. YODA is one such step, and we hope Congress goes on to restore these other rights of users who have purchased devices with embedded software and want to actually own them.

Proposed Anti-Terror Law in France Would Erode Civil Liberties

A proposed anti-terrorism law in France has freedom of expression advocates concerned. The bill, as our friends at La Quadrature du Net frame it, “institutes a permanent state of emergency on the Internet,” providing for harsher penalties for incitement or “glorification” of terrorism conducted online. Furthermore, the bill (in Article 9) allows for “the possibility for the administrative authority to require Internet service providers to block access to sites inciting or apologizing for terrorism” without distinguishing criteria or an authority to conduct the blocking.

Apart from specific concerns that the bill treats online speech as distinct from other speech, other provisions are just as problematic. For example, while Article 4 refers to “provocation aux actes de terrorisme” or “incitement to terrorism”—a clearly defined legal concept—it also refers to “apologie du terrorisme” or “apologizing” or “glorifying” terrorism, implying a condemnation of opinions alone rather than any overt acts, as Reporters Without Borders points out. La Quadrature du Net’s mini-site on the bill addresses further concerns (in French).

Anti-terror laws have been used in various countries around the world to prosecute individuals for their speech about unpopular ideas. In the United States, the prosecution of Tarek Mehanna—a young Muslim who translated and posted material referred to by prosecutors as “Al Qaeda propaganda”—involved the use of conspiracy and so-called “material support” laws. In Ethiopia, anti-terror laws have been used to silence journalists and are currently being used to prosecute the dissident Zone9 Bloggers. And the list goes on.

France’s attempt to “cleanse” the Internet of terrorist content isn’t a first in the EU either. In 2012, a leaked document showed that the European Commission sought to make use of private Internet companies to remove terrorist content, without oversight or accountability.

While terrorism itself is a serious concern, it is far too often invoked as the justification for a broader clamp down on civil liberties. We support La Quadrature du Net in opposing this dangerous bill and encourage our French readers to check out their mini-site for information on the bill and how to fight back against it.

The Society of Fugitives

How does aggressive police surveillance transform an urban neighborhood? A sociologist reports from the inside.

James Forman Jr.

One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America’s least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon. The only news most people ever hear about the inner city comes from grim headlines; the only residents they can name are characters on The Wire. Of course, ignorance of a community doesn’t stop outsiders from having opinions about it or passing laws that govern it. But those opinions, based on stereotypes and catchphrases, make it difficult to conduct meaningful public deliberation about social policy. And the laws, all too often, harm people who have enough going against them already.

While most Americans are detached from the urban poor, social scientists have been examining and formulating theories about their lives for more than a century. One line of research, exemplified by a chapter from Elijah Anderson’s Streetwise (1990), explores policing practices in the tough-on-crime era that began in the 1970s. Anderson looked at interactions between police and young black men in Philadelphia. He found that such men were at constant risk of being stopped, harassed, and even arrested, whether or not they had committed a crime. In these circumstances, Anderson wrote, a black youth “knows, or soon finds out, that he exists in a legally precarious state. Hence he is motivated to avoid the police, and his public life becomes severely circumscribed.”

According to Alice Goffman, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, things have only gotten worse in the quarter century since Anderson wrote those words. Goffman spent six years doing fieldwork in a poor, almost all-black part of Philadelphia, starting in 2002, when she was an undergraduate (and a student of Anderson’s) at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the first people she got to know on Sixth Street—her pseudonym for the neighborhood—was a thin, bearded 22-year-old she calls Mike. A month after she met him, Mike went into hiding; Goffman learned that he was wanted on a shooting charge, and that this wasn’t his first brush with the law. Many of his associates were fugitives as well. Some had outstanding arrest warrants for crimes. Others were being sought for violating terms of parole, failing to pay court costs, or missing a court date.

Goffman was a sociology major, but her coursework hadn’t prepared her for the phenomenon she was witnessing. The situation of men like Mike and his friends had not figured prominently in previous ethnographies of the inner city. Whereas Anderson and others had written about young men who were continually suspected by the police but who had some chance of walking free after a street stop, the men Goffman studied were actually wanted. If the police were to stop them and discover their fugitive status, they would be taken into custody. These men also risked arrest for noncriminal activity that violated their probation or parole—staying out past curfew, for instance, or visiting a part of town where they weren’t allowed to be. As a result, they lived their lives on the run.

Goffman set out to understand what it means to be a fugitive in a place where so many others are fugitives, too. This question led to broader ones: How do high incarceration rates and intensive policing affect a neighborhood as a whole? What happens when the criminal-justice system extends its tentacles into every part of a community’s daily life?

The police, in Goffman’s portrayal in On the Run, are at full-fledged war with residents. They beat up people under arrest, steal from suspects, smash up homes while serving warrants, and use the results of surveillance to turn lovers or family members against one another. Such behavior shocks Goffman, at least at first. But the neighborhood’s longtime residents are more resigned. To them, police raids are like thunderstorms: take cover if you can, and don’t go back outside until it stops raining.

Police surveillance on Sixth Street has few limits, as one of Mike’s friends, Alex, learns when he accompanies his girlfriend, Donna, to the hospital for the birth of their first child. Shortly after the delivery, police officers arrive to handcuff Alex. One of them tells Goffman that they had come to the hospital with a shooting victim and followed their practice of running the names of men on the visitors’ list; Alex’s name came back with a warrant attached. (The warrant had nothing to do with the shooting; Donna later tells Goffman that it had been issued when Alex was found to be violating his parole by driving after his license had been revoked.) Donna begs the officers to let Alex stay and promises to go with him to the police station the next day, but to no avail. They take Alex into custody, along with two other men on the maternity ward. Once his friends learn of his arrest, they decide to avoid hospitals, even at the cost of missing their own children’s births.

In places like Sixth Street, Goffman argues, “the sheer scope of policing and imprisonment … is transforming community life in ways that are deep and enduring, not only for the young men who are their targets but for their family members, partners, and neighbors.” She writes at length, for instance, about how the police coerce mothers and girlfriends into revealing a fugitive’s whereabouts by threatening them with arrest, eviction, or loss of custody of their children. She notes that a woman who yields to such pressure may come under criticism from others in the community, while those who resist may be regarded as strong and loyal. To Goffman, this is an example of what happens once the criminal-justice system “has come to occupy a central place” in people’s lives.

Goffman is a compelling writer, and she supports her argument with one vivid anecdote after another. Her descriptions of aggressive surveillance and gratuitously violent arrests are consistent with earlier research on policing in poor urban communities. Her terrifying accounts of abusive behavior by police executing search warrants also echo stories I heard from countless clients during my six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C.

But other police practices that Goffman describes may be outliers. For example, I was astonished by her account of the police trolling maternity wards for parole violators. I had never heard of such a thing. When I spoke with civil-rights attorneys and public defenders in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and with a police official in New Haven, Connecticut, I couldn’t find a single person who knew of a case like Alex and Donna’s.

It is also worth considering whether the young men in On the Run are representative of young men in low-income black neighborhoods. In one important sense, they are. Nationally—not just on Sixth Street—staggering percentages of black men between the ages of 20 and 29 are under criminal-justice supervision. The Sentencing Project estimates the proportion at one in three. In the poorest neighborhoods, it’s even higher.

But in another, equally important sense, Goffman’s characters are atypical. Many of the guys on Sixth Street—especially the ones with whom she spends the most time—are violent offenders, and they are often armed. Steve pistol-whips a man who has called him a snitch. Mike engages in multiple gun battles with a man who robbed him. On one occasion, when Mike gets angry with Marie, the mother of his children, he pays another woman a bag of marijuana to assault her. He watches the beating from his car and calls out for the woman to hit Marie again and again. Ronny raises bail money for Mike by borrowing Mike’s gun, robbing a house, and selling the loot. Chuck, one of Mike’s best friends and among the book’s most prominent characters, owns two guns, bullets, and a bulletproof vest. One young man, new to Sixth Street and high on PCP, murders someone from a rival neighborhood during a dice game. The ensuing violence puts the entire community at risk as bullets fly into the homes of law-abiding residents.

With one exception I know of—Dwayne Betts, writing in Slate—most reviewers of On the Run seem to regard such violence as routine. Like Goffman, they make it sound as though most young black men in poor communities behave this way. For example, Alex Kotlowitz, in The New York Times Book Review, writes of Mike, “Like the others we meet, he’s neither hero nor villain. He’s simply trying to get by.” But most young men in the inner city who are “simply trying to get by” don’t commit the violent offenses that Mike and his friends commit.

This is a crucial point. Ever since Marvin Wolfgang’s landmark study, Delinquency in a Birth Cohort (1972), criminologists have known that a small percentage of repeat offenders are responsible for most violent crime. Wolfgang and his research team studied 10,000 Philadelphia boys from childhood into adulthood and discovered that 6 percent of the group was responsible for two-thirds of the violent crime. Other researchers have confirmed and extended Wolfgang’s insight. Studies in Boston over the past two decades have found that youth gangs, which are involved in more than half of the city’s homicides, comprise only 1 percent of the young-adult population.

Previous ethnographers have also found that a minority of young black men in poor communities engage in violent crime, and that even fewer carry guns. In Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (2011), a superb book that should be read alongside On the Run, the sociologist Victor Rios reports on his study of 40 heavily policed teens in Oakland, California. Most of his subjects had been arrested, but few resorted to the kind of violence we see on Sixth Street. Rios writes, “I found that the youths did not typically take up arms and assault others. In most cases, conflicts usually found resolution—or at least a stalemate—in harsh conversations.”

To her credit, Goffman devotes a chapter to “clean people,” residents who have managed to stay out of trouble. Still, her book ends up reinforcing the belief that the average young black man in a neighborhood like Sixth Street is violent and prone to take up arms. This falsehood has been the basis for many tough-on-crime measures, including some that were instituted as part of the war on drugs. Now that this war has become a damaged brand, the measures have been repackaged and resold as part of a war on guns. Thus, during the recent debate over New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy, then–police chief Raymond Kelly argued that aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics “take guns off the street and save lives.” Opponents countered (correctly) that armed offenders are the exception, even in low-income minority neighborhoods, and that it is a mistake to police all blacks as if they were high-rate offenders.

The fact that Goffman’s subjects have serious criminal histories impairs our ability to generalize from some of her findings. For example, her central characters are all wanted on warrants at one time or another, some of them repeatedly (Mike has 10 warrants altogether). To Goffman, this indicates that Philadelphia’s criminal-justice system issues too many warrants. But it may simply indicate that Mike and his friends are unusually criminally active.

Perhaps anticipating this challenge, Goffman extends her inquiry beyond the most criminally active members of the community. When she conducts a door-to-door survey of Sixth Street, she finds that about half the men there were wanted on warrants over a three-year period. This is astounding; no previous researcher has reported such a high concentration of fugitives living in one community. This raises questions that Goffman doesn’t answer with precision, but that I hope she and others will explore in the future: How many of these warrants were for failure to pay court costs—which should rarely if ever be imposed on poor people in the first place—versus something more serious, such as skipping a court date? Does fugitive status affect the lives of less criminally involved young men in the same ways it affects the lives of Mike and his friends? If it does, and if other communities harbor equally large proportions of fugitives, Goffman has discovered a profound social problem that deserves further research and a policy response.

As it stands, Goffman’s book requires us to confront the limitations and failures of our criminal-justice policies to date. Not least, On the Run reminds us that while we as a society have devoted vast resources to apprehending and punishing men like Mike and his friends, we have done little to attempt to set them onto a better path earlier in life. As Goffman says,

Many in law enforcement recognize that poverty, unemployment, and the drugs and violence that accompany them are social problems that cannot be solved by arresting people. But the police and the courts are not equipped with social solutions. They are equipped with handcuffs and jail time.

She couldn’t be more right.

Consider Chuck’s story. His mother was addicted to crack, and he himself sold drugs off and on as a teenager. But he was a decent student—he made it to his senior year, played on the basketball team, and was earning B’s and C’s. Things began to fall apart when he got into a fight at school. Even though the other guy’s injuries were minor, Chuck was charged with aggravated assault and sent to the county jail. After eight months, most of the charges were dismissed and he was released. But when he tried to re-enroll in school at age 19, he was turned away; the school said he was too old.

What if the system had responded differently to Chuck’s school-yard fight? What if, instead of an aggravated-assault charge and a bed in the county jail, Chuck had received an in-school suspension, or a chance to participate in a restorative-justice program through which he could make amends to the young man he assaulted? What if the high school had allowed him to return and graduate? None of this is impossible to envision; it is how the world works right now for those with resources and, occasionally, in a few places, for those without them. It is how the world could, and should, work on Sixth Street.

The 1% has bought its own internet. What's next? Words with Rich People?

If Internet Platinum Reserve is surprising, it’s only because we’ve been trying to fool ourselves that the web is a populist haven, over here at Poor People Online

Jess Zimmerman

In one of the best moments of the genius webcomic Achewood, occasional protagonist Ray – a Scottish Fold cat who is also a wealthy playboy – goes on eBay while high and impulsively types, in the search bar, WHAT’S THE BEST THING YOU GOT? The screen blinks, then lights up with the message “Welcome to eBay Platinum Reserve.”

“Congratulations. By thinking like the world’s greatest, you have unlocked a wealth of incredible opportunities,” the message continues. These are, to be specific, purchasing opportunities. Purchasing opportunities that, as it turns out, include the actual Airwolf helicopter ($20bn) and Keith Moon’s head in a jar ($4.7bn, “eyes may close in transit – there is no technology to guard against this”). It’s an entire hidden eBay, accessible only by password – and the password is the grasping entitlement of the rich.

Proponents of net neutrality worry about this happening for real. Or at least they worry about a future in which a small handful of monopoly-happy telecoms are able to throttle access to any website that doesn’t make them money or provide lower-paying customers with slowed and restricted service. Net neutrality boosters want government regulation to dictate that all sites and customers get the same treatment, rather than splitting the web into “slow lanes” and “fast lanes” along financial lines. Internet pinkos don’t want rich people to have better internet.

Well, it’s too late. Rich people already have better internet. Mercifully, cable modems are fairly common these days – remember when the best you could afford was DSL? – so for now, the rich don’t necessarily get faster internet. But they do get Internet Platinum Reserve.

The rich have better dating sites, like The League, an invite-only dating app for “successful” people that’s basically snobby Tinder. The rich have better Facebook; the new social network Netropolitan costs $6,000 to sign up plus $3,000 a year, and is specifically geared towards “people with more money than time”. (Or, I might add, sense.) According to Scientific American, the rich get luxury ads and credit and loan offers that the rest of us never see. To be fair, though, I couldn’t read the second page of that article because it would have cost me $6; increasingly, the rich have more access to better news and writing as publications go subscription-based. There’s even a tech startup, lauded this month by Silicon Valley, that will let you rent a butler. That’s right: rich people have Ask Jeeves with ACTUAL JEEVES.

Netropolitan, which was just announced this week, seems like a particularly egregious example. It’s not even clear what, functionally, this new social network has over Facebook, other than allowing members to converse about “everything from fine wines to classic cars to vacation destination recommendations” (all illegal on regular Facebook, of course). The site has moderators, but stipulates that they are not concierges: “Our Member Service Associates will not book you a charter jet, or find you tickets to a sold-out Broadway show. They exist solely to help members technically navigate and find their way around the social club.” So the primary perk of Netropolitan appears to be that it has people who can help you figure out how to use Netropolitan.

But it also offers a significant intangible benefit: the guarantee that you’ll never accidentally encounter a poor. Netropolitan’s founder, the astoundingly dirty-named composer James Touchi-Peters (no shame in that, James!), cites his motivation as wanting “an environment where you could talk about the finer things in life without backlash.” Who wants to hear “#FirstWorldProblems” every time you complain about spilling fine wine on the upholstery of your classic car on the way to a vacation destination, am I right? The rich are willing to pay a lot just to know they have a separate internet from you. And the internet is willing to afford them every luxury.

What’s next: Richipedia? Reddit for rich people, with karma replaced by gold bullion? Words with Rich People? Maybe there’s business to be done in lolcat dressage or custom-painted animated GIFs. Or 4chan could offer the option to pay a huge lump sum and get a cruel hoax invented just for you.

If Internet Platinum Reserve is surprising, that’s only because we’ve been trying to fool ourselves that the web is a populist haven. For going on a generation now, we have insisted upon a place where accidents of birth and fortune are smoothed out. On the internet, nobody knows you’re a pedigreed dog. Maybe it’s not a completely equal-opportunity utopia, since there are still potentially costly barriers to entry (computer, ISP), but it is at least supposed to be free of the most restrictive forms of elitism. You don’t need connections or an Ivy League degree to set up a blog and, maybe, get heard. If you only want to comment on a website, you barely even need to be literate.

But that’s just a lie we tell ourselves out here on the poor people’s web. Over in Netropolitan, they’re hoisting glasses of Chateau Margaux (I Googled “very expensive wine,” but rich people Google probably would have given me a more accurate answer) and snickering at our naivete. The truth is, money gets you better everything, and always has. Better education, better internet, better Keith Moon’s head in a jar. Even if it isn’t that much better, at least it’s separate, and strictly reserved for you.

This is why we need net neutrality: because the net is not and never has been neutral. Income inequality is baked into it, the same way it’s baked into everything else; there’s nothing special about this series of tubes that makes it immune to capitalism. Profit is, in fact, its guiding spirit. Maintaining net neutrality is like maintaining the public school system; it’s a tiny, feeble kick against the elitism that shapes our lives. It means that, even if you’ll never get access to the secret rooms of the wealthy, you’ll get something. Corporations won’t be able to hold information hostage until you pay. Like public schools, a neutral internet acknowledges that information is the best currency some of us are going to get.

But it won’t buy you that Airwolf chopper. For that, you’re on your own.

Manifesto

I don't normally write to this blog myself as it's more or less an aggregation blog for my own reference, but since other people have started following me I think this post is in order. I'm no longer going to be posting incidents of police violence. If you check the archives you can get an idea of just how horrible this is, and just how much worse it's getting day by day. The latest incident I ran across was of a man being shot 60+ times for having a bb-gun. Not only that but he was awaken out of a drunken stupor with headphones on. How could that person have acted in any way that the police could Not have taken as an excues to take his life? And as always there was no attempt at de-escalation, just firing until the man had no face left. This is not an exception. This is Standard Operating Procedure. The US Government and all the state governments and county and city governments are the watchers and no one watches them. They are free to get away with anything that they let themselves get away with because no one in the universe (that we know of) has more power and can hold them accountable. The masses who could stand up for justice are too stupid to realise their lives are in danger until they're killed, or they're mollified by TV and Nikes.

My point is this. There is no more "just another isolated incident". There hasn't been for a long, long time. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely may not be true for everyone or in all cases but it is certainly true in this country. There are too many cases of unwarranted police brutality and outright murder (which they Always seem to get away with) for me to follow any longer. I want this blog to be full of things which implications of every kind and I believe the implications of our Police State are well known by now for anyone of the type to be reading this now. I will be leaving police brutality to other blogs. A quick Google search will find you plenty if that's what you're looking for.

-Keisar Betancourt

Congress Doesn't Have the Power to Make Asteroid Mining Legal

by Jason Koebler

When most of us look at the night sky, we see stars. But a few entrepreneurs see dollar signs. Lots and lots of them, embedded in asteroids that hold a near-limitless sum of platinum, nickel, iron, even water that could be mined and brought back to Earth—or used to power the interstellar economy. Then there are space lawyers, who look at the entrepreneurs looking at the sky, and see a regulatory mess brewing.

As we explored in depth last year, there are no real easy legal answers when it comes to mining an asteroid. For every clause in the Outer Space Treaty governing outer space's resources, there's a loophole or a gap that would-be asteroid mining companies like Planetary Resources and Moon Express would love to slip through.

Strictly speaking, under the Outer Space Treaty, it's probably not illegal to actually mine an asteroid—but, as an international resource, it's very unclear who, exactly, the mined minerals would belong to. It's problematic when you plan on spending billions to develop the technology and know-how to actually do it, mine an asteroid, bring back untold riches of platinum, and then have to split it with every country on the planet.

Regardless of how you feel about asteroid mining in general, it's a problem that Congress is currently trying to navigate in a way that only the United States seems to be able to: By potentially telling everyone else in the world it's going to do what it wants because, finders keepers.

Earlier this week, the House Science Committee examined the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS, get it?) Act, a bill that would "promote the right of the United States commercial entities to explore and utilize resources from asteroids in outer space, in accordance with the existing international obligations of the United States, free from harmful interference, and to transfer or sell such resources."

The bill also claims that "any resources obtained in outer space from an asteroid are the property of the entity that obtained such resources."

The problem is, that idea doesn't really mesh at all with the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a document that, if we're being totally honest, has been a thorn in the side to Silicon Valley-types looking to set up space colonies or, whadya know, mine an asteroid.

In testimony given earlier this week at the House hearing, Joanne Gabrynowicz, director of space law at the University of Mississippi School of Law, suggested that "as with the ownership status of extracted resources, there is no legal clarity regarding the superior status of a claim found to be 'first in time.'"

In other words, it's-yours-if-you-found-it might work in space, or it might not.

"Unlike some other global commons, no agreement has been reached at to whether title to extracted space resources passes to the extracting entity," she said. "There is no legal clarity regarding the ownership status of the extracted resources. It is foreseeable that the entity's actions will be challenged at law and in politics."

So, if Peter Diamandis wants to go and drill a barrel full of diamonds out of an asteroid, he's certainly welcome to do so ("appropriating" territory in space, including an asteroid, is expressly prohibited, while the "exploitation of natural resources" seems to be fair game), but when he gets back to Earth, he might have to give them to Spain or Germany or Japan or, hell, maybe all of them.

The thing here is, we don't know. "International space law contains many gaps and ambiguities," Gabrynowicz said.

There's a way to navigate this, but Congress unilaterally passing a law that doesn't include other countries in it likely isn't the way forward. As Adam Minter of Bloomberg wrote, "such ambitions should have US policymakers thinking seriously about using this opportunity to draw China and Russia [and others] into the orbit of international agreement, if not law."

Perhaps the US should start by approaching the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and take it from there. Giving American companies the go-ahead to do this, without international agreement, isn't going to end quietly.

James Foley's mother 'appalled' by U.S. government handling of case

By Greg Botelho and Catherine E. Shoichet

(CNN) -- The mother of James Foley -- an American journalist beheaded by ISIS militants -- said she is "embarrassed and appalled" by how the U.S. government dealt with her son's case, telling CNN that officials even suggested family members could be charged if they raised ransom to free him.

"I think our efforts to get Jim freed were an annoyance" to the U.S. government, Diane Foley told CNN's Anderson Cooper in an interview that aired Thursday. "It didn't seem to be in (U.S.) strategic interest, if you will."

Officials told Foley family members "not go to the media," and that the "government would not exchange prisoners," or carry out "military action" to try to rescue her son, according to Diane Foley.

"Jim was killed in the most horrific way. He was sacrificed because of just a lack of coordination, lack of communication, lack of prioritization," Diane Foley said. "As a family, we had to find our way through this on our own."

She added that the family was told many times that raising ransom "was illegal (and) we might be prosecuted."

"We were just told to trust that he would be freed somehow, miraculously," Foley's mother told CNN. "And he wasn't, was he?"

In fact, video posted online on August 19 showed James Foley kneeling next to a man dressed in black, with Foley reading a presumably scripted message that his "real killer" is America, then being summarily executed.

ISIS -- the Islamist extremist group that's taken over large swaths of Syria and Iraq in its quest to create a far-reaching caliphate under its strict version of Sharia law -- took credit for Foley's beheading, saying it was in response to U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and threatening more killings.

'Our government needs to be ... willing to negotiate'

More than three weeks later, U.S. President Barack Obama named Foley as he outlined his strategy for fighting ISIS and described the terrorist group's brutality.

"They enslave, rape, and force women into marriage. They threatened a religious minority with genocide. In acts of barbarism, they took the lives of two American journalists -- Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff," Obama said in a televised address Wednesday night.

As she watched the speech, Diane Foley said one thing was going through her mind.

"This whole strategy to eliminate ISIS and the terror threat is important, obviously, so perhaps part of the strategic way of doing that is to bomb them, and to engage in force. But that only caused Jim's death," she said. "I guess all I'm trying to say is that our government needs to be shrewder, smarter, willing to negotiate with these people who hate us, so that we can find better ways to rid ourselves of terror."

'He was compelled to bear witness'

After her son's death, Diane Foley wrote on the Free James Foley Facebook page that "we have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people."

Sometimes, she said Thursday, it was tough for his family to deal with his decisions to report in dangerous parts of the world.

"At times, even his siblings were angered that he would return after his captivity in Libya. I mean, it was hard as a family to understand, because Jim was so loved ... and we were selfish. We wanted him with us. We wanted him safe," she said. "But Jim was not. Jim was selfless, and he had the courage and the compassion. ... He was compelled to bear witness."

To this end, his family launched a foundation -- the James W. Foley Legacy Fund -- aimed at helping families of American hostages, supporting U.S. journalists in war zones and helping urban youth in educational endeavors.

The organization is one way the Foley family is trying to honor James' past and do something positive in the future. But none of it takes away Diane Foley's disappointment that more wasn't done -- especially by the U.S. government -- to secure his release, somehow, since his November 22, 2012, disappearance in northwest Syria. At the time he was working for U.S.-based online news outlet GlobalPost.

"Jim would have been saddened" by the U.S. government's efforts in the years after his abduction, his mother told CNN. "Jim believed, till the end, that his country would come to (his) aid."

A failed rescue operation

Upon hearing these comments, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice -- after praising the Foley family for doing "an amazing job ... to try to bring Jim home safely" -- said she "and others in the U.S. government worked very hard with Diane Foley and her family to try to be supportive, to try to provide what information we could."

Rice also pointed out "hundreds of American personnel" were involved in a "very daring and very well-executed rescue operation" to free Foley and other captives, after getting what they hoped was "actionable intelligence" about the location of the hostages. Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby has said elite U.S. commandos undertook this mission this summer inside Syria.

"Unfortunately, they were no longer there," Rice, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told CNN. "But I think that effort ... underscores the importance that we attach to doing everything that we possibly can to bring Americans in captivity back home."

Diane Foley, though, said the rescue operation came "very late."

"Their location was known for more than a year," she said.

During her son's time in captivity, she said, it often seemed the family knew more about his whereabouts than the authorities.

"I did all I could," she said. "I was unable to do enough."

Lessons for the future

Now, Diane Foley says she thinks Washington should change its approach to cases like that of her son and Steven Sotloff, another American journalist beheaded by ISIS weeks after James Foley.

"I pray that our government will be willing to learn from the mistakes that were made," she told CNN, "and to acknowledge that there are better ways for American citizens to be treated."

There should be international dialogue about how to handle hostages of terrorist groups, she said.

"The risk is becoming higher and higher," she said, "and I really feel that our country let Jim down."

Teen May Get 2 Years For Pic of Fake Oral Sex With Jesus

By Hilary Hanson

Will this boy get punished for coming to Jesus?

A Pennsylvania teen may face up to two years behind bars for allegedly taking a photo of himself simulating oral sex with a statue of Jesus, Kron 4 reports.



The photo was taken in front of Love in the Name of Christ, a Christian organization in Everett, Pennsylvania, and posted on Facebook back in July.

On Tuesday, the 14-year-old — whose name has not been released by police — was charged with desecration of a venerated object, the Smoking Gun reported. If convicted, he could wind up spending two years in a juvenile jail, according to Kron 4.

“Desecration” is defined in Pennsyvlania as ““Defacing, damaging, polluting or otherwise, physically mistreating in a way that the actor knows will outrage the sensibilities of persons likely to observe or discover the action.”

Patheos.com notes that in Pennsylvania, a vandalism charge usually carries a maximum penalty of only one year in jail. JT Eberhard writes:

So let’s say an adult (subject to harsher penalties than minors) elected to spray paint “Jesus loves dicks” on the side of this boy’s school. That guy, at most (and the “at most” comes in to play for people with previous criminal records, which this boy doesn’t have), would serve a year in jail – and that’s assuming the cost of having the wall re-painted exceeds $150, otherwise the penalty would be less.

But a 14 year-old does something stupid that causes literally zero property damage and he could face two years in juvenile jail because it’s a “venerated object”? That’s insane. That’s really ludicrous.

The teen's original Facebook post garnered 124 Facebook comments, ranging from “Amazing” and “this is heaven” to “this is repulsive, even if you don’t believe you could at least have respect for those who do and those who ARE going to Heaven…you discusting [sic], disturbed, disrespectful little punk ass bitch.”

A spokesperson for Love in the Name of Christ told Raw Story that the ministry did not ask police to press charges.

Cop To Cameraman: 'If You're Invoking Your Rights, You Must Be Doing Something Wrong'

The notion that certain rights are guaranteed to citizens is being proven false every day. For instance, you have the First Amendment right to film police officers and other public officials, but it often takes an official policy change (usually prompted by lawsuits) before these public servants will begrudgingly respect that right.

You also have certain rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment, but even these aren't innate. You can't simply remain silent while detained or arrested. You have to invoke these rights (often repeatedly) or risk having your silence (things you didn't say) used against you.

In the case of photographing police officers, you'll notice that activists and others who are recording will invoke their rights repeatedly. In some cases, this forces those being recorded to back off and reconsider their attempts to shut down recordings or seize cameras. It doesn't always work but it works often enough to show that these police officers know you have this right but won't respect it unless you invoke it.

Techdirt reader timlash sends in this video of two citizens filming a sally port (where prisoners are shuttled in and out of the courthouse) in Jacksonville, Florida. As is to be expected, police officers show up and try to shut down the recording of a public building from a public sidewalk. But the most amazing part of the video is the police officer's statement in response to the cameraman invoking his rights.

"You must be doing something wrong if you invoke your rights."

That's the prevailing attitude. Invoke your Fourth Amendment rights to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures and the government assumes you have something to hide. Invoke your Fifth Amendment rights and the government assumes you've committed a crime. Invoke your First Amendment right to record police officers and you're told that you're "obstructing" an investigation or creating a public disturbance.

You have rights as an American citizen. They just won't be respected by default. And when you invoke them, you'll be treated as an activist (at best) or a criminal (at worst). The land of freedom has tipped the balance away from the citizens and towards the government -- because whether we're fighting terrorism, drugs or illegal immigration, the respect of citizens' rights impedes the progress of the nation's many "warriors."

Stop and seize

Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes

Written by Michael Sallah, Robert O’Harrow Jr., Steven Rich

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.

Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of “highway interdiction” to departments across the country.

One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists — criminals and the innocent alike — including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government’s burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems — despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.

Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

Cash seizures can be made under state or federal civil law. One of the primary ways police departments are able to seize money and share in the proceeds at the federal level is through a long-standing Justice Department civil asset forfeiture program known as Equitable Sharing. Asset forfeiture is an extraordinarily powerful law enforcement tool that allows the government to take cash and property without pressing criminal charges and then requires the owners to prove their possessions were legally acquired.

The practice has been controversial since its inception at the height of the drug war more than three decades ago, and its abuses have been the subject of journalistic exposés and congressional hearings. But unexplored until now is the role of the federal government and the private police trainers in encouraging officers to target cash on the nation’s highways since 9/11.

“Those laws were meant to take a guy out for selling $1 million in cocaine or who was trying to launder large amounts of money,” said Mark Overton, the police chief in Bal Harbour, Fla., who once oversaw a federal drug task force in South Florida. “It was never meant for a street cop to take a few thousand dollars from a driver by the side of the road.”

To examine the scope of asset forfeiture since the terror attacks, The Post analyzed a database of hundreds of thousands of seizure records at the Justice Department, reviewed hundreds of federal court cases, obtained internal records from training firms and interviewed scores of police officers, prosecutors and motorists.

Civil forfeiture cash seizures

Under the federal Equitable Sharing Program, police have seized $2.5 billion since 2001 from people who were not charged with a crime and without a warrant being issued. Police reasoned that the money was crime-related. About $1.7 billion was sent back to law enforcement agencies for their use.

The Post found:

There have been 61,998 cash seizures made on highways and elsewhere since 9/11 without search warrants or indictments through the Equitable Sharing Program, totaling more than $2.5 billion. State and local authorities kept more than $1.7 billion of that while Justice, Homeland Security and other federal agencies received $800 million. Half of the seizures were below $8,800.

Only a sixth of the seizures were legally challenged, in part because of the costs of legal action against the government. But in 41 percent of cases — 4,455 — where there was a challenge, the government agreed to return money. The appeals process took more than a year in 40 percent of those cases and often required owners of the cash to sign agreements not to sue police over the seizures.

Hundreds of state and local departments and drug task forces appear to rely on seized cash, despite a federal ban on the money to pay salaries or otherwise support budgets. The Post found that 298 departments and 210 task forces have seized the equivalent of 20 percent or more of their annual budgets since 2008.

Agencies with police known to be participating in the Black Asphalt intelligence network have seen a 32 percent jump in seizures beginning in 2005, three times the rate of other police departments. Desert Snow-trained officers reported more than $427 million in cash seizures during highway stops in just one five-year period, according to company officials. More than 25,000 police have belonged to Black Asphalt, company officials said.

State law enforcement officials in Iowa and Kansas prohibited the use of the Black Asphalt network because of concerns that it might not be a legal law enforcement tool. A federal prosecutor in Nebraska warned that Black Asphalt reports could violate laws governing civil liberties, the handling of sensitive law enforcement information and the disclosure of pretrial information to defendants. But officials at Justice and Homeland Security continued to use it.

Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the department had no comment on The Post’s overall findings. But he said the department has a compliance review process in place for the Equitable Sharing Program and attorneys for federal agencies must review the seizures before they are “adopted” for inclusion in the program.

“Adoptions of state and local seizures — when a state and local law enforcement agency requests a federal seizing agency to adopt a state and local seizure for federal forfeiture — represent an average of only 3 percent of the total forfeiture amount since 2007,” Carr said.

The Justice Department data released to The Post does not contain information about race. Carr said the department prohibits racial profiling. But in 400 federal court cases examined by The Post where people who challenged seizures and received some money back, the majority were black, Hispanic or another minority.

A 55-year-old Chinese American restaurateur from Georgia was pulled over for minor speeding on Interstate 10 in Alabama and detained for nearly two hours. He was carrying $75,000 raised from relatives to buy a Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles, La. He got back his money 10 months later but only after spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer and losing out on the restaurant deal.

A 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for having tinted windows. Police said he appeared nervous and consented to a search. They took $18,000 that he said was meant to buy a used car. He had to hire a lawyer to get back his money.

Mandrel Stuart, a 35-year-old African American owner of a small barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Va., was stunned when police took $17,550 from him during a stop in 2012 for a minor traffic infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax. He rejected a settlement with the government for half of his money and demanded a jury trial. He eventually got his money back but lost his business because he didn’t have the cash to pay his overhead.

In defense of seizures

Steven Peterson, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent who arranged highway interdiction training through a company called the 4:20 Group, said that patrol officers used to try to make their names with large drug busts. He said he saw that change when agency leaders realized that cash seizures could help their departments during lean times.

“They saw this as a way to provide equipment and training for their guys,” Peterson said. “If you seized large amounts of cash, that’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

There is no question that state and federal forfeiture programs have crippled powerful drug-trafficking organizations, thwarted an assortment of criminals and brought millions of dollars to financially stressed police departments.

Advocates of highway interdiction say it plays an important role in protecting the public and that officers take care to respect the rights of citizens.

“We don’t go hunting for money in general,” said Sandy Springs, Ga., Officer Mike DeWald, who has served as a trainer for 4:20. “I never have been pressured to go after money. We are in pursuit of the criminal element.”

Police trainers said that their work has helped make the country safer by teaching police to be more vigilant in identifying drug smugglers and terrorists.

“9/11 caused a lot of officers to realize they should be out there looking for those kind of people,” said David Frye, a part-time Nebraska county deputy sheriff who serves as chief instructor at Desert Snow and was operations director of Black Asphalt. “When money is taken from an organization, it hurts them more than when they lose the drugs.”

Frye and Desert Snow’s founder, a former California highway patrolman named Joe David, defended Black Asphalt, which David started in 2004. They said they have taken steps in recent years to ensure that the informal police network complies with state and federal laws. David declined to speak to The Post.

“The Black Asphalt is not flawless, however the intent behind it is,” David and Frye wrote in a letter in 2012 sent to police and obtained by The Post. “The information being moved through the system has proven itself reliable on hundreds of occasions. Much more reliable than any criminal informant. The results have been staggering. It has proven itself an extremely valuable tool for law enforcement.”

Hain, Desert Snow’s marketing official, said “the operational and software platforms of the Desert Snow site and Black Asphalt site are completely separate.” He said Black Asphalt is “a secure system for intelligence sharing” and does not store information.

“No personal identifying information from seizure reports have ever been collected or stored by the Black Asphalt,” Hain said. “The Black Asphalt software is simply a pass-through system that allows the user to input data, which is then sent directly, via e-mail, to a select group of law enforcement (i.e. local investigators, ICE Bulk Cash Smuggling Center, DEA agents, etc.). Again, none of the personal information is held within the system, only the summary of the seizure. And then the seizure narratives are only maintained for 21 days before they get purged.”

The Post obtained hundreds of Black Asphalt records from law enforcement sources with access to the system.

Among Black Asphalt’s features is a section called BOLO, or “be on the lookout,” where police who join the network can post tips and hunches. In April, Aurora, Colo., police Officer James Waselkow pulled over a white Ford pickup for tinted windows. Waselkow said he thought the driver, a Mexican national, was suspicious in part because he wore a University of Wyoming cap.

“He had no idea where he was going, what hotel he was staying in or who with,” Waselkow wrote. The officer searched the vehicle with the driver’s consent but found no contraband. But he was still suspicious, so he posted the driver’s license plate on Black Asphalt. “Released so someone else can locate the contraband,” he wrote. “Happy hunting!”

Waselkow’s department did not respond to a request for an interview.

The Post’s review of 400 court cases, which encompassed seizures in 17 states, provided insights into stops and seizures.

In case after case, highway interdictors appeared to follow a similar script. Police set up what amounted to rolling checkpoints on busy highways and pulled over motorists for minor violations, such as following too closely or improper signaling. They quickly issued warnings or tickets. They studied drivers for signs of nervousness, including pulsing carotid arteries, clenched jaws and perspiration. They also looked for supposed “indicators” of criminal activity, which can include such things as trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks or air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors.

One recent stop shows how the process can work in the field.

In December 2012, Frye was working in his capacity as a part-time deputy in Seward County, Neb. He pulled over John Anderson of San Clemente, Calif., who was driving a BMW on Interstate 80 near Lincoln. Frye issued a warning ticket within 13 minutes for failing to signal promptly when changing lanes.

He told Anderson he was finished with the stop. But Frye later noted in court papers that he found several indicators of possible suspicious activity: an air freshener, a radar detector and inconsistencies in the driver’s description of his travels.

The officer then asked whether the driver had any cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin or large amounts of cash and sought permission to search the BMW, according to a video of the stop. Anderson denied having drugs or large amounts of cash in his car. He declined to give permission for a search. Frye then radioed for a drug-sniffing dog, and the driver had to wait another 36 minutes for the dog to arrive.

“I’m just going to, basically, have you wait here,” Frye told Anderson.

The dog arrived and the handler said it indicated the presence of drugs. But when they searched the car, none was found. They did find money: $25,180.

Frye handcuffed Anderson and told him he was placing him under arrest.

“In Nebraska, drug currency is illegal,” Frye said. “Let me tell you something, I’ve seized millions out here. When I say that, I mean millions. . . . This is what I do.”

Frye suggested to Anderson that he might not have been aware of the money in his vehicle and began pressing him to sign a waiver relinquishing the cash, mentioning it at least five times over the next hour, the video shows.

“You’re going to be given an opportunity to disclaim the currency,” Frye told Anderson. “To sign a form that says, ‘That is not my money. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t want to know anything about it. I don’t want to come back to court.’ ”

Frye said that unless the driver agreed to give up the money, a prosecutor would “want to charge” him with a crime, “so that means you’ll go to jail.”

An hour and six minutes into the stop, Frye read Anderson his Miranda rights.

Anderson, who told Frye he worked as a self-employed debt counselor, said the money was not illicit and he was carrying it to pay off a gambling debt. He would later say it was from investors and meant to buy silver bullion and coins. More than two hours after the stop had begun, he finally agreed to give up the cash and Frye let him go. Now Anderson has gone to court to get the money back, saying he signed the waiver and mentioned the gambling debt only because he felt intimidated by Frye.

A magistrate has ruled at a preliminary step in the case that Frye had reasonable suspicion to detain Anderson. Frye said he always follows the law and has never had a seizure overturned.

Legal scholars who viewed the video of the stop told The Post that such practices push constitutional limits. Officers often are taught not to tell the driver they have a right to leave at any time after a traffic stop is concluded. But extended stops in which the officer uses psychological pressure on the driver without charges or Miranda warnings can cross the line.

“Encouraging police to initiate searches for the purpose of seizing cash or other assets, rather than to seize evidence to be used in a prosecution, is a dangerous development,” said Clifford Fishman, a law professor at Catholic University and former New York City prosecutor. “It is particularly troubling if police officers are trained to manipulate the suspect into forfeiting the assets or waiving the right to contest the search.”

David A. Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, said Frye’s stop crossed the line when he detained the driver while summoning a canine.

“You cannot elongate the stop to bring in the dogs,” he said. “In doing that, you’re detaining the person without probable cause. That ain’t kosher.”

A tool in the drug war

Civil asset forfeiture law is among the more unusual areas of American jurisprudence. It does not involve evidence of a crime or criminal charges. It is a civil action against an object, such as currency or a boat, rather than a person. It has its basis in British admiralty law, which allowed the taking of a ship to recover damages.

In 1970, Congress turned the federal civil asset forfeiture law into a weapon against the illegal drug trade, allowing for the seizure of aircraft, boats and vehicles used to transport drugs. The federal law was eventually expanded to include cash tied to drug trafficking and to allow the money to be shared with local and state police, who could keep up to 80 percent of the seized assets. When police make a seizure, a federal agency must approve or “adopt” it for inclusion in Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program.

It was a much more effective tool for federal prosecutors than criminal forfeiture, which required the conviction of a defendant with proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Most significantly, the law places the burden of proof on the property owner to demonstrate that an object is not tied to criminal activity.

As the drug trade ramped up throughout the 1980s, money deposited into Justice’s federal forfeitures fund increased from $27 million in 1985 to $556 million in 1993. (It reached $2.6 billion in 2007.) Some of that increase was driven by Operation Pipeline, a nationwide DEA program launched in 1986 that promoted highway interdiction training for state and local police.

Several newspapers later wrote exposés about innocent people being caught up in the forfeiture net and police spending on luxuries. The Orlando Sentinel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for pointing out that the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office had used state seizure laws to take $8 million from motorists, nine out of 10 of them minorities.

The attention prompted Congress to reform federal seizure laws in 2000, allowing owners to be reimbursed for their legal fees after successful lawsuits. But a key reform was cut. It would have removed what some lawmakers called the “perverse incentive” to target cash — the sharing of money between the feds and locals. It died after police and Justice waged a “voracious lobbying” campaign, according to former representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

“We didn’t have the votes,” said Frank, who is still an ardent critic of asset forfeiture. “There is this terrible unfairness. It is about as fundamental a denial of their constitutional rights as I can think of.”

After Sept. 11, 2001, civil forfeiture and the war on drugs became entwined with efforts to improve homeland security. Smugglers of all kinds turned away from airports because of the tightened security and took to the nation’s interstate highway system. With federal encouragement, police from small towns, rural counties and big cities sought specialized training.

Among those that met the demand was Desert Snow, a family-owned company founded in 1989 by Joe David, a California highway patrolman. Other firms also stepped up, including the 4:20 Group, Caltraps, Hits, Diamondback Training, and Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants. Soon more than a dozen companies were competing for millions in state and federal grants and contracts, along with fees from local departments across the country.

The training had an immediate effect in some areas.

After the Kansas Highway Patrol arranged sessions through Desert Snow for state and local police in 2005 and 2006, the amount of cash flowing into police budgets from seizures nearly doubled, from an average of $2.6 million a year between 2000 and 2006 to $4.9 million a year after 2007.

After 25 Wisconsin State Patrol officers received training from Desert Snow in 2010, the agency’s cash seizures the following year more than doubled to $585,657. “It creates a surge period,” said Sgt. Nate Clarke, a state patrol supervisor. “These guys get all fired up because they’re seeing photo after photo of seizures on the PowerPoints.”

The number of agencies participating yearly under Equitable Sharing went up 22 percent to 2,842 between 2003 and 2007, while cash seizures without search warrants or indictments during that period rose more than 50 percent, to $242 million. Under the Obama administration, police have made more than 22,000 such seizures worth about $1 billion through the Justice Department program.

Federal support helped drive the surge. In Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin alone, police spent a total of at least $1 million during the last decade in Justice and Homeland Security grants for Desert Snow training. The DEA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and others spent an additional $2.5 million in contracts on Desert Snow training for police, records show. The DEA also paid more than $2 million for training from the 4:20 Group. Individual local and state police forces across the country paid millions more for the training using seized cash, one of the uses permitted by Equitable Sharing rules.

The police trainers estimate they have taught more than 50,000 police officers in the more aggressive techniques during the last decade.

Some trainers say they worry that an overemphasis on seizing money has distorted policing.

“Over a period of a single decade, the culture was now totally changed,” said Shawn Pardazi, a detective in Pearl, Miss., and owner of Global Counter-Smuggling Training Consultants and a former Desert Snow trainer.

As the demand for training grew, the competition among the firms for business became fierce.

Getting the money back

Decisions that police make during brief roadway stops take motorists who challenge the seizures a year on average to resolve, according to a Post analysis. For 350 owners, it took more than two years to get their money back.

Last year, Ming Tong Liu, 55, a Chinese-born American from Newnan, Ga., was stopped on I-10 in Alabama for driving 10 miles over the speed limit while heading to Louisiana to buy the Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in Lake Charles for himself and his investors — two daughters and another relative.

A Mobile County sheriff’s deputy gave Liu a ticket for speeding and asked for permission to search the car. The deputy found $75,195 in a suitcase in the back seat, neatly wrapped in white napkins and placed in a black plastic bag and then took the money after the deputy said Liu gave conflicting accounts of his travel plans.

The deputy took Liu to a sheriff’s department office and called for an officer from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which stood to share in the money.

Liu’s attorney, Rebecca Ding-Lee, said the officers overstepped their authority, held Liu for nearly two hours and searched his car unlawfully without a warrant. “He cannot speak English,” she said. “He didn’t understand what the police said.”

Ten months after the cash was seized, customs officials agreed to return the money, documents show.

Police often rely on drug-sniffing dogs to justify warrantless searches when a driver refuses to give consent. In 48 cases examined by The Post, dogs alerted to the presence of drugs but the officers found only money.

In October 2008, Benjamin Molina, 40, a permanent resident from El Salvador, was traveling through Virginia on I-95 when an Emporia police officer pulled him over for tinted windows. A carpenter, Molina was going from North Carolina to his home in Perth Amboy, N.J. The officer wrote him a warning ticket and began asking him questions, including whether he had cash in the car.

Molina told the officer that he was shopping for a used car and had $18,000 in his pockets. Molina’s face began to tremble, which police said they took as a sign of possible wrongdoing. Molina said his cheek twitched from medication he was taking for a health condition that included kidney disease. Molina also had duct tape in his car, which police said is “commonly used by traffickers.”

Know your rights: During traffic stops on the nation’s highways, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protects motorists “against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The law also gives police the power to investigate and act on their suspicions.

1. Police have a long-established authority to stop motorists for traffic infractions. They can use traffic violations as a pretext for a deeper inquiry as long as the stop is based on an identifiable infraction.

2. An officer may detain a driver only as long as it takes to deal with the reason for the stop. After that, police have the authority to request further conversation. A motorist has the right to decline and ask whether the stop is concluded. If so, the motorist can leave.

3. The officer also has the authority to briefly detain and question a person as long as the officer has a reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in criminal activity. Reasonable suspicion is based on specific and articulable facts but falls short of the legal standard for making an arrest.

4. A traffic infraction or reasonable suspicion alone do not give police authority to search a vehicle or a closed container, such as luggage. Police may ask for permission to search; drivers may decline. Police do not have to tell drivers that they have a right to refuse.

5. An officer may expand a roadside investigation if the driver’s responses and other circumstances justify a belief that it is more likely than not that criminal activity is occurring. Under this standard, known as probable cause, an officer can make an arrest or search a vehicle without permission. An alert by a drug-sniffing dog can provide probable cause, as can the smell of marijuana.

6. Police can seize cash that they find if they have probable cause to suspect that it is related to criminal activity. The seizure happens through a civil action known as asset forfeiture. Police do not need to charge a person with a crime. The burden of proof is then on the driver to show that the cash is not related to a crime by a legal standard known as preponderance of the evidence.

The officer asked Molina, who had no criminal history, to hand over the cash. The officer placed the money in an envelope, which he set down on the ground alongside two empty envelopes.

A dog called to the scene sat down next to the envelope with the cash, indicating the presence of drugs, according to police.

The police took the money, but Molina took steps to get it back.

He hired David Smith, an Alexandria attorney and former federal prosecutor who once headed the federal government’s forfeiture program in the Eastern District of Virginia.

After Molina appealed, a federal prosecutor refunded the money. It took four months.

Smith said the Molina case is an example of the kind of overreach that the civil asset forfeiture reforms passed by Congress in 2000 were aimed at preventing.

“This type of police bounty hunting is antithetical to everything our criminal justice system is supposed to stand for,” said Smith, who helped craft the reform legislation.

Among the indicators police look for are rental cars, which are often used by smugglers.

On Nov. 1, 2011, Jose Jeronimo Sorto and his brother-in-law, Victor Ramos Guzman, were driving a rented sedan on I-95 south of Richmond when a Virginia state trooper stopped them. Both were lay leaders of the Pentecostal Nuevo Renacer church in Baltimore. They were carrying $28,500 in church funds meant for the purchase of land to build a church in El Salvador and a trailer for a new congregation in North Carolina.

Their experience has been cited as a case study in civil forfeiture abuse by The Post’s editorial page, the New Yorker magazine and others. Unknown until now in the public debate is the fact that the trooper who made the stop, C.L. Murphy, is a top interdiction trainer for Virginia State Police and Desert Snow, as well as a member of Black Asphalt.

Murphy told Sorto and Guzman that they were speeding and following too closely. Murphy said Guzman told him about the cash and consented to a search of the car.

Guzman, 39, of Sterling, Va., said he showed the trooper documents indicating that he belonged to a tax-exempt church, and he said the cash had been collected from congregation members. But Murphy disregarded their explanations, saying they contained inconsistencies. He called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which accepted the seizure for the Equitable Sharing Program, and he escorted the men to a nearby police station. He did not issue a ticket but seized the cash after Guzman signed a waiver.

Three lawyers agreed to represent the church members for free. Three months later, they received a check from ICE for $28,500.

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller would only say, “The facts of the stop speak for themselves.”

ICE spokeswoman Marsha Catron defended the seizure, saying in a statement “the situation was indicative of bulk cash smuggling” and that Guzman consented by signing a waiver for the money.

“Both the male driver and passenger disclaimed ownership of the money and provided inconsistent and contradictory statements,” Catron said. She added: “Money was ultimately returned to Mr. Ramos Guzman after he provided documentation that the cash belonged to his church.”

Guzman told The Post he was truthful to the trooper the entire time. The experience left him shaken.

“They didn’t give me a chance to explain,” Guzman said. “There was no way out.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report. Also contributing were Alexia Campbell, Cathaleen Chen, Hoai-Tran Bui, Nagwa Abdallah and Justin Warren, who were attached to The Washington Post’s Investigative Unit through a partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University.

About this story

The Washington Post relied on an array of materials to explore the rise of civil seizures in recent years, with a particular focus on highway seizures made by state and local police. For details about seizures and the techniques employed by police, reporters reviewed more than 400 federal court cases in which owners of cash filed legal appeals to get it back. The Post also examined some seizures made under state forfeiture laws.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, The Post obtained a database from the Justice Department containing details about 212,000 seizures since 1996 through the Equitable Sharing Program, the federal government’s largest asset forfeiture effort.

Justice officials did not release data that pinpointed the geographic location of each seizure, so it is impossible to identify precisely how many seizures occur during traffic stops. To focus on roadside stops, The Post looked at cases that were not made at businesses and that occurred without warrants or indictments: 61,998 seizures have met those criteria since Sept. 11, 2001. That group of cases was then compared to a list obtained by The Post of 1,654 departments and agencies with officers who are members of an unofficial police intelligence network known as the Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that is focused on highway stops and seizures. The Post also obtained more than 43,000 Justice Department reports from state and local police departments across the country that participated in Equitable Sharing, along with records provided by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil liberties group, to assess how seizures contribute to department budgets.