Lawrence targets woman who opens home to downtrodden

By Heather Staggers

Debbie Nall has thrown open the doors to her three-story house to these individuals and more. She's now looking to sell her home and move because the city of Lawrence, KS is threatening big fines if she continues to help out the less fortunate.

Lawrence has an ordinance that says residents in a single-family zoned neighborhood cannot have more than three unrelated guests in their home over a 90-day period. Nall has made her case, but city officials say if she doesn't stop that they are going to issue hefty fines.

The city recently cited Nall after neighbors claimed. She says two of the guests mentioned in the citation were sergeants based at Fort Leavenworth who are in between relocations.

"I've lived here 26 years. From the time I've lived here, I've taken in over 90 people," Nall said.

Her home has six rooms that hold up to six comfy beds that she offers to anyone needing a warm place to say. She dishes up food for her guests daily.

"Usually it's abused women, displaced women or people who have gotten out of the hospital who don't want to die in the hospital," she said. "If people only knew the blessing that comes out of it."

Shelters, churches and other nonprofits call Nall when they have someone needing a place to stay. Nall said she lets people stay as long as they need until they get back on their feet.

"These are her guests. The house is not overflowing. If you have eight bedrooms, own your home, how can the city impose fines for opening your home to guests?" her daughter wrote to KCTV. "Not renters. She takes no money. She asks for no help. She has worked her whole life to pay her house off and now the city fines her heavily for opening her doors."

Nall nearly broke down when discussing the situation. She hopes the news coverage can soften the hard hearts at City Hall against her.

While some neighbors think her efforts shouldn't be done in a residential neighborhood, others say they don't have an issue with what she is doing. City of Lawrence officials declined comment, citing people being out of the office due to the Thanksgiving holiday.

"I'm not against the ordinance. I just wish they would add an amendment so I can continue to do what I'm doing,'" she said. Because Lawrence is a college town, there are areas in which you can have multiple residents and guests in a residential area, but Nall's neighborhood is not one of them.

Meet the Punk Rocker Who Can Liberate Your FBI File

Ryan Shapiro's technique is so effective at unburying sensitive documents, the feds are asking the courts to stop him.

By Will Potter

Ryan Shapiro has just wrapped up a talk at Boston's Suffolk University Law School, and as usual he's surrounded by a gaggle of admirers. The crowd­, consisting of law students, academics, and activist types, is here for a panel discussion on the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a 2006 law targeting activists whose protest actions lead to a "loss of profits" for industry. Shapiro, a 37-year-old Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, contributed a slideshow of newspaper headlines, posters, and government documents from as far back as the 1800s depicting animal advocates as a threat to national security. Now audience members want to know more about his dissertation and the archives he's using. But many have a personal request: Would Shapiro help them discover what's in their FBI files?

He is happy to oblige. According to the Justice Department, this tattooed activist-turned-academic is the FBI's "most prolific" Freedom of Information Act requester—filing, during one period in 2011, upward of two documents requests a day. In the course of his doctoral work, which examines how the FBI monitors and investigates protesters, Shapiro has developed a novel, legal, and highly effective approach to mining the agency's records. Which is why the government is petitioning the United States District Court in Washington, DC, to prevent the release of 350,000 pages of documents he's after.

Invoking a legal strategy that had its heyday during the Bush administration, the FBI claims that Shapiro's multitudinous requests, taken together, constitute a "mosaic" of information whose release could "significantly and irreparably damage national security" and would have "significant deleterious effects" on the bureau's "ongoing efforts to investigate and combat domestic terrorism."
"Under the FBI's theory, the greater the public demand for documents, the greater need for secrecy and delay."

So-called mosaic theory has been used in the past to stop the release of specific documents, but it has never been applied so broadly. "It's designed to be retrospective," explains Kel McClanahan, a DC-based lawyer who specializes in national security and FOIA law. "You can't say, 'What information, if combined with future information, could paint a mosaic?' because that would include all information!"

Fearing that a ruling in the FBI's favor could make it harder for journalists and academics to keep tabs on government agencies, open-government groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Security Archive, and the National Lawyers Guild (as well as the nonprofit news outlet Truthout and the crusading DC attorney Mark Zaid) have filed friend-of-the-court briefs on Shapiro's behalf. "Under the FBI's theory, the greater the public demand for documents, the greater need for secrecy and delay," says Baher Azmy, CCR's legal director.

Shapiro takes pride in his "most prolific" status, but it's not an honorific he had in mind when he set out to learn how the FBI came to view animal rights activists as the nation's "number one domestic terrorism threat." He ran into a wall when he first began requesting significant numbers of documents from the bureau in 2010. He needed case numbers, file names, and names of field offices where investigations originated, and even when he had them, the FBI often claimed it didn't have any relevant documents. So he began reading everything he could find on FOIA law, including the FBI's internal regulations and court filings describing how it conducts its searches.

When he started using privacy waivers, Shapiro realized he was on to something. Suppose you and I volunteered for the animal rights group PETA. If Shapiro requested all PETA-related FBI documents, he might get something back, but any references to us would be blacked out. If he requested documents related to us, he'd probably get nothing at all. But if he filed his PETA request along with privacy waivers signed by us, the FBI would be compelled to return all PETA documents that mention us—with the relevant details uncensored.

Shapiro began calling up old friends and asking for waivers. Coming of age amid the 1990s punk scene, he'd been drawn to animal rights causes and took part in their actions. He walked into foie gras facilities to film sick and injured ducks, several of which he rescued, and locked himself to the doors of fur salons. And while he no longer does such things, he has kept in touch with people who do.

Armed with signed privacy waivers, he sent out a few experimental requests—he calls them "submarine pings"—and when the FBI returned more than 100 pages on a close friend, he knew he'd struck gold. The response included pages of information that Shapiro had requested previously, but that the FBI had claimed didn't exist. Using case details from those documents and a handful of additional waivers, he filed a new set of requests.
"Each response is a teeny little window opened into the backrooms of these deliberately byzantine FBI filing systems."

Bit by bit, the black boxes began to go away. "Each response is a teeny little window opened into the backrooms of these deliberately byzantine FBI filing systems," Shapiro told me. "You get enough windows, and then you have the light you need to see what's back there." Soon Shapiro was submitting hundreds of requests, yielding tens of thousands of pages.

One of his privacy waivers had my name on it. As an independent journalist whose website and recent book focus on agribusiness, animal rights, and ecoterrorism, I've known Shapiro for years. I've quoted him in stories and written about documents he's procured showing that the FBI considered terrorism charges against activists who engaged in undercover investigations of factory farm conditions. I knew from filing my own FOIA requests that the FBI's Counter Terrorism Unit has monitored my website and speaking events, and so I agreed to sign a waiver. I wanted to see whether Shapiro's technique would reveal anything new. I never found out, though, since the FBI has stopped complying with his requests.
The feds want seven years just to determine whether the documents Shapiro requested can be released. "That would be a world-record setter," says Dan Metcalfe. "The FBI never did anything like this."

In 2012, after Shapiro sued the FBI to release the blocked documents, the Justice Department responded by asking the court for what's known as an Open America stay—a delay tactic dating back to a Watergate-era court decision. FOIA experts consider it a nuclear option, and the courts say it is meant for "exceptional circumstances," when an agency is deluged with requests. Under normal circumstances, government agencies are allowed 20 days to say whether (if not when) they will comply with a given query. For example, in a recent case in which the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the FBI for documents about cellphone tracking, the bureau asked for 14 extra months, claiming—as it has in Shapiro's case—an unexpectedly high FOIA workload. A federal judge denied the stay, pointing out that the annual volume of documents requests received by the FBI has decreased "significantly" since 2008.

In Shapiro's case, the feds want seven years to determine whether the docs can be released. "That would be a world-record setter," says Dan Metcalfe, who, after more than a quarter century running the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, now heads the Collaboration on Government Secrecy at American University Law School. "The FBI never did anything like this even back in the darkest days of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan."
Claiming it cannot discuss the case in open court without damaging "national security law enforcement interests," the FBI has outlined its argument in a secret declaration.

The FBI claims that it cannot discuss the case in open court "without damaging the very national security law enforcement interests it is seeking to protect." Instead, it has filed a secret declaration outlining its case. "This is an especially circular and Kafkaesque line of argument," Shapiro counters. "The FBI considers it a national security threat to make public its reasoning for considering it a national security threat to use federal law to request information about the FBI's deeply problematic understanding of national security threats."

Shapiro's attorney, Jeffrey Light, was able to obtain a heavily redacted version of the FBI's declaration. Among other things, it cites the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act and says that 81 of Shapiro's FOIA requests covering 64 individuals, groups, and publications, relate to "animal rights extremism."

The FBI, oddly enough, is processing his requests involving arsons by the fringe Animal Liberation Front but blocking documents concerning movement mainstays like Mercy for Animals. Some of the disputed requests pertain to anti-animal-rights groups such as the Center for Consumer Freedom. The FBI's so-called extremists span a wide spectrum—from former ALF operative Rod Coronado to Jon Camp, who has no criminal record and whose job consists of handing out leaflets for a group called Vegan Outreach. I was surprised to learn that I, too, am among them—and that the bureau asserts that releasing information about me and my book would interfere with law enforcement proceedings. A ruling is expected in the case within the next few months. In the meantime, Shapiro continues writing his dissertation, collecting waivers, and drafting FOIA requests late at night while watching television with his wife. Lately he's been interested in getting the FBI files of famous punk and hip-hop artists. He acknowledges that his work has become a borderline obsession. When Daniel Ellsberg visited MIT for a lecture, Shapiro had lunch with him and some other grad students. He walked away with a privacy waiver from the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

DHS agent cites private medical history to deny disabled Canadian woman entry to U.S.

By Travis Gettys

A Canadian woman said she was denied entry into the U.S. by a Customs and Border Protection Agent who cited her hospitalization last year for clinical depression.

Ellen Richardson, of Weston, Ontario, said she intended to fly Monday to New York City on her way to a 10-day Caribbean cruise, but she said the agent working with the Department of Homeland Security told her she must first get medical clearance.

Richardson, who is paraplegic and set up her cruise through the March of Dimes with about a dozen other travelers, said the agent told her she must be examined by one of three Toronto physicians approved by DHS.

“I was so aghast. I was saying, ‘I don’t understand this. What is the problem?’” said Richardson, who paid about $6,000 for the trip. “I was so looking forward to getting away . . . I’d even brought a little string of Christmas lights I was going to string up in the cabin . . . It’s not like I can just book again right away.”

Richardson, who said she hadn’t discussed her private medical history or background with agents at the airport, said she was told that a call to her psychiatrist wasn’t sufficient.

She said the breakup of a personal relationship triggered her clinical depression in summer 2012 that led to her hospitalization, although she said no police had been involved in that case.

Richardson also said she’d attempted suicide in 2001 as a result of delusions, but she said that medication had generally stabilized her since then.

She said she’s been on three cruises since 2001, traveling each time through the U.S., and had never encountered trouble over her medical history before, and she said her suicide attempt had never been brought up – including by the agent who stopped her this week.

Richardson said the agent gave her a signed document that showed “system checks” had found the “mental illness episode” that required medical clearance before entering the U.S.

A customs spokesperson said the department was prohibited from discussing individual cases due to privacy laws.

Canadian lawmaker Mike Sullivan said the incident was “enormously troubling,” and he intended to contact the nation’s federal privacy commissioner to determine how U.S. agents got access to Richardson’s personal medical information.

Richardson said she’d contacted her attorney about a possible breach of privacy and act of discrimination against those with mental health issues.

A spokeswoman for Ontario’s health ministry said U.S. authorities are not given access to health or medical records for Canadians traveling into the country.

Richardson said she bought insurance for her trip, but the policy does not cover travelers who are denied boarding, although she said the carrier had told her it would continue to examine her claim.

More than a dozen Canadians reported in 2011 and 2010 that they were denied entry to the U.S. after their mental health records were shared with DHS.

Step 1. Understand the Problem

"I start from the supposition that we don't have to say too much about this because all we have to do is think about the state of the world today and realize that things are all upside down."
-- Howard Zinn

Before a disease can be cured, it first must be understood. Think about the state of the world today, take off the rose-colored glasses and the blinders of race and religion; use your common sense and really think about it. Is it right that I am sitting here typing away on a $500 laptop and sipping my coffee, while somewhere in the Sudan, a 3-week old infant (and a million more like her all over the world) just died from starvation? That's all she ever got; out of all the wonderful experiences and adventures that this world has to offer, all she ever got to do was suffer for 3 weeks and die.

We cannot allow fellow members of our species to continue suffering in this way. We cannot continue to lie back and accept the havoc that a few greedy individuals are wreaking on the human race, our animal friends, and on the precious planet that we all share. There are so many problems that need fixing: massive economic disparity, war, deforestation, a genetically modified food supply, racism, genocide, famine, factory farming & the animal cruelty it propagates, the starving, the sick, and above all, the competition and animosity between all our respective countries.

These problems all have one underlying cause and that is the existence of the global elite. They use their money to control the global economy and lobby governments into adopting policies that will benefit their multinational corporations; regardless of how negatively such policies will impact the populace. They have learned that fabricating war between nations is extremely profitable, after all they can sell weapons to both sides and double their profits! They have conditioned us to hate one another and created differences where there are none. They have kept us fighting each other for years in order to keep us from uniting against the true enemy, them.

Their influence is strong even in the more developed countries like America. They have poisoned Americans with artificial food, fluoridated water, prescription medications, and a myriad of other harmful chemicals in our food, water, and air. We are weak and disabled, infested with cancers, obesity, and most horrifying of all, ignorance. They keep us sick and stupid so that we continue to buy more of their food, pills, and other useless material goods. It's a vicious yet brilliant cycle. If we sit and do nothing they will continue to poison, manipulate, and subjugate; and one day we will be too weak and too ignorant to do anything about it.

If we can help our fellow members of the United Underclass to understand these simple truths, we will be so much closer to true, unfettered freedom. Think of all the money wasted on building nuclear and chemical weapons, all the money spent on useless research for medications that don't cure but only treat the symptoms of diseases (that they caused in the first place by pumping us full of artificial chemicals). Think of where we could be, where we can STILL be, if we took all those billions of dollars and used them to improve the life of every living being that suffers on this planet. Think of what we could accomplish, working together as one species, instead of squabbling amongst ourselves about who owns what and which border goes where. We cannot do as the Pharmaceutical industry does, treat only the symptoms while ignoring the cause. We MUST cure the disease. We must UNITE against this tyranny. We must ignore the the small issues that keep us divided and attack the real problem head-on. It is truly the only way.

Many of us are already awakened to the true nature of our world and our numbers are growing everyday. The best thing that we can do is help those numbers grow FASTER!!! Share the knowledge; spread the word; refrain from belittling others in your mission; instead, help them to understand. We are all in the same sinking boat. Are you going to stand around criticizing? Or are you going to help us bail? Make your choice. Sit and watch, or stand and fight.

Faithfully yours,
Jedi

Thousands of Ohio State Students Defy Police Orders, Storm Barricades

Zenon Evans


Citing frustration with overzealous safety rules, thousands of Ohio State University students defied police orders and stormed through barricades to participate in an annual school tradition on Monday.

Once a year, Ohio State students show their mettle by jumping into the frigid waters of a pond called Mirror Lake. This raucous custom, which last year drew 15,000 people, had gone largely undisturbed for two decades. This year, however, university officials decided a major overhaul was needed after one student died following an unrelated, isolated drowning incident in August.

The university's newspaper, The Lantern, details the extent to which administrators went to deprive the event of any spontaneity or danger and make it more like Soviet breadline than a night of collegiate camaraderie:


OSU officials had announced there would be increased safety and security efforts for the Mirror Lake jump... Fences were installed surrounding Mirror Lake with one designated entrance spot and multiple exits. Students, whether jumping or watching, were set to be required to wear a wristband issued to those with [student identification] only for admission to the area.

University police also used their squad cars to act as additional barricades around the perimeter.

School officials overestimated the students' complacency. Campus Police Chief Paul Denton told the school paper over the weekend that he didn't anticipate students resisting the planned protocol, but said the police were prepared to handle it if they did. Vice President for Student Life Javaune Adams-Gaston said, “I know that change is difficult and people have the right to have views about that change, but I also know that our student population is one that is spirited and not disruptive,”

The Columbus Dispatch states that despite the presence of several dozen officers guarding the area, the collegians knocked down the six-foot fences and jumped in defiance of the restrictions. Reports vary on how many students participated in the protest last night, but the newspaper ballparks it in the thousands. Once the students began flooding in, the police declined to stop them.

One student told the Dispatch that defying the administrators was her “way of protesting the university telling me when, where and how I should jump.”

“We wanted a night that is unregulated and something the students can own and can continue a really fun and really great tradition,” another student told the school paper.

Ironically, the attempt to micromanage the situation could have backfired for the school, the Dispatch notes:

And there’s an odd angle to Ohio State trying to control the jump, said at least one lawyer. The university could be increasing its liability if a student were to get hurt once wristbands are required, said Gerry Leeseberg, a Columbus lawyer who specializes in wrongful-death and personal-injury cases. “The more control they exert, the further the risk they take,” he said.

Metropolitan police detained David Miranda for promoting 'political' causes

Justification for airport detention of partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald alarms human rights groups and Tory MP

Jamie Doward


David Miranda was arrested and held for nine hours at Heathrow airport under powers granted by the Terrorism Act.

The detention of the partner of a former Guardian journalist has triggered fresh concerns after it emerged that a key reason cited by police for holding him under terrorism powers was the belief that he was promoting a "political or ideological cause".

The revelation has alarmed leading human rights groups and a Tory MP, who said the justification appeared to be without foundation and threatened to have damaging consequences for investigative journalism.

David Miranda is the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who – often in collaboration with the Guardian – has broken many stories about the extent and scope of spying by the US National Security Agency. Miranda was stopped at Heathrow airport in August and held by the Metropolitan police for nine hours while on his way home to Brazil.

Miranda, it has been claimed, was carrying some 58,000 encrypted UK intelligence documents. He had spent a week in Berlin visiting a journalist, Laura Poitras, who has worked with Greenwald on many of his stories, which have been based on information leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Now documents referred to in court last week before a judicial review of Miranda's detention shine new light on the Metropolitan police's explanation for invoking terrorism powers – a decision critics have called draconian.

It became apparent during the court hearing that there were several drafts of the Port Circular Notice – the document used to request Miranda's detention under schedule 7 to the 2000 Terrorism Act – before the final version was submitted.

The draft that was finally used states: "Intelligence indicates that Miranda is likely to be involved in espionage activity which has the potential to act against the interests of UK national security. We therefore wish to establish the nature of Miranda's activity, assess the risk that Miranda poses to national security and mitigate as appropriate."

The notice then went on to explain why police officers believed that the terrorism act was appropriate.

"We assess that Miranda is knowingly carrying material, the release of which would endanger people's lives. Additionally the disclosure or threat of disclosure is designed to influence a government, and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism and as such we request that the subject is examined under schedule 7."

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the police assessment represented a "chilling" threat to democracy. "More and more we are shocked but not surprised," she said. "Breathtakingly broad anti-terror powers passed under the last government continue to be abused under the coalition that once trumpeted civil liberties.

"The express admission that politics motivated the detention of David Miranda should shame police and legislators alike. It's not just the schedule 7 detention power that needs urgent overhaul, but a definition of terrorism that should chill the blood of any democrat."

Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship, which campaigns for free speech, said that the police's justification for Miranda's detention was "very dangerous" for investigative journalism. "The whole point of such journalism is to find stuff the government doesn't want raised," he said. "The message this gives off is 'don't find this sort of stuff, or you will be treated as a terrorist'."

Greenwald was equally scathing, tweeting: "UK govt beats its mighty chest, now explicitly equates journalism with 'terrorism' and 'espionage'."

The home secretary, Theresa May, has criticised the Guardian's decision to publish the Snowden leaks. May has said she agrees with the assessment of Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, that the newspaper had damaged Britain's national security. But Conservative MP Dominic Raab said: "The assertion that national security has been undermined has been bandied around wildly and not explained in any cogent way."

And he questioned the police's handling of the Miranda affair. "If he was behaving in such a nefarious way why wasn't he arrested, charged and bailed?" Raab said. "If he was guilty of putting national security at risk, then why did they let him go?"

Gwendolen Morgan of Bindmans, Miranda's solicitors, said this week's judicial review will focus on whether the use of schedule 7 was disproportionate and whether it was incompatible with the inalienable right to freedom of expression.

"We will argue that draconian counter-terrorism powers were used in our client's case for an improper purpose," Morgan said. "Not to determine whether our client could in any sense be considered a 'terrorist', but rather to retrieve potentially embarrassing journalistic material in his possession."

The impact of Snowden's leaks on national security is expected to be addressed this week when parliament's intelligence and security committee will question the heads of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ in public for the first time.

UK Cryptographers Call For Outing of Deliberately Weakened Protocols, Products

by Dennis Fisher

A group of cryptographers in the UK has published a letter that calls on authorities in that country and the United States to conduct an investigation to determine which security products, protocols and standards have been deliberately weakened by the countries’ intelligence services. The letter, signed by a number of researchers from the University of Bristol and other universities, said that the NSA and British GCHQ “have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.”

The appeal comes a couple of weeks after leaked documents from the NSA and its UK counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, showed that the two agencies have been collaborating on projects that give them the ability to subvert encryption protocols and also have been working with unnamed security vendors to insert backdoors into hardware and software products. Security experts have been debating in recent weeks which products, standards and protocols may have been deliberately weakened, but so far no information has been forthcoming.

The cryptography researchers in the UK are asking the UK and U.S. governments to reveal which ones are suspect.

“By weakening cryptographic standards, in as yet undisclosed ways, and by inserting weaknesses into products which we all rely on to secure critical infrastructure, we believe that the agencies have been acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve. We find it shocking that agencies of both the US and UK governments now stand accused of undermining the systems which protect us. By weakening all our security so that they can listen in to the communications of our enemies, they also weaken our security against our potential enemies,” the letter says.

Published on Monday, the letter is signed by cryptographers from the University of Bristol, University of London, University of Birmingham, University of Luxembourg, University of Southampton, University of Surrey, University of Kent, Newcastle University and University College London. In it, the researchers call on the relevant authorities to publicly name the products and standards that have been weakened in order to inform users which systems they should avoid.

“We call on the relevant parties to reveal what systems have been weakened so that they can be repaired, and to create a proper system of oversight with well-defined public rules that clearly forbid weakening the security of civilian systems and infrastructures. The statutory Intelligence and Security Committee of the House of Commons needs to investigate this issue as a matter of urgency. In the modern information age we all need to have complete trust in the basic infrastructure that we all use,” the letter says.

In the weeks since the documents detailing the NSA’s cryptographic capabilities emerged, further details about exactly which protocols the agency can attack successfully and which standards it may have influenced have been scarce. NIST, the U.S. agency that develops technical standards for cryptography, among other things, as denied accusations that the NSA was able to weaken some of the NIST standards. However, at the same time, NIST officials have issued a recommendation that people no longer use one of the encryption standards it previously published.

“NIST strongly recommends that, pending the resolution of the security concerns and the re-issuance of SP 800-90A, the Dual_EC_DRBG, as specified in the January 2012 version of SP 800-90A, no longer be used,” the NIST statement says.

The standard in question is an elliptic curve random bit generator, and cryptographers have called into question its integrity in the wake of the latest NSA revelations, mainly because its difficult to tell how the points on the elliptic curve were determined.

“This algorithm includes default elliptic curve points for three elliptic curves, the provenance of which were not described. Security researchers have highlighted the importance of generating these elliptic curve points in a trustworthy way. This issue was identified during the development process, and the concern was initially addressed by including specifications for generating different points than the default values that were provided. However, recent community commentary has called into question the trustworthiness of these default elliptic curve points,” the NIST statement says.

Parental rights threatened because of baby’s raw milk diet

State demands corn-syrup laden baby formula over natural goat's milk

BROOKLIN, ME — A mother is being harassed over the diet she is feeding her baby. This case is yet another of a long train of abuses perpetrated by power-drunk agencies with the ability to separate children from their natural parents, often for profit.

17-year-old mother Alorah Gellerson had difficulty getting her baby Carson to breastfeed. Instead of switching over to artificial baby formula, often comprised of up to 50% corn syrup solids, she decided to go the natural route. She began feeding Carson a mixture of goat’s milk and celery juice.

“Oh, he loved it,” Gellerson said. “We put celery juice in it, and he just loves that, and it worked really well with his body, and he grew like a weed.”

But no self-respecting busybody would allow a parent to make a decision without state-approval. Gellerson’s doctors reported her to the government. Soon she had the Department of Health and Human Services after her for not feeding store-bought formula to her child.

A social-worker “came in and threatened to take him away and put him in foster care until I complied to go to the doctor and get him seen,” said Gellerson.


Alorah Gellerson and baby Carson.

“DHHS said they had no one available to speak, instead directing reporters to websites for procedures they follow, like one from the USDA, which says goat milk is not recommended for infants because of inadequate quantities of certain vitamins,” reported WAFB.

Yet even after complying with DHHS, switching to store-bought formula, and exposing Carson to more doctors and even an overnight stay in a hospital, she still is being harassed and her parental rights threatened.

Regardless of what DHHS feels is “adequate” for feeding a baby, real life scenarios don’t always fit into their handbook. Some babies simply don’t respond well to formula, breast milk, or other alternatives. It is important that parental choice is preserved and flexibility is afforded to parents who need to make these difficult decisions.


Attendees of a rally in support of the Gellerson family.

It is unfair and oppressive for parental rights to be threatened over such personal decisions. It begs the question: Is there some greater motive in government agencies’ incessant attempts to take healthy children from loving parents?

As it turns out, there are monetary incentives that have been instituted at the federal level to encourage state agencies to turn out numbers of adoptions. The Safe Children and Families Act of 1997 placed rewards of thousands of dollars per head on children being taken from their natural parents and put into foster homes. Agencies like CPS and DHHS naturally bend to the corrupting influence of federal dollars, leading toward more numerous and less necessary child confiscations. Watch this brief video for more information.

“I hope this all goes away. It’s been so terrible and hard on us. We’re just trying to live our lives and they keep bothering us. I just want it to be all over,” Gellerson said.

The future of baby Carson remains uncertain, resting on the arbitrary decisions of federal bureaucrats.

MPAA Gets Its Wish: Court Basically Says It Can File Bogus DMCA Takedowns Without Concern For Fair Use

Well, this is unfortunate. We've been covering a somewhat bizarre, petty legal squabble between two bloggers who have very different views about birthing methods, and who have a history of sniping at each other. Eventually the sniping went legal after one (Gina Crosley-Corcoran) posted a photo of herself giving the middle finger, telling the other (Amy Tuteur) to "take back to your blog and obsess over." Tuteur, in response, posted the image on her blog along with some choice words for Crosley-Corcoran. Crosley-Corcoran threatened a highly questionable copyright infringement claim over the reposting of the photo, then eventually did send equally questionable DMCA takedown notices to Tuteur's hosting companies (plural) leading Tuteur to feel the need to shift hosts a few times. Crosley-Corcoran publicly laughed at Tuteur's blog being taken down, and later stated (publicly) that she wanted to stifle Tuteur's speech by getting Tuteur to stop talking about her, and finally soliciting a "legal fund" to go after Tuteur, promising to continue to take down her blog wherever it was posted.

This seemed like a clear case of abusing the DMCA to stifle speech, and we noted that it might be an important case in determining if the DMCA's 512(f) clause had any teeth. 512(f) is the clause that provides for damages if you file a bogus DMCA notice (technically if you make "material misrepresentation" in the notice). The key question: is sending a DMCA notice when the use is clearly fair use a "material misrepresentation." The EFF jumped in to help argue this point, freaking out the MPAA who insisted that having to consider fair use before filing an abusive, censorious DMCA takedown is crazy talk.

Unfortunately, it appears that the judge has now agreed with the MPAA that Congress probably didn't intend for DMCA filers to have to consider fair use, saying that if that was the intent, Congress should change the law. The argument made by the court is that the takedown process was designed to be "expeditious" and having to consider things like fair use make it too slow.

... in enacting the DMCA, Congress did not require that a notice-giver verify that he or she had explored an alleged infringer’s possible affirmative defenses prior to acting, only that she affirm a good faith belief that the copyrighted material is being used without her or her agent’s permission.... There is a reason for this. To have required more would have put the takedown procedure at odds with Congress’s express intent of creating an “expeditious[],” “rapid response” to “potential infringement” on the Internet.... Undoubtedly abuses will occur - as is the case with almost any system that permits legal self-help.... For these abuses Congress provided a remedy in section 512(f). If experience ultimately proves that the remedy is weighted too heavily in favor of copyright owners at the expense of those who seek to make “fair use” of another’s intellectual property, the resetting of the balance is for Congress and not a court to strike.

I think this is an incorrect reading of the law, since to file a DMCA notice you are making a statement that you believe the work is infringing, and as Section 107 of the Copyright Act clearly states, "the fair use of the copyrighted work... is not an infringement." So I don't see how you can truly claim that something is infringing without at least exploring whether it's fair use.

Still, if we accept the court's reading of this, it seems (to me, at least) to only further the argument that the DMCA takedown process is a clear violation of the First Amendment, because it now clearly allows for blatant censorship, with no remedy even if the process is abused to remove non-infringing speech, such as fair use.

Police shoot toothless 16-year-old family dog during no-knock raid

A familiar story of aggressive policing plays out in a small Alabama town.


The Fretwell’s faithful dog, Belle.

RABUN, AL — A family feels violated after their home was subject to an unannounced, no-knock raid and their gentle family dog was shot by a deputy.

The all too familiar scenario played out in Alabama as it has thousands of other times throughout the country. Deputies intruded into a family residence with no knock, no announcement, and no permission. The family pet, curious and scared, approached the unwelcome strangers to investigate. The family pet was shot, and deputies’ justified their shoot with claims that the family disputes.

Such was the experience of the Fretwells who live on Stacey Drive in Rabun, Alabama. On Friday, November 22nd, their aging family companion was shot by a Baldwin County deputy who had entered their home without permission.

“She’s gentle, she has a caring soul, she wouldn’t hurt anything and she never has, we’ve never had this problem ever,” said homeowner Angel Fretwell.
“I just think that maybe if they would have announced themselves or give it some kind of warning or anything at that point I think it would’ve helped this situation a lot.”

The Fretwells’ dog, Belle, is 16 years old, can barely get around, and has lost all of her teeth.

Upon hearing the four strangers in her home she approached deputies. They claim they had to shoot Belle for fear of their lives when she allegedly came after them. But the family disputes that claim. The Fretwells claim that Belle ran before she was shot in the shoulder.

After shooting their pet, deputies wouldn’t let the family care for her for over 1 hour.

They claim to have been searching for a relative of the Fretwells, who was not in the home.

Veterinarians say that Belle has a chance to survive, but will lose her leg and require a $1,000.00 surgery.

Between the use of no-knock raids on family residences and the cowardly shooting of family pets, concerned citizens have a lot to address with the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office. Only citizen activism can curb aggressive police tactics and acquire accountability.

“They have to be cautious,” Fretwell said to WPMI Local 15 News. “I just think that maybe if they would have announced themselves or give it some kind of warning or anything at that point I think it would’ve helped this situation a lot.”

California City Bans Smoking at Home

by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.

Government isn’t content to control public behavior, it is now clamping down on how citizens act at home, as well.

Multiple media outlets are reporting that the city council of San Rafael, California has passed an ordinance prohibiting smoking inside residences with shared walls. This would include, of course, apartments, condominiums, duplexes, and other multi-family dwellings.

The ordinance was passed in October 2012, but did not go into effect until November 14, 2013.


According to a statement made by the city council on the city’s official website, the new regulation strengthens “the City’s municipal code to further protect the community from secondhand smoke.”

In particular, the ordinance “applies to all new and existing properties and does not allow grandfathering rights. Landlords and property owners are required to enforce this ordinance through new lease language or lease amendments as well as posting signage.”

The ordinance may be the strictest in the country, and city officials are proud to be out front on the issue. Breitbart News quoted Rebecca Woodbury, "an analyst in the San Rafael's city manager's office who helped write the ordinance," as boasting: "I'm not aware of any ordinance that's stronger."

And the Blaze revealed:

The city’s mayor, Gary Phillips, is apparently well-aware of the leadership role San Rafael may have given itself with the decision. He said that the city is “happy to blaze a trail” before the vote took place.

“We’re most happy to be in the forefront of the issue because we think it will greatly benefit our residents and those visiting San Rafael, and we think it will set the tone for other cities as well,” the mayor proclaimed.

The Breitbart News story reported on the opposition to this alarming intrusion into the sanctity of the home:

"The science for that is spurious at best," said George Koodray, the state coordinator for Citizens Freedom Alliance and the Smoker's Club in New Jersey.

Steve Stanek, a research fellow at the free-market oriented policy group Heartland Institute in Chicago, supported the rights of smokers.

Stanek, a non-smoker, said, "My sympathies aren't with smokers because I am one, it's because of the huge growth in laws and punishments and government restricting people more and more.”

Beyond the city’s reliance on questionable science, the violation of the “Takings Clause” of the Constitution may actually be actionable.

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, in relevant part, “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed down several decisions aimed at defining the scope of the so-called Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

An article from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law reports:

The Court has had a difficult time articulating a test to determine when a regulation becomes a taking. It has said there is "no set formula" and that courts "must look to the particular circumstances of the case." The Court has identified some relevant factors to consider: the economic impact of the regulation, the degree to which the regulation interferes with investor-backed expectations, and the character of the government action.

By applying the ordinance to owners and renters, an argument can be made that its enforcement will impact the ability of investors to receive a return on their investment in property within San Rafael. Where once owners could sign leases with any citizen, regardless of their smoking preference, that property will now be restricting to renting to those who do not smoke. That may be fine going forward, but considering the “no grandfathering” clause of the ordinance, many of those who have purchased buildings as investment income property will now see their ability to achieve occupancy severely reduced by an overzealous local government.

As the ordinance has been in effect for only about 10 days as this is being written, it seems that local land owners would have a cause of action against the San Rafael city council. Should the owners of apartments, condos, and all other residences that contain units that share walls be able to demonstrate that their property rights have been diminished by the city council without the “just compensation” required by the Constitution, then the ordinance would be subject to being struck down.

Should the ordinance be enforced as written, owners of qualifying property will find themselves unable to use their property as intended and unable to recover for their losses.

There are those opponents of the ordinance who have chosen, unfortunately, to focus on the soundness of the science rather than on the assault on the fundamental right of property.

In the long run, health risks identified by science or by “science” will change. There will rarely be consensus on such issues, particularly when forces on both sides have billions of dollars to pour into competing studies (Michael Bloomberg and the tobacco industry, for example).

What does not change, however, and is not subject to contemporary or corporate manipulation, is the sacrosanct place afforded property in the Anglo-American legal tradition.

Proponents of the law point to the “nuisance exception” that the Supreme Court has established. Put simply, the high court has ruled that the right to injure neighbors is not covered by the Takings Clause, and thus need not be compensated for should the government decided to regulate the injurious behavior.

This has gone too far, however.

Writing for the Cato Institute, Roger Pilon explains the potential for abuse of the nuisance exception to the Takings Clause:

In defining the nuisance exception, therefore, care must be taken to tie it to a realistic conception of rights, which the classic common law more or less did. Thus, uses that injure a neighbor through various forms of pollution (e.g., by particulate matter, noises, odors, vibrations, etc.) or through exposure to excessive risk count as classic common-law nuisances because they violate the neighbor’s rights. They can be prohibited, with no compensation owing to those who are thus restricted.

By contrast, uses that “injure” one’s neighbor through economic competition, say, or by blocking “his” view (which runs over your property) or offending his aesthetic sensibilities are not nuisances because they violate no rights the neighbor can claim. Nor will it do to simply declare, through positive law, that such goods are “rights.” Indeed, that is the route that has brought us to where we are today. After all, every regulation has some reason behind it, some “good” the regulation seeks to bring about. If all such goods were pursued under the police power—as a matter of right—then the owners from whom the goods were taken would never be compensated. The police power would simply eat up the compensation requirement.

And that is where the citizens of San Rafael find themselves today. The city council has unconstitutionally exercised the police power and has “eaten up” the protected property rights of owners of multi-family dwellings.

Although the fight wouldn’t be an easy one, property owners in San Rafael affected by the newly enforced ordinance would be wise to stand against their local government’s deprivation of their right to enjoy their property. When regulations run amok, property rights are almost always the victim.

Officer Repeatedly Sprayed Mace in Woman’s Vagina as Punishment: Lawsuit 17

NEW MEXICO — A New Mexico woman suffered for weeks with painful urination and swollen, burning genitals after an officer repeatedly sprayed mace in her vagina to “punish” her, according to an ACLU lawsuit.

“It’s tantamount to torture,” Peter Simonson, the Executive Director of ACLU of New Mexico said in an interview.

Marlene Tapia was apparently arrested for a drug-related issue.

She was taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where two officers made her strip naked. They then forced her to bend over at the waist.

The officers claimed that Tapia had a “plastic baggie” in her vagina, but rather than sending her to medical staff to get it removed, one of the officers began spraying mace inside Tapia as punishment, according to the lawsuit.

“It’s just the maliciousness, the wanton disregard, wanton maliciousness that the corrections officer demonstrated,” said Simonson.

View the Court records: NM ABQ Sprayed Genitals

Bizarre scene in Toledo: Cop holds entire family on ground with Taser

Aaron Tatkowski and his family are held at the point of a taser while proned out in the street.

TOLEDO, OH — A bizarre scene was recorded in Toledo involving an officer aiming his Taser at an entire family, including a boy, as they were forced to lay in the middle of the street. According to witnesses, the aggressive encounter originated when a man questioned the way an officer was handling a license plate citation for his neighbor. The man who spoke up, and his entire family, were ripped from their vehicle and threatened with a taser.

Aaron Tatkowski told Toledo News Now that he returned home on Sunday to find his daughter-in-law, Cassandra Meyers, pulled over in a traffic stop on their street by a Washington Township Police officer. Tatkowski witnessed the officer speaking to her in a way that upset him, so he questioned the officer.



Aaron Tatkowski is escorted to a police cruiser (Source: YouTube)

“He hollered for me to get back in my truck, so I got back in my truck,” Tatkowski told reporters. “Next thing you know, I’m yanked out of the truck and it made my girlfriend say a few things. He yanked her out of the truck.”

Tatkowski, his girlfriend, and his 14-year-old son were all ripped from the vehicle and made to lay down in the street. Tatkowski began to fear for the safety of his family and called out to a witness to begin recording.

The video begins with the encounter already in progress. An adult male, an adult female, and a boy are laying face down in the street with a heavyset officer pointing his taser at them, screaming.

Christine Lipper uploaded the video to YouTube on September 15. Based on what she and others witnessed, she titled the video “Crazy Toledo Cop.”

Neighbors gathered along the quiet street inside the trailer park, dismayed at the heated encounter. One concerned neighbor whispered, “Call a different cop.”

The frazzled officer — identified as Officer Hart — continued to exchange words with the family he had proned out in the middle of the street.

Lipper briefly described the events on the caption of the video, saying, “The cop pulled somebody over and blocked neighbors driveway, neighbor comes home and asks cop to move vehicle..this is what happens.”


Officer Hart lifts a handcuffed woman by her arms from behind. (Source: YouTube)

A man called Toledo police to request a different officer on the scene. “Umm yeah we need Toledo police here at 165 Pineridge in Washington Township,” the witness said to the 9-1-1 dispatcher. “We’ve got an officer in distress right now.”

Officer Hart proceeded to pick up Tatkowski by his arms and shove him into the back of his cruiser, emblazoned with the words “Washington Township.”

The officer then turned his attention to the boy. The female suspect screamed, “You had no right to throw him on the ground! You had no right to throw any of us on the ground! All you’re doing is harassing everybody!”

The boy stood up and was escorted to the side of the truck. The officer then craned the female up by her arms, which were handcuffed behind her back.

“Oww! He’s raising my arms up!” she cried in pain, as her limbs were unnaturally extended backwards.


Officer Hart snatches a witness’s phone and throws it to the ground.

After sitting the woman on the back of her pickup truck, Hart turned his attention toward the witnesses; one in particular who had been on the phone with a police dispatcher.

“Sir, get off the phone,” said the officer. “This is not the city of Toledo and they’re already on their way. Now hang up the phone.”

“What are you afraid of?” the male witness challenged.

The officer then snatched the man’s phone and chucked it to the ground.

“Go! Get out! I don’t need you people…” the officer barked.

“What you’re saying is you don’t need witnesses,” retorted the neighbor, fetching his phone from the ground.

Lawyers to earn higher legal aid fees for early guilty pleas

Legal critics brand government moves to shave £220m off legal aid bill as perverse, unethical and counter-productive

Owen Bowcott

Lawyers will be given financial incentives to encourage clients to plead guilty early under government reforms to legal aid but will lose money if cases go to trial, according to solicitors in London.

The warning emerged during the last day of the Ministry of Justice's consultation on saving £220m from the annual criminal legal aid budget and as former Liberal Democrats prepared to protest outside the party's headquarters against coalition support for the policy.

The London Criminal Courts Solicitors Association (LCCSA), which has examined revised fee figures in the MoJ consultation, says that a pattern of perverse financial incentives will affect both magistrate and crown court cases.

"A client pleading guilty to a standard actual bodily harm charge in crown court will earn their lawyer as much as a 20% fee increase," the LCCSA said. "There are some cases in the crown court where a quick guilty plea will earn a lawyer a 75% fee increase.

"Likewise, in magistrates courts a simple guilty plea [for instance, for common assault] will reward lawyers with a 17% pay increase. This flies in the face of the government's advertised 17.5% cuts to save £220m from the legal aid budget."

The association said the revised fees would result in some lawyers losing out as much as 65% in some magistrate court cases and up to 73% in some crown court cases. Steven Bird, a London solicitor and LCCSA member, said: "The only conclusion to draw from these figures is the sad truth that the new fee structure is ideological and has nothing to do with austerity.

"By law, we're already obliged to advise our clients about the benefits of an early guilty plea, by way of credit on their sentence … It doesn't take a legal background – or criminal record – to realise that these incentives for a guilty plea and disincentives for a trial are an affront to justice."

Responding to the claim, the MoJ said: "For a lawyer to advise a client to plead guilty when they are not would be one of the most serious breaches of the profession's code of conduct, and could see them lose their right to practise. We do not believe a professional lawyer would do so.

"At around £2bn a year we have one of the most expensive legal aid systems in the world and even after our changes would still have one of the most generous. We cannot avoid finding efficiencies to ensure it remains sustainable and available to those most in need of a lawyer."

The MoJ said the consultation involved average cuts of 17.5% and the existing "overly-complex fee structure" needed reform. The department has now told lawyers that cuts of up to 30% in so-called very high cost cases will start from 2 December. Some lawyers have threatened to boycott cases if fees are cut.

Meanwhile, the Justice Alliance, which is opposed to the legal aid cuts, is planning to demonstrate outside the Liberal Democrats headquarters on Friday morning. Among them will be Professor Philippe Sands QC, Dinah Rose QC and Jo Shaw, who recently resigned from the party.

Rose said: "The protection of the right of access to justice ought to be fundamental to a party which values civil liberties. It is put in jeopardy by the government's proposals to implement yet more cuts on legal aid."

Matt Foot, a solicitor and founder of Justice Alliance, said: "The government has no idea whether the proposals will work or whether it will cause total chaos. MPs from across the political spectrum have expressed their concern at government plans which will make it hard for ordinary people to challenge the state."

The Bar Council, which represents barristers in England and Wales, also released a statement opposing the cuts. Maura McGowan QC, chairman of the Bar, said: "What we have seen … is the denigration of thousands of members of the profession, who work hard in the public interest, whether in civil or criminal courts, and have had to endure deeper cuts than anywhere else in the public sector."

The Law Society, which represents solicitors in England and Wales, although less critical, also opposed the proposal. The society's president, Nicholas Fluck, said: "We are confident that, with some modifications, the Ministry of Justice's proposals can ensure that anyone accused of a crime and unable to meet the costs of legal representation has access to a high-quality defence solicitor of their choosing."

"It is unwise to risk tarnishing the respect in which our justice system both domestically and internationally is held by an apparent incentive to plead guilty, which could jeopardise the relationship of trust between clients and solicitors."

Fifth Amendment Prohibits Compelled Decryption, New EFF Brief Argues

Encryption is one of the most important ways to safeguard data from prying eyes. But what happens when those prying belong to the government? Can they force you to break your own encryption and provide them with the information they want?

In a new amicus brief, we explain that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination prohibits the government from forcing someone to decrypt their computer when they're suspected of a crime.

Leon Gelfgatt was charged with forgery and the government, with a search warrant, seized a number of his electronic devices. Law enforcement couldn't break the encryption that protected the devices, so it went to court, asking a judge to order Gelfgatt to decrypt the devices for them. The Fifth Amendment protects a person from being forced to testify against themselves and so the government promised not to look at the encryption key—the "testimony" in their eyes—but nonetheless wanted the ability to use the unencrypted data against Gelfgatt. The judge denied the government's request, ruling that forcing Gelfgatt to decrypt the devices would violate the Fifth Amendment.

The government appealed that decision and the case is now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, where we filed an amicus brief with the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Our brief argues that the lower court got it right. The Fifth Amendment protects a person from being forced to reveal the "contents of his mind" to the government, allowing law enforcement to learn facts it didn't already know. When it comes to compelled decryption, the Fifth Amendment clearly applies because the government would be learning new facts beyond simply the encryption key. By forcing Gelfgatt to translate the encrypted data it cannot read into a readable format, it would be learning what the unencrypted data was (and whether any data existed). Plus, the government would learn perhaps the most crucial of facts: that Gelfgatt had access to and dominion and control of files on the devices.

It's not the first time we've made this argument in court; we've filed amicus briefs in other cases involving forced decryption, and won big last year in the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed with us that the act of decrypting a computer is protected by the Fifth Amendment.

At a time when the recent public disclosures have suggested the government has been undermining cryptography, we hope the court understands the importance of having strong technological safeguards to protect our privacy and find that our constitutional protections prohibit what the government is trying to do here.

The Most Nefarious Part Of The TPP Proposal: Making Copyright Reform Impossible

So with yesterday's revealing of the IP chapter of the TPP, there are plenty of great analyses out there of what's in there, but I wanted to highlight some parts that are the most nefarious and downright slimy in that they represent parties (mainly the US) pretending to do one thing while really doing another. These are tricks pulled by a dishonest, shameful USTR, entirely focused on making his corporate buddies richer at the expense of everyone else. Remember, our current USTR, Michael Froman, has a long history of this kind of crap. While he hasn't been there throughout the negotiating process, it shouldn't be surprising that he "delivers" this sweetheart deal to a few legacy industry players.

Watch closely, and you'll see supporters of TPP, and especially USTR employees, make the claim that nothing or almost nothing in the TPP will require legal changes in the US. They'll say that this is just about "harmonizing" norms across borders to make it easier for businesses to do business internationally. This is a lie.

It's a lie in two different ways. First, there are multiple provisions in here that will absolutely require changes to US law. We'll discuss a few in other posts, but what's much more nefarious and downright obnoxious, is that this would lock in a variety of really bad copyright policies, making it nearly impossible for Congress to go back and change them. And that's a real issue, because, as we've been discussing, Congress is actually discussing copyright reform again. The head of the US Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, has proposed a bunch of changes to copyright law (some good, some bad), and astoundingly, just as Congress is at least trying to have the discussion about whether or not those and other ideas make sense, the USTR is looking to effectively tie everyone's hands by saying "these things cannot be changed," including many of the reforms that Pallante has directly proposed.

That's really quite incredible if you think about it. On the one hand, you have the very head of the Copyright Office suggesting some reforms, and you have Congress beginning the process to explore that. On the other, you have the USTR totally ignoring the sole power of Congress to make copyright and patent law, and effectively saying "you cannot make any of the suggested reforms." And then the USTR has the gall to ask Congress to give up its power to challenge specific provisions in the agreement? While we're concerned about the Congressional copyright reform process, at least it's being done in the open. The USTR has been hashing out the plan in TPP in total secrecy for years.

Who the hell does the USTR think they are that they can flat out override the Constitution and the Congressional process, and effectively block them in and stop any meaningful attempt at copyright reform? All done via a process driven entirely by a few special interests? It's anti-democracy. It's pure corporate cronyism by the worst cronies around.

Now, defenders of this proposal will lie. They'll claim that technically (1) Congress has to approve this and (2) nothing in a trade agreement can limit Congress's ability to pass laws. Neither point is really true (the fun with things that are "technically" true, but false in reality). As mentioned above, the USTR (and President Obama) is pushing extra hard for Trade Promotion Authority, which basically is Congress granting the USTR full power over the TPP. Normally, Congress would be able to debate, challenge and reject questionable provisions in the agreement. But, with TPA "fast track" ability, Congress could only give a yes/no vote on the whole package. And, yes, some will claim that they can just vote no, but the reality is that there are other parts of this agreement that are designed to make that nearly impossible. There are all sorts of little things that we'll be told we "need." TPA is a bit of theater. What's delivered to Congress will almost have to be passed -- so if it's granted (before it's even public what's in the full agreement) -- Congress has effectively approved the whole agreement.

As for the claim that Congress' hands cannot be bound by a trade agreement, this is again technically true, but it ignores that it becomes realistically impossible. The second that Congress tries to change a law that goes against the TPP -- such as, say, reducing the term of copyrights from the insane level today to merely crazy -- lobbyists and pundits will come screaming from every direction about how we can't abandon our "international obligations." We'll hear horror stories about how breaking the agreement will have widespread implications, including trade wars, tariffs and other horrible things. Once it's in the trade agreement, "breaking it" becomes effectively impossible.

The lobbyists for the entertainment industry know this stuff cold. Over the past three decades they've perfected this process of getting crap they can't get done in Congress pushed through in various trade agreements, and then they use that to mold US law to exactly how they want it. They're not even shy about it, admitting this is exactly how they got the DMCA in the first place. Considering that the TPP has a form of DMCA-on-steroids, it shouldn't be a surprise that they're using an even bigger trade agreement to do the same thing.

All of this should lead to a basic question: why is the USTR and President Obama directly trying to undermine Congress' sole authority over copyright and patent policy? Are they proud of the tricks they tossed in the agreement? I imagine that when the USTR staffers move on to their jobs in the same industries that pushed them to write the agreement this way, they'll all laugh about that time they fucked over the American public.

What’s So Bad About Casual Drug Use?

Most people who try cocaine don't go on to become addicts
By Nick Gillespie

So Representative Trey Radel, the Republican from Florida, a self-styled “conservative voice” in Congress, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of cocaine possession. And Toronto’s city council has stripped Mayor Rob Ford of much of his power after it came out that he had smoked crack (never mind that Ford’s well-known drunken antics were not cause for such censure).

Rather than arguing whether such figures are hypocrites (Radel voted in favor of mandatory drug testing for food-stamp beneficiaries) or debating how they should attempt damage control (he’s also pledged to enter a substance-abuse program after paying a fine and receiving a year’s probation), let’s ask a more basic question: What’s so scandalous about casual drug use?

Yes, some substances are illegal (though as the case of marijuana shows, this status is subject to change). But absent other indicators of dangerous and antisocial behavior — like driving while intoxicated — why should snorting coke be treated any differently than, say, drinking a beer?

Prohibitionists typically deny the very possibility of responsible or voluntary use of currently illegal substances. They argue that drugs such as coke, heroin, ecstasy, methamphetamine and even marijuana are verboten precisely because they simply can’t be used casually. Any use either already constitutes abuse or quickly leads to it. “Drugs are not dangerous because they are illegal,” former drug czar William Bennett and former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano wrote in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “they are illegal because they are dangerous.”

Nearly 50% of people have tried an illegal drug at least once, yet most don’t repeat the experience. With cocaine, most who have tried it not only don’t go on to became addicts under even the most expansive possible definition of the term, they don’t even go on to become regular users.

According to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 14.5% of Americans ages 12 and older have tried cocaine at least once, but just 1.8% report using the drug recreationally in the past year. And just 0.6% have used it in the past 30 days, which would seem to be the minimal definition of a casual user.

The same pattern is true for heroin, which is typically talked about as magically addictive. Fear of the drug is surely one of the reasons why just 1.8% of Americans have ever tried it at all. But only 0.3% report using it in the past year and just 0.1% in the past month. That pattern simply shouldn’t be possible if these drugs were as addictive as commonly thought.

In the early 1970s, researcher Lee N. Robins led a study commissioned by the Department of Defense that followed tens of thousands of Vietnam War veterans as they returned to the U.S. Use of narcotics and heroin was rampant among soldiers stationed in Southeast Asia, with as many 20% showing signs of addiction. Yet during the first year back, “only 5% of those who had been addicted in Vietnam were addicted in the U.S.” and “at three years, only 12% of those addicted in Vietnam had been addicted at any time in the three years since return, and for those readdicted, the addiction had usually been very brief.” It wasn’t for lack of access to junk, either: half of the returning addicts said they’d tried heroin at least once since arriving back home.

As my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum has documented, such take-it-or-leave-it findings are common in drug research. In his 2004 book Saying Yes and other places, he’s detailed work in which researchers find a surprising range among heroin users, including a study that concluded, “It seems possible for young people from a number of different backgrounds, family patterns and educational abilities to use heroin occasionally without becoming addicted.”

It’s also true that regular drug users can often function quite well. Sigmund Freud used cocaine habitually for years, and his first major scientific publication was about the wonders of the drug (he eventually forsook it). Another pioneering late 19th and early 20th century man of medicine, William Halsted, was dependent on cocaine and morphine during an illustrious career that revolutionized and modernized surgical techniques.

None of this is a brief for snorting cocaine, shooting heroin or smoking marijuana (a substance that 58% of Americans think should be legal for recreational use) any more than it is a plea for drinking single-malt whiskey or pinot noir.

But in an age in which we are expected to use legal drugs (like beer) and prescription medications (Adderall) responsibly, it’s time to extend that same notion to currently illegal substances whose effects and properties are widely misunderstood. Indeed, the effects of coke, heroin and the rest are a mystery partly because their outlaw status makes it difficult both to research them and have honest discussions about them.

Radel has announced that he’ll be taking a leave of absence from Congress while he enters rehab. Perhaps he does need to sober up — that’s really for him and his family to decide — but it’s far from clear that his problem is particular to cocaine or illegal drugs. Indeed, in announcing his plans, he didn’t blame cocaine for his troubles but “the disease of alcoholism,” which he says led him to make really bad decisions. And alcohol, after all, is perfectly legal.

Warner Bros: Our False DMCA Takedowns Are Not a Crime

In a few weeks movie studio Warner Bros. will have to defend itself against DMCA fraud and abuse allegations from file-hosting service Hotfile. The two parties are currently preparing for this clash, and in recent filings Warner asks the court to exclude Hotfile’s “perjury” accusation. The movie studio admits that mistakes were made but insists that they’ve committed no crime.

In response to a copyright infringement lawsuit launched by the MPAA, Hotfile counter sued Warner Bros. two years ago for abuse of its DMCA takedown process on numerous occasions.

The file-hoster alleged that after giving Warner access to its systems the studio wrongfully took down hundreds of files including demos and Open Source software without holding the copyrights to them. The takedowns continued even after the movie studio was repeatedly notified about the false claims.

While Warner later admitted the accusations, the movie studio argue that they are not to blame because the mistakes were made by a computer, not a person. As a result, the false takedown request were not “deliberate lies.”

However, not all false takedowns were unintentional. Warner admitted that one of their employees deleted Open Source software from Hotfile on purpose. Their rationale for this was that the software in question could have speeded up infringing downloads.

Warner nonetheless asked the court for summary judgment in its favor, but in September Florida District Court Judge Kathleen Williams decided to let the issue be heard before a jury later this year. She stated that there is enough evidence showing that “Warner intentionally targeted files it knew it had no right to remove.”

Through several new filings Warner is hoping to limit the potential damage, by asking the court to exclude two issues from being discussed during the upcoming trial. The first issue deals with Hotfile’s claim that Warner committed perjury, and the other relates to an audit of the movie studio’s anti-piracy system.

The perjury motion relates to Hotfile’s Special Rightsholder Account (SRA) which Warner used to remove links from the site. This tool required the movie studio to check a box confirming “under penalty of perjury that I am owner or an authorized legal representative of the owner of the copyrights in this material.”

Since Warner admitted that they submitted false takedown requests and Hotfile specified the above requirements in its terms of service, the file-hoster argued that the studio committed a crime. However, Warner disagrees with this line of reasoning.

“That is not how perjury works, not how the DMCA works, is irrelevant to the claims the jury must decide, and would unfairly prejudice the jury against Warner by suggesting that Warner’s errors amounted to criminal acts,” Warner writes.

Warner adds that the DMCA only requires the penalty of perjury statement to confirm that the sender represents the copyright holder, not that the allegedly infringing links point to their copyrighted material, they say.

“The DMCA ‘penalty of perjury’ language is thus narrower than the SRA language that Hotfile employed. The DMCA’s language applies only to impersonating a copyright owner or sending notices on their behalf without authorization; mere misidentification of the files being taken down or the works represented therein are at most incorrect ‘statements’.”

However, Warner also removed copies of JDownloader, which they were certainly not authorized to do. But this was also not a crime either according to the the studio, since it never claimed to be representing JDownloader’s developer Appwerk GmbH.

“To fall under the ‘penalty of perjury’ language in [the DMCA section], however, Warner would have needed not to misidentify instances of JDownloader as infringing Warner works (which is what happened), but instead to correctly identify the taken-down files as JDownloader and then misrepresent itself as acting under authority from Appwerk GmbH, JDownloader’s developer.”

Interestingly, the above reasoning confirms that Warner deliberately used Hotfile’s DMCA tools to take down files that they are not the owner of, an issue that will certainly be brought up during trial.

Warner believes that the above is reason enough to exclude the “perjury” issue from trial. Hotfile can’t just make up crimes by extending the scope of the DMCA, and should not be allowed to present an argument which could mislead the jury, they claim.

In a separate motion Warner wants the court to exclude evidence Hotfile has gathered on an audit of the movie studio’s anti-piracy system, and changes that were made as a result. Warner argues that the audit is irrelevant, since it was performed after the false takedown notices were sent.

If Hotfile would use the audit to argue that the movie studio was aware of the errors in their system, this could potentially confuse the jury.

“There is a substantial risk that the jury will see evidence of Warner’s efforts to investigate the claims in Hotfile’s lawsuit and correct any sources of errors as evidence that Warner ‘knew’ about potential inaccuracies in its system at the relevant times, and improperly attribute such knowledge to Warner months earlier.”

“Because Hotfile has selectively cherry-picked the instances in which Warner located and corrected errors as part of its August 2011 audit, there is further risk that the jury will misread the evidence as ‘proving’ that Warner’s system was error-prone and seek to punish Warner for it,” Warner adds.

The above suggests that Warner is not totally confident that the trial will end well for them. It is now up to the judge to decide whether or not the issues above can be raised during trial.

The judge is also still considering a motion from Hotfile to exclude terms such as “piracy,” “theft” and “stealing” from their trial against the MPAA.

To be continued.

Insidious government surveillance may be worse than outright censorship

by Liat Clark

The insidious nature of government spying has a chilling and subtle effect on web freedoms that could ultimately be more damaging to society than outright censorship, creator of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee told the audience at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation's 2013 Web Index findings.

The legacy of the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden into the actions of the NSA, GCHQ and others will be long-lasting, intimated Berners-Lee. While nations such as China openly engage in censorship, what the US and the UK has done could potentially leave a trail of paranoia that in turn leads to a trend for self-censorship among citizens of the allegedly "free" West.


"The question of 'who is it that's got the off switch for our connectivity' started to be asked because of Egypt," said Berners-Lee. "It's a rather obvious thing you can see happening, and a country that does that doesn't get very far. Turning off the internet got the youths onto the streets because that's what they had left to do. So blocking of the internet is kind of obvious. And censorship in places like China is obvious too when it comes to blocking whole websites. It's hard to pretend it doesn't exist when the rest of the web has links to those websites.

"But spying is this insidious form, because of its chilling effect If you feel someone's looking over your shoulder, there's all kinds of things you will not do… [You're not going to be] able to use facilities because of nameless fear."

This year's Web Index was finished in September, so Berners-Lee suggests some countries may have ranked even lower considering the revelations of the past few months. The US and the UK predictably fell a few spots down the table on the sub-index Freedom and Openess. Though the UK came out third overall, one spot ahead of the US, it came 24th for Freedom and Openess. It came eighth for Universal Access, first for Relevant Content and third for Empowerment.
"Provisions against cybercrime, terrorism, or blasphemy are frequently being employed to silence legitimate dissent or justifying blanket digital surveillance"

It shows the contradiction that can exist between the public's perceived freedoms online, and the government's control of those freedoms. For instance, while the US is first for Empowerment -- defined as "how far the Web is empowering people not just to receive information, but to voice their own views, participate in public affairs, and take action to improve their lives" -- it came 27th for Freedom and Openness. Citizen empowerment and public engagement is concealing the darker underbelly of wider spread abuses of personal privacy. "Provisions against cybercrime, terrorism, or blasphemy are frequently being employed to silence legitimate dissent or justifying blanket digital surveillance," explains the report.

Anonymity is a key area where the state's agenda directly clashes with concepts of freedom, suggested Berners-Lee, and it will be a complex issue to solve.

"Some things are good, like the openness of government data, and some thing are just bad. But anonymity is one where it's not so simple. NGOs that work under oppressive regimes and are in contact with the underground campaign for it. Then we have people dealing with cyber bullying where clearly if someone's saying nasty, mean untrue things about you then you can reveal who they are."

In any situation where users say they need a secondary identity, Berners-Lee says we need "a whole social system and machinery" around that service to protect others. Communities need to be self-monitoring so that anonymity can legitimately exist where necessary -- as with whistleblower Edward Snowden.


The revelations of the US and UK's mass surveillance of its own citizens could also have a knock-on effect among those countries employing more obvious means of censorship.

"In my work I campaign in countries in a diplomatic way to explain why it's important for their economy and future to have freedom of expression," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, also at the Web Index launch. "Wikipedia provides a great platform for doing that, and in countries where it's blocked or restricted it's hard to say we only block terrorists or paedophiles -- it's not exactly a crazy thing. But when I'm sitting down with the state council information officer in China or Kazakhstan and saying to them 'you're on the wrong side of history, this is not the approach that will be here with us in 20 years and it will look bad', it's important to be able to point to the UK and US. And when we're no longer able to do that, it rings a little hollow to say 'you shouldn't be spying'."

As such, Wales said it's important we as citizens voice our concerns, before that mentality of entitlement makes matters worse. "We may trust GCHQ not to disappear activists, but China may feel more justified and will disappear activists. That's something we should be concerned about.

"I have some real concerns about the direction the web is taking."

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked and cofounder of Global Voices Online, reiterated that now is the time for citizens to empower themselves and ensure these matters are not left to governments alone, a point backed up by the fact that 94 percent of all countries surveyed in the Index fail to meet "best practice standards for checks and balances on government interception of electronic communications".

"Trust no one unless you can hold them accountable," she said. "In China where they block international sites heavily and control data tightly, they're saying from a national security point of view, we did exactly the right thing.

"There's potential for people to assert more localised power over how the web is developing in their own countries. If that drive is coming from the government claiming to be acting on behalf of government, it's an excuse for more control and surveillance. The role of citizens in insisting on accountability is key."

Bright Simons, president of the mPedigree Network, said he doesn't believe trust has been irrevocably broken by the NSA-GCHQ revelations, mainly because people weren't all that trusting beforehand. "It's leading to a backlash of fascinating proportions. People are going to make a choice. There is awareness among citizens that it's an issue to be concerned about, and a greater level of citizen empowerment is needed. It's an important milestone in citizen digital rights."

Berners-Lee suggested that empowerment should be facilitated by the destruction of the gulf that exists between the technology world and the policy world -- our technology pioneers should not be afraid to engage in political matters, and policymakers need to understand the tech when drafting relevant legislation.

"I spend a lot of time encouraging people to program, not just because we need some people to understand technology -- we need lawyers and those in parliament to understand it, otherwise they're not going to be able to make appropriate steps." We need those with the technological knowledge to be writing policy as well as standards in protocols.

Despite the air of pessimism surrounding the Web Index 2013 launch in light of the state spying controversies, Berners-Lee remained positive about the many good things that are happening around the globe. According to the report the internet remains vital in catalysing citizen action and real world change. Despite the fact 30 percent of nations engage in targeted web censorship and "moderate to extensive blocking or filtering of politically sensitive content", the web and social media played a big role in "public mobilisation" in 80 percent of nations

"This is not being spearheaded by political parties and NGOs," said Anne Jellema, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation. "It's spontaneous and grassroots action driven by social media." The Philippines, for instance, came 20 places higher in the table than its GDP per capita. This, she said, is because those connected are "active and creative users of the web", as demonstrated last year when they fought back against a proposed cybercrime bill and ultimately crowdsourced its replacement, a bill of rights for the internet. It demonstrates that wealth does not necessarily correlate to a free and open web practice. In fact some of the world's wealthiest nations fell far short of the Web Index's standards. Saudi Arabia, for instance, lingered near the bottom of the table for all sub-indexes.

"I am optimistic," said Berners-Lee. "I think the people will win. I have faith in people and humanity as a whole. There's going to be some push back, but change will come in lots of different ways -- from activism, but also UN resolutions. Also from within government. There are people that care about this stuff."