Archive for the ‘Law’ Category

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Case brief: Katz v. United States.

Tuesday, October 4th, 2011

Not that Katz. This one was Charles Katz, and he was a gambler who got caught “transmitting wagering information by telephone across state lines in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1084”. The Man had attached a recording device to the outside of the phone booth he was using, and his recorded conversations were used as evidence against him.

Katz said, “Foul!” and the Supreme Court agreed. This is actually an interesting and somewhat surprising case; it serves as a very nice example of the Supreme Court changing its mind in a very public way. The government argued that what they had done was A-OK, because the Court had ruled (in Olmstead v. United States, which I understand comes up in the Ken Burns thing) this this kind of activity didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court came back and said, “Yeah. You know something? We’ve changed our mind. Olmstead is no longer controlling. Too bad. So sad. You lose.”

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information about Charles Katz, either before or after his conviction. One of his lawyers on the appeal says he never even met the man.

Anyway, here’s my case brief, for your reading and mocking pleasure.

Posted in Law, School | 1 Comment »

Things I’ve missed.

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Terry Francona fired by the Boston Red Sox.

Former Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro passed away on Wednesday. Former Sheriff Navarro is probably most famous for two things:

  1. Being all over the early episodes of Cops.
  2. Trying to press obscenity charges against 2 Live Crew.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Firings, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Case brief: Terry v. Ohio.

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Posted for your mocking pleasure.

Here’s what 1276 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland looks like today, according to Google Street View:


View Larger Map

Posted in Law, School | Comments Closed

What wine goes with an extra-long cheese coney and tots?

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Chain restaurants like Sonic (in one location) and Burger King (at least in their Whopper Bars) have started offering beer and wine. Unfortunately, this has turned into a great pain for little benefit:

“Candidly, they’re not utilizing those products very much at this point,” he said. “It doesn’t look like it’s a big deal to consumers — it’s clear they come to us to have an extra-long cheese coney or an all-beef hot dog.”

(Our first thought is a big mouth-filling Cabernet. Other suggestions welcome in comments.)

The LAT asks the same musical question the FAA is asking: how do you keep planes from going into the crowd at Reno?

And the FBI apparently paid a deputy in the LA County Jail $1,500 to smuggle a cellphone in to an informant. You’re telling me a government agency would do something illegal? Why, the next thing I know, you’ll be telling me that government agents used form letters from BATFE to buy guns with taxpayer money, and then provided those guns directly to the drug cartels!

(Edited to add: Fox News. Hattip: Snowflakes in Hell.)

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Food, Guns, Law, Planes | Comments Closed

Shame! Come back, shame!

Monday, September 19th, 2011

I forgot to stick this in the loser update update, but it may merit a separate post anyway.

Someone (I forget who; it may have been the bloggers at Jimbo’s old site) alerted me to Taylor Branch’s “The Shame of College Sports” in the October issue of The Atlantic.

I think this is worth your attention, even though it is long. I’m still digesting the article, but there’s quite a bit of interesting material in it about the NCAA’s past (and current) legal battles; the information Branch brings out makes me more convinced that we’ll see the end of the NCAA in the next decade.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Sports | 3 Comments »

Special non-sports firings watch.

Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

Back in March, we noted that the Miami PD had shot a bunch of folks, and some people were upset over this.

Miami Police Chief Miguel Exposito was fired on Monday. The reason for his firing does not appear to involve shootings:

…[City Manager Johnny] Martinez suspended Exposito for disobeying an order not to demote three high-ranking police officers. The chief chose to reassign and strip the officers of their authority — though not their rank and pay — anyway.

The City Commission voted 3-2 in favor of firing Chief Exposito, and is calling for amendments to the city charter. But don’t cry for the Chief:

Exposito, who was scheduled to retire in January, leaves the city after stints in the internal affairs and sex crimes divisions. The chief, who earned $196,000 a year, will walk with close to $900,000 in banked pension pay and unused sick and vacation time. He turned 57 on Saturday. When the clock struck midnight at City Hall, he received muted happy birthday wishes.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Firings | Comments Closed

Mapp v. Ohio.

Monday, September 12th, 2011

I’ve mentioned previously that one of the courses I’m taking at St. Ed’s this semester is “Constitutional Criminal Procedure”, in which we’ve (so far) spent a lot of time talking about the Fourth Amendment (not the FORTH amendment, but check this out, kids), probable cause, and such like.

One of the things we have to do for this class is write “case briefs”, which are basically one to two page summaries of a major court decision, detailing what the factual elements were, what the main argument was, how the court voted, summarize the majority opinion and concurring opinions, summarize the dissenting opinion and concurring dissents, and (finally!) give our own opinion about the decision.

Anyway, with things being kind of slow, and me not wanting to let a good opportunity for y’all to mock my writing go to waste, I give you my first case brief for Mapp v. Ohio. What makes this case significant is that the Supreme Court held, for the first time, that the exclusionary rule applied to the states as well as to the federal government. The application of the exclusionary rule at the Federal level was established in the case of Weeks v. United States as far back as 1914, but for some odd reason the court didn’t apply this at the state level. As a matter of fact, in Wolf v. Colorado, a 1949 case, the Supreme Court expressly declined to apply the exclusionary rule to the states: Mapp v. Ohio amounted to a complete reversal of that decision.

Beyond the legal aspect, there’s two other things about this case that I find interesting:

  1. This took place in Cleveland, where I still have family. The Cleveland Memory Project has a lot of background material on Miss Mapp and Mapp v. Ohio.
  2. One of my fellow students mentioned this in class when I asked, “Is it just me, or did the Cleveland PD really have it out for this woman?” The confidential informant who tipped the cops off? That was…Don King. Yeah, that Don King. According to my classmate, Miss Mapp had previously been…”employed” in Mr. King’s…”business” of…”providing services to gentlemen”, if you know what I mean and I think you do. Miss Mapp decided her talents were more valuable elsewhere, Mr. King did not like this, and hilarity ensued. I’m having some trouble confirming specific details of Miss Mapp’s employment with Mr. King. But it does seem that Miss Mapp was certainly well known to the Cleveland PD, judging by some of the clippings at Cleveland Memory.

Anyway, there you go. Feel free to mock and criticize in the comments to this post.

Posted in Geek, Law, School | Comments Closed

Thank you, Tam!

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

I generally try to avoid linking to stuff that’s been posted on other blogs more widely read than mine. After all, if someone like Tam’s already written about it, what more can I add?

My excuse in this case is that Tam only covered one very small part of the website in question, and there’s a lot more there that I think is fascinating.

Faded Glory: Dusty Roads of an FBI Era is devoted to the FBI agents of the early 1930s. Quoting:

This website is a tribute to the many FBI Agents of the ’30s long forgotten and to a very young FBI they so proudly served.  It is their recorded accounts of what really happened; it is their photos they left behind and it’s their letters and more revealing much of which has never seen a day of print.

In addition to Delf Bryce’s employment application, which Tam linked, there’s a lot of other great stuff here. For example:

And all of that is just a small part of what’s on the Faded Glory website. There’s weeks worth of browsing material there. Thanks to Tam for the heads-up.

Posted in Cops, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

SAMCRO.

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

How do you top a college professor accused of pimping?

Would you believe a college professor who led a chapter of the Devils Diciples motorcycle gang, and who is charged with dealing meth?

The six-month investigation culminated with a joint drug task force raiding Kinzey’s home Friday, recovering a pound of methamphetamine as well as a number of rifles, handguns and biker paraphernalia, he said.

Damn. A pound of meth?

Edited to add: More detailed LAT article here. In response to Borepatch’s comment, neither of the articles say anything about the tenure status of the professors involved. But the accused pimp has apparently been working for his university since 1969, and the biker/drug dealer has been teaching at his university for ten years, so I’d be a little surprised if both of them weren’t tenured.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | 2 Comments »

Civic corruption update.

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

A while back, I read Ian Flemming’s book Thrilling Cities. It occurs to me that someone could write a book called Crooked Cities, possibly without ever leaving California.

First up: the state Senate has rejected a bill that would have disincorporated the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon. This isn’t the end of the line: the city has agreed to some reforms, and is currently under investigation by the IRS. But it is a major setback for those of us who were hoping for a good disincorporation.

Meanwhile, back in Bell, former fiefdom of Robert “Ratso” Rizzo, it seems that the city issued $50 million in bonds a few years back. (I can’t tell if it was 2003 or 2004 from the LAT article.) The bonds were intended to pay for

a state-of-the-art complex for baseball and soccer and a new practice space for the Bell Sapphires, its award-winning cheerleading team. The city also planned to improve the civic center and parks, and to build a new library and other facilities.

Anyone want to take a guess on what’s happened?

The city spent millions of dollars on design, site preparation and fencing. But the land remains vacant, with no plans to build anything there. Some improvements were made at other city parks, but the promised facilities weren’t built.

Here’s the punchline: even though nothing was built, the money’s gone, and the city’s broke, the new city government still has to go through with the tax increases that were put into place to pay off the bonds.

For a home valued at $400,000, the annual property tax levy would increase by $116 beginning around October, according to city officials. Bell’s current tax rate would rise from 1.54% to 1.57%. That means the owner of a $400,000 home in Bell would pay about $2,000 more in property taxes than a similar homeowner in Pasadena or Beverly Hills.

Of course, the tax increase money is going to the bond holders, not into the general city government fund. And the city residents are upset that their taxes are being increased. But what’s the alternative, guys? Defaulting on the bonds, even if they were issued by a bunch of crooks, is just going to hurt you in the long run. Bell’s best bet at this point seems to be to return the unspent funds (about $20 million, per the LAT), and try to squeeze whatever they can out of Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and his cronies.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

I have an odd sense of humor.

Monday, August 29th, 2011

Sorry for the radio silence the past few days. Two reasons:

  1. There just hasn’t been that much to report. I understand there was an earthquake somewhere, and a hurricane in some other place? Other than that, I got nothing (well, except it hit 110 in Austin over the weekend).
  2. I’ve been running around Armadillocon 33 all weekend.

Content will, perhaps, resume soonish. In the meantime, here’s a picture I took Sunday morning, just because I happened to have the book with me at breakfast (I was expecting to be eating alone) and the juxtaposition amused me.

 


The book is Murder Behind the Badge: True Stories of Cops Who Kill, a book which I don’t feel I can recommend. (There may be a longer post later on this.) The dish is pigs in a blanket from the Original Pancake House. The arm belongs to the elusive Mike the Musicologist.

Posted in Books, Cops, Food, Law | Comments Closed

TMQ watch: August 16, 2011.

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday! Nitro-burning Tuesday Morning Quarterback after the jump!

(more…)

Posted in Austin, Hysteria, Law, Nixon, Obits, Photography, Planes, Sports, Theatre, TMQ watch, TV | 1 Comment »

Staplerfahrer Klaus, call your office, please.

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

A Fort Worth man remained in custody Tuesday on at least five charges after he climbed aboard a forklift and led police on a chase that reached 16 mph and ended on Interstate 30.

The gentleman is charged with stealing the forklift (duh), drinking while driving (and that should be pretty easy to prove, since he’s also charged with throwing beer bottles at traffic), evading police, and…aggravated assault. Aggravated assault? Does that mean that he…tried to kill someone with a forklift?

Also, it is apparently not a good idea to follow a police chase and film it with your iPhone. Important safety tip there, guys.

(Subject line hattip.)

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

DEFCON 19 notes: day 1.

Saturday, August 6th, 2011

“Welcome and the Making of the DEF CON 19 Badge”: didn’t bother going. I don’t care much about the making of this year’s badge.

“WTF Happened to the Constitution?”: perfectly fine talk. Except for some of the case law theprez98 referenced, pretty much everything he covered was already familiar to me from “The Agitator” and “Hit and Run”. That’s not his fault, though, and I’m sure a lot of what he covered was new to the rest of the audience. I was also previously unaware of The Assault on Privacy, and will have to add that to my blogroll.

“From Printer To Pwnd”: This was a fun little talk, covering multi-function printers and the vulnerabilities they introduce into networks. Basically, people get sloppy with these devices and fail to do things like change default passwords; also, many of these devices have bugs in the embedded firmware. The presenter, Deral Heiland, demonstrated some interesting attack vectors: “malformed” URLs which allow you to bypass authentication on certain devices, “information leakage” attacks which allow you to get useful information (like passwords) out of the web admin pages, “forced browsing” attacks which allow you to grab device address books (which may also contain passwords), and “passback attacks” which trick the device into communicating with an attacker (for example, using LDAP configuration script testing). All of this culminated in the release of Praeda, an automated toolkit for attacking multi-function devices. The latest version can be found here: I don’t have a link to the slides, but will add one when I do.

“Black Ops of TCP/IP 2011“: You know how people talk about wanting the old funny Woody Allen back? This was the old funny Dan Kaminsky back; the guy who does deep arcane magic with TCP/IP packets and DNS.

His talk broke down roughly into three parts:

  1. Bitcoin. Short summary: Bitcoin is remarkably secure (“there are entire classes of bugs that are missing”) but it isn’t anonymous, and doesn’t scale well. Kaminsky found a way to basically build a file system on top of BitCoin (BitCoinFS) and also outlines ways of breaking BitCoin anonymity. In the process, Kaminsky also outlined a serious flaw with the Universal Plug and Play (UPNP) protocol used by many wireless routers.
  2. IP spoofing. Kaminsky was running a little behind (it took a while to fill the Penn and Teller theater) and was speeding through this portion of his talk. Rather than attempting to give detailed summaries of how all this stuff works at the low TCP/IP level, I’ll suggest you check out the slides.
  3. Net neutrality. Kaminsky’s developed two tools: N00ter and Roto-N00ter, designed to detect ISPs playing silly buggers with packets (for example, giving preference to packets destined for Bing over packets destined for Google).

“And That’s How I Lost My Eye“: the funniest panel I went to today. Deviant Ollam, Bruce Potter, and Shane Lawson wanted to see if it was possible to destroy a hard drive in less than 60 seconds such that the data was unrecoverable, without setting off alarms or damaging any nearby humans, and without spending a lot of money on something like the SEMShred.

Ollam took the explosives/incendiary part of the equation. His results can be summarized as: it might be possible to use explosives, especially the popular “boomerite” type explosives used in exploding targets, to destroy a hard drive. But playing around with explosives, especially when you’re activating them electronically, is a good way to attract the attention of unpleasant people with badges. Apparently, those same people have no problems with explosives triggered by a rifle bullet, so if you want to affix an M1A above your server with a ton of “boomerite” below, go ahead…

Chemical methods didn’t work out very well either. Cobalt isn’t highly reactive, and the type of acids that can quickly dissolve a hard drive platter aren’t easily available at Home Depot and don’t play well with people and other living things. There were a lot of slides of vats of acid doing nothing to hard drive platters.

It’s also hard to destroy a drive physically. Hole saws, spade bits, and grinders did nothing.

The presenters did discover that a combination of a salt solution and electricity could strip the plating off of ceramic platter drives. But that didn’t work on aluminum platter drives.

What finally did work was fire. Propane and MAPP gas (which you can’t get in the US any more) will melt aluminum, but it’s hard to apply those to a spinning drive and have it melt; the spinning drive tends to dissipate heat. The presenters were working on an automated solution involving a glow plug, propane, and an Arduno, but ran out of time before they could finish that project.

However, you don’t have to melt a drive to render it unreadable; you only have to heat it to the Curie point. That’s not quite as spectacular as a spinning drive throwing off chunks of molten aluminum, but it will work. (However, if I understand Wikipedia right, the Curie point of colbalt is 1100 degrees C, and the melting point of aluminum is 660 degrees C. So I’m not sure what that buys you.) I wonder:

  • Could you come up with some sort of inductive heating method for hard drives?
  • I also wonder, thinking about Deviant Ollam’s approach, what would happen if you fired a nail gun loaded with the right kind of nails into a spinning hard drive at close range? I wonder if Snoop ever tried that. (I also wonder if a nail gun at close range would trigger “boomerite”.)

“Key Impressioning“: I can’t give this panel a fair evaluation. In brief, impressioning consists of sticking a blank key into a lock, moving the blank up and down, removing it, noting where the lock pins hit the key, filing down the contact points, and repeating the process until all the pins reach the proper depth and you have a working key. The presenter gave a live demo of this process, and was impressively quick at it.

The problems I had with this panel were:

  • the camera that was set up for the demo did a poor job of showing the actual process.
  • the sound was off for over half the panel. Combined with tbe presenter’s accent, that left me able to make out about one out of every four words he said. I’m sure he’s an okay guy; I just couldn’t see what he was doing, or hear much of what he said.

Posted in DEFCON 19, Explosives, Geek, Guns, Law, Locks | 6 Comments »

Police professionalism watch.

Monday, August 1st, 2011

Anthony Magsam worked for the Philadelphia Police Department in the Firearms Identification Unit. In that position, Officer Magsam had the opportunity to handle a lot of nifty guns. Officer Magsam was something of a gun buff as well:

Magsam was known by colleagues in the FIU as a gun collector, and he spoke often about knowing how to convert semiautomatic weapons into automatic weapons, according to more than a half-dozen police sources…

Unfortunately, Officer Magsam let his gun buffery get the better of him. Allegedly, he removed the trigger group from what’s described as an AR-15 with three-round burst capability, and replaced it with a semi-auto AR trigger group. He also allegedly took parts out of an M2 carbine:

“The bolt had been removed and replaced with nonautomatic parts that had been ground down and colored with a marker, so that nobody would notice,” the source said. “That started a snowball effect.”

So this is bad, m’kay? Officer Magsam was fired and criminally prosecuted, right? That’s what would happen if you or I were in illegal possession of full-auto parts, right?

Bzzzzt! Wrong! Thanks for playing! Officer Magsam was allowed by the commanding officer of the FIU to transfer out of FIU into another unit, and the theft was not reported.

When a handful of FIU members complained to [Lt. Vincent] Testa [the unit’s commanding officer – DB] that Magsam had broken the law, that the incident should have been reported, the sources said he told them: “That’s what’s going to be done. I gave an order. If you don’t like it, that’s tough s—.”

If I understand the Daily News article correctly, Internal Affairs is investigating. But IA had been investigating for over a year when the Daily News reported the story; it seems the investigation was “stalled”.

By the way, the guy who was overseeing the IA investigation used to work with Lt. Testa in the FIU. And Officer Magsam’s mother…

…Barbara Feeney, a longtime police sergeant, is married to retired police Chief Inspector Michael Feeney.

Posted in Cops, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

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