My Blog

Category: Law

  • Huge Increase in Warrantless Electronic Surveillance

    Pen register and trap and trace devices now generally refer to the surveillance of information about—rather than the contents of—communications. Pen registers capture outgoing data, while trap and trace devices capture incoming data. This still includes the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing telephone calls and the time, date, and length of those calls. But the government now also uses this authority to intercept the “to” and “from” addresses of email messages, records about instant message conversations, non-content data associated with social networking identities, and at least some information about the websites that you visit (it isn’t entirely clear where the government draws the line between the content of a communication and information about a communication when it comes to the addresses of websites).

    via ACLU.

    For the record, I agree with the ACLU exactly one time.  This is it.

    Our government has taken to spying on its own citizens, that’s us, on an unprecedented level.  As more and more communications go electronic it’s easier and easier to intercept.  That it is done without a warrant is truly frightening.  If these communications are so important then the FBI should present evidence to a judge and get a warrant.

    Mind you, this is the same FBI that cannot find hundreds of guns from Fast and Furious.  This is the same presidential administration that refuses to turn over records regarding those guns or the Fast and Furious catastrophe.  The same administration that promised to the “the most open and transparent in history” and has proven to be just as closed and private as Dick Cheney and the Bush years.

    When it comes to spying on you but keeping gov. secrets Obama = Bush.

  • Chick-fil-A Wavies 1st Amendment Rights

    Chick-fil-A has pledged to stop giving money to anti-gay groups and to back off political and social debates after an executive’s comments this summer landed the fast-food chain smack in the middle of the gay marriage debate.

    The Civil Rights Agenda, which dubs itself the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group in Illinois, said Chick-fil-A agreed in meetings to stop donating to groups such as Focus on the Family and the National Organization for Marriage. Such groups oppose same-sex marriage.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    WT…?!  Why?

    Everyone please note how the Left does not wish to openly discuss issues of public disagreement — No National Discourse will be held.

    Opposing opinions will be silenced by any means necessary.

    I fully support Chick-fil-A giving money to any political cause it likes.  I don’t have to eat there.

    I fully support Progressive Ins. giving money to any leftest cause it likes.  I have have to buy Ins. from them.

    Warren Buffet = Geico.  Don’t have to buy their ins. either.

    Sheldon Adelson runs the Sands Casino group and gives a lot of money to Romney.  You don’t have to gamble at a Sands owned hotel.

    I could go on.

    But badgering people over and over and over and over and over and over until the have to submit to political correctness does not server the public good.  The solution for bad speech is not no speech but MORE speech.

    If you disagree with me, fine.  Be polite, state your case.

    I disagree strongly with what you say,
    but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
    –Voltaire –

    This Civil Rights Agenda stands for anything but.  It’s evil.

  • Moneyball in Law Firms

    Moneyball is moving onto another major-league diamond: Big Law, where law firm chiefs—under pressure from clients to cut costs—are re-engineering law firm management, much as the Oakland Athletics’ Billy Beane did for baseball.

    Exploding salaries, frequent roster changes and emphasis on short-term performance in a tight economy are just some of the sports-world realities confronting the legal industry.

    via Crain’s Chicago Business.

    Couldn’t happen to a more well deserving bunch of people.

    I’ve worked as in-house counsel for a couple of companies and lawyers understanding NOTHING about business.  They don’t understand cash flow, human resources, receivables, etc.  It’s amazing that big law has survived as long as it has.

    Big law is dying.  Everyone will be better off as a result.

  • ‘Patent Trolls’ Get Biggest Piece Of Patent Pie

    So-called patent trolls – which don’t actually make anything – in recent years received significantly larger damages awards on average than those won by companies that make things, a new report found.

    Critics of “trolls,” or nonpracticing entities, claim they hold huge numbers of patents and make money by simply attacking others with litigation.

    During the 2006-2011 period, these “trolls” received a median damages payment of $6.9 million versus practicing entities’ $3.7 million, according to the study by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

    via Business Insider.

    I know this is not my usual post but it’s important.  These Patent Trolls cost everyone money and contribute nothing to the economy.  They don’t provide jobs.  They provide little tax revenue.  Yet they drive up the cost of goods that we all buy on a regular basis.

    This is a legal problem that must be solved in Washington if we want to get this country moving again.

     

  • NSA to Spy on Everyone… Everyone.

    Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

    But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

    via Wired.com.

    Like most Wired articles this one goes into incredible detail about how the government spy’s on you and me.

    Frankly, it’s kinda terrifying.  I wrote in an earlier post about how we’re at the point in time where Fahrenheit 451 meets 1984.  The government now has all the data in needs to know everything about your life.  All they have to do now is choose to control it… oh, wait.  Check out the Obama health care bill.

    Somewhere right now a government jack-booted thug is ordering a few rat masks.

  • Cell Carriers Asked for Your Data

    In the first public accounting of its kind, cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.

    The cellphone carriers’ reports, which come in response to a Congressional inquiry, document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.

    via NYTimes.com.

    We’re very close to the junction of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984.

  • Gotta Love American Ingenuity (& Tax Avoidance)

    So I’m reading two stories (here and here) about a new law that will effectively outlaw Roll-Your-Own tobacco stores.  It’s something I kinda follow because I always thought it was a decent business model (until the government outlaws your business) and another fine example of what steps people will go through to avoid taxes.

    In short:

    A tiny amendment buried in the federal transportation bill to be signed today by President Barack Obama will put operators of roll-your-own cigarette operations in Las Vegas and nationwide out of business at midnight.  …

    The machines are used by customers who buy loose tobacco and paper tubes from the shop and then turn out a carton of finished cigarettes in as little as 10 minutes, often varying the blend to suit their taste. Savings are substantial – at $23 per carton, half the cost of a name-brand smoke – in part because loose tobacco is taxed at a lower rate.

    via ReviewJournal.com.

    And I was thinking about how sad this was for all the people who work in this industry: the store owners, their employees, the folks who manufacture the RYO machines, their families, the companies who make the cigarette tubes, and the loose pipe tobacco makers, and all of the folks who work in packaging all of these things.

    And then… in the comment section of the Law Vegas article I read this:

    James Fliess Jul. 6, 2012 | 2:47 p.m.

    Just a thought. My understanding, and maybe I’m wrong, is that cigarettes manufactured by these machines must cost (via taxes) as much as other cigarettes. How about this arrangement. The store sells the tobacco and supplies as they always have, but they do not have a rolling machine. A buisness next door does not sell tobacco or supplies, but it rents time on their rolling machine. Does it work?

    Kudos to you Mr. James Fliess!!

  • Muslims Attack Christians in Dearborn MI

    Very bizarre behavior on the part of the young Muslims.

    Very bizarre behavior on the part of the local police.

    The whole thing is very disturbing.  I frankly don’t know what to make of it.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJBW49afzg?rel=0]

  • Police Boss: No Emergency = No Police

    As Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy tries to streamline the way his department fights violent crime, he is stepping up his potentially controversial plan to reduce his officers’ load of 911 calls.

    Facing heat over a surge in homicides as he enters his second year in Chicago, McCarthy has expressed frustration over the pace of making the logistical and policy shift necessary to free up officers from what he considers nonessential responsibilities.

    “I’ve been told we handle more types of calls for services than any other place in the country,” McCarthy said.

    He wants to keep officers from wasting their time with what he labeled the “my son won’t eat his peas” type of call.

    “We would set the policy. We’re not responding to calls for A, B and C,” McCarthy said, noting that he hasn’t yet defined “what standard would we apply.”

    via chicagotribune.com.

    Now that I’ve written about Comstat we all understand the manipulation of crime statistics.  Comstat was Plan A.  This is Plan B.

    Imagine the ability to set crime statistics by simply listening to a 911 call and right there without any other information saying what qualifies a police response.  And we already know that in Chicago no report means no crime.  By simply choosing to not send police to the scene of a crime it is nearly assured that no report will be created and thus no crime will be reported.

    When this is implemented McCarthy and Rahm are going to oversee the greatest crime reduction is city history.  Of course blood will still be flowing in the streets, thousands of cars will be stolen, drugs will be available everywhere, homes will be broken into hourly, and tourist beatings on Michigan Ave will continue.

  • Compstat

    I can’t believe that I have not already written a post on Compstat but I can’t find anything.  Grrrrrr!!

    Ok so, for those that don’t know Compstat is a system of policing accountability which originated in New York with the NYPD.  And in case you don’t know Garry McCarthy, the current Chicago Police Superintendent, is from the NYPD and eats, sleeps, sh__s, and wipes Compstat.  If Compstat was a person (woman or man) Garry McCarthy would marry it.  When McCarthy came to Chicago he brought Compstat with him.  You can find many articles about this at the Tribune, SunTimes, etc.

    So what?  Well here’s the rub:  It’s a fraud.

    No Superintendent of any police department wants to oversee an increase in crime.  No politician wants to be in office when there is an increase in crime.  So what happens is that the politicians beat down on the Superintendent who beats down on the Deputy Chiefs who beat down the Commanders who beat down on the Captains who beat down on the Lieutenants who beat down on the Sargents who beat down on the beat cops.  And just like magic, the beat cops make sure that there is less crime.  How?

    I’ve already written about how CPD brass is telling us crime is down crime is down but 911 calls to the OEMC is off the charts.  In Chicago no report = no crime.  So when police are busy and can’t get to you, your crime goes unreported, therefore there was no crime.  In Chicago we have a severe shortage of police officers.  Fewer officers means longer response times means fewer crimes are reported.  Consider this, the way that Chicago tracks crime if there were no police there would be no crime.

    Back to Compstat.  Compstat’s fraud is in addition to the crimes that actually unreported.  Compstat coerces police of all ranks to reclassify crimes in order to create the appearance of less crime.  e.g.  Instead of arresting someone for burglary (a felony) they get written-up for trespass (a misdemeanor.)  Fewer felonies means less crime.

    You don’t think it happens?  Think again.

    February 2010

    There’s something very big here. If you look at the repercussions, this stats program does for police what the Leave No Child Behind program for schools does to teachers– encourages them to shape the data. In this case, it may be putting us all at risk by fudging crime stats.

    A new survey of over 100 retired NYPD captains and senior officers found that they believed that statistics were manipulated to portray lower crime rates for the compsat program that calculates crime rates..

    The survey suggests that police have distorted crime reporting, dropping value of stolen goods so the theft is categorized as misdemeanor instead of felony. They drop categorization of crimes from felony to misdemeanor if suspects can’t be found.

    via HuffPo.

    This story forced the NYPD to clamp-down on officers who were talking about the fraud.  It took some time but two years later the NYPD forced a lawsuit by an officer who was pressured to downgrade crimes.  It was written about here, and here, and here.  A quick search will reveal other stories as well.

    So… what’s important to understand here is that you cannot trust the crime numbers put out by the police department.  It’s 100% pure manipulated hogwash.  You know that CPD is losing control of the city.  You know that your friends don’t feel as safe after Cubs games as they used to.  You see there are more street fights outside of bars.  You read in the paper that more people are getting shot than ever before.

    The difference between the truth and what the CPD reports is Compstat.

     

    UPDATE 06/30/2012:  Silly me had “comstat” instead of “compstat”.  I need an editor.