Category: government

Our government in action, for good, and mostly for worse

Ernest Withers, Civil Rights Photographer an FBI Informer

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Trust no-one. Especially when the FBI has your organization on its radar. On Sunday, the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal published an explosive exposé on renowned Civil RIghts photojournalist, Ernest C. Withers.

art-gop-fascism-poster.jpg

At the top of the stairs he saw the blood, a large pool of it, splashed across the balcony like a grisly, abstract painting. Instinctively, Ernest Withers raised his camera. This wasn’t just a murder. This was history.

 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood here a few hours earlier chatting with aides when a sniper squeezed off a shot from a hunting rifle.

Now, as night set over Memphis, Withers was on the story.

Slipping past a police barricade, the enterprising Beale Street newsman made his way to room 306 at the Lorraine Motel — King’s room — and walked in. Ralph Abernathy and the others hardly blinked. After all, this was Ernest C. Withers. He’d marched with King, and sat in on some of the movement’s sensitive strategy meetings.

A veteran freelancer for America’s black press, Withers was known as “the original civil rights photographer,” an insider who’d covered it all, from the Emmett Till murder that jump-started the movement in 1955 to the Little Rock school crisis, the integration of Ole Miss and, now, the 1968 sanitation strike that brought King to Memphis and his death.

(click to continue reading Photographer Ernest Withers doubled as FBI informant to spy on civil rights movement » The Commercial Appeal.)

 

According to the article, Withers was instrumental in the FBI’s questionable war1 against every organization that challenged the status quo: the Black Panthers, religious groups, U.S. Civil Rights Commission, you name it. The program2 was called COINTELPRO, and it was worse, and more pervasive than you think. The links in the quoted section below go to scans of primary documents, hosted at the moment at The Commercial Appeal, so you can read them in their malicious banality yourself.

Much of his undercover work helped the FBI break up the Invaders, a Black Panther-styled militant group that became popular in disaffected black Memphis in the late 1960s and was feared by city leaders.

 

Yet, Withers focused on mainstream Memphians as well.

Personal and professional details of Church of God in Christ Bishop G.E. Patterson (then a pastor with a popular radio show), real estate agent O.W. Pickett, politician O. Z. Evers and others plumped FBI files as the bureau ran a secret war on militancy.

When community leader Jerry Fanion took cigarettes to jailed Invaders, agents took note. Agents wrote reports when Catholic Father Charles Mahoney befriended an Invader, when car dealer John T. Fisher offered jobs to militants, when Rev. James Lawson planned a trip to Czechoslovakia and when a schoolteacher loaned his car to a suspected radical.

Each report has a common thread — Withers.

As a so-called racial informant — one who monitored race-related politics and “hate” organizations — Withers fed agents a steady flow of information.

Records indicate he snapped and handed over photos of St. Patrick Catholic Church priests who supported the city’s striking sanitation workers; he monitored political candidates, jotted down auto tag numbers for agents, and once turned over a picture of an employee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said to be “one who will give aid and comfort to the black power groups.” In an interview this year, that worker said she came within a hearing of losing her job.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Chicago Division

 

From the New York Times in follow up:

On Sunday, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis published the results of a two-year investigation that showed [Ernest C.] Withers, who died in 2007 at age 85, had collaborated closely with two F.B.I. agents in the 1960s to keep tabs on the civil rights movement. It was an astonishing revelation about a former police officer nicknamed the Original Civil Rights Photographer, whose previous claim to fame had been the trust he engendered among high-ranking civil rights leaders, including Dr. King.

 

“It is an amazing betrayal,” said Athan Theoharis, a historian at Marquette University who has written books about the F.B.I. “It really speaks to the degree that the F.B.I. was able to engage individuals within the civil rights movement. This man was so well trusted.”

From at least 1968 to 1970, Mr. Withers, who was black, provided photographs, biographical information and scheduling details to two F.B.I. agents in the bureau’s Memphis domestic surveillance program, Howell Lowe and William H. Lawrence, according to numerous reports summarizing their meetings. The reports were obtained by the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act and posted on its Web site.

A clerical error appears to have allowed for Mr. Withers’s identity to be divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Mr. Withers and his informer number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several locations, the F.B.I. appears to have forgotten to hide them.

(click to continue reading Civil Rights Photographer Unmasked as Informer – NYTimes.com.)

 

Presumedly, a diligent researcher researcher could now go through redacted FBI documents, and find everywhere else that Withers code name was used

A clerical error appears to have allowed for Mr. Withers’s identity to be divulged: In most cases in the reports, references to Mr. Withers and his informer number, ME 338-R, have been blacked out. But in several locations, the F.B.I. appears to have forgotten to hide them.

Wonder if there the FBI is conducting an updated version of COINTELPRO to investigate/infiltrate the Tea Party zealots? Probably not, for most of the history of the FBI, they have only been concerned with liberal dissent. Conservatives get a pass, even if they blow up buildings or kill innocents. A liberal group providing cigarettes to an incarcerated protester? That’s grounds for expanding the file.

 

Footnotes:
  1. the fact of the war is not in dispute, only its motive for existing in a supposedly free society [↩]
  2. We’ve blogged about COINTELPRO many times [↩]

Egg Inspectors Failed to Raise Alarms

Seth Anderson0 comment

Surprise, surprise, another federal regulatory agency more concerned with the industry it is supposed to oversee than with the public it is allegedly supposed to protect and serve. If the USDA was a person, it could be jailed for crimes, but…

You Are Beautiful with Amish Meat

U.S. Department of Agriculture experts found growing sanitary problems including bugs and overflowing trash earlier this year on the Iowa farm at the center of the national egg recall, but didn’t notify health authorities, according to government documents and officials.

The problems laid out in USDA daily sanitation reports viewed by The Wall Street Journal underscore the regulatory gaps that may have contributed to delays in discovering salmonella contamination. Tainted eggs sickened at least 1,470 Americans.

Wright County Egg of Galt, Iowa, recalled 380 million eggs in mid-August, but people likely began getting ill around May 1, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Robert Arnold said he reported problems at Wright County Egg when he worked there, but was ignored.

The USDA was the only federal body with a regular presence at Wright, but it says it wasn’t responsible for safety. USDA graders were at a Wright egg-packing plant seven days a week to oversee designations such as “Grade A” on egg cartons.

The Food and Drug Administration, which has overall responsibility for egg safety but didn’t inspect the Wright facility until this August, says it never heard from the USDA about problems such as dirt and mold. The two agencies have a formal understanding about the USDA giving the FDA notice over sanitary issues, but the USDA declined to give details.

The USDA said it didn’t give notice because “the conditions at the egg plant packing facilities were routine.”

(click to continue reading Egg Inspectors Failed to Raise Alarms – WSJ.com.)

Routine. Yikes. That makes me feel like eating 50 eggs!


“Cool Hand Luke” (Warner Home Video)

Growing Concern About Tainted Eggs After Recall

Seth Anderson0 comment

Why is food safety such a low priority in Washington? How many people have to be sickened by agribusiness and factory farming methods before reform is undertaken? Are farm lobbyists really so powerful that the Senate has been sitting on Durbin’s Bill S. 510 for years? Unconscionable.

Holding My Life in My Hand

The latest action — the third recall announcement in two weeks for eggs — is bound to shake the confidence of consumers rattled by a succession of food safety scares in recent years, most prominently for foods like beef and lettuce.

The idea that half a billion suspect eggs have been circulating in the food supply comes as an embarrassment for the egg industry and federal regulators. New egg safety rules went into effect in July that the Food and Drug Administration had said would prevent tens of thousands of salmonella illnesses a year.

“You have to treat eggs with the assumption that they’re contaminated with salmonella,” said Carol Tucker Foreman, a food safety expert of the Consumer Federation of America. “We may all object to the fact that we have to treat food like toxic waste, but if we don’t want to get sick, and especially if you have someone in your house that’s immune-suppressed, you have to handle things carefully and demand that the standards be set higher.”

(click to continue reading Second Iowa Producer Recalls 170 Million Eggs – NYTimes.com.)

The FDA has been too lax for too long, and needs to be inculcated with a new mission, namely protecting consumers instead of the industry it purportedly regulates.

Chasing WikiLeaks is A Dumb Strategy

Seth Anderson0 comment

Marc Thiessen is an idiot, and that’s being kind. Thiessen wants to assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, or have the US Government perform some sort of magical Denial of Service or something. Who knows.

Raffi Khatchadourian gives a bit of context:

Shutting WikiLeaks down—assuming that this is even possible—would only lead to copycat sites devised by innovators who would make their services even more difficult to curtail. A better approach for the Defense Department might be to consider WikiLeaks a competitor rather than a threat, and to recognize that the spirit of transparency that motivates Assange and his volunteers is shared by a far wider community of people who use the Internet. Currently, the government has its own versions of WikiLeaks: the Freedom of Information Act and the Mandatory Declassification Review. The problem is that both of these mechanisms can be grindingly slow and inconsistent, in part because the government appears to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of data that should never have been classified to begin with—a phenomenon known as “overclassification.”

…

Presidential Portal Stones

It’s worth recalling the first WikiLeaks project to garner major international attention: a video, shot from an Apache helicopter in 2007, in Iraq, that documented American soldiers killing up to eighteen people. For years, Reuters sought to obtain that video through FOIA because two of its staff members were among the victims. Had the military released this footage to the wire service, and made whatever minor redactions were necessary to protect its operations, there would never have been a film titled “Collateral Murder”—the name of WikiLeaks’s package for the video—because there would have been nothing to leak. Even after Assange had published the footage, and even though the events documented in it had been previously revealed in detail by a Washington Post reporter, the military (at least, as of July) has still not officially released it.

There is a simple lesson here: whatever the imperfections of WikiLeaks as a startup, its emergence points to a real shortcoming within our intelligence community. Secrets can be kept by deterrence—that is, by hunting down the people who leak them, as Thiessen proposes, and demonstrating that such behavior comes with real costs, such as prison time. But there are other methods: keep far fewer secrets, manage them better—and, perhaps, along the way, become a bit more like WikiLeaks. An official government Web site that would make the implementation of FOIA quicker and more uniform, comprehensive, and accessible, and that might even allow anonymous whistleblowers within federal agencies to post internal materials, after a process of review and redaction, could be a very good thing—for the public, and for the official keepers of secrets, too.

(click to continue reading News Desk: Chasing WikiLeaks : The New Yorker.)

 

Top 5 Social Security Myths

Seth Anderson1 Comment

I’ve heard some of these assertions dozens of times, mostly from loud-mouthed, small brained Republicans. Helpful to have rebuttal response handy…

Myth: Social Security is going broke.

Forget-me-not Social Security

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.3 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a ‘T’). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever. After 2037, it’ll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits–and again, that’s without any changes. The program started preparing for the Baby Boomers retirement decades ago. Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

Myth: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than did 70 years ago. What’s more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly–since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half. But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

Myth: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn’t need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it, here’s a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come. Right now, high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income. But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

Myth: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn’t full of IOUs, it’s full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market–which would have been disastrous–but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

Myth: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It’s not just wrong — it’s impossible! By law, Social Security funds are separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can’t add one penny to the deficit.

(click to continue reading MoveOn.org Political Action: Democracy in Action.)

 

Bush Defense Dept lost most of Iraqi oil revenue

Seth Anderson0 comment

Oh come on!1 Why aren’t these criminals in jail? Realistically, how do you lose such massive amounts of money?

Continuing to Talk

The Defense Department is unable to properly account for $8.7 billion out of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil revenue entrusted to it between 2004 and 2007, according to a newly released audit that underscores a pattern of poor record-keeping during the war.

Of that amount, the military failed to provide any records at all for $2.6 billion in purported reconstruction expenditure, says the report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is responsible for monitoring U.S. spending in Iraq. The rest of the money was not properly deposited in special accounts as required under Treasury Department rules, making it difficult to trace how it was spent.

Though there is no apparent evidence of fraud, the improper accounting practices add to the pattern of mismanagement, reckless spending and, in some instances, corruption uncovered by the agency since 2004, when it was created to oversee the total of $53 billion in U.S. taxpayer money appropriated by Congress for the reconstruction effort.

No apparent evidence of fraud? Simple accounting errors?

First, let’s look at those numbers in the proper context. With lots of zeros. $8,700,000,000. Out of $9,100,000,000. Missing. Gone. Poof.

Now, let’s do the math. $8,700,000,000 divided by $9,100,000,000. That comes to 0.9560. Or 95.6%. Missing. Of the Iraqi oil revenue entrusted to the Defense Department between 2004 and 2007. Which would be during the Bush-Cheney administration. Which would be mostly during the tenure of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

(click to continue reading Daily Kos: Bush DoD lost $8,700,000,000 in Iraqi oil revenue.)

That is a lot of fracking money to be “unaccounted” for, no?

And just to say it again, because I had the same reaction as Laurence Lewis of Daily Kos: No evidence of fraud? Really? Really?

Footnotes:
  1. in my best Gob Bluth voice [↩]

Gale Norton Loves Her Some Sex, Meth and Oil

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Gale Norton, former Bush Pioneer,1 has no regrets about the shambles she left behind in her wake, before she joined Royal Dutch Shell.

I like to eat paste

Gale Norton, former President George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior, ran the department during the time when its Minerals Management Service was guilty of some of its worst excesses—including holding cocaine and meth-fueled sex and oil parties. But that didn’t stop Norton from taking to Capitol Hill Tuesday to defend the “hardworking and professional men and women of the Minerals Management Service.”

Norton was one of two Bush-era Interior secretaries who testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Tuesday morning, the first time representatives from the previous administration have been put on the hot-seat about the regulatory miscues that may have led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Current Secretary Ken Salazar joined Norton (who served in the role from January 2001 to March 2006) and Dirk Kempthorne (June 2006 to January 2009) before the panel.

In her opening statement, Norton accused critics of the Interior Department of vilifying the Minerals Management Service (now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement). “There has been a great deal of media attention to the ethics of MMS. It pains me to see the vilification of MMS and its employees. I want to speak in defense of the vast majority of hardworking and professional men and women of the Minerals Management Service,” said Norton in her prepared opening statement.

Now, it was under Norton’s watch that many of the porn, meth, and oil parties took place at the MMS’ Lake Charles, La. office. Oh, and the sex, oil, and cocaine parties at the Lakewood, Colorado office. And Norton, who went to work for Shell Oil shortly after leaving office, has been the subject of a Department of Justice criminal investigation into whether she illegally used her position at DOI to benefit the company that would hire her soon thereafter

(click to continue reading Bush Official on Sex, Meth and Oil: What’s the Big Deal? | Mother Jones.)

Jerkstore

Footnotes:
  1. well, probably, too lazy to look her up [↩]

Banks Laundering Drug Money Without Consequence

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The cynic in me thinks the reason the United States has not assertively moved to legalize drugs1 is for this reason – large banks are making so much freaking money laundering drug money. The banks have many, many lobbyists in Congress, and have made it known they are opposed to changing the status quo. The politicians claim it is a moral issue, but we know they lie.

Nancy Reagan - Just Say Yo

We’ve all read damning accounts of the government saving banks from their risky subprime bets, but it turns out that the Wall Street privilege problem is far more deeply ingrained in the U.S. legal system than the simple bailouts witnessed in 2008. America’s largest banks can engage in flagrantly criminal activity on a massive scale and emerge almost completely unscathed. The latest sickening example comes from Wachovia Bank: Accused of laundering $380 billion in Mexican drug cartel money, the financial behemoth is expected to emerge with nothing more than a slap on the wrist thanks to an official government policy which protects megabanks from criminal charges.

Bloomberg’s Michael Smith has penned a devastating expose detailing Wachovia’s drug-money operations and the government’s twisted response. The bank was moving money behind literally tons of cocaine from violent drug cartels. It wasn’t an accident. Internal whistleblowers at Wachovia warned that the bank was laundering drug money, higher-ups at the bank actively looked the other way in order to score bigger profits, and the U.S. government is about to let everyone involved get off scott free. The bank will not be indicted, because it is official government policy not to prosecute megabanks. From Smith’s story:

No big U.S. bank . . . has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again . . . . Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory. Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets.

Wachovia was acquired by Wells Fargo in late 2008. The bank’s penalty for laundering over $380 billion in drug money is going to be a promise not to ever do it again, and a $160 million fine. The fine is so small that Wachovia will almost certainly turn a profit on its drug financing business after legal costs and penalties are taken into account.

(click to continue reading Wall Street Is Laundering Drug Money and Getting Away with It | Economy | AlterNet.)

Even if banks are not actively laundering the cartel money, they are storing it – the drug economy is easily in the trillions of dollars, and upper level drug cartel executives are not keeping their cash under their beds. Just imagine, if one drug dealer in a medium size U.S. city like Baltimore can clear a few million dollars a month, and illegal drugs are being dealt everywhere humans live, well, you do the math.

From Michael Smith’s article, a hint of the huge sums of money we are talking about

Wachovia admitted it didn’t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion [PDF – Exhibit A Factual Statement] for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That’s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history — a sum equal to one-third of Mexico’s current gross domestic product.

(click to continue reading Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal – Bloomberg.)

See, that’s over $125,000,000,000 a year in just one bank! From one area of the drug economy! Not including Columbians, Jamaicans, Americans, Taliban, Triads, yadda yadda. I don’t know for certain, but this Wachovia case seems to only be discussing cocaine dollars, in other words, not including profits from heroin, cannabis, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and whatever else people buy to get high. All in all that is a seriously large number of dollars, untaxed, unregulated, unaccounted for. And for what? So that bankers and drug lords can live high on the hog, and addicts can die from adulterated street drugs?

No, the drug war continues because the status quo is making certain groups an almost unfathomable amount of profit.

Footnotes:
  1. despite the will of the electorate [↩]

Patent Office Snuffs Out High Hopes

Seth Anderson0 comment

When will our country move beyond these petty rules and regulations for plants?

Hurry This Way Again

For three months until last week, marijuana dealers had something they could only dream of before: the apparent stamp of approval of a federal agency.

On April 1, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office created a new trademark category: “Processed plant matter for medicinal purposes, namely medical marijuana.” The patent office, part of the Department of Commerce, posted the new category on its website.

The patent-office change set off a land rush by pot dealers in the 14 states where laws permit medical-marijuana sales. Some staked claims on rights to long-used names like Maui Wowie and Chronic. Others applied to trademark business names such as Budtrader and Pot-N. Two companies applied to trademark psychoactive sodas named Keef Cola and Canna Cola.

“It looked like a positive step to me. We don’t have many steps by the federal government legitimizing medical cannabis,” said Steve DeAngelo, executive director of the Harborside Health Center medical marijuana dispensary in Oakland, Calif., who hired an intellectual-property lawyer to trademark his company name before the patent office created the new category.

But last week the patent office snuffed out the promise of federal recognition. On Tuesday, after questions about the new pot-trademark category from a Wall Street Journal reporter, a patent-office spokesman said the office planned to remove the new pot classification by week’s end, and the category is now off the website.

The spokesman, Peter Pappas, said the office’s lawyers were “aware” of the category weeks ago. “It raises examination issues,” Mr. Pappas said. “It was a mistake and we have removed it.”

(click to continue reading Patent Office Snuffs Out One Industry’s High Hopes – WSJ.com.)

Almost progress, almost.

A Concise History of Fuck

Seth Anderson0 comment

Juli Weiner of Vanity Fair with a delightful small article reacting to the recent FCC ruling in regards to the expressive and powerful word, fuck…

Both verb and noun, infix and interjection, “fuck,” like many chimerical beasts, is of ill repute and unknown genesis. The American Heritage Dictionary, similar to its tweedier brother, the Oxford English Dictionary, is unable to divine the exact etymology of “fuck,” however it does provide information about its first known publication. Specifically, the word initially appeared in a satirical poem composed sometime around 1500 that takes aim at the Carmelite friars of Cambridge. Although the letters F, U, C, and K do not appear in their recognizable, rancorous order, they are expressed in a simple code that “is easily broken by simply substituting the preceding letter in the alphabet, keeping in mind differences in the alphabet and in spelling between then and now,” according to the dictionary. Drained of its cryptic Latin and less cryptic cryptology, “non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk” begets “they are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].” For what it’s worth, the Online Dictionary of Etymology surmises that “fuck” has roots in the Middle English “fyke,” meaning to “move restlessly.” “Fyke” had sexual connotations, too; it suggested fidgeting as well as flirting, as the wives of Ely might attest.

Hundreds of years later, James Joyce was not as covert in his use of the word. The 1921 publication of the complete Ulysses was met with book banning and book burning. A New York court ruled the work obscene, even though the word “fuck” appeared just twice—once as noun, once as verb—in 265,000 words. Other classics infamous for their embrace of the word include The Catcher in the Rye and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Norman Mailer substituted “fug” for “fuck” in The Naked and the Dead, from which the band the Fugs would later take its name. (One of the group’s founding members, Tuli Kupferberg, passed away yesterday.) “Fug,” a cacophonous cousin, is still an undeserving member of the vernacular. Alternative progeny also include “fink,” “freak,” “feck,” “frack,” and “frig,” the latter regretfully embalmed for pop-culture immortality with the 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite. The Wire eschewed euphemisms altogether, embracing the guttural, satisfying “fuck” a total of 38 times in a single scene.

(you should click to continue reading A Concise History of “Fuck” | VF Daily | Vanity Fair.)

 

Words are words, no? The government shouldn’t be in the business of deciding what words are appropriate and which are not.

Illinois Law Requires Testing All Rape Kits

Seth Anderson0 comment

Amazing that other states don’t already have this requirement, and that Illinois has been so slack in processing rape kits.

Wheels Go RoundFacing criticism that physical evidence from sexual assault cases in Illinois often went unanalyzed, Gov. Patrick J. Quinn this week signed a law requiring the police to test all rape kits. State officials and victims’ advocates said it is the first such law in the nation.

Over the past year, critics had exposed a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits in Illinois, and officials said the law would send an important message.

“As a direct result of this law, we will increase the number of arrests and prosecutions of sex offenders and get them out of our communities and into prison,” said Lisa Madigan, the state’s attorney general.

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch released a report showing that since 1995, only about 20 percent of rape kits, which contain physical evidence obtained from victims, could be confirmed as having been tested in Illinois. More than 4,000 kits had gone untested, the report found.

Testing of evidence like semen, saliva and other DNA samples can be used to identify an offender, to connect a case to another rape or to exonerate innocent suspects.

“Illinois’ failure to test DNA evidence is not only an insult to rape victims — it puts all women at risk by leaving rapists who could be identified at large, some of whom may attack again,” said Sarah Tofte, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The problem is widespread, with reports of thousands of untested kits in cities including Detroit and Houston.

(click to continue reading Illinois Law Requires Testing All Rape Kits to End Backlog – NYTimes.com.)

Also, who is funding this? The State of Illinois isn’t, as there isn’t any money to be had. The Federal Government has more important priorities – war, tax cuts and subsidies for Fortune 100 corporations – so talk is good, but execution will be proof.

But some worried that that language provided an out if funds were not available for tests — a distinct possibility, they said, for a state already facing a budget deficit of at least $12 billion.

Mr. Quinn said the state would apply for federal grants to test the backlog and find additional state money if necessary.

Human Rights Watch said the law could be a model for other states. “It’s a landmark piece of legislation, but there is this big loophole,” Ms. Tofte said. “The law is not going to be effective if the funding is not there.”

U.S. Program to Detect Cyber Attacks

Seth Anderson0 comment

Mixed feelings about this: the Federal Government probably should have some sort of cyber patrol to protect the nation’s infrastructure against attack, but am always skeptical that this isn’t just an excuse to legalize the spying upon citizens that has become the norm.

Eye see u Willis

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

Defense contractor Raytheon Corp. recently won a classified contract for the initial phase of the surveillance effort valued at up to $100 million

(click to continue reading U.S. Program to Detect Cyber Attacks on Infrastructure – WSJ.com.)1

 

Footnotes:
  1. non-WSJ subscribers use this link [↩]

Deficits and Bush

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Reducing the federal1 deficit is not a bad idea, in general, but the question is about the details. What exactly is the cause of it? I’d say Pentagon spending is an insanely large percentage, and should be drastically reduced. Bush tax cuts, which targeted wealthy, should also be immediately eliminated.

President Obama’s administration has been blamed for reckless spending that has put America into its debt hole. But in reality, much of that spending emanates from policies of President Bush, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. They argue that Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Bush tax cuts (along with the economic downturn) are what is driving the U.S. deficit, not stimulus spending. The CBPP focuses on lower to middle income issues and may be directly involved with the Democratic Party. The chart presents the ugly truth.

(click to continue reading CHART OF THE DAY: Reminder, The Deficit You’re Freaking Out About Is Bush’s Fault.)

chart-of-the-day-bush-policies-deficits-june-2010.gif

I’d add that sometimes the government can and should spend more than it collects in taxes and revenue: infrastructure, and human services shouldn’t be slashed without looking at the overall picture. Do we, as a society, really want to have more homeless, mentally ill people wandering the street looking for food just so we can buy another aircraft carrier?

 The CBPP2 adds:

Bush Tax Cuts, War Costs Do Lasting Harm to Budget Outlook

Some commentators blame recent legislation — the stimulus bill and the financial rescues — for today’s record deficits. Yet those costs pale next to other policies enacted since 2001 that have swollen the deficit. Those other policies may be less conspicuous now, because many were enacted years ago and they have long since been absorbed into CBO’s and other organizations’ budget projections.

Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [6] (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers

Without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous Administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade. That would have put the nation on a much sounder footing to address the demographic challenges and the cost pressures in health care that darken the long-run fiscal outlook.[7]

Footnotes:
  1. and state government too [↩]
  2. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities [↩]

United States E-Passports Contain RFID Chip

Seth Anderson0 comment

Wondered why my newly minted passport contained such a thick cover. Reading the back page carefully, I noticed the phrase, “This document contains sensitive electronics,” and of course, my curiosity was piqued.

This document contains sensitive electronics

The chip used in the e-passports will comply with the ISO 14443 RFID specification and contain the same information as a passport’s data page—the passport holder’s name, nationality, gender, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photo. The chip will also contain the passport number, issue date, expiration date and type of passport. The ISO 14443 specification permits chips to be read when an e-passport is placed within approximately 10 centimeters of an RFID interrogator (reader).

Of all objections the department received regarding its plans, the overwhelming majority expressed concern over the potential for skimming and/or eavesdropping. Skimming is the act of creating an unauthorized connection with an RFID tag in order to gain access to its data. Eavesdropping is the interception of the electronic communication session between an RFID tag and an authorized reader.

To prevent skimming, the department will add shielding material to the passport’s front cover and spine. The material is supposed to make the e-passport’s RFID tag unreadable as long as its cover is closed or nearly closed. The department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC), which functions as a Personal Identification Number (PIN) in the form of characters printed on the passport data page. Before a passport’s tag can be read, this PIN must be inputted into an RFID reader. The BAC also enables the encryption of any communication between the chip and interrogator

(click to continue reading United States Sets Date for E-Passports – RFID Journal.)

 

Cannabis and Capitalism

Seth Anderson0 comment

The uneasy dalliance between capitalism, government, and cannabis is most advanced in Colorado. There is real money to be made here, for bold entrepreneurs who are willing to trailblaze.

One of the odder experiments in the recent history of American capitalism is unfolding here in the Rockies: the country’s first attempt at fully regulating, licensing and taxing a for-profit marijuana trade. In California, medical marijuana dispensary owners work in nonprofit collectives, but the cannabis pioneers of Colorado are free to pocket as much as they can — as long as they stay within the rules.

A Green Stride Forward

The catch is that there are a ton of rules, and more are coming in the next few months. The authorities here were initially caught off guard when dispensary mania began last year, after President Obama announced that federal law enforcement officials wouldn’t trouble users and suppliers as long as they complied with state law. In Colorado, where a constitutional amendment legalizing medical marijuana was passed in 2000, hundreds of dispensaries popped up and a startling number of residents turned out to be in “severe pain,” the most popular of eight conditions that can be treated legally with the once-demonized weed.

More than 80,000 people here now have medical marijuana certificates, which are essentially prescriptions, and for months new enrollees have signed up at a rate of roughly 1,000 a day.

As supply met demand, politicians decided that a body of regulations was overdue. The state’s Department of Revenue has spent months conceiving rules for this new industry, ending the reefer-madness phase here in favor of buzz-killing specifics about cultivation, distribution, storage and every other part of the business.

Whether and how this works will be carefully watched far beyond Colorado. The rules here could be a blueprint for the 13 states, as well as the District of Columbia, that have medical marijuana laws. That is particularly the case in Rhode Island, New Jersey, the District of Columbia and Maine, which are poised to roll out programs of their own.

Americans spend roughly $25 billion a year on marijuana, according to the Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, which gives some idea of the popularity of this drug. Eventually, we might be talking about a sizable sum of tax revenue from its sales as medicine, not to mention private investment and employment. A spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws says hedge fund investors and an assortment of financial service firms are starting to call around to sniff out opportunities.

(click to continue reading In Colorado, Pot-Selling Pioneers Try to Turn a Profit – NYTimes.com.)

And this is a pretty good model to follow, methinks:

Three Thousand Walgreens

If there is a historical precedent for what’s now happening in Colorado, it could be the 1920s and the era of Prohibition. During America’s dry age, the federal alcohol ban carved out an exemption for medicinal use, and doctors nationwide suddenly discovered they could bolster their incomes by writing liquor prescriptions.

Pharmacies, which filled those prescriptions, and were one of the few places whiskey could be bought legally, raked it in. Through the 1920s, the number of Walgreens stores soared from 20 to nearly 400.

Prohibition also enriched adventurous sorts at every level of booze production and consumption, from grape farmers and distillers to the owners of speakeasies. Many of them went on to earn legitimate fortunes once Prohibition was repealed.

Fascinating to see how far along the reform of our out-dated marijuana laws has come in the last few years. Of course, federal law still classifies cannabis as a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance – i.e., with no accepted medical or societal usage. When is that going to change? How many states have to reform their laws before the reactionaries in Congress act?

From Wikipedia:

(1) Schedule I.—

(A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.”