Author: Joe from MassPrivateI

Bloomberg – by Robert Schmidt

A trial attorney from the Securities and Exchange Commission said his bosses were too “tentative and fearful” to bring many Wall Street leaders to heel after the 2008 credit crisis, echoing the regulator’s outside critics.

James Kidney, who joined the SEC in 1986 and retired this month, offered the critique in a speech at his goodbye party. His remarks hit home with many in the crowd of SEC lawyers and alumni thanks to a part of his resume not publicly known: He had campaigned internally to bring charges against more executives in the agency’s 2010 case against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)   Continue reading “SEC Goldman Lawyer Says Agency Too Timid on Wall Street Misdeeds”

The Des Moines Register – by Kyle Munson

WASHINGTON, Iowa. – The police chief has yet to mount flashing lights and a siren and plaster his department’s official logo on the sides of his new vehicle.

Not that Greg Goodman needs such window dressings so that this 49,000-pound, 10-foot-tall, six-wheel-drive behemoth will cause necks to crane and local motorists to veer out of the way.   Continue reading “Heavy-duty military equipment given to police”

MassPrivateI

The World Privacy Forum report: ‘How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Your Future’ highlights the unexpected problems that arise from new types of predictive consumer scoring, which this report terms consumer scoring. Largely unregulated either by the Fair Credit Reporting Act or the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, new consumer scores use thousands of pieces of information about consumers’ pasts to predict how they will behave in the future. Issues of secrecy, fairness of underlying factors, use of consumer information such as race and ethnicity in predictive scores, accuracy, and the uptake in both use and ubiquity of these scores are key areas of focus.   Continue reading “How secret consumer scores threaten our privacy”

Tech Dirt – by Mike Masnick

While the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify its $40 million, 6,300 page report detailing the CIA’s torture regime — including the facts that it went beyond what was authorized, produced no useful intelligence and then the CIA lied about it all — three members of the Committee voted against it. Senators James Risch, Dan Coats (though, who knows if he had any idea what he was voting on) and Marco Rubio all voted against declassifying, with Risch and Rubio putting out a statement claiming that the State Department didn’t want the report declassified.   Continue reading “State Department Official Freaks Out That Declassifying CIA Torture Report Might Make The World Angry”

Tech Dirt – by Mike Masnick

We’ve been writing quite a bit about the supposedly devastating $40 million, 6,300 page Senate report that exposes the CIA torture program for being useless — and (perhaps more importantly) describing in detail how the CIA lied about it to everyone, including Congress. There’s been something of an ongoing fight about declassifying the document, with the general thinking being that the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee would likely support declassification, but the Republicans would not. But, as we’d pointed out, despite Intelligence Committee boss Senator Dianne Feinstein’s condemnations of the CIA concerning the report, she still couldn’t must up the courage to admit that what the CIA was doing was “torture.” Instead, it was always the “detention and interrogation program.” But, anyone who’s looked at it knows exactly what it was: a torture program, almost certainly in violation of the Geneva conventions.    Continue reading “Some Senators Finally Willing To Call CIA’s Torture Program ‘Torture’”

Detroit News – by JOEL KURTH AND LAUREN ABDEL-RAZZAQ

ACLU – by Jay Stanley

At a panel in Toronto recently I was asked whether I thought the United States had become a “surveillance state.” How to answer that question? At first glance it’s an impossibly fuzzy question, the answer to which is relative depending on whether one has in mind life in an 18th century American town, or the Stasi. At the same time, if we can impose some structure on how we approach the question, it is an opportunity to take stock of where we stand—probably a healthy exercise.

Thinking it over, I came up with a five-part test by which we can consider the question:   Continue reading “Have We Become a “Surveillance State”? A Five-Part Test”

MassPrivateI

New England drivers who speed through toll plazas in neighboring states without paying are in for a rude surprise. you’re being tracked!

Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire have agreed to crack down on their own residents who frequently blow off tolls in the other states. The three-year-old arrangement has yielded only modest amounts of money, but it is being hailed as a model for interstate cooperation as electronic tolling spreads across the country.   Continue reading “New England states to track (spy) on you across state lines”

Washington Examiner- by JOEL GEHRKE

Federal agents who convinced mentally disabled people to commit crimes and then arrested them may have done so because they didn’t realize the people they were targeting had special needs, according to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Todd Jones.

“We do not target the developmentally disabled,” Jones told House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., adding that ATF learned of that the people were disabled as “the result of defense pleadings” in court.   Continue reading “ATF director: Undercover agents targeted mentally disabled people by accident”

Huffington Post – by Ryan J. Reilly and Saki Knafo

WASHINGTON — Several organizations representing state and local law enforcement are quietly trying to kill a bipartisan bill that would roll back tough mandatory sentences for people convicted of federal drug offenses under legislation passed during the height of America’s drug war three decades ago.

These groups include the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Narcotic Officers’ Associations’ Coalition, the National Association of Police Organizations and the Major County Sheriffs’ Association, The Huffington Post has learned.   Continue reading “Law Enforcement Lobby Quietly Tries To Kill Sentencing Reform”

New York Daily News – by NINA GOLGOWSKI

The police officer who mistakenly shot and killed a Hofstra University student as she was held at gunpoint by a Long Island intruder last year has been cleared of wrongdoing.

Nassau County officer Nikolas Budimlic “acted accordingly” when he opened fire, killing not only the armed suspect but 21-year-old Andrea Rebello in May 2013, the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday.   Continue reading “Officer who fatally shot Hofstra University student cleared of wrongdoing”

ARS Technica – by Joe Silver

Last Thursday, the Obama Administration announced details of its plan to overhaul the government’s bulk phone-records collection program, previously authorized under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

Under the proposed changes, the National Security Agency would no longer be in the business of collecting call records in bulk. Rather, the agency will be required to go directly to phone companies to obtain records, and it will need prior permission from a judge to access such information.   Continue reading “What, besides phone records, does the NSA collect in bulk?”

The Daily Sheeple- by Melissa Melton

Aren’t the cops supposed to protect and serve?

Two Clinton, Oklahoma parents called police back in December 2013 because they were worried their 18-year-old son, diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, might harm himself.

Apparently he did not have to harm himself. Moments after police entered the house, they shot the boy dead.   Continue reading “Why Did Officers Have To Shoot This Teen Nine Times?”

MassPrivateI

The Law Enforcement National Data Exchange (N-DEx) run by the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division now contains approximately 223 million records on nearly two billion searchable entities.  An FBI CJIS presentation from February 2014 posted on the website of the Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute includes detailed information on state and local data contributors including a tally of the total number of records contributed by state.   Continue reading “The Law Enforcement National Data Exchange contains 223 million records”

MassPrivateI

Article first appeared in lewrockwell.com:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court has been issuing general warrants to the National Security Agency (NSA) since 1978, but it was not until last June that we learned that these general warrants have been executed upon the telephone calls, text messages, emails, bank records, utility bills and credit card bills of all persons in America since 2009.   Continue reading “What’s happened to ‘probable cause’ in America?”