Author: Joe from MassPrivateI

Reason- by Scott Shackford

“I did something stupid, and something I shouldn’t have done” are the first words of Bill Peyser’s tale of how he ended up getting arrested and jailed for the first time in his life at the age of 73.

Peyser, a San Francisco cab driver, says he had been frustrated with a couple of noisy younger neighbors in the spring of 2017. Exhausted and angry after a sleepless night that had led to him skipping a day of work, he decided to confront them on the afternoon of April 17.   Continue reading “Innocent Until Proven Guilty, But Only If You Can Pay”

MassPrivateI

Yesterday a Philadelphia Appeals Court ruled that TSA agents can not be sued for molesting or falsely arresting air travelers.

According to an article in Yahoo News the government has granted DHS employees immunity from lawsuits.   Continue reading “TSA screeners allowed to molest and falsely arrest air travelers; watch list complainers”

Reason – by Scott Shackford

Close to 1,000 people in Michigan had their property seized by police or government officials last year even though they were neither convicted nor sometimes even charged with committing a crime.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that we have this information at all. In 2015 Michigan passed legislation that mandated local law enforcement agencies report more information to the state about the extent of their seizures. The Department of State Police just released its first report that encompassed all agencies for a full calendar year.  Continue reading “Police Seized Property of Close to 1,000 People in Michigan—Without Ever Convicting Them of Crimes”

Technology Review

A decision from the US Department of Justice allows the online distribution of computer-designed gun models.

Looking back: Cody Wilson, the founder of Defense Distributed, created and fired the first fully 3-D printed gun in 2013. The gun’s design files, which he uploaded on his website Defcad.com, were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in a few days.  Continue reading “The files you need to make your own gun can now be legally shared online”

FAIR – by Jim Naureckas

There’s a category of story we call “Them Not Us”—US media reporting on problems abroad, and seemingly not noticing that they have the same problems at home. There’s a great example of that in the New York Times (7/8/18), headlined “Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: AI, Shame and Lots of Cameras.” Continue reading “‘Dystopia’ in Chinese Surveillance Looks a Lot Like US Surveillance”

Tech Xplore – by Nancy Owano

Remember when tech topics had such happy focal points as bendable displays and a new stylus for tablets? Unfortunately, the accent in this year’s headlines is on how much we might be getting tracked. Facebook, move over. This time the glare is on smart TVs.

An article in the The New York Times has attracted a lot of buzz in its look at smart TV tracking services, designed for viewers’ convenience as well as ad targeters.  Continue reading “Privacy conversation turns to enabling smart TV tracking services”

Eric Peters Autos

Reinhard Heydrich, who was the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia – formerly Czechoslovakia, until the Nazis decided it wasn’t anymore – was probably the smartest Nazi. He knew how to wheedle his victims into cooperating in their own victimhood.

“His Czechs” – as he styled them –  would be rewarded with extra rations and less brutal working conditions when they submitted obediently  . . . and punished when not. He called it the “carrot and stick” approach. It worked so well that the Brits parachuted a team of SOE operatives behind the lines to assassinate the entirely too-effective Reichsprotecktor.  Continue reading “Carrot and Stick”

Of Two Minds – by Charles Hugh Smith

I know it hurts, but the reality is painfully obvious: the USA is now a 3rd World nation.

Dividing the Earth’s nations into 1st, 2nd and 3rd world has fallen out of favor; apparently it offended sensibilities. It has been replaced by the politically correct developed and developing nations, a terminology which suggests all developing nations are on the pathway to developed-nation status.   Continue reading “The USA Is Now a 3rd World Nation”

Boing Boing

Kudos to the Gates Foundation, seriously: after spending $775m on the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching, a Big Data initiative to improve education for poor and disadvantaged students, they hired outside auditors to evaluate the program’s effectiveness, and published that report, even though it shows that the approach did no good on balance and arguably caused real harms to teachers and students.

Cathy “Weapons of Math Destruction” O’Neil has given the report a close reading, and she found that the problems with the approach were pretty predictable: asking principals to rate teachers produces pretty uniform and meaningless five-star results, while the “value add” algorithms that are supposed to figure out how much of a student’s performance is attributable to a teacher are basically random number generators.   Continue reading “The Gates Foundation spent $775m on a Big Data education project that was worse than useless”

News & Observer

CHICAGO – Chicago’s City Council on Wednesday approved a $2.5 million settlement in an excessive-force lawsuit that accused police of traumatizing a 3-year-old girl by pointing a gun at her chest and striking her handcuffed mother.

A lawyer for Aretha Simmons, the girl’s mother, says upcoming Chicago Police Department reforms don’t address how officers treat children during arrests. Attorney Al Hofeld Jr. says “it is not even on CPD’s radar.” Continue reading “Council approves $2.5M payout for girl traumatized by police”

Reason – by Declan McCullagh

For nearly a decade, on precisely 10 different occasions, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) concluded that so-called bump-fire stocks on AR-15s and similar rifles are legal under federal law. Bump-fire stocks use the gun’s recoil to increase the rate of fire.

But then came the October 2017 mass shooting of concert attendees in Las Vegas, where police said the shooter possessed bump fire stocks. Within weeks, the ATF abruptly reversed itself, with an endorsement from President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this year.   Continue reading “ATF Flips on Bump Stock Ban, Some Gun Rights Groups Are Mad”

News Observer

North Carolina will start offering an unusual escape clause for the thousands of North Carolina residents who complain that Duke Energy’s two-way communication utility meters give them headaches, ear-ringing and a case of the “brain fog.”

Residents who say they suffer from acute sensitivity to radio-frequency waves can say no to Duke’s smart meters — as long as they have a notarized doctor’s note to attest to their rare condition.   Continue reading “You can say no to Duke Energy’s wireless meter. But you’ll need a doctor’s note.”

The Newspaper

Red light camera programs generate millions for local governments that, in turn, commission studies to bolster the case for their continued use. A study released last week by the Maryland Department of Transportation highlights the dramatic impact that have on the reported results.

“For example, if the crash data from the two years before period was used as the baseline to compare to the three-year crash data in the after period, then the conclusion was either ‘no change’ or ‘an increase’ in the frequencies of side-impact crashes,” researchers noted regarding the intersection of MD 355 and Halpine Road in Montgomery County. “A quite different conclusion, however, was reached if the crash data from the five years before period is used.”    Continue reading “Maryland DOT Study Shows How Camera Studies Are Gamed”

The Detroit News – by Mike Martindale

Two Michigan State Police polygraph experts have upcoming court dates after allegedly taking a bicycle on a late-night joyride between watering holes on Mackinac Island last month.

The two downstate troopers were visiting the picturesque island, where motorized vehicles are banned, to attend a training conference for Michigan lie detector examiners.  Continue reading “2 MSP polygraph examiners charged in Mackinac joyride”

The Intercept – by Ryan Gallagher, Henrik Moltke

THE SECRETS ARE hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.   Continue reading “The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs In Eight U.S. Cities”

ABC 15 Arizona

PHOENIX – A blind man is pleading for the charges against him to be dropped after, what he calls, an honest misunderstanding.

Marco Zepeda says on Friday he was trying to find an open urinal in the QuikTrip restroom at 83rd Avenue and McDowell Road.

“I didn’t hear anybody coming out,” he said, adding he was snapping his finger and skimming his hand against the wall to navigate due to his blindness.   Continue reading “Blind man fighting arrest for assault of Phoenix police officer”