How the Federal government is tracking your children.

Would it bother you to know that the federal Centers for Disease Control had been shown your daughter’s health records to see how she responded to an STD/teen-pregnancy-prevention program? How about if the federal Department of Education and Department of Labor scrutinized your son’s academic performance to see if he should be “encouraged” to leave high school early to learn a trade? Would you think the government was intruding on your territory as a parent?

Under regulations the Obama Department of Education released this month, these scenarios could become reality. The department has taken a giant step toward creating a de facto national student database that will track students by their personal information from preschool through career. Although current federal law prohibits this, the department decided to ignore Congress and, in effect, rewrite the law. Student privacy and parental authority will suffer.

The administration wants this data to include much more than name, address and test scores. According to the National Data Collection Model, the government should collect information on health-care history, family income and family voting status. In its view, public schools offer a golden opportunity to mine reams of data from a captive audience.

The department’s eagerness to get control of all this information is almost palpable. But current federal law prohibits a nationwide student database and strictly limits disclosure of a student’s personal information. So the department has determined that it can overcome the legal obstacles by simply bypassing Congress and essentially rewriting the federal privacy statute.

Last April, the department proposed regulations that would allow it and other agencies to share a student’s personal information with practically any government agency or even private company, as long as the disclosure could be said to support an evaluation of an “education program,” broadly defined. That’s how the CDC might end up with your daughter’s health records or the Department of Labor with your son’s test scores.

And you’d have no right to object — in fact, you’d probably never even know about the disclosure.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/how_the_feds_are_tracking_your_kid_xC6wecT8ZidCAzfqegB6hL


28 Signs That U.S. Public Schools Are Rapidly Being Turned Into Indoctrination Centers:

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/28-signs-that-u-s-public-schools-are-rapidly-being-turned-into-indoctrination-centers-and-prison-camps

A federal appeals court has given telecommunications companies immunity for helping the government spy on you.

San Francisco, CA —A federal appeals court has ruled as constitutional a law giving telecommunications companies legal immunity for helping the government with its email and telephone eavesdropping program.

Thursday's unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court decision regarding the 2008 law.

The appeal concerned a case that consolidated 33 different lawsuits filed against various telecom companies, including AT&T, Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. on behalf of these companies' customers.

The court noted comments made by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding the legal immunity's role in helping the government gather intelligence.

"It emphasized that electronic intelligence gathering depends in great part on cooperation from private companies ... and that if litigation were allowed to proceed against persons allegedly assisting in such activities, `the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future,'" Judge M. Margaret McKeown said.

“By passing the retroactive immunity for the telecoms’ complicity in the warrantless wiretapping program, Congress abdicated its duty to the American people,” EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl said. “It is disappointing that today’s decision endorsed the rights of telecommunications companies over those over their customers.”

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/12/30/court_oks_immunity_for_telecoms_in_wiretap_case/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/dragnet-surveillance-case/

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/12/29/42649.htm


Court Opinion: https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/filenode/20111229_9C_Jewel_Opinion.pdf

TX- Recent DNA exonerations have revealed troubling gaps in the criminal justice system.

TX- Since Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins took office in 2007, incidents of wrongfully convicted men being released from Texas prisons have become almost commonplace.

The sheer number of DNA exonerations — and the efforts to uncover how the courts failed so miserably — have revealed troubling gaps in the criminal justice system: Eyewitnesses are more fallible than jurors might think; forensic evidence isn't always reliable or interpreted correctly; the way police run lineups can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, those problems may just as easily plague cases in which no DNA exists. Modern science has shown the justice system the tip of the iceberg, but how many innocent men and women are suffering in prison and likely to stay there because they have no evidence to test? Where do law enforcement and innocence advocates, faced with sorting out the guilty and innocent, go from here?

In 1998, Duke's stepdaughter insisted that she lied when she told her aunt that he touched her inappropriately. Dallas criminal defense attorney Robert Udashen took Duke's case and filed a writ of habeas corpus claiming his innocence based on her changing her story. Though the director of the Dallas Children's Advocacy Center testified that the recantation was credible and no medical evidence of sexual abuse existed, both the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction: Duke remained behind bars.

A decade later, Watkins took office and instituted an open file policy, making it easier for defense attorneys to obtain evidence from prosecutors. Udashen requested a review of Duke's case, and last March he caught a huge break. Prosecution files revealed that the girl's maternal grandmother, who died in 2006, had given a statement saying she believed the child was lying and that her aunt coerced her accusation. The statement, made before Duke's trial and previously unknown to Duke's defense attorneys, corroborated the recantation.

"That's really the only thing that changed," Udashen says, but it was enough for a new hearing in front of Judge Hawk, who declared Duke "actually innocent," meaning that with the new evidence, no reasonable jury would have found Duke guilty.

"The DNA exonerations have sensitized everybody to the fact that there are a lot of innocent people in prison," says Gary Udashen. The brothers' firm has represented 11 exonerees. They buck the Dallas County trend in that most of their cases have not been rooted in DNA evidence, and they were successful with several exonerations even before Watkins took office.

Nationwide, there have been more than 800 exonerations since 1989, a majority of which are non-DNA cases. Since DNA evidence was stored indefinitely in Dallas County and Watkins has been actively pursuing DNA cases, Dallas, with a sweeping majority of DNA-based cases, is out of step with the nation.
http://www.dallasobserver.com/2011-12-29/news/beyond-dna-difficult-tests-for-the-justice-system/

Change your Facebook setting now to avoid letting people hijack your account.

Facebook finally provided a way to keep any random jerk in the café from hijacking your account. But you have to go out of your way to enable this protection, and you might have to wait. Still: Jump on this.

Facebook has at long last offered an option to use the encrypted "HTTPS" protocol, a feature it will begin rolling out today but won't finish for a "few weeks." You should check now if it's available, and sign up as soon as it is enabled for your account. The performance overhead is minor—zippy Gmail, for example, uses HTTPS for everything—and it's an important step to keep your Facebook account safe from being hijacked on an open or poorly secured wireless network.

By default, Facebook sends your access credentials in the clear, with no encryption whatsoever. Switching to HTTPS is important because a browser extension called Firesheep has made it especially easy for anyone sharing your open wireless network—at cafe or conference, for example—to sniff your credentials and freely access your account. One blogger sitting in a random New York Starbucks was able to steal 20-40 Facebook identities in half an hour. HTTPS solves this longstanding problem by encrypting your login cookies and other data; in fact the inventor of Firesheep made the software to encourage companies like Facebook to finally lock down their systems.

You can sign up for Facebook HTTPS by going to Account Settings and then selecting "Account Security," third from the bottom. Then click under "Secure Browsing" — if it's there. Facebook says everyone should have this by the end of the day, but in the meantime you might be missing the relevant option toggle.
http://gawker.com/5744229/the-facebook-setting-you-should-change-as-quickly-as-possible

Elected officials in questionable alliances with gangs in an effort to secure votes.

Chicago, IL- A few months before last February’s citywide elections, Hal Baskin’s phone started ringing. And ringing. Most of the callers were candidates for Chicago City Council, seeking the kind of help Baskin was uniquely qualified to provide.

Baskin isn’t a slick campaign strategist. He’s a former gang leader and, for several decades, a community activist who now operates a neighborhood center that aims to keep kids off the streets. Baskin has deep contacts inside the South Side’s complex network of politicians, community organizations, and street gangs. as he recalls, the inquiring candidates wanted to know: “Who do I need to be talking to so I can get the gangs on board?”

Baskin—who was himself a candidate in the 16th Ward aldermanic race, which he would lose—was happy to oblige. In all, he says, he helped broker meetings between roughly 30 politicians (ten sitting aldermen and 20 candidates for City Council) and at least six gang representatives. That claim is backed up by two other community activists, Harold Davis Jr. and Kublai K. M. Toure, who worked with Baskin to arrange the meetings, and a third participant, also a community activist, who requested anonymity. The gang representatives were former chiefs who had walked away from day-to-day thug life, but they were still respected on the streets and wielded enough influence to mobilize active gang members.

The gang representatives were interested in electing aldermen sympathetic to their interests and those of their impoverished wards. As for the politicians, says Baskin, their interests essentially boiled down to getting elected or reelected. “All of the political hopefuls were aware of who they were meeting with,” he says. “They didn’t care. All they wanted to do was get the support.”
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2012/Gangs-and-Politicians-An-Unholy-Alliance/index.php?cparticle=1&siarticle=0#artanc

Ten Illinois legislators who logged the most recorded requests for transfers of prisoners—and the gang members they've helped:
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2012/Gangs-and-Politicians-Prisoner-Shuffle/

Wrongful incarcerations totaled 1,480 in the last five years, a Times report finds.

CA- Hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks behind bars before authorities realized those arrested were mistaken for wanted criminals, a Times investigation has found.

The wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years. They were the result of a variety of factors, including officials' overlooking fingerprint evidence and working off incomplete records.

The errors are so common that in some years people were jailed because of mistaken identity an average of once a day.

Many of those wrongly held inside the county's lockups had the same names as criminals or had their identities stolen — problems that took days or weeks for authorities to sort out.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wrong-id-20111225,0,7157038.story

Full Report: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jails-sg,0,4834651.storygallery

Sheriff Lee Baca to create task force to address wrongful jailings:
The L.A. County sheriff's move comes in response to a Los Angeles Times investigation that found that wrongful incarcerations occurred more than 1,480 times in the last five years.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wrong-id-jails-20111228,0,3640104.story

Amazon may begin spying on Kindle users.

We don't need to tell you how big an issue tracking software is. What we do need to tell you about is a new patent from Amazon that lays out its plan to track and predict your movements via mobile devices.

Made public last week, the patent describes a system that allows mobile devices — read Kindles, or a future Amazon phone — to track the geographical position of users, and then use that information to predict their likely next steps. The intention is then to use that information to better target ads, coupons, or other messages, that could appear either on the mobile device itself, or on big screens or other displays on the person's route.

Though the patent's not clear what data it would use to do all this, it could obviously use GPS, cell tower triangulation, or, to make it work with all Kindles, even wifi connections to spot location. That same data can then be used to estimate speed and direction of travel in order to predict future movements. The patent also describes how the predicted location would be used to take bids from third parties that want to send marketing messages. That's not a new concept in itself, but tied in with geographical targeting and digital snooping, it makes for a potent combination.
http://gawker.com/5868327/will-amazon-soon-spy-on-you-through-your-kindle?tag=privacy

Retailers are watching you shop, how long before authorities are linked to the feeds?

To get a better understanding of their customers in real time, mall operators are monitoring shoppers’ behavior with devices that track mobile-phone signals, while retailers including Montblanc, T-Mobile, and Family Dollar Stores are finding new uses for old tools such as in-store security cameras. The goal is to divine which variables affect a purchase, then act with Web-like nimbleness to deploy more salespeople, alter displays, or put out red blouses instead of blue. Until recently, “stores have been a black hole,” says Alexei Agratchev, chief executive officer of consultancy RetailNext. “People were convinced something was true and spending tens of millions based on that” without evidence to back it up.

Agratchev says RetailNext was founded in 2007 to change that. It helps retailers build systems to better understand customer behavior. In most cases, the company relies on the video from a store’s existing security camera system. That feed is run through RetailNext’s software, which analyzes the video and correlates it with sales data. The software can also integrate data from hardware such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips and motion sensors to track how often a brand of cereal is picked up or how many customers turn left when they enter a store. The company now has 40 retailer clients, including American Apparel and Family Dollar, and another 20 are testing the systems. RetailNext’s data sometimes refutes conventional wisdom. For instance, many food manufacturers pay a premium for their products to be displayed at the end of an aisle. But customers pay greater attention to products placed in the center of an aisle, according to RetailNext’s analysis.

Luxury retailer Montblanc began testing RetailNext’s video analytics at a store in Miami six months ago. Employees have used it to generate maps showing which parts of the store are best-trafficked and to decide where to place in-store decorations, salespeople, and merchandise. Rodrigo Fajardo, Montblanc’s brand manager in Miami, says RetailNext’s analysis helps his team make decisions faster. “We aren’t taking six months to make a change,” he says. “We analyze one week, and the next week we are making the changes.” He says the software has helped boost sales 20 percent and that Montblanc plans to expand its use to a dozen locations.

T-Mobile employs similar technology from San Francisco’s 3VR, a maker of security systems. Two years ago, 3VR executives realized that its cameras could be used to gather consumer data, according to the company’s CEO, Al Shipp. He says T-Mobile, in Bellevue, Wash., uses 3VR’s technology in some of its retail stores to track how people move around, how long they stand in front of displays, and which phones they pick up and for how long. T-Mobile declined to comment. Now 3VR is testing facial-recognition software that can identify shoppers’ gender and approximate age. The software would give retailers a better handle on customer demographics and help them tailor promotions, Shipp says. “You’ll have the ability someday to measure every metric imaginable. We’re scratching the surface.”

Shopping centers using FootPath post signs near entrances and mall maps informing shoppers that their mobile phones are being tracked and to turn off their phones if they don’t want to be monitored.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/big-brother-is-watching-you-shop-12152011.html

Alarming study reveals our school children are being Tazered and pepper sprayed.

There is something truly disturbing about a society that seeks to control the behavior of schoolchildren through fear and violence, a tactic that harkens back to an era of paddle-bruised behinds and ruler-slapped wrists. Yet, some American school districts are pushing the boundaries of corporal punishment even further with the use of Tasers against unruly schoolchildren.

The deployment of Tasers against “problem” students coincides with the introduction of police officers on school campuses, also known as School Resource Officers (SROs). According to the Los Angeles Times, as of 2009, the number of SROs carrying Tasers was well over 4,000.

A joint investigation carried out by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch found that students with disabilities “are subjected to violent discipline at disproportionately high rates.” Students with disabilities made up 19 percent of the nearly 250,000 public school students subjected to “violent” and “degrading” punishment in the 2006-2007 school year, despite being just 14 percent of the student population. Autistic students in particular, were “likely to be punished for behaviors common to their condition, stemming from difficulties with appropriate social behavior.”

Cruel punishments were also disproportionately dished out to black students, who during that same school year made up 35.6 percent of abused students but only 17.1 percent of the nationwide student population.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/153536/madness%3A_even_school_children_are_being_pepper-sprayed_and_shocked_with_tasers_/?page=entire

South Carolina- DNA points to another suspect so why is the prosecution still charging Billy Wayne Cope with murder?

Columbia, SC-  A life sentence given in a York County murder case before the S.C. Supreme Court has attracted the attention of veteran ex-prosecutors and national legal experts, who say it is a classic case of an innocent man being sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

The case of the State vs. Billy Wayne Cope involves a surprise DNA match, a possible false confession and questions about whether police and prosecutors overreached.

“Whatever the Supreme Court decides to do, we will be teaching this case for the rest of my career,” said University of South Carolina Law School legal ethics professor Greg Adams.

Last month, Adams devoted an entire legal ethics class before some 50 second- and third-year law students to the case. Cope, now 48, in 2004 was convicted of murder and criminal sexual conduct in the strangling death of his daughter Amanda, 12.

In February, Cope’s case will be a centerpiece of a two-day national conference at USC on ethical questions surrounding prosecutors in wrongful-conviction cases, Adams said.

For 20 months, the case has been before the S.C. Supreme Court. It has not yet decided whether to grant a hearing for a new trial.

A major issue stems from DNA found in saliva and semen on Amanda’s body. It was a perfect match but not for Cope.

 Instead, the DNA matched that of James Sanders, now 52, an ex-con, sex predator and burglar later charged with breaking into four houses in Cope’s neighborhood and assaulting women just after Amanda was murdered. Police didn’t learn that DNA results linked Sanders  but not Cope to Amanda until nine months after Cope had been charged.
http://www.thesunnews.com/2011/12/17/2555242/disputed-dna-murder-case-in-limbo.html

Seattle- A recently released report on officer-involved shootings says SPD culture must change.

SEATTLE - A recently-released report on officer involved shootings in Seattle recommends many of the same changes now set forth by federal investigators.

Rebecca Roe, a former senior deputy prosecutor for King County, authored the Citizen's Report.

Roe's 2010 report found that five of the six Seattle Police Department officer involved shootings were justified, but it also calls for additional training for officers dealing with confrontations. The report highlights areas where Roe believes officers need additional training on how to "disengage peacefully from situations where their authority has been legitimately challenged."

"If you approach somebody who is not doing anything wrong and you want to talk to them but they don't want to talk to you, they don't have to talk to you," Roe said.
http://www.komonews.com/news/local/New-report--136052748.html?tab=video&c=y

Firearms Review Board Citizens Observer Report 2010:
http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~CFS/CF_311849.pdf

The CIA's watchdog has no problem with it's relationship with the NYPD.

WASHINGTON - The CIA said Friday its internal watchdog found nothing wrong with the spy agency's close partnership with the New York Police Department.

The agency's inspector general concluded that no laws were broken and there was "no evidence that any part of the agency's support to the NYPD constituted 'domestic spying'," CIA spokesperson Preston Golson said.

The inspector general decided to do a preliminary investigation after a series of stories by The Associated Press revealed how after the 9/11 attacks the CIA helped the NYPD build domestic intelligence programs that were used to spy on Muslims. A CIA officer also directed intelligence collection and reviewed reports, according to former NYPD officials involved.

The revelations troubled some members of Congress and even prompted the U.S. director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to remark that it did not look good for the CIA to be involved in any city police department. Thirty-four lawmakers have asked for the Justice Department to investigate but so far that request has gone nowhere.
http://www.officer.com/news/10576864/cia-watchdog-has-no-problem-with-nypd-partnership

The Pentagon influenced TV analysts so the public would support Iraq/Afghanistan wars.

In January 2009, the inspector general’s office issued a report that said it had found no wrongdoing in the program. But soon after, the inspector general’s office retracted the entire report, saying it was so riddled with inaccuracies and flaws that none of its conclusions could be relied upon. In late 2009, the inspector general’s office began a new inquiry.    

The results of the new inquiry, first reported by The Washington Times, confirm that the Pentagon under Donald H. Rumsfeld made a concerted effort starting in 2002 to reach out to network military analysts to build and sustain public support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The inquiry found that from 2002 to 2008, Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon organized 147 events for 74 military analysts. These included 22 meetings at the Pentagon, 114 conference calls with generals and senior Pentagon officials and 11 Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Twenty of the events, according to a 35-page report of the inquiry’s findings, involved Mr. Rumsfeld or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or both.
  

One retired officer, the report said, recalled Mr. Rumsfeld telling him: “You guys influence a wide range of people. We’d like to be sure you have the facts.” 

The inspector general’s investigation grappled with the question of whether the outreach constituted an earnest effort to inform the public or an improper campaign of news media manipulation.

One military analyst described the talking points as “bullet points given for a political purpose.” Another military analyst, the report said, told investigators that the outreach program’s intent “was to move everyone’s mouth on TV as a sock puppet.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/us/pentagon-finds-no-fault-in-its-ties-to-tv-analysts.html?_r=1&hp

Inaccurate background checks can have devastating consequences.

The business of background checks is booming. Employers spend at least $2 billion a year to look into the pasts of their prospective employees. They want to make sure they're not hiring a thief, or worse.

But it is a system weakened by the conversion to digital files and compromised by the welter of private companies that profit by amassing public records and selling them to employers. These flaws have devastating consequences.

It is a system in which the most sensitive information from people's pasts is bought and sold as a commodity.

A system in which computers scrape the public files of court systems around the country to retrieve personal data. But a system in which what they retrieve isn't checked for errors that would be obvious to human eyes.

A system that can damage reputations and, in a time of precious few job opportunities, rob honest workers of a chance at a new start.

Those are the results of an investigation by The Associated Press that included a review of thousands of pages of court filings and interviews with dozens of court officials, data providers, lawyers, victims and regulators.

"It's an entirely new frontier," says Leonard Bennett, a Virginia lawyer who has represented hundreds of plaintiffs alleging they were the victims of inaccurate background checks. "They're making it up as they go along."

Two decades ago, if a county wanted to update someone's criminal record, a clerk had to put a piece of paper in a file. And if you wanted to read about someone's criminal past, you had to walk into a courthouse and thumb through it. Today, half the courts in the United States put criminal records on their public websites.

Digitization was supposed to make criminal records easier to access and easier to update. To protect privacy, laws were passed requiring courts to redact some information, such as birth dates and Social Security numbers, before they put records online. But digitization perpetuates errors.

"There's very little human judgment," says Sharon Dietrich, an attorney with Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, a law firm focused on poorer clients. Dietrich represents victims of inaccurate background checks. "They don't seem to have much incentive to get it right."

Dietrich says her firm fields about twice as many complaints about inaccurate background checks as it did five years ago.

The mix-ups can start with a mistake entered into the logs of a law enforcement agency or a court file. The biggest culprits, though, are companies that compile databases using public information.

In some instances, their automated formulas misinterpret the information provided them. Other times, records wind up assigned to the wrong people with a common name.

Another common problem: When a government agency erases a criminal conviction after a designated period of good behavior, many of the commercial databases don't perform the updates required to purge offenses that have been wiped out from public record.

It hasn't helped that dozens of databases are now run by mom-and-pop businesses with limited resources to monitor the accuracy of the records.http://www.telegram.com/article/20111216/NEWS/111219555/1116

A new study says nearly 1 in 3 Americans will be arrested before they reach 23 years old.

Nearly one in three people will be arrested by the time they are 23, a study to be published today in Pediatrics found.

"Arrest is a pretty common experience," says Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and principal author of the study.

The new data show a sharp increase from a previous study that stunned the American public when it was published 44 years ago by criminologist Ron Christensen. That study found 22% of youth would be arrested by age 23. The latest study finds 30.2% of young people will be arrested by age 23.

Criminologist Alfred Blumstein says the increase in arrests for young people in the latest study is unsurprising given several decades of tough crime policies.

The new study is an analysis of data collected between 1997 and 2008 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The annual surveys conducted over 11 years asked children, teens and young adults between the ages of 8 and 23 whether they had ever been arrested by police or taken into custody for illegal or delinquent offenses.

The question excluded only minor traffic offenses, so youth could have included arrests for a wide variety of offenses such as truancy, vandalism, underage drinking, shoplifting, robbery, assault and murder — any encounter with police perceived as an arrest, Brame says. Some of the incidents perceived and reported by the young people as arrests may not have resulted in criminal charges, he says.

“This estimate provides a real sense that the proportion of people who have criminal history records is sizable and perhaps much larger than most people would expect,” said Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the State University at Albany and a co-author of the study, which appears in Monday’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.

The study analyzed data collected as part of the federal government’s National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The 7,335 participants were nationally representative and ranged in age from 12 to 16 when they were enrolled in the survey in 1996. The first interviews were conducted in 1997. Follow-up interviews have been carried out annually since then.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Longitudinal Survey of Youth:
http://www.bls.gov/nls/

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-12-19/youth-arrests-increase/52055700/1?loc=interstitialskip

The lack of autopsies being performed in hospitals allow them to hide possible malpractice.

A half-century ago, an autopsy would have been routine. autopsies, sometimes called the ultimate medical audit, were an integral part of American health care, performed on roughly half of all patients who died in hospitals. Today, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show, they are conducted on about 5 percent of such patients.

Sudden unexpected deaths do not trigger postmortem reviews. Hospitals are not required to offer or perform autopsies. Insurers don’t pay for them. Some facilities and doctors shy away from them, fearing they may reveal malpractice. The downward trend is well-known — it’s been studied for years.

What has not been appreciated, pathologists and public health officials say, are the far-reaching consequences for U.S. health care of minuscule autopsy rates.

Diagnostic errors, which studies show are common, go undiscovered, allowing physicians to practice on other patients with a false sense of security. Opportunities are lost to learn about the effectiveness of medical treatments and the progression of diseases. Inaccurate information winds up on death certificates, undermining the reliability of crucial health statistics.

For the last year, ProPublica, PBS “Frontline” and NPR have probed America’s deeply flawed system of death investigation, focusing primarily on forensic autopsies, which are conducted by coroners’ offices and medical examiners when there is suspicion of an unnatural death. State laws vary, but the preponderance of deaths that occur in hospitals are considered natural. When deaths are unexplained, unobserved or within 24 hours of admission, hospitals may be required to report them to local coroners or medical examiners, but such agencies rarely take hospital cases.

Hospital physicians, with consent from patients’ next of kin, may order a clinical autopsy to explore the disease process in the body and determine the cause of death. That was the norm 50 years ago, when the value of the autopsy was considered self-evident.

“Much of what we know about medicine comes from the autopsy,” said Dr. Stephen Cina, chairman of the forensic pathology committee for the College of American Pathologists. “You really can’t say for sure what went on or didn’t go on without the autopsy as a quality assurance tool.”

“I know new hospitals are being built these days without a place to do an autopsy,” said Dr. Dean Havlik, the Mesa County, Colo., coroner, who estimated that the overall hospital autopsy rate in his area is less than 1 percent.

Hospitals have powerful financial incentives to avoid autopsies. An autopsy costs about $1,275, according to a survey of hospitals in eight states. But Medicare and private insurers don’t pay for them directly, typically limiting reimbursement to procedures used to diagnose and treat the living. Medicare bundles payments for autopsies into overall payments to hospitals for quality assurance, increasing the incentive to skip them, said Dr. John Sinard, director of autopsy service for the Yale University School of Medicine.

“The hospital is going to get the money whether they do the autopsy or not, so the autopsy just becomes an expense,” Sinard said. 
http://www.propublica.org/article/without-autopsies-hospitals-bury-their-mistakes

AT&T and Sprint claim their customers agreed to be tracked by Carrier IQ.

More than two weeks ago, security researcher Trevor Eckhart posted a video about Carrier IQ, an obscure software installed on approximately 150 million smartphones. The 17-minute video sparked a firestorm not only because it alleged the software logged numerous details about users' activities, but also because it did so without their knowledge.

But this week, two wireless carriers that use Carrier IQ's software said customers should not have been surprised that some of their activities were being tracked. In letters to Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), who asked them to explain how they used the software, AT&T and Sprint said Carrier IQ's capabilities were clearly outlined in their privacy policies.

AT&T gives "clear notice" to customers that "we collect network, performance and usage information from our network and customer devices, and we use that information to maintain and improve our network and their wireless experience," wrote Timothy McKone, AT&T's executive vice president for federal relations.

"Sprint believes customers expect service providers and network operators to take reasonable technological steps to maintain the performance of their networks and device functionality in order to effectively deliver call and data services to users," wrote Vonya McCann, senior vice president for government affairs at Sprint. "Sprint's privacy policy contains notice of the information we collect."

According to reports, Sprint says it is disabling Carrier IQ software on its devices.

Samsung and HTC, which also wrote letters to Franken, said they install Carrier IQ software on their devices at the behest of mobile carriers and do not receive data collected by the software. Franken gave T-Mobile and Motorola until Dec. 20 to explain their usage of Carrier IQ's software.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/17/att-sprint-carrier-iq-customers-agreed_n_1155040.html

Are deaf people receiving a fair trial in our justice system?

On August 4, 1981, Felix  Garcia accompanied his brother Frank, his sister Tina, and her boyfriend, Ray Stanley, to a pawnshop. Frank had a ring he wanted to hock. He said he didn't have his ID and asked Felix to sign the pawn ticket. The ring, it turned out, belonged to a man who'd been murdered the day before at a motel. Six days later police, having traced the ticket, arrested Felix at Tina and Ray's house.

Felix now says that he didn't understand the officer who read him his Miranda rights. In any case, he insisted he knew nothing about the crime, and he refused to sign a statement for the police. Michelle and her mother both later testified that Felix was with them at the time of the killing, eating pizza and watching videos at the mother's home. But Frank—who knew the victim and had left fingerprints at the scene—cut a deal with the state to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed robbery and fingered Felix as the killer. Tina—who married Ray shortly after the arrest—also agreed to testify against her younger brother. It wasn't until nearly a quarter century later that Frank would confess that Felix had had nothing to do with the crime.

At Felix's trial, in 1983, an expert declared that the defendant had a 70-decibel hearing loss, which is considered severe deafness. Through most of the proceedings, he had cotton in his ears to stop the pus. Felix was given a hearing aid, which he said didn't work, and a loudspeaker, which amplified noise but didn't help him understand what people were saying. He tried to read lips, but the prosecutor often faced away from him, and he had no clear view of the witness box. In other words, he was largely clueless as to what was going on.

"Deaf people have a hard time when they are thrown into the criminal-justice system," says MacKay Vernon, a psychologist and authority on the deaf who is familiar with the details of Felix's situation. "The courts—judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers—just don't understand what they're up against. Turning up the sound system doesn't mean the defendant better understands what's going on. He just hears more noise. In the case of Felix, sign language interpreters wouldn't be much help because at the time of the trial he couldn't understand signs. And anyhow, sign language interpreters can't keep up with the speech in courts. Moreover, deaf people often don't have the vocabulary to understand. Their ability to read can lag far behind hearing people."

The first motion, arguing that Felix's constitutional rights were violated because of his inability to understand trial testimony, was quickly shot down. In Florida, as in many states, defendants have only two years from the time of their direct appeal to file such motions. The deadline for Felix had passed some 12 years earlier.

Traditionally, the federal courts have provided recourse for constitutional claims that have timed out in state courts. But the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, championed by Bill Clinton and passed with broad bipartisan support in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, imposed time limits on such cases. "These statutes of limitations are just killers," says Steve Bright, senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, noting that the law cuts off appeals even in capital cases.

Laura Rovner, a former attorney for the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) who now runs the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, says Felix could well have had his conviction overturned were it not for that missed deadline. Under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, any entity receiving federal money needs to have an effective communication system in place for the deaf or hard of hearing. "It is hard to think of a situation where that is more critical than where somebody is being tried for a serious crime," Rovner says.

The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) strengthened that requirement, demanding that the criminal-justice system take "appropriate steps" to make sure a disabled person can communicate as effectively as anyone else. This might require "appropriate auxiliary aids and services," such as a setup akin to closed captioning or an oral interpreter to facilitate lip reading.

In fact, criminal justice agencies "frequently do not honor the letter and spirit of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act," says Howard Rosenblum, who heads the NAD. "The challenge has been to actually litigate against every law enforcement agency, lawyer, court, and prison that violate the requirements." The Justice Department could enforce the requirements, he adds, but to a large degree has failed to do so. (The DOJ asked me to submit written questions for this story but did not respond to them by press time.)
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/deaf-prisoners-felix-garcia

The Dept. of Justice report says the Seattle police department used excessive force.

The Seattle Police Department has broken its trust with the community by using excessive force, charged federal investigators who called for more training and better supervision.
The conclusions were reached after more than eight months of investigation into the department's use of force, Assistant Atty. Gen. Thomas E. Perez of the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division told reporters Friday at a Seattle news conference.

"We found that the systems of accountability are broken. Accountability is at the heart of constitutional policing," Perez said, adding that the Justice Department would work with local officials to improve training and supervision. "The trust between the Seattle Police Department and the people of Seattle is broken and must be repaired."

While insistent in calling for change, including a court monitor to check on progress, federal officials stopped short of finding that the police had engaged in discriminatory policing, and were gracious to the department, which has been under community fire after several cases of violence against minorities. U.S. Atty. Jenny A. Durkan cited the city's cooperation with the investigation and willingness to make changes as reasons to be optimistic.

"We take the allegations very seriously," Mayor Mike McGinn said in a telephone interview, adding that the city was looking forward to working with Justice officials. "I and Police Chief John Diaz are committed to the best police force possible, open and transparent. We will continue to work building trust with community."

The Justice Department is investigating about 20 police departments across the country, Perez said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-justice-seattle-20111217,0,7302236.story

Dept. of Justice Report on the Seattle police department: http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/spd_findletter_12-16-11.pdf

UK- Police include Occupy movement on ‘terror’ list, how long before the US follows suit?

The city of London police have sparked controversy by producing a brief in which the Occupy London movement is listed under domestic terrorism/extremism threats to City businesses.

The document was given to protesters at their “Bank of Ideas” base on Sun Street – a former site of financial corporation UBS. City police have stepped up an effort to quell the movement since they occupied the building on 18 November, with the document stating: “It is likely that activists aspire to identify other locations to occupy, especially those they identify with capitalism.

“Intelligence suggests that urban explorers are holding a discussion at the Sun Street squat. This may lead to an increase in urban exploration activity at abandoned or high profile sites in the capital.” The Occupy movement is listed alongside threats posed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), Al Qaeda and Belarusian terrorists. 

“Just the words themselves are enough to deceive the public opinion and this is what we see at the moment,” Occupy spokesman Spyro Van Leemnen told Yahoo! News. “We are clearly nothing to do with extremists or terrorists, we are a peaceful group and we do use direct action to raise our point but definitely not terrorism.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/police-include-occupy-movement-on-%E2%80%98terror%E2%80%99-list.html

ACLU report- Protecting privacy from aerial drones.

The federal government has held up the domestic use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) out of concern for the safety of U.S. airspace. The use of UAVs have been mostly limited to the U.S.-Mexico border and in war-zones outside the country.

But pressure is going on the FAA to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to gain permission to use UAVs. “Proposed legislation would require the FAA to grant permits more quickly and allow broader use of the technology by 2015,” the ACLU report states. “Meanwhile, amid the mounting pressure, the FAA is planning to create a more permissive approval system for commercial UAV operations, which have been severely restricted until now.”

There are hundreds of different models of UAVs, from large fixed-wing aircraft to a tiny drone called the Nano Hummingbird. The drones employ a wide range of surveillance technology as well, including high-power zoom lenses, infrared and ultraviolet imaging, see-through imaging and video analytics. Some drones are also large enough to be fitted with weapons.

“Our privacy laws are not strong enough to ensure that the new technology will be used responsibly and consistently with democratic values,” warns the ACLU report. “We need a system of rules to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this technology without bringing us a large step closer to a ‘surveillance society’ in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities.”
https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/protectingprivacyfromaerialsurveillance.pdf

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/15/police-departments-could-soon-have-easier-access-to-airborne-drones-report/

Genealogy websites remove deceased individuals SSN #'s from their listings.

Washington, DC - The world's largest commercial genealogy website this week removed the Social Security numbers of recently deceased individuals, two weeks after lawmakers urged the site, Ancestry.com, to stop enabling ID thieves by posting the sensitive information.

A spokeswoman for the Provo, Utah, company said that "there was some sensitivity" about the company policy of releasing the numbers. That led to a "purposeful decision" to not post the numbers for those who have died in the last 10 years, spokeswoman Heather Erickson said.

An employee with a second website, Genealogybank.com, said that the Naples, Fla., company also has decided to stop posting Social Security numbers.

The moves come six weeks after a Scripps Howard News Service investigation showed how people obtain and use the deceased's Social Security numbers -- which are freely released by the government -- to commit identity fraud, including submitting false tax returns and collecting refunds.

The lawmakers are continuing to press Social Security to limit the information it releases. The agency has said it cannot act until Congress changes the law, and a spokesman did not return a request for comment for this article.
http://scrippsnews.com/content/genealogy-sites-remove-social-security-numbers-deceased

Justice dept. finds widespread use of excessive force by Seattle police.

A federal civil-rights investigation into the Seattle Police Department has found routine and widespread use of excessive force by officers, and city and police officials were told at a stormy Thursday night meeting that they must fix the problems or face a federal lawsuit, according to two sources.

The meeting, attended by Mayor Mike McGinn, Police Chief John Diaz, members of his command staff and others, ended in raised voices and bitter accusations by city and police officials, upset at the Justice Department's findings, the sources said. One source said the language in the agency's report, to be officially released Friday, is "astoundingly critical" of the department.

The sources confirmed the city will get a chance to work with the Justice Department to address the issues, or it will face a federal lawsuit that could result in fines, penalties and even the appointment of an outside special master to oversee the Police Department.

The Justice Department's  most recently announced findings, released Thursday and detailing widespread racial profiling by the Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff's Office, took more than three years. See article below...

Department of Justice letter to the Seattle police department November 2012: http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/268702-doj-letter-to-spd

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2017026414_doj16m.html

Probe Finds Arizona Sheriff Violated Civil Rights.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice released the results of a three-year investigation in which authorities conclude that Arpaio and his deputies are the ones who have been breaking the law.

According to investigators, Arpaio's office was found to routinely discriminate against Latinos and retaliate against its critics, in violation of both the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, says his investigation also uncovered widespread racial profiling.

"Our expert found that Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped than similarly situated non-Latino drivers," Perez says, adding that they were often stopped for no good cause. "This expert concluded that this case involved the most egregious racial profiling in the United States that he had ever personally observed in the course of his work."

Federal investigators made two more critical findings regarding the Maricopa County sheriff's office. The first is an illegal pattern of retaliation that they say comes straight from the top of the department.

Justice Department findings Maricopa County, AZ:
http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/274910-justice-department-findings-in-its-investigation.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/16/us/arizona-sheriffs-office-unfairly-targeted-latinos-justice-department-says.html

DHS and an American-Israeli anti terror think tank are accused of spying on environmental protestors.

  HARRISBURG, PA - The Gas Drilling Awareness Coalition sufficiently pleaded First Amendment violations in its lawsuit against an American-Israeli anti-terror think tank that contracted with Pennsylvania's Office of Homeland Security to keep tabs on environmentalists' protests against natural gas drillers, a federal judge ruled.

     U.S. District Judge William Caldwell denied qualified immunity to defendant James Powers Jr., the former director of Pennsylvania's Office of Homeland Security, who allegedly approved the contract.But Caldwell dismissed the Coalition's request for an injunction prohibiting the defendant Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITTR) from acting as a state agent to surveil groups engaging in peaceful First Amendment conduct in Pennsylvania.

     The alleged contract has been canceled and the requested injunction is therefore "overreaching," the judge found in an 18-page opinion filed Monday.

     According to the Coalition's September 2010 lawsuit, the group was swept up "in a prolonged and secret campaign of domestic surveillance" after Powers gave the green light to a $125,000 contract for the Institute to "regularly surveil and report on potential terrorist threats against ... Pennsylvania's critical infrastructure."

     That surveillance was published in the form of tri-weekly "Pennsylvania Intelligence Bulletins" which "were routinely transmitted to Marcellus gas drilling 'stakeholders'" and to law-enforcement agencies to keep them abreast of "plaintiff's campaign against their unregulated drilling plans," according to the complaint.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/12/14/42225.htm

Court Filing: http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/12/14/Fracking.pdf

Could being Facebook "friends" overturn a conviction?

Blogging lawyers and tweeting jurors already are under scrutiny as social media invades the country’s courtrooms.

Now, a Wilmington woman found guilty of battering a child wants her conviction overturned partly because members of her alleged victim’s family are Facebook “friends” with her judge’s children. They could take their argument to a Joliet courtroom Wednesday.

Kelly A. Klein and her attorney, Steven Becker, argue in court filings that Will County Judge Daniel Rozak should have recused himself before presiding over Klein’s bench trial and finding her guilty in June. They’ve filled her case file with printouts of his son’s and daughters’ Facebook pages, and they claim the relationship between the Rozaks and the Basham Family goes deeper than a simple social-media connection.

“It is now apparent that the Facebook friendships between the Rozaks and the Bashams are only the tip of the iceberg,” Becker wrote.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/9422311-417/facebook-friends-of-will-county-judges-children-at-issue-in-new-trial-bid.html?intcmp=emailheadlines

The FBI might have access to every keystroke on your smartphone.

Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield has an interesting commentary on revelations that the FBI may be availing itself of some of Carrier IQ’s “features” that its customers may be deploying:

… this doesn’t mean they already have their hands on your text messages, or even that there’s any cooperation on the part of Carrier IQ. Indeed, there may be a passel of issues surrounding any effort to gain access to every keystroke you ever tapped on your smartphone, though it would appear that since it’s in the hands of a third party, no Fourth Amendment right attaches. On the other hand, since no one knew this was happening, and it came as a huge, and scandalous surprise to the public, a court should be hard pressed to conclude that it passes scrutiny under Katz’s reasonable expectation of privacy test.

But now you do know. And so does the FBI. And as long as you continue to tap, tap, tap on that cute little qwerky keyboard, you can’t deny you took the risk of exposure to the government by Carrier IQ.

We’re inundated with the magic of technology, making our world easier, faster and perpetually more fabulous. Those who adore technology gush over every shiny new toy. And to a large extent, the toys are great fun and occasionally useful. But nobody wants to be serious about the perils. And there is no shortage of perils.

My deep understanding of all things technical precludes me from discussing the potential of evils that could stem from this rootkit. I don’t even know what a rootkit is. But I know too well that the government will have no qualms about using it to their advantage if they can get their hands on it.

So enjoy those new, shiny toys. Tap to your heart’s content. Hang in the clouds. Eventually, we’ll find out whether you had some unexpected company with you, and by the time it reaches a circuit court and a decision is made about how unreasonable you were to expect that your private, personal communications and messages would remain private, it will be too late to worry about it. By then, you will be informed that everyone knows that there’s no privacy in the technological, digital, shiny toy world. But by then, it will be too late to worry about it.
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2011/12/13/the-fbi-reads-the-internet-too.aspx

Newly released emails show a disturbing relationship between American Traffic Solutions and police.

The distinction between employees for a private photo enforcement firm and taxpayer-funded public servants blurred in the city of Lynnwood, Washington. Emails between city officials and American Traffic Solutions (ATS) suggest a cozy relationship developed where both sides were willing to perform the duties of the other in terms of marketing and public relations.

Lynnwood Police Sergeant Wayne "Kawika" Davis, for example, used official government resources and time to come up with a marketing plan to sell for the privately held firm at a conference held at the Tulalip Resort Casino in June.

"Ray, I really believe this is a great venue for ATS exposure," Davis wrote in a May 19 email to ATS project manager Ray Pedrosa. "I have some ideas that really could market ATS in WA, ID, OR and Canada. I know you are already in some of these areas; however, there is a lot more business to be had. Is there someone in marketing that you might turn me on to?

ATS was equally generous in inviting municipal employees from across the country to attend a complimentary seminar in Arizona discussing "tips and tricks for speaking with the media" regarding red light cameras and "when to panic, when to relax" regarding efforts in the state legislature to restrict automated ticketing. Airfare, lodging and wages during such events is considered official business and paid by taxpayers. ATS picked up the rest of the tab, for which municipal employees expressed gratitude.

http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/36/3663.asp
ATS emails: http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2011/wa-atsemail.pdf

Carrier IQ claims it wants to be transparent about its monitoring of smart phones.

As the company prepares to answer the questions put to it by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, it’s hoping to set the record straight, once and for all, by publishing a definitive report (embedded below) on the functionality of its software, including an in-depth analysis of the video that inspired the allegations against it.

In an exclusive interview with AllThingsD, Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart, and Andrew Coward, the company’s VP of marketing, discuss that report, why its software isn’t opt-in, and how it handles law enforcement requests.

This following statements reads like an incredible tale of fiction:

The document you’re releasing today says that a bug in your software may have caused some SMS messages to be unintentionally collected. Can you talk about this a bit? Should we worry?

Coward: As we went and did a deep dive into our technology to prove to consumers that there is nothing untoward in it, we found a bug. We found that if an SMS was sent simultaneously while a user is on the phone, the SMS would be captured by our software. Obviously, this is something that doesn’t happen very often, but we discovered that it could happen, and we caught it. Now, that information was never used. It wasn’t decoded. It sat on a server in encoded format, and no one could really get to it.

Lenhart: We didn’t even know the data was being captured. The actual information is in nonreadable format. And our customers didn’t know it was there. So it was never looked at. Over the past few weeks, we worked with our customers to resolve the issue.
http://allthingsd.com/20111213/carrier-iq-gets-transparent-about-its-mobile-monitoring/

Three of the four major cellular providers — AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint — have said they use the company’s software in line with their own privacy policies. A Verizon spokesman said the program is not on any of the company’s mobile devices. Apple has said it would remove Carrier IQ from i­Phones in a future software update.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/feds-probing-carrier-iq/2011/12/14/gIQA9nCEuO_story.html

"In-Q-Tel: A New Partnership
Between the CIA and the Private Sector":


Readers should check out the link to the CIA which details Carrier IQ's relationship with them:

Why was In-Q-Tel Created?

The Agency’s leadership recognized that the CIA did not, and could not, compete for IT innovation and talent with the same speed and agility that those in the commercial marketplace, whose businesses are driven by "Internet time" and profit, could. The CIA’s mission was intelligence collection and analysis, not IT innovation. The leadership also understood that, in order to extend its reach and access a broad network of IT innovators, the Agency had to step outside of itself and appear not just as a buyer of IT but also as a seller. The CIA had to offer Silicon Valley something of value, a business model that the Valley understood; a model that provides those who joined hands with In-Q-Tel the opportunity to commercialize their innovations. In addition, In-Q-Tel’s partner companies would also gain another valuable asset, access to a set of very difficult CIA problems that could become market drivers. Once the Agency’s leadership crossed these critical decision points, the path that led to In-Q-Tel’s formation was clear.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/additional-publications/in-q-tel/index.html

New survey suggests more than 20,000 innocent people are behind bars in the US.

Before we talk about how many people may be behind bars for crimes they did not commit, we must acknowledge that it's nearly impossible to know—only broad estimates are possible. There are several key reasons, experts say, why a number is so hard to ascertain. Because the sprawling criminal justice system is a patchwork of federal, state, county, and municipal courts, prisons, and jails—each with its own system (or lack thereof) of record-keeping and data-reporting—we don't even know how many people are convicted, let alone wrongfully convicted, of crimes in the United States. "We don’t even have a denominator," says University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett. "But the wrongful convictions we do know about suggest that there's a big problem."

Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted.

Moreover, a tiny amount of total criminal cases actually go to trial. Nineteen out of twenty, or 95 percent, of convictions in the US are by plea bargain—and so we know little about them. They "generate virtually no records that can be retrieved," writes Gross: "no trial transcripts, no appeals, frequently no court hearings of any sort, in many cases no description of the investigation at all beyond a single police report, which (if it could be found) might include little factual information of any value."
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/innocent-people-us-prisons

FBI claims Carrier IQ files are being used for "law enforcement purposes."

A recent FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for "manuals, documents or other written guidance used to access or analyze data gathered by programs developed or deployed by Carrier IQ" was met with a telling denial. In it, the FBI stated it did have responsive documents - but they were exempt under a provision that covers materials that, if disclosed, might reasonably interfere with an ongoing investigation. The FBI tells the public we have documents detailing our work with Carrier IQ, but we're not going to tell you about it.

Carrier IQ came under fire after a security researcher demonstrated that the previously little-known company had software installed on a variety of phones on a variety of networks that could track user locations, keystrokes, encrypted Internet traffic and more, some of which was or could be sent back to either the cell phone owner's service provider or Carrier IQ's own servers.

What is still unclear is whether the FBI used Carrier IQ's software in its own investigations, whether it is currently investigating Carrier IQ, or whether it is some combination of both - not unlikely given the recent uproar over the practice coupled with the U.S. intelligence communities reliance on third-party vendors. The response would seem to indicate at least the former, since the request was specifically for documents related directly to accessing and analyzing Carrier IQ data.
http://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2011/dec/12/fbi-carrier-iq-files-used-law-enforcement-purposes/

http://gizmodo.com/5867427/the-fbi-is-using-carrier-iq-information

Should ICE be allowed to police itself?

Immigrants in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are among the country’s most vulnerable detainees. Many speak little English, and fear retribution if they report sexual or physical abuse.

But a proposed rule released in January by the Department of Justice excluded them from the expanded federal protections against sexual abuse or harassment of prisoners under PREA, passed unanimously in 2003.

The proposed rule shocked civil liberties and immigrant rights advocates, said Joanne Lin, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

But can ICE effectively police its far-flung facilities—many of which are operated by private companies or local law enforcement?

The problem was recognized by the 2009 report produced by the commission appointed to formulate national standards for the law. After five years of study, the commission called for a zero-tolerance policy for sex and sexual assault, limitations on cross-gender pat-downs and greater protections for juveniles in detention, among others.

Recommendations included special protections for ICE detainees, such as measures to assure they were separated from the general population in jails, to offer them access to counseling and to provide better access to outside groups for reporting.

“Because immigration detainees are confined by the agency with the power to deport them, officers have an astounding degree of leverage,” the commissioners wrote. “The fear of deportation cannot be overstated and also functions to silence many individuals who are sexually abused.”

ICE’s new standards, originally slated to be enacted in 2010, have been delayed several times. Just Detention International, a Washington-based advocacy group that works to halt sexual abuse in custody, said the most recent public draft of the standards falls short of what is needed to keep detainees safe.

Among the shortcomings highlighted by Just Detention: they do not detail how a detainee can report abuse; they don’t provide confidential support services for victims; and they don’t provide for outside audits.
http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/inside-criminal-justice/2011-12-can-ice-police-itself

Collection agencies resort to throwing American's in jail for unpaid debt.

Collection agencies are resorting to some unusually harsh tactics to force people to pay their unpaid debt, some of whom aren't aware that lawsuits have been filed against them by creditors.

Here's how it happens: A company will often sell off its debt to a collection agency, generally called a creditor. That creditor files a lawsuit against the debtor requiring a court appearance. A notice to appear in court is supposed to be given to the debtor. If they fail to show up, a warrant is issued for their arrest.

Beverly Yang, a legal aid attorney with Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance, says most debtors don't know their rights.

In fact, she says, some judges don't even know debtors' rights, which could result in the debtor being intimidated into a pay agreement.

"I've seen this even when I'm standing in the court room as the legal aid attorney," Yang says. "The judge will ask if they can pay, how about $150 a month. How about $75 a month? How come you can't even pay $50 a month? Did you apply for a job last week?"

The Federal Trade Commission received more than 140,000 complaints related to debt collection in 2010. That's nearly 25,000 more than the previous year.

Yang says some creditors are eager to use harsh tactics. "Whatever the creditors or the creditors' attorneys can do to leverage some kind of payment, it will help their profits enormously because they have, literally, millions of these."

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan thinks more can be done. It's illegal in Illinois for people to be sent to jail because they're in debt. But Madigan thinks some creditors are abusing the law.

"You wouldn't be in that predicament if you didn't have debt," Madigan says. "But for being in debt, you wouldn't be in prison. And that essentially equates to being thrown in jail, debtors' prison."http://www.npr.org/2011/12/12/143274773/unpaid-bills-land-some-debtors-behind-bars

ProPublica found that whites are almost four times as likely as minorities to be pardoned.

If the government wants to correct racial disparity in presidential pardons, it will require a hard look at the standards used to judge applicants and whether there is implicit bias in the way decisions are made, a wide range of experts told ProPublica.

In an in-depth investigation of the presidential pardons process, published this week, ProPublica found that white applicants were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities, even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence were considered.
Pro Publica study: http://www.propublica.org/series/presidential-pardons

The Justice Department has said it is reviewing ProPublica’s statistical analysis on race and other factors in the pardons process, including a finding that applicants with letters of congressional support are three times as likely to be pardoned as those without.

Jack Glaser, a University of California, Berkeley, expert on discrimination who reviewed ProPublica's analysis, said the process invites “way too much discretion.”

“To the extent that they allow their staff to be making judgments into somebody’s attitude — that’s an entry point for bias,” Glaser said. “It’s not that it’s a reflection of racial biases, because there are also cultural attitudes. White people understand white people better. They may not understand the outlooks of minority people as well.”
http://www.propublica.org/article/racial-disparity-in-presidential-pardons-what-can-be-done

A convicted man was in jail when he was accused of an armed robbery.

Texas- Sentenced to life in prison in November for armed robbery, LaDondrell Montgomery insisted he was not the shadowy figure on surveillance video. He swore the eyewitness identifying him were flat wrong.

If only the 36-year-old habitual offender had an alibi. If only he could remember exactly where he was that day of the robbery.

A week after jurors sentenced Montgomery, his attorney was researching the felon's lengthy rap sheet. In that file was a report that had details about a 2009 arrest and an iron-clad alibi: He was in jail. Released from custody about nine hours after the December 13, 2009 crime, Montgomery was actually innocent.

State District Judge Mark Kent Ellis shook his head as he berated Ray and prosecutors for the oversight."It boggles the mind that neither side knew about this during trial," Ellis said Thursday. "Both sides in this case were spectacularly incompetent."

The judge personally apologized to Montgomery, who stood at the bench in an orange jail uniform.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Convicted-man-was-in-jail-when-crime-occurred-2391025.php

The first known arrests of U.S. citizens by police using a Predator drone occurred in North Dakota.

North Dakota- Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said.

Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

He also called in a Predator B drone.

As the unmanned aircraft circled 2 miles overhead the next morning, sophisticated sensors under the nose helped pinpoint the three suspects and showed they were unarmed. Police rushed in and made the first known arrests of U.S. citizens with help from a Predator, the spy drone that has helped revolutionize modern warfare.

But that was just the start. Local police say they have used two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June. The FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration have used Predators for other domestic investigations, officials said.

The drones belong to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which operates eight Predators on the country's northern and southwestern borders to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers. The previously unreported use of its drones to assist local, state and federal law enforcement has occurred without any public acknowledgment or debate.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drone-arrest-20111211,0,324348.story

Gamma International videos show how to hack WiFi, Skype and email.

What better way to sell your wares than to produce a marketing video showing exactly how your product works? Even if that product is spyware, marketed to oppressive regimes.

WikiLeaks, as part of its Spy Files trove of documents, released on Thursday a series of videos from Gamma International, a UK-based firm that markets the Finfisher spyware. The video shows how the company’s product can be used to sniff WiFi networks from a hotel lobby, hack computers and cell phones, or intercept Skype communications and siphon encryption passwords.
 Gamma International videos: http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/releasedate/2011-12-08.html#

Additionally, Gamma, which was found to have marketed its tools to Hosni Mubarak’s regime before Egyptian protestors toppled him, asserts in one of its videos that it has the ability to send a “fake iTunes update” to targets to infect their computers with the company’s surveillance software – though Apple has reportedly fixed the bug it exploited.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/spy-firm-videos/

Anatomy of a bad confession Parts 1 & 2

WORCESTER, MA. — The world has always had its ways of extracting confessions. The rack, the screw, dunking — a method applied to suspected witches in Salem — the old, recently revived art of waterboarding and the simple rubber hose that gave menace to “the third degree” in the black and white heyday of police detectives have all proven their worth in winning confessions. It was only in 1936 that the common practices of hanging suspects out of windows, hitting them with hoses, and plunging their heads under water were effectively outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nowadays, police departments mainly rely upon psychological tools to extract confessions. If these methods seem less brutal in comparison, they can be even more effective, as a growing number of scientifically proven false confessions have demonstrated.

Ms. Truong's lawyer, Edward P. Ryan Jr. of Fitchburg, said he was appalled by the tactics of the detectives in the case.

“In 35 years, I have never seen a more brutal interrogation. Brutal in the sense that the emotional torture inflicted on this girl was shocking,” Mr. Ryan said. “I was fairly confident from the moment that I watched that video that this confession was false, that she only told them what they forced her to say.”

In her ruling throwing out the confession, Superior Court Judge Janet Kenton-Walker found that Miss Truong's statements to the detectives were not made voluntarily, and investigators did not offer her a “genuine opportunity,” as required by law, to consult with a parent, interested adult or lawyer about her right to remain silent before she spoke with police.

“When, as here, there exists a combination of trickery and implied promises, together with Nga's young age, lack of experience and sophistication, her emotional state, as well as the aggressive nature of the interrogation, the totality of the circumstances suggests a situation potentially coercive to the point of making an innocent person confess to a crime,” the judge wrote.

http://www.telegram.com/article/20111208/NEWS/112089614/1116

Anatomy of a bad confession-Excerpt 1

To view all the videos click on the link at the bottom.

Anatomy of a bad confession: Part 1
http://www.wbur.org/2011/12/07/worcester-coerced-confession-i

Anatomy of a bad confession: Part 2
http://www.wbur.org/2011/12/08/worcester-coerced-confession-ii

Anatomy of a bad confession:Videos
http://www.wbur.org/2011/12/07/coerced-confession-videos