Law

Former Chicago police officer and FBI informant Keith Herrera told “60 Minutes” that pressure to get results in the war on drugs led to police officers lying about the facts in order to get arrests, and ultimately to a corrupt ring of officers engaging in thefts from drug dealers and a plot to kill two of fellow officers who weren’t with the program and were prepared to testify against them. Herrera is one of seven officers in the Special Operations Section who have been charged with robbery, kidnapping, and other crimes. (As reported by Reuters on Yahoo.)

Anti-piracy company MediaDefender, which defends its clients’ intellectual property by disrupting the content on peer-to-peer networks, launched a denial of service attack (SYN flood) against Revision3 over Memorial Day weekend. The attack was launched after Revision3 discovered that their servers were being used by MediaDefender to post spoofed BitTorrent index files and Revision3 shut off their access. Revision3, a legitimate company that distributes HD video over the Internet using BitTorrent, was not amused, and the FBI is investigating. Any legitimate Internet provider should refuse to provide services to companies that engage in illegal or immoral tactics to try to stop peer-to-peer piracy of copyrighted content, such as denial of service attacks or interference with services that are being used legitimately, even if they are also being used for piracy. If they don’t have methods which can be targeted specifically against the copyrighted content they are authorized to protect, then their methods cross the line, in my opinion. MediaDefender’s upstream network providers are Savvis (ASN 3561), Beyond the Network (ASN 3491), WV Fiber (ASN 19151), and SingTel (ASN 7473). They all should have a problem with denial of service attacks by their customer. MediaDefender was previously in the news in September 2007 when its security was breached by hackers and 700 MB of executive emails and the content of VoIP telephone calls from the company were leaked to the Internet. This seems to me like a company that should not be in business. ...

James J. Buchanan of the Christ Life Church in Tempe, Arizona, is accused of defrauding 30-40 people out of over $5 million over the last ten years. He claimed to be a financial planner, and took many people’s life’s savings, as well as money from the church. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office says it’s hard to tell where the money went, but it appears that he used some of it to pay off early investors in classic Ponzi scheme style, and spent the rest on himself. His scheme collapsed this March, after he refused to provide documentation to show where one investor’s money was, and that investor refused a payoff to stay quiet and went to the police. (A previous discussion of religious affinity fraud on the increase, at the Secular Outpost.) UPDATE (11 February 2012): Also see “Affinity fraud: Fleecing the flock” from The Economist, January 28, 2012.

The UK’s ridiculous laws are not only being used to infringe free speech in the UK, as when a 15-year-old picketing the Church of Scientology is given a citation for a sign referring to Scientology as a “cult," but to chill speech elsewhere as a result of its bad libel laws, where it seems to be all-too-easy for a deep-pocketed plaintiff to get a judgment against publishers of legitimate criticism. Recent examples include Khalid Salim A. Bin Mahfouz’s lawsuit against U.S. author Rachel Ehrenfeld for her book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, which resulted in a $225,000 default judgment against Ehrenfeld in London, even though she doesn’t live there and the book wasn’t published there; Bin Mahfouz obtained standing because some individuals in Britain purchased the book. This has led to the State of New York proposing an amendment to its code of civil practice to prohibit the enforcement of foreign libel judgments. Bin Mahfouz has similarly successfully sued in the UK against other writers 33 times for linking him to terrorism. Similarly, a Ukrainian tycoon, Rinat Akhmetov, has sued in London against a Ukrainian newspaper, the Kyiv Post, owned by an American, even though it’s not published in the UK, on the grounds that 100 subscribers are located in Britain. Akhmetov has also successfully sued Obozrevatel (Observer), a Ukrainian Internet news site that’s not even in English, in the UK. I think New York has the right idea. Better yet would be if Britain reforms its libel and insult laws. UPDATE (May 23, 2008): The Crown Prosecution Service has declined to prosecute the boy with the “cult” sign, stating that “Our advice is that it is not abusive or insulting and there is no offensiveness (as opposed to criticism), neither in the idea expressed nor in the mode of expression.” Yet abuse, insult, and offense should not be the standard in any case. Ed Brayton has now commented on that story at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. ...

Dennis Prager writes, regarding the California Supreme Court’s decision to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage, that: The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity - especially females - can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction - until now, accomplished through marriage. It sounds like he thinks that female heterosexuality is so tenuous that it must be enforced by the power of law. Does he also think this is a justification for denying civil liberties and rights to women? Ed Brayton gives a good fisking to Prager’s entire crazy essay on this subject, showing that his arguments are very similar to arguments that were made against integration and interracial marriage in response to Supreme Court decisions. ...

The director of “The Secret” video, Drew Heriot, is suing its author, Rhonda Byrne, for $150 million. Heriot claims he co-authored the screenplay and the book and is thus owed half of what the book and DVD have earned. “The Secret” advocates the “law of attraction,” which claims that everybody always gets what they deserve because what you think about comes to you. Apparently Heriot and Byrne have been thinking a lot about giving money to lawyers. Byrne previously settled another legal case with “holistic healer” Vanessa Bonnette in Australia, and is facing two other lawsuits in the United States. Previous critiques of the utter nonsense that is “The Secret” may be found here. The fact that this claptrap has made so much money is a poor reflection on the gullibility and idiocy of far too many people on this planet. ...

Conservative “family values” Republican Congressman Vito Fossella (R-NY) was arrested on DUI charges on May 1, 2008, and released to the custody of retired Air Force Lt. Col. Laura Fay. He originally claimed that he had been driving to pick up his sick daughter, then revised his story the next day to claim he was going to visit a sick friend. During his press conference, he refused to deny that he had previously driven under the influence of alcohol. In fact, he had been having an extramarital affair with Fay for years, and had fathered an illegitimate child with her, which he admitted on May 8 after days of denials. He had essentially been living a double life, with his wife in New York City and with Fay and their now 3-year-old daughter in Washington, D.C. Fossella has a lesbian sister, with whom he cut off all contact, and refuses to attend any family events if she is present with her partner. Some “family values." His Wikipedia page lists several other controversies regarding the Congressman, including financial misconduct. No doubt more will be found as his record is scrutinized further. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars and Wikipedia.)

The Washington Post reports that there have been more than 250 recent cases of the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency giving “pre-flight cocktail” injections of psychotropic drugs to foreigners being deported. These injections of antipsychotic drugs have been given to people with no history of mental illness and for no medical justification, with the only apparent purpose to sedate them during their flights. The practice of “involuntary chemical restraint of detainees” without medical justification violates some international human rights codes, according to the Post, and is banned in several countries. Confidential documents obtained by the newspaper indicate that in some of the cases they report, detainees were not able to be given additional injections during layovers because to do so would be illegal in the countries in question. These sedations violate the government’s own rules, which only permit sedation if the individual has a mental illness which requires the drugs or if the person is aggressive to the point of creating a danger to those around them. The Post reports that during 2007, there were 67 people deported with medical escorts with no medical justification, 53 of whom were given psychiatric drugs, and 48 of whom had no documented history of violence. Most of those given drugs appear to be individuals who had previously resisted deportation. One man deported to Nigeria was still under the effects of the drugs for four days after his arrival. One drug often reported used was Haldol, which created some controversy during George H.W. Bush’s presidency when it was reported that he took the drug to avoid jet lag; some speculated that this drug was the cause of his vomiting at a dinner with (and vomiting on) the Prime Minister of Japan. A related story in the Post looks at 80 cases of deaths of immigration detainees, of which 30 were found to be “questionable,” including two in Arizona. (Via The Agitator.)

The Arizona House has passed SB 10242 and sent it on to the Senate. This would put a measure to the voters to amend the Arizona Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. A similar proposal was voted down in 2006, but that measure included a provision that would have prohibited state benefits to domestic partners–this one doesn’t. Unfortunately, I think this has a good chance of passing. Arizona already bans same-sex marriage by statute, but not in its Constitution.

Turkish creationist “Harun Yahya” (pseudonym for Adnan Oktar) has been sentenced to three years in prison for “creating an illegal organization for personal gain," according to Reuters: Oktar had been tried with 17 other defendants in an Istanbul court. The verdict and sentence came after a previous trial that began in 2000 after Oktar, along with 50 members of his foundation, was arrested in 1999. In that court case, Oktar had been charged with using threats for personal benefit and creating an organization with the intent to commit a crime. The charges were dropped but another court picked them up resulting in the latest case. ...