Law

All of Scientology’s Operating Thetan (OT) levels have now been leaked through Wikileaks, which may account for considerable slowness of that website. Although at the very least large parts of these documents have previously leaked on the Internet (via Usenet) back in the mid-nineties, which led to multiple lawsuits by the Church of Scientology against those responsible, this may be the first time the entire 612-page manual of OT levels 1-8 has been circulating on the Internet. I think it’s likely that Scientology will be filing a copyright infringement lawsuit against Wikileaks, which is distributing the document in a single large PDF. ...

It was only a matter of time. Where John Todd, Mike Warnke, “Lauren Stratford,” and others found that they could get attention and money by claiming to be ex-Satanists/witches/Illuminati converted to Christian evangelists, we now see “ex-Islamic terrorists” turned born-again Christians and hitting the lecture circuit, and getting paid for appearances at the U.S. Air Force Academy, as the New York Times reports. The Times article ends with the most obvious question: Arab-American civil rights organizations question why, at a time when the United States government has vigorously moved to jail or at least deport anyone with a known terrorist connection, the three men, if they are telling the truth, are allowed to circulate freely. A spokesman for the F.B.I. said there were no warrants for their arrest.Of the three speakers, Zak Anani, Kamal Saleem, and Walid Shoebat, Anani is described as the most explicitly preaching born-again Christianity rather than providing information about Islamic terrorism. He also seems to be the one with the clearest record of making false claims about his own background: Anani, now an evangelical Christian, claims to be an expert on the topic because he killed 223 people in Allah’s name, “two-thirds of them by daggers.” He even claims to have killed a man for waking him up at 3 a.m. to pray. Anani, born in Lebanon, said he joined a militant Muslim group in the early 1970s at age 13, and made his first kill shortly after. … He said he was soon promoted to troop leader and formed his own regiment, but later met a Christian missionary and converted. ...

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, who is actually featured in the dishonest Ben Stein intelligent design propaganda movie “Expelled,” was denied admittance to a screening and asked to leave the premises. His guest, however, was permitted to attend, and was apparently, quite astonishingly, unrecognized–Richard Dawkins. (Myers provides a few more details here.) The New York Times contacted “Expelled” producer Mark Mathis about it, and he claimed that Dawkins was intentionally allowed in and insinuating that Myers would cause trouble at the screening. (Anyone who has met Myers in person knows this is ridiculous.) Here’s video of P.Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins describing their respective experiences. Jeffrey Overstreet gives what appears to be the spin that will be used to respond to this event, based on the clearly mistaken description of Myers’ removal from student Stuart Blessman: I just happened to be standing directly in line behind Dawkins’ academic colleague. Management of the movie theatre saw a man apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in. Management then approached the man, asked him if he had a ticket, and when he confirmed that he didn’t, they then escorted him off the premises. Nowhere was one of the film’s producers to be found, and the man certainly didn’t identify himself. If a producer had been nearby, it’s possible that he would have been admitted, but the theatre’s management didn’t want to take any chances.Myers points out: ...

The Eliott Spitzer prostitution scandal is bringing the moralizers out of the woodwork. At TPM Cafe, E.J. Graff writes: I'm tired of hearing about Eliot Spitzer's "classical tragedy." I'm not interested in whether he was targeted by Republicans, especially since the TPMmuckrakers seem to have shown fairly clearly that his shady-looking wire transfers drew ordinary oversight attention. I'm a little sickened to read that paying thousands of dollars for sex is all about buying a "positional good"--if I understand Harold Meyerson correctly (and Harold is magnificent on other subjects, but very strange here), the point of paying $5500 for sex isn't that it gives you better-than-ordinary sex, but rather, that the cost itself makes it *higher status* than buying your way into a lower-cost vagina. ... To know that your father is paying to use the body of someone just a couple of years older than your own--well, I picture eating disorders ahead for those girls. I picture that in part because Eliot Spitzer cannot be going to a prostitute for the sex. He's a powerful, good-looking, wealthy man, and could seduce a woman if nonmarital sex were all he wanted. No: he wanted to order some woman around, wanted to treat her not like a person but like a collection of body parts put together for his pleasure. To use women this way -- just for the thrill of power -- is appalling. If that's how your dad treats women, that cannot make you feel good as a future woman yourself. ... We're not talking about a victimless crime. We're talking about a way of degrading and traumatizing women who have already been degraded and traumatized (and sometimes trafficked). Some of my friends who are recovering drug addicts (and, yes, violently abused as children) were once prostitutes, and what they've told me is fully in keeping with the studies: it's alienating, traumatizing, violent, and not what anyone dreams of doing when they grow up. So here's an idea: let's decriminalize *being* a prostitute ... but criminalize *patronizing* a prostitute. Leaving aside Graff's attribution of intentions and views to Spitzer on the basis of no evidence of any kind and her last comment advocating the Swedish model that's also advocated by Melissa Farley, contrast her moralizing with H.L. Mencken's views on prostitution in his "The Lady of Joy": EVEN PROSTITUTION, in the long run, may become more or less respectable profession, as it was in the great days of the Greeks. That quality will surely attach to it if ever it grows quite unnecessary; whatever is unnecessary is always respectable, for example, religion, fashionable clothing, and a knowledge of Latin grammar. The prostitute is disesteemed today, not because her trade involves anything intrinsically degrading or even disagreeable, but because she is currently assumed to have been driven into it by dire necessity, against her dignity and inclination. That this assumption is usually unsound is no objection to it; nearly all the thinking of the world, particularly in the field of morals, is based upon unsound assumption, e.g., that God observes the fall of a sparrow and is shocked by the fall of a Sunday-school superintendent. The truth is that prostitution is one of the most attractive of the occupations practically open to the sort of women who engage in it, and that the prostitute commonly likes her work, and would not exchange places with a shop-girl or a waitress for anything in the world. The notion to the contrary is propagated by unsuccessful prostitutes who fall into the hands of professional reformers, and who assent to the imbecile theories of the latter in order to cultivate their good will, just as convicts in prison, questioned by teetotalers, always ascribe their rascality to alcohol. No prostitute of anything resembling normal intelligence is under the slightest duress; she is perfectly free to abandon her trade and go into a shop or factory or into domestic service whenever the impulse strikes her; all the prevailing gabble about white slave jails and kidnappers comes from pious rogues who make a living by feeding such nonsense to the credulous. So long as the average prostitute is able to make a good living, she is quite content with her lot, and disposed to contrast it egotistically with the slavery of her virtuous sisters. If she complains of it, then you may be sure that her success is below her expectations. A starving lawyer always sees injustice in the courts. A bad physician is a bitter critic of Ehrlich and Pasteur. And when a suburban clergyman is forced out of his cure by a vestry-room revolution he almost invariably concludes that the sinfulness of man is incurable, and sometimes he even begins to doubt some of the typographical errors in Holy Writ. ... Even the most lowly prostitute is better off, in all worldly ways, than the virtuous woman of her own station in life. She has less work to do, it is less monotonous and dispiriting, she meets a far greater variety of men, and they are of classes distinctly beyond her own. Nor is her occupation hazardous and her ultimate fate tragic. A dozen or more years ago I observed a somewhat amusing proof of this last. At that time certain sentimental busybodies of the American city in which I lived undertook an elaborate inquiry into prostitution therein, and some of them came to me in advance, as a practical journalist, for advice as to how to proceed. I found that all of them shared the common superstition that the professional life of the average prostitute is only five years long, and that she invariably ends in the gutter. They were enormously amazed when they unearthed the truth. This truth was to the effect that the average prostitute of that town ended her career, not in the morgue but at the altar of God, and that those who remained unmarried often continued in practice for ten, fifteen and even twenty years, and then retired on competences. It was established, indeed, that fully eighty per cent married, and that they almost always got husbands who would have been far beyond their reach had they remained virtuous. For one who married a cabman or petty pugilist there were a dozen who married respectable mechanics, policemen, small shopkeepers and minor officials, and at least two or three who married well-to-do tradesmen and professional men. Among the thousands whose careers were studied there was actually one who ended as the wife of the town's richest banker--that is, one who bagged the best catch in the whole community. This woman had begun as a domestic servant, and abandoned that harsh and dreary life to enter a brothel. Her experiences there polished and civilized her, and in her old age she was a grande dame of great dignity. Much of the sympathy wasted upon women of the ancient profession is grounded upon an error as to their own attitude toward it. An educated woman, hearing that a frail sister in a public stew is expected to be amiable to all sorts of bounders, thinks of how she would shrink from such contacts, and so concludes that the actual prostitute suffers acutely. What she overlooks is that these men, however gross and repulsive they may appear to her, are measurably superior to men of the prostitute's own class--say her father and brothers--and that communion with them, far from being disgusting, is often rather romantic. Certainly there are prostitutes that meet Graff's description, but I suspect that those working for the Emperor's Club, including Ashley Alexandra Dupre, are more accurately described by Mencken. Better than listening to either Graff or Mencken is to read what sex workers write about their own experiences (and not just those who have found new careers condemning their previous one), as in Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander's Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry. BTW, the comments on Graff are far, far better than her article, and are well worth reading. Commenter Common Dreamer in particular points to some actual empirical research on prostitution (including a newspaper article summarizing prostitution researchers' responses to some bad research by a particular individual with an axe to grind). (Compare the comments on that newspaper article to the comments on Graff's article--at least Graff has attracted a much higher quality commenter than the Las Vegas Sun gets.) Common Dreamer points to some references on the ProstitutionProCon website, which looks like a good source for arguments and evidence regarding the question of whether prostitution should be legal. Historical Comments Amber (2008-03-29): I liked your blog :)http://beinganescort.blogspot.com/My blog about being an escort,,,, it sucks ...

The Miami Herald has uncovered a new Homeland Security threat–and it’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents that are committing crimes. Bribery, drug trafficking, migrant smuggling, embezzlement, and other crimes have become so prevalent that a senior manager has issued a memo pointing out that agents are supposed to uphold, not break the law: U.S. Customs and Border Protection is supposed to stop these types of crimes. Instead, so many of its officers have been charged with committing those crimes themselves that their boss in Washington recently issued an alert about the ‘‘disturbing events’’ and the ``increase in the number of employee arrests.’’ ...

Speechnow.org is being supported by the Institute for Justice and the Center for Competitive Politics in its lawsuit against federal laws and regulations which forbid it from receiving more than $5,000 in donations per year from any individual and require it to file forms and engage in reporting in order to do what it wants to do. What does Speechnow.org want to do? It wants to advocate the view that voters should vote for candidates who support the First Amendment and against candidates who do not. It takes no corporate or union money, it doesn’t donate to or coordinate with individual candidates or political parties. Yet this is sufficient under current law to restrict its activities and entangle it in red tape, so Speechnow.org has filed a federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction.

The writers of perhaps the best show on television, The Wire, have published an opinion piece in Time magazine in which they advocate that jurors vote to acquit any drug case defendant, and state that they will do so: If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens. ...

RateMyCop.com is a new website that allows you to rate individual police officers on the basis of your interactions with them, on the attributes of authority, fairness, and satisfaction, for which you can rate them poor, average, or good, and leave specific comments about your interactions. The site describes itself like this: Welcome to RATEMYCOP.com, the online watchdog organization serving communities nationwide. RATEMYCOP.com is not affiliated with any government agency; we are an independent, privately managed organization. Our mission is to compile information on cops’ performance and to provide a forum where users can freely share individual accounts. Good, bad or indifferent. Most of all, we would like to hear your stories. Your appreciation and your disapproval. Did you witness a cop doing a good deed, or were you involved in an unfortunate altercation? Tell us about it. Tell others about it. Let it out. Don’t feel intimidated by the badge to remain quiet. While we respect their authority we are also free to question it. You have the right to remain informed.The site has lists of 120,000 individual police officers from 450 departments around the country, which the site obtained directly from police departments, asking only for the names of patrol officers who work with the general public, not undercover officers. There are no photos, addresses, or telephone numbers, only names. The city of Tempe has expressed disapproval and its intention to try to remove this information from the site, according to an ABC 15 News story which claims the site is a danger to officers. Tempe Police Department Officer Tony Miller is quoted in the story raising issues about undercover officers, and the article says that he “feels as though officers like him are scrutinized enough.” The article also states that “Tempe officer Brandon Banks says the department’s chief, human resources and even the city’s prosecutor are looking into the website and fighting it.” I don’t see that they have a case, this information should all be a matter of public record. It seems to me that there is potential for abuse (especially in the form of inaccurate ratings and comments, just as on teacher rating websites), but less so than there is from other kinds of public records about all of us that are published on the web. I disagree with Officer Miller’s opinion that there is already sufficient accountability for police officers; this blog’s previous posts in the “police abuse and corruption” category and the far more numerous and detailed posts from Radley Balko’s The Agitator blog and his article “Overkill” are overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It’s worth noting that the courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no duty of police officers to protect individual members of the public, and many states have statutes which prevent individual officers and departments from being held civilly liable for a failure to provide adequate protection, a fact often used by gun advocates to argue for widespread gun ownership for individual protection (e.g., here, here, and here). The U.S. Supreme Court also eliminated a major protection against police abuse in 2006, when it ruled in Hudson v. Michigan (PDF) that evidence from an illegal no-knock raid need not be excluded from trial, because police officers have entered a new realm of “professionalism” in which they recognize civil liberties and can be trusted to investigate and deter their own abuses. In the wake of such decisions and continuing abuses, a website such as RateMyCop.com seems to me like a good idea. What the site seems to be missing, though, is a way to quickly find officers who have received ratings (very few seem to have any yet), and to sort those in order to find those with favorable or unfavorable ratings. UPDATE (March 12, 2008): Apparently GoDaddy has pulled the plug on RateMyCop.com’s website without notice to the owner, allegedly first for “suspicious activity” and then for exceeding bandwidth limits, and the site is up with a new web hosting provider. It looks like the ratings are now on a single category, and you can see a list of the most-rated and most-recently-rated on the front page. Another feature that would be nice would be a way to allow registered users to rate the raters for reliability, similar to the way Amazon.com book reviews can be rated as helpful or not helpful. That way, ratings could be weighted based on judgments of the reliability of the raters from the user base, and ratings from those with a personal axe to grind could have their weight minimized. Looks like Rackspace has also refused to host ratemycop.com. Interestingly, apparently Gino Sesto of RateMyCop.com was a Bush voter. ...

Pat Boone writes a column in which he imagines a conversation between himself and Thomas Jefferson, in which he completely misrepresents Jefferson’s views and quite a few facts. Ed Brayton supplies a critique. (You can find the link to Boone’s column there.) Historical Comments olvlzl (2008-03-05): Pat Boone writes fan fiction. Look at his history, his entire career was based on covers, stealing the work of superior black artists and white washing them. It's just more of the same for the zit meds huckster. Anthony McCarthy, who someday will stop reminding people that he used to be covered by olvlzl ...

Jeremy Jaynes, the spammer who was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison in 2003 for violating Virginia’s anti-spam law, has lost his appeal before the Virginia Supreme Court in a 4-3 ruling. Several of the dissents claimed that Virginia’s anti-spam law, which criminalizes unsolicited bulk email with falsified headers, even if it is political or religious in content rather than commercial, is a violation of the First Amendment. The quotations from Justice Elizabeth Lacy and Jaynes’ attorney Thomas M. Wolf both state that the law has diminished everyone’s freedom by criminalizing “bulk anonymous email, even for the purpose of petitioning the government or promoting religion." Both Lacy and Wolf misrepresent the law, which makes it a crime to “Falsify or forge electronic mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic mail through or into the computer network of an electronic mail service provider or its subscribers." There is a difference between forging headers and sending anonymous email–the latter does not require the former, and the latter is not prohibited by the law. Jaynes wasn’t just trying to be anonymous–he was engaged in fraud, and falsifying message headers and from addresses to try to avoid the consequences of his criminality. He wasn’t using anonymous remailers to express a political or religious message, and if he had been, he wouldn’t have been able to be charged under this law. UPDATE (September 12, 2008): The Virginia Supreme Court has reversed itself and struck down Virginia’s anti-spam law as unconstitutional, on the grounds that prohibiting false routing information on emails infringes upon the right to anonymous political or religious speech. This is a very bad decision for the reasons I gave above. There are ways to engage in anonymous speech without doing what Jaynes did, falsifying message headers and domain names. The court’s argument that one must falsify headers, IP addresses, and domain names in order to be anonymous is factually incorrect. Anonymity doesn’t require header falsification, it only requires omission of identifying information.