The official rationale for issuing Tasers to police officers is that the electro-shock devices represent a “non-lethal” alternative to the use of a firearm in dealing with situations that threaten the life or safety of an officer or innocent bystanders.
In practical terms, however, the Taser — which is proving to be a reliably lethal weapon — has become an instrument of “pain compliance.” In unadorned terms, this is summary punishment through torture for those who pose no threat to anyone, but who refuse to cooperate instantly with orders issued to them by police officers.
After a police officer stopped Mrs. Winkfein for allegedly driving 60 in a 45 MPH zone, the grandmother refused to sign the ticket stub. Under Texas “law,” motorists are required to sign traffic tickets under threat of arrest.
According to the police officer, Mrs. Winkfein not only refused to comply, but she “swore” and became “violent” with him. Palsied with terror over the threat posed by a frail septuagenarian woman, the officer hit her with a blast from his Taser. Mrs. Winkfein disputes every element of the official account, and intends to file a lawsuit.
Massey refused to accept the traffic ticket. Under Utah law, he didn’t have to; Trooper Gardner could simply have shrugged his shoulders and mailed it to Massey. But following that approach would mean that Gardner had failed to compel a “mundane” to submit to his Authoritah:
In this dashcam recording taken from Gardner’s cruiser, it’s important to note how — beginning at roughly 11 seconds into the video — we see Gardner pull over to the side of the road, thereby obstructing Massey’s view of the sign announcing the speed limit of 40 MPH. After Massey passed, Gardner pulls him over almost instantaneously.
At that time Gardner pulled over, Massey was not speeding, and Gardner had no reason to pull over — unless he wanted to manufacture a traffic stop by preventing the motorist from seeing the speed limit sign.
Massey, who didn’t see the sign, was understandably outraged by Gardner’s asinine stunt, and his mood didn’t improve when the tax-feeder threatened his pregnant wife.
In a tacit admission that Gardner acted improperly by needlessly escalating the confrontation, the Utah state police did place him on administrative leave and ordered him to undergo anger management training.
Of particular interest in the Massey case was the reaction of the Provo Daily Herald newspaper, for which I wrote a weekly (then bi-weekly) column a couple of decades ago, long before its descent into unalloyed statism.
“Here’s a tip: when a uniformed man with a badge and a gun tells you to do something, shut up and do exactly what he says,” opined the Herald, which serves the reddest community in “Red-State” America. A more suitable example of the martial law mind-set would be difficult to find.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney “personally” oversaw at least four briefings with members of Congress about the Bush administration’s interrogation program in an effort to maintain support for the torture of detainees in U.S. custody.
The briefings, part of a “secret” defense of the program Cheney began in 2005, were held as congressional oversight committees were threatening to investigate, or end the use of the interrogation methods, lawmakers and officials told The Washington Post.
Cheney’s advocacy of the use of waterboarding and warrantless wiretapping are certainly no secret, but his role in defending the program to lawmakers was undisclosed to the public until this time.
Documents delivered to Capitol Hill last month by the CIA listed every lawmaker briefed on the interrogation program since 2002, but made no mention of Cheney’s involvement in the meetings. For the briefings led by Cheney, intelligence committee members were told that information pertaining to the person who oversaw the meetings was “not available.”
During the briefings, Cheney “was adamant that the enhanced interrogations were needed to preserve national security,” two participants in the briefings told the paper, and when lawmakers questioned the legality of the program, “CIA briefers said that half of the agency’s knowledge about al-Qaeda’s plans and structure had been obtained through the interrogations.”
The report offers nothing to confirm or deny that top Democrats were aware that waterboarding was being used on detainees as early on as 2002, but does state that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “was not present at any of the briefings that included Cheney.” Pelosi has been under fire since she accused the CIA of intentionally misleading her during a 2002 briefing on the use of waterboarding.
One of Pelosi’s most vocal critics, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), was in attendance during a very private meeting with the former vice president in 2005, reports the paper:
“On March 8, 2005 — two days after a detailed report in the New York Times about interrogations — Cheney gathered Rockefeller, Harman and the chairmen of the intelligence panels, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), according to current and former intelligence officials. Weeks earlier, Roberts had given public statements suggesting possible support for the investigation sought by Rockefeller. But by early March 2005, Roberts announced that he opposed a separate probe, and the matter soon died.
Beyond the secret briefings with lawmakers, Cheney also reportedly sent five senators to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba with his chief counsel, David Addington. Senator Graham, who was along for the trip, voiced concern about the legality of the interrogation program, and “urged Addington to put the interrogations at secret prisons and the use of military tribunals into a stronger constitutional position by pushing legislation through Congress, rather than relying on executive orders and secret rulings from Justice Department lawyers.”
Addington pulled a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution from his coat, according to Graham, and replied “I’ve got all the authority I need right here.”
An anti-abortion activist was charged yesterday with first-degree murder in the death of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, and the prosecutor said evidence in the case ruled out the death penalty.
Scott Roeder, 51, was shown via a video link from the Sedgwick County jail as Judge Ben Burgess read the charges.
Burgess ordered Roeder held without bond and said he was not allowed to communicate with Tiller’s family or two witnesses Roeder is accused of assaulting. The judge told him that he would be assigned a public defender.
A preliminary hearing is set for June 16.
If convicted of the murder charge, Roeder would face a mandatory life sentence and would not be eligible for parole for at least 25 years.
Kansas law requires that special circumstances exist before the death penalty can be considered: killing a law officer, killing more than one person or a victim kidnapped for ransom or rape, or a murder for hire.
Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group, said Roeder attended at least one day of a March trial in which Tiller was acquitted on 19 counts of failing to obtain a second, independent opinion before performing late-term abortions. Roeder wore an anti-abortion T-shirt, which a court officer had him cover up, Newman said.
Roeder is accused of fatally shooting Tiller on Sunday at the doctor’s Lutheran church in Wichita as he was serving as an usher. Roeder also was charged with aggravated assault for allegedly threatening two people who tried to stop him.
Roeder was arrested hours after the shooting near Gardner, about 170 miles northeast of Wichita.
When asked about online privacy, most people say they want more information about how they are being tracked and more control over how their personal information is used. Those consumer expectations are rarely in line with the data collection practices of Internet companies, which often collect information about their users not only on their own sites, but also when those users visit other sites across the Web.
Those are some of the central findings of a new privacy study conducted by a group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, which was released late Monday. The students at the School of Information — Joshua Gomez, Travis Pinnick and Ashkan Soltani — studied consumer expectations by looking at sources like complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and data collected by the state of California and a privacy group. They analyzed company practices using Ghostery, a browser plug-in that detects cookies, Web beacons and other types of trackers that allow third parties to gather information about Web site visitors, often without their knowledge.
Google showed up as the most conspicuous tracker on third-party sites. Google Analytics, a free product that allows online publishers to gather statistics about visitors to their sites, was used on 81 of the top 100 sites. Cookies from the advertising company DoubleClick, which is owned by Google, were present on 70 of those sites. When combining trackers from those two services, Google had a presence on 92 of the top 100 sites. Others weren’t far behind. Cookies from Atlas, Microsoft’s DoubleClick rival, appeared on 60 sites, and trackers from two other analytics companies, Quantcast and Omniture, showed up on 54 sites.
The findings roughly line up with those in other studies of third-party tracking on the Web. Researchers from AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, for instance, looked at a much larger sample of 1,200 popular Web sites and found Google trackers on 61 percent of them. Omniture’s tracker was on 34 percent and Microsoft’s on 24 percent.
What is striking in the Berkeley students’ report is that in a sample of nearly 400,000 Web domains, Google’s presence remained high, at 88 percent, while those of other companies declined sharply. The second most frequent tracker in that sample was from an analytics company called StatCounter, which appeared on only 7 percent of domains. Assuming the data is accurate, it is a testimony to the widespread popularity of Google’s services like Analytics, DoubleClick and AdSense, the company’s contextual advertising network, which is used by a large percentage of Web sites small and large.
“I don’t know that anyone has identified the scope and depth of the coverage that Google has across the Web in terms of tracking,” Mr. Soltani said. “Our data shows that even if you are not going to Google, if you are browsing the Web they are collecting data about you.”
The implications of the study, however, are not exactly clear. “We are not claiming that Google aggregates information from each of these trackers into a central database, though it does possess the capability to do so,” the researchers wrote.
But Google disputes even that. For instance, it said that the cookies used by its analytics service are different on each Web site, so they do not allow the company to track a user from site to site. “It doesn’t enable any cross-site tracking,” said Mike Yang, managing counsel at Google. Mr. Yang also said Google’s contracts with customers do not allow it to merge data from various services like DoubleClick and AdSense, or to link that data to personal information that Google collects when users sign up for its other services.
What’s more, the data from the Berkeley study, which reports the presence of trackers by domain, can overstate the amount of tracking that is taking place. Many large domains like MySpace can include multiple sites with thousands of pages, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. The presence of a tracker on one site or page doesn’t mean users are tracked across the entire domain.
Still, the numbers are eye-catching. And as important as the numbers themselves is what the study says about the disconnect between how Americans conceive of privacy, company practices and the government’s approach to regulation of those practices, said Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs, who helped advise the students.
“Consumers were complaining to the F.T.C. about a lack of control over personal information,” Mr. Hoofnagle said. “That is very different from how the F.T.C. has framed the issue,” he said, noting that under the Bush administration, the agency frowned on privacy practices only if they caused harm to consumers.
Mr. Hoofnagle added: “We have a new F.T.C. now. They may scrap the ‘harm’ approach and look at some other method for balancing rights and responsibilities.”
Westminster speculation has raised a new question mark over the future of the government’s flagship identity card scheme, following news of the forthcoming departure of home secretary Jacqui Smith.
Smith was one of the main driving forces behind the ID card policy, fighting off Treasury concerns about cost and rejecting a Treasury-led proposal for a private-sector-led ID system.
But she has been badly tarnished by the row over her husband’s claim for renting a porn video on her expenses and her designation of her main home as a room in her sister’s London house. She is expected to leave the Cabinet in Gordon Brown’s expected reshuffle next week.
One of Smith’s possible successors, Alistair Darling, whom the prime minister failed to support as his ongoing Chancellor, is not known as a strong supporter of the ID scheme .
With budgets under pressure and if he gets the post, Darling may see the switch at the top as the opportunity to change the policy.
But there was late speculation that he might refuse the job and with the government itself in disarray following a co-ordinated series of resignations, the future of ID card policy is the last of Brown’s problems.
Gordon Brown’s Government is ‘collapsing’ as Hazel Blears became the latest Cabinet minister to quit her role.
The departure of the Communities Secretary on the eve of crunch European and local elections comes hot on the heels of the resignation of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who revealed yesterday that she will quit in the coming reshuffle, expected within the next few days.
The move comes as a massive blow to the embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Tory leader David Cameron taunted Gordon Brown in the Commons today saying his team was now “deserting him” and the Government was “collapsing”.
Mr Cameron accused the Prime Minister of being “in denial” and said Ms Blears’ resignation was “a direct challenge to his authority”.
Mr Cameron accused the Prime Minister of being “in denial” and said Ms Blears’ resignation was “a direct challenge to his authority”.
I think the game is up for Gordon Brown. We are seeing a Government that is in its last dying throes
“If these people have done such good work, why are they walking away from their jobs?” the Tory leader asked.
“The Communities Secretary’s statement doesn’t pay tribute to him or a single one of his policies. The minister in charge of local government is resigning the day before local elections.
“Isn’t the fact that she has chosen today of all days to go a direct challenge to his authority?” Mr Brown said that recent weeks had put “enormous pressure” on MPs of all parties and their families because of the string of revelations about their expenses.
He accused Mr Cameron of trying to make party political advantage from the situation.
Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg said the Government was in “total meltdown” but Mr Brown insisted he was dealing with the problems facing the country.
Ms Blears has come under pressure after it was revealed that she did not pay capital gains tax when selling a property on which she had claimed the parliamentary second homes allowance.
She later repaid £13,000 to HM Revenue and Customs.
In a statement released today, Ms Blears urged voters to back Labour tomorrow and said she wanted to “return to the grassroots (where I began), to political activism, to the cut and thrust of political debate”.
The Salford MP is a former Labour chairman and was one of the most prominent Blairites in Gordon Brown’s Cabinet.
The timing of her departure, less than two hours before Mr Brown faced the House of Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions and 24 hours before voters go to the polls, was described by Shadow Commons Leader Theresa May as a calculated bid to destabilise the PM.
Today’s statement was notable for the absence of any expression of backing for the Prime Minister.
With rumours of a possible challenge to Mr Brown’s position gathering pace at Westminster, Ms Blears’ resignation statement will be pored over for signs that she may back his removal.
Her comment that she wants the Labour Party to “reconnect with the British people” will be seen by some MPs as suggesting she believes the party has lost touch with voters.
And her comment that “the role of a progressive Government should be to pass power to the people” and to give ordinary people “the right support and encouragement” may be interpreted as suggesting that Mr Brown’s administration has failed to do so.
Ms Smith today said she was “very sorry” at Ms Blears’ departure and said she had done “an excellent job” in Government.
And she gave her backing to Mr Brown, insisting that she believed he should remain Labour leader and Prime Minister.
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