Well, this ought to prompt another round of police-protecting legislation in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed two bills into law — one that creates a 25-foot “no go” zone around police officers and one that strips police oversight boards of their independence. And that’s on top of the immediate effort made by the legislature in reaction to a recent court ruling that said the state’s victims’ rights law couldn’t be used to withhold names of officers who engaged in excessive force in “response” to alleged, mostly made-up “crimes” against them (contempt of cop, etc.).

This recent decision [PDF] from a Florida appeals court says the state’s two-party consent law for recordings doesn’t extend to public officials. And that means the five bogus wiretapping charges brought against Michael Waite for daring to record his conversations with cops are going to disappear. (h/t WFLA)

As we’re all well aware, wiretapping laws have been abused by cops for years in states with two-party consent laws. Multiple people have been arrested for filming their interactions with police officers and hit with bogus wiretapping charges because the officers did not “consent” to be recorded. Most of the resulting lawsuits have not delivered the results cops want. Instead, a majority of them have established precedent that says the First Amendment protects recordings of public officials.

That’s what has happened here. Rather than dismiss the charges voluntarily, the state chose to fight this in court. And now there’s precedent preventing officers from pulling this sort of bullshit in the future.

The backstory is this: Michael Waite is no fan of local law enforcement. According to court records, he had been involved in a long property boundary dispute with the sheriff’s office and other city employees. Waite called 911 and accused deputies of trespassing. He recorded the call and forwarded it to the sheriff’s office. Rather than do nothing, the sheriff’s office obtained an arrest warrant. This led to an altercation when officers served the warrant, resulting in battery charges that aren’t going to be dismissed.

The important thing is the precedent. The appeals court says there’s no expectation of privacy in carrying out public duties while utilizing public equipment, i.e., department-issued cell phones and landlines.

Here, Waite recorded a telephone conversation with Sergeant Blair. He subsequently emailed the audio recording to the CCSO to report what he believed to be police misconduct and requested an internal investigation. It was later discovered that Waite had similarly recorded four other conversations with CCSO deputies. Under these circumstances, it cannot be said that any of the deputies exhibited a reasonable expectation of privacy that society is willing to recognize.

Importantly, this is based on the record before us as there is no dispute that all conversations concerned matters of public business, occurred while the deputies were on duty, and involved phones utilized for work purposes. As such, Waite did not violate section 934.03(1)(a) when he recorded the conversations with the deputies, all of whom were acting in their official capacities at the time of the recordings, just as if he had the conversations face-to-face.

This all seems extremely obvious and yet it took a second court’s review of the case to make it clear enough that Florida law enforcement officers will understand it. And that probably means some legislator has already fired up Word and is crafting a law that will exempt state law enforcement from… well, the First Amendment, I guess. The ruling here cites plenty of local precedent about the right to record, but Florida’s always imaginative lawmakers are rarely deterred by things like years of case law or the US Constitution itself.

As case law continues to be developed, it continues to look as though the best way to hold onto your Fifth Amendment rights is to secure your devices with a passcode.

There’s no solid consensus at this point, and the Supreme Court has yet to set precedent, but unless law enforcement really screws up while linking an arrestee to a seized device, most courts appear to feel that producing a fingerprint to unlock a phone is pretty much the same thing as producing a fingerprint when being booked. It’s “non-testimonial” — a biometric marker that not only can be used to identify you, but used against you to give law enforcement easy access to an encrypted device.

That’s the decision the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has reached. The decision [PDF] handed down earlier this month says the Constitution simply does not apply here.

The panel held that the CHP officers did not violate Payne’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when they compelled him to unlock his cell phone using his fingerprint. Payne established that the communication at issue was compelled and incriminating. The panel held, however, that the compelled use of a biometric to unlock an electronic device was not testimonial because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking, and merely provided the CHP with access to a source of potential information. Accordingly, the Fifth Amendment did not apply.

Now, there are a couple of details to this case that may make this a little less open-and-shut than it initially appears. The defendant, Jeremy Payne, was a parolee subject to certain search conditions, which limited his Fourth Amendment protections. A special search condition required Payne to surrender any electronic devices and their passcodes when asked by law enforcement. It did not, however, require him to unlock them using a biometric identifier.

However, the court said it’s pretty much the same thing in this case: he was required to unlock devices, which meant the compelled application of his fingerprint to the phone when stopped by CHP officers followed the spirit of the search conditions, if not the actual letter. It also held that this warrantless search of Payne’s phone during a traffic stop did not violate the Riley decision because — at least according to the Ninth Circuit — Riley’s warrant requirement does not apply to parole searches.

Given this, there’s still a chance the Ninth Circuit could decide compelled production of biometric markers does violate the Fifth Amendment in other cases where parole search conditions aren’t involved. But it would take a very specific set of details to obtain this ruling and, like this one, the ruling would not generally apply to compelled fingerprint production, since it’s clear the court here feels it’s no different than compelling fingerprint production during the booking process.

If Payne decides to appeal this, the Supreme Court could decide to set precedent on this issue. But even if this is appealed, it seems unlikely the nation’s top court would find this set of details broad enough to feel comfortable establishing precedent that could possibly affect all Americans, not just those subject to special search conditions while on parole.

So, while this decision certainly doesn’t work out for Jeremy Payne, it’s narrow enough that compelled production of fingerprints is still a question open enough it may be reconsidered by this same court at some point in the future. But from what we’ve seen so far while following this issue, the best way to retain your Fifth Amendment rights is to secure devices with passwords/passcodes rather than some part of your body.

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and Florida’s legislature have combined forces to craft and pass some of the most unconstitutional laws ever written in the United States. A series of bad laws has led to series of injunctions from federal courts, including one that traveled all the way to the Supreme Court just to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the top court in the land.

It’s a campaign of hate. The laws, without exception, target either people the governor and his legislative fanbois don’t like (a lot of this targets LGBTQ+ people) or people who don’t like DeSantis or his legislative fanbois (hence all the legislation targeting social media services which don’t find it all that profitable to host hateful content).

Like other states with the same set of bad ideas and worse legislators, Florida has turned libraries into battlefields where the First Amendment matters less than the petty outrage of people who can’t stand to have any ideas they don’t agree with given shelf space. Book challenges are the new normal in far too many places in the United States.

But Florida leads the way by a large margin. According to stats gathered by PEN America, Florida has served up more than three-quarters of the nation’s book bans over the last six months of 2023.

The vast majority of school book bans occurred in Florida, with 3,135 bans across 11 of the state’s school districts. A spokesperson with Florida’s Department of Education declined NPR’s request for comment.

Across the nation, 4,349 book bans were reported over that same period. And that six month period produced more book bans than the entirety of 2022.

Apparently, that’s beginning to be a bit of a problem for the state that leads the nation in book challenges. Realizing that most challenges are filed by just a handful of extremely petty people with far too much time and ideology on their hands (the NPR report notes a single Wisconsin parent was responsible for 444 book challenges), DeSantis is now trying to unreap at least part of the harvest he has sown.

Florida residents who don’t have children attending school will have significantly fewer chances to challenge books in local K-12 libraries under a new law signed Tuesday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Meant to curb what lawmakers described as a “logistical nightmare” facing school districts flooded with requests to remove books, the policy marks an admission from Republican leaders that last year’s expansions to book challenge laws may have gone too far after national backlash from free speech groups and even some conservatives.

We’ll see if this actually deters the book ban overachievers from filing challenges as quickly as they can change the To: field in their form letters. Somehow, I think this will just encourage a lot of “straw” challenges from people who either don’t exist or don’t realize some shitty sociopath is using their name to engage in ideological warfare with ideas and content they don’t like.

This would all be stupid enough if it weren’t for the statements made by DeSantis when signing this bill into law.

All of it is disingenuous. First, DeSantis pretends it isn’t just the shittiest members of his voter base that are responsible for having to legislate a claw-back on book challenges.

In backing the idea, DeSantis said Florida wants to stamp out frivolous challenges as “activists” from “all ends of the political spectrum” are objecting to “everything under the sun.”

It’s the Trumpian “fine people on both sides” tactic but in reverse. And it’s bullshit. Let’s go back and check the data gathered by PEN:

Those who ban books often cite “obscenity law and hyperbolic rhetoric about ‘porn in schools’ to justify banning books about sexual violence and LGBTQ+ topics (and in particular, trans identities),” the report says.

That doesn’t sound like “all ends of the political spectrum.” That sounds like one very narrow end of the political spectrum — the end containing the narrowest minds.

Then there’s this bit of chastisement, which should have provoked open laughter from every journalist in attendance:

“Schools are there to serve the community,” DeSantis said Monday during an event touting the legislation. “Schools are not there for you to try to go on some ideological joyride at the expense of our kids.”

Holy fuck, Ron! Your entire state is little more than an ideological joyride, at least since you’ve taken office. Your legislature — with few exceptions — does nothing more than craft more rides for your ideological playground. You and your buddies in the legislature directly encouraged this sort of bullshit from your constituents. And now you want to pretend you’re somehow above it all?!

You created this shitstorm, Ron. I guess we can all feel thankful you at least feel bad enough about it to show up with a tarp, even though pretty much everything is already covered in feces. But you should be fine moving forward. I would assume the legislators on your side of the aisle that approved this bill have used up whatever last vestiges of shame they contained. This isn’t a sign of hope. It’s just the last plateau before everything resumes its usual downhill course.

While there’s no doubt illegal fentanyl use is one of the leading causes of death in this nation, the DEA’s persistent hysteria hasn’t done anything to make anyone safer. Faced with the fact it can’t make a dent in the fentanyl trade, the DEA has opted to drum up panic, pretending — despite all evidence to the contrary — that drug cartels are using social media services and multi-colored pills to literally kill the same children the DEA claims cartels are trying to turn into lifelong addicts.

Even the most obtuse person can suss out the internal contradiction in these claims. Either cartels want to kill children or they want to create a lifelong addiction. They can’t have it both ways. Kill off kids and you kill off a lifetime of profit. It’s that simple.

It’s so simple you’d think even the DEA could understand it. But it can’t. Regular cops, however, aren’t quite as stupid, at least when it comes to colorful pills. The point here is branding, which allows purchasers to easily recognize what they’re buying, as well as its potency. (Regular cops, however, are also just as stupid, often pretending being within a few feet of possible fentanyl is enough to hospitalize them, if not outright kill them.)

It’s dumb all over and it’s getting dumber. Having failed to do anything but make the general public (and their elected representatives!) more stupid, the DEA is now moving on to stoking the fear fire over (checks article) completely legal drugs designed to help sufferers of certain mental health conditions. (h/t Boing Boing)

The fast rise of prescriptions for Adderall and other stimulants, along with rampant online treatment and advertising, suggest the start of another drug crisis like the opioid epidemic, a senior Drug Enforcement Administration official said Thursday.

The warning is the most urgent public message yet on these types of drugs by the agency.

“I’m not trying to be a doomsday-er here,” said Matthew Strait, deputy assistant administrator in the diversion control division said in an online seminar. But he compared the current situation with stimulants to the beginning of the opioid crisis and said “it makes me feel like we’re at the precipice of our next drug crisis in the United States.”

Let’s tackle that last paragraph first. Come on, Mr. Strait. You are absolutely trying to be a “doomsday-er.” That is how the DEA has handled anything related to drug use since its inception — an origin that is as steeped in racism as the formation of police departments across the United States. The DEA can only remain relevant by stoking fears and inducing panic because it has utterly failed to in its original directive: to stymie the flow of illegal drugs into this country. Thanks to the DEA, most street drugs have become cheaper and more potent since the beginning of the so-called “War on Drugs.”

So, all that’s left is for the DEA to start declaring this drug or that drug the next “doomsday” substance. And, like it has in the past, the DEA’s newest source of hysteria is going to result in enforcement activities that will make it much more difficult for people who rely on (legal!) drugs to manage illnesses to obtain them.

And, sure, we’ve all consumed enough pop culture to equate Adderall with “cramming for finals.” There’s enough off-label use that it’s become a cliché. But, unlike fentanyl, the infrequent abuse of stimulants by people desiring just a bit more focus for whatever reason is hardly the same thing as Adderall and its analogs being poised on the precipice of becoming the next fentanyl.

It’s not enough to disrupt the supply chain with the side effect (intended or otherwise) of preventing people who need these drugs from obtaining them. The DEA also has to pretend drug dealers are selling one drug as another drug because fucking up paying customers is somehow the most profitable way to run an illegal drug operation.

Strait urged people looking for stimulants not to buy drugs on the internet.

“We see fake pills that look like Adderall that are being sold on the open net and the dark net,” he said. But they may not be Adderall at all, but rather fentanyl, or methamphetamine.

My guess is that any “fake pills” being sold on the internet don’t contain any drugs at all, least of all the illegal ones. Why spend money on real drugs just to see your customer base move on to other sources because you’ve failed to deliver the product they’re seeking? While I understand no drug dealer is staffing complaint lines to better understand their user base, they’re also generally smart enough to know that screwing paying customers tends to result in fewer customers, rather than extremely profitable revenue streams that ensure the viability of the operation for months or years to come.

Remember, this is coming from officials in an agency that specializes in investigating and dismantling large drug operations. And this is how they portray that business — as something run by opportunistic idiots who are somehow both going to cause a drug crisis by providing large amounts of drugs while simultaneously creating a drug crisis by providing a large amount of drugs that aren’t even the drugs the DEA now claims are being abused regularly.

On top of that, there’s cognitive dissonance of agitating for more direct control of legal drug manufacturing and delivery by pharmaceutical companies and health care providers while simultaneously claiming the major danger is dark web drug dealers providing bags full of random drugs to people seeking actual Adderall.

But this is the sort of stupidity you get from people whose continued employment relies on them making the people paying their salaries even stupider than they are. The more legislators and members of the public they can dupe, the bigger the budget they can expect to control during the next fiscal year.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is an utter asshat. Not only is he the chosen defender of litigation over unconstitutional laws passed by an equally idiotic legislature, but he’s also the man behind plenty of Texas government action meant to make things worse for plenty of Texas residents.

On top of that, Ken Paxton has been indicted for committing securities fraud and recently agreed to pay $300,000 in restitution to avoid a criminal trial. The man who is the voice of the law in Texas not only doesn’t understand the Constitution but he seemingly can’t wrap his mind around the normal flow of litigation through the federal judicial system. On top of that, he can’t seem to stop violating laws himself, even though his position is at the top of the state’s “law and order” organizational chart.

But once you’ve decided “performative” is preferable to “competent,” all sorts of stupid things start happening. While AG Paxton continues to defend bad laws written by worse legislators, he’s also charged with fielding lawsuits filed by unhappy Texas residents who don’t feel their state government has any right to destroy their land without providing some compensation in return.

A civil rights lawsuit filed by two Texas residents whose land was destroyed thanks to government incompetence have sued the state. AG Paxton tried to have it both ways with these suits, as Matt Stringer explains for The Texan:

The case began when the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) built a dam on Interstate 10 near DeVillier’s fifth-generation family farm at Winnie, Texas, causing it to flood. The water destroyed his home, orchard, and livestock, prompting him to seek just compensation from the state.

DeVillier filed the lawsuit in state district court seeking compensation under both the Texas Constitution and the “Takings Clause” contained in the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

Pointing to DeVillier’s neighbors who were also suing, the Office of the Texas Attorney General (OAG) asked the case to be removed to federal district court in the U.S. Southern District of Texas in order to better accommodate the plaintiffs. Once in federal court, Texas moved to dismiss the case, claiming the plaintiffs couldn’t sue the state in federal court directly under the Fifth Amendment.

Under the 11th Amendment, citizens may not sue state governments in federal court unless the state says they may, or a “cause of action” law is passed waiving the state’s sovereign immunity.

The stated reason for moving the lawsuits from state court to federal court was to make things “simpler” for the plaintiffs suing the state. The real reason was to convert the state cases to federal lawsuits for the sole purpose of dodging the claims by arguing the litigants (whose cases were moved without their approval) could not pursue these lawsuits in federal court.

Heads, Paxton wins. Tails, the plaintiffs lose. And it actually went that way for a little bit. The district court said the state waived its sovereign immunity against the suits by moving them to a federal court. This effort made the Fifth Amendment “self-executing,” which meant the plaintiffs could move forward with their lawsuits in the federal court.

Paxton appealed this decision. The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court (which is routinely awful when it comes to protecting the rights of circuit residents) reversed that decision, holding that the Fifth Amendment was not self-executing and ordering the lawsuits be returned to the state court from whence they had originated.

That obviously wouldn’t work for Paxton. A return to state court meant the state would continue to have to face these claims without the shield of sovereign immunity, which only would apply if the lawsuits were pursued in federal court.

So, Paxton appealed again, asking the Supreme Court to take a look at the lawsuits and make a call on the issue since the district court and Appeals Court had come to different conclusions… neither of which worked out in the state’s favor.

The Supreme Court took a look at the Fifth Circuit decision and vacated it. By doing so, it created a path for the plaintiffs to continue suing the state over constitutional violations, undoing Paxton’s attempt to scuttle the case by invoking sovereign immunity.

Somehow, AG Paxton decided this reversal — which allowed the lawsuits to continue in federal court — was somehow a win for him and his office. He went right to XTwitter to gloat, because that’s the platform of choice for idiots like Paxton who like to shout things into blue-checked echo chambers whenever possible.

Paxton bleated (I believe that’s the technical term for X posts?) this in response to the unanimous 9-0 shutout at the Supreme Court:

WIN: Today we secured a unanimous 9-0 win at the U.S. Supreme Court in a case protecting the ability of Texas to handle compensation disputes under State law for any allegedly taken property. 

For as long as Texas has been Texas, it has recognized that property rights are crucial to a free society. Under the U.S. Constitution, such claims should be pursued under state law unless Congress has said otherwise. I’m pleased the Supreme Court agreed with us unanimously that citizens should sue under Texas law.

Paxton is wrong. Patrick Jaicomo — a litigator for the Institute for Justice who represented the plaintiffs in this case — was one of the first to point out Paxton’s stupidity. Plenty of other people capable of comprehending court rulings pointed out this error as well, forcing Elon Musk’s Internet Hate Machine to append a clarification to AG Paxton’s misrepresentation of the SCOTUS decision. This “Community Note” was quickly attached to Paxton’s post.

Texas did not win. Texas asked the Court to affirm the 5th Circuit’s ruling. The Court instead vacated the 5th Circuit’s ruling.

Rather than taking the L and receding into the background to wait for some new debacle to overtake the X zeitgeist, Paxton doubled down, issuing a “correction” to the Community Note that, again, claimed the loss he had taken was actually a win.

By doing this, Paxton secured an ultra-rare double Community Note, extending his original tweet to include two sets of corrections to his mis-portrayal of the Supreme Court decision:

This would be embarrassing enough if it was just some person incorrectly informing XTwitter about the outcome of a legal case. But this is the state’s top lawyer — the man who is given the responsibility of representing the state in court, as well as overseeing a host of prosecutors handling criminal cases. And all this shows is Paxton is so desperate for good news he will willfully misunderstand a clear-cut (and unanimous!) Supreme Court decision so he can lob a fact-free assessment into his favorite echo chamber like chum tossed to particularly stupid sharks.

He’s been an embarrassment for years. This very public blowout makes it clear he’ll be an embarrassment for years to come if Texas voters continue to allow him to hold this office.

The government had a few years to sort this out, but as usual, the final call came down to the last minute. Shortly after Section 702 expired at midnight, April 19, the Senate pushed through a two-year reauthorization — one pretty much free of any reforms.

This happened despite there being a large and vocal portion of the Republican party seeking to curb the FBI’s access to these collections because some of their own had been subjected to the sort of abuse that has become synonymous with the FBI’s interaction with this particular surveillance program.

The reauthorization passed to the Senate from the House had been stripped of a proposed warrant requirement and saddled with an especially expansive definition of the term “electronic communication service provider.” Here’s how Senator Ron Wyden explained it while speaking out against the amendment:

Now, if you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, a phone, or a computer. Think about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. These people are not just the engineers who install, maintain and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government could deputize any one of these people against their will, and force them to become an agent for Big Brother.

For example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight. The FISA Court won’t know about it. Congress won’t know about it. The Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. And unless they can afford high priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.

So, instead of reform, we’re getting an even worse version of what’s already been problematic, especially when the FBI’s involved. As the clock ticked down on this vote (but not really: the FISA court had already granted the Biden administration’s request to keep the program operable as-is until 2025), attempts were made to strip the bill of this dangerous addition and add back in the warrant requirement amendment that had failed in the House.

None of this worked, as Gaby Del Valle reports for The Verge:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced an amendment that would have struck language in the House bill that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider.” Under the House’s new provision, anyone “who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.” The expansion, Wyden has claimed, would force “ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying.” The Wyden-Hawley amendment failed 34-58, meaning that the next iteration of the FISA surveillance program will be more expansive than before.

Both Sens. Paul and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced separate amendments imposing warrant requirements on surveilling Americans. A similar amendment failed in the House on a 212-212 vote. Durbin’s narrower warrant requirement wouldn’t require intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to query for those communications, though it requires one to access them.

The version headed to the president’s desk is the worst version. The rush to push this version of the bill through possibly gained a little urgency when two unnamed service providers informed the government they would stop complying with FISA orders pretty much immediately if the Senate didn’t renew the program.

One communications provider informed the National Security Agency that it would stop complying on Monday with orders under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables U.S. intelligence agencies to gather without a warrant the digital communications of foreigners overseas — including when they text or email people inside the United States.

Another provider suggested that it would cease complying at midnight Friday unless the law is reauthorized, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

We’ll never know how empty these threats might have been or if the Intelligence Community would have even noticed the brief interruption in the flow of communications. Section 702 has been given a two-year extension in the form approved by the Senate, superseding the FISA Court’s blessing of one more year of uninterrupted spying if discussions over renewal blew past the April 19, 2024 deadline.

If you’re a fan of bipartisan efforts — no matter the outcome — well… enjoy your victory, I guess. But there’s nothing about this renewal debacle that can actually be called a win. Unless you’re the FBI, of course. Then it’s all gravy.

Cops hate being watched, no matter where they’re located.

In the United States, we’ve seen several arrests and prosecutions of journalists and citizens for daring to record public officials performing their public duties. The case law isn’t completely settled in the United States, but in most parts of the country, it’s understood the First Amendment covers these activities.

That fact hasn’t stopped cops and prosecutors from pursuing everything from obstruction charges to alleged violations of state wiretapping laws against people who hold cops accountable simply by documenting the things they do.

There’s no First Amendment in the UK. But that doesn’t mean UK law enforcement officers are free to arrest people who do nothing more than document their actions. Given this lack of built-in protection, it’s extremely surprising to see UK prosecutors admit they’re in the wrong when it comes to shielding cops from accountability efforts that don’t involve government employees.

A journalist who did nothing more than try to document a criminal investigation taking place in full view of the public has received an apology of sorts from the UK government, as Steven Morris reports for The Guardian.

The Crown Prosecution Service has admitted it was wrong to press on with a case against a news photographer arrested as he tried to lawfully take pictures at a crime scene.

Judge Walters at Swansea crown court described the case against Dimitris Legakis, which was dropped on the eve of his trial, as “disturbing” and said it seemed “the high point” of the prosecution was that a police officer “took offence” against someone whose job was to take photographs.

The journalist did nothing more than show up at the scene of a car fire last year. He attempted to document the police response, only to get arrested by UK police officers, apparently because he was the only one in the crowd operating a camera. That this later turned out to be a murder investigation (allegedly a man beat his wife to death with a hammer before setting fire to the car with her in it) doesn’t really matter. At that point, it was just a normal police response to a potentially dangerous situation.

At some point during the police response, an “altercation” between some members of the crowd began. For whatever reason, officers decided to single out the journalist as the problem. He was arrested “with considerable force” and detained for 15 hours, supposedly for assaulting a first responder and “obstructing” a police officer, despite the fact no obstruction or assault was captured by any cameras operated by responding officers. The lack of evidence was admitted by the prosecution prior to its dropping of the charges.

The trial was due to start on Tuesday but at a hearing on Monday prosecution barrister Alycia Carpanini said no evidence would be offered in the case. The barrister said it had also been decided that it was not in the public interest to pursue the obstructing a constable matter, a summary-only offence.

Asked by Judge Geraint Walters why the decision to offer no evidence had been taken on the eve of the trial, the barrister said the original statement taken from the police officer “does not coincide” with what he later said in his victim personal statement, and she said the alleged assault itself was not captured on bodycam. The judge said having read the papers in the case it seemed to him “the high point of the prosecution case” was that somebody employed as a photographer was taking pictures and a police officer “took offence” to it.

When faced with taking this case to trial, the CPS finally admitted it had no evidence. But it took a court calling this out as a bullshit “contempt of cop” prosecution for that to happen.

And while there’s a very rare apology here, it comes couched in exculpatory language that suggests the CPS was completely in the right until it was forced to admit it was completely in the wrong.

A spokeswoman said: “We take assaults on emergency workers incredibly seriously. In all cases, including those resulting from police charge, we have a duty to continually review the evidence. In a review prior to the recent hearing, we decided that there was no longer sufficient evidence to continue with the prosecution and it should be stopped. We acknowledge this should have been done sooner.”

Maybe the CPS should divert some of its resources to investigating police officers who cook up bogus charges for the sole purpose of deterring public accountability. And, very definitely, the agency employing the officers who arrested the journalist and concocted a host of criminal charges should act quickly to punish the officers involved in this potential miscarriage of justice. It shouldn’t take 15 hours of detention and the run-up to a criminal case to finally have the truth come out. Because if that’s what it takes for the government to finally admit it’s in the wrong, the harm has already been done and the chilling effect on public accountability remains intact.

That being said, it’s still a step ahead of the status quo here in the United States. Even when governments pay out settlements to people whose rights have been violated, the payments are almost always attached to legal verbiage in which the government refuses to admit any wrongdoing. At least in the case above, the government acknowledged it was at fault. And that’s something, even if the lack of consequences means CPS and the cops that provide it with cases to prosecute are free to make the same “mistakes” over and over again.

Cops continue to wonder why people don’t trust them. Go figure.

At the center of this latest “we’re better than you” posturing by law enforcement is the raid of the wrong house by self-proclaimed “trained and experienced” officers, who mistook one Arab male for another before rushing into a house and pointing guns at everyone.

Now that there’s an official complaint in place and a civil rights lawsuit underway, the Raleigh police department has decided the public would be better served by keeping its recordings of the raid under wraps. Here’s Charlotte Kramon and Jeffrey Billman reporting for Indy Week:

On Tuesday, the Raleigh Police Department asked a judge to block the release of body-camera footage from the botched raid of Amir and Mirian Ibrahim Abboud’s home in April 2021. On Thursday, the judge obliged.

According to court records, an RPD SWAT team “suddenly and without warning, broke and busted open the Abbouds’ front door with a battering ram, pointing their long, AR-styled firearms at Mr. Abboud, Mrs. Abboud, and their 11-month-old son.” Though the search warrant was ultimately based on mistaken identity—State Bureau of Investigation agents confused Abboud with a neighbor who is also of Arab descent—the police refused to pay for the damage, court records show. 

Sounds like a lot of stuff cops do all the time: raid houses, break stuff, screw up, and refuse to apologize. Victims of these assaults are expected to just suck it up because law enforcement often needs to move fast and (literally) break things.

In this case, the Raleigh PD actually went to court to argue against the release of body cam footage of this botched raid. It didn’t have to do this but it did. Worse, it got a court to agree with its arguments — arguments that were patently ridiculous.

The RPD pointed out that an attorney for the Abbouds had released home security footage of the raid online, which the police said made releasing the body camera footage redundant. At the same time, the RPD claimed that releasing the body camera footage might expose confidential information about search warrant execution or damage officers’ reputations. 

It’s only in cases like these that government entities seem to feel redundancy is a bad thing. And if no harm was done to officers by the release of the home security footage, it seems no harm would occur if the PD released its own footage.

But after arguing the public had all the footage it deserved, the RPD went on to argue that the supposedly “redundant” footage would somehow “expose confidential information” or “damage officers’ reputations” if it released its own footage. Not only that, but the PD’s lawyer claimed releasing footage of a wrong house raid captured on home security cameras would somehow endanger the RPD itself.

At Tuesday’s hearing, RPD attorney Sherita Walton told Houston—who was appointed by Senate leader Phil Berger last year—that the Abboud raid was “valid on its face” and insisted that none of the officers did anything wrong. Walton said releasing the footage would be “dangerous.” (The SBI also asked Judge Houston to withhold the footage.) 

All of these arguments are equally stupid. Footage can be edited to remove “confidential information” and protect the identities of the officers involved in the wrong house raid. As for “damaging reputations,” what even is the point of this argument? The involved officers did what they did and any reputational damage is due to their own actions. It has nothing to do with the residents of a house that was only raided because the cops screwed up. And there’s no “because it might make us look bad” public records exception. And if the officers “did nothing wrong,” it’s hard to believe releasing footage of such outstanding police work would be “dangerous.”

Unfortunately, as Indy Week points out, body cam footage is not considered a public record under North Carolina state law. That doesn’t mean it can never be released. It’s that the presumption of opacity prevails unless the state AG or a presiding judge determines otherwise.

Then there’s the particulars of the raid itself. It wasn’t a no-knock raid. But it was as close to a no-knock warrant as warrants get, with so little difference between the two it may as well have been no-knock.

According to a complaint filed on December 7 in Wake County, Raleigh police officers “wrongfully executed a ‘Quick Knock’ warrant on the Abbouds’ home”—meaning the cops knocked and kicked in the door before the Abbouds had time to answer—though they weren’t suspected of criminal activity. The police “invaded the privacy of their house with long guns drawn, terrorizing them and their child,” the complaint allege.

Knock-and-announce is already a misnomer, as it suggests officers will announce their presence and give occupants enough time to answer the door and (possibly) grant officers’ access to the house. “Quick knock” is some imagined liminal space between knock-and-announce and no-knock, where officers knock once while shouting “Police!” and immediately attempt a forcible entry.

I’m sure it works out well for North Carolina law enforcement. It means they don’t have to meet whatever standards are in place for a no-knock warrant but still get all the advantages of a no-knock, with the only separation being the fractions of a second needed to yell the word “police” once to satisfy the (lol) constraints of a “quick-knock” warrant.

As Radley Balko reported last year, the constraints on warrants like these are pretty much non-existent in North Carolina. Here’s the money quote from University of North Carolina’s Jeffrey Welty’s report on warrant requirements in the state:

Among the conclusions are: (1) there is no explicit authority for North Carolina judicial officials to issue no-knock warrants; (2) judicial officials sometimes issue such warrants anyway; (3) no-knock warrants seem to be very rare; (4) when an application for a no-knock warrant is granted, the resulting warrant does not always include an express judicial determination regarding the need for a no-knock entry or an express judicial authorization of such an entry; and (5) quick-knock entries, where officers knock and announce their presence and then immediately force entry, may be widespread.

Unsurprisingly, data on no-knock and quick-knock warrants is hard to come by. Pretty much the only option is tracking every criminal case that involves a warrant and that’s something that’s difficult to scale, not just in terms of expense (state and local courts tend to charge even more exorbitant per-page fees than even the rightfully-reviled PACER system) but in terms of practicality.

But what can be surmised from the limited data is that “quick knock” warrants are a handy replacement for no-knock warrants, giving officers the same leeway to immediately engage in a forcible entry without asking them to satisfy the minimal requirements of a no-knock warrant. They’re basically the same thing. The only difference is the “announcement” that accompanies the sound of a door being bashed in.

It’s all amazingly shitty and stupid. And now there’s this added to it: cops arguing (successfully!) that their reputations might be harmed if the public is allowed to observe their actions after the fact. And, for now, that’s how it remains. The challenges to this burial of apparently embarrassing footage will continue, but for now, cops have the upper hand. The mistakes they made will remain under the cover of judicially-granted opacity.

For a little while, it looked as though Section 702 surveillance might finally be curtailed, if not substantially reformed. Lots of House Republicans were irritated that some of Trump’s inner circle had been (inappropriately) targeted by FBI investigators taking advantage of the agency’s backdoor access to US persons’ communications collected by a foreign-facing collection program.

This was on top of the years of abuse the FBI has committed and continues to commit in terms of its warrantless access to communications collected by the NSA. Despite the FBI’s continuous promises to do better (and its continual failure to achieve that goal), far too many House members were willing to vote for a clean reauthorization of Section 702. And far too many — especially on the Democratic side of the aisle — were willing to vote down a proposed warrant requirements, something privacy advocates like Senator Ron Wyden have been trying to get written into law for years.

Not only did the warrant requirement fail, but the reauthorization effort moved from the House to Senate with something much, much worse attached.

The Turner-Himes amendment – so named for its champions Representatives Mike Turner and Jim Himes – would permit federal law enforcement to also force “any other service provider” with access to communications equipment to hand over data. That means anyone with access to a wifi router, server or even phone – anyone from a landlord to a laundromat – could be required to help the government spy.

This vastly expands the government’s collection authority under Section 702, moving on from the normal definition of “service providers” to cover places where communications are at rest, rather than being transmitted or received. Here’s how Marc Zwillinger, Steve Lane, and Jacob Sommer break down the wording of the Turner-Himes amendment:

[It] (1) drops the qualifier “communication” from the class of covered “service providers;” (2) makes access to communications-carrying equipment enough to establish eligibility; and (3) adds “custodian” to the list of individuals who can be forced to provide assistance. But unlike the FRRA, it then enumerates a list of business types that cannot be considered ECSPs, including public accommodations, dwellings, restaurants, and community facilities. 

This amendment was written in response to a FISA court ruling that told the government’s surveillance apparatus that the law — as it currently stood — did not cover the target of the proposed surveillance. It fell outside the statutory definition of “electronic communication service provider.” The FISA court suggested that if the ODNI (Office of the Direction of National Intelligence) and DOJ didn’t like the wording, they were welcome to take it up with Congress.

That’s exactly what they did. And now, two House reps have managed to attach an amendment that broadly expands the definition of “electronic communication service provider” to cover just about anything that might be a source where electronic communications can be collected.

Here’s how Senator Wyden described the amendment’s intended effects in his statement [PDF] during Senate discussion of the pending reauthorization:

Now, if you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, a phone, or a computer. Think about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. These people are not just the engineers who install, maintain and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government could deputize any one of these people against their will, and force them to become an agent for Big Brother.

For example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight. The FISA Court won’t know about it. Congress won’t know about it. The Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. And unless they can afford high priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.

Of course, those pushing the amendment claim nothing bad will happen if they give the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) more collection power and more sources to collect from. Rep. Himes has responded to concerns by treating all criticism of the amendment as overblown.

Wyden’s statement points out the flaw of this argument: mainly that it assumes, with zero facts in evidence, that this will be the one expanded surveillance power that won’t be abused.

Supporters also claim that the provision has a narrow purpose and that the government does not intend to start tapping into every American’s phone line or wifi. But that’s not how this provision is written. And I would say respectfully that anyone who votes to give the government vast powers under the premise that intelligence agencies won’t actually use it is being shockingly naive.

It’s not just naïve. It’s asinine. Years of abuse by the FBI clearly demonstrates the FBI will abuse access to these new “service providers.” Years of surveillance power abuse by the NSA — an agency headed by officials with “collect it all” attitudes and willingness to continuously test the outer limits of the Constitution — makes the same statement: if you give the IC this power, it will be abused.

And the reps behind the amendment know it. As Wyden pointed out, the fact that carve-outs for coffee shops, hotels, restaurants, and community facilities were written into the amendment following the first signs of opposition make it clear even the amendment’s authors knew the proposed changes would be a vehicle for abuse, hence the quick move to exempt certain entities from the broad definitions they’re seeking to have written into law.

Considering this surveillance authority has already been abused by the government to target anti-police violence protesters, political campaign donors, and journalists, expanding the number of sources where communications can be collected only ensures exponential growth in the number of abuses.

What started as an effort that may have actually limited the FBI’s abuses by forcing it to obtain warrants has devolved into a proposed rewriting of the authority to vastly expand the government’s surveillance opportunities. If we can’t get a warrant requirement approved, the very least the Senate can do is ensure this amendment does not become law.

It’s enough to make you want to shoot yourself in the face in embarrassment. It’s enough to make you want to dress as a mime when visiting Europe because at least you won’t be mistaken for an American. It’s enough to make you wonder how the Land of the Free became the Land of the Besotted Idiots so quickly during the four years overseen by a lame duck president more famous for sexual harassment, failed lawsuits, and bankruptcies than actual governance.

And yet, here we are. We live in a post-truth America. To be sure, America’s relationship with the truth has always been a bit iffy, given a history that includes genocide and slavery. But we always thought we were continuously improving, however slightly, year-over-year. That all came to a halt in 2016, when the Electoral College decided Donald Trump was our new president.

Trump had already shown he was incapable of competently managing property located on prime NYC real estate. Post-election, he proved he was incapable of managing international relationships, pandemic protocols, and his own re-election campaign.

But Trump did achieve something: he rallied the masses to proclaim his election loss “stolen.” He stoked the fires of several conspiracy theories, aided and abetted by tech shitlords (Elon Musk) and social media gadflies (Joe Rogan, etc.) to subvert the normal (if boring) operation of government machinery. Trump acolytes and supplicants took control of local governments, crafting spittle-flecked legislation comprehensible only to those incapable of understanding anything normal and willing to back legislation that reads more like a rejected letter to the editor than anything a legislator should ever seriously consider submitting to their legislature.

Thanks to this turn of events — spearheaded by a president who promoted conspiracy theories, referred to COVID-19 as the “kung flu,” and otherwise ensured no one would take him seriously but the least serious of constituents — the country is now overrun by legislators who have abdicated their responsibility to the general public in favor of embracing the most embarrassing members of their voting base.

And that voting base is filled with people too cowardly to just say “It’s the Jews,” even when represented by legislators who say “It’s the Jews.” It’s pre-WWII Germany all over the place, with the people who blame any outsider (immigrants, Jews, Blacks, liberals) for any friction they encounter in their personal lives turning out in record numbers to elevate the most shameless of bigots to governmental positions.

To justify this elevation of hate, voters (and the legislators that cater to them) entertain large number of conspiracy theories, including those that have been debunked for longer than they’ve been alive.

Enter the new era of “chemtrail” legislation. This new wave appeases an extremely shitty voter base by doing two things: giving credence to chemtrail conspiracy theories and/or preventing anyone from engaging in projects that might result in the limitation of greenhouse gases or other side effects of climate change.

It’s win-win for these fuckheads. And that’s why we’re now seeing batshit insane legislation spreading from the states you expect to see it in (i.e., the “Red” states) to areas where normality has long been the accepted state of affairs.

Let’s turn it over to Kevin Underhill and his insanely amusing and informational blog, Lowering the Bar. Recounting the recent effort by the Tennessee legislature to enact an anti-chemtrail bill, Underhill notes that the legislature was far too cowardly to enact an extremely helpful amendment that would have made it clear exactly what was going on here.

Sadly, the House refused to adopt a second proposed amendment to the bill, this one proposed by Rep. John Ray Clemmons (D–Nashville). Amendment No. 2 looked an awful lot like Amendment No. 1 (which inserted the chemtrails stuff), but with a couple of tweaks.

And what was this addition to the proposed conspiracy theory-coddling bill? Well, it was an amendment that treated the proposed law with all the respect it deserved.

WHEREAS, it is documented, among those within the pseudoscience of cryptozoology, that there exists a large and hairy human-like creature that inhabits forests of North America, and

WHEREAS, this creature is commonly referred to as a yeti, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch…

This amendment was rejected, apparently because the self-serious people engaging in chemtrail conspiracy theories felt this undercut the seriousness of banning something that wasn’t happening, has never happened, and will never happen.

[O]nly 18 representatives voted for the Sasquatch Amendment, with 71 voting against. 

But the problem is not confined to the areas where the voting base views itself as “conservative,” while approving of the government expanding its remit to cover anything subject to conspiracy theories, Jewish control, or involving non-whites existing in America.

As Underhill reports, even the great liberal playground that is the Minnesota legislature has been subjected to a conspiracy theory fueled bill by state legislators who appear to believe catering to the most ignorant voters is a long-term strategy worth pursuing.

Minnesota’s SF 4630 makes Tennessee’s bill look positively sane. That one would not only ban chemtrailing—or as the bill pseudoscientifically describes it, “stratospheric aerosol injection”—it is also super-worried about “excessive electromagnetic radiation” that the same conspirators are trying to harm brains and/or the environment with. And if you have been releasing “xenobiotic agents” in Minnesota, you could be in big trouble if this passes. What are xenobiotic agents? The bill defines “xenobiotic” as “foreign to the body or to an ecological system,” and I guarantee you that whoever drafted this thing has no idea what that might mean.

There are no safe spaces in America. As we’ve suspected all along, the people with the least common sense command the most power. While we’ve seen the occasional aberration over the years, four years of Trump has resulted in a legislative dynamic where being seriously stupid is not only acceptable, but might actually be the best way to ensure re-election. Canada has never looked so good, no matter what libertarians might opine about its free healthcare and general politeness.

The only things keeping America from becoming the new Third Reich are its square footage and its diversity. But let’s not fool ourselves. Legislators who’ve traded in their reputation for a remora-esque existence on the Trump Train deeply desire a country where bigotry is backed by government force. And while the current Israel-Palestine conflict makes it extremely difficult to go after Jews directly, the moment that pressure resides, these idiots will start dipping their conspiracy into the deep well of antisemitism that has always existed in this country, adding those “foreigners” to the long list of non-whites they believe are ruining what used to be a pretty great nation.