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It seems to me that police officers are unfairly targeting those who live on the street in their personal property. Enforcing parking codes does not result in a significant, if any, increase in public safety. And, as a court recently ruled at least in regard to utilizing chalk marks on tires it is illegal and a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of this Great Nation.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Taylor v. City of Saginaw recently determined that the chalking of car tires in order to enforce parking regulations constitutes a violation of the law as an illegal search. Now, I used to do parking enforcement in Portland chalking isnt the only way to track how long a vehicle has been parked in one area. A LPR (license plate reader) system may also be used.

Yet by the logic of the court, wouldnt this kind of system also fall under the classification of an illegal, unwarranted search? Searches on homes in regard to municipal codes may be conducted without a warrant if they meet reasonable regulatory or administrative standards, but the court stated that this isnt a free-for-all for civil officers. Homeowners are given a chance for pre-compliance review, while vehicle owners often do not have that same luxury. Therefore, exceptions to the rule do not apply and vehicles cannot be searched without warrant.

There is simply no reason to force people who dont have a home to constantly be on the move. Nor is there any reason to add insult to injury with unnecessary fines, which likely wont be paid anyway. And finally, it is ridiculous to impound someones shelter. It is a waste of resources and time, in my humble opinion, to pursue such ventures when funds could be redirected and better spent finding real solutions.

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Letter: Targeting the homeless | Letters | theworldlink.com - Coos Bay World

It used to be privacy was largely the domain of constitutional law and patient health care law: the Fourth Amendment, and then the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Today, privacy is the practice of navigating the state-by-state patchwork of data security laws and regulations, subject matter specific privacy laws, and a number of federal rules stuck in there for good measure. Dealing with health-related information? Look to HIPAA. Biometric information? Illinois has a law for that. Financial information? Look to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). Antitrust, of course, has lumbered along for over one-and-a-quarter centuries based largely on two federal statutes. At first blush, antitrust and privacy would seemingly have little to do with one another, each content to operate in their respective spheres.

Originally Published in "The Privacy and Antitrust Paradox in the Age of Data," Cybersecurity Law Report - February 2022.

Please see full Publication below for more information.

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The Privacy and Antitrust Paradox in the Age of Data - JD Supra

Ed Mullins, the former head of the New York Police Department's Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA), has been charged with defrauding his own union of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which he spent on expensive meals, luxury items, and even a relative's college tuition.

Mullins, 60, a controversial figure with a reputation for excusing terrible behavior from the police and publicly lamenting about the decriminalization of marijuana, resigned in October following an FBI raid on the SBA office and Mullins' home. He had been the president of the union for 20 years. At that time, sources told the New York Post that Mullins was being investigated for possibly misappropriating union funds.

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice revealed that was indeed the case. According to the complaint filed by U.S. Attorney Damian Williams with the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, Mullins for the past five years was allegedly "submitting false and inflated expense reports to the SBA, seeking reimbursement for those bills as legitimate SBA expenditures when in fact they were not." From that, he managed to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars that his union membersincluding 13,000 fellow officers, both active and retiredhad paid in dues.

According to the complaint, the fraud all started when the vice president retired in 2017. The treasurer took responsibility for approving Mullins' expense reports and reportedly didn't bother to scrutinize them or even request receipts from Mullins. When Mullins submitted his reports, he would jack up the amounts charged. Just one example provided in the complaint states that he changed a $45.92 charge from a wine bar to $845.92. The complaint notes that Mullins in 2018 added this treasurer (who is not named in the complaint) to his slate for his reelection.

Mullins faces one federal count of wire fraud, which comes with a maximum 20-year sentence (though he will most likely not receive the maximum sentence if convicted).

Mullins, of course, is entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence until he is convicted. But, ironically, Mullins was a quite public and vocal opponent of this. He once tweeted out an attack on New York City's Civilian Complaint Review Board, calling them a "disgrace." He was offended by a tweet that simply acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protected Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and encouraged New Yorkers to file a complaint if this right was violated. Mullins complained on Twitter in 2018 that he might get into trouble if he tried to arrest a guy smoking marijuana at a subway entrance, so he didn'tand he shouldn't have arrested the guy anywaybecause New York City had long since decriminalized marijuana possession.

According to The New York Times, Mullins surrendered to police Wednesday morning and was released on a $250,000 bond. That seems awfully high for a nonviolent crime. Maybe he would benefit from some federal bail reform? Oh, right. He hates bail reform too.

Continued here:
Former NYPD Union President Charged With Stealing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars of Members' Dues - Reason

Highland, Kansas, is a town of about 1,000 people surrounded by miles and miles of rolling cornfields. Theres one gas station, no stoplights. But Highland Community College is a magnet for people like Aiden Moore. It offered him something no other school did, namely a shot at playing college football.

It was really my last chance, says Moore, remembering a call he got from a Highland recruiter. I had interest from big-time schools, but I just didnt have the grades.

Moore made the trip from his home in Louisville, Kentucky, joined the Highland Scotties, and enrolled in classes. But he soon wished he had kept his construction job in Louisville. A sophomore this year, he says a white coach called him a gangster with a genius IQ and otherwise made fun of his intellect. He says campus police hound him and other black players on the team in a relentless effort to catch them smoking pot. He says townspeople sometimes seem scared to share space with them in the gas station or even to see him and other players on the street.

In a tiny school in a tiny, rural town, Black student-athletes feel conspicuous and scrutinized, even under attack.

Kejuan Carson, who hails from Auburn, Alabama, says he was cut from Highlands football team this month after he asked permission to skip a practice to finish an English paper.

And I thought everything was cool," Carson says. "But later on that day, that's when people started telling me I got kicked off the team."

He says the team has cut at least two dozen players, all of them Black, since the beginning of the year.

B.J. Smith, a former Highland womens basketball coach, says harsh treatment of Black student-athletes dates to 2019 when Highland hired a new president, Deborah Fox, who brought in a new athletic director, Bryan Dorrel. Smith says Dorrell immediately laid down the law.

His exact words were I needed to recruit more kids the culture of our community could relate to, Smith says. I honestly don't know what you mean. What, what are you saying? And he very aggressively said you know exactly what I'm saying. He wanted me to recruit more kids that looked like the people that lived in Highland.

From then on, Smith says, the school looked for excuses to punish Black players, suspend them from games and even expel them from school.

You need to look right. You act right, speak when spoken to, you know, there's a terminology for what they want of Black people, Smith says.

In 2019, Highlands winning football coach, Aaron Arnold, who is white, resigned. The next year, the ACLU of Kansas sued the school on behalf of four Black students, alleging it sought to reduce the number of its Black students. The school settled the lawsuit eight months after it was filed, agreeing to pay up to $15,000 to each of the four students and pledging to provide anti-discrimination and Fourth Amendment training to staff and administrators.

Smith, among the nations most successful junior college womens basketball coaches at the time, lost his job that same year when his contract wasnt renewed.

Carlos Moreno

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KCUR 89.3

Earlier this month, Smith, who is white, and two assistant coaches, both Black, sued the school, claiming it was seeking to get rid of its Black student-athletes. Parkville, Missouri, attorney Bill Odle, who represents them, says the coaches refused to go along with a pattern of abusive behavior toward Black players.

It's a concerted campaign to make Highland white again, Odle says.

Fox, Highland's president, issued a statement strongly denying the allegations and asserting that almost half the student-athletes at Highland are Black, the same percentage as when Smith lost his job. She said the school is looking forward to presenting its case for getting rid of Smith.

Smith has been ousted before. He was the womens basketball coach at Southeast Missouri State University when the school was caught up in a flurry of basketball recruiting violations, resulting in NCAA sanctions. In 2014, while at Highland, he pleaded guilty to participating in an illegal car theft ring by helping to obscure the paper trail of cars that had previously been sold for salvage. Smith, who says he didnt know about the stolen cars, was given probation and Highland kept him on as the women's basketball coach.

But Smith said the school never specified what, if any, violations he had committed when it didnt renew his contract. Smith says the school is attacking him to mask its own deplorable behavior.

School officials declined to comment. But Ryan Kuhnert, a 2009 Highland graduate, insists the school values diversity.

When I went to Highland it was the most Black people I had ever encountered in my life being from a small farm town," Kuhnert says. "And it was a great learning experience for me."

Kuhnert says the schools treatment of Black student-athletes is in keeping with the strict discipline he saw imposed on everyone, white or Black.

Highland farmer Jerry Blevins agrees and says the college is just trying to strengthen its ties to the community.

The reason why they want Kansas kids, it has nothing to do with Black or white. They want local kids, so with their parents and family and stuff, Blevins says.

But the racial issues at Highland Community College were made stark earlier this month when The Kansas City Star published a recording of Fox likening a Black football player to Hitler, whom she called a great leader."

Fox said in a subsequent statement that she meant the player was misdirecting his own substantial leadership abilities and she apologized. But, for Ann Myers, whose son attended Highland, that apology fell well short.

That that was a bad, bad call. I felt disgusted as a human being, she says.

Carlos Moreno

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KCUR 89.3

Myers sent off her son, Dominic Perks, to Highland Community College when he was just 17. In his second year, Perks, who is Black, argued with a campus security guard over whether he was properly signed in to eat at the cafeteria, which according to Myers he was. The guard accused Perks of uttering the f-word. That was enough to get Perks expelled the next day.

The teenager called his mother after he was kicked off campus, locked out of his dorm room and stranded five hours from his home in St. Louis.

It was a horrible feeling, recalls Myers, emotion rising in her voice. Because, you know, as parents, we are our children's protectors, we're the advocates. And at that present moment, I couldn't protect him. It still bothers me because I feel like he's always gonna be trying to prove who he is.

Now Highland Community College itself is under the microscope, struggling to show that it remains a stepping stone for Black student-athletes and not a place where their sports and academic careers go to die.

Read the rest here:
A small Kansas community college finds itself in the spotlight amid allegations of racial animosity - KCUR

In the past month, this column has twice addressed the unbridled propensity of federal intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without search warrants as required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

These agencies believe that the Fourth Amendment which protects the individual right to privacy only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.

There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government. Period. Last week, Congress got burned when the CIA released a heavily redacted summary of its current spying in the United States.

When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within the United States. The legislation creating the CIA contains those limitations.

Nevertheless, we know from statements of former governors of several states that CIA agents claim to be physically present in all 50 statehouses in the United States.

The agents who have infiltrated state governments didnt arrive until after Dec. 4, 1981. Thats the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries and keep from law enforcement whatever it finds.

Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a wall of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.

So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors who can only use evidence lawfully obtained any evidence of his domestic violence.

All this changed 20 years later when President George W. Bush demolished Reagans wall between law enforcement and domestic spying and directed the CIA and other domestic spying agencies to share the fruits of their spying with the FBI.

Thus, thanks to Reagan and Bush authorizing it, and their successors looking the other way, CIA agents have been engaging in fishing expeditions on a grand scale inside the country for the past 20 years. Congress knows about this because all intelligence agencies are required by statute to report the extent of their spying secretly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

This, of course, does not absolve the CIA of its presidentially authorized computer hacking crimes; rather, it gives Congress a false sense of security that it has a handle on whats going on.

Whats going on is not CIA lawyers appearing before judges asking for surveillance warrants based upon probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires. Whats going on is CIA agents going to Big Tech and paying for access to communications used by ordinary Americans. Some Big Tech firms told the CIA to take a hike. Others took the CIAs cash and opened the spigots of their fiber optic data to the voracious federal appetite.

If the CIA went to a judge and demonstrated probable cause of crime for example, that a janitor in the Russian Embassy was passing defense secrets to Moscow surely the judge would have signed a surveillance warrant. But to the CIA, following the Constitution is too limiting.

Thus, by acquiring bulk data fiber optic data on hundreds of millions of Americans acquired without search warrants the CIA could avoid the time and trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. But that time and trouble were intentionally required by the authors of the Fourth Amendment so as to keep the government off our backs.

Not to be outdone by its principal rival, the FBI soon began doing the same thing gathering bulk data without search warrants.

When Congress learned of this, it enacted legislation that banned the warrantless acquisition of bulk data. Apparently, Congress is naive enough to believe that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, their cousin with 60,000 domestic spies, actually comply with federal law.

Last week, that naivete was manifested front and center when the CIA sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee documenting the extent of its domestic acquisition of bulk data on Americans.

Two senators who should have known better claimed they were shocked at what they read. They read an admission of continued CIA warrantless bulk acquisition of personal data on unsuspecting and unsuspected Americans, and they saw large portions of the letter redacted so that the senators do not know the nature of the data received.

So, notwithstanding the persistent efforts of members of Congress from both parties to limit and in some cases to prohibit the warrantless acquisition of bulk data by the CIA from Americans, the practice continues, the CIA defends it and presidents look the other way.

In 1947, Congress created a monster which today is so big and so powerful and so indifferent to the Constitution and the federal laws its agents have sworn to uphold that it can boast about its lawlessness, have no fear of defying Congress and always escape the consequences of all this largely unscathed.

I suspect the CIA and its cousins get away with this because they spy on Congress and possess damning personal data on members who regularly vote to increase their secret budgets. When will we have a government whose officials are courageous enough to uphold the Constitution?

Read more:
CIA spies and their collaborators | Opinion | journal-spectator.com - Wharton Journal Spectator