Homeless in Arizona

The sky is falling - We need a police state!!!!

Legal fight brews on impairment in medical-marijuana DUIs

Arizona's medical marijuana law says people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations are they are called can't be arrested for DUI simply because they have marijuana metabolites in their body, but the cops have decided to ignore Prop 203 and arrest medical marijuana patients for DUI solely because they have microscopic traces of marijuana in their body.

I believe Arizona's DUI/DWI laws are among the strictest in the nation and if even a microscopic trace of marijuana is detected in your body you are consider guilty of drunk driving according to ARS 28-1381 and ARS 13-3401

28-1381.A. It is unlawful for a person to drive or be in actual physical control of a vehicle in this state under any of the following circumstance

3. While there is any drug defined in section 13-3401 or its metabolite in the person's body.

13-3401. Definitions

4. "Cannabis" ...

ARS 36-2802.D Operating, navigating or being in actual physical control of any motor vehicle, aircraft or motorboat while under the influence of marijuana, except that a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment.

Source

Legal fight brews on impairment in medical-marijuana DUIs

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Wed Aug 7, 2013 10:54 PM

Medical-marijuana cardholders in Arizona who drive after using the drug may face a difficult legal choice: their driver’s license or their marijuana card. If they use both, they could be charged with DUI.

Valley prosecutors say that any trace of marijuana in a driver’s blood is enough to charge a motorist with driving under the influence of drugs [per ARS 28-1381.A and ARS 13-3401] and that a card authorizing use of medical pot is no defense. [per ARS 36-2802.D - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

But advocates of medical marijuana, which voters approved in November 2010, argue that the presence of marijuana in a person’s bloodstream is not grounds for charging drivers who are allowed to use the drug. [again per ARS 36-2802.D]

The legal battle over the rights of medical-marijuana cardholders to drive while medicating is being fought in the state’s court system. Motorists convicted in municipal courts, which typically rule it unlawful for a driver to have any trace of marijuana in his or her blood, are appealing cases to Superior Court, where judges’ decisions could set precedents for how the medical-marijuana law applies to Arizona drivers.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia authorize the use of marijuana for medical purposes, making marijuana-related DUIs an issue for police, prosecutors and politicians nationwide.

The biggest issue is deciding what blood level of marijuana makes a driver impaired, similar to the way blood-alcohol levels determine when a person is legally drunk. [Arizona's DUI laws say any microscopic trace of an illegal drug is an automatic conviction for DUI, but Arizona's medical marijuana law says this does not apply to people with medical marijuana prescriptions or recommendations]

In Arizona, the confusion over interpretation of the Medical Marijuana Act stems from its inception because prosecutors and police didn’t have the chance to weigh in before it went to voters in 2010. [it's not confusion, police and prosecutors have decided to ignore Prop 203 which says - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

Prosecutors say Arizona law allows motorists who are not impaired to drive with prescription drugs in their system if they are using them under doctors’ orders.

The problem for marijuana cardholders is that pot can’t be prescribed, only recommended, offering no legal grounds for a motorist to drive with even trace amounts of the drug in their system, according to prosecutors. [wrong Prop 203 very specifically excludes people with medical marijuana prescriptions - "a registered qualifying patient shall not be considered to be under the influence of marijuana solely because of the presence of metabolites or components of marijuana that appear in insufficient concentration to cause impairment"]

For most driving-under-the-influence-of-marijuana cases, the drug charge is secondary to the charge of driving while impaired. Arizona’s DUI laws have three aspects: driving while impaired to the slightest degree, driving under the influence of alcohol and driving under the influence of drugs.

The handful of cases making their way through the courts grew out of traffic stops, where drivers are typically cited for both driving while impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs.

Attorneys for the accused say they are willing to argue about impairment, which would allow a drug expert hired by the defense to counter testimony from a police drug-recognition expert, but that a suspect’s legal participation in the state’s medical-marijuana program should provide a defense to the DUI-drug charge if there is no evidence of impairment.

Prosecutors in Mesa and other jurisdictions have successfully argued to keep juries from hearing information about a suspect’s medical-marijuana card, which could be appealed.

“They can make that argument (about impairment) and I think it’s a fair one to make. What they can’t do is preclude a jury from hearing that he has a medical-marijuana card,” said Craig Rosenstein, an attorney representing a DUI-drug suspect in Mesa. “The idea that he would be able to beat the (DUI-drug) charge is impossible unless the jury can hear that they have a medical-marijuana card. Otherwise, he’s just a kid smoking weed and he got caught.”

Morgan Jackson Doyle, 24, was coming back from the Salt River on Memorial Day 2012 when he was stopped at a sobriety checkpoint by Mesa police near Power Road and the Red Mountain Freeway.

An officer said Doyle had reddened eyes and a raspy voice, which prompted him to ask whether Doyle had recently smoked marijuana, according to police.

Rosenstein, Doyle’s lawyer, said Doyle gave the officer his medical-marijuana card with his driver’s license, “out of an abundance of truth.”

Doyle was put through a series of field-sobriety tests, some of which indicated impairment while others did not, before a trained drug-recognition officer was called to put Doyle through more thorough tests that look for clues of drug use.

The drug-recognition expert determined it was not safe for Doyle to drive, police said. He was cited for driving while impaired to the slightest degree and driving under the influence of drugs.

Blood tests later showed Doyle had the psychoactive component of marijuana in his blood, but in an amount that falls below levels some scientists consider the threshold for impairment.

A judge in Mesa refused to allow Doyle to introduce the card at his trial, prompting his lawyer to seek a ruling in Superior Court, which sent the case back to Mesa. If the court rules as expected, attorneys said the case will be appealed.

“I think it’s ridiculous. Voters in Arizona adopted the Medical Marijuana Act, whether politicians agree, or not,” Rosenstein said. “My concern was, if this isn’t isolated to Mesa, in theory that could make bad law for the entire state.”

Phoenix prosecutors have taken the same stance on drug DUIs for marijuana cardholders, in part, because the drug does not come with any of the same controls as a standard prescription, said Beth Barnes, the city’s traffic-safety resource prosecutor.

The potency of marijuana can vary among dispensaries that sell to patients, and doctors’ recommendations do not have dosage limits and warning against operating heavy machinery that prescriptions usually carry, she said.

Those and other factors mean possession of a card is not relevant in DUI cases, Barnes said.

Aaron Carreón-Ainsa, Phoenix’s chief prosecutor, said he understands it is legal for authorized patients to use medical marijuana, but that right can infringe on other privileges they might enjoy.

“For those people who have medical-marijuana cards, OK, it’s legal. Fine,” Carreón-Ainsa said. “But don’t come to this building because you’ve been driving. Just take it and don’t drive.”

Blood concentration

Though some states have tried to attach a number to impairment, experts say the practice is complicated by a number of factors including the patient’s metabolism and smoking frequency.

A 10-year study of more than 8,700 DUI-drug cases in Sweden led researchers to conclude that zero-tolerance policies were probably most effective because they help identify suspects whose concentration-level might have fallen below an arbitrarily set limit while waiting to give a blood sample.

“Scientists have found it virtually impossible to agree upon the concentration of a psychoactive substance in blood that leads to impairment in the vast majority of people,” the researchers wrote.

Colorado legislators consistently rejected proposals to link impairment with a particular amount of marijuana in a driver’s blood, but this year passed a law allowing prosecutors to presume impairment if that level is above 5 nanograms per milliliter. Defense attorneys argue that 5 nanograms is an arbitrary amount that has no bearing on impairment.

“We need to stop looking at a meaningless number, and in the case of Arizona, not only a meaningless number but a cruel and unusual application of it: you punish somebody on a Monday morning for them killing their pain on a Friday night,” said Lenny Frieling, a Colorado attorney and medical-marijuana advocate.

“I don’t want impaired drivers on the road. The key in my mind is looking at whether somebody really is or is not impaired. If they’re impaired, I don’t care which drug impaired them.” [but Arizona's DUI laws in ARS 28-1381 say that anybody with a detectable amount of an illegal drug is considered guilty of DUI even if they ARE NOT impaired - and a person can have marijuana metabolites in their body weeks after using marijuana]

Frieling is developing a mobile test that gauges factors, including memory and balance, that could help determine impairment, but without years of clinical trials and research about marijuana concentrations that equate to impairment, the issue often relies on police drug-recognition experts and interpretation of state laws.

Courts within the same states have been inconsistent in applying the law.

A Michigan man was charged with driving a car with a prohibited substance in his system after he told an officer during a traffic stop that he was an authorized medical-marijuana cardholder and had smoked five hours earlier.

A judge concluded that the state’s medical-marijuana law protected him from prosecution unless police could prove he was impaired. Another court agreed before the Michigan Court of Appeals reversed the judge’s order and determined that legislators deemed it unsafe for a motorist to drive with any amount of marijuana in their system.

The Michigan Supreme Court reversed that Appeals Court decision earlier this year and found that the state’s medical-marijuana law authorized participants to have traces of marijuana in their bloodstream so long as they were not impaired while driving.

The Michigan driver’s blood contained 10 ng/ml of the active marijuana metabolite — twice the limit adopted in Colorado — but the justices said the amount was not enough to constitute driving under the influence without evidence of impairment.

“The MMMA (Michigan Medical Marihuana Act) shields registered patients from the internal possession of marijuana,” the court ruled. “The MMMA does not define what it means to be ‘under the influence’ but the phrase clearly contemplates something more than having any amount of marijuana in one’s system and requires some effect on the person.”

Arizona’s medical-marijuana users should be afforded similar protections when they are not impaired, say the law’s supporters.

Andrew Myers, campaign manager for the organization that got the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act on the 2010 ballot, said law enforcement should not base an arrest solely on the presence of marijuana in a cardholder’s system.

“The presence of metabolites alone shall not constitute impairment under the law — period,” he said. He said the program’s language was “very mindfully” written to avoid cases such as the Mesa case.

“There’s absolutely no way that, if challenged in court, that a conviction would stand — the law is absolutely clear on this point,” Myers said. “You could medicate on a Friday and get pulled over on a Monday two weeks later. It’s that ridiculous — it would absolutely preclude any medical-marijuana cardholder from operating a motor vehicle at any time if they were an active patient. And that’s ridiculously onerous and it’s not reflective of reality for a person who medicates.”

Myers said law enforcement should propose legislation to establish a legal standard of impairment: “Until that point, I think the law needs to favor the citizenry,” he said. [Arizona's medical marijuana law clearly says it is illegal to drive when stoned on marijuana, but it also says that you are not considered guilty of DUI simply because you have marijuana metabolites in your body.]

Most people are in prison for victimless drug war crimes

After victimless drug war crimes most people are in prison for weapons violations

Victimless drug and gun crimes are why most people are in Federal prisons.

51 percent of federal prison inmates are there for victimless drug war crimes. In the above graph the second highest number of people are in federal prisons for weapons violations. The article didn't give a percent for weapons violations.

Source

Eric Holder is cutting federal drug sentences. That will make a small dent in the U.S. prison population.

By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 12 at 2:50 pm

Populations at federal prisons have grown, but state prisons are the real problem.

Attorney General Eric Holder will announce Monday that the Justice Department will no longer charge nonviolent drug offenders with serious crimes that subject them to long, mandatory minimum sentences in the federal prison system. As my colleague Sari Horwitz explains, Holder “is giving new instructions to federal prosecutors on how they should write their criminal complaints when charging low-level drug offenders, to avoid triggering the mandatory minimum sentences.”

He’s also expected to call for the expanded use of prison alternatives, such as probation or house arrest, for nonviolent offenders and for lower sentences for elderly inmates. And he’ll endorse legislation by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would increase federal judges’ flexibility in sentencing nonviolent drug offenders.

The changes Holder wants will likely make a big difference at the federal level. But that won’t be enough to solve America’s mass incarceration problem.

Focusing on drug offenses is a smart way to go about reducing the federal incarceration rate. According to data in Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?, a new book by UC – Berkeley’s Steven Raphael and UCLA’s Michael Stoll, the most serious charge for 51 percent of federal inmates in 2010 was a drug offense. By comparison, homicide was the most serious charge for only 1 percent, and robbery was the most serious charge against 4 percent.

Tougher drug sentencing accounts for much of the increase in the incarceration rate. “If you go back and decompose what caused growth in the federal prison system since 1984, a large chunk can be explained by drug offenses, around 45 percent,” Raphael says. The other big category accounting for the federal increase is weapons charges, such as the five-year mandatory minimum faced by drug offenders caught with guns. Raphael estimates that that accounts for 18 to 19 percent of the increase.

There’s also been an increase in incarcerations on immigration charges, with the rest of the increase in other areas. But there’s no doubt that the biggest category of crime behind the increase in the federal incarceration rate is drugs. Easing up on drug sentencing would make a big dent.

The states are different

But the federal system isn’t really where the action is. The most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) estimates find that there are 1,353,198 people incarcerated at the state level and 217,815 incarcerated federally. So about 13.9 percent of U.S. prisoners are in federal institutions; the other 86.1 percent are in state facilities. And most prisoners at the state level are not there for drug crimes.

In 2004, about 20 percent of state-level inmates were incarcerated on drug convictions, Raphael and Stoll find. Compared with the federal population, those incarcerated at the state level are much likelier to have committed violent offenses. In 2004, 14 percent were in prison for homicide, 9 percent for rape or sexual assault, 12 percent for robbery and 8 percent for aggravated assault. In 2011, it was much the same, according to BJS stats on state inmates serving sentences of a year or more. Fifty-three percent of inmates were in prison for violent offenses, 18.3 percent for property crimes, 10.6 percent for “public order” offenses such as drunk driving, weapons possession or vice offenses, and 16.8 percent for drug convictions.

Bjs state breakdown

Raphael and Stoll’s estimates of what’s accounting for the higher incarceration rates suggest that violent crimes are a big part of the state-level story. They find that harsher sentencing for violent offenders explains 48 percent of growth in incarceration rates, compared with about 22 percent attributable to increases in drug sentencing, and 15 percent due to increases in property crime and other sentences.

Then again, most people who go through state criminal justice systems do so on drug offenses. If you look at admission rates, rather than incarceration rates, at the state level, drugs become a much bigger part of the picture. For admissions, Raphael and Stoll find “relatively modest increases for violent crimes and property crimes and pronounced increases for drug offenses, parole violations, and other less serious crime.” And while higher admissions for less serious crimes with shorter sentences don’t affect the incarceration rate as much as increases in sentencing for serious crimes, they do dramatically affect the lives of those admitted, who have to find work as ex-offenders and live with the sundry restrictions states impose upon those who’ve served time.

It’s not hopeless

Holder is taking a fairly plausible approach to reducing the U.S. incarceration rate at the level where he can effect it. But that’s not the level that matters most, and if we were to get serious about reducing the state-level incarceration and admissions rates, we need to talk not just about reducing sentences for drug crimes but also about reducing prison admissions for drug offenses, and perhaps also lowering sentences for property crime and even violent offenses, particularly robbery.

There has been growing enthusiasm for reforming state sentencing laws, even backed by many conservatives. The American Legislative Exchange Council has joined the cause, creating model legislation for loosening state mandatory minimum laws. Especially if it’s not just limited to drug offenses, that kind of reform could greatly reduce the state incarceration rate.

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

I remember we had an anti-war protest in Phoenix and the government used the same convoluted logic about a chalk drawing made on the sidewalk.

They also said the drawing would cost thousands of dollars to clean up, when in fact 5 minutes with a hose and water is all it would take to clean up the drawing.

Source

Sidewalk chalk could land four protestors in jail for a year

By FRANCIS MCCABE

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

Four people could face up to a year in jail for chalking up city sidewalks while protesting police misconduct.

Kelly Wayne Patterson, 44, Brian Ballentine, 31, Hailee Jewell, 18, and Catalino de la Cruz Dazo Jr., 20, face multiple gross misdemeanor counts of placing graffiti or defacing property and conspiracy to commit placing graffiti.

If convicted, they could face probation, a suspended driver’s license, community service and up to a year in the Clark County Detention Center.

The four protesters, affiliated with Nevada Cop Block and Sunset Activist Collective, used washable colored chalk in July to write critical statements of police on the sidewalks outside the Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters and in front of the Regional Justice Center.

Demonstrating against police brutality and officer-involved shootings in Las Vegas, the protesters say they were practicing free speech and should not face charges.

District Attorney Steve Wolfson is taking the case seriously.

“This is not a kid drawing with a piece of chalk on the sidewalk. These are adults who used chalk to draw profanity,” he said. “And there is a law on the books that make it a crime to engage in this activity.”

One statement read: “Not one single cop in Metro’s entire history has been charged after shooting someone. Even if that person was unarmed and/or innocent.”

Another was: “(Expletive) the police.”

Officers on July 13 watched the protesters write statements on the sidewalk and told them they were violating anti-graffiti laws, according to police reports and court documents.

After the protest, Patterson and Ballentine were cited, and police called the city graffiti abatement team, which used high-powered washers to clean the dusty words.

Days later, before a scheduled court hearing on the citation the protesters again used colored chalk, typically made from a composite of calcium sulfate, as part of their protest outside the Regional Justice Center.

One statement read: “(Expletive) Pigs.”

An unknown woman dumped coffee on it, washing it away, according to police who witnessed the protest.

According to documents, Patterson then wrote on the coffee-stained ground, “(Expletive) the police.”

Police documented the evidence, called the city’s graffiti abatement team and began exhaustive research about the perils of power washing to sidewalks, including that it “artificially erodes and abrades the concrete’s surface thereby adding to the unnecessary wear and tear.”

Detailed police reports said the city crew cost $1,550 to clean both crime scenes.

The reports did not include the cost of the coffee used to clean one of the statements. It’s unclear whether it was a small, medium or large coffee.

Lawyer Robert Langford called the case preposterous and is representing the defendants pro bono.

“Under that standard, any kid that does hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk can be guilty of the same crime,” Langford said.

The veteran defense lawyer added, “Justice in this case is that the case should be dismissed. They were engaged in constitutionally protected First Amendment activity. Period. They have the right to engage in that type of protest. This was something that was harmless.”

Langford accused law enforcement officials of inflating the cost of the cleanup to justify the arrest and incarceration until bail was posted, instead of simply issuing a citation.

Part of his defense will be to show that the chalk could have been cleaned up at a lessor cost.

“My bet is a good stiff broom would have done the same thing,” he said.

By employing the power washing crew at a cost of more than $250, the graffiti charge was elevated from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor, which could mean a stiffer sentence if they are convicted.

Langford said the amount of time, money and other taxpayer resources spent on the case is ridiculous. And all “because the bullies at the Las Vegas police department wanted to hurt people who wanted to criticize them. That’s, in the final analysis, what this case is about.”

Langford added he’s considering filing a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of the defendants.

“Public property is being defaced with profanity,” Wolfson said. “That’s what it comes down to.”

A preliminary hearing is set for December.

Contact reporter Francis McCabe at fmccabe@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-1039.

The Emperor Wears No Clothes

The Emperor Wears No Clothes

If you want a thousand good reasons to legalize, or re-legalize marijuana the book The Emperor Wears No Clothes has those reasons for you.

NSA Surveillance - Lady Liberty Raped

NSA Surveillance - TSA goons destroying America

Sacrifice a politician????

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

1) I have always suspected that the NSA can use it's supercomputers to crack PGP and other public key encrypted messages. But I suspected it took some effort to decrypt the messages. Is that still true??? Or it is now a trivial inexpensive task for NSA to read messages that are encrypted with PGP and other public key??

2) Just what are these "secret portals" or "hooks" that the NSA has created??? I suspect they are hooks that tell the encryption software used by HTTPS encryption to create encrypted data that is easily decrypted by NSA and other government agencies.

3) This shows that it is really not safe to put ANYTHING that you would like to keep secret from anybody, especially the government on the internet. Same goes for putting the data on telephone lines, radio waves or any public communication method.

Files show NSA cracks, weakens Internet encryption

By Michael Winter USA Today Thu Sep 5, 2013 4:51 PM

U.S. and British intelligence agencies have cracked the encryption designed to provide online privacy and security, documents leaked by Edward Snowden show.

In their clandestine, decade-long effort to defeat digital scrambling, the National Security Agency, along with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have used supercomputers to crack encryption codes and have inserted secret portals into software with the help of technology companies, the Guardian, the New York Times and ProPublica reported Thursday.

The NSA has also maintained control over international encryption standards.

As the Times points out, encryption "guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world."

The NSA calls its decryption efforts the "price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."

A 2010 memo describing an NSA briefing to British agents about the secret hacking said, "For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies. Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

The GCHQ is working to penetrate encrypted traffic on what it called the "big four" service providers ---Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, the Guardian said.

Who needs back up files when you have the NSA????

Don't think of it as the government flushing the Bill of Rights down the toilet!!!

Think of it as a free file backup service run by government goons!!!!

N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web

The article says the NSA has been getting makers of ICs or integrated circuits to put back doors into their products so the NSA can read or listen to your data before the chip encrypts it.

The article says the NSA is also working with software vendors like Microsoft getting them to put back doors in their software products, again so the NSA can grab the data before the software encrypts it.

Journalist Facing Prison Over a Link

Placing a "link" or an "A tag" to a document is a Federal crime???

"By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities ... are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it"

I guess that is just a cockamamie, convoluted, lame excuse to flush the First Amendment down the toilet by Obama's federal goons.

Source

A Journalist-Agitator Facing Prison Over a Link

By DAVID CARR

Published: September 8, 2013

Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim. A Dallas-based journalist obsessed with the government’s ties to private security firms, Mr. Brown has been in jail for a year, facing charges that carry a combined penalty of more than 100 years in prison.

Professionally, his career embodies many of the conflicts and contradictions of journalism in the digital era. He has written for The Guardian, Vanity Fair and The Huffington Post, but as with so many of his peers, the line between his journalism and his activism is nonexistent. He has served in the past as a spokesman of sorts for Anonymous, the hacker collective, although some members of the group did not always appreciate his work on its behalf.

In 2007, he co-wrote a well-received book, “Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter Bunny,” and over time, he has developed an expertise in the growing alliance between large security firms and the government, arguing that the relationship came at a high cost to privacy.

From all accounts, including his own, Mr. Brown, now 32, is a real piece of work. He was known to call some of his subjects on the phone and harass them. He has been public about his struggles with heroin and tends to see conspiracies everywhere he turns. Oh, and he also threatened an F.B.I. agent and his family by name, on a video, and put it on YouTube, so there’s that.

But that’s not the primary reason Mr. Brown is facing the rest of his life in prison. In 2010, he formed an online collective named Project PM with a mission of investigating documents unearthed by Anonymous and others. If Anonymous and groups like it were the wrecking crew, Mr. Brown and his allies were the people who assembled the pieces of the rubble into meaningful insights.

Project PM first looked at the documents spilled by the hack of HBGary Federal, a security firm, in February 2011 and uncovered a remarkable campaign of coordinated disinformation against advocacy groups, which Mr. Brown wrote about in The Guardian, among other places.

Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern and a fan of Mr. Brown’s work, wrote in The Huffington Post that, “Project PM under Brown’s leadership began to slowly untangle the web of connections between the U.S. government, corporations, lobbyists and a shadowy group of private military and infosecurity consultants.”

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents. The credit card data was of no interest or use to Mr. Brown, but it was of great interest to the government. In December 2012 he was charged with 12 counts related to identity theft. Over all he faces 17 charges — including three related to the purported threat of the F.B.I. officer and two obstruction of justice counts — that carry a possible sentence of 105 years, and he awaits trial in a jail in Mansfield, Tex.

According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

Because Mr. Brown has been closely aligned with Anonymous and various other online groups, some of whom view sowing mayhem as very much a part of their work, his version of journalism is tougher to pin down and, sometimes, tougher to defend.

But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents.

Journalists from other news organizations link to stolen information frequently. Just last week, The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica collaborated on a significant article about the National Security Agency’s effort to defeat encryption technologies. The article was based on, and linked to, documents that were stolen by Edward J. Snowden, a private contractor working for the government who this summer leaked millions of pages of documents to the reporter Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian along with Barton Gellman of The Washington Post.

By trying to criminalize linking, the federal authorities in the Northern District of Texas — Mr. Brown lives in Dallas — are suggesting that to share information online is the same as possessing it or even stealing it. In the news release announcing the indictment, the United States attorney’s office explained, “By transferring and posting the hyperlink, Brown caused the data to be made available to other persons online, without the knowledge and authorization of Stratfor and the card holders.”

And the magnitude of the charges is confounding. Jeremy Hammond, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to participating in the actual hacking of Stratfor in the first place, is facing a sentence of 10 years.

Last week, Mr. Brown and his lawyers agreed to an order that allows him to continue to work on articles, but not say anything about his case that is not in the public record.

Speaking by phone on Thursday, Charles Swift, one of his lawyers, spoke carefully.

“Mr. Brown is presumed innocent of the charges against him and in support of the presumption, the defense anticipates challenging both the legal assumptions and the facts that underlie the charges against him,” he said.

Others who are not subject to the order say the aggressive set of charges suggests the government is trying to send a message beyond the specifics of the case.

“The big reason this matters is that he transferred a link, something all of us do every single day, and ended up being charged for it,” said Jennifer Lynch, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that presses for Internet freedom and privacy. “I think that this administration is trying to prosecute the release of information in any way it can.”

There are other wrinkles in the case. When the F.B.I. tried to serve a warrant on Mr. Brown in March 2012, he was at his mother’s house. The F.B.I. said that his mother tried to conceal his laptop and it charged her with obstruction of justice. (She pleaded guilty in March of this year and is awaiting sentencing.)

The action against his mother enraged Mr. Brown and in September 2012 he made a rambling series of posts to YouTube in which he said he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. He proceeded to threaten an F.B.I. agent involved in the arrest, saying, “I don’t say I’m going to kill him, but I am going to ruin his life and look into his (expletive) kids ... How do you like them apples?”

The feds did not like them apples. After he was arrested, a judge ruled he was “a danger to the safety of the community and a risk of flight.” In the video, Mr. Brown looks more like a strung-out heroin addict than a threat to anyone, but threats are threats, especially when made against the F.B.I.

“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

At a time of high government secrecy with increasing amounts of information deemed classified, other routes to the truth have emerged, many of them digital. News organizations in receipt of leaked documents are increasingly confronting tough decisions about what to publish, and are defending their practices in court and in the court of public opinion, not to mention before an administration determined to aggressively prosecute leakers.

In public statements since his arrest, Mr. Brown has acknowledged that he made some bad choices. But punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Montgomery to Saldate - Please help us frame Debra Milke

In this article it sure sounds like Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is sending a message to crooked Phoenix Police Detective Armando Saldate saying he won't be charged with perjury if he helps Bill Montgomery frame Debra Milke for murder.

With prosecutors like Bill Montgomery and cops like Detective Armando Saldate it's almost guaranteed an innocent person won't get a fair trial.

I am not sure on this but I think according to the rules of the court Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery is required to give Debra Milke any evidence that could help her prove her innocent. And that certainly would include evidence that Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate seems to be a lying scum back cop based on things he has done in the past.

An interesting case that is related to this is Brooklyn, New York where New York City Police Detective Louis Scarcella is suspected of framing around 50 people for murder. The similarities are amazing.

NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella is accused of making up imaginary confessions up out of thin air, just like Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate.

NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella is accused of giving criminal snitches drugs, money, reduced sentences and special favors in exchange for them making up imaginary evidence to convict people he was investigating of murder. Just like Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate.

And NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella is accused of beating people us to get confessions out of them. Just like Phoenix Detective Armando Saldate.

This case also has a lot of simularities to the Phoenix area Buddhist Temple murders in which four kids from Tucson were framed for the murders in the Buddhist Temple.

Source

Montgomery: Milke case detective being intimidated

By JJ Hensley The Republic | azcentral.com Fri Sep 13, 2013 10:39 PM

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery delivered a message on Friday to the detective who allegedly received the disputed confession at the heart of the Debra Milke murder case: You have no reason to avoid testifying because you fear prosecution.

A lawyer for former Phoenix police Detective Armando Saldate told a trial judge on Thursday that he had recommended Saldate take advantage of his constitutional protection against self-incrimination if he is called to the witness stand in Milke’s retrial, a move that would bar her alleged confession from being considered in the case.

The confession was crucial to her conviction in the 1989 shooting death of her 4-year-old son, Christopher, which left two men on death row and sent Milke there for 22 years until her release last week.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out her conviction and death sentence earlier this year because the trial court refused to let her introduce evidence that could have discredited the confession. Prosecutors “remained unconstitutionally silent” about Saldate’s history of misconduct, including lying, the panel wrote.

And if Saldate doesn’t testify during Milke’s retrial, the confession will not be allowed into the retrial, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Rosa Mroz said Thursday.

In pointed remarks aimed at Saldate, his attorney and lawyers representing Milke, Montgomery said the belief that Saldate could face some sort of prosecution for the misconduct outlined in the 9th Circuit’s ruling is being used to intimidate the 21-year Phoenix police veteran and keep him from testifying. [What's wrong with threatening a crooked cop with being jailed for perjury if he lies in court or lied in court to frame Debra Milke for murder?]

And there is no reason for Saldate to believe he could implicate himself in criminal activity by testifying, Montgomery said.

“There is no basis for the state’s witness to be able to assert the Fifth Amendment … because there is no criminal conduct,” Montgomery said.

The panel that sent Milke’s case back to Maricopa County Superior Court also requested that the opinion be sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for investigation into whether Saldate’s misconduct outlined in the ruling amounted to a violation of Arizonans’ rights. Federal prosecutors sent a letter to Montgomery’s office in late August saying that the statute of limitations had expired on any misconduct by Saldate. [So the message to Detective Armando Saldate is please help us frame Milke because the statute of limitations is expired and you can't be charged with any crimes you committed when you helped frame her the first time???]

“There is no objective basis for Mr. Saldate to fear prosecution from anyone for anything,” Montgomery said. [because if he commits perjury helping me frame Debra Milke for murder I won't prosecute him for anything]

But investigative documents released late Friday afternoon by Milke’s defense team indicate that Saldate was reluctant to speak with police and prosecutors soon after the appeals court released its opinion.

An investigator for the County Attorney’s Office wrote that he contacted Saldate in April to talk about the case and was unable to reach him for months until the investigator served Saldate with a subpoena in late July.

An attorney representing Saldate did not return a call for comment Friday afternoon.

Montgomery spent nearly 20 minutes of his news conference on Friday going through cases where the 9th Circuit cited court rulings that noted potential misconduct on Saldate’s part, none of which were related to Milke’s confession but all of which should have been provided to her defense team at the time of her trial, according to the appeals court.

But Montgomery is convinced the 9th Circuit got it wrong, and the three-judge panel that sent Milke’s case back to court had it in for Saldate, who retired from Phoenix police within a year of taking the confession.

“The 9th Circuit, on a wild goose chase, went after detective Saldate,” Montgomery said.

So, Montgomery plans to file a memo with Mroz, who is the assigned judge for Milke’s trial, in the hopes of making her aware of some of the shortcomings he perceives in the federal appeals court’s opinion.

“It is very unusual,” Montgomery said, adding that he thought a unique approach was warranted.

“I was dumbfounded when I read the (9th Circuit) opinion and in researching what had actually happened in those cases, that the reality is very different from how they were characterized and the conclusions that were drawn,” he said.

An attorney for Milke questioned Montgomery’s analysis of the 9th Circuit opinion, noting that the panel drew its conclusions about Saldate from completed court cases, not pending allegations against the former detective.

“If you even look at the way (Montgomery) analyzes the facts, he doesn’t do that very well,” attorney Michael Kimerer said. “What I think he’s trying to do, quite frankly, is use the media to confuse the facts and issues.”

The DEA, CIA, FBI and NSA were reading my email

Of course I was paranoid and wonder was someone else really reading my email.

Of course my first guess was that it was one of my enemies like David Dorn.

And of course the second guess was that it was the government.

Of course now after Edward Snowden released his information that the government was spying on it that I realized that the government probably was involved with illegally reading my emails several times.

I also wondered why on Earth government would waste their time cracking my passwords.

Well again from the recently released information about government spying it turns out that the government wasn't cracking my passwords.

The NSA was simply twisting the arms of Google and Yahoo and getting them to give the government the passwords and email addresses of people the government considers to be criminals like me.

Of course the government's definition of a criminal seems to be any body that "thinks they have Constitutional rights" or anybody that expects the government to obey it's own laws.

And I guess by those definitions I am a criminal because I do think I have "Constitutional Rights" and I do expect the government to obey it's laws.

Of course I an not a criminal by the standards most normal people think of criminals being.

I don't steal stuff. I don't vandalize stuff. I don't destroy property.

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