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Submission + - DEA steals life savings of innocent man

schwit1 writes: In another example of civil forfeiture, DEA agents confiscated the life savings of a man heading to California based on no evidence.

There was no evidence of a crime, the man was never charged, but three weeks later he still has not gotten his money back.

Sean Waite, the agent in charge for the DEA in Albuquerque, said he could not comment on the Rivers case because it is ongoing. He disputed allegations that Rivers was targeted because of his race. Waite said that in general DEA agents look for "indicators" such as whether the person bought an expensive one-way ticket with cash, if the person is traveling from or to a city known as a hot spot for drug activity, if the person's story has inconsistencies or if the large sums of money found could have been transported by more conventional means.

"We don't have to prove that the person is guilty," Waite said. "It's that the money is presumed to be guilty."

Read the whole article. This is entirely unconstitutional. The fifth amendment to the Bill of Rights expressly forbids the taking of private property "without just compensation."

Submission + - What to Say When the Police Tell You to Stop Filming Them 3

HughPickens.com writes: Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that first of all, police shouldn’t ask. “As a basic principle, we can’t tell you to stop recording,” says Delroy Burton, a 21-year veteran of DC's police force. “If you’re standing across the street videotaping, and I’m in a public place, carrying out my public functions, [then] I’m subject to recording, and there’s nothing legally the police officer can do to stop you from recording.” What you don’t have a right to do is interfere with an officer's work. "“Police officers may legitimately order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations,” according to Jay Stanley who wrote the ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” guide for photographers, which lays out in plain language the legal protections that are assured people filming in public. Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your digital photographs or video without a warrant and police may not delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

What if an officer says you are interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations and you disagree with the officer? “If it were me, and an officer came up and said, ‘You need to turn that camera off, sir,’ I would strive to calmly and politely yet firmly remind the officer of my rights while continuing to record the interaction, and not turn the camera off," says Stanley. The ACLU guide also supplies the one question those stopped for taking photos or video may ask an officer: "The right question to ask is, ‘am I free to go?’ If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal."

Comment Re: Without Legal Mumbo Jumbo (Score 1) 87

It's worse than that. If they were ACTUALLY interested in fixing the problem, they would want to have someone who would actually understand the disclosure. At least the lawyer would ask if there was a technical write-up he could pass on to an engineer. However, the correspondence published showed no interest in the technical information whatsoever except for making a vague threat should it be released.

Their intentions are quite clear.

Comment Re:Deny them the pleasure of security by obscurity (Score 2) 87

You know, it's possible to disclose that a vulnerability exists without disclosing how to exploit it. The letter from the lawyer also states that the firm is interested in discussing this further but was rebuffed by the "researcher". How are they supposed to know if the exploit is real or not if the "researcher" in question refuses to disclose the PoC to their lawyer. I'm pretty certain that a single phone call resolved the "are you working on their behalf" question. At that point (verification) he should have simply given the vendor the PoC and a few more days before putting people at risk.

Had the vendor shown any actual interest in addressing the issue rather than burying it, they probably could have gotten an extension. Instead, they chose to squash any inclination to good will by prattling on with vague DMCA threats.

If the nature of the attack isn't released in detail, how does anyone learn from the mistake? As for the details, what good does it do to tell the lawyers? Might as well tell the mailroom guy. If they were serious about learning from their mistake, they would want him to discuss it with an engineer. Perhaps if the disclosure is public, one of the engineers might hear about it in a coherent enough form to actually fix something.

They made specific claims about their security product that have been determined to be untrue, what's your solution? Let them keep selling weak security to high security facilities?

Comment Re:Correction (Score 1) 71

Amusingly, fortnight is a well defined term still in reasonably common use in many English speaking countries. There is no ambiguity.

I suppose that's an apt analogy since the judge wrote the ruling in contemporary English as well with an equal lack of ambiguity.

Considering the number of archaic words one finds in some legal documents, you might be hard-pressed to notice that your contract was re-written into Ye Olde English. :-)

Comment Re: Money does exist. (Score 1) 1097

Some believe that if the shaman curses them and points at them with a particular bone representing his power, they will die.

Sure enough, if the shaman does exactly that, *they* will die. So, is it true then? At least in some sense it seems to be.

A $100 bill is a piece of paper with printing on it. It carries very little intrinsic value. Among those who *BELIEVE* it has value, you can offer it in exchange for goods and services. It is true in the same sense as the shaman's curse.

I'll bet I couldn't get you to put in hours of hard work in exchange for an animal's tail, but in some places you'll get a lot more for it than you will for that $100.

Comment Re:Measurements (Score 1) 425

I think the answer is in there somewhere. At one time, the answer to your question was YES! 1000 times YES! Those two lines make the difference between the program fitting in memory and completing by the deadline and failure. At that time, the bar to successful programming was much higher than now. There may have been merely average programmers but their programs didn't fit into RAM. Besides that, the machines were very expensive and so was runtime on them. Much too expensive to burn on a merely average program.

Comment Re:Grinding slowly but exceedingly fine? (Score 1) 71

Lawyers can't use being hired help as a defense. They are officers of the court first, so it is their duty to refuse to behave unethically no matter who pays how much. Vigorous representation does not include illegal acts.

Considering that the company listed an unwilling and unassociated person as an officer, it may well not even exist legally. No company, no protection. Beyond that, the corporate veil isn't quite blanket immunity, particularly when the company is small enough that the officers can't claim to not know about the illegal activity. There is no reason at all to not expect personal criminal liability to attach.

Comment Re:Not Actually $3500 (Score 1) 317

The circuits that generate the sine wave from the clock already exist. That's what an inverter is. The ability to invert DC off grid really is just a matter of adding an internal clock to replace referencing the grid and a relay to disconnect the grid for safety reasons.

There is additional logic and circuitry to do battery management and charging, of course. It is expected to be more expensive, but there is no technical reason it should be 4x more expensive.

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