Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

If you’re an American, or otherwise living in the USA, stories like That Money Is GUILTY! should make you extremely angry:

Deputy Chris Engel, 25, had been on the job just two weeks when a routine traffic stop Dec. 20 turned into the biggest cash seizure the Nebraska county has ever seen. The driver’s story didn’t add up, Engel said, so he did a little more investigating. The driver was not arrested — or even ticketed for going 10 mph over the 75 mph speed limit. (He was warned.) But the investigation is ongoing, Engel said. The Nebraska State Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Agency are assisting in the investigation.

“Chris is a very aggressive young deputy,” Hanson said. Investigators don’t know if they will be able to connect the money to a drug operation, Hanson said, but the important work already has been done. “The big thing is he grabbed 69 (thousand dollars) and took it away from them,” Hanson said of the money seized. “That’s going right straight to the heart of the matter.”

Thanks to America’s asset forfeiture laws, Police can and will take your property from you if they want to, or suspect they can. Usually this occurs when carrying large amounts of cash under the assumption that anyone carrying a large amount of cash must be guilty of a crime. The legal proceedings are dubious, as the Federal government brings a civil case against your seized cash:

The US Government sues the item of property, not the person; the owner is effectively a third party claimant. Once the government establishes probable cause that the property is subject to forfeiture, the owner must prove on a “preponderance of the evidence” that it is not.

On a practical level, the law enforcement agents making the seizures are either (a) funding their departments or (b) acquiring equity that will personally benefit them, a clear conflict of interest between revenue generating activities and lawfulness. This came from the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), passed by Congress in 1970, which sought to reduce crime by eliminating its financial motivations. For example, in the case of a drug dealer, RICO would let police take his pimped out car, stacks of cash, and other such business accessories, making it unprofitable and embarrassing to be in that profession.

The Mesa Tribune did an analysis of the RICO cases filed in Arizona between January 1990 to November 1993. The nine local agencies it analyzed were the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the D.P.S. (Department of Public Safety), the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and the Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe police departments:

• Nearly three-fourths of the people who lose property in forfeiture cases are never charged with a crime.
• About two-thirds of the people who had property seized had no criminal records in Maricopa County.
• One of every six people whose property was seized was an uninvolved third party who was not even present when the property was taken. Typically these were parents, siblings, boyfriends, or girlfriends who entrusted their cars or other property to someone who was arrested on a narcotics-related charge.
• More than $4 million in cash - 54.8% of that taken - was seized from people who were never charged with a crime.
• Of the more than 2,400 people whose property was seized, only one in five was ultimately convicted.
• Only one in 20 went to prison.
• One in 40 went to prison for five years or more, even though those are the people most likely to be the kingpins at which the law is aimed.
• Despite the law’s stated aim of breaking wealthy crime organizations, the average cash seizure is $3,063.
• According to the Mesa Tribune study, the nine agencies raised $26.5 million in that time period. Typically, forfeiture profits are divided among the agencies that contributed to the case.

Once your equity has been taken from you, it’s your own responsibility to sue to get it back. Probably, you won’t even be charged with a crime, just presumed to be guilty of criminal activity before being proved so. To show “innocent ownership” in court, according to Practical Freedom, you must demonstrate all of the following:

1. The person acquired an interest in the property before or during the criminal act.
2. The property was acquired legally.
3. The owner did not or could not have known of the illegal activity.
4. The owner was not married to the person committing the illegal act.

When is someone going to sue the government and get this turned around? Asset forfeiture makes sense when it is applied after the judgment of guilt, not before, and inside the usual limitation and restrictions of law.

Scrabulous, the popular Scrabble clone, was announced dead earlier today by Mashable. With over 600,000 daily users, it caught the eye of Hasbro and Mattel who sent a takedown notice to Facebook.

The only problem, Mashable, is that I have been playing it today. Basically, the story is completely false; if Facebook did get a takedown request, it would be wiped out completely and not throwing errors / playable.

Do you think they look alike at all?

Ignoring any of Hongli Lai’s actual code, I reran the PHP, Ruby, C++, Perl, and Python mergesort benchmarks he gave, and came up with substantially different results. Here are the versions of the programming languages I am using for the test:

• PHP - PHP 5.1.6 (cli) (built: Sep 18 2007 09:07:28)
• Ruby - ruby 1.8.5 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 114) [x86_64-linux]
• Perl - This is perl, v5.8.8 built for x86_64-linux-thread-multi
• Python - Python 2.4.4 (#1, Oct 23 2006, 13:58:18)
• C++ - gcc version 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-13)
• Java - Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_10-ea-b10)

You’ll notice I’m adding Java into the mix for fun. Here’s the results, over 10 runs, on an Intel Dual-core 1.80GHz machines with 2Gb of RAM currently running this website:

Lang	Average	Min	Max
PHP	8.8325	8.637	9.303
Ruby	7.2896	7.143	7.729
Perl	4.3231	4.262	4.428
Python	3.3465	3.289	3.417
C++	0.5638	0.53	0.609
Java	0.4062	0.262	0.551

There are a couple important conclusions to note here that are significantly different than Hongli Lai’s:

• PHP is 21% slower than Ruby, not 41% as in his benchmark
• Python is 29% faster than Perl, not 17% as in his benchmark
• Java runs this 39% faster than C++, and 2100% faster than PHP

So, PHP is slower than Ruby, but not quite as slow as Hongli Lai would have you believe. Python is the fastest scripting language in this benchmark, while Java is the faster language all around, and is incredibly, incredibly fast. Maybe all of our code should start using java!

* NOTE: I am ignoring the obvious deficiencies of this micro-benchmark and just trying to reduplicate it. What I’ve found is that there are significant discrepancies between Hongli Lai’s run of the tests and my own, probably owing to slightly different versions of the components involved. Also, if I make some trivial optimizations to the loops in the PHP script, I can get it to run faster than everything but C++, in about 2.4s. Then again, just calling sort() is faster by another two orders… but still half as slow as Java’s built-in sort… and two orders slower than perl’s built-in.

Dreamhost’s ineptitude has struck again, billing all of its customers for an extra year of service. That’s $7.5M that they now have to refund.