Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Normally I’d be uninterested in the story of how three New Zealand teen allegedly murdered 14 year old John Hapeta in New Zealand. According to the New Zealand Herald, “Two men charged with the murder of 14-year-old John Hapeta allegedly armed themselves with a revolver-style pistol and a claw hammer when they went to his house looking for drugs and cash. John Hapeta was celebrating his friend’s 15th birthday at his home in Justamere Place, Weymouth, when the attack occurred. Police allege the three went to John’s home on August 12 with the intention of robbing what they thought was a ‘tinnie’ house. The draft police summary of facts said Tumata and Williams pulled black bandannas over their faces and walked up to the house, confronted a man and allegedly shouted, ‘Where’s the drugs, where’s the drugs?’”

The story now becomes interesting when Judge David Harvey bans online mention of the accused’s names. No one is sure why print media (which is searchable, through interfaces like Lexis Nexus) gets special treatment here. I certainly disagree, and I’m free to publish whatever I’d like, as a journalist, including the names of the accused.

Anytime anyone wants to suppress totally free speech, I say RESIST!!

The law is quite clear–John McCain is not eligible to president. The New York Times, in A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue, explains:

A law professor at the University of Arizona has concluded that neither Mr. McCain’s birth in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone nor the fact that his parents were American citizens is enough to satisfy the constitutional requirement that the president must be a “natural-born citizen.”

The analysis, by Prof. Gabriel J. Chin, focused on a 1937 law that has been largely overlooked in the debate over Mr. McCain’s eligibility to be president. The law conferred citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone after 1904, and it made John McCain a citizen just before his first birthday. But the law came too late, Professor Chin argued, to make Mr. McCain a natural-born citizen.

Essentially, to become a “natural born citizen” you can either be born in the United States (John MCCain was born in the illegally occupied Canal Zone in Panama), or to be covered by a law enacted at the time of one’s birth. The law in effect when McCain was born would grant citizenship to babies born to American parents “out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States.” However, while the Canal zone was out of the limits of the United States, it was not out of the jurisdiction of the US.

However, in a statement to the AP, John McCain said:

Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona when it was a territory, Arizona was a territory, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And there’s no doubt about that. And it was researched again in 2000. It’s very clear that (the idea that) an American born in a territory of the United States whose father is serving in the military would not be eligible for the presidency of the United States is certainly not something our founding fathers envisioned. I am confident that the United States Supreme Court, should it ever address the issue, would agree.’

If John McCain can be president, then Arnold Schwarzenegger can run too. Of course he’s going to say it’s legal for him to become president, given he’s running. Is anyone interested in preventing him from gaining presidency using this legal technicality?

There’s now a serious reason not to vote for Barack Hussein Obama in the upcoming election. On the issue of illegal wiretapping he voted for HR 6304, which grants retroactive immunity from prosecution to telephone companies who cooperated with Bush’s presidency to illegally spy on millions of Americans.

Illegal Wiretaps We Can Believe In

We are all disappointed, Obama. TechCrunch, in Barack Obama Breaks Promise, Flip Flops, and supports Telco’s, says it best:

In voting for the bill, Obama acted in direct contradiction to his earlier statements. In 2007 Bill Burton, an Obama campaign spokesman, said “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Update: BoingBoing just posted the same thing a little late to the game!

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.