Another vic­tim of the drug war. ANOTHER VICTIM OF THE DRUG WAR and its lying infor­mants. A paid career crim­i­nal has more cre­dence than an hon­est man with some peo­ple, just because he’s an “anti-drug war­rior” and a pal of the cops. Who’ll pay for this death? Who’ll pay for all the rest of the deaths and impris­on­ments?
[Wolfes­blog]

From the article:

bq. What hap­pened to Chuck Plin­ton was a mas­sive injus­tice that the Uni­ver­sity of Akron is just now try­ing to resolve, six months after his death.

Luis M. Prozenza, pres­i­dent of the uni­ver­sity, in a state­ment issued yes­ter­day said he is “call­ing for a thor­ough assess­ment of uni­ver­sity reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing the stu­dent dis­ci­pli­nary process.”

A year ear­lier, a “thor­ough assess­ment” may have saved Chuck Plinton’s life.

Instead, the uni­ver­sity took the word of a paid infor­mant in one of the shaki­est minor drug cases that ever came before a jury. They sus­pended him, took away the tuition waiver and stipend he was liv­ing on and he was banned from the dorms for life.

[…]

“We hold our­selves to the high­est stan­dards of fair­ness,” Prozenza said in his state­ment yesterday.

If Prozenza is telling the truth we can expect to read a follow-up story about how he killed him­self to atone for what had been done to Chuck Plin­ton. I won’t be hold­ing my breath.

iJack­ing. The San Fran­cisco Bay Guardian is report­ing on a new crime: peo­ple who grab lap­tops out of their own­ers’ hands and then run away. It’s called “iJack­ing,” and there seems to be a wave of this type of crime at Inter­net cafes in San Francisco:

bq. In 2004 the SFPD Rob­bery Divi­sion recorded 17 strong-arm lap­top rob­beries city­wide. This increased to 30 cases in 2005, a total that doesn’t even include thefts that fall under the cat­e­gory of “bur­glary,” when a vic­tim isn’t present. (SFPD could not pro­vide sta­tis­tics on the num­ber of lap­top burglaries.)

In the past three months alone, Park Sta­tion, the police precinct that includes the West­ern Addi­tion, has reported 11 strong-arm lap­top rob­beries, a sta­tis­tic that sug­gests this one dis­trict may exceed last year’s city­wide total by the end of 2006.

Some sto­ries:

bq. Mal­oney was absorbed in his work when sud­denly a hooded per­son yanked the lap­top from Maloney’s hands and ran out the door. Mal­oney tried to grab his com­puter, but he stum­bled across a few chairs and landed on the floor as the per­pe­tra­tor dashed to a vehi­cle wait­ing a quar­ter block away.

[…]

Two weeks before Maloney’s rob­bery, on a Sun­day after­noon, a man had been fol­lowed out of the Star­bucks on the cor­ner of Ful­ton Street and Masonic Avenue and was assaulted by two sus­pects in broad day­light. Accord­ing to the police report, the sus­pects dragged the vic­tim 15 feet along the pave­ment, kick­ing him in the face before steal­ing his computer.

In early Feb­ru­ary a women had her lap­top snatched while sit­ting in Ali’s Caf

Armor? We don’t need no stinkin’ Armor!. The U.S. Army has banned privately-purchased body armor for sol­diers, osten­si­bly to “pro­tect” them. Accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment: “We’re very con­cerned that peo­ple are spend­ing their hard-earned money on some­thing that doesn’t pro­vide the level of pro­tec­tion that the Army… By William L. Ander­son. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

I don’t believe the Army’s claim. All body armor sold to civil­ians is rated accord­ing to a sys­tem estab­lished by the National Insti­tute of Jus­tice, which is if any­thing some­what con­ser­v­a­tive. Armor under­goes test­ing to ver­ify that the rat­ing is correct–and it’s not a com­pli­cated test­ing process. Any­one can ver­ify that their armor meets its claimed rat­ing sim­ply by putting it over a soft clay back­drop and shoot­ing it.

Note that the armor issued to sol­diers by the mil­i­tary is pur­chased directly from the man­u­fac­turer and never under­goes the kind of test­ing and rat­ing that civil­ian armor does. If any armor’s effec­tive­ness should be ques­tioned, it is the Army’s.

Lenovo Under U.S. Probe for Spy­ing. Big­Con­tro­versy writes “The Dai­lyTech has a report indi­cat­ing that Lenovo, the giant Chi­nese PC man­u­fac­turer, is under a probe by the U.S.-China Eco­nomic Secu­rity Review Com­mis­sion (USCC) for pos­si­ble bug­ging. Appar­ently, the gov­ern­ment has ordered 16,000 PCs from Lenovo but is now request­ing that Lenovo be inves­ti­gated by intel­li­gence agen­cies. The fear is of for­eign intel­li­gence apply­ing pres­sure to Lenovo to equip its PCs so that the U.S. can be spied on.” From the arti­cle: “Despite the probe, Lenovo says that its inter­na­tional busi­ness, espe­cially those that deal with the US, fol­low strictly laid out gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions and rules. Lenovo also claims that even after pur­chas­ing IBM’s PC divi­sion, its inter­na­tional busi­ness has not been affected neg­a­tively. Inter­est­ingly, in an inter­view with the BBC, Lenovo men­tioned that an open inves­ti­ga­tion or probe may neg­a­tively affect the way that the com­pany deals with future gov­ern­ment con­tracts or bids.” There just has to be bet­ter uses of our intel­li­gence community’s time. [Slash­dot]

I’m not par­tic­u­larly con­cerned about some Chi­nese intel­li­gence agency spy­ing on me when US intel­li­gence agen­cies are forc­ing com­pa­nies such as AT&T to spy on Americans.

FBI Out­rage in Har­rison­berg, VA. Max Saw­icky details some really hor­ri­ble treat­ment of pro-U.S. Iraqi Kurds liv­ing in Virginia.

How­ever, four of them have been arrested for trans­fer­ring funds to their fam­i­lies and char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tions in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan with­out a license, a felony offense under the Patriot Act and the act to keep Cubans from send­ing money to their rel­a­tives in Cuba. One has been con­victed in a trial in which most of the evi­dence was not allowed and in which the FBI sug­gested that the defen­dant was a ter­ror­ist. These peo­ple were cowed into not talk­ing to the media, and now they are all in deep trou­ble. Their homes have been raided, their money seized, even things like med­ical insur­ance cards (with one wife preg­nant), appli­ca­tions for cit­i­zen­ship are off, they are fac­ing depor­ta­tion, and so on. They were assigned a Croa­t­ian trans­la­tor for the court. There is a seri­ous string of out­rages asso­ci­ated with this with no cov­er­age by any seri­ous media. The FBI agent in charge even told them, “I know you are not the bad guys, but too much paper­work has gone for­ward on this.”

Max has con­tact infor­ma­tion for the peo­ple being harassed if anyone’s inter­ested in help­ing them out.

Just another exam­ple of how there hasn’t been a sin­gle inci­dence of PATRIOT Act abuse, I guess.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

Chameleon Weapons. You can’t detect them, because they look nor­mal:

bq. One type is the exact size and shape of a credit card, except that two of the edges are lethally sharp. It’s made of G10 lam­i­nate, an ultra-hard mate­r­ial nor­mally employed for cir­cuit boards. You need a dia­mond file to get an edge on it.

[…]

Another con­fig­u­ra­tion is a stab­bing weapon which is indis­tin­guish­able from a pen. This one is made from melamine fiber, and can sit snugly inside a Bic cas­ing. You would only find out it was not the real thing if you tried to write with it. It’s sharp­ened with a blade edge at the tip which Defense Review describes as “scary sharp.”

Also:

bq. The FBI’s exten­sive Guide to Con­ceal­able Weapons has 89 pages of weapons intended to get through secu­rity. These are gen­er­ally vari­a­tions of a knifeblade con­cealed in a pen, comb or a cross — and most of them are pretty obvi­ous on X-ray. [Schneier on Secu­rity]

That G10 credit card knife sounds pretty neat. Too bad there wasn’t a link to the com­pany sell­ing it, or I might have bought one.

As a follow-up to the story about the man being arrested in West Hol­ly­wood for hav­ing “coun­ter­feit” billion-dollar bills, I was in the local Post Office this morn­ing here in Kore­atown. The clerk had a billion-dollar bill taped in his cubi­cle, along with var­i­ous other dec­o­ra­tions. I guess the SS isn’t in such a hurry to arrest fel­low gov­ern­ment employ­ees for nonex­is­tent crimes.

Ask Cap­i­tal Times!. David Codrea — Mr. Codrea trans­lates a Wis­con­sin newspaper’s response to a sim­ple ques­tion about open carry. [codrea]

[End the War on Free­dom — Links and Com­men­tary from my Crypto-Anarcho-Libertarian Per­spec­tive]

Get­ting Ready for Bernanke. A news story has been cir­cu­lat­ing that a man was busted car­ry­ing coun­ter­feit $1 Bil­lion dol­lar bills..

The coun­ter­feit money looked good, but there was one flaw: there is no such thing as a billion-dollar bill.

US Cus­toms agents in Cal­i­for­nia say they found 250 bogus billion-dollar bills while inves­ti­gat­ing a man charged with cur­rency smuggling.

Tekle Zigetta, 45, pleaded guilty to three fed­eral counts of try­ing to bring cash, fake bills and a fake $100,000 gold cer­tifi­cate into the United States in January.

Fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion led agents to a West Hol­ly­wood apart­ment where they found the stash of yel­low­ing and wrin­kled one billion-dollar bills with an issue date of 1934 and bear­ing a pic­ture of Pres­i­dent Grover Cleveland.

“You would think the $1 bil­lion denom­i­na­tion would be a give­away that these notes are fake, but some peo­ple are still taken in,” James Todak said, a secret ser­vices agent involved in the probe.

Not men­tioned is how some­thing can be “coun­ter­feit” if it’s an orig­i­nal work of art that doesn’t try to imi­tate some­thing that already exists.

Lawyer Who Blew Mous­saoui Case on $120,000/Year Vaca­tion. Even though it’s really all the State’s fault that they did not go to the FISA court and get per­mis­sion to search Zacharias Moussaoui’s com­puter until after the 9/11 attacks, it is true that he was in cus­tody, had knowl­ege of at least some of the hijack­ers, and failed to give warn­ing. For this the man should hang, but some stu­pid lawyer for the TSA had to screw all that up by send­ing detailed notes on how to tes­tify to all the gov­ern­ment wit­nesses in the sentencing.

She is now get­ting a… [Antiwar.com Blog]

Why exactly should he hang? If he had given warn­ing, he would have been incrim­i­nat­ing him­self. It’s ille­gal under the Fifth Amend­ment to require some­one to incrim­i­nate himself.