Ken's Weblog

People should not fear their governments; governments should fear their people.

Month: September 2016

  • Not so offline as the Gestapo would like

    Court: Group’s 3D printer gun files must stay offline for now The federal civil suit originated three years ago when Cody Wilson and his group, Defense Distributed, published designs for the “Liberator,” the world’s first 3D-printed handgun. Within months, Defense Distributed received a letter from the United States Department of State’s Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance, stating that 10 files, including the designs of the Liberator, were in violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). This letter came despite the fact that these files had already been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and continue to circulate online. [Ars Technica]

    This reminds me of the 1990s, when the Evil Empire tried to keep encryption technology away from people using the same tactics. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now. Here’s a BitTorrent link to download the files in question.

  • Cops can’t even fabricate charges right

    Cops record themselves allegedly fabricating charges with suspect’s camera. In a federal civil rights lawsuit, a Connecticut man has shared footage to bolster his claims that police illegally confronted the pedestrian because he was filming one of them. Authorities seized Michael Picard’s camera and his permitted pistol, and the officers involved then accidentally recorded themselves allegedly fabricating charges against the man.

    […]

    The tickets Picard got were for the alleged use of a highway by a pedestrian and for allegedly creating a public disturbance for carrying an “exposed loaded sidearm in plain view of passing motorists.” The authorities eventually dismissed the tickets. [Ars Technica]

    Note that carrying an exposed loaded sidearm in plain view of passing motorists is perfectly legal in Connecticut as long as you have a carry permit, which Picard did. Not only did the jackboots get caught fabricating charges, they were so stupid that they couldn’t even come up with something that was actually illegal for their lies.

  • Twenty Years

    I’ve now had the orange-road.com domain name for twenty years.

  • The inevitable result of being a good cop

    West Virginia cop fired for not killing a man with an unloaded gun. He did what police officers are supposed to do — put himself at risk to save a life. [Radley Balko]

    What Mader did upon arriving at the scene is a hell of a lot braver course of action than simply opening fire when the suspect doesn’t immediately disarm. What Mader did is in fact exactly what we want cops to do when someone is in crisis. It’s also precisely what law enforcement officers say they do on a daily basis — put themselves at risk in order to save lives. Mader should have been given a medal.

    Of course the outcome of this guy being a good cop is completely predictable: he was fired. Also, two other cops showed up who were perfectly willing to murder the guy who Mader wouldn’t.

  • Apparently his message was heard

    Ferguson Activist Darren Seals Found Shot and Dead in Burning Car in St. Louis. 29-year-old activist Darren Seals was found dead in a burning car in the Riverview section of St. Louis this week, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. Seals became an anti-gun violence activist after being shot in 2013, and in 2014 was among the first protesters in Ferguson, according to the Washington Post.

    Seals helped found the group Hands Up United and was a vocal opponent of African-Americans voting Democrat as a bloc. “Just because they’ve got the D next to their name, that don’t mean nothing,” Seals told the Washington Post in 2014. “The world is watching us right now. It’s time to send a message of our power.” [Hit & Run)]

    The danger of sending messages like that in a police state is that the people in charge might actually get the message and decide to send back one of their own.

  • Another phony crisis

    New Round of Fearmongering Over Texting and Driving. If you went by the breathless reporting on texting and driving, or the word of law enforcement or “traffic safety advocates” you’d think at any given moment someone is careening to their death because they or another driver had their eyes on their cellphones and not on the road. [Hit & Run]

    I’ll consider believing that phones are some sort of serious threat to driver safety that must be banned once they ban things that are unquestionably more distracting in cars, like small children.

  • Quote of the Day

    An election is the act of choosing a new paint job for the tank which is plowing through your house and crushing your children.

    Kent McManigal