Chasing your tail, California Style

Instapundit today offers up a Police Chief magazine article talking about increasing revenue streams to fund policing in California. There is exactly zero attention paid to increasing economic activity. Of the twenty item list for revenue enhancers, the vast majority have a side effect of shrinking the local economy. The three exceptions are selling ride alongs, selling ad space on the police website, and allowing advertising and branding using the police department's name.

Socializing economic activity or launching government economic activity in competition with private firms occupies 7 of the 20 slots. The rest is mostly raising taxes and fees of various types.

Reducing nuisance laws in order to make economic activity cheaper (increasing ordinary tax revenue) is just nowhere in sight.

It really is just sad.

Militia Software - I

It seems pretty likely that a number of foreign governments are running cell phone interceptor towers in DC. Were our government on the ball, I would expect these towers to be taken down quickly and consequences issued either in diplomatic expulsions, EMP shenanigans, or some other nasty deterrent that would ensure the safety of our government's communications from prying foreign governments. This apparently has not happened, with the towers being discovered by a private company touting an expensive anti-interception phone technology who reported it to the FCC and let the rest of us know via press release.

An individual firm or even the spy chasers have a limited number of people to run around and seek out these interceptor towers. But making a phone app that identifies local towers and alarms on the appearance of new ones shouldn't be that hard or expensive. Widely release that app and you have a way to pick up the spies no matter where they are. Applications like Llama provide a functional model for finding signal and AntennaSearch provides a database to filter out existing towers.

This is a militia activity that is in response to a real threat actually being deployed against the US. You don't have to run around in camo or make any large sacrifice, just run an app occasionally on the smartphone you already own. It will make it hazardous for foreign enemies to deploy the technology against us. It will also catch domestic enemies deploying the technology in violation of the law. Legitimate use by law enforcement will have paperwork filed and the reports of this software will file will hit that paperwork and not raise alarms.

Fixing the data loss loophole

The US Congress could, with a pretty small outlay of money, set up a web portal with an API that would allow all executive branches to report data losses within a few days of when they happened. And then we should require that they report within 5 days. We could call it Lois' law. 

Most recently this would have had the effect of chopping two years off the timeline of the IRS scandal and perhaps made it a live issue for the 2012 campaign. Big data analytics might also be deployed on this database to find "data loss hot spots" and better direct where to deploy investigative efforts. The bonus, a lot of hard drives are over $100 dollars so just destroying one is a crime sporting a ten year prison term. You have a lot of leverage at that point to play 'make a deal' in order to get at the underlying politically motivated crimes. 

I need a license for what?

The Town of Munster in Lake county, Indiana has a bit of a training issue on how they handle their solicitation licensing. I had heard that there was a local anti-solicitation ordinance and was driving by town hall anyway so I stopped by to figure out what was going on. The ordinance itself is pretty unobjectionable. In Munster if you're going to be asking for money, you need to get a background check and let the town know what you're doing and you're limited to going to the front door. You're not allowed to go wandering around private property.

I was directed to an office and asked if starting conversations and talking to people door to door would need notice and was informed that not only that it needed notice but that I needed to pay a fee as well. The explanation was vague and unsatisfying but they were at least savvy enough to suggest I look up the law on the town website as I had 1st amendment concerns. I stopped off at the police department and they called what I was doing a gray area and that in case of complaints (which they apparently get every day), I would get a warning to stop and then a citation for a few hundred dollars.

In the end, reading the ordinance made it clear that there was no need to apply for one. The town fathers hadn't flipped their lids and violated the Constitution. The higher ups knew what they were doing. They just aren't training their front line people to be clear about what's going on and their printed materials lack the text of the law so you have to do just a bit of digging. I wonder how many people just forked over the license fee?

America's biggest serial killer

The Gosnell movie that Kickstarter tried to censor is in its final fundraising push on Indiegogo. The promo video does an excellent job laying out the issues. 

America's biggest serial killer is not something to overlook. Thanks to crowdfunding, it looks like it won't be.

HT: National Review

Don't skip looking up the law

The Pennsylvania special ed student who recording a bullying episode and was threatened with a wiretapping felony charge has been making the rounds. What nobody seems to be mentioning is that what he did was perfectly legal. The school officials, the police, the judge, and even all the hyperventilating commenters all seem to have skipped looking up the law.

Title 18 Section 5704 Subsection 17

Any victim, witness or private detective licensed under the act of August 21, 1953 (P.L.1273, No.361), known as The Private Detective Act of 1953, to intercept the contents of any wire, electronic or oral communication, if that person is under a reasonable suspicion that the intercepted party is committing, about to commit or has committed a crime of violence and there is reason to believe that evidence of the crime of violence may be obtained from the interception.

I'm not a lawyer. I just know how to use Google fairly decently. Bullying is a crime of violence.

The law seems pretty clear. So why did the school officials, the cop, and the judge all fail to do their basic duty? Why aren't we calling them on not enforcing the law?

The only silver lining in this whole mess is that the judge is elected and could get booted for this.

Catholic Death Penalty

The argument in the Catholic Church regarding the death penalty has always proceeded on terms that are not that clear to many outsiders. The essence of the argument for invalidating the traditional permission for the death penalty is that something fundamental has changed about modern penal systems, that for the first time ever we can prevent crime and that it is safe to keep heinous criminals alive and thus the death penalty should be abolished.

The counter in Catholic circles has always been that it is simply not true, that nothing fundamental has changed. It has always bothered me that neither side seems eager to tear the covers off what modern prisons are really like and honestly, openly monitor matters. Here's a data point on the pro-death penalty side. Murder spree conducted by sex offenders wearing GPS ankle bracelets.

Can we trust the state to actually keep us safe? That's an open question.

Wedging Police Culture

I don't like the way much of the anti-police militarization movement is going. I see police militarization as being a serious threat to the american way of life. The police are not an army and should not have military attitudes. The time to fix that is before the batons and stun guns come out. It's certainly time before the knock on the door happens.

Who are your police? What forces could conceivably execute that knock on the door and how many of them are honorable peace officers? How many of them have poor impulse control and are a disgrace to their uniform? And how many of them mean well but really haven't thought through the issues? These are the sorts of questions we should be asking but we don't seem to be doing it.

Oh well, one more report in the queue for Citizen Intelligence.

The American Dream vs the Kleptocrats

Open source warfare is a larger subject but today, specifically, John Robb talks about one use case where it is likely to show up, the battle between the American Dream and the Kleptocrats. Open source warfare is something that our current band of domestic kleptocrats don't take too seriously. If they did, they would be taking pretty visible countermeasures and have been doing so for years. Simply put, they are not.

The protests in Ukraine that ended up with president Yanukovych fleeing are an example of open source warfare but because of the US' huge size and federalist structure, it's unlikely to be the variant that is dominant in here. Much more likely will be open source warfare techniques to coopt lower government nodes and area denial for higher level nodes that are too big to be taken on at the time. This is likely to show up in somewhat improbably high accident rates for agents of the states when they show up in areas that an organized resistance is trying to exclude them from. Overt killings will be rarer but not unheard of.

We're a long way from this sort of internal security picture but the key tipping point seems pretty clear. The growing belief that our elections are not sufficiently honest to win change in a peaceful manner, if it ever gains critical mass, is the point on which rebellion will start.

Improving Prison Inc.

What if private prison contracts were structured in a way that they would favor bids by organizations that do mental health institutionalization and prisons both? What if we made treating mentally ill people was slightly more profitable than warehousing them in prisons? This would create an incentive to identify and move people into a mental health treatment situation so that they aren't in and out of very expensive prison slots. The prisons themselves would, as a function of the profit motive, seek to move people into mental health treatment and not allow them to fall through the cracks once their sentence ends.

Is anybody already doing this?

Chicago's got police car problems

It's the same old shell game. In NYC the Wagner administration started shorting road infrastructure maintenance in the 1940s. 30 years of holding off just a bit too long on painting, rust removal, and parts replacements and the West Side Highway comes down in 1973. An unforeseen accident said all the pols with their hands in the road maintenance budget

Today, we move to Chicago and we find that the police are suffering from unforeseen problems with their car fleet. Stretch out maintenance cycles, reduce parts budgets, purchase even a little bit based on the clout of the contractor and this is what you get. It's as predictable as a highway collapse and just as untraceable by the time the disaster unfolds.

Bring back the Barbican?

Call it a mud room for the zoning department but after reading one more story about how much of a mockery modern police forces are making "knock and announce" warrant service, I am starting to wonder whether it's time to start bringing back the barbican, that lovely architectural feature that frustrates home invasion by putting more than one single door between you and the outside world.

It doesn't need to delay the police long, maybe 10-15 seconds. That's time enough to slow down the rush and avoid the risk of misidentification and a groggy defender thinking that they're being robbed, instead of being served with a legal warrant. A rudimentary barbican wouldn't even have to be that expensive.

If we're going to have medieval disrespect for our rights, defenses from that era are inevitable.


 HT: Instapundit

A good cure for hypotension

Guaranteed to cure your low blood pressure problem, I give you the Checkpoint USA Youtube channel. A collection of border stop videos miles away from the border, interspersed with occasional beatings when regular people get too assertive in defending their rights.

Our current immigration policy is so far from right it's not even wrong.

HT: Instapundit