Miserable tatter of background checks

The shooting death of Charles Albert Poland Jr. and the kidnapping of a young boy named Ethan were completely preventable. There is no way Jimmy Lee Dykes should have been permitted to possess firearms:

Mr. Dykes, who has lived in a travel trailer here for about two years, has a troubled past, including arrests on charges connected to drugs, drunken driving and, in Florida in 1995, unlawful display of a firearm. On Wednesday he was due in court in this county, accused of shooting at a neighbor in a dispute over driving on his property.

Everyone who knew Dykes knew he was bad news.

Neighbors of Mr. Dykes generally kept their distance, which he made easy. He frequently made violent threats to anyone who wandered onto his property, once even beating a neighbors’ dog to death with a lead pipe. He would sometimes sit watching and holding a rifle when young children played in a nearby yard. Late into the night he would dig in the backyard of his travel trailer or patrol his property with a flashlight and a long gun.

Now Poland is heroically dead, Dykes has been justifiably killed by the FBI, and Ethan has been rescued.

But Alabama won't rethink its gun laws, and the NRA won't rethink its crazy, extremist position against closing the gun show and private sale loopholes in the miserable tatter of current background check law.

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Connecting the dot

Singular. The FBI looked into Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan correspondence with a radical Islamic cleric. Good. They should have. It was certainly alarming on its face.

Many Republicans, including Joe Lieberman, already have a diagnosis for why the FBI didn't make waves about it, and they don't even know what the FBI found:

[Fran Townsend] expressed concern that “political correctness,” and fear of intruding on Major Hasan’s free speech rights, may have interfered with the sharing of information earlier this year, when an F.B.I.-led counterterrorism team examined his e-mail exchanges with Anwar al-Awlaki, a well-known radical cleric, but found nothing amiss.

By political correctness, Bushists like Townsend mean observance of legal and Constitutional rights. Free speech? Who needs it!

I know they object to having to abide by the law of the land, but that email correspondence is the single dot they have to connect to a conspiracy that coddles soldiering while Muslim. It doesn't seem like a web of failure.

The Walter Reed fitrep (or unfitrep!) might look like another dot, but it's a garden variety personnel matter. In addition to being undeniably Muslim, Hasan was a really bad psychiatrist, and there's no denying that that is another possible motive for his crimes.

Son of FISA

"The only privacy that's left is the inside of your head. Maybe that's enough."

The U.S. is trailing the U.K. in achieving the surveillance state. Trailing is a good thing. But the U.K.'s lead is tenuous.

Even though FISA was extremely easy to satisfy, it was amended under the scare tactics of the Bushists to make it almost completely toothless. Sure enough, the FBI couldn't even trouble itself to obey the weak tea of FISA as amended.

United States of Wingnut

Every society has its weirdnesses. Many people inside the society don't even realize how weird they seem to outsiders. A history of homosexual hazing of schoolboys? Isn't that the English way?

Sometimes, a society changes enough within one lifetime that oldsters feel more than normally alienated - or maybe that's a universal, I'm not sure. Within my lifetime - and I'm only an oldster to the very young - the American national conversation has shifted far to the right. Extreme voices that would have been universally condemned when I was young are now defended by mainstream conservatives.

So it is with right-wing extremists. The FBI releases a report on increased activity and recruiting by extremist groups, and conservative Republicans worry that this somehow infringes their free speech rights!

[C]onservative radio talk show host Roger Hedgecock was not persuaded. "If the Bush administration had done this to left-wing extremists, it would be all over the press as an obvious trampling of the First Amendment rights of folks and dissent," he told CNN.

That's just weird. It's their potential violence that the FBI is targeting. It's not as though the extremists are reluctant to talk about the need they see for violence. It's not as though they aren't already armed. Sheesh.

Yet somehow this report is evidence of the asymmetrical victimization of right-wing extremists! Consider this: When was the last time a left-wing extremist killed someone? Does Ted Kaczynski count against the left? If so, huuuge organization - we better worry about the revolution of the Luddite bombers.

Yes, there have been some property crimes, and those deserve a police response, but some deranged right-winger kills someone every few months, and threats are much more common. Yet, big media bends way over backward to adopt conservative questions, even if they won't admit that they asked those canned questions:

A DHS official said the department was not trying to squelch free speech by issuing the report. "There is no link between extremists being talked about in that report and conservative political thinkers, activists and voters," the official said.

As if the DHS official would bring that up on his own!

But here's the best part:

In fact, the Obama administration in January did issue a warning about left-wing extremists. Both reports were initiated during the administration of former President George W. Bush.

In sum, a perfectly reasonable and obviously true report commissioned by a conservative administration squelches the free speech of radicals on the right (but not the left) by noting their propensity for political violence, and conservatives are therefore the victims of the liberal administration that merely releases the report. The media reports this as if it were plausible.

Yeah, this is something really weird about our society.

Favorite white T-shirt

Even if they had figured out how to get the blood out, those stupid stains are impossible to treat. Cripes, they didn't even have the wit to hide the bloodstains and to tell the clerk that one's wife needed to get stains out, much less to burn the stained clothing. These losers are a lot more than a few bricks shy of a load.

Just you wait, there's going to be a sexual abuse aspect of this case or at least involuntary imprisonment. That should get the charge upgraded to murder one.

Invade Kappa Kappa Gamma!

If this tissue of bullshit is any indication of the strength of the government's evidence against Bruce Ivins, then we better invade some unrelated place looking for WMD. Think about this - it's what they're leading with:

The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college's Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property. Sorority members do not live there...

Somewhere roughly on the edge of this picture there's a mailbox, and it obviously picks out Kappa Kappa Gamma (marked 'A').


This is a link? If so, maybe the FBI can connect Ivins to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Or maybe he has a link to the grassy knoll. Think of all the things you come within a hundred yards of in the course of a year. How many could be connected less tenuously than this with a crime? Further:

[A]uthorities acknowledge they cannot place Ivins in Princeton the day the anthrax was mailed.

If they don't have anything better than this, they hounded an innocent man into killing himself. On the up side, they're having an easy time making him sound like a weirdo, so there is that.

Update: Where I have snark, Glenn Greenwald has some serious smackdown.

Update (8/8): Newsweek thrusts the propaganda with hardly any skepticism. What would you expect from Spiky Isikoff? He and his coauthor say that the mailbox was only 60 feet from KKG's storage room, which is a new factoid.

Vitter watch, day ... hmm

Is the FBI tailing David Vitter, trying to record his well-known propensity for buying sex? How about salacious warrants - any of those filed and still sealed?

Poor Eliot Spitzer, not unassailable enough to be Caesar's wife. What an idiot not to know that when you mess up rich people, you'd better stay clean.

Image from Wikimedia Commons under CCA ShareAlike 2.0. Rights owned by Dave Winer.

Take away checks and balances...

... and you'll get plenty of surveillance without justification.

Is anyone surprised that the FBI continued to abuse national security letters? Without oversight, you get misbehavior. That's exactly why judicial review is essential, even if the FISA court is mostly a fig leaf.

There is no report of any administrative accountability inside the FBI for the abuse, either.

I love this quote:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Michigan, said, "At the same time the administration is trying to intimidate the Congress into giving it additional spying power, we find out yet again that it has abused its authority to pry into the lives of law-abiding Americans."

Yeah, we got email

What this says is that the ISPs are cavalier about what they give to the government and are likely to err on the side of too much. They don't really care about their customers' privacy or legal rights. They just want to keep the government happy and doing business with them.

D.B. Cooper

Could the unwitting anti-establishment anti-hero have been the founder of MIB? Is that why the FBI is looking for him again? Is Identikit responsible for the fact that D.B.'s eyes have exactly the same expression as the alien from Area 51?

Seriously, the FBI is not hoping someone will solve this for them. They are just shaking the trees for new information. Don't believe me? Take a look at what they've "released". It's practically nothing but press accounts, some of which are accompanied by indictments against con men who defrauded a reporter into paying $30,000 for a made-up story.

Here's what you won't find:

• Any usable map, though this blurry, unoriented, useless POS is posted, and you can tell where Portland is
  
• Records of search areas
• Timelines with uncertainties
• Records of the search of the plane - did he really parachute?
  
• Precise locations of anything
• Rationales for dismissing certain theories - For example, the FBI says that Cooper could not have been an experienced because he jumped into the 200 mph wind from the 727's air speed, yet a paratrooper whom they exonerated for a similar hijacking also jumped successfully at a similar speed.
  

Obviously, I didn't have enough to do today - or at least I wasn't doing it.

Cooper's probably dead. A crime like this could easily be the work of a loner down on his luck, whom no one would report missing. But the FBI is still trying to solve it itself without letting all us nut case amateurs in on the case.

Stamping out anonymity

The FBI's getting into biometrics in a big way. Using technology tested in Iraq, they'll be creating dossiers on us, storing and comparing. DNA from birth is only a matter of time.

And, get this, if your employer - or maybe even just a prospective employer - wants a background check on you, it can ask the FBI to hang onto your fingerprints, your palm print, your facial geometry, and your iris scan so that the FBI can notify your boss if you ever run into a little trouble.

The only privacy left is inside your head, and maybe that's enough. Yeah, sure.

Lock 'em up

The Washington Post does actual investigative reporting in this story. Maybe this will keep John Solomon out of political reporting in something he actually does well.

There was a complete lack of appropriate experimental control in the original forensics of bullet lead analysis. And this comes on the heels of many other instances in the recent past where forensics labs can measure something very precisely but have no idea what their measurement means.

In this case, the FBI assumed that bullets in the same box were likely to have the same measured composition and that that composition was systematically different from bullets in other boxes. It turns out that they were wrong on both counts and at least a few innocent suspects were convicted as a result. The tire expert in My Cousin Vinny was confident of his evidence, and it all fell apart. At least he was honest enough to admit it. The FBI, typical of bureaucracies, buried its error under vague memos.

When did testilying become so acceptable?

Surveillance state

The only privacy we have left is inside our heads, and maybe that's enough. --Tom Reynolds (Jon Voight), Enemy of the State

Want to drive into a city but you're not willing to pay taxes to maintain the roads? User fees, extracted by transponder. It'll even be pitched as good for the environment since it gives an incentive to take public transportation.

Want to be able to find missing persons like the woman near Seattle. (And who doesn't?) Get a routine court order for cell phone proximity records - if you're not the FBI and can't mail-merge a National Security Letter. It's not a nefarious conspiracy, but a cell phone can be used to find political dissidents. It's only a matter of time before it actually happens.

Sure, but who would do that? Well, Tom DeLay used the FAA to find the Democrats from Texas when they were fighting his eventually successful attempt to change the rules for the sole purpose of helping Republicans.

You think there are any records of what you have watched, purchased, eaten, written, or surfed that can't be obtained by an interested bureaucrat? Nope. Sorry. Duhbya has the power, and everything goes down on disk these days. Searching it is not Constitutional, but the Washington Democrats are meekly acquiescing.

So don't be surprised if the NSA knows every move you make in a few years. Or today.

(Cross-posted from KnoxViews in response to a blog about this.)

Get Whitey

I don't think Whitey Bulger has been visiting old amici in Sicily. After all, even though he had help from a paisan' or two, Whitey's from the Irish mob, and he ratted out Gennaro Angiulo, whose son Junior just got out of prison.

Besides, the man in the photo is too young, and the woman is too old.

Update (9/28): Whitey's old girlfriend agrees. If I could tell this at a glance, why couldn't the FBI? Probably trying to wash off the stain Special Agent John Connolly left.

Perfect template

FBI data mining, which I thought they denied doing but now seems to be universally accepted as fact, went too far. Surprise, surprise!

Eric Lichtblau can write as many stories as he wants on this template. We are all under surveillance for our own protection, so these little tidbits will keep leaking out as long as anyone is interested in them.

The surveillance culture didn't start with the Bushists. They only used fear to perfect it.

FBI apologizes

In response to Steven Seagal, the FBI has released the following statement:

The Bureau regrets that it has been unable to provide Mr. Seagal with his day in court. All Bureau personnel have been occupied with on-going surveillance operations.

This was redacted from the original version for its unprofessional tone:

Many of those surveillance operations involve listening to conversations between Dawna and Raeann filled with "like, y'know, totally" - in Arabic where available, of course. These conversations, however tedious, are more interesting than Mr. Seagal's films, though we were pleased to see him killed early in Executive Decision. (Some might say that his character was killed in the movie, but we know from our wiretaps that grandiose faux heroism is all there is to his so-called personality.)

Let's see him jump that snark.