Paul M. Jones

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is set to announce Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences.

The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder will reveal in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco, according to senior department officials. He is also expected to introduce a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals.

Good. Better if they end the drug war entirely, but I'm happy for baby steps in that direction. (Credit where credit is due.) Via Holder seeks to avert mandatory minimum sentences for some low-level drug offenders - The Washington Post.

“We knew USG would come after us”. That’s why Silent Circle CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch his company shut down its Silent Mail encrypted email service. It hadn’t been told to provide data to the government, but after Lavabit shut down today rather than be “complicit” with NSA spying, Silent Circle told customers it has killed off Silent Mail rather than risk their privacy.

The Silent Circle blog posts explains “We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now.” It’s especially damning considering Silent Circle’s co-founder and president is Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of widely-used email encryption program Pretty Good Privacy.

...

Silent Circle’s other secure services including Silent Phone and Silent Text will continue to operate as they do all the encryption on the client side within users’ devices. But it explained that “Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has.” With too many opportunities for information and metadata leaks in the SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email protocols, the company believes there was no way to live up to its promise of total privacy.

...

“We wanted to be proactive because we knew USG would come after us due to the sheer amount of people who use us- let alone the “highly targeted high profile people”. They are completely secure and clean on Silent Phone, Silent Text and Silent Eyes, but email is broken because govt can force us to turn over what we have. So to protect everyone and to drive them to use the other three peer to peer products- we made the decision to do this before men on [SIC] suits show up. Now- they are completely shut down- nothing they can get from us or try and force from us- we literally have nothing anywhere.”

The Feds don't like it when you try to keep your communications private. The police state is here. Via Silent Circle Preemptively Shuts Down Encrypted Email Service To Prevent NSA Spying | TechCrunch.

With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

T.S.A. and local law enforcement officials say the teams are a critical component of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts, but some members of Congress, auditors at the Department of Homeland Security and civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. The teams are also raising hackles among passengers who call them unnecessary and intrusive.

A free man, unaccused of any crime, without any articulable suspicion against him, should be free to travel unmolested in his own country. This is the authoritarianism of a police state, and it is here now. Via T.S.A. Expands Duties Beyond Airport Security - NYTimes.com.

The government currently backs about 90 percent of newly issued mortgages, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs. To all intents and purposes, except for very large loans to very affluent people, there is no private mortgage market in the U.S.

More socialism. Or is it fascism? Via How's Obama Going to Get U.S. Out of the Mortgage Market? - Bloomberg.

When you try to help, you try to give things, you start to have the consequences. There’s an author Bob Lupton, who really nails it when he says that when he gave something the first time, there was gratitude; and when he gave something a second time to that same community, there was anticipation; the third time, there was expectation; the fourth time, there was entitlement; and the fifth time, there was dependency. That is what we’ve all experienced when we’ve wanted to do good. Something changes the more we just give hand-out after hand-out. Something that is designed to be a help actually causes harm.

via Your Help Is Hurting: How Church Foreign Aid Programs Make Things Worse - Forbes.

A man who was brutally stabbed by Brooklyn subway slasher Maksim Gelman two years ago had his negligence case against the city dismissed in court yesterday, despite the fact that two transit officers had locked themselves in a motorman's car only a few feet from him at the time of the attack.

Gelman stabbed Joseph Lozito in the face, neck, hands and head on an uptown 3 train in February 2011, after fatally stabbing four people and injuring three others in a 28-hour period. Lozito, a father of two and an avid martial arts fan, was able to tackle Gelman and hold him down, and Gelman was eventually arrested by the transit officers. Lozito sued the city, arguing that the police officers had locked themselves in the conductor's car and failed to come to his aid in time.

The city, meanwhile, claimed that the NYPD had no "special duty" to intervene at the time, and that they were in the motorman's car because they believed Gelman had a gun.

The police have no duty to protect you. At best, they prevent before and clean up after. Protecting you during an attack is not their job. You need to be prepared to defend yourself and others if necessary. Having a gun makes that easier. Nobody is coming to save you; you will have to save yourself. Via Subway Stabbing Victim Can't Sue NYPD For Failing To Save Him: Gothamist.

Mohammed Asif was left in tears in a police cell after Astria Berwick told officers he had carried out an assault on her in his cab.

But the 34-year-old eventually proved his innocence with a voice recording app he was using in his taxi because his CCTV was broken.

Berwick, of Bingham, Notts, was sentenced to 16 months in prison after admitting perverting the course of justice.

Nottingham Crown Court heard she had used Mr Asif's taxi on February 20, then called police to say she had been the victim of a serious sexual assault.

Judge Michael Stokes QC, The Recorder of Nottingham, said: "This was outrageous behaviour by the defendant against a wholly innocent man who had been saved by the recording on his phone."

Do all women lie about rape all of the time? No. Do some women lie about rape some of the time? Yes. Via Cab driver falsely accused of rape saved by his phone app - Telegraph.

All comments that include threats of violence will be subjected to editing or deletion at my discretion.

(Updated 28 July 2013)

A 23-year-old Houston woman defended herself with deadly force Sunday night after a man assaulted her and threatened her with a knife in a gas station parking lot.

Surveillance footage shows the shooter retrieving a rifle from the trunk of her car and pointing it toward the feet of a man making wild arm gestures and wielding an umbrella and a knife.

Then it shows the man hitting the woman as she steps back and fires. Louis Daniel, 58, was pronounced dead at the scene, KHOU 11 News reported.

Police said the woman claimed the man had made unwanted sexual advances and refused to leave her alone. She also told police she feared for her life, the station reported.

Women need to be ready to defend themselves against armed aggression; having a gun makes that a hell of a lot easier. She should start carrying a pistol instead of having to retrieve a rifle from the trunk. Via Houston woman stands her ground, fatally shoots man wielding knife - Washington Times.

... HB 603 passed without much fanfare in the spring. At the time, the law might have seemed extraneous, or even paranoid. But knowing what we know now, the law seems prophetic (not unlike the way Shia LaBeouf warned us about spying back in 2008) and is getting some new-found attention. The law is pretty straightforward--the government can't spy on Montanans through their electronic devices unless they obtain a warrant ...

And "electronic device" is meant to encompass laptops, cell phones and tablets ...

That effectively makes Montana the first state in the country's history to pass an electronic privacy law that protects you from the government. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Daniel Zolnikov, and Montana's lawmakers outpaced all the states in the country when it comes to privacy--Texas signed an email privacy bill into law last month, and Massachusetts and a handful of other states are considering their own privacy laws when it comes to electronic surveillance and wiretapping.

Of course, the question now is, how do you enforce that? Still, it's a good symbolic move. Via If You Don't Want the Government to Spy on You, Move to Montana - Alexander Abad-Santos - The Atlantic Wire.