Truth in Dating – DOJ Looking At Lying on Websites as a Crime

Well… there goes the 5000 under 50 something women on E-Harmony and match – and most of the guys with those fancy jobs and fancy wheels!

The Department of Justice is now saying that lying on personal sites, like the dating sites or Facebook…

Could be a crime.

So much for that “About Average” body type classification on those dating sites!

Athletic and Fit, Driving a Mercedes... Not.

DOJ: Fibbing on web sites should be a crime

The U.S. Department of Justice is defending computer hacking laws that make it a crime to use a fake name on Facebook or lie about your weight in an online dating profile.

In a statement obtained by CNET that’s scheduled to be delivered tomorrow, the Justice Department argues that it must be able to prosecute violations of Web sites’ often-ignored, always-unintelligible “terms of service” policies.

The law must allow “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider,” Richard Downing, the Justice Department’s deputy computer crime chief, will tell the U.S. Congress tomorrow.

Scaling back that law “would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution,” and jeopardize prosecutions involving identity theft, misuse of government databases, and privacy invasions, according to Downing.

The law in question, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, has been used by the Justice Department to prosecute a woman, Lori Drew, who used a fake MySpace account to verbally attack a 13-year old girl who then committed suicide. Because MySpace’s terms of service prohibit impersonation, Drew was convicted of violating the CFAA. Her conviction was later thrown out.

What makes this possible is a section of the CFAA that was never intended to be used that way: ageneral-purpose prohibition on any computer-based act that “exceeds authorized access.” To the Justice Department, this means that a Web site’s terms of service define what’s “authorized” or not, and ignoring them can turn you into a felon.

On the other hand, because millions of Americans likely violate terms of service agreements every day, you’d have a lot of company.

A letter (PDF) sent to the Senate in August by a left-right coalition including the ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and FreedomWorks warns of precisely that. “If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime,” the letter says. “Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law.”

Orin Kerr, a former Justice Department computer crime prosecutor who’s now a professor of law at George Washington University, says the government’s arguments are weak.

Kerr, who is also testifying tomorrow before a House Judiciary subcommittee, told CNET today that:

The Justice Department claims to have an interest in enforcing Terms of Use and computer use policies under the CFAA, but its examples mostly consist of cases in which the conduct described has already been criminalized by statutes other than the CFAA. Further, my proposed statutory fix (see the second proposal in my testimony) would preserve the government’s ability to prosecute the remaining cases DOJ mentions while not raising the civil liberties problems of the current statute…

Investigation Finds Massive Problems in NOLA Police Department

One of the impacts of Katrina’s aftermath…

A Corrupt Beauty

Report Finds Wide Abuses by Police in New Orleans

Justice Department officials on Thursday released the findings of a 10-month investigation into this city’s Police Department, revealing a force that is profoundly and alarmingly troubled and setting in motion a process for its wholesale reform.

The report describes in chilling detail a department that is severely dysfunctional on every level: one that regularly uses excessive force on civilians, frequently fails to investigate serious crimes and has a deeply inadequate, in many cases nonexistent, system of accountability.

Using the report as a guideline, federal and local officials will now enter into negotiations leading to a consent decree, a blueprint for systemic reform that will be enforced by a federal judge.

“There is nobody in this room that is surprised by the general tenor and the tone of what this report has to say,” said Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, at a news conference attended by city and federal officials.

But, added Mr. Landrieu, who publicly invited federal intervention in the Police Department just days after his inauguration in May, “I look forward to a very spirited partnership and one that actually transforms this Police Department into one of the best in the country.”

The city’s police chief, Ronal Serpas, said he fully embraced the report and would be going over its findings with senior leadership later in the day.

While the report describes an appalling array of abuses and bad practices, it does not address in detail any of the nine or more federal criminal investigations into the department. These inquiries have already led to the convictions of three police officers, one for fatally shooting an unarmed civilian and another for burning the body.

Justice Department officials chose to exclude the information gleaned in the criminal inquiries to keep a wall between those investigations and the larger civil investigation into the practices of the department. But there were more than enough problems left to uncover.

While other departments generally have problems in specific areas, like the use of excessive force, “New Orleans has every issue that has existed in our practice to date, and a few that we hadn’t encountered,” said Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The report reveals that the department has not found a policy violation in any officer-involved shooting for the last six years, though federal officials who reviewed the records found that violations had clearly occurred. The department’s canine unit was so badly mismanaged — the dogs were so aggressive they frequently attacked their handlers — that federal officials encouraged the department to suspend it last year even though the investigation was still under way.

The report details a record of discriminatory policing, with a ratio of arrests of blacks to whites standing at nearly 16 to 1. Calls for police assistance by non-English speakers often went unanswered.

The report also found that the police “systemically misclassified possible sexual assaults, resulting in a sweeping failure to properly investigate many potential cases of rape, attempted rape and other sex crimes.”

 

In the End, For Conservatives – It’s Always About Their Racism

Here’s the core of the arguments against Atty General Holder’s DOJ. And up until the last paragraph, the author makes a reasonable case of why is the DOJ involved in such minor things that should be handled within the purview of the local school administration or at worst – State Courts.

‘Civil Rights’ Gone Wild
To the Civil Rights Division, pilgrimages and stiletto heels matter more than actual violations of the Civil Rights Act.

The Author  points out several cases where Federal involvement seems a bit on the overkill side such as -

In the latest outrage, the Civil Rights Division is suing the board of education in the leafy Chicago suburb of Berkeley, Ill. The board’s offense? It would not allow a middle-school computer-math-lab teacher to take off three weeks during December’s crucial end-of-semester course reviews and final exams in order to make a pilgrimage to Mecca…In 1977, in TWA v. Hardison, the Supreme Court held that it is an “undue hardship” if the employer has to “bear more than a de minimis cost” in order to provide the accommodation.

The author hints at going off the rails here with:

Extremists in the Civil Rights Division are pouncing on other school policies as well. When it was first formed in the 1960s, the division pursued cases of real discrimination — cases where, for example, black students were harassed or intimidated or provided with intentionally inferior education.

Why? Because one of the problems with the Bushit Administration’s DOJ was a complete ignoring of Minority Civil Rights for a all hands on deck, fruitless search for the Holy Grail of conservative bigots – cases of reverse discrimination.

They managed to actually find and prosecute 1 case in 8 years, despite 12,000-16,000 cases of discrimination against minorities being referred to the DOJ by local authorities a year… Which they ignored. So when the author is referring to “Extremists”… The Bushit Administration perversion of the Civil Rights Division resulted in filling the Division with…what? Good Ol’ Boys?

The current cases involve two schools in upstate New York that supposedly discriminated against one male student who wore a pink wig and makeup and another male student who wore a wig and stiletto heels and wanted to be able to “dress like a woman.” These students had violated the schools’ common-sense dress codes and were told to change clothes and remove the makeup. That prompted the Civil Rights Division to come knocking. The boys were being treated “differently” from female students, and such differential treatment, the division asserted, “implicate[s] the civil rights laws that we enforce.”

Sounds reasonable. The local school system should have the ability to define a dress code for all students as far as I can see. One of my personal heroes is the principal in memphis who has developed “The Urkel” System -

But then the author goes and quotes these scumbags -

As Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity observes: “The Obama administration apparently believes that it is unconstitutional for high schools to have a dress code that makes distinctions between what is appropriate dress for males and what is appropriate dress for females.” Clegg also points out that the division’s attempt to equate “sexual-orientation discrimination” with sex discrimination, by asserting that the use of sexual “stereotypes” is an instance of the latter, is nothing but naked bootstrapping (if you will pardon the expression). But legal justification or not, in the eyes of the warped and silly (but dangerous) lawyers inhabiting the division, barring boys from wearing stiletto heels is a serious civil-rights violation.

For those not familiar with right-wing racist code language, “The Center for Equal Opportunity” is one of the KKK organizations in suits that occupies the right, whose sole purpose is to re-segregate schools fully with the financial and legal support of the so called “Federalist Society” made up of right wing, and racist lawyers little better than the Council of Conservative Citizen scum they shill for.

So our writer isn’t really pissed about th DOJ’s intrusion  into local decision making, as much as he is pissed that such intrusion isn’t on behalf of re-segregation, and the re-institution of Jim Crow.

The proof?

Oddly, one of those views is that discrimination by some racial groups is perfectly acceptable. This explains why the Justice Department dismissed the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case it had already won. It is why this administration is studiously not pursuing cases like the one filed against Southern Illinois University in 2006 for maintaining a paid fellowship program that categorically excluded white males from applying. It was the Bush administration’s race-neutral enforcement policy in such cases that enraged the radical civil-rights organizations that dominate Washington and formed the basis for much of the unfair and misleading criticism of that administration’s enforcement of civil-rights laws.

The “author” in this case, was one of the racist scumbags illegitimately placed in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division during the Bushit Administration, who now works at one of the right wing’s premier racist “think tanks”…

Hans A. von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.

Methinks this conehead sheet wearer…

Has a problem.

If the best the right can do is to complain that Atty General Holder is a “bad man” because he won’t let them be bigots-in- charge anymore.

They have a weaker case than even I thought, and I already had them as the “bargain brand” in those toilet tissue commercials where one drop of water cases where you wouldn’t want to set the good china on the cheap stuff…

Orange Tapdance Award! Tom Delay Investigation Dropped

Tom Delay on Dancing With The Stars

The Obama Administration Justice Department prosecution of Republican political crime bosses has led to the need for the creation of a new type of orange finery beyond the normal orange jumpsuit these guys should have been wearing…

Tom DeLay cleared in federal probe, but Texas charges loom

After a six-year investigation, the Justice Department ended its probe into former House majority leader Tom DeLay’s relations with convicted ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, without bringing criminal charges. The announcement did not come from the Justice Department, which typically does not comment on investigations that do not result in charges, but from Mr. DeLay’s legal team, as reported by Politico. “Six years is a long time, and I’m sure he wishes it had happened years ago,” Richard Cullen, attorney for the former Texas Republican lawmaker, told Politico Monday. The broad investigation of Mr. Abramoff and his connections stirred up a storm of allegations and led to convictions or charges for some 20 House staff, former lobbyists, and Bush administration officials. One member of Congress, Rep. Robert Ney (R) of Ohio, former chair of the House Administration Committee, was convicted for doing official favors for Mr. Abramoff in exchange for campaign contributions, trips, gifts, sports tickets, and meals. House Democrats used such allegations as Exhibit A in their successful bid to take back the House in 2006. Other members of Congress, including former Sen. Conrad Burns (R) of Montana, Rep. J. D. Hayworth (R) of Arizona, and Rep. Richard Pombo (R) of California lost their 2006 reelection bids in the midst of allegations of involvement in such pay-to-play schemes, but, like DeLay, were not subsequently charged with a crime.

So what was Tom using to Tango away from the Justice Department?

The Orange Tap Dance Award - To Tap Dance Away From Federal Prosecution

Sherrod to Sue Brietbart

Even if the DOJ won’t do it’s job and pursue criminal charges, at least, like the OJ case there may be some justice in the Civil Court…

Let’s hope she doesn’t get an all-Republican jury.

Sherrod to Sue Brietbart, posted with vodpod

Sherrod plans to sue Breitbart

Former Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod said Thursday she will pursue a lawsuit against conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart posted an edited video clip of Sherrod appearing to say she discriminated against a white farmer looking for assistance. The clip showed her addressing a chapter of the NAACP.

“I will definitely do it,” she said when asked whether she was considering legal action. Sherrod made her remarks during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in San Diego, California.

Breitbart “had to know that he was targeting me,” Sherrod said. “At this point, he hasn’t apologized. I don’t want it at this point, and he’ll definitely hear from me.”

Obama Administration Chickens Out, And Bows Down to Thugs Again

More chickenshit from the Administration with no cajones…

No Criminal Charges in Firing of US Attorneys

The Bush administration’s Justice Department didn’t commit any crimes when it fired nine federal attorneys in 2006, a two-year investigation has concluded. The internal report removes the possibility that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who resigned in part because of the controversy, will face prosecution. The report did fault him for making misleading statements.

Investigators looked into whether the Bush administration improperly dismissed nine US attorneys, and in particular New Mexico’s David Iglesias, who said the firings were politically motivated. “Evidence did not demonstrate that any prosecutable criminal offense was committed with regard to the removal of David Iglesias,” the Justice Department said in a letter to lawmakers. “The investigative team also determined that the evidence did not warrant expanding the scope of the investigation beyond the removal of Iglesias.”

Brietbart NAACP Shirley Sherrod Story Explodes!

Brietbart and Faux News’ lies have cost this poor woman her job. The tape of Shirley Sherrod speaking before the NAACP was manipulated. Here, in this CNN interview a few hours ago, the wife of the white farmer who supposedly was mistreated by Mrs. Sherrod calls her a dear friend without whose help, they would have lost their farm.

Breitbart’s Sherrod/NAACP story disintegrates |…, posted with vodpod

I repeat my call for the DOJ to criminally charge Mr. Brietbart, and anyone participating in this criminal conspiracy,defamation, and  assault such as Faux News against Mrs. Sherrod, and prosecute them to the fullest extent of Federal law.

Faux News and ACORN – Legally Actionable?

Seems to me that next up on the DOJ’s criminal docket should be Faux News’ violation of ACORN employees Civil Rights – and possibly a RICO Investigation into criminal activity aimed at illegally destroying the organization. Several employees lost their jobs due to defamatory reporting. Further, it is normally incumbent on a News Organization to determine if the information it is broadcasting was collected legally – AND if laws were broken in the collection or manipulation of that information.

Rachel Maddow – ACORN gets the Last Laugh, posted with vodpod

More Racism From Faux News’ Megyn Kelly

Another racist tirade from Megyn Kelly -

Here specifically are the problems with Megyn’s rant.

1. The case against the New Black Panthers was dropped on January 8, 2009 – that’s nearly two weeks BEFORE President Obama was sworn in

From the testimony of Thomas Perez, head of the Civil Rights Division, before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in May:

This means that the case was downgraded to a civil case 11 days before Obama was inaugurated, 26 days before Eric Holder became attorney general, and about nine months before Thomas Perez was confirmed as head of the Civil Rights Division.

2. Adams accuses two Obama period Justice Department appointees of killing the case and making a policy decision not to prosecute cases against black people -

Adams also said that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes declared, “Never bring another lawsuit against a black or other national minority, apparently no matter what they do.” But according to the Raben Group, a progressive PR firm Fernades worked for prior to the Justice Department, she didn’t leave her job with them until June 22, 2009, more than six months after the criminal case against the NBPP members was dropped.

Further – As Media Matters demonstrated, Adams himself readily acknowledged that he was not present for the meetings and conversations that he pointed to as evidence supporting his allegations. More from Media Matters -

Reality: Adams’ accusations don’t stand up to the facts

• Adams is a long-time right-wing activist, who is known for filing an ethics complaint against Hugh Rodham that was subsequently dismissed, served as a Bush poll watcher in Florida 2004, and reportedly volunteered for a Republican group that trains lawyers to fight “racially tinged battles over voting rights”;
• Adams was hired to the Justice Department in 2005 by Bradley Schlozman, who was found by the Department of Justice Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility to have improperly considered political affiliation when hiring career attorneys — the former head of the DOJ voting rights section reportedly said that Adams was “exhibit A of the type of people hired by Schlozman”;
• Adams has admitted that he does not have first-hand knowledge of the events, conversations, and decisions that he is citing to advance his accusations;
• The Bush administration’s Justice Department — not the Obama administration — made the decision not to pursue criminal charges against members of the New Black Panther Party for alleged voter intimidation at a polling center in Philadelphia in 2008;
• The Obama administration successfully obtained default judgment against Samir Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party carrying a nightstick outside the Philadelphia polling center on Election Day 2008;
• The Bush administration DOJ chose not to pursue similar charges against members of the Minutemen, one of whom allegedly carried a weapon while harassing Hispanic voters in Arizona in 2006;
• No voters have come forward to claim that they were intimidated from voting on account of the New Black Panthers standing outside the polling center in 2008;
• The Republican vice chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which is currently investigating the Justice Department’s decision, has called that investigation “very small potatoes” full of “overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges,” and said it has not “served the interests of the commission”; she further said that DOJ has given a “plausible argument” for not pursuing additional charges in the case.

Now, as to Megyn’s “discomfort”, she’s acting like a woman spurned – which brigs up the question as to whether she has some “personal” interest…

I mean, would the uhhhh… black  Playa who just traded her in on a better model – please introduce her to somebody?

Shabazz… Was that you, brother?

More Hanky-Panky In South Carolina Primaries

S.C. lawmaker calls for investigations of Democratic primary, 2 other races

House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) called for federal and state investigations into alleged campaign irregularities in South Carolina after an unemployed Army veteran who lives with his parents won a Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate there.

Alvin M. Greene, who has an outstanding felony obscenity charge pending, “was someone’s plant,” Clyburn said Thursday.

Clyburn added that Greene was one of three individuals, all African American, whose congressional campaigns were designed to upend the Democratic primary process in the Palmetto State. The lawmaker also raised questions about the campaigns of Gregory A. Brown, who ran a vigorous but unsuccessful challenge against Clyburn in the 6th Congressional District, and Benjamin Frasier Jr., a perennial candidate who surprised observers by beating retired Air Force Reserve Col. Robert Burton in the 1st District.

The Federal Elections Commission has no public record of any of the three filing quarterly reports revealing their funding sources or campaign outlays.

Ending Segregation (Again) in Mississippi

Remember the battles over School Busing?

Mississippi School District Ordered to End Racial Segregation

A federal judge gave a school district in Mississippi 30 days to halt the ‘clustering’ of white students into certain schools and classes, saying it amounted to segregation.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a Mississippi school district to halt local policies that had allowed some of the district’s schools and classes to become racially segregated.

US District Judge Tom Lee gave the Walthall County School District 30 days to amend its student transfer policy and ordered an immediate halt to the alleged “clustering” of white students into certain classes in Tylertown, Miss., elementary schools.

“The district shall cease using race in the assignment of students to classrooms in a manner that results in the racial segregation of students,” Judge Lee said in his eight-page order.

“The district shall randomly assign students to classrooms at the Tylertown Elementary Schools through the use of a student management software program,” the judge said.

Desegregation Order Dates Back 40 Years

The action stems from a federal desegregation order issued in August 1970 – nearly 40 years ago. The case was closed for lack of activity in 2001.