Scientists pinpoint fats danger BBC
Wisconsin court upholds GPS tracking by police Chicago Tribune
In-house fraud cases surge Financial Times
Stressing Fannie and Freddie – What Does It Mean? Bruce Krasting
Rising Credit Card Losses Are Next Challenge for Banks New York Times
Mortgages Over 5% Mean Fed Purchases as Bonds Slump Bloomberg
Rating Agency Nonsense Independent Accountant. The Connecticut AG is tackling the rating agencies’ claims to First Amendment protection head on.
Economics Was OK, It Was Only the Economists who Failed (Disputed) EconoSpeak
Deutsche Bank’s Socialization Of Risk Culture Redux Tyler Durden
Collateral Damage and Double Standards Robert Kuttner, Huffington Post. A good read. Get a load of this tidbit:
I also recently spoke at a convention of industrial construction companies. These are the people who build and maintain factories, power plants, and do other heavy industrial construction. I asked a room full of hundreds of executives how many saw signs of improvement in their order books. Not a single hand went up. Then I asked how many had had projects deferred because of difficulty getting financing. About two thirds of the people in the room raised their hands.
Long road to a ‘good GM’ filing John Dizard, Financial Times. A must read. Concise explanation of the issues involved in a Section 363 sale, which is what the government hopes to use with GM, and the procedural obstacles. Bottom line: the secured creditors will not be cowed as they were with Chrysler (remember, in this case, the secured creditors have rejected the deal, this isn’t a mere dissident group), and have good grounds for hoping to get a stay of the 363 sale. This is likely to be ugly and protracted.
Antidote du jour:
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Re the GPS search:
This is obviously a “search”. This is not a person visually looking at something, making judgements about the data, relvance, and propriety of his observation, but rather an inertial machine which is set in motion and systematically, remorselessly collects information.
Regarding the constitution, there are two possibilities here:
1. The judgement is incorrect; the framers gauged the Bill of Rights to personal actors and budgets, not to cheap, literally totalitarian technology, and therefore the presumption should be that our rights and privacy are specially protected against this technology, which must surmount a higher constitutional bar; or
2. My construction is incorrect, the court is technically correct, the constitution as it stands does not afford such protection, so that we currently have a Hobbesian free-fire zone where it comes to technologically-abetted police action – in which case the constitution itself is inadequate to this new Orwellian paradigm, and must quickly be amended.
I guess the question is whether such technology, through both superior performance and relative inexpensiveness, so amplifies police powers as to produce a qualitatively new kind of police power which must be held to a more strict constitiutional standard.
I would argue that this is the case, that the comparison to a detective physically following and surveilling a suspect is invalid, and that the special police action is more in need of a warrant. So I’d say the constitution as it stands is sufficient if correctly applied.
But the court here blithely calls this technological change a simple quantitative increment, which requires no special constitutional scrutiny. So it implicitly says the current constitution is inadequate to preserving liberty and privacy.
I think in general people and courts tend to be mesmerized by technology. In most cases where I hear of technology generating some allegedly novel legal situation (e.g. the internet vis copyright, libel, or privacy), it seems to me the existing law is adequate to deal with it if correctly applied.
But everyone always assumes you need something brand new. Thus you have the court here saying GPS just fell out of the sky and needs a constitutional amendment to protect against police abuse of it.
(Of course, there’s always the possibility that they’re intentionally seeking tyranny, and will twist, distort, and decide based only on what serves this goal. But for the sake of this comment I was assuming good faith to isolate the structural issues.)
There is a non-violent political solution to these kinds of cases. Jury nullification.
Jury nullification has been slandered in the MSM and textbooks for a long time. But if a Jury doesn’t have the right to judge the fairness of the laws that were used to bring the defendant in to court, what’s the use of them?
A jury that finds a defendant guilty because the judge directs them to do so has failed in their responsibility as jurors.
When enough juries return verdicts of “Not Guilty” because of such laws, the cops will stop using them. No shots need be fired.
Tim in Sugar Hill
But there are checks on jury nullification, too. While courts are somewhat constrained in reviewing jury decisions, if the judge is convinced the jury "got it wrong," there is an option called JNOV – judgment notwithstanding the verdict – in which the judge can basically preempt the jury.
Also, the faith in the jury is touching, but arguably misplaced. A brief peek into the world of the Innocence Projects will show you that people are convicted & sentenced to death on often scant evidence.
Yves, NPR’s Planet Money interview with Elizabeth Warren is a must-listen. Not sure if there’s a full transcript available, but this really gets to the core of the dispute between Elizabeth Warren and the mainstream media which has embraced the administration’s approach.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/05/hear_elizabeth_warren_checks_i.html
On the GPS issue, I am totally with those considering it to be a search. In my view, one of our critical weaknesses in Constitutional rights right now is the failure to treat public surveillance as a search. The courts have been relying for too long on definitions of search that are exclusive to a physical presence on a person’s private property, when a solid majority of people feel that public surveillance is inappropriate, whether it is traffic cameras, high-resolution satellite photos, street-level photos, covert videotaping in public places, etc. This is an issue which bears further investigation by the courts, ideally by the Supreme Court.
Katrina says
But there are checks on jury nullification, too. While courts are somewhat constrained in reviewing jury decisions, if the judge is convinced the jury “got it wrong,” there is an option called JNOV – judgment notwithstanding the verdict – in which the judge can basically preempt the jury.Many jurisdictions have this for civil trials, and judges can sometimes downgrade or override guilty verdicts in criminal trials.
But there’s no place a judge can override an acquittal.
I agree completely that nullification is something we can never rely upon.
attempter: My construction is incorrect, the court is technically correct, the constitution as it stands does not afford such protection, so that we currently have a Hobbesian free-fire zone where it comes to technologically-abetted police action – in which case the constitution itself is inadequate to this new Orwellian paradigm, and must quickly be amended.Kyllo v. United States had something to say on this.
The virtually unused Third Amendment would suggest that quartering GPS trackers (and other property) would have been just as outrageous to the Founding Fathers as the quarering of soldiers was.
But that would be a broadening, while the history of the SCOTUS and other courts has been clever, but still mindless, narrowing of the applicability of the USC.