The efficacy of a crime fighting technique is often used as its justification, even at the expense of privacy. Police agencies using infrared heat sensors to uncover marijuana grow lights inside residences, without bothering to obtain a search warrant, argued that they were merely measuring heat in the public air to catch bad guys before the Supreme Court concluded that their efforts violated the Fourth Amendment.

The latest controversial use of technology to invade privacy is GPS tracking. A transmitter is surreptitiously attached to a suspect's car, and the police follow the suspect's movements electronically.

[more ...]

Welcome to Gitmo of the Rockies, or as Denver locals are calling it, Gitmo on the Platte (for the nearby Platte River.)

Denver's CBS4 News reporter Rick Salinger scores an exclusive on Denver's plans for arrested protesters in the event of mass arrests -- as proof, he and his camera people got inside and shot this video before being asked to leave.

The facility is a city owned warehouse.

Inside are dozens are metal cages. They are made out of chain link fence material and topped by rolls of barbed wire.

"This is a secured environment," Capt. Frank Gale of the Denver Sheriff's Department told CBS4. "We're concerned about how that's going to be utilized by people who will be potentially disruptive."

More....

The Antonio family owns a little grocery store in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles. Plagued by taggers who covered their walls with graffiti, they finally paid $3,000 to a team of graffiti artists to paint murals on the building. Because the artists they hired had "street cred," taggers respected the work and left it alone. Problem solved? Not exactly.

"ORDER TO COMPLY," said the letter from the Building and Safety Department, which required the Antonios to remove "excessive signage" under threat of a $1,000 fine "and/or six (6) months imprisonment" for each of four alleged violations.

The Antonios called the office of Councilman Ed Reyes for help, but to little avail. One day the city sent out a work crew and just like that, the Antonios' $3,000 investment was gone, covered over with dull beige paint.

You know what happened next: taggers covered the blank walls with graffiti by the next morning. Great work, city government. You managed to respond to a problem that had been solved by making it worse.

Barack Obama take notice - according to a new Greenberg poll (PDF), Americans are ready for REAL change (PDF), not post partisan unity schticks. Greenberg writes:

When asked to compare the current times and the types of solutions needed to deal with their problems to three other difficult eras – FDR’s “New Deal” era in the 1930s, the late 1970s and early 1980s when Reagan was elected, and the early 1990s of Bill Clinton – voters’ preferences are striking: By significant margins, voters believe Roosevelt’s times and solutions are more analogous to ours than Reagan’s, but that Reagan’s are closer to ours than Clinton’s. These feelings center largely around a desire to restore an American middle class that has declined steadily in recent decades.

More . . .

Apparently John McCain believes the presidential election will come down to which candidate is the bigger (or lesser) celebrity:

Here's proof, if proof were needed, that the McCain campaign's advertising strategy is in fact being run by a crack team of six-year-olds, out of their minds on Sunny Delight. Yesterday they released a new ad, Fan Club, which continued to mock Barack Obama as a celebrity, this time on account of his "dreamy eyes". It included a brief clip of Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in Wayne's World ("We're not worthy!") -- but Myers objected, claiming copyright violation, and the ad was reissued without the clip.

Doesn't the McCain campaign realize that voters love celebrities? How else to explain the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in California or Jessie Ventura in Minnesota? If McCain had ideas that were worth listening to, perhaps he wouldn't have to spend his time mocking his opponent's popularity.

The Vice Presidential candidate speaks at the Democratic Convention on Wednesday night. The theme that night is "Securing America's Future."

So the VP candidate is someone who fits with that theme. Also, according to another report I read elsewhere, miltary veterans are part of the night's theme.

Could Gen. Wesley Clark be back in the ballgame? His organization is Securing America's Future, the same name as the night's theme. More on that here.

Gen. Wesley Clark would be just fine with me. He's actually got progressive views on criminal justice issues and constitutional rights: [More...]

Sen. Hillary Clinton will be one of four speakers on Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention.

The convention keynote speaker, who will also be speaking Tuesday, has just been announced. It's former Governor Mark Warner.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama's rival during the Democratic presidential primaries, is also scheduled to speak that night, Aug. 26. But Warner is being given the plum position, according to an e-mail that Obama campaign adviser Mike Henry sent to Virginia supporters late Tuesday.

Other newly announced speakers: Michelle Obama's brother will introduce her on Monday night. Nancy Pelosi, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, will also speak Monday.

Each night has a theme: [More...]

Mark David Chapman, the killer of John Lennon, was denied parole today.

This is an open thread.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld the dismissal of Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson's lawsuit against Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.

Plame and Wilson accused the four men of violating their constitutional rights by leaking Plame's identity to the media in retaliation for a New York Times opinion piece by Wilson that questioned the Bush administration's basis for going to war in Iraq.

The decision ``allows outrageous government conduct to go unpunished,'' said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that represented Plame and Wilson. She said the group is considering asking the full D.C. Circuit to review the case and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Today's opinion is here.The trial court's opinion dismissing the suit is here. More background here.

A British drug warrior has come to the realization that drug abuse should be treated as a public health problem, not as a crime.

A former senior civil servant who was responsible for coordinating the government's anti-drugs policy now believes that legalisation would be less harmful than the current strategy. Julian Critchley, the former director of the Cabinet Office's anti-drugs unit, also said that his views were shared by the "overwhelming majority" of professionals in the field, including police officers, health workers and members of the government.

Critchley points out that "enforcement and supply-side interventions ... have no significant, lasting impact on the availability, affordability or use of drugs." His belief "that New Labour's policy on drugs was based on what was thought would play well with the Daily Mail readership, regardless of evidence of what worked," parallels the belief of American politicians that a "tough on drugs" attitude plays well with the voting public despite overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice approach has failed. When will our policy makers have the courage to learn the obvious truth that Critchley has embraced?

Russia says it has punished Georgia enough:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia agreed on Tuesday to the terms of a cease-fire that could end the clashes in Georgia, saying Russia had “punished” Georgia enough for its aggression against the separatist enclave of South Ossetia.

Get the message?

Attorney General Michael Mukasey today said there will be no prosecutions from the investigation into hiring practices of U.S. Attorneys.

“Where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute,” he said. “But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime,” he said. As the inspector general’s report acknowledged, the hiring violations were such a case, because the wrongdoing violated federal civil service law, but not criminal law, he said.

“That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences,” Mr. Mukasey said. “Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the Department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity.