If this headline doesn’t scare you, pull your head out of the sand please. Straight from Courthouse News Service:
The Department of Justice has blown off FOIA requests for information about its policies and role in “tracking the location of individuals’ mobile phones without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause,” the ACLU claims in Federal Court.
The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice just released its Report and Recommendations on the Administration of The Death Penalty in California. The report is 145 pages. It stops short of saying the death penalty should be abolished, but it does highlight numerous reasons why we can’t financially afford to carry it out as it is done today.
One of America’s Finest. ICE Assistant Chief Counsel Constantine Peter Kallas was arrested for allegedly accepting a $20,000.00 bribe to assist an immigrant with citizenship. The DOJ’s investigation shows an additional $900,000.00 deposited into his personal bank accounts. This doesn’t look good.
Here’s the DOJ Press Release from Courthousenews.
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (DOJ-OIG) just released a partially redacted report on the FBI’s Security Check Procedures for Immigration Applications and Petitions. The Executive Summary states:
Through its National Name Check Program (NNCP) and Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provides federal agencies, state and local law enforcement agencies, and approved non-governmental institutions criminal history and identification services from its repositories of investigative records.
So who exactly are “approved non-governmental institutions”? Interestingly the FBI claims that the IAFIS maintains the largest biometric database in the world. While searching for more information on the IAFIS I found a power point presentation from some other government regarding the program.
Some great minds at Stanford have been teaching a course on Information Retrieval and have now made an exhaustive textbook available. The best part is that its free to view and/or download. Grab Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze. The Information Retrieval companion website gives you an easy way to navigate it. Be forewarned that the information is thick and deep. This isn’t for the novice searcher.
From beSpacific, “FBI agents in Guantanamo and other military zones were faced with interrogators from other agencies who used more aggressive interrogation techniques. The FBI ultimately decided that it would not participate in joint interrogations of detainees with other agencies in which techniques not allowed by the FBI were used. Our investigation found that the vast majority of the FBI agents deployed in Guantanamo and the other military zones continued to adhere to FBI policies and separated themselves from other agencies’ interrogators who were using non-FBI-approved techniques. In only a few instances did FBI agents use techniques that would not normally be permitted in the United States or participate in interrogations during which such techniques were used by others.”
