Alabama Voters Say At Least One Sheriff Won't Be Enriching Himself With Federal Inmate Food Funds

from the fixing-the-law-one-county-at-a-time dept

Things will get a little less crooked in part of Alabama in the near future. Sheriffs will no longer be able be able to personally benefit from federal funds meant to feed the state's prisoners.

More than one sheriff in the state had been caught starving prisoners while picking up nice things for themselves with the leftover money. Weirdly, this is all legal under state law, which allows personal use of unused food funds by sheriffs running the state's jails.

Three consecutive sheriffs in Morgan County found themselves in legal trouble for taking advantage of state law. One was hit with a consent decree forbidding county sheriffs from taking home food funds. The next two sheriffs decided to ignore this legal agreement, with one of them earning the nickname "Sheriff Corndog" from his underfed prisoners. The third in line -- continuing a 16-year tradition of ignoring the 2001 consent decree -- raised the bar on county sheriff legal troubles by giving $160,000 in federal food funds to a corrupt car dealership run by a former felon.

A sheriff in Etowah County also brought down the heat on himself by taking home $250,000 a year in federal food funds that were supposed to be used to feed inmates. The $750,000 that managed to be accounted for is likely only a small part of the sheriff's total take. According to public records, Sheriff Todd Entrekin managed to acquire $1.7 million in property while officially taking home a $93,000 salary.

In Cullman County, this loopholicious law has been closed. As Zuri Davis of Reason reports, voters have decided one local sheriff won't be making himself richer at the expense of the inmates he oversees. Strangely enough, this amendment -- which passed with 88% of the vote -- had the support of the local sheriff.

Sheriff Matt Gentry decried the practice as ruining the reputation of Alabama sheriffs. He instead touted support for the Sheriff's Food Bill, or Local Amendment 1. The amendment sought to add a constitutional protection to make the use of the funds more transparent. Under the amendment, the money would be placed in a public account and all excess funds would go toward law enforcement operations like deputy equipment. The account would also be subject to an audit by the state every two years.

It's good to see someone recognize a problem and do something to fix it, rather than view the problem as an opportunity to be taken advantage of. This doesn't change anything anywhere else in the state. Certainly the Alabama legislature is aware of the negative press but it still seems reluctant to amend the law that allows local law enforcement officials to behave in a manner befitting crooked cops. Until it does, sheriffs will continue to make themselves look bad and legislators look complicit.

Filed Under: alabama, amendment, food, matt gentry, sheriffs

House Intel Boss, Rep. Devin Nunes, Lying To Congress About Attempt To Stop Encryption Backdoors

from the liar-liar dept

There are some in Congress who apparently have no problem deceiving both their colleagues and the American public in the pursuit of making Americans less safe and putting our country, economy and infrastructure at risk. This time, it's House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, along with Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, who chairs the NSA subcommittee. They've been sending around a letter that blatantly misrepresents a proposal designed to better protect Americans' privacy and security.

For the past two years, around this time, we've talked about the importance of an attempt by Reps. Thomas Massie and Zoe Lofgren to prevent two different kinds of "backdoor" surveillance -- the use of backdoor searches to the NSA's 702 collection and (perhaps more importantly) attempts to backdoor encryption. The Massie/Lofgren amendment has been overwhelmingly supported in the House the past couple of years, but the Senate (with help from surveillance state supporters in the House) keeps conspiring to strip it out of the final agreement.

The Massie/Lofgren amendment is back again this year, and it's pretty straightforward. First, it defunds gov't employees from doing "backdoor" searches (i.e., searching through massive databases of material on Americans that was collected "incidentally" but still kept anyway):

... none of the funds made available by this Act may be used by an officer or employee of the United States to query a collection of foreign intelligence information acquired under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1881a) using a United States person identifier.

But, more importantly, it blocks any funding for attempts to force anyone to backdoor encryption:

none of the funds made available by this Act may be used by the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency to mandate or request that a person (as defined in section 101(m) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801(m))) alter its product or service to permit the electronic surveillance (as defined in section 101(f) of such Act (50 U.S.C. 1801(f))) of any user of such product or service for such agencies.

While that's a bit of a word jumble, in short, it says that the NSA and CIA cannot force companies to backdoor encryption to enable government surveillance. This point is especially important this year, following on the DOJ/FBI's flubbed attempt to force Apple to decrypt some iPhones earlier this year, combined with the dangerous Burr/Feinstein anti-encryption bill (thankfully dead for now), to offer Congress a clear attempt to say that it will not accept attempts to backdoor encryption.

In the past, those in Congress against this amendment have tried to stop it by totally misrepresenting what the amendment covers, and that appears to be the strategy of Nunes and Westmoreland this time around.

In the letter being sent around to other Representatives, they lay on a thick layer of misleading to downright false FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) -- and of course, they exploit the tragedy in Orlando to further their misleading claims.

The national security threats to the United States and its allies are greater today than at any point since 9/11. To keep Americans safe, our Intelligence Community needs to fully employ every tool available to it. We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security. As recent events in Orlando have made tragically clear, terrorists will continue to attack the U.S. homeland.

That seems like a somewhat misleading and self-serving description of what happened in Orlando. While there's still a variety of reports, it's clear that the shooter was an American, born in America, and it doesn't appear he had any connection whatsoever to overseas terrorist organizations. In short: this doesn't look like an issue that the intelligence community would have been able to figure anything out about. The shooter was already known to the FBI, who investigated him and found nothing. And then it appears that he did the shooting on his own, meaning there is little "communication" that the intel community would have needed to track. But even if there was, nothing in this amendment would stop law enforcement or the intelligence community from getting access to such information. Nothing.

But Nunes and Westmoreland are just warming up. It's the next part that is really extremely misleading.

Despite the threats that face us, Congressman Massie and Congresswoman Lofgren's amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act (H.R. 5293) would end the use of a vital tool for identifying and disrupting terrorist plots at home and abroad. If this amendment were enacted, the Intelligence Community would not be able to look through information lawfully collected under FISA Section 702 to see if Omar Siddiqui Mateen, the Orlando nightclub attacker, was in contact with any terrorist groups outside the United Statets.

This is just blatantly false. It's true that outlawing backdoor searches would mean that law enforcement and intelligence wouldn't be able to do backdoor searches on Mateen's communications, but this falsely implies that's the only way in which Mateen's communications could be checked. That's just wrong. Law enforcement still can (and I'm sure already has) get access to Mateen's call records and lots of other communications information through a variety of third parties (and I'm sure would have no trouble getting warrants issued if necessary). Law enforcement and the intelligence community could still get a warrant to search through the information that has been collected. They just need to get a warrant -- which should be pretty damn easy. So there's nothing stopping law enforcement from figuring out if Mateen was in contact with people overseas. The bill just means that the intelligence community can't just go randomly sniffing through the massive database they've already collected of "incidental" information from other searches.

This is no way to legislate. To blatantly mislead their Congressional colleagues in order to protect programs that harm Americans' privacy and security is a pretty cowardly approach to handling these issues. It's fine to debate the relative merits (or lack of merits) of the Section 702 program or other surveillance techniques, but flat out lying to colleagues to block an amendment that they've overwhelmingly supported for the past two years just seems... dishonest and sleazy.

Filed Under: amendment, appropriations, backdoor searches, backdoors, devin nunes, encryption, house intelligence committee, lynn westmoreland, omar mateen, section 702, surveillance, thomas massie, zoe lofgren

Congress Should Support Amash Amendment Just Because White House Statement Is So Insulting

from the don't-take-that-kind-of-crap dept

Last night, we wrote about the pure insanity of the White House's statement against the Amash Amendment, which would pull funding from the NSA for just the "dragnet" surveillance efforts, in which it collects all metadata on all phone calls. Considering that the very author of the Patriot Act insists the law was never meant to allow this kind of collection, Amash's amendment shouldn't be all that controversial. It's literally him bringing the actual law back in line with what many in Congress thought the law already was. For the Obama White House to hit back by claiming that this clear fix to the law "is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process" is downright ridiculous and insulting, considering that the decision to reinterpret the law in secret was hardly the product of an "informed, open or deliberative process."

In fact, as Marcy Wheeler points out, this statement is so insulting to Congress, that Congress should vote for the Amash amendment as a response to the White House's claim. As she notes, this seems to be the White House blaming Congress for not being "informed, open or deliberative" in responsing to the administration's own efforts to mislead Congress by keeping them not fully informed, with a secret process, that guaranteed many were kept in the dark. To then flip that around and blame Congress as if it was Congress who wasn't being open is downright insulting:

Hell, if I were a self-respecting member of Congress, I’d support Amash-Conyers even if I weren’t already predisposed to, if only because this is such a crazy bat-shit claim to reason and openness.

The Executive Branch has had 7 years to have an open debate. It chose not to have that open debate. Now that one has been brought to it by Congress, it pretends Congress is the one at fault for the lack of informed or open process.

Of course, Wheeler makes another good point in that same post. The fact that the White House put this statement out, even after the NSA did a full court emergency lobby extravaganza to convince Congress not to support the amendment, at least suggests that the White House is realizing that there might really be enough votes to get this amendment through.

President Obama claimed he "welcomed this debate." He might want to speed up that process, because it's happening and all he's doing is stalling and blaming others. But the debate is happening without him, and he might not like where it ends up.

Filed Under: amendment, appropriations, debate, justin amash, nsa, nsa surveillance, patriot act, section 215, white house