Bid to halt medical-pot ruling due in court
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery continue to try to flush Arizona's medical marijuana laws down the toilet.
If you remember Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne was in an alleged hit and run accident while having an alleged affair with assistant attorney general and alleged mistress Carmen Chenal. If you ask me Tom Horne is just trying to create a smoke screen to cover up his own crimes.
Bid to halt medical-pot ruling due in court
By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez The RepublicIazcentral.com Wed Dec 12, 2012 11:46 PM
Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Michael Gordon will hear arguments at 11 a.m. today on a request to stay or suspend his recent ruling on the legality of the state’s medical-marijuana law.
Last week, Gordon ruled Arizona’s controversial medical-marijuana law does not conflict with federal drug laws and rejected arguments made by Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery and Attorney General Tom Horne that state employees would be facilitating federal crimes if they issued licenses to medical-marijuana dispensaries.
Gordon also required the county to issue documents allowing White Mountain Health Center of Sun City to move forward with its effort to open a dispensary.
Montgomery and Horne have filed a motion to suspend Gordon’s ruling until their appeal has run its course. In their request, the prosecutors asked the court to “preserve the status quo” pending an appeal, saying, “This case concerns the question of pre-emption by federal law of the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, a significant issue of first impression in the Arizona courts. Given that there is no appellate court guidance in Arizona on this important issue, it would be prudent to preserve the status quo and not compel county defendants to take any action that may later prove to be unsupported by Arizona law.”
Local attorneys Jeffrey Kaufman and Ezekiel Edwards, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s criminal-law reform project, represent White Mountain Health Center. The lawyers said that neither the stay request nor the appeal has merit and that the judge has already considered Montgomery’s argument that county officials would be harmed if they issued zoning documents.
“The argument has been raised and rejected,” Edwards said. “It seems the county is simply trying to sabotage implementing the voter-approved and voter-enacted Arizona Medical Marijuana Act, and we are encouraging the court to reject the county’s motion to stay.”
Linda Valdez thinks marijuana should be legalized???
SourceLinda Valdez | azcentral Republic
U.S-Mexico border lesson: legalize marijuana
Posted on December 12, 2012 by Linda Valdez
The U.S.-Mexico border is rarely discussed in such rational terms as these:
“You know, as we continue to tighten the border more and more, they’ll find every method they can explore to get their drug loads over.” That was Border Patrol Agent K. Linwood Estes talking to KTVK-TV Phoenix.
Agent K is far too astute to ever go into politics. Pity. He was talking about smugglers who become rich by being resourceful in the lucrative business of supplying the recreational drug needs of Americans.
The smugglers in this story used cannons to lob canisters of marijuana from Mexico. You can only wonder what took them so long to think this up.
The officers who found the cans of pot near Yuma this week said the strategy was new to the area. Yuma is everybody’s favorite border enforcement success story. It has super-sized fencing, and is lifted up by Republicans and other border hardliners as having gained “operational control.”
Somebody had better tell the smugglers.
It’s a few billion dollars too late to discover that “danged fence” doesn’t get the job done. And you can bet the danged-fence advocates will keep pounding the drum to “secure the border” if discussions about real immigration reform ever get started again.
But the pot cannons and the frank assessment of one Border Patrol agent really ought to teach us a few things.
- If there’s a demand — for drugs or cheap labor — somebody will find a way to supply it.
- Fences foster creativity; they don’t stop smuggling.
- Legalizing marijuana makes more sense than enriching the drug cartels.
When it comes to border fences, the lesson is simple: If you build it, they will find a way around it.
Russia says Assad may fall in Syria
By Elizabeth A. Kennedy and Vladimir Isachenkov Associated Press Fri Dec 14, 2012 12:11 AM
BEIRUT -- Syria’s most powerful ally, Russia, said Thursday that President Bashar Assad is losing control of his country and the rebels might win the civil war, the first time Moscow has acknowledged the regime is cracking under the force of a powerful rebellion.
NATO also predicted Assad’s fall, with Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen saying the regime’s collapse is “only a matter of time.”
“An opposition victory can’t be excluded, unfortunately, but it’s necessary to look at the facts: There is a trend for the government to progressively lose control over an increasing part of the territory,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said during hearings at a Kremlin advisory body.
Bogdanov also said Moscow is preparing to evacuate thousands of its citizens from Syria, where nearly two years of violent conflict have killed more than 40,000 people and turned Assad into a global pariah. His statement marks a clear attempt by the Kremlin to begin positioning itself for Assad’s eventual defeat at a time when rebels are making significant gains.
Opposition fighters have seized large swaths of territory in northern Syria along the border with Turkey and appear to be expanding their control outside of Damascus, pushing the fight closer to Assad’s seat of power in the capital. In a Damascus suburb, a bomb blast Thursday near a school killed 16 people, at least half of them women and children, the state news agency SANA reported.
A day earlier, the U.S., Europe and their allies recognized the newly reorganized opposition leadership, giving it a stamp of credibility and possibly paving the way for greater international aid to those fighting Assad’s forces.
At the same time, international condemnation of the regime has grown more intense as Western officials raise concerns that Assad might unleash his chemical weapons stockpiles against rebels in an act of desperation.
On Wednesday, the U.S. and NATO said Assad’s forces had fired Scud missiles at rebel areas.
Syria denied the Scud allegations, calling them nothing more than a conspiracy.
But the NATO secretary-general said the military alliance detected the launch of a number of the unguided short-range missiles inside Syria earlier this week.
“We can’t confirm details of the missiles, but some of the information indicates they were Scud-type missiles,” he said at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
“In general, I think the regime in Damascus is approaching collapse. I think now it’s only a question of time.”
Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs, said Bogdanov’s statement may reflect new information about the situation on the ground.
“A public statement like that appears to indicate that the balance is shifting,” he said.
Abu Bilal al-Homsi, an activist based in a rebel-held neighborhood of Homs in central Syria, said he is encouraged by Bogdanov’s comments because Russia is in a position to know about the strength of Assad’s forces.
“The Russians know his capabilities and his military force. Russia knows what warplanes and what weapons he has,” Abu Bilal said via Skype. “The Free Syrian Army is on the verge of strangling Damascus and this indicates that the regime is reaching an end,” he added, referring to the main rebel fighting force.
Despite Russia’s acknowledgement that Assad could lose, Bogdanov gave no immediate signal that Russia would change its pro-Syria stance at the U.N. Security Council, where Moscow has shielded Damascus from world sanctions.
Bogdanov also reaffirmed Russia’s call for a compromise, saying it would take the opposition a long time to defeat the regime and Syria would suffer heavy casualties.
“The fighting will become even more intense, and you will lose tens of thousands and, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “If such a price for the ouster of the president seems acceptable to you, what can we do? We, of course, consider it absolutely unacceptable.”
Russia’s ties to Syria date back to Assad’s father, Hafez, who ruled Syria with an iron fist from 1971 until his death in June 2000.
In the last four decades, Russia has sold Syria billions of dollars’ worth of weapons. A change in power in Damascus could not only cost Russia lucrative trade deals, but also reduce Russian political influence in Arab world.
The Russians also strongly oppose a world order dominated by the United States and they are keen to avoid a repeat of last year’s NATO air campaign that led to the ouster of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, a former Moscow ally.
Bogdanov’s remarks will likely be seen in Damascus as a betrayal of these longstanding ties. There was no immediate reaction from the Syrian regime on the comments.
Bogdanov said the Foreign Ministry is preparing evacuation plans for thousands of Russian citizens, most of whom are Russian women married to Syrian men and their children.
“We are dealing with issues related to the preparation for evacuation,” Bogdanov said. “We have mobilization plans. We are finding out where our citizens are.”
The Interfax news agency said that if the government decides to evacuate Russians from Syria, it could be done by ships escorted by the Russian navy and by government planes.
At the same time, violence was escalating in and around the capital.
The government says the bombing on Thursday in the Damascus suburb of Qatana was the latest in a string of similar bombings in and around Damascus that killed at least 25 people in the last two days.
The government blames the bombings on terrorists, the term it uses to refer to rebel fighters. While no one has claimed responsibility for the bombings, some have targeted government buildings and killed officials, suggesting that rebels who don’t have the firepower to engage Assad’s elite forces in the capital could be resorting to guerrilla measures.
Similar attacks hit four places in and around Damascus on Wednesday.
Three bombs collapsed walls of the Interior Ministry building, killing at least five people. One of the dead was Syrian parliament member Abdullah Qairouz, SANA reported.
Assigning responsibility for the blasts remains difficult because rebels tend to blame attacks that kill civilians on the regime without providing evidence while competing groups often claim successful operations.
European court condemns CIA in landmark ruling
By Angela Charlton Associated Press Thu Dec 13, 2012 9:23 PM
PARIS - A European court issued a landmark ruling Thursday that condemned the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” programs and bolstered those who say they were illegally kidnapped and tortured as part of an overzealous war on terrorism.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled that a German car salesman was an innocent victim of torture and abuse, in a long-awaited victory for a man who had failed for years to get courts in the U.S. and Europe to acknowledge what happened to him.
Khaled El-Masri says he was kidnapped from Macedonia in 2003, mistaken for a terrorism suspect, then held for four months and brutally interrogated at an Afghan prison known as the “Salt Pit” run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. He says that once U.S. authorities realized he was not a threat, they illegally sent him to Albania and left him on a mountainside.
The European court, based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that El-Masri’s account was “established beyond reasonable doubt” and that Macedonia “had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the U.S. authorities in the context of an extra-judicial rendition.”
It said the government of Macedonia violated El-Masri’s rights repeatedly and ordered it to pay $78,500 in damages. Macedonia’s Justice Ministry said it would enforce the court ruling and pay El-Masri the damages.
U.S. officials closed internal investigations into the El-Masri case two years ago, and the administration of President Barack Obama has distanced itself from some counterterrorism activities conducted under former President George W. Bush.
But several other legal cases are pending from Britain to Hong Kong involving people who say they were illegally detained in the CIA program. Its critics hope that Thursday’s ruling will lead to court victories for other rendition victims and prevent future abuses.
The case focused on Macedonia’s role in a single instance of wrongful capture. But it drew broader attention because of how sensitive the CIA extraordinary renditions were for Europe, at a time when the continent lived in fear of terrorist attacks but was divided over the Bush administration’s methods of rooting out terrorism.
Those methods involved abducting and interrogating suspects — without court sanction — in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A 2007 Council of Europe probe accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centers or carry out rendition flights between 2002 and 2005.
The CIA declined to comment on Thursday’s ruling.
The court, in its 92-page ruling, said El-Masri was severely beaten, sodomized, shackled and hooded “at the hands of the CIA rendition team” in the presence of Macedonian authorities.
"The 9 Step Reid Method" is the technique that most police agencies in the world use to get confessions.
Go ahead right now and Google
Back in the old days cops used to get confessions by beating people with rubber hoses. The great thing about rubber hoses is they don't leave marks like beating a person with a club would and the cops can say the person confessed willingly without being beaten.
The "9 Step Reid Method" is just a modern method of beating the sh*t out of suspected criminals with psychological rubber hose. It's a very effective method in getting people to confess. In fact it's so effective that it routinely gets innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
And the good thing about "The 9 Step Reid Method" is that the psychological rubber hoses used to beat a suspected criminal into confession leave even less marks then real rubber hoses.
The bad thing about "The 9 Step Reid Method" is that the confessions cops get
when they use it are about as reliable as those they got when they beat the sh*t out of
a person with a rubber hose to get the confession.
As of today, DNA tests have cause 301 people who were framed by the police to be released from death row. Many of those people confess to the crimes the crimes the police framed them for. And of course most of those police confessions were obtained using the "The 9 Step Reid Method".
Alvarez to '60 Minutes': False confessions story was 'offensive'
By Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune reporter
8:05 a.m. CST, December 14, 2012
After days of scathing reviews of her "60 Minutes" interview on false confessions, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez fired off a letter to the venerable news program calling its Sunday report "one-sided and extremely misleading" and vowing to set the record straight.
The segment titled "Chicago: The False Confession Capital" featured two infamous Chicago-area cases in which teenage boys allegedly confessed to brutal murders but were later exonerated when DNA excluded them as the killers.
In her letter, addressed to CBS News Chairman Jeff Fager, Alvarez called the story "an offensive display" and accused reporter Byron Pitts of using only snippets of a 6-month-old interview to distort her record and make it appear she was still trying to prosecute the cases.
"Had I known that this story would completely distort my position and intentionally omit critical facts, I would never have agreed to your interview," Alvarez wrote.
One particularly damaging portion of the interview involved the Dixmoor Five case in which five men were convicted as teens of the 1991 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl whose body was found on a path. DNA linked a serial rapist to the crime and undermined confessions from the teens. They were cleared in 2011 after spending years in prison.
Alvarez explained in the interview that one possible explanation for the DNA was necrophilia — that the rapist had sex with the girl after she'd already been killed.
That answer — which was roundly mocked in blogs and news critiques — was misconstrued, Alvarez said in the letter. She wrote that the necrophilia theory was used at trial years before she had any involvement in the case.
"I have never advanced that theory or argument, but simply responded, when asked by Mr. Pitts, that we can't say with certainty what had occurred," Alvarez wrote. "This story was not designed to inform, it was designed to undermine me and mislead the public."
Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for Alvarez, said the reaction to the piece has been vitriolic. "She's gotten hate mail, things you couldn't even publish," Daly said.
CBS News representatives did not return phone calls seeking comment.
jmeisner@tribune.com
Russia says Assad may fall in Syria
I suspect that both Russia and the USA could care less about the "people" of Syria. We are both in it because we want the support of the next dictator of Syria. And that will give the country that backs the winner more power in the Middle East.
European court condemns CIA in landmark ruling
Source
Alvarez to '60 Minutes': False confessions story was 'offensive'
Anybody that doesn't believe that the police routinely get innocent people to confess to crimes they didn't commit needs to read up on "The 9 Step Reid Method".
9 Step Reid Method
Lots of sites will pop up.
Here are some of them:
Federal prisoners turn snitching into a profitable gig
Source
Federal prisoners turn snitching into a profitable gig
By Brad Heath USA Today Fri Dec 14, 2012 9:51 AM
ATLANTA -- The prisoners in Atlanta’s hulking downtown jail had a problem. They wanted to snitch for federal agents, but they didn’t know anything worth telling.
Fellow prisoner Marcus Watkins, an armed robber, had the answer.
For a fee, Watkins and his associates on the outside sold them information about other criminals that they could turn around and offer up to federal agents in hopes of shaving years off their prison sentences. They were paying for information, but what they were really trying to buy was freedom.
“I didn’t feel as though any laws were being broken,” Watkins wrote in a 2008 letter to prosecutors. “I really thought I was helping out law enforcement.”
That pay-to-snitch enterprise — documented in thousands of pages of court records, interviews and a stack of Watkins’ own letters — remains almost entirely unknown outside Atlanta’s towering federal courthouse, where investigators are still trying to determine whether any criminal cases were compromised. It offers a rare glimpse inside a vast and almost always secret part of the federal criminal justice system in which prosecutors routinely use the promise of reduced prison time to reward prisoners who help federal agents build cases against other criminals.
Snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at least 48,895 federal convicts -- one of every eight -- had their prison sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators, a USA TODAY examination of hundreds of thousands of court cases found. The deals can chop a decade or more off of their sentences.
How often informants pay to acquire information from brokers such as Watkins is impossible to know, in part because judges routinely seal court records that could identify them. It almost certainly represents an extreme result of a system that puts strong pressure on defendants to cooperate. Still, Watkins’ case is at least the fourth such scheme to be uncovered in Atlanta alone over the past 20 years.
Those schemes are generally illegal because the people who buy information usually lie to federal agents about where they got it. They also show how staggeringly valuable good information has become — prices ran into tens of thousands of dollars, or up to $250,000 in one case, court records show.
John Horn, the second in command of Atlanta’s U.S. attorney’s office, said the “investigation on some of these matters is continuing” but would not elaborate.
Prosecutors have said they were troubled that informants were paying for some of the secrets they passed on to federal agents. Judges are outraged. But the inmates who operated the schemes have repeatedly alleged that agents knew all along what they were up to, and sometimes even gave them the information they sold. Prosecutors told a judge in October that an investigation found those accusations were false. Still, court records show, agents kept interviewing at least one of Watkins’ customers even after the FBI learned of the scheme.
The risks are obvious. If the government rewards paid-for information, wealthy defendants could potentially buy early freedom. Because such a system further muddies the question of how informants -- already widely viewed as untrustworthy -- know what they claim to know, “individual cases can be undermined and the system itself is compromised,” U.S. Justice Department lawyers said in a 2010 court filing.
Before Watkins became an informant, he was a prolific armed robber.
In 1995, he held up a string of shops and restaurants, sometimes robbing the same place more than once, and sometimes pulling more than one robbery a day, according to court records. The last time he was arrested, in 2006, Atlanta police said he asked a supermarket clerk for a pack of cigarettes, stepped back, pulled a handgun and yelled “robbery.” He fled before he got any money, employees caught him, and federal prosecutors hit him with a gun charge that could have put him in prison for the rest of his life.
By then, Watkins had been a federal informant for a decade, he said in a letter to USA TODAY. He claimed he once wore a wire inside a prison to help catch another man who was selling information to would-be witnesses. That man, Gregory Harris, later confessed, but, in an unusual move, the government agreed to halve the 20-year prison sentence Harris was already serving in exchange for his cooperation in other cases. (Harris was found dead this year inside the trunk of a burning car.)
And so began a career of trying to cash in on what he knew.
Pressure, and plenty of cooperation
People charged with federal crimes don’t have many ways to avoid a tough sentence.
Nearly everyone charged is convicted. They usually face the prospect of a lengthy prison term, driven by long minimum sentences for drug crimes and sentencing rules that leave judges little leeway to make exceptions — unless they cooperate. Often, becoming an informant is the only chance defendants have.
An experienced lawyer who knows what his client has been charged with “can ask a client three or four questions, and you can get 95 percent accuracy on the sentencing range within 10 minutes â€1// unless he has something to trade,” said Tim Saviello, a John Marshall Law School professor and former federal public defender in Atlanta. “People are willing to pay $20,000 or $30,000 to get a piece of information. That tells you how valuable it is.”
Every year for the past decade, 11 percent or more of the people convicted of a federal crime got a shorter sentence because they provided “substantial assistance” to investigators, a USA TODAY examination of federal sentencing data shows. That figure almost certainly understates the extent to which defendants cooperate because some get breaks that aren’t reflected in court records and others only pass on information that the government doesn’t find useful.
In return, prisoners offer up names and addresses of drug dealers. They wear recording devices or let police listen to their phone calls. They introduce undercover agents to their contacts inside crime organizations.
That kind of help has become indispensable for law enforcement. The Drug Enforcement Administration told the Justice Department’s inspector general in 2005 that it “could not effectively enforce the controlled-substances laws of the United States” without its confidential sources.
Cooperation is especially common when drugs are involved. Nationwide, at least a quarter of the people sent to federal prison in drug-trafficking cases over the past five years successfully traded information for a shorter sentence. In some parts of the country — including Idaho, Colorado and western New York — more than half did, while in Nebraska, fewer than 5 percent of convicted drug traffickers got deals. One reason is that some prosecutors’ offices demand far more cooperation to get a deal.
The benefits can be huge. Last year, half of the defendants who cooperated with the government got their sentences chopped by 50 percent or more, according to a U.S. Sentencing Commission report. People convicted of some white-collar crimes such as bribery and tax evasion usually avoid prison entirely.
It’s up to Justice Department lawyers to decide who gets a break.
A jailhouse enterprise
Watkins’ business plan was simple.
His associates on the outside collected information about drug dealers and other criminals, and he offered to sell it to other prisoners at the Atlanta City Detention Center who had money but lacked the facts or criminal contacts to cooperate with the government on their own. Sometimes the money ended up in a jail account that inmates use to buy commissary items, according to court records.
In exchange, he would deliver “packages” of information his customers could share with federal agents looking to open new cases or buttress old ones.
The trouble was most of what Watkins had to sell was “classic street-level information” that was of little interest to federal agents looking to take down major drug traffickers, said Robert McBurney, who worked a related case when he was a federal prosecutor in Atlanta. He said Justice Department lawyers were uncomfortable shortening one prisoner’s sentence as a reward for someone else’s information, and doubly so when the would-be informants concealed the fact that their information was secondhand.
And then there was the money. “There were discussions that, if the information he relayed is valid, maybe he’s an entrepreneur. If he chooses to get money instead of a reduction in sentence, Adam Smith would applaud that,” McBurney said, invoking the 18th-century economist. But prosecutors didn’t take the same view.
Watkins said he didn’t see the problem. “The biggest buyer of information is the government,” he said during a brief phone call from a detention center in Georgia. “But they pay in years.”
He claimed during a phone call that the agents who debriefed him “knew money’s been changing hands,” and his lawyer said in court filings that it should have been obvious to investigators that Watkins was getting outside information. “They basically authorized all of this,” Watkins said. He said he is still providing information to federal agents, an allegation that prosecutors have disputed.
Watkins’ enterprise didn’t come to light until the summer of 2008, when another inmate contacted prosecutors looking for a deal — with information about Watkins. (He got one.) Watkins later told the FBI that he had brokered deals for four inmates. James Rochester, the informant who turned him in — and had been intercepting his mail — told federal prosecutors through his lawyer that he thought there were at least a dozen customers. Watkins himself wrote to agents and prosecutors admitting that he had acted as a broker for other prisoners seeking information.
McBurney said prosecutors tried to review all cases that could have been tainted by Watkins’ scheme. “It’s a pernicious situation that, sadly, undid some good works,” McBurney said. But FBI Agent Mile Brosas testified in December 2010 that agents went “just based on the names that Mr. Watkins gave us.”
Neither Watkins nor his customers were ever prosecuted for the scheme. At least one actually won a reduced sentence .
Watkins is still angling to get his own sentence reduced.
He pleaded guilty to a federal gun charge in 2007; in exchange, the government promised in a written plea agreement to recommend a 30-year sentence. But five and a half years later, he still hasn’t been sentenced. Part of the reason is that he’s still trying to get a judge to force the Justice Department to give him a “substantial assistance” reduction as a reward for the help he said he has given to state and federal agents.
The Justice Department “feigns dismay that Marcus Watkins was allegedly buying and selling information when the Government had been legally buying information from him over a lengthy period of time,” his lawyer, Martin Cowen III, alleged in one court filing. He said it should have been obvious to agents by 2008 that Watkins -- who had been in prison for two years by then -- couldn’t have been giving them current information about criminals unless he was getting it from someone outside the jail.
The government, Cowen said, was “’shocked, shocked’ to find that information was being sold in the jail.”
But if prosecutors weren’t actually surprised, Atlanta’s chief federal judge was. At a hearing in 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Julie Carnes excoriated the “abominable situation” of prisoners trading for outside information, and said she was “appalled that it’s going on to the level it appears to be going on.” The scheme, she said, could let the wealthy buy their way to reduced sentences, conjuring images of Hessian mercenaries of the Revolutionary War.
Carnes still hasn’t decided what to do with Watkins.
Information has a price
It wasn’t the only time someone here figured out how much information was worth.
In 2010, federal prosecutors indicted another man, Sandeo Dyson -- an Army medic locked up on charges that he had tried to burn down a strip club for money -- for running a similar scheme out of the same jail at the same time as Watkins. His customers paid $5,000 and $10,000 for information they hoped would win them lighter sentences. Prosecutors said he made $50,000 selling information to four other inmates.
Dyson pleaded guilty to a charge of encouraging his customers to lie to agents about the source of their information and was sentenced to 18 more months in prison.
U.S. District Judge Richard Story had planned to lock Dyson up longer. But by the time Dyson’s attorney, Barry Lombardo, finished sketching the history of the pay-to-snitch business in Atlanta, Story instead sentenced him to the bottom end of what the federal sentencing guidelines said was appropriate, Lombardo said. (The transcript of that hearing remains sealed.)
In 2000, prosecutors here convicted Harris.
Four years before that, agents charged a prominent local defense lawyer, Robert Fierer, and his former drug-dealer client, Kevin Pappas, with running an even bigger information-for-sale enterprise. Their customers were quoted prices up to $250,000 for information that they hoped might help them go home sooner, according to court records.
To get a deal, Pappas said, people needed the right kind of information about the right kind of criminal -- solid information about someone significant enough to be worth a federal agent’s time, but not so ironclad that they’d ever be asked to testify. “The key is you got to know what the point of interest is in a given office today,” he said.
The prosecutor who put the pair in prison, Buddy Parker, says he understands the pressures that made the information so valuable. “The only way to avoid a long sentence was to cut a cooperation deal. People without information, they’re screwed,” he said. “The guy who was the greatest criminal had the greatest likelihood of getting a low sentence.”
Fierer got a two-and-a-half-year sentence. But he went home early after he gave agents information about another case.
Following the information, and the money
Watkins’ information is still reverberating through one drug case.
In early 2008, an Atlanta jail inmate facing mortgage fraud charges approached FBI agents with information about a drug trafficker who was dealing in tractor-trailer loads of marijuana and cocaine. Leon Lumsden was by then practiced at trying to use information to win a deal. At his sentencing hearing that July, so many federal agents showed up on his behalf that the judge gave him an even bigger sentence reduction than prosecutors had sought.
The prosecutor on Lumsden’s case, Gale McKenzie, had warned state and federal officers that his “credibility was nil.” Still, she wrote in a September, 2008 e-mail, “many from state and federal law enforcement debriefed him and reported receiving verified information of value as well as making arrests based on his cooperation.”
But the information about the drug dealer panned out. Marlon Burton -- “Bird” on the street -- lived in a country club south of Atlanta and traveled in a Mercedes; he had a direct connection to a Mexican cartel, according to court records.
What was less clear was how Lumsden -- a white-collar crook -- knew about him. During a phone interview this month, Watkins said he provided the information about Burton to Lumsden, and that he was compensated for it. Court records show he had previously offered the same facts to federal investigators.
Lumsden insisted that the information he got from Watkins was worthless. “I didn’t benefit from all the garbage he gave me,” he said during a brief phone call from a Georgia prison. “Everything he gave me was straight BS.”
A reliable source, and more arrests
Still, in November of 2008, the FBI used Lumsden’s information to ask a federal judge to let agents wiretap the trafficker’s cellphone. He was an important part of the case because the agents’ other informant hadn’t done business with Burton in years, meaning a judge might think it was too stale to justify a wiretap. The agent who signed the wiretap application, Nikki Badolato, told the judge that Lumsden was “reliable.”
Badolato later testified that she didn’t know that Lumsden had been buying information because his name was misspelled in an FBI database.
The FBI got its wiretap. Agents arrested Burton the next year.
Burton in turn informed on the other members of his organization. In return, prosecutors chopped a decade off his prison sentence, a bargain the judge called “more than generous.” One of the people Burton implicated was the owner of a Lithonia, Ga., machine shop where he said he would park, and sometimes unload, truckloads of marijuana and cocaine.
Agents arrested the owner, Ivey Grant, in the drive-through line of a Sonic Drive-In. It was the first time Grant, 61, had been charged with a crime, and when FBI agents booked him, they found his hands were so scoured by years of labor that his fingerprints had worn away.
Grant is serving nine years in federal prison.
He insists he didn’t know what was in Burton’s trucks; to him, they were just like any of the other big rigs and dump trucks that rent space in the shop’s dusty parking lot. Now he’s asking a federal appeals court in Atlanta to overturn his conviction, saying that the judge who approved the wiretap that ensnared him should have been told about the shaky informants behind it.
Sitting in a cinder-block prison office in Atlanta’s federal prison last month, Grant sounded more confused than angry about how he ended up facing almost a decade in custody. “I don’t think it’s right for a convicted felon to get up on the stand in front of honest citizens and convict other people,” he said.
But with seven years to go, he sees the attraction.
“If someone says you can go home today if you say that box is blue,” he said, stabbing a thick finger at a big, white cardboard box in the corner of the office and grinning, “then that box is blue.”
Turkey Seizes Drugs, Guns, Ammo in Raid on Kurdish Rebels
As long as drugs are illegal criminals will use them to raise large sums of money.Of course when drugs are legalized this criminal activity will disappear overnight, and all the real crimes that were cased by making drugs illegal will also disappear at the same time.
The insane world wide "war on drugs" was created by the American government and exported to the rest of the world when the American government started giving "bribes" which they call "foreign aid" to other countries to criminalize drugs.
If drugs were legal, a kilo of marijuana wouldn't cost any more then a head of lettuce.
Turkey Seizes Drugs, Guns, Ammo in Raid on Kurdish Rebels
By REUTERS
Published: December 15, 2012 at 10:14 AM ET
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Turkish security forces backed by helicopters seized an estimated $22.5 million worth of marijuana along with guns and fertilizer in a swoop against suspected Kurdish militants on Saturday, officials said.
Hundreds of soldiers, police and special forces carried out the coordinated raids in seven villages around the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, seizing drugs, guns, ammunition and ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make explosives, officials said.
Turkish officials say the drug trade is a major source of funding for Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, who since 1984 have been fighting to carve out a Kurdish state in Turkey's southeastern border region with Iran and Iraq.
The PKK uses the remote Kandil mountains in northern Iraq as a base from which to stage attacks on Turkish territory. The group is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
"The income obtained from drugs is sent to Kandil ... The organization is earning a significant income though these drugs," Diyarbakir Governor Mustafa Toprak told reporters.
The PKK has mainly carried out guerrilla-style attacks against Turkish military targets in the southeast but has also killed civilians with bomb attacks in major cities including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.
Fighting flared over the summer and the security forces have stepped up operations against suspected PKK bases in recent weeks out of fear that they could try to stage further attacks in the winter months.
The military carried out several raids on suspected PKK bases in the Bestler-Dereler area of the neighboring province of Sirnak last week, destroying 32 of the group's camps and seizing explosives, the governor's office said on Saturday.
There have also been raids by the security forces against two PKK groups in the province of Tunceli further north, security sources said.
Toprak said the security forces had seized 21 tonnes of marijuana and destroyed drug plantations in the fields around the villages in Saturday's operation. Three people were arrested while a fourth was still being sought, he said.
More than 40,000 people have been killed in 28 years of fighting between Turkey and the PKK, a conflict which has hampered development in one of the country's poorest corners.
In 2009, U.S. authorities named several senior members of the PKK as suspected narcotics traffickers, freezing their assets and banning U.S. citizens from doing business with them.
Turkey is an important route for drug trafficking to Europe both as a producer and an importer, mainly from Syria and Iran.
Turkey seized around 47 tonnes of marijuana in 2011 as a whole, a 50 percent rise on the previous year, according to Turkish police figures.
($1 = 1.7790 Turkish liras)
(Writing by Seltem Iyigun; Editing by Nick Tattersall/Mark Heinrich)
More confusion on Obama's pot policy
Obama has lied in the past and said he wouldn't bust medical marijuana users, while at the same time he was sending in his DEA thugs to raid California medical marijuana clinics.Personally I suspect Obama is still lying to us. I suspect Obama says he won't bust pot smokers because he wants mainstream Americans to love him. I suspect he will also continue to support the unconstitutional war on drugs because he wants the DEA thugs that work for him to keep their high paying jobs arresting people for victimless drug war crimes.
President's pot comments prompt call for policy
By Paul Elias
Associated Press
Posted: 12/15/2012 07:21:03 AM PST
SAN FRANCISCO -- President Barack Obama says he won't go after pot users in Colorado and Washington, two states that just legalized the drug for recreational use. But advocates argue the president said the same thing about medical marijuana -- and yet U.S. attorneys continue to force the closure of dispensaries across the U.S.
Welcome to the confusing and often conflicting policy on pot in the U.S., where medical marijuana is legal in many states, but it is increasingly difficult to grow, distribute or sell it. And at the federal level, at least officially, it is still an illegal drug everywhere.
Obama's statement Friday provided little clarity in a world where marijuana is inching ever so carefully toward legitimacy.
That conflict is perhaps the greatest in California, where the state's four U.S. Attorneys criminally prosecuted large growers and launched a coordinated crackdown on the state's medical marijuana industry last year by threatening landlords with property forfeiture actions. Hundreds of pot shops went out of business.
Steve DeAngelo, executive director of an Oakland, Calif., dispensary that claims to be the nation's largest, called for a federal policy that treats recreational and medical uses of the drug equally.
"If we're going to recognize the rights of recreational users, then we should certainly protect the rights of medical cannabis patients who legally access the medicine their doctors have recommended," he said.
The government is planning to soon release policies for dealing with marijuana in Colorado and Washington, where federal law still prohibits pot, as elsewhere in the country.
"It would be nice to get something concrete to follow," said William Osterhoudt, a San Francisco criminal defense attorney representing government officials in Mendocino County who recently received a demand from federal investigators for detailed information about a local system for licensing growers of medical marijuana.
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano said he was frustrated by Obama's comments because the federal government continues to shutter dispensaries in states with medical marijuana laws, including California.
"A good step here would be to stop raiding those legal dispensaries who are doing what they are allowed to do by law," said the San Francisco Democrat. "There's a feeling that the federal government has gone rogue on hundreds of legal, transparent medical marijuana dispensaries, so there's this feeling of them being in limbo. And it puts the patients, the businesses and the advocates in a very untenable place."
Obama, in an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, said Friday that federal authorities have "bigger fish to fry" when it comes to targeting recreational pot smokers in Colorado and Washington.
Some advocates said the statement showed the president's willingness to allow residents of states with marijuana laws to use the drug without fear of federal prosecution.
"It's a tremendous step forward," said Joe Elford, general counsel for Americans for Safe Access. "It suggests the feds are taking seriously enough the idea that there should be a carve-out for states with marijuana laws."
Obama's statements on recreational use mirror the federal policy toward states that allow marijuana use for medical purposes.
"We are not focusing on backyard grows with small amounts of marijuana for use by seriously ill people," said Lauren Horwood, a spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner in Sacramento. "We are targeting money-making commercial growers and distributors who use the trappings of state law as cover, but they are actually abusing state law."
Alison Holcomb, who led the legalization drive in Washington state, said she doesn't expect Obama's comment to prompt the federal government to treat recreational marijuana and medical marijuana differently.
"At this point, what the president is looking at is a response to marijuana in general. The federal government has never recognized the difference between medical and non-medical marijuana," she said. "I don't think this is the time he'd carve out separate policies. I think he's looking for a more comprehensive response."
Washington voters approved a medical marijuana law in 1998, and dispensaries have proliferated across the state in recent years.
Last year, Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed legislation that would have created a state system for licensing medical dispensaries over concern that it would require state workers to violate the federal Controlled Substances Act.
For the most part, dispensaries in western Washington have been left alone. But federal authorities did conduct raids earlier this year on dispensaries they said were acting outside the state law, such as selling marijuana to non-patients. Warning letters have been sent to dispensaries that operate too close to schools.
"What we've seen is enforcement of civil laws and warnings, with a handful of arrests of people who were operating outside state law," said Alison Holcomb, who led Washington's legalization drive and helped write the bill that Gregoire vetoed. of
Eastern Washington has seen more raids because the U.S. attorney there is more active, Holcomb added.
Colorado's marijuana measure requires lawmakers to allow commercial pot sales, and a state task force that will begin writing those regulations meets Monday.
State officials have reached out to the Justice Department seeking help on regulating a new legal marijuana industry but haven't heard back.
DeAngelo said Friday that the Justice Department should freeze all pending enforcement actions against legal medical cannabis providers and review its policies to make sure they're consistent with the president's position. He estimated federal officials have shuttered 600 dispensaries in the state and 1,000 nationwide.
DeAngelo's Harborside Health Center is facing eviction after the U.S. attorney in San Francisco pressured his landlord to stop harboring what the government considers an illegal business.
"While it's nice to hear these sorts of positive words from the president, we are facing efforts by the Justice Department to shut us down, so it's hard for me to take them seriously," DeAngelo said.
The dispensary has a hearing Thursday in federal court on the matter.
----
Associated Press writers Terry Collins in San Francisco and Manuel Valdes in Seattle contributed to this report.
Border Patrol to stop interpreting
But you should always take the 5th and say no to any police questioning!!!
If you talk to any competent defense lawyer they will always tell you to always take the 5th Amendment and to refuse to answer any and all questions from the police. And of course that includes border patrol thugs.Border Patrol to stop interpreting
Associated Press Thu Dec 13, 2012 3:39 PM
SEATTLE — U.S. Border Patrol agents will no longer serve as interpreters when local law enforcement agencies request language help, according to a new decree issued by the Department of Homeland Security.
The new guidance said agents should refer such requests to private services often used by government agencies.
Seeking language help is a common practice among local law enforcement agencies in Washington state. If a person is pulled over and can only speak Spanish, the U.S. Border Patrol is often called.
However, immigration advocates complain that Border Patrol agents ask people questions about immigration and in some cases arrest immigrants suspected of being in the country illegally.
“The concept of language access should be without people being questioned about their immigration status,” said Jorge Baron, executive director of the Seattle-based Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a legal aid organization.
Immigrants have grown apprehensive about calling local law enforcement agencies if they knew the Border Patrol is going to respond, he said.
The new Border Patrol guidance should help, even though it leaves agents some room for decision-making, he said.
The Border Patrol said Thursday it is trying to use its resources efficiently.
“The new guidance related to requests for translation services helps further focus CBP efforts on its primary mission to secure our nation’s borders.” a statement by Customs and Border Protection said. “CBP remains committed to assisting our law enforcement partners in their enforcement efforts.”
The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project sent a letter in May to the Department of Justice and Homeland Security saying the interpreting practice violated the Civil Rights Act.
The letter included dashboard camera video in which a Border Patrol agent is heard using a derogatory term for illegal immigrants.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush ordered U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees the Border Patrol, to beef up its presence on the U.S.-Canada border, which is almost twice as long as the U.S.-Mexico border.
In 2007, the northern border had about 1,100 agents. Now it has more than 2,200. In the same period, the number of agents in the Blaine sector, which covers the border west of the Cascades, went from 133 to 331.
Along with providing language services, Border Patrol agents often assist local law agencies that are short on personnel and equipment. In addition, highway checkpoints have been implemented.
The American Civil Liberties Union and Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a lawsuit earlier this year seeking to bar Border Patrol agents from doing traffic stops on the Olympic Peninsula, claiming people were being pulled over and questioned over the way they look and without reasonable suspicion. The lawsuit is pending.
The Border Patrol has denied any discrimination.
Tom Horne and Bill Montgomery should arrest real criminals, not pot smokers!!!!
Jason Llewellyn wants Tom Horne and Bill Montgomery to arrest real criminals instead of pot smokers!!!Letter: An open letter to Bill Montgomery and Tom Horne
Posted: Saturday, December 15, 2012 2:31 pm
Letter to the Editor
Dear Sirs, Please be advised that President Obama has said in an interview with Barbara Walters the following when it comes to legalized marijuana. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry... It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational uses in states that have determined that it’s legal.”
So Mr. Montgomery and Mr Horne, we all know you both have a disdain for medical marijuana and the current president. So why can’t you just let this go? Clearly, the president doesn’t see it as a priority, so why do you both continue to waste taxpayer dollars? Instead, take the tax revenue and fight real crimes. The voters and legislatures in 18-plus states and D.C. have made their choices and we, the voters, demand that you stop chasing ghosts and stop the charades. Let adults make their own choices.
Click here to find out more!
Court after court in Arizona has sided against the state time and time again when it comes to Proposition 202. It’s time for the full law to go into effect. As a medical cannabis patient, and a U.S. Navy Gulf War-era veteran, stop harassing us!
Jason Llewellyn
CHANDLER
AG Tom Horne’s hit-and-run case delayed again
SourceHorne’s hit-and-run case delayed again
Associated Press Mon Dec 17, 2012 7:16 AM
PHOENIX — A court proceeding on a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge against Arizona Attorney Tom Horne is being postponed again and his lawyer says he is trying to reach a settlement with prosecutors.
Horne’s attorney requested and obtained a second one-month delay in a pretrial conference that was scheduled Monday in Phoenix Municipal Court.
Michael Kimerer’s request says he needs more time to evaluate the evidence and interview “critical witnesses.” He also wrote in a Dec. 13 motion he is having ongoing settlement communications with city prosecutors he hopes lead to a resolution.
Horne is accused of not leaving a note after FBI agents saw him tap another vehicle while driving a borrowed car earlier this year.
Horne says he didn’t think the other vehicle was damaged. He has pleaded not guilty.
Cell phone data analysis by the police
If the cops get your cell phone this is what they will do with it
This is an interesting article from the November 2012 issue of Law and Order.The article is titled
"Cell Phone Analysis: Part 1"While we certainly don't like crooked cops that doesn't mean they are stupid. And from this article if you happen to be unlucky enough to be arrested with a cell phone and the police find it they will probably steal your phone and get a lot of information off of it they may be used against you in court.
They will also get your contacts information off the phone probably contact those people asking them about you trying to dig up dirt on you.
And of course they can get GPS information off of the phone and from cell phone tower records to monitor where you have been.
Cell Phone Analysis: Part 1
Written by Ed Sanow
"At a crime scene, grab the cell phone."
www.paraben.comThe Columbus, Ohio Police and the Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area offer a one-day course on Cell Phone Analysis across the U.S. Taught by Christine Roberts, the class familiarizes investigators and patrol officers alike with the basics of cell phone technology, the information and data stored on these phones, forensic methods used in retrieval, cell-tower site analysis, and the info available from cellular service providers.
www.secureview.us
www.cellebrite.com
This is all geared to better understanding the use of mobile devices as evidence in criminal trials. The course covers the use of information stored on the handset, SIM cards, expansion cards, prepaid phones, live and historical tracking, cell-based financial crimes, payments and money laundering, cyber stalking and cloud storage.
An incredible amount of evidence is just sitting on smartphones waiting for you to access it. You would never overlook a drop of blood at a crime scene. A cell phone may even be more helpful, and that includes info “deleted” from the phone.
Juries understand cell phones, cell phone towers and cell phone pinging. They also understand cell phones can put the suspect in the proximity of the crime. Or at least the cell phone was at the area – and the suspect testified that he never lets the cell out of his possession. Cell phones and cellular service providers are a vast source of evidence that investigators are just now grasping.
Mobile phones are one of the most important developments in technology in the courtroom in the last five years. When a person types and sends an e-mail or text message, they create a piece of evidence that can be used for or against them. Cell records can be used in court to show exactly where someone was – or was not – and to whom they were talking at a particular time.
Electronic and Retained Evidence
Two types of evidence can be retrieved from a cell phone: 1) electronic evidence and 2) retained data evidence. Electronic evidence includes the user’s call history, contacts / phone book, calendar information, and information stored on the SIM card. Retained data evidence is telecom records involving the detail of calls made and received and the geographical location of the mobile phone when a call took place. Part One will cover electronic evidence. Part Two (November 2012, LAW and ORDER) will cover retained evidence.
Electronic evidence is stored in different places depending on the channel access method of the phone. GSM (global system for mobile communication) is typically used by AT&T and T-Mobile. With this and the iDEN (integrated digital enhanced network) phones, evidence is stored on the handset and the SIM card. CDMA (code division multiple access) is typical of Verizon and Sprint-Nextel. The evidence here is all on the handset. There is no SIM card with CDMA phones. However, this is slowly changing – the new LTE network will require all phones to have a SIM card.
Every handset has a unique identification number. On CDMA phones, an ESN (electronic serial number) or a MEID (mobile equipment identifier) 56-bit serial number is used. On GSM phones, an IMEI (international mobile equipment identity) is used. Both are found under the battery. The point is this: you don’t need to know the phone number for the handset. You can subpoena the MEID/ESN or IMEI to obtain call detail records.
“The SIM card of a phone can contain a lot of valuable evidence. If you see these loose and lying around, grab them,” said Roberts. Then you can subpoena the ICCID number to the network provider and receive the toll records associated with that phone.
Electronic evidence is fragile. It can be altered, damaged or destroyed by improper handling or improper examination. Special precautions should be taken to document, collect, preserve and examine this type of evidence.
The Big Three
The address book, call history and text messages are the Big 3 in your investigation. The address book has contact information that gives insight to the social network of the suspect or victim. It can be used to link a suspect to a victim and to provide a list of people to interview. It can provide a cross-reference between real names and nicknames. And the picture next to the contact number can even put a face to a name.
The call history gives even a deeper insight to the activities of the owner. You can see the last received and sent calls, when they occurred and their duration. The duration is important for indirect conclusions. A wrong number going to voice mail would have a duration of 30 seconds, while a duration of 15 minutes means a real phone conversation.
Text messages are becoming more and more important in both criminal and civil proceedings. Texts are one of the most common forms of electronic evidence. Texts offer concrete and direct information in contrast to the call history and address book that only offer indirect and inferential information. These contain the actual words written by the owner or intended for the owner. That is good news for evidence in court.
Text Is Perishable
The bad news is that text messages are perishable. Cell phone companies no longer store or extract text messages. Verizon does not keep text messages on their servers for very long, between three and seven days. AT&T stores the text message for 48 hours to be sure it is delivered, and then deletes them.
The best chance to get any text message information is by searching the handset. If the telecom company keeps text messages, then an option is to fax a letterhead “preservation” request to the cell service provider. If this is done in time, the cell phone company will hold the data for a police agency for up to 90 days, allowing the investigator time to get a court or search warrant for records.
If the text messages have been deleted from the handset, a cell phone forensic specialist must become involved. Even still, “try” and “maybe” are what you are likely to hear. However, these forensic specialists pride themselves on doing the difficult and complicated. The lesson is the text is not “deleted” until the cell forensics folks with all their expensive retrieval hardware and software say it is deleted.
Unlike text messages, voice mail is stored at the service provider for at least 30 days. Voice mail can be more damaging evidence than text messages. Texts don’t indicate tone of voice or sincerity. Voice mail reveals much more of a person’s intentions, especially in stalking or intimidation cases. Some of today’s smartphones store voicemail on the handset so don’t think that all voicemail is deleted.
Voicemail is easy to copy. Audacity.com offers free software. CellTap™ from JK Audio allows audio recording, including live recording, from any cell phone, not just smartphones. On the other hand, voice mail can also be deleted remotely.
Photos on SD Cards
People are proud of their crimes. They take cell phone pictures of the crimes as trophies, and sometimes cell phone videos of the crime in process. Data on the phone can be used to determine the exact date and time an image was taken, and possibly even a location.
Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification to photos and videos. Geotags are automatically embedded in photos taken with smartphones. When these photos are uploaded to the Internet, they remain tagged with location data. Got a photo of a marijuana grow operation? Got a photo of a kidnap victim? The image probably contains the geotag with the latitude and longitude. “We often overlook this,” Roberts said.
One place to look for images is the expansion memory (SD) cards. The iPhone does not use an SD card. It uses its hard drive instead. All other phones use an SD card. A 32-GB SD card can hold 12,320 (fine mode) photos. In a child porn case, one forensic specialist retrieved 4,500 images that had been “deleted.” One forensic specialist retrieved 5,800 text messages that had been “deleted.”
Just to keep the two straight, an SD expansion or memory card is very different from a SIM card. The SD card holds photos and videos. The SIM (subscriber identity module) card is the brains of the phone and stores the phone number subscribed to the phone.
Grab all the SD cards you can. Getting deleted images from these cards is relatively easy unless the information has been over-written. Consider asking cooperative witnesses (who have taken images of the crime or suspects) for their SD card – if you can verify that the evidence is stored on the SD card. You don’t need their phone (if it has an SD card) and they won’t want to give it up for the duration of a criminal investigation. Just ask for the SD card.
SIM Cards
SIM cards may hold incredible amounts of evidence. And the information on the SIM card may be very different from what is on the handset. The trained cell forensic specialist will want to process the cell phone (handset) separately from the SIM card in that phone. Deleted text messages on the SIM card can be retrieved as long as a new message has not over-written the old message. SIM card readers like Paraben are pretty common.
The investigator may find loose SIM cards lying around on desks or in wallets. Grab them. As a rule, AT&T and T-Mobile phones use SIM cards. Even the iPhone uses a SIM card if it is on AT&T. (Recall the iPhone does not use an SD card).
The phone book on the SIM card and the handset may have different phone book contact numbers. The SIM card typically holds between one and 10 numbers last dialed. The cell phone’s internal memory may hold many more than that.
If the Phone Is OFF
The rule: If the cell phone is OFF, leave it OFF until the SIM card and SD card are processed by a cell forensic specialist.
The location area identifier shows where the mobile phone is currently located. This value is retained by the SIM card when the phone is turned OFF. However, the location updates on the SIM card when the phone is turned back ON.
You found the cell phone of an abducted child. What if that phone was turned OFF at the location the child is being held or the body was disposed? The location area identifier will tell you where the phone was when it was shut OFF. Turning the phone ON destroys that information!
Just turning the phone ON runs the risk of changing other data on the phone. For example, you turn the phone ON and two bad things can happen. First, new information may be added through an incoming call or text message. This may cause over-writing of existing calls, voice mails or text messages. A new text comes in and bumps off the oldest 20th text (max of 20 SMS) and that 20th text had valuable intel.
Second, turning the phone ON allows the increasingly common kill/wipe signal to be received. Just like the voice mail can be remote deleted, the hard drive can be remote wiped. Most cell phone companies offer a lost phone tool on smartphones. If you lose your phone, you can log onto the website and send a command to erase all the information stored on the phone, phone book, recent calls, and text messages.
If the Phone Is ON
If the phone is ON, the very first step is to find a way to get the phone off the network. There are several options. One of the easier options is to put the cell phone in airplane mode (Stand Alone, Radio Off, Standby or Phone Off Mode). This is not considered a “search” because it is done to “preserve evidence.”
If the phone is on, leave it on. Why safeguard the phone in the “ON” position? Why not just turn it OFF or pull the battery? This can cause the phone to activate a handset lock code that your forensic expert may not be able to bypass. A forensic expert can defeat a lot of handset passcodes on a small percentage of today’s phones. Always ask for the passcode from the suspect whom you are taking the phone; you will be surprised how many suspects give up there passcode when asked. Make sure to write this passcode down for the forensic expert.
Pre-Paid Phones
Everything that can be done on a regular contract cell phone can be done on a pre-paid cell phone. Numerous Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) sell mobile services with few restrictions. Nextel has Boost; Sprint has Virgin, Disney and Helio; Verizon has Tracfone and Amp’d Mobile; AT&T has GoPhone; and T-Mobile has T-Mobile.
The advantage of a pre-paid phone for criminal activity is obvious: anonymity. Plans and phones are paid for with cash. There is no contract to tie the identity of the person to the device or service agreement. They are essentially disposable.
However, there is still valuable data on the Verizon, Nextel, T-Mobile and AT&T supported cell phones. It is on the handset and SIM card! This includes the last numbers dialed, call logs, call durations, pictures and text messages. (Text messages may contain names or nicknames.)
It gets better. Did the subject buy a ringtone, game, music or app on the Internet for the pre-paid phone? You might now have a credit card number. Same for purchasing additional minutes. They may have used an e-mail address registering online for a receipt or a notification.
By mapping Call Data Records (patterns of communication) to known acquaintances and performing a Cell Site Analysis, it may be possible to either prove or disprove ownership of the pre-paid phone.
Damaged Phones
Don’t let a damaged phone, even a badly damaged one, stop you from obtaining evidence. The majority of all damaged cell phones can be repaired and processed. That includes the ever-common water damage. (One investigator had been able to recover some evidence from a phone that had been under water for two years). About 90 percent of water damage that most of us cause is just to the battery and connections. In fact, part of formal cell phone forensics training is cell phone repair. The iPhone, for example, has 42 screws and snap-in parts. Take the cell phone to the forensic expert and see if repairs can be made.
Formal training is necessary to become a cell phone forensic specialist. This training may be covered by grants, such as the Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grant. Specialized hardware and/or software will be required. Software-based solutions include Paraben and Secure View. Hardware-based solutions are available from Cellebrite. Cellebrite is easy, portable and car-adaptable. The unit is a bit expensive, compared to the software-only solutions, including both an initial outlay and a yearly subscriber fee.
Grant money is available for cell-phone investigative training based in Ohio and California. This training is the one-day initial overview training up to a 40-hour advanced investigative training, and the formal cell-phone forensic training involving forensic and diagnostic hardware and software to process the handset and SIM cards.
Published in Law and Order, Nov 2012
Previous articles on the American War Machine.
More articles on the American War Machine.