Any interest among Chicago-area Agitatortos in a meetup tomorrow night?

If so, let yourself be known in the comments. It would likely be in the Wrigelyville area.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• The state of Georgia executed Troy Davis last night. Here’s a rundown of the witnesses who recanted. I honestly didn’t think they’d go through with it. Which only goes to show that however low your expectations of government may be, they probably aren’t low enough.
• California city is demanding couple purchase a permit to host Bible study sessions.
• The cops who beat University of Maryland student John McKenna have been indicted. This would never have happened were it not for social media and cell phone video.
• Telling stats on marijuana arrests.
• The McGurk Effect.
• Cops in the Kelly Thomas case charged with murder, manslaughter.
• RAND study: No connection between medical pot dispensaries, crime.
• Here’s a delightful shredding of Thomas Friedman.
• Government paternalism and overreaction trumped by government in competence.

Looks like I won’t be speaking at Columbia Law School later this month. But I will be going to Malibu in November, which sounds nice.

October 6
Tulane Law School
New Orleans, Louisiana
Topic: Overcriminalization

October 25
Mississippi Innocence Project Panel
University of Mississippi School of Journalism
Oxford, Mississippi
Topic: Forensics, and the Kennedy Brewer/Levon Brooks cases.

November 7
Hanover College
Hanover, Indiana
Topic: Police Militarization

November 14
Pepperdine University School of Law
Malibu, California
Topic: Overcriminalization

• Ethics trial of former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas begins.
• Calderón again hints at drug legalization.
• Obama Justice Department ramping up civil rights investigations into bad cops. They deserve credit for this.
• Greenwood, Indiana police chief turns down package of “machine pistols.” He deserves credit for this.
• Headline of the day.
• This isn’t encouraging.
• DOJ spent $120 million on conferences over two years, including expenses like $16 muffins and afternoon snacks that ran $32 per person. But no worries! Government thrift will bring down the cost of health care!
• In defense of media bias.
• Awing astronomy photo. Here’s another one.
• The photos that go with this slide show are completely random and hilarious. Quick, give me a photo that says “New Orleans!” and “miserable!” Okay, now Coral Gables, Florida! What? Nothing? Then give me a stock photo of old people! Also, tornadoes!
• “It was misleading.” That’s putting it mildly.

Rovinj, Croatia.

Full Tilt Poker partners and poker pros Howard Lederer and Chris “Jesus” Ferguson have been added to U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s  civil case against against the company.

The amended suit accuses Full Tilt of being a Ponzi scheme that paid executives with funds that were supposed to be reserved in player accounts. Skeptical as I generally am of the government in these cases, a cursory reading of the relevant information suggests to me that Full Tilt was at minimum guilty of making some really stupid and likely fraudulent business decisions. From what I can tell, in an effort to stay operational after the feds brought down the hammer, Full Tilt continued to pretend to process deposits from U.S. players, even though it hadn’t lined up a legal processor to conduct the transactions. (Because the feds had already arrested and charged the executives of any processing company that tried.) So they were crediting accounts without actually withdrawing money from the players whose accounts they were crediting.

Shortly after the indictments, the feds then barred the company from processing any more payments from U.S. players, but simultaneously told players they could still use the site to cash out their accounts. Full Tilt couldn’t come remotely close to covering the ensuing run. That isn’t really a Ponzi scheme. But if true, it’s certainly not on the up and up. If Full Tilt executives were misleadingly running the site like a (poorly run) bank, I’d imagine that’s a pretty good case for fraud. It’s also fraudulent (and crappy business practice) to pay out your executives and celebrity endorsers first, while knowing that you can’t pay your players the money you promised them was protected and kept separate from general operating expenses. (I’m sure it’s illegal, but unlike the allegations above, I can’t personally conjure up much moral outrage over the allegation that Full Tilt disguised billing codes to get around the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act.)

How much Lederer and Ferguson knew about all of this remains to be seen. (Disclosure: I’ve met and like both, so I hope their involvement was minimal.)

I’m sure opponents of online poker will cite all of this as proof that they were right, that these sites are havens for fraud, money laundering, and all sorts of other criminal enterprise. But the reason offshore sites were so popular in the first place is that it was and is illegal for any company based in the U.S. to provide online poker to U.S. residents, despite the fact that millions of U.S. customers clearly want to play. Full Tilt was trying to fill that demand, first legally, then by operating in a legal gray area, and finally (allegedly) by trying to circumvent the law. That doesn’t excuse the company from defrauding its customers, if that’s indeed what happened. But the government has been standing between the millions of people who want to play poker online and the companies that want to provide them with that service legally. This is what happens when you create black and gray markets. It is entirely predictable.

I’ll reserve judgment for now on whether Full Tilt’s legal problems amount to intentional fraud or dumb mismanagement wrought in part by trying to stay up and running even as the feds continued to slam doors. My best guess is it’s mostly the latter, combined with a bit of the former as it became clear the gig was up. What is abundantly clear is that the federal government’s paternalistic efforts to “protect” online poker players from losing money to offshore gaming sites . . . was a colossal failure.

MORE: See this comment from Mike C., who says meshing of player accounts with operating expenses was going on well before last year’s indictments. I’ve also now read the full indictments, and from here it looks pretty bad all around for Full Tilt and its executives. Of course, we do have trials for this sort of thing. So we’ll see how they go about attacking the complaint when the time comes. But the feds depict some really shady stuff going on, well beyond just trying to figure out how to keep the site operational.

MORE: This post initially indicated that Lederer and Ferguson had been indicted. That isn’t true. They’ve been added to the fed’s civil complaint. I’ve changed the post to reflect this.

Several people have asked me to post a state-by-state rundown of laws pertaining to citizens’ right to record on-duty police officers. There’s been a lot of bad reporting on this issue, which I think is the source of much of the confusion. (This PC World outline of the various legal issues involved is very good.)

It boils down to this: In every state but Illinois and Massachusetts, you are perfectly within your legal rights to record or photograph an on-duty police officer, so long as you don’t physically interfere with him. In Massachusetts, you’re free to record so long as you do so openly, though this month’s First Circuit ruling suggests that even the prohibition on secret recording in public spaces may soon be overturned. In Illinois, it’s still illegal to record on-duty cops without their permission. The law is currently being challenged, and was recently found to be unconstitutional by one state judge but that decision only applied to the case before him.

Here’s the catch: Even though it’s perfectly legal to record and photograph cops in all 48 other states plus the District of Columbia, the police can still arrest you for doing so. They can also still threaten you, then can still take away your camera, they can still destroy your photos or video, and they can still destroy your camera. All of these things are illegal. They aren’t supposed to do them. But they still do.

They still do because while recording cops is perfectly legal in every state but two, the courts (save for the recent First Circuit decision) have yet to make recording on-duty government officials a constitutionally-protected right. This means that cops can illegally arrest you under wiretapping laws, but until we get a few more of these cases into the federal courts, they probably aren’t going to be held liable. So far, I don’t know of any case where a police department, prosecutor, or other government agency has sanctioned a cop for illegally harassing or arresting a citizen who was attempting to record him.

Aside from wiretapping laws, police could also arrest you on vague charges of interfering with a police officer’s official duties, creating a public disturbance, refusal to obey a lawful order, or some other catch-all charge unrelated to wiretapping. Here, even if the courts do eventually establish a right to record, you’d have to show that the arrest was actually for recording in order to get into court.

The takeaway from all of this? In 48 of the 50 states, you can’t be convicted under and sentenced to jail for recording on-duty police officers, at least under wiretapping laws. And even in the two states where that’s still plausible, it’s unlikely. But until police officers start facing real consequences for disregarding the law, you can still be harassed, arrested, have your files or camera destroyed, and even spend a night or two in jail while you wait for the charges to be dropped.

And in any state, you could still conceivably be convicted of one of those catch-all offenses if a cop arrests you for recording him, claims you were interfering in some way, and the courts believe his version of events.

I see two ways to end the arrests and harassment. The first would be for the federal courts to establish a clear right to record on-duty public officials, and to suspend qualified immunity for the law enforcement officials who violate that right. The second would be for state legislatures, or even Congress, to establish the right to record with legislation, along with an enforcement mechanism allowing citizens to take action against cops and prosecutors who ignore the law.

(Note: This is a journalistic summary of the laws surrounding this issue. It isn’t legal advice.)

Interesting post from the National Motorists Association about a highway in Massachusetts where state officials are keeping the speed limit artificially low, despite plenty of evidence that doing so makes the road more dangerous.

From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

It was difficult not to feel safe Monday inside the main exhibition hall at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

Hundreds of armed police officers — many looking like professional bodybuilders with badges, skin-tight T-shirts, camouflage fatigue pants and combat boots — crowded the aisles of the sprawling hall for the vendor show of the National Tactical Operations Conference.

Tactical robots whirred across the hall’s floor, competing for space with the conventioneers — in this case some 1,000 members of Special Weapons and Tactics teams from police agencies across the nation. The officers were drawn to row after row of exhibits of everything from firearms to body armor and the latest in night-vision equipment.

At every booth, the officers were encouraged to check out the wares, as evidenced by the red laser beams from high-tech rifle scopes constantly dancing across the ceiling.

Wonder what the family of Christie Green would make of all this.

Here’s some video:

• The war on e-cigarettes. I’ve written this before, but because e-cigarettes are harmless, and because they can help people quit actual cigarettes, these attempts to prohibit them are an excellent example of paternalistic regulations that actually kill people.
• Connecticut Supreme Court justice apologizes to Suzette Kelo for ruling against her.
• Given the numerous times a story I first reported was re-reported by a bigger news outlet without credit (something that also happens pretty frequently to other bloggers, and especially to alt weeklies), I find it kind of amusing that reporters at larger news outlets are now complaining when it happens to them.
• L.A. Times: Here are two statistics that have nothing to do with one another. But we’re going to juxtapose them anyway.
• David Rittgers: Abolish the Department of Homeland Security.
• Man gets life sentence for shoplifting.
• New Jersey cop attacks woman who was filming him at a DWI checkpoint.

Rovinj, Croatia.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles is now deliberating the fate of Troy Davis. The A.P. gives us the background of the board’s five members:

Gale Buckner, a former Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent . . . . Robert Keller, the ex-chair of a Georgia prosecutors group . . . James Donald, the former head of the Georgia Department of Corrections, Albert Murray, who led the state’s juvenile justice program, and Terry Barnard, a former Republican state lawmaker.

I can’t speak with any authority on whether this guy had the right to sell his art at the Inner Harbor, but the cop who told his friend to turn off the video camera was just plain wrong. Again. (If true—the article indicates that allegation came from the friend, and wasn’t captured on video.)

Of all places, police in Maryland should know by now that citizens are permitted to record them while they’re on duty. The state wiretapping law never authorized police to order people to turn off cameras in the first place. But the state’s attorney general issued an opinion last year stating that there’s no law barring it. And in a case that made national headlines last year, a state judge went further, finding a First Amendment right to record on-duty cops.

There’s really no excuse for a Maryland police officer to not be aware of this by now—or for his department to not have made him aware of it.

Here’s a write-up of my speech at Adrian College last week. And here’s some nice stuff about my visit from Dr. James Hanley, the faculty member who invited me to speak.

And while I’m linking to people who write flattering things about me, I’m honored to get some love from the great Robert Higgs.

Higgs wrote the book Naomi Klein might have written had she been interested in producing something interesting, scholarly, and important, instead of  merely libeling Milton Friedman. Oh, and Higgs wrote his book 20 years ago.

So this seems pretty blatant.

A woman testifies against Tulsa cops in a corruption case, and is expected to testify in her family’s related civil suit against the city. In the weeks after the criminal trial, police get warrants on outstanding traffic violations, all misdemeanors, going back to 2007. Naturally, the police serve these warrants by forcing their way into her home.

No intimidation there at all, right? I mean, I’m sure Tulsa PD serves misdemeanor traffic warrants by breaking into citizens’ homes all the time.

Once they were inside her home, Tulsa PD says one officer also accidentally fired his gun. They won’t release that officer’s name.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• Disabled woman arrested for . . . sitting.
• Photos from London’s underground river.
• “Not my problem.”
• This story just created four hundred thirty nine new libertarians.
• Headline of the day.
• I blame gay marriage.
• Paul Krugman: I didn’t really mean Social Security was a Ponzi scheme back when I wrote that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme.
• Puppycide: Raylen Givens edition.
• Most styles of sunglasses are manufactured by the same company.

Allison, who I first wrote about here, was facing up to 75 years in prison for recording public officials with a digital recorder. Those charges have been dismissed.

“A statute intended to prevent unwarranted intrusions into a citizen’s privacy cannot be used as a shield for public officials who cannot assert a comparable right of privacy in their public duties,” the judge wrote in his decision dismissing the five counts of eavesdropping charges against defendant Michael Allison.

“Such action impedes the free flow of information concerning public officials and violates the First Amendment right to gather such information,” he wrote….

In Thursday’s ruling, Circuit Court Judge David Frankland said that Allison had a First Amendment right to record the police officers and court employees.

The judge also ruled that while it was reasonable to prohibit the defendant from recording in the courtroom, making what Allison did a felony offense was overreaching and irrational.

“The statute [as it is currently written] includes conduct that is unrelated to the statute’s purpose and is not rationally related to the evil the legislation sought to prohibit,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “For example, a defendant recording his case in a courtroom has nothing to do with an intrusion into a citizen’s privacy but with distraction.”

Although some civil rights activists call the decision a small victory, the Illinois eavesdropping law is still in effect.

Great news. And kudos to Allison for refusing to take a plea in the case. I’m not exactly sure where things go from here. I’ll report more on this next week.

• Bicycling magazine on what happens when bicyclists know more about the law than cops.
• Metal-based life?
• Brookings scholar wants the media to be sunnier about Afghanistan.
• Headline of the day.
• Runner-up.
• ThinkProgress blogger is upset that Brooke Shields will star in a movie about how government takes land from working class people and gives it to corporations. Her clarifications don’t really help.
• I don’t think that is the correct spelling.
• NASA discovers planet with two suns.

Rovinj, Croatia.

I’m not a hunter. But I kinda’ want to kill something just so I can give this guy my business.

Wrong-door drug raid on the home of a CBS News correspondent.

Some new parents got an unexpected scare Wednesday morning when they awoke to a team of armed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents attempting to raid their home.

CBS News correspondent Priya David and her husband Alex Clemens were at their home with their newborn child on Lina Avenue when they heard a banging on the door just after 7 a.m.

“Our first thought was the neighborhood is on fire,” resident Alex Clemens said. “I see what turns out to be eight uniformed, armored, armed officers – four of which are pointing guns through the window at my face.”

Just as officers were about to cuff Clemens he warned them that they had the wrong guy.

“They yelled at me ‘Is anyone else in the house,’” Clemens recalled. “I did say ‘yes, my wife is a CBS News correspondent. She’s upstairs nursing our infant baby.’ That seemed to de-escalate things a little bit.”

The suspect apparently lived across the street.