Sigh.

The way the Justice Department wants to interpret a current law, lying on the Internet would amount to a crime.

Richard Downing, deputy chief of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section at the Department of Justice, argued that in order to properly protect the country, the part of the CFAA that says a person must exceed their “authorized access” to break the law should include a violation of the terms of service.

This is how DOJ went after Lori Drew, the woman who used a MySpace account to pose as a teenage boy in order to torment a girl who was bullying her daughter. The girl later committed suicide, which led to calls for Drew’s prosecution, even though it wasn’t clear that she had committed any crime. The charges were tossed by a judge, so Congress and DOJ want to give prosecutors more power. But in the name of protecting intellectual property and national security.  Here’s how Downing put it in his testimony.

“These are just a few cases, but this tool is used routinely. The plain meaning of the term ‘exceeds authorized access,’ as used in the CFAA, prohibits insiders from using their otherwise legitimate access to a computer system to engage in improper and often malicious activities. We believe that Congress intended to criminalize such conduct, and we believe that deterring it continues to be important. Because of this, we are highly concerned about the effects of restricting the definition of ‘exceeds authorized access’ in the CFAA to disallow prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider.”

The Volokh Conspriacy’s Orin Kerr also testified.

“In the Justice Department’s view, the CFAA criminalizes conduct as innocuous as using a fake name on Facebook or lying about your weight in an online dating profile. That situation is intolerable. Routine computer use should not be a crime. Any cybersecurity legislation that this Congress passes should reject the extraordinarily broad interpretations endorsed by the United States Department of Justice.”

I think we should just bar Congress from passing any law related to the Internet.

• Whole Foods CEO John Mackey: “To Increase Jobs, Increase Economic Freedom”
• Dept. of Energy pressured Solyndra to postpone layoffs until after the 2010 elections.
• Veteran starts petition asking feds to allow medical marijuana for PTSD.
• Senators push bill requiring indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, citizens or not, with or without sufficient evidence.
• Gary Johnson files FEC complaint over his exclusion from the GOP primary debates.
• Headline of the day.
• Interesting story on triathletes who may be dying after having panic attacks while swimming.

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.

In this hysterical USA Today piece about infants born addicted to prescription painkillers, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi says, “I’m scared to death this will become the crack-baby epidemic.”

I agree. I hope this doesn’t turn into an excuse to pass a bunch of dumb laws that will restrict personal freedom and impose draconian sentences on people who commit nonviolent offenses, all in response to a hyped-up, non-existent problem drummed up by the media and drug warriors. The “Oxy baby” narrative has the added potential to further chill the treatment of chronic pain.

It may well be that this is a huge and growing problem. But I don’t find the USA Today piece all that convincing. In 2009, the New York Times looked at recent studies of what has happened to “crack babies.” Turns out, the consensus seems to be that the biggest hurdle they’ve had to overcome is the fact that they’ve been called “crack babies” all their lives.

Ex-drug dealer gets out of prison. Gets his life together. Opens a shoe store. Neighborhood hit with repeated robberies, shootings, and murders. D.C. police can’t protect residents and business owners. Guy’s sister-in-law puts a shotgun in the store for protection. Guy has altercation with customers. Accounts of the altercation differ, but it ends with customers calling the police, who then discover the gun. Guy now faces mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence.

There’s lots to chew on here. Maybe it’s a good idea to bar felons from owning guns, though if so, it should be limited to people convicted of violent felonies. Still, given the circumstances, they didn’t have to charge this guy. And police ineptitude led to him needing the gun in the first place. Post-Heller, the shotgun would have been legal if the guy hadn’t been a felon, but there’s also the question of exactly how residents and business owners in violent neighborhoods like this one are supposed to protect themselves. (Pre-Heller, a D.C. friend of mine once asked his pro-gun ban councilman that very question after a murder in his neighborhood. The councilman recommended my friend wear a whistle around his neck.) And of course this is another example illustrating how D.C.’s decades-old restrictive gun control laws have done little to keep guns away from criminals. Except, I guess, for ex-cons who have opened a business, and are trying to get their lives back together.

Here’s the kicker.

Since Hines’s arrest, there have been some changes at City Beats. Cameras monitor the sales floor. No one works alone in the shop.

But, Hines said, people in the neighborhood know there’s no longer a gun inside. “They gotta have in their mind that if they come in the store, you can’t pull a gun on us,” Hines said. “Without people thinking there’s some repercussions . . . they would definitely try to take advantage.”

On Sunday, his wife, Sherita McLamore-Hines, closed the shop as usual at 5 p.m., then proceeded to review inventory with her son and nephew.

About two hours later, a familiar customer knocked on the shop’s glass door, cash in hand. McLamore-Hines let him in, hoping to make one more sale. But after the man stepped in, three men wearing ski masks came in behind him. One of the men held a gun to McLamore-Hines’s head and cleaned out the cash register as she crouched behind the counter.

Police had not made any arrests in the case.

In other gun news, a battered wife acquitted of shooting her husband with one of his guns (she claimed self-defense) still faces three years for illegally using the gun. Meanwhile, a deputy who peered through a window, mistook a woman holding a cell phone for a man holding a gun, then shot the woman through her own door . . . is being defended by his sheriff.

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.

• An online museum of banned toys. I think the Atomic Energy Laboratory will get you sent to Gitmo today.
• Catholic Church’s investigator of pedophilia claims found with thousands of child porn images on his computer.
• Press release of the day. As a metaphor at least, it’s not too far off.
• Strange Internet criticism of the day.
• Good on Justin Bieber.
• Another incredible time-lapse video of Earth from the International Space Station.

The Natchez Trace Parkway in Tennessee.

• The Internet is weird.
• Michigan SEIU gets $6 million/year in mandatory union dues from parents who provide long-term care to their own disabled children.
• Utah mayor uses fake names to write articles praising his city. 
• The science of happiness.
• Montgomery County, Maryland considering what may be the most asinine anti-Walmart legislation to date.
• Interesting paper from Cato’s Jim Harper on how the federal government can publish data ways that are more transparent and usable. One example from the paper: The FEC has actually invented its own class of text file, which uses the extension .fec.

Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee.

I’m giving a talk at Pepperdine Law School on Monday.

Here are the details.

Leiper’s Fork, Tennessee.

• Your Penn State reading: An interesting post from Joe Paterno’s biographer. And the New Yorker lays out four important and unanswered questions.
• Economic advice from Gene Simmons.
• Interesting (and troubling) emails from Tennessee state police monitoring the Occupy Nashville protests.
• Blogger Aunt B. gives the vodka-soaked tampon story the Mythbusters treatment.
• Congressman wants to enlist national intelligence agencies to fight marijuana.
• Overcriminalization watch: The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  Also, the Wall Street Journal interviews Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz.
• Some analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court’s upcoming case on sentencing juveniles to life without parole.
• Ted Allen cooks up some pretentious foodie bullshit.

I have a new post up at Nashville Byline that profiles Nashville blues band the Cold Stares. It includes the acoustic tunes they played from my couch earlier this year, an interview with the band, and my first attempt at using iMovie, below.

• More feuding over “professional courtesy” between Miami police and Florida state troopers.
• Massachusetts to keep health care costs down with  . . . price controls.
• Coca-Cola gets a ban on plastic bottles at national parks overturned. And somehow . . . the Koch brothers and libertarianism are to blame.
• I’m not sure I understand the point of handing out annual awards for classic rock.
• A nation asks: Who, if not government, will count our goats?
• I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.

It’s the scariest thing since iDosing.

Yes, I’m calling bullshit on this story. Beware of any hyped-up local news report that involves teenagers, alcohol, and sex. Throw in the Internet, and this one would have been a sensational local news home run.

Note that the reporter doesn’t talk to a single student, either one who has tried it (which would give the station the opportunity to cover them in shadow and give them that creepy disguised electro-voice), or even one who knows other students who have. The only source for this story is a school cop who claims to have overheard kids talking about it all in the hallway. From this, he concludes that the vodka-soaked tampon trend has infested every school, city, and state in America—it’s “everywhere.” So they put him on TV.

They do at least interview one doctor, but the doctor never says he’s actually seen a student who has done it. He only talks about the possible physiological effects if a student were to try it. A Google News search turns up about a dozen stories . . . and all of them lead back to this one news report out of Arizona.

The “rectal beer funneling” seems particularly silly. High school boys tend to be pretty homophobic. I find it hard to believe there’s an epidemic of them dropping trow at parties, then helping one another pour beer into their rectums. (Logistically, I would think this is more than a one-man job.) Especially when they can just, you know, drink the stuff through their mouths.

According to Snopes, an email circulated about vodka-soaked tampons a couple years ago, and it included a number suspiciously similar details to the news story in the video, including the reasons why students claimed to be doing it.  (To pass breath tests, to drink more without vomiting, etc.) Snopes also finds a couple print reports out of Finland in the late 1990s. Booze-soaked tampons were also featured in a 2008 episode of CSI, and the alcohol-delivery method is apparently also part of a rumor about the Scottish band Mogwai.

Here’s another one of Keb’ Mo’ at the Americana Music Fest.

Incredible story. Part of me envies the kid. And part of me feels bad for him.

• Study suggests low income obesity and fast food are unrelated.
• Ethan Nadelmann on Obama’s medical marijuana crackdown.
• Lessons in capitalism from Occupy Wall Street.
• Washington State breaks up state liquor monopoly. Includes a beautiful quote from public service union rep.
• Alaska hit by a “snowicane.”
• Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper on ending the drug war.

The Blind Boys of Alabama, in Nashville.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo correctly diagnoses the problem with bans on texting, cell phone use, and other forms of distracted driving . . .

During the last five years, 34 states have passed laws that ban texting while driving. The laws in each of those states differ widely—some make it illegal to “send” texts, while others prohibit “electronic communication” as well as “reading” texts. Each of these versions would make Siri-based texting verboten, because even if you dictate a message, you’re still, technically, sending some kind of electronic communication (and if you glance at the screen to make sure Siri correctly transcribed your message, you’re reading it).

From the A.P.:

Maury Paulino said in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court that one officer punched, kneed, and doused his face with pepper-spray while the other officers stood by and did nothing to stop it.

Paulino, 19 at the time of the November 2009 arrest, said in the lawsuit he sought treatment at a hospital for injuries including abrasions on his neck, bleeding from his mouth, nose, and lips, and a laceration on his scalp.

Paulino originally went to the city police station in Roxbury to bail out a friend, according to his lawyers, Howard Friedman and David Milton. The friend acted belligerently as he was being released and exchanged heated words with one officer.

Paulino started recording when officers allegedly started mistreating the friend outside the station. He was charged with violating the state wiretapping laws. He also was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and assault and battery on a police officer.

His lawyers said he did not interfere with police while recording, nor did he curse, threaten or act aggressively. The lawsuit said a federal appeals court has ruled that it is legal to record police who are performing their official duties in public.

The illegal wiretapping charge was dismissed by a clerk magistrate; Paulino was acquitted of all other charges at trial.

• Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood easily wins reelection.
• In better news, anti-immigration zealot Russel Pearce is recalled from the Arizona Senate.
• From the Department of Surprising Headlines.
• Man gets life without parole for possession of child porn. It’s likely that the guy would have received a lighter sentence if he had actually molested a child.
• Unfortunate headline of the day.
• Interesting Slate discussion about which modern pop culture fixtures will become classics.
• In Tennessee, where all other forms of gambling are banned because the state doesn’t believe people can control themselves, the legislature is considering allowing credit card purchases of lottery tickets.

The Jayhakws, in Nashville.