What an IP Address Can Reveal About You

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada 

 IP Address - General remarks on IP address functionality

Knowledge of an IP address allows a searcher to obtain other information about a network, device or service. Specifically, one can:

• determine who owns and operates the network. Searching the WHOIS database using an IP address can provide a range of information about the individual4 (which could, in turn, reveal organizational affiliations) or organization to which the address is assigned, including a name, phone number, and civic address5;

• perform a reverse lookup (the resolution of
  an IP address to its associated domain name) to obtain a computer name6, which often contains clues to logical and physical location;

• conduct a traceroute (a computer diagnostic tool for displaying the route (path) of packets across an IP network) to find the logical path to the computer, which often contains clues to logical and physical location;

• determine the geolocation of the computer, with varying degrees of accuracy. Depending on the lookup tool used7, this could include country, region/state, city, latitude/longitude, telephone area code and a location- specific map;

• search the Internet using the IP address or computer names. The results of these searches might reveal peer-to-peer (P2P) activities (e.g., file sharing), records in web server log files, or glimpses of the individual's web activities (e.g., Wikipedia edits). These bits of individuals’ online history may reveal their political inclinations, state of health, sexuality, religious sentiments and a range of other personal characteristics, preoccupations and individual interests; and/or

• seek information on any e-mail addresses used from a particular IP address which, in turn, could be the subject of further requests for subscriber information.

  According to Electronic Frontier Canada8, even non-commercial Internet activity, such as reading documents on web pages, invariably requires the transmission of IP address information that can identify what one reads online.

What we found ...

To illustrate the process, a simple test was conducted using, as a starting point, the IP address of the web proxy of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

A WHOIS lookup revealed that the IP address was assigned to Public Works and Government Services (PWGSC), with an address of 350 KEDC (this is the King Edward Avenue Data Centre), Ottawa, ON, K1A 0S5. The technical point of contact is listed in this entry, including full name, email address, and phone number.

Using the IP address as a search term yielded more than 240 ”hits.” The results revealed that individuals working behind the IP address had visited sites dealing with, for example:

• search engine optimization training;

• Canada's advertising and marketing community;

• web governance;

• identity management;

• privacy issues;

• legal advice related to insurance law and personal injury litigation;

• a specific religious group;

• fitness;

• online photo sharing;

• the revision history of a Wikipedia entry; and

• specific entertainers which, in turn, exposed a variety of usernames.

  3. IP Address - Information about individuals

  It should be noted that the above information was based on the online activity of a group of computers, not an individual work station. Having said that, the process used to derive these results applies equally well to the case of a residential subscriber. The specific information that can be retrieved however depends on how active the subscriber is online and how the websites he/she visits treat IP addresses (i.e., do they expose them to indexing by search engines).

  To show what an IP address can unlock about an individual, a similar analysis was undertaken using IP addresses more representative of an individual subscriber.

6

What we found ...

Starting with people who were active contributors to Wikipedia, we found that conducting searches using the IP address shown by this site often reveals a detailed profile of an individual's activities.

For example, the IP address of one individual Wikipedia contributor9 revealed that the person has:

• Edited hundreds of pages on Wikipedia about television shows, both North American and international. The interest in TV shows was extensive and specific, but the details are not included here for privacy reasons;

• Edited dozens of pages on Wikipedia related to history topics;

• Participated in a discussion board about a television channel; and

• Visited a site devoted to sexual

  preferences following an online search for a specific type of person. [MORE] 

The Difficulties Of Proving Racial Targeting when Ignoring the Operating System of White Supremacy

NPR

Closing arguments have wrapped up in a lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy. Plaintiffs say the majority of the stops involved black and Hispanic men. But New York City says there's no racial motivation whatsoever. Host Michel Martin asks the tricky question: how exactly do you prove racial profiling?

[That is, how do you do this while ignoring that white supremacy is the cause for racial targeting?

Smoking gun evidence such as racial slurs, white kkk hoods and pronouncements by the police such as, "I'm assaulting you because you are Black" is what the court is looking for. The court's fake search for tangible evidence from the mind of a bigoted decision maker ignores white supremacy as an operating system of oppression- the Court's inquiry is done only for show and will rarely result in justice for the victims of white supremacy.This is the refinement of white supremacy. Like the scripted white folks you see on TV everyday interacting with non-whites. There is no white supremacy on TV - except in Kung Fu flicks!  TV is not real, it is a mind shampoo. In reality, you should presume that all white people you encounter are racist and expect white supremacy/racism from all of them. If they are not racist then be pleasantly surprised. bw] 

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE, from NPR News. We'd like to start today by mentioning that, as you would imagine, NPR is continuing to follow developments concerning that deadly tornado that struck Oklahoma yesterday. We hope you will stay tuned to your public radio station or check our website, npr.org, for the latest updates.

Now, though, we are going to turn to the debate about balancing safety and civil liberties in New York City. On Monday, closing arguments were heard in a federal court challenge to the New York City Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy. For years, civil rights groups have accused the department of racial profiling and point to data that 87 percent of the stops last year were of black and Hispanic people.

But city officials, including New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, continue to defend stop-and-frisk.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I can't imagine any rational person saying that the techniques are not working and that we should stop them.

MARTIN: We wanted to talk more about the whole question of racial profiling, in this case and more broadly. So we're joined now by two law professors who have been following this issue for decades. David Harris is professor of law and a distinguished faculty scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. Professor Harris, thank you so much for joining us.

DAVID HARRIS: It's good to be with you, Michel.

MARTIN: Thank you. And Delores Jones-Brown is a professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Professor Jones-Brown, thank you so much for joining us.

DELORES JONES-BROWN: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: For people who have not been following these events in New York City, why is it that this policy in New York City has come under such intense scrutiny from so many people for so many years?

JONES-BROWN: Well, there are two primary issues. One is that 87 percent of those stops involve black and Latino persons, and almost 90 percent of those stops are people who are innocent, as opposed to who are found to be involved in criminality. There is the suggestion that the stops are for the purpose of finding guns. However, in 98.8 percent of all cases, no guns are found.

MARTIN: Professor Harris, if you'd pick up the thread there.

HARRIS: Sure. It is legal for police officers to do this, as long as there is reasonable suspicion. But it became a tactic that looks like it was over-relied on to the point that people felt this was not a tactic being done for them to provide greater public safety, but being done to the them, and the people subjected to this in an outsized way were overwhelmingly people of color.

MARTIN: Professor Jones-Brown, I mean, the plaintiffs in the case presented a secret recording of a police leader who told officers explicitly that black males 14 to 21 were the right people to stop. What's the city's response to this specific kind of evidence that says that these particular people were targeted because of their race?

JONES-BROWN: The city seems to support the notion - you may know that the commissioner was on "Nightline" the other evening suggesting that blacks are being under-stopped under this policy, because 75 percent of violent crime perpetrators are described as African-American males, while only 56 percent of folks who are stopped are black.

So black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 21, or 14 and 24 are believed by the commissioner to be the crime problem in the city. No differentiation is being made between those who are law-abiding and those who are not. In addition to the recording that you spoke of, Senator Eric Adams testified that the commissioner said to him in front of then-Governor Paterson that, yes, stop-and-frisk focuses on black and Latino males because they want to instill fear in those males.

And when the commissioner was questioned about whether he thought that was, you know, fair or valid, he said: How else are we going to get guns off the street?

MARTIN: That's actually what I was going to ask you, though. If you're just - and if you're just joining us, we're talking about a case involving New York City's stop-and-frisk policy. That case is being challenged in federal court, and closing arguments were heard on Monday. We're talking about this with law professors Delores Jones-Brown and David Harris, who have been following the issue closely through the years.

But, Professor Harris, I mean, again, what's the answer to the argument that if that is indeed the group of people where crime is most present, then that's the appropriate group of people to subject to this level of scrutiny? What's the answer to that?

HARRIS: The answer to that is that targeting them based on their racial or ethnic appearance is not a successful crime-fighting strategy, despite what the commissioner and the mayor seem to believe. What they say is, see? It's working. By this method, they say, of instilling fear in people, we don't want people to carry their guns. That's why we do this.

So they win either way. Targeting people based on race or ethnicity has never been shown - not in New York, not in anywhere else where this has been statistically tracked - to be the successful way to get guns, to get drugs, to get bad guys. Because what you do is you force people overall to pay an enormous cost across an entire racial or ethnic group for the actions of a very few people.

And it also leaves out the fact that you could certainly use other methods, as other cities do, to force crime down that don't rely on this kind of very aggressive stop-and-frisk activity that embarrasses and humiliates, and most importantly, drives people away from police. It gives them the idea that the police are their enemy. So what they are doing is they are simply saying it works because we know it works. Look at the results. And, of course, heads I win, tails you lose.

MARTIN: Professor Delores Jones-Brown, you're in New York. Why do you believe that the city officials are so vigorously defending this policy?

JONES-BROWN: I think part of it is in the investment in the stereotype, that if the commissioner actually believes that the crime problem in the city and the mayor believes that the crime problem in the city are black and Latino folks, then they can't move off of that belief. The other notion is if they were - they believe that if they were to change tactics now - in 2012, we now have data that stops were reduced by 22 percent and crime did not go up.

We also have data from the first quarter of 2013, where stops are down again and crime has not gone up. And so it's a really good question that you ask. Given this information, why isn't the mayor or the police commissioner changing position some to at least recognize we can reduce the number of stops without jeopardizing the public safety?

MARTIN: Professor Harris, you have any final thought here?

HARRIS: It just points out the fact that they can do the same kind of crime reduction with a much lesser degree of this very intensive stop-and-frisk activity. Stop-and-frisk is legal. It's done in every city, as long as there is reasonable suspicion. There's no reason that police can't do it. What we don't want to have is this kind of overreliance on one tactic that takes an incredible chunk out of the cooperation and the partnership that you need to have between police and the people they serve.

MARTIN: Professor Jones-Brown, before we let you go...

JONES-BROWN: Mm-hmm.

MARTIN: ...both of you are critics of the policy. Both of you clearly believe that the policy has kind of passed the point of being constructive, to the point where it's destructive to the social fabric. Apart from the city officials who are defending it, what do people think about it in the city overall?

JONES-BROWN: People are confused. There are members of the communities of color who have accepted the notion that this is what they need to be safe in their community. And I think it's a sad position, because those folks don't accept the fact that they have as much a right to be able to walk to the store to get that quart of milk without getting stopped, as if they lived in a different community. And so that's problematic.

So communities are divided over whether they support or they oppose stop-and-frisk. There are other policing tactics - something called hot spots policing - that's being used by the NYPD that doesn't necessarily involve stop-and-frisk that researchers have found have, in fact, contributed to the crime reduction in the city. So one of my suggestions recently has been to do more of that, and less of stop-and-frisk, because we can see a direct causal or relationship between that kind of a practice, hot spots policing or something else where we focus on the few dangerous people that can be identified individually and remove those people from the street while leaving the law abiding people alone.

MARTIN: I just think a lot of people listening to our conversation will not understand what is wrong with what the police are doing. I mean the police - I think pretty much anywhere in the country, I think most people would agree, if they see something suspicious, then I think most people would believe that the police should stop and intervene in whatever is going on. So what is it that in your view the New York City Police Department is doing wrong?

JONES-BROWN: In my view, the department is engaging in something I call appearance profiling, and so if they see a young black or Latino male in certain types of clothing, like a hoodie or sagging pants and they appear to be seen between certain ages, they automatically suspect them, but there's nothing criminal about being young, being black, being Latino, being male and wearing saggy pants or a hooded sweatshirt or wearing particular colors that the police assume are gang-related.

And so it is the way in which people are not allowed to walk on the street without being suspected simply because of how they appear. It's not even their behavior, because the majority of stops are based on something called furtive movement. It's a very ambiguous term that New Jersey has almost outlawed as a reason for a reasonable suspicion or a reasonable stop. But it is, more than 50 percent of the time, cited as a reason why a police officer, in combination with other factors, has stopped a person on the street in the city of New York.

And so the notion is that you should not be suspicious simply based on what you look like, simply for where you're standing or walking. The notion of high crime area is often cited, but people live in an area because that's where they can afford to live, and so everyone who lives in a high crime area should not automatically be suspected of being criminal, and in fact the crime statistics in this city indicate that not everyone, and in fact a very small number of folks who live in high crime or low crime areas, are involved in serious violent offending, and the rhetoric around Stop and Frisk doesn't make that point clear.

MARTIN: Delores Jones-Brown is a professor in the department of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She was with us from our bureau in New York. David Harris is professor of law and a distinguished faculty scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. He joined us from member station WESA in Pittsburgh.

Thank you both so much for speaking with us.

JONES-BROWN: Thank you for having us.

HARRIS: It was a pleasure.

MARTIN: Needless to say, there are other perspectives about Stop and Frisk. Tomorrow we expect to hear from Paul Brown, the deputy commissioner of the NYPD. We'd also like to hear from you. We'd like to hear if you have an experience with Stop and Frisk, either as a person who's been stopped, as a bystander or as a law enforcement officer. Send us a tweet using hash tag #TMMFrisk.

A million Israeli landmines planted in occupied Palestinian West Bank

BlackListedNews

About a million landmines have been planted by the Israeli occupation in occupied Palestinian West Bank, official Palestinian data has shown.

The Commissioner General of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Washington, Maan Erekat, said: "The number of Israeli landmines planted is between 800,000 to a million."

During his meeting with UN and NGO officials in New York on Wednesday, Erekat said: "This significant number of landmines poses great direct danger to the safety and security of Palestinian citizens." He discussed efforts with the officials he met to remove these landmines.

Erekat reiterated the importance of "continuing the efforts being exerted by the UN and NGO in cooperation with Palestinian parties to remove the landmines planted around the occupied West Bank."

Bankster's Paradise: Banks’ Lobbyists Help in Drafting Financial Bills

BlackListedNews

Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.

Obama Expands Militarization of Police

BlackListedNews

Men in heavy armor carry assault rifles, patrolling streets alongside armored personnel carriers. These are scenes from the manhunt in Watertown, following April 15′s Boston Marathon Bombings. After locking down the area, local, state, and federal agencies sent SWAT teams out in force in search of the remaining suspect. The images from those days are striking, and raise serious questions about how and when the use of paramilitary policing tools should be used.

SWAT teams originated in the late 1960s, but their use greatly expanded in the 1980s as the Reagan administration doubled down on the drug war. In 1988 the Byrne Grant Program passed Congress, allocating substantial funding for anti-drug policing. As money was awarded for drug arrests, resources shifted toward drug raids, increasingly using SWAT teams for this purpose. Meanwhile federal programs were introduced increasing training and cooperation between the military and domestic law enforcement to battle drug crime.

Other Reagan-era policies encouraged the transfer of surplus military hardware to law enforcement, which in the 1990s became firmly established by the Clinton Administration’s 1033 Program, incorporating millions of pieces of equipment designed for war zones into domestic policing agencies.

2 Million People In 52 Countries March Against Monsanto

BlackListedNews.com 

Proponents argue that GM crops can help feed the world. And given ever increasing demands for food, animal feed, fiber and now even biofuels, the world needs all the help it can get.

Obama asks Congress to establish special court or board to authorise legal drone action

CitizensforLegitGov

Proposals to vet future US drone strikes risk creating "kill courts" according to human rights campaigners who say Barack Obama's promise of new legal oversight does not go far enough to end what they regard as extrajudicial executions. The president has asked Congress to consider establishing a special court or oversight board to authorise lethal action outside warzones under a new counter-terrorism doctrine which he says will end the "boundless war on terror". But responses to his speech from leading campaign groups, though broadly welcoming, highlight how little change Obama is proposing to the underlying principle that the US has a legal right to kill suspected terrorists abroad without trial.

John Kerry defends US use of assassination drones

ColorLines

US Secretary of State John Kerry has defended Washington’s use of assassination drones, which has already led to massive civilian casualties in different countries around the world. During a trip to the Ethiopian capital city of Addis Ababa on Sunday, Kerry said the drones were needed to hunt down "terrorists" and that each attack was carried out after "a great deal of vetting." He also said the drone program was one of the most "accountable" of programs.

Racially Segregated 'Black-Only Pods' in Florida County Jail

ColorLines

U.S. Department of Justice investigators found a number of unconstitutional practices at the Escambia County Jail facility in northwest Florida that "constitute serious risks to prisoner safety," according to the Justice Department's findings letter. Among those problems were insufficient access to mental healthcare for the inmates, and racial segregation of black prisoners. Said the U.S. Department of Justice in a release:

Specifically, the department concluded that known systemic deficiencies at the facility, stemming mainly from staffing shortages, continue to subject prisoners to excessive risk of assault by other prisoners and to inadequate mental health care. Additionally, the department found that until recently, the jail had an informal policy and practice of designating some of its housing units as only for African-American prisoners. By segregating some of its prisoners on the basis of race, the jail not only stigmatized and discriminated against many of its African-American prisoners, it also fanned combustible racial tensions within the jail.

The racial segregation of black inmates into "black-only pods" had been occurring for decades. Justice officials first discovered the practice in October last year during a tour. They warned Escambia County Jail officials then that this was a breach of 14th Amendment equal protection rights. According to the findings letter, "For decades, the Jail's officials have assumed that segregating on the basis of race would lead to a safer facility."

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Roy Austin, Jr., who wrote the findings letter, said such assumptions were "unproven and untethered to data" and "insufficient to justify an explicit racial classification."

Escambia County's population is 23.1 percent African-American, and 70 percent white. The county jail has 1,442 prisoners, 65 percent of whom are black and 35 percent white.

A new sheriff for Escambia, David Morgan, told the Justice Department this past April that the segregation had stopped but Austin wrote that the Justice Department "will want to ensure that any agreement we reach with the Jail completely and permanently eliminates racially segregated housing units." Their investigation concluded that "the practice of segregating on the basis of race has compromised security by exacerbating racial tensions within the Facility."

Escambia County is 23.1 percent African-American, and 70 percent white.

Other Justice Department findings:

• Prisoner-on-prisoner assaults are a common occurrence, owed to a shortage of correctional staff, resulting in serious harm to prisoners
• The jail does not provide timely and adequate access to appropriately skilled mental health care professionals
• The jail routinely fails to provide appropriate medications to prisoners with mental illness
• The jail provides inadequate housing and observation for prisoners with serious mental illness who are at risk for self injury or suicide

Austin wrote that these are all violations of the 14th amendment and the 8th amendment, which protects those convicted of criminal offenses.

Was Violent Felon Ban on Food Stamps Accepted With False Data?

ColorLines

When Democrats and Republicans unanimously accepted Sen. David Vitter's amendment (#1056) that would ban violent felons from receiving food stamps during a Senate debate earlier this week, that proposal may have been launched from poor facts.

In Sen. Vitter's press release about the amendment, he exclusively cites a report from Louisiana's legislative auditor's report to justify his amendment. For Vitter's focus on those convicted of violent felonies, you'd think there was some information about the abundance of felons using food stamps. Quite the contrary, there's not a single word in the report about violent felons.

Vitter's press release doesn't mention anything from the report on felons abusing food stamps either. He does point to other fraud the auditor found:

The audit covered the fiscal years from 2010 to 2012 and found that there were duplicate and overpayments of millions. The results show that more than $1.1 million was issued to 1,761 people who were in prison, 322 people gained benefits even though their wages exceeded $50,000, and 3,060 people used $2 million worth of benefits in a state other than Louisiana.

Few things here: One, that same report noted that 1,157 cases that resulted in $841,615 in overpayments happened because of state agency errors -- mistakes "such as a caseworker entering incorrect income amounts or failing to remove an ineligible member from the case."

That may seem like a big deal, but consider those are totals for 2010 and 2011. Total SNAP benefits in those years totaled $2.5 billion in Louisiana. $840,000 in overpayments from $2.5 billion is rather minute. What this has to do with former incarcerated citizens with violent felonies is unclear.

Not to mention, Louisiana has one of the lowest overpayment rates in the nation -- of all the states last year they ranked fourth in low overpayment error rates, and had the second highest improvement among all the states.

This improvement happened while the state's administrative burdens increased. From 2008 to 2012 the workload for SNAP administrative increased 76 percent -- 259,770 cases to 380,011 cases -- mostly because of the economic recession. Meanwhile, staffing at the state's SNAP offices decreased from 1,315 to 1,090 caseworkers.

But the number of erroneous cases alone might explain some of the questionable findings in the auditor's report, such as prison inmates using food stamps (How exactly does that work?).

As for the 3,060 who spent $2 billion in SNAP benefits in other states, Vitter fails to mention that this is legal. SNAP beneficiaries receive their food allocations by their resident state, but those can be used anywhere in the United States. That this might indicate fraud is purely speculative.

Fraud isn't a major problem in the SNAP program at large. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the national program achieved its lowest overpayment error rate on record in 2011. "The overwhelming majority [of errors] result from honest mistakes by recipients, eligibility workers, data entry clerks, or computer programmers," writes CBPP senior policy analyst Dottie Rosenbaum.

Colorado Gov.: Should We As A State Be Taking Lives?

Human Rights Now

Colorado’s Governor granted an indefinite stay for Nathan Dunlap, who was set to be executed in August. In doing so the Gov. questioned the death penalty itself (Photo Credit: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images).

Governor John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado did something rather extraordinary on Wednesday, when he prevented (by granting an indefinite reprieve) the execution of Nathan Dunlap. Dunlap was scheduled to be put to death during the week of August 18 for a horrible crime, the 1993 murder of four people – three teenagers and a mother of two – in an Aurora, Colorado, Chuck E. Cheese.

Hickenlooper’s reprieve was not based on anything having to do with Dunlap’s case, but was based on problems with the death penalty itself. As Hickenlooper writes:

“It is a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives.”

Oregon’s Governor John Kitzhaber did something similar back in November 2011, when he used the granting of an execution reprieve to impose a blanket moratorium on executions intended to “bring about a long overdue reevaluation of our current policy and our system of capital punishment” – a reevaluation he hoped would put an end to “this compromised and inequitable system.”

Colorado’s Governor Hickenlooper states that Colorado’s death penalty has also “not been fairly or equitably imposed.” He observes that the realization that capital punishment doesn’t work is becoming more widespread, and that his state is already one of 25 that have either abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in 10 years. He mentions that over two thirds of the world’s countries have similarly either not executed for a decade or abolished capital punishment altogether. He points out that most religions do not support the death penalty. And he notes the practical problem (which is really a moral problem) that it is getting harder and harder to procure lethal injection drugs from pharmaceutical companies that don’t want to be involved in state killing of prisoners.

Colorado has had one execution in the last 45 years, and nearly abolished the death penalty in 2009. Hickenlooper suggests in his order, perhaps with a bit of understatement, that his decision is intended to “continue the intense conversation Coloradans are having about the death penalty.”

It certainly will.

A Prosecutor, a Wrongful Conviction and a Question of Justice

Propublica

This is part of a series. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Edwin Oliva, a 29-year-old petty thief and drug addict, says he was a wreck as he sat in a chair in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office in winter 1995. A year earlier, he'd told police a lie that helped implicate a possibly innocent man in a murder. Now, prosecutors wanted him to repeat his story in court; he wanted to take it back.

Oliva says he had been on a crack and heroin binge at the time he'd made his initial claim, and that he told prosecutors he implicated the man only because of relentless pressure from police. A statement he had signed — asserting that he had heard a young man named Jabbar Collins discussing a murder plot days before a man wound up shot to death in a Brooklyn apartment building — was a fiction that detectives had fed him.

But the prosecutors, Oliva says, weren't having it. Collins, the man Oliva had fingered, had already been arraigned based in part on Oliva's word. Collins, then 21, was sitting in a Rikers Island jail cell awaiting trial, and the Brooklyn District Attorney's office was intent that he stay behind bars for a very long time. Oliva was going to be a critical witness, whether he liked it or not.

When Oliva refused to testify, the prosecutors, led by senior Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione, threatened to charge him with conspiracy to commit murder, Oliva says. Prosecutors then held Oliva for several days at Lincoln Correctional Facility, a minimum-security prison in Harlem. But Oliva held firm.

"I refused to testify to a lie," he said in a sworn statement submitted years later in federal court.

Vecchione's team, Oliva says, finally found a way to leverage him: Oliva was out of prison on a work release program, so prosecutors got the privilege revoked, and on March 1, 1995, Oliva was transferred to Ulster Correctional Facility, a maximum security state prison two hours north of New York City.

Oliva was brought back to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office for a meeting with Vecchione's partner, Assistant District Attorney Charles Posner. According to Oliva, Posner told him that he could have his work release privileges restored if he'd testify against Collins.

"I felt trapped and desperate," Oliva said. "And so I agreed."

Oliva took the stand against Collins, insisting that his testimony was not a result of any agreement with prosecutors. And Vecchione, in a powerful closing argument, vouched for Oliva's credibility.

"He saw something. He heard something," Vecchione told the jury. "Someone asked him about it. And he is telling what he saw and he is telling what he heard. Nothing else."

Jabbar Collins was convicted of murdering Abraham Pollack, a rabbi from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and spent the next 15 years in prison. But he eventually gained his freedom through a rare federal petition in 2010, one asserting that prosecutors and police had invented, distorted and withheld evidence in his case. And now Collins is suing for $150 million, naming the individual prosecutors and detectives as defendants along with the city.

Based on an assortment of prosecution and government documents, as well as a number of sworn statements, Collins and his lawyer have asserted a staggering array of misconduct on Vecchione's part:

Vecchione, they charge, coerced an illiterate drug addict named Angel Santos to testify against Collins by physically threatening him and sending him to jail for a full week. Vecchione, they claim, persuaded a minor drug dealer named Adrian Diaz to testify by chasing him down in Puerto Rico and helping him avoid violating the terms of his probation. In court, they maintain, Vecchione suborned perjury; he concocted cover stories about how Collins' family threatened one or more witnesses. And while Collins spent a decade and a half in a state prison, Vecchione oversaw an effort to deny Collins access to the information that might have freed him.

In a series of filings in state and federal court, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office has refuted Collins' claims of misconduct. Officials say Oliva was promised no deal for his testimony; Santos took the stand voluntarily; Vecchione took no special steps to protect Diaz in exchange for his testimony; and the office handled Collins' requests for records in good faith.

Today, Vecchione, 63, remains a senior figure in the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes. Hynes has stood by him, heralding Vecchione as a principled lawyer and an effective prosecutor. Both Vecchione and Hynes refused to be interviewed for this article.

Benjamin Brafman and Alan Dershowitz, two prominent defense lawyers who say they have known Vecchione for years, cautioned against concluding Vecchione was guilty of what has been alleged.

"These allegations are based largely on unproved claims made in an adversarial complaint," the lawyers said in a letter. "They have not yet been subjected to the full truth testing mechanisms of a judicial proceding."

"In our view," they asserted, "Mr. Vecchione has not been found to have committed any judicial misconduct."

A review of Vecchione's career shows that he has been a lightning rod for criticism for years. In a 1993 murder case, Vecchione was accused of withholding a cooperation agreement between himself and a key witness. State judges have chastised him for over-the-top behavior in court. Some defense lawyers, judges and former colleagues have said Vecchione is an all-too-willing lieutenant to Hynes, a loyalist interested in making headline-producing cases and then winning them at all costs.

Vecchione's aggressive pursuit of Clarence Norman, the onetime Brooklyn political kingpin, failed to produce what the district attorney's office most hoped it would — evidence that judgeships were for sale in Brooklyn.

Vecchione tried to prosecute a former FBI agent for helping arrange the murders of gangsters, only to have the case fall apart in embarrassment when it was revealed that Vecchione's chief witness was disastrously unreliable.

And just last year, a prosecutor leading a sex trafficking unit overseen by Vecchione resigned amid accusations that she had withheld a victim's recantation in a high-profile rape case.

For many legal experts, defense lawyers and advocates for the wrongly convicted, Vecchione is a prominent example of a troubling aspect of the American criminal justice system: Prosecutors who are implicated in misconduct often seem immune from meaningful punishment.

A recent investigation by ProPublica looking at more than a decade's worth of court records found that New York judges don't routinely refer prosecutorial misconduct to state panels that handle attorney discipline, even when they overturn convictions and upbraid prosecutors for constitutional violations. State disciplinary panels, when they do get referrals, rarely impose meaningful sanctions. The city's district attorneys lack the will to punish their subordinates, perhaps out of fear of embarrassment. All told, ProPublica found 30 cases in which judges reversed convictions based on misconduct by New York City prosecutors. Just one of these prosecutors was publicly disciplined.

The pattern is much the same across the country. The Northern California Innocence Project reviewed 12 years of court opinions and found that California prosecutors were hardly ever disciplined after convictions were overturned because of their misconduct.

Frederic Block, the federal judge presiding over Collins' civil lawsuit, has expressed something like amazement at Hynes' unwillingness to sanction Vecchione.

"I'm just puzzled why the district attorney did not take any action against Vecchione," Block said in court last fall. "To the contrary, he seems to ignore everything that happened. And an innocent man has been in jail for 16 years."

Hynes appears more willing to investigate detectives who might have helped make bad cases. Earlier this month, his office said it would review 50 murder cases handled by a single retired Brooklyn homicide detective. The action came after Hynes supported the release of a man who had been wrongly convicted based on the work of the detective, Louis Scarcella. So far, there's been no indication that Hynes' review of that case, or the larger case review, will extend to the prosecutors who investigated side by side with Scarcella for years, attending the same possibly suspect lineups, accepting the now supposedly dubious confessions, vouching for the witnesses Scarcella helped identify.

Collins' lawyer, Joel Rudin, is not at all surprised. Rudin has a long record of holding the city's prosecutors accountable. He's won millions of dollars in settlements from the city for wrongfully convicting people, and maintains a long list of cases in which prosecutors have broken ethics rules to win convictions, all without disciplinary sanctions. Often those prosecutors have been promoted after state and federal judges have excoriated their conduct.

Rudin's allegations against Vecchione and the office he works for are built on a formidable assortment of depositions, prison records, sworn affidavits and a review of state appellate court records. Rudin is scheduled to depose Vecchione on June 14.

Jabbar Collins — guilty or not — never got a fair trial. Two federal judges have declared it so. Both have been unsparing in condemning the conduct of Vecchione. Block, who is handling the civil lawsuit, has said in open court that he's eager to dig deeper.

"This was horrific behavior on the part of Vecchione," Block said. "We are going to have a civil proceeding, and all of this is going to be uncovered. I kid you not."

Hynes, meanwhile, does not seem outwardly concerned about Vecchione's record, or any damage it might have done to his office. As he runs for a seventh term, Hynes has agreed to have his office be the subject of a prime-time CBS television show, "Brooklyn DA."

A Second Coming

Brooklyn in the early 1990s was rife with racial tension, particularly between the borough's large Jewish and African-American populations. The conflict was most visible in Crown Heights, where in 1991 the mutual suspicions erupted in several days and nights of unrest.

The newly elected Brooklyn District Attorney, Charles "Joe" Hynes, quickly found himself on the hot seat. The Jewish vote had helped him win office, but he had reason to fear losing that support: In October 1992, his prosecutors failed to convict a 16-year-old black man named Lemrick Nelson for chasing down a 29-year-old rabbinical student and stabbing him to death during the 1991 disturbances. Hynes' handling of the case eventually became the subject of a damning state critique.

Under fire, Hynes wound up benefiting from the work of a prosecutor recently returned to his ranks. Mike Vecchione — who had begun his career in the Brooklyn District Attorney's office 15 years earlier, followed by a career as a defense lawyer — had come back to the office at Hynes' urging. Vecchione, a seasoned trial lawyer, was soon made chief of Hynes' homicide bureau, taking on the most sensitive cases involving Jewish victims.

There were more than a few, and Vecchione consistently won convictions.

There was the 1992 case of 15-year-old Tziporah Yagodayev, strangled to death on the Williamsburg Bridge. Vecchione proved that a drug-addicted thief named Raymond Vargas was the killer, sending him away for 25 years to life. Later that year, a 37-year-old Hasidic mother died after being stabbed more than 35 times during a botched robbery. Vecchione won a murder conviction by showing that the defendant's palm matched a bloody handprint found at the crime scene. When Vecchione emerged from the courtroom, he got a hero's welcome from a group of overjoyed Hasidic women.

"He's very smooth and confident in the courtroom," said Alan Vinegrad, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who once helped prosecute a kidnapping case with Vecchione. "He's an excellent trial attorney. He had a great rapport with witnesses and could talk to real people in a real way."

Vecchione, who had grown up in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, first came to work in the office in 1973 when Eugene Gold was the district attorney. He had gone to St. John's University, and graduated as part of the first class of Hofstra University's law school. He then took a job as a junior prosecutor.

His illusions of legal grandeur, however, were roughed up a bit on his very first day in criminal court.

"I was so proud, standing right in front of the bench, wearing my brand new suit," Vecchione wrote in a 2009 book about his role in a famous police corruption case. "I was officially part of the great American tradition of jurisprudence. And then the judge, wearing the solemn robes of his office, cleared his throat, opened a top drawer in his desk, and spit right into it. And then closed the drawer. Well, so much for majesty."

Vecchione said in the book that his first major case was a mob murder, and winning it meant more than anything to him. In a closed office late at night, preparing for trial, Vecchione said he came across a report that called into question the integrity of his main witness.

"It would have been absolutely nothing for me to take that report and tear it up or just throw it away," Vecchione wrote. "No one would have known the difference. Not one person. I would be lying if I said the prospect of getting caught didn't enter my mind. It did."

Vecchione said he kept the report in the file and went to trial. He lost.

"One lie leads to another and another and another," Vecchione said in explaining his decision. "And then the whole house of cards falls down."

In the coming years, Vecchione won dozens of cases. Cases with loads of evidence, and cases with less than overwhelming proof.

"He had a passion for trying cases. He was very aggressive," recalled Tommy Dades, a retired New York City detective who worked for years with Vecchione and who collaborated with him on the 2009 book. "Other prosecutors would want a video of the guy with a gun doing the shooting. Mike would say, 'Tommy, get me a case, and we'll try it. Corroborate it, and we'll try it.'"

After a decade in the office, Vecchione left to start his own practice, and he proved to be a respected defense lawyer, too. One of his more noteworthy accomplishments came in a murder case involving a battered woman who killed her abusive husband by setting him on fire with cleaning fluid. The woman was found guilty of a lesser charge — criminally negligent homicide — and spared prison time.

Back for a second stint in the district attorney's office, and piling up noteworthy triumphs, those who worked alongside Vecchione said his confidence only grew.

"Even back in the '70s, he looked at himself as a tough guy, a take-no-prisoners kind of guy," said one Brooklyn judge. "But at the time, nobody knew where he'd end up."

McDonalds = Cheap Junk Food that Sucks

Grio

NEW YORK (AP) — McDonald’s once again faced criticism that it’s a purveyor of junk food that markets to children at its annual shareholder meeting Thursday.

The world’s biggest hamburger chain has been looking to keep up with changing tastes as people increasingly opt for foods they feel are fresh or healthy. Customers can now order egg whites in its breakfast sandwiches, for example. McDonald’s also recently introduced chicken wraps to go after people in their 20s and 30s looking for better-for-you options.

But at its shareholder meeting Thursday, McDonald’s was taken to task by speakers associated with an advocacy group about its menu and marketing toward kids. As with other shareholder meetings, McDonald’s Corp. allotted about a half-hour for anyone who owned its stock to address its top executives.

Among those was a 9-year-old girl who asked CEO Don Thompson to stop “tricking kids into eating your food.” Later on, the girl’s mother echoed the request, saying McDonald’s undermines parents by marketing to children.

Another speaker asked that McDonald’s remove its locations from hospitals, while others asked it to stop targeting communities of color by signing stars such as Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas and the NBA’s LeBron James.

Three of the individuals were members of Corporate Accountability, which has been critical of the company’s marketing practices. Others were health professionals, parents or writers linked to the group.

Thompson stood by the company’s menu, saying McDonald’s doesn’t sell “junk food,” pointing out items such as the yogurt parfait and side salad and noting that the company has been adding more fruits and vegetables to its menu.

Thompson, who took over as CEO this past summer, also noted that his kids eat at McDonald’s and that many of its 1.8 million employees are parents.

Still, he said at one point, “I do agree we have some issues, and we can be part of the solution.”

Of course, other fast-food chains such as Burger King, Wendy’s and Taco Bell aren’t exactly paragons of healthy eating. And plenty of smaller, mom-and-pop restaurants sell food with just as many calories and fat as a Big Mac or Quarter Pounder. But with more than 14,000 U.S. locations, McDonald’s is an easy target because of its size and has become a symbol of processed foods in American culture.

The criticism is far from new but its persistence illustrates the uphill battle McDonald’s faces in trying to evolve its image and stay relevant. After years of outperforming its rivals, the company has been struggling to increase sales more recently. Last month, McDonald’s said sales at restaurants open at least a year fell 1 percent for its first quarter. That marked the first quarterly decline for the figure in a decade.

McDonald’s has blamed its troubles in part on the broader economy, saying the restaurant industry was flat to declining in the past year. But the company is also pushing to improve the image of its food at a time when chains such as Chipotle, Panera and Subway are gaining popularity.

McDonald’s is also enduring criticism that it still markets to children.

Despite Thompson’s claims that the company doesn’t target children in schools, Corporate Accountability noted that McDonald’s has moved much of its marketing online where it’s harder for parents to monitor what kids see. Nick Guroff, a spokesman for the group, also said that commercials featuring Gabby Douglas and LeBron James are directed at kids.

Corporate Accountability in recent years had pressured McDonald’s to stop using Ronald McDonald to market to children. Thompson on Thursday noted that the company isn’t using Ronald “the way it used to” but nevertheless stood by the mascot.

“Ronald is not a bad guy — he’s about fun, he’s a clown,” Thompson said. “So I’d ask all you to let your kids have fun, too.”

Third Circuit upholds conviction of White Judge in Pennsylvania juvenile sentencing scandal

[JURIST]

The US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit [official website] on Friday upheld [opinion, PDF] the conviction and 28-year sentence for former Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas [official website] judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. In February 2011 Ciavarella was convicted by a jury [JURIST report] in the US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania [official website] of racketeering, mail fraud, money laundering, tax fraud and other related crimes. The convictions stemmed from a juvenile sentencing scandal [JURIST news archive] in which Ciavarella and judge Michael Conahan allegedly received $2.8 million in kickbacks from a commercial builder, an attorney and a businessman in exchange for helping to construct and operate two juvenile detention centers, and placing hundreds of juvenile offenders there. In August 2011 the court sentenced [JURIST report] Ciavarella to 28 years in prison despite his eligibility for a life sentence under federal sentencing guidelines. On appeal, Ciavarella specifically challenged denial of his motions to disqualify the district judge, arguing that the judge had "improperly relied on extrajudicial statements" by commenting to the media and public before denying Ciavarella's plea agreement. The appellate court, however, found that the district judge's statements did not constitute the requisite bias required for disqualification under 28 USC § 455(a) [text] because they did not display "a deep-seated favoritism or antagonism that would make fair judgment impossible." Pursuant to the ruling, Ciavarella will continue to serve his 28-year sentence in federal prison in Illinois.

Ciavarella's trial began [JURIST report] in early February 2011. In December 2012 a federal judge approved a settlement [JURIST report] of almost $18 million in a lawsuit brought by juveniles wrongfully incarcerated by the two judges. In July 2010 Judge Edwin Kosik accepted [JURIST report] a plea agreement from former judge Conahan for his involvement in the juvenile sentencing scandal. Conahan now faces a 20-year prison sentence, a fine of up to $250,000 and disbarment. Kosik had previously rejected [JURIST report] joint plea agreements from Conahan and Ciavarella, finding that plea bargaining to honest services fraud and tax evasion charges demonstrated that the men did not accept responsibility and that the disbarment and 87-month prison sentences were too lenient [JURIST op-ed]. In October 2009 the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania overturned 6,500 juvenile-offender convictions issued by Ciavarella [JURIST report]. Conahan and Ciavarella were indicted in September 2009, following a withdrawal of the guilty pleas they entered [JURIST reports] in February 2009.

BART Cop Involved with Killing Oscar Grant Charged With Unemployment Fraud

NBC

A former BART police officer who was fired for his role in a  confrontation that ended with the fatal shooting of passenger Oscar Grant III  four years ago has been charged with unemployment fraud and grand theft.

    The charges against Anthony Pirone, which were filed in mid-April,  allege that he collected unemployment checks from the state for a seven-month  period in 2011, after he had been fired by BART, even though he had a job.     However, Pirone's attorney, William Rapoport, said today that he  thinks the allegations against Pirone are "not provable" and he's "confident"  that Pirone, who currently is serving with the Army National Guard in  Afghanistan, won't be convicted.
    Rapoport said Pirone wasn't on active duty with the military at  the time he was receiving the unemployment checks that are the subject of the  criminal charges and was only in training with the Army National Guard.
    Rapoport said Pirone probably received some type of payments while  he was in training but those payments aren't considered earnings or wages  that would make him ineligible to collect unemployment benefits.
    Pirone had been scheduled to appear in Alameda County Superior  Court this week but he couldn't attend because he's in Afghanistan so his  case was postponed until next year, when he's scheduled to return to the U.S.
    Grant, 22, of Hayward, was shot and killed by former BART police  Officer Johannes Mehserle in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 2009, after  Mehserle, Pirone and other officers responded to reports that there was a  fight on a BART train.
    Mehserle was charged with murder but he was only convicted of the  lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter.
    Pirone wasn't charged in connection with the incident but John  Burris, an Oakland attorney who represented Grant's family in a wrongful  death lawsuit, alleged that Pirone escalated the situation at the Fruitvale  station.
    Pirone was the first officer to arrive at the station's platform  and video recordings showed him acting aggressively.
    Pirone is in the midst of an arbitration hearing in which he is  seeking to get his job back at BART and Rapoport alleged that the criminal  charges against him are an attempt by BART to gain "an advantage" in the  arbitration process.
    BART officials didn't respond to a request for a comment today.
    Rapoport said an evidentiary hearing in the arbitration matter  concluded on Wednesday and will be followed by about six months of legal  briefs. He said he expects a ruling late this year or early next year.
    Rapoport noted that Marysol Domenici, another BART police officer  who was fired for her role in the Grant incident, was victorious at the end  of her arbitration process in December 2010 and has been back at the transit  agency for more than two years now.
    Rapoport previously said he thinks the incident that led to  Grant's death has been "politicized" and he believes Pirone will win his  arbitration case.