Federal Agent or Drug Dealer

Wednesday this week. I arrived early at work to find a truck parked in front of my wife’s business and as I arrived the occupant opened the car door to throw some litter on the ground. So naturally being the Fatsavage that I am, I threw a rant outside the occupant’s car door about what right did he have to litter in my front yard. I insisted he tell me where he live so I could go to his house and throw litter all over his yard. After awhile, I notice that the tint on the truck windows was so dark that I couldn’t even identify the race or features of the person I was talking too.

What I did notice was the glow of an eye level laptop pointed towards my nemesis in the drivers seat professionally mounted on some sort of platform on the passenger side and that the person had a princess sized hand set from a phone that he was holding too his ear (like a radio phone). Since he had not yet shot me or got out of his vehicle, prudence dictated I move on.

Well I chatted with one of my Police friends about whether I was dealing with a drug dealer or an undercover Federal Agent and he opted for the latter.

As he pointed out, no self respecting drug dealer would be driving a dented pick-up truck as they preferred more sporty models.

Also, the local police had been hounding the drug dealers with tinted windows as a method to make targeted car stops and removal of the illegal tint.

Finally, no self respecting drug dealer would have put up with my verbal crap. He simply would have shot me in the knee cap and moved on down the road.

In his mind, I definitely had a Federal Agent of some kind observing me.

For some of my resent discoveries on domestic spying, check out tigerstail.wordpress.com.

Feds on The Run!

There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded boar (Wild Pig). They have tusks to kill, and incisors that tear the flesh from the bone. Hunting the wild boar is not a task for the weak at heart. Likewise it’s probably not too wise to piss off Federal Agents. I doubt that there is a formal written policy of domestic spying and holding people for an indeterminate term without a sentence, but when someone makes a rouge decision, those in command can either over rule the decision or ignore it and look the other way. It thus becomes sort of impossible to know how many or how few people are involved in illegal activities, how many illegal acts are taking place or who initiated them.

Now Charles Stephano’s appeal is based on the perjury of Federal Witnesses and is wicked at best. The Judge is past retirement date and way in the hither lands so he can either do the right thing or simply look the other way for another six months and dump it in the lap of his replacement. Meanwhile, Mr. Stephano is developing some potentially dangerous health issues so if the Feds just wait long enough, he could die and the whole sordid affair will be over. So it’s hard to figure out why anyone would do something very stupid in the affairs of Mr. Stephano and I guess this is just another area of the Federal Criminal Justice System that we will never figure out.

In the words of Mr. Stephano:

I received correspondence from my Legal Representative, Return Address “Law Office of Martial Webster, Attorney at Law.” It was a legal envelope clearly addressed thusly:

LEGAL MAIL

Charles Stephano

Reg. No. etc. etc.

Now legal Mail is considered “By the rules and by the book” as sacrosanct as the Diplomatic Pouch. Even a modicum of intelligence would dictate that legal mail is privileged in the legal sense. Guests of these Federal Detention Centers enjoy few privileges. After all they ait here to receive the Medal of Honor! One of these few privileges is the right to 100% private 2-way communications with their lawyer. This is a Law in itself: A Federal Law. People just don’t go about breaking federal laws willy-nilly, or do they?

My clearly marked legal mail had been opened before I saw or received it. Regular mail is regularly read by these federal employees – outgoing or incoming. I have no problem with that. But, my legal mail (Being Clearly identified as such) was opened, read and maybe even copied prior to my receipt of same. I’ve gone on record in protest of this clear violation or my rights.

The unfortunate little detail left out by Stephano is that he has been incarcerated in a Federal prision for more than two years without either having had his right to an appeal or even being sentaced to a specific term. Oh well maybe the Feds will get lucky and he will die in jail so they never have to defend their abuses of power.

Jill Trumbull-Harris, Story Teller

“Oh what a wicked web we weave

When first we practice to deceive”

“But then when we have practiced quite a while

how vastly we improve our style”.

“Success at trials can be child’s play

when willing to lie to win the day.”

When Little Jill and her Professor wrote the book on Mock Trials, even though she was not yet a lawyer, the authors were very careful to describe the need to be ethical while developing the story to be told at trial. There was not even a hint that a Lawyer or Law Student should ever tamper with witnesses or evidence or suborn perjury. Their method allows for being selective in the evidence and witnesses presented in support of the story, but officially frowns on truly unethical acts.

In some cases it’s really not necessary to alter the story of a person who wants to be the hero in saving the community from some dastardly villain. Once the hero learns the most important facts (which can be transmitted by a skillful interviewer who is guiding the questioning with smiles and frowns), a smart hero will pick up on the story he is supposed to tell and adapt his story accordingly so he can remain the hero.

Our Technician who discovered the kiddie porn on the computer didn’t need much guidance to develop a story compatible with the story Little Jill was trying to develop. Initially he kept on trying to tell his version of the truth at the suppression of evidence hearing but did manage to get most of his “facts” in line with the story by trial.

The biggest flaw was that he was testifying way beyond his scope of expertise. Mr Aloyo described himself as an A+ certified entry-level technician who works in a position to diagnoses and repairs computers. In no way does this qualify him to testify on the nature, appearance or cause of popup windows and browsers. Yet he said that the porn was on a browser and not a popup. Aloyo has no proven or even self proclaimed expertise in scripting for the Internet so could not make that determination. He assumed, as an armature might, that a popup is one of those miserable advertising boxes which can only be closed by clicking on the “X” in the box on the upper right. In fact the javascript code to open a whole new window involves changing the word “no” to “yes” seven times which is certainly no great programming feat. So the same code that creates advertising popups also can be used to create spawned porn browsers.

The code for a pornloader can be found here. It is not the best, it is not the worse, it is simply one that works and proves that full fledged browser can be made to pop-up all over the place. There are no porn pictures of any type used in this demonstration. It is completely safe (although annoying) and will also prove that pop-up pages do register in index.dat files and that images will be stored in cache image folders whether you requested the images or not. When browser pages load in the index.dat file you can’t tell for the most part whether it was a spawned browser, someone clicked a link or someone typed in a URL. (For this demonstration to work, the popup blocker must be turned off.)

I don’t believe Little Jill asked Aloyo to lie, I believe it just came easy for him with a little guidance from Jill.

Jill Trumbull Harris, the Pied Piper of Witnesses

You really should check the original version of both the Pied Piper Story and Trial Advocacy to see how close I stick to the title. I will get to the Pied Piper in a moment, but a pretty close description of trial advocacy is presented as it was written by Jill Trumbull Harris in a previous post.

Now her story told about Stephano was 100% consistent. The old man lived in a pig sty that only a mentally ill person could endure. He lived alone and spent every waking moment typing in URL’s of kiddie porn sites where he intentionally downloaded 40,000 porn pictures of which, 600 were readily identified as kiddie porn. This deranged 64 year old man took time to learn everything about computer security in the two months he owned the machine, his machine was fully protected and he never got hit by pornloaders or was unintentionally redirected to a site which had kiddie porn. He was just a disgusting dirty old man who liked looking at kiddie porn and if he would stop, no one would ever molest a child again as there would be no profit motive if people stopped paying for porn.

Now the problem with the story is that it never fit the facts. Obviously this deranged old man had no credit cards or memberships at pay per view sites and never used a chat room. But some evidence was on Jill’s side and that was the pictures. Every time the defense would discredit her case, she would show a few hundred really nasty pictures and the video of the horrific dump Stephano lived in. Over and over the jury was told that possession of only one picture was a criminal offense but he possessed 600. Now if the story were tried strictly on the thesis, it would be tough to beat. Unfortunately, there was a complete body of evidence that contradicted her story.

According to Jill, it is permissible to minimize evidence and contradict witnesses when they contradict your story as long as it’s done in an ethical manner. However, the question which will be explored is about suborning perjury under the guise of Homeland Security and the Protected Critical Information Infrastructure Act.

Now as the Pied Piper, Jill Trumbull Harris came to St. Croix to protect the community from perverts if only the witnesses would help her develop her story and remember things her way. It’s hard to know what siren song she sang that mesmerized her witnesses it to mindlessly following her story line and failing to tell the simple truth when asked a direct question.

It appears that Stephano’s attorney has finally presented an appeal that leaves the judge with a Faustian dilemma. The appeal is based on blatant and provable perjury. If he grants the appeal, perjury charges should follow and be directed at federally employed agents and expert witnesses.

Now Jill got a promotion and is probably above the law so it will be interesting to see who is blamed for the perjured testimony. However like the Pied Piper she will flee our community forever and leave us with memories of  her dastardly deed.

Why Fuck Wade Rowland Sanders?

Who is this man and why did he plead guilty to Child Pornography?

He was a U.S. Navy Swift boat captain during the Vietnam War, where he earned the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He retired from the U.S. Navy as a captain. He was chosen by fellow Swift boat veteran John Kerry to introduce him at the 2004 Democratic Convention, when the Senator accepted the presidential nomination.

Previously, he entered the 2000 congressional race in a San Diego district, but withdrew citing lack of funding. He also served as the senior adviser to California Lt. Gov. John Garamendi for Veterans and Military Affairs until the time of his arrest, according to the U.S. Attorney’s office. He was also in the Clinton administration as a deputy assistant secretary of the Navy.

When Garamendi’s office announced his appointment in July 2007, it said he was a practicing lawyer and a community activist. “He is a member of the San Diego Police Department Senior Oversight Committee and has served on many non-profit boards,” the lieutenant governor’s office said.

His name is Wade Rowland Sanders.

FBI agents raided Sanders’ home last May after they suspected his home Internet service account was used to download several pictures and a video showing underage girls having sex with adult men, according to an investigator’s sworn statement. “Sanders admitted that he had downloaded child pornography using the program Limewire but that he deleted the files once he noticed that they had been downloaded,” FBI Special Agent John Caruthers said.

Now for those who don’t know, Limewire is a very insecure file sharing program. A remote attacker can request and read any file on a host running an affected version of Limewire. The files accessible to a remote attacker include all of the user’s private, local files, and any file on the machine if the user has administrator privileges.

In plain English, it doesn’t matter what a person does to delete a file after it’s been downloaded. There is probably a record in the download file and and another in a Temp file where it was viewed after downloading. It doesn’t take a genius to move a file from the Temp file to the “My Documents” folder so any computer personnel for FBI or Home Land Security could make the transfer.

A search of Sanders’ computer found the child porn files saved on his hard drive in two “My Documents” folders. Which is certainly not the default storage place for Windows.

Wade Rowland Sanders admitted to having 600 images of minors on his computer, including a video depicting “several prepubescent females engaged in sexual conduct with an adult male and performing oral sex on one another,” according to a statement from U.S. Attorney Karen Hewitt.

When Sanders, 67, is sentenced on March 30, he could get up to 10 years in prison and be ordered to pay a $250,000 fine.  The minimum sentence for the charge is five years with supervised release for his lifetime and registration as a sex offender, the prosecutor said.

Now a couple of items are strange. The 600 images are about the same number as the Stefano Computer and these are the easiest to find as they are all hashed and archived in the National Archive of Kiddie Porn Pics. Like any other celebrity prosecution by the government, they picked a pillar of the community who is a veteran and had a noble career (like Stephano). I don’t know what Sanders did to become an enemy of the Bush administration but am getting a better idea of what Stephano did.

So why did he plead guilty of possession?

Kiddie porn is such a heinous crime that once you are charged and a story about you developed by an all powerful government, you have no defense. You may as well crawl in a hole in the ground and die. Just plead guilty and done.

As a footnote to planted evidence, this method is far cleaner than the one used against Stephano. In his case, Agent Carter went on line with Stephano’s computer and surfed known kiddie porn sites. He then went to hidden files which were beyond the technological grasp of Stephano and copied the pictures in order to support a warrant to seize the computer and gather evidence that there were 600 pictures in hidden files in cache memory. All in all a pretty primitive method to plant evidence.

In the case of Mr. Sanders, he downloaded a movie from a honeypot which he found offensive enough to delete. Somebody went to the Temp files and moved it into “My Documents” where it was available to a casual observer without going on line.

Oh well Life sucks and then you die.

American Justice

In my youth, I would rather run wild in the woods than watch Television but on rainy days or when it was too dark and cold in winter to be outside, there were books and Television. One family favorite was Perry Mason that intrepid seeker of truth who was part detective and part Defense lawyer who got his clients off by seeking the truth and inevitably finding the guilty party.

Well, this vision is pretty much bullshit in our modern world. Law is no longer about a noble lawyer in a battle to learn the truth. It is a combative blood sport played by pugnacious lawyers out to win at all cost. The outcome of the trial is not a matter or guilt or innocence but simply a battle to tell the most believable story and score a win for the story teller. The fact that justice may or may not be served is somewhat irrelevant.

The art of story telling is so important that it is now taught in law schools all over the nation and there is  a national ranking of law schools that teach Trial Advocacy or how to develop a detailed story which will allow you to win your case.

Now the following brief description of the new system of American Justice is very jaded:

Each party to a trial has the opportunity to tell a story…The person who succeeds in telling the most persuasive story should win….Devising the story you tell at trial is a creative process since the facts in the case file will almost always be subject to multiple interpretations. To imagine the most persuasive trial story, imagine a series of alternative scenarios and assess each for its clarity, simplicity, and believability..

This is a pretty disgusting view of American Justice but it’s exactly that taught by Prosecutor, Jill Trumbull-Harris, as she wrote the book with a coauthor and that’s a quote from page 19 of the book. It’s easy to see how this attitude would corrupt the justice system especially when used by the government prosecutor in a trial. An overbearing government can coach witnesses, include or disallow evidence and tell any story they want with impunity. (I mean who polices the police or prosecutes the Prosecutor?) The job of the government is no longer to solve the crime and seek justice but to tell the best story and win the case.