Tag: crime

The value of a reputation

I strongly appreciate the importance of a reputation for probity.

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.

So many vague accusations and suspicions can float around in everyday life where the best basis for judgement is to appeal to prior probability. But this goes too far:

Mossack Fonseca says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and never been accused or charged with criminal wrong-doing.

Mossack Fonseca has just mislaid 11 million documents that show its complicity in a vast web of tax evasion through secret accounts in Panama. Even to say that it has operated legally would be stretching credulity. To say that it has been “beyond reproach”… well, I suppose it’s technically true, since no one knew enough about them to reproach them. Similarly a master burglar, when finally caught with his home full of stolen jewels and cash, could say, “This is an outrage. No one has ever cast such aspersions on my good name.”

Social climber

What is it about rock climbing that makes it such a useful synecdoche for enjoying your life? In an article about an unusual case about a girl whose lawsuit against a sexually abusive teacher foundered when her claims of “loss of enjoyment of life” seemed to be contradicted by a happy Facebook page, I was struck by the comment

Melissa’s account was mostly locked to outsiders, but some pictures were visible: Melissa hanging out with her boyfriend, Melissa working at a veterinary hospital, Melissa rock climbing, Melissa out drinking with friends… Nor did it support her claim of “loss of enjoyment of life,” which one judge has defined as the loss of “watching one’s children grow, participating in recreational activities, and drinking in the many other pleasures that life has to offer.” Rock climbing is a recreational activity; drinking with friends is one of life’s pleasures, after all. Last month, the court ordered Melissa to hand over every photograph, video, status update, and wall message ever posted on her Facebook accounts so that the school district may search for more clues that Melissa is secretly thriving.

And that reminded me of an article many years ago in Harper’s about American casualty adjustors, whose job it is to put a price on someone’s life for purposes of wrongful death suits.

I ask them to evaluate my worth, and they tell me that outdoorsy people are worth more than people like me, who stay home and read. “People have no sympathy for somebody who sits alone on his couch, drinks beer, eats food, and is a load,” Ed says.

“That’s why nobody likes me,” says George. “It’s how sympathetic you are. People go, ‘He rock climbed,’ you know. `This guy enjoyed life. He was out there doing things.’ You cherish life more if you are interacting with it.”

Contrapositive version of “C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute”

A judge in Chicago has reversed this famous Napoleonic bon mot. Whereas Antoine Boulay attacked a judicial decision (to condemn the Duc d’Enghien) as “Worse than a crime, an error,” Judge Dennis Porter has decided to acquit a murderer with the reverse argument: “It was not an error, therefore not as bad as a crime.”

The basic facts are these: the accused, off-duty police officer (not that that has anything to do with it) Dante Servin, having decided on his own initiative to confront a noisy crowd from the comfort of his automobile, says he was spooked when he mistook a telephone for a gun. He naturally did what any reasonable person would do in such a situation: He fired five shots blindly into the crowd, missing the man with the dangerous telephone, but killing one other person and injuring another. In his trial for manslaughter the judge ruled that he could not possibly be guilty of that crime, because manslaughter requires “recklessness”, and Servin was clearly not reckless because he intended to shoot at people. No, really:

Porter… agreed that Servin was acting intentionally when he fired his gun. In fact, he said in his ruling, Illinois courts have long held that when a defendant “intends to fire a gun, points it in the general direction of his or her intended victim, and shoots, such conduct is not merely reckless,” but “intentional” and “the crime, if any there be, is first degree murder.”

Since he had not been charged with first degree murder, the only alternative was to acquit him.

Are you “cultural”?

A while back I remarked on a tic shared by politicians and political journalists, of designating certain people and their voting choices as “demographic”. Now the RCMP have disrupted a planned mass shooting at a Halifax mall.

wouldn’t characterize it as a terrorist event. I would classify it as a group of individuals that had some beliefs and were willing to carry out violent acts against citizens,” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commanding Officer Brian Brennan said.

Now, you may be wondering, how do “violent acts against citizens” carried out by “individuals that had some beliefs” — I’m guessing he means to imply that the acts were supposed to be promoting those beliefs somehow — differ from what you or I would call “terrorism”?

He would not specify what those beliefs were, saying simply that “they were not culturally based.”

Got that? “Terrorists” carry out their violent acts in furtherance of beliefs that are “culturally based”. Wanton violence to promote non-culturally-based beliefs are lamentable, but not terrorism.

I wonder if he has any particular cultures in mind?

“The important thing is to get the money in”

That’s what Lin Homer, head of HM Revenues and Customs (the UK tax authority) said in 2012 about agreements not to prosecute wealthy Britons who had been concealing their money in Swiss bank accounts, and so also protect them from having their identities publicly revealed, in exchange for them kindly consenting to pay the taxes that they were legally obliged to pay. We wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone! And then I recall this woman (a mother with two children) who was sentenced to prison for five months for receiving an item of clothing from a friend who had stolen it.* As Bob Dylan sang, “Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king.”

Shocked by the criminal activity at HSBC in Geneva, which was revealed to the French tax authorities by an enterprising tech support guy, the Swiss police have been unusually active in seeking to ensure that such lawlessness is stopped — by seeking to extradite and prosecute the guy who revealed the information. Informed of HSBC’s crimes in 2010, the UK government sought ingeniously to decapitate the bank, by appointing its CEO Stephen Green to the House of Lords and making him Minister of State for Trade.

In order to further ensure that appropriate standards of legal and ethical behaviour were put into effect at HSBC, the head of tax at HMRC, Dave Hartnett, started working for HSBC as a consultant two years later.

* This sentence was later overturned on appeal. But she certainly wasn’t allowed anonymity, and no one said “The important thing is to get the trousers back”.

What would they do with the data?

The Conservatives and the security services are ramping up the propaganda for the digital panopticon, now particularly pressuring US-based social network companies to give up their quaint ideas of privacy. If you’re not with the snoopers you’re with the terrorists and the paedophiles.

“Terrorists are using the internet to communicate with each other and we must not accept that these communications are beyond the reach of the authorities or the internet companies themselves,” [David Cameron] told MPs after the report was published.

“Their networks are being used to plot murder and mayhem. It is their social responsibility to act on this.”

This refers to the government report on the murder of soldier Lee Rigby by an Islamist extremists Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, that accuses Facebook (not by name — the name of the company was only leaked to the press, for some reason) of failing to inform the security services that they had been carrying on conversations about plans to murder a soldier on Facebook.

Try this out with regard to telephone service: If criminals were found to have plotted a killing on the telephone — not that such things ever happened before there was Facebook — would that be taken to prove that the telecoms are responsible for monitoring the content of every phone call? What about the post? What if they didn’t use electronic media, but fiendishly took advantage of the fact that there is currently no electronic surveillance in everyone’s bedrooms?

Why aren’t the security services who have been downloading all of our communications, including everything on Facebook, supposedly to protect us from terrorism, responsible for detecting the terrorist chats?

Those who see no problem with the collection of vast quantities of private data by various security services, or who see it as a necessary evil, tend to assume that Western democracies can ensure through legal structures that the information is used in the public interest, in the defence of democracy. Others believe this is naïve. There is nothing about Western democracy that nullifies the basic truths of humanity, and how people respond to the temptations of power.

If you are having difficulty imagining what our wise and good protectors in the security services might get up to if they had access to a complete collection of correspondence, maps of contacts, purchasing history for everyone in the country — indeed, for most of the world — consider this historical affair that has recently been in the news: Continue reading “What would they do with the data?”

Alleged allegations

Do journalists even think about where they’re putting the word “alleged” as an incantation to ward off accusations that they might be making unproven accusations of criminality? Here’s a paragraph from today’s Guardian:

Scotland Yard has launched a criminal investigation into claims a child was killed by a paedophile ring alleged to have high-level connections to the establishment.

The Guardian understands the claim involves the alleged killing of a child during the alleged activities carried out by members of the ring.

There was an alleged killing during alleged activities. Shouldn’t that be “alleged members of the alleged ring”? If it turns out the members didn’t actually carry out any activities, then they wouldn’t really constitute a “ring”, would they? Conversely, if this was a “paedophile ring”, as the first sentence asserts, implicit in that is that there were activities, including paedophile activities, so why are they referred to as “alleged activities”? Perhaps “alleged child”, if it’s not yet clear if this particular crime has any basis in reality.

Default settings, encryption, and privacy

One essay that powerfully shaped my intellect in my impressionable youth was Douglas Hofstadter’s Changes in Default Words and Images, Engendered by Rising Consciousness, that appeared in the November 1982 issue of Scientific American (back when Scientific American was good), and Hofstadter’s associated satire A Person Paper on Purity in Language. Hofstadter’s point is that we are constantly filling in unknown facts about the world with default assumptions that we can’t recognise unless they happen to collide with facts that are discovered later. He illustrates this with the riddle, popular among feminists in the 1970s, that begins with the story of a man driving in a car with his young son. The car runs off the road and hits a tree, and the man is killed instantly. The boy is brought to the hospital, prepped for surgery, and then the surgeon takes one look at him and says “I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son.” As Hofstadter tells it, when this story was told at a party, people were able to conceive of explanations involving metempsychosis quicker than they could come to the notion that the surgeon was a woman. It’s not that they considered it impossible for a woman to be a surgeon. It’s just that you can’t think of a human being without a sex, so it gets filled in with the default sex “male”. (The joke wouldn’t really work today, I imagine. Not only are there so many women surgeons that it’s hard to have a very strong default assumption, but the boy could have two fathers. On the other hand, a “nurse” has a very strong female default, so much so that a male nurse is frequently called a “male nurse”, to avoid confusion.)

Continue reading “Default settings, encryption, and privacy”

David Cameron’s other operation

Headline in the Guardian:

David Cameron: I will not resign if Scotland votes for independence

It reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about hapless gangsters, the Piranha brothers:

they began to operate what they called ‘The Operation’. They would select a victim and then threaten to beat him up if he paid the so-called protection money. Four months later they started another operation which the called ‘The Other Operation’. In this racket they selected another victim and threatened not to beat him up if he didn’t pay them. One month later they hit upon ‘The Other Other Operation’. In this the victim was threatened that if he didn’t pay them, they would beat him up. This for the Piranha brothers was the turning point.

If Cameron really wants to preserve the union, he needs to switch to the other other operation, promising that he will resign if Scotland votes to stay in the UK.

Creative destruction (Updated)

Headline on the NY Times website:

TV Chief Takes 2-by-4 to a Proposed Cable Merger

I was at first confused by the reference. Having grown up around my father’s lumberyard, I naturally think of a 2-by-4 as a basic element of house construction. For those whose experience of lumber is shaped by Mafia films, it’s an implement of destruction. (It’s interesting how the pop-culture image of organised crime has been shaped by the somewhat coincidental situation of the New York-New Jersey crime families who largely laundered their money through construction firms. Think “cement overshoes”.) I am reminded of the period in the early 1990s when skinhead mobs in Eastern Germany and Berlin suddenly started attacking foreigners, particularly but not exclusively asylum-seekers. The favoured weapons were baseball bats. I remember an article from around 1993, where a police expert was interviewed about why it was that baseball bats were ideally suited to be used as weapons, in addition to their advantage of having a legal use that endows carrying them with a superficial legitimacy, despite the fact that, as the German association of baseball enthusiasts admitted, the total number of baseball players in Germany was estimated at just a few hundred, substantially smaller than the number of baseball bats that had been sold in the past year. In any case, baseball bats (“Baseballschläger”) have become routine emblems of violence in German newspaper headlines, with no further explanation required, specifically xenophobic neo-Nazi violence. For example, when Der Spiegel reported on a government-sponsored youth music initiative with a CD of songs opposing neo-Nazi violence, the article was titled

Tonträger gegen Baseballschläger     (Recordings vs. Baseball Bats)

Interestingly, when Bill Gates handed over control of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, Der Spiegel covered press reports with a headline “Baseball bat in his hand”, referring to an LA Times report that said

Ballmer, der dafür bekannt ist, dass er bei internen Besprechungen herumbrüllt und manchmal Anordnungen gibt, während er einen Baseballschläger in der Hand hält… (Ballmer, who is known for screaming during internal conferences, and sometimes holds a baseball bat in his hand while giving orders…)

It sounds much more menacing in German.

Update: Somehow I forgot the famous lyric from the gospel song Oh Mary Don’t you Weep (what I take to be Pete Seeger’s revised lyrics; at least, it’s clearly not part of the original spiritual, and does appear on Pete Seeger’s recordings, and later versions):

Moses stood on the Red Sea shore

Smotin’ the water with a two-by-four.

Pharaoh’s army got drowned.

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep!