Penny Dean and Your Rights

President Donald Trump announced Friday plans to nominate Fraternal Order of Police President Chuck Canterbury to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Canterbury has been Fraternity Order of Police (FOP) president for 16 years, having previously spent 26 years in the Horry County, South Carolina, Police Department’s patrol, criminal and training divisions, according to the White House statement.

The maker of vehicle license plate readers used extensively by the US government and cities to identify and track citizens and immigrants has been hacked. Its internal files were pilfered, and are presently being offered for free on the dark web to download.

Tennessee-based Perceptics prides itself as "the sole provider of stationary LPRs [license plate readers] installed at all land border crossing lanes for POV [privately owned vehicle] traffic in the United States, Canada, and for the most critical lanes in Mexico."

Police have the power to collect your location along with the numbers of your incoming and outgoing calls and intercept the content of call and text communication. They can do all of this without you ever knowing about it.

How? They use a shoebox-sized device called a StingRay. This device (also called an IMSI catcher) mimics cell phone towers, prompting all the phones in the area to connect to it even if the phones aren't in use.

For nearly two years, Minneapolis waited for answers about the fatal police shooting of Justine Ruszczyk, an unarmed woman who had called 911 seeking help. There was no video of the shooting. There was no audio. And the officer involved, Mohamed Noor, would not answer investigators’ questions.

But on Tuesday, after a monthlong trial in downtown Minneapolis, a jury handed down a verdict that is exceedingly rare in police shooting cases: Mr. Noor was guilty of murder.

From TheFederalist.com:

If your lawyer believes that having a firearm license defines you as dangerous, you may be at risk of losing your Second Amendment rights and even your freedom. You may not know about his belief or recognize the risk until it is too late.

I can almost hear you saying, “My attorney is my advocate. What are you talking about? That could never happen!” You are wrong.

A US judge gave the cops permission to force people's fingers onto seized iPhones to see who could unlock them, a newly unsealed search warrant has revealed.

Specifically, Judge Judith Dein, of the federal district court of Massachusetts, gave agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) the right to press Robert Brito-Pina's fingers on any iPhone found in his apartment in Boston. The bloke was suspected to be trafficking guns, hence the application for a search warrant. In fact, anyone nabbed at the property would be forced to use their fingers to unlock any cellphones seized at the home, according to the court filing.

The warrant, issued April 18, is due to be executed by May 2, though it's not clear if it has been carried out yet, and therefore if the agents have been able to force Brito-Pina's fingers, or anyone else's digits, onto mobiles seized at the apartment, including his own iPhone. In any case, the document makes it plain that the ATF went to some trouble to get the judge's specific authorization on the issue.

An 18-year-old New York student has slapped Apple with a $1 billion lawsuit after he says the company’s facial recognition software led to his false arrest.

The suit filed Monday alleges that Ousmane Bah was first wrongly identified as a thief at one of Apple’s stores in Boston last May after someone used his learner's driving permit which did not have a photo to pass themselves off as him when they were caught stealing more than $1,200 worth of merchandise. Bah claims he lost his permit, which may have been found or stolen by the real criminal.

A hacker broke into thousands of accounts belonging to users of two GPS tracker apps, giving him the ability to monitor the locations of tens of thousands of vehicles and even turn off the engines for some of them while they were in motion, Motherboard has learned.

A man who refused to open his door to let police enter his home without a warrant should not have been convicted for obstruction of justice, the lead opinion for the Washington Supreme Court concluded on Thursday. “Criminalizing the refusal to open one’s own door to a warrantless entry would be enormously chilling and inconsistent with our deeply held constitutional values,” Justice Steven Gonzalez wrote in Shoreline v. McLemore.

The first state trooper to be sentenced in the major overtime fraud scandal got just one day in prison — time served — after admitting he stole more than $7,000, though prosecutors pushed for three months behind bars.

Eric Chin, 46, of Hanover will have to pay back the $7,125 he admitted to stealing through claiming overtime hours he didn’t actually work. U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns on Monday sentenced Chin to a single day in jail — which the judge deemed he’d already served before his arraignment — with three months of house arrest and nine months of supervised release.

Chin, who has been fired by the state police, pleaded guilty in December to one count of embezzlement from an agency receiving federal funds.

U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling had sought three months behind bars for Chin followed by a year of supervised release. In a sentencing memorandum, Lelling wrote, “Few crimes strike at the core of the justice system more than those involving law enforcement officers who choose to break, rather than uphold, the law. Though at its heart a crime motivated by simple greed, it is far more troubling than the run of the mill fraud cases in this court.”