Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. The total value of asset forfeitures was more than one-third of the total value of property stolen by criminals in 2014. That represents something of a sea change in the way police do business — and it's prompting plenty of scrutiny of the practice.
A Leak Has $prung →
By one estimate -- based on data from the World Bank, IMF, UN, and central banks of 139 countries -- between $21 and $32 trillion is hiding in tax havens, more than the United States’ national debt. That study didn’t even attempt to count money from fraud, drug trafficking and other criminal transactions whose perpetrators gravitate toward the same secret hideouts.
...a new trove of secret information is shining unprecedented light on this dark corner of the global economy. Fusion analyzed an archive containing 11.5 million internal documents from Mossack Fonseca’s files, including corporate records, financial filings, emails, and more, extending from the firm's inception in 1977 to December 2015. The documents were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with Fusion and over 100 other media outlets by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as part of the Panama Papersinvestigation. The massive leak is estimated to be 100 times bigger than Wikileaks. It's believed to be the largest global investigation in history.
In recent years, government investigations have centered on how major banks are used to move, hide, and launder money by the wealthy. But the new Panama Papers trove shows the role of often-overlooked lawyers and incorporation agents in the process. The results of the yearlong investigation encompass 214,488 corporate entities – among them companies, trusts, and foundations –controlled by everyone from heads of state, politicians, Forbes-listed billionaires, to drug lords, businesses blacklisted by the US government, scammers, and FIFA officials. There’s a common thread between members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, the man who laundered money from a record-setting robbery in the U.K., and a drug trafficker convicted of killing a U.S. DEA agent: They have all used companies created by Mossack Fonseca.
Panama Papers: Mossack Fonseca leak reveals elite's tax havens →
Eleven million documents were leaked from one of the world's most secretive companies, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.
They show how Mossack Fonseca has helped clients launder money, dodge sanctions and evade tax.
The company says it has operated beyond reproach for 40 years and has never been charged with criminal wrong-doing.
The documents show links to 72 current or former heads of state in the data, including dictators accused of looting their own countries.
Gerard Ryle, director of the ICIJ, said the documents covered the day-to-day business at Mossack Fonseca over the past 40 years.
"I think the leak will prove to be probably the biggest blow the offshore world has ever taken because of the extent of the documents," he said.
Lawful Hacking and Continuing Vulnerabilities →
This is how vulnerability research is supposed to work.
Vulnerabilities are found, fixed, then published. The entire security community is able to learn from the research, and -- more important -- everyone is more secure as a result of the work.
The FBI is doing the exact opposite. It has been given whatever vulnerability it used to get into the San Bernardino phone in secret, and it is keeping it secret. All of our iPhones remain vulnerable to this exploit. This includes the iPhones used by elected officials and federal workers and the phones used by people who protect our nation's critical infrastructure and carry out other law enforcement duties, including lots of FBI agents.
This is the trade-off we have to consider: Do we prioritize security over surveillance, or do we sacrifice security for surveillance?
Trump the Disrupter →
Parliamentary democracy is often tumultuous, but like a slippery fault system, the turmoil tends to release pent-up tension gradually, in regular small bursts, rather than catastrophically, all of a sudden. To become prime minister, a politician needs to climb the ranks through the system— a process that tends to weed out reactionaries and radicals. To remain in power, a prime minister needs to nurture the respect of the coalition that promoted her or him in the first place. Should the parliament lose confidence in the prime minister, it selects another, or parliament is dissolved and the country holds a general election.
Presidential systems impose no similarly moderating influences on ambitious demagogues. Linz recognized that by forcing two different, popularly elected branches of government to share power—like twin princes fighting for the throne—presidential systems give rise to legitimation crises almost by design. A few years before Linz died, this observation was borne out dramatically by the consecutive U.S. elections of 2008 and 2010, when voters installed a Democratic president by a landslide, then a Republican House of Representatives by another landslide. The question of which branch of the government was the more legitimate voice of the people pitted Congress and the White House against each other in dangerous brinkmanship. Within months of the 2010 midterms, the government nearly ceased functioning twice, the second time amid a threat by the GOP majority to undermine the supposedly inviolable validity of U.S. debt.
That crisis, which courted global economic calamity, was resolved at the last minute when President Obama largely acceded to House Speaker John Boehner’s demands. But the episode raised an alarming question: What happens when we have a president who refuses to be so accommodating?
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It is no great stretch to interpret Trump’s rise as a phenomenon driven by disgruntled masses abandoning democracy in favor of autocracy—as part of the natural progression of Linzian decay. But it’s also possible that American democracy really is unusually resistant to systemic breakdown and can endure even the unprecedented challenges that Trump could pose. Maybe, despite the potential for crisis that’s baked into our way of governing, we can relieve these systemic tensions in other ways: through party realignments, through sheer institutional robustness, or through popular insistence that we uphold our constitutional traditions. In that more optimistic light, Trump looks less like doom for the republic than doom for the Republican Party.
If Trump were to govern with a more even keel than he’s led us to expect, his presidency could conceivably serve as a weird remedy to the constitutional problems we’re already experiencing—and end up being powerful evidence of the political anti-gravity that keeps our democracy from succumbing to ideological polarization.
Ralph Nader: Why Bernie Sanders was right to run as a Democrat →
During a recent town hall in Columbus, Ohio, Sen. Bernie Sanders said the unthinkable. At least, you would have thought he did, judging by the response of several Democratic operatives. Sanders was deemed “extremely disgraceful” by Donna Brazile, vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, and “a political calculating fraud” by Brad Woodhouse, a former DNC communications director.
What was his crime? The old-fashioned Rooseveltian New Dealer had answered a question about why he is running as a Democrat, instead of as an independent, with typical candor: “In terms of media coverage, you had to run within the Democratic Party,” he observed, adding that he couldn’t raise money outside the major two-party process.
As one of the more successful third-party presidential candidates in recent U.S. history, I know firsthand the obstacles Sanders might have faced if he had run as an independent...
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Just appearing on the ballot is a challenge for independent candidates. While any Democrat or Republican who wins their party’s nomination is guaranteed a place on general-election ballots nationwide, smaller parties must, in many states, petition election officials to be listed. And that is a delicate process, easy for the major parties to disrupt. Their operatives have a number of tools at their disposal to knock third-party candidates off the ballot, render their campaigns broke, and harass and ostracize them.
The Places on Campus Where Concealed-Carry Is Most Controversial →
Two years ago, Georgia’s Republican governor, Nathan Deal, signed a law allowing licensed gun owners to carry their weapons into churches, schools, bars, and some government buildings. But when a bill that would allow people to pack heat on college campuses flew through the legislature and landed on his desk this month, he balked.
Disciplinary hearings, campus day-care centers, and faculty and staff offices were places that gave the governor pause, prompting him to ask lawmakers to carve out more gun-free, or at least gun-optional zones. They refused, so now he has until May 3 to sign the legislation or veto it. If he does neither, it automatically passes and Georgia will become the ninth state with a campus-carry law on the book
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In some states, the possibility of negotiation over which campus locations can exclude firearms has gun enthusiasts and skeptics sketching out complex scenarios. They involve checkpoints, lockers, and areas of potential confusion, including questions about security in buildings where some professors will be allowing armed visitors and others won’t.
Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues →
But the years that followed have done little to narrow the list of likely precursors. Rather, the murky science seems to imply that nearly anyone is a potential terrorist. Some studies suggest that terrorists are likely to be educated or extroverted; others say uneducated recluses are at risk. Many studies seem to warn of the adolescent condition, singling out young, impatient men with a sense of adventure who are “struggling to achieve a sense of selfhood.”
Such generalizations are why civil libertarians see only danger in government efforts to identify people at risk of committing crimes. Researchers, too, say they have been frustrated by both the Bush and Obama administrations because of what they say is a preoccupation with research that can be distilled into simple checklists, even at the risk of casting unnecessary suspicion on innocent people.