90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, February 2, 2020

Happy Groundhog Day!!

California Crime Bill Would Allow Adults To Be Tried as Children

The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously termed the individual states “laboratories of democracy.”

In this way, California’s kind of like if you let Bunsen and Beaker from “The Muppet Show” loose to do as they pleased in the nation’s most populous state.

Instead of Beaker bearing the brunt of the ill-conceived experiments, however, the 39 million residents are the ones who end up feeling the pain when it all blows up in their face.

Plastic straw bans? Guess where they started?

A law designed to turn independent contractors into full-time employees that ended in massive job losses for those in the gig economy? They’ve got that, too.

Oh, and then there are those restrictive building policies that have led to expensive housing and massive rates of homelessness.

Paper straws, unemployment and tent cities are all pretty bad.

The damage SB 889 may end up wreaking upon California could be just as awful.

The legislation is the brainchild of state Sen. Nancy Skinner, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
I
She’s from Berkeley, so I’ll give you 0.5 guesses as to what party she belongs to. The particulars of the bill, introduced Jan. 24, can be summed up with a wait-you’re-kidding-she-didn’t-actually-propose-that-did-she headline:

SB 889 means criminal suspects under the age of 20 could be charged as juveniles.

“Under SB 889, prosecutors who wished to charge anyone aged 16 through 19 as an adult would need to file a motion in juvenile court,” the Mercury News reported.

“What happens next is a trial in front of a judge, who is presented with aggravating and mitigating factors, and determines whether to approve the...

China Caught Spying: Engineer at US Defense Contractor Charged for Taking Missile Defense Secrets to China

A Chinese-American former engineer at a major U.S. defense contractor has been indicted on charges of violating federal export control laws after he took his work laptop containing classified missile technology, without authorization, to China.

Wei Sun, a 48-year-old Chinese-born American citizen, had worked as an electrical engineer for a decade at Raytheon Missile Systems, a subsidiary of Raytheon, the fourth-largest U.S. defense contractor, according to court documents. The Arizona-based company produces missile and missile-defense systems for the U.S. military.

During his employment, Sun held a secret-level security clearance and had access to sensitive advanced missile-defense technology.

In December 2018, Sun told a Raytheon official that he planned on taking his work laptop on an overseas trip, court records said. The engineer was told however that doing so would be a violation of company policy and of federal export control law because his laptop contained sensitive information on a missile-defense project that he had been working on.

Sun did so anyway, prosecutors allege. He also logged onto the Raytheon internal network while overseas and, using his work email, sent an email to the company in January 2019 saying he was resigning in order to study and work overseas.

After returning to the United States a week later, he admitted to taking the laptop overseas, the documents said. While he initially told Raytheon security officials he had only visited Singapore and the Philippines during his trip, he later admitted to taking the laptop to China.

Sun was arrested by the FBI the next day, according to Quartz, which first reported the case.

As assessment of Sun’s laptop by a Raytheon lawyer confirmed that it contained defense data subject to export restrictions under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, the complaint said. Under those regulations, a person must apply for a license from the U.S. State Department to export any export-controlled data from the United States.

Sun’s laptop had sensitive data relating to two missile programs: advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) used on U.S. fighter jets and Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV), a now-canceled Pentagon project that aimed to replace the interceptor which shoots down...