Tuesday, March 9, 2021
County Prosecutor Floats Charging Gretchen Whitmer over Nursing Home Deaths
A prosecutor from a large Michigan county raised the prospect of charging Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) over thousands of coronavirus-related deaths that occurred in nursing homes.
Macomb County Prosecutor Peter Lucido told WXYZ criminal charges “could be in the works” if families of victims are able to obtain “he vital information about the circumstances of their death and take that to local police and make a complaint as a wrongful death.”
Medical privacy laws prevent Lucido from getting the information, he said.
“If we find there’s been willful neglect of office if we find there’s been reckless endangerment of a person’s life by bringing them in then we would move forward with charges against the Governor. Of course, we would,” he told WXYZ.
“Nobody’s above the law in this state.”
Via WXYZ:
Lucido is asking people to go back to the nursing homes and gather the vital information surrounding deaths and take it to local police to file a wrongful death report.Lucido told Breitbart News in January he wanted the prosecutors association to assemble a “blue ribbon committee” to review nursing home deaths.
He will be meeting with Macomb County Police to instruct them on how to process and verify the information and bring it to his office.
“The public deserves nothing less,” he said.
According to WXYZ, the association “as a group declined and said Lucido should make the request to the Michigan Attorney General and...
Chinese Communist Party Violating Every Act Of Genocide Convention New Legal Report Finds.
A new non-governmental legal report finds the Chinese Communist Party guilty of violating every article of the United Nations’ genocide convention.
Published by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy in cooperation with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, the report is the “first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China.”
“For this purpose, dozens of experts in international law, genocide studies, Chinese ethnic policies, and the region were invited to examine pro-bono all available evidence that could be collected and verified from public Chinese State communications, leaked Chinese State communications, eyewitness testimony, and open-source research methods such as public satellite-image analysis, analysis of information circulating on the Chinese internet, and any other available source,” a summary of the report’s methodology notes.
According to the United Nations 1948 convention – signed by 152 countries including China – genocide occurs if a party violates just one of the following five acts: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The report posits the Chinese Communist Party is guilty of engaging in all five, emphasizing it has an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
“The intent to destroy the Uighurs as a group is derived from objective proof, consisting of comprehensive state policy and practice, which President Xi Jinping, the highest authority in China, set in motion,” the report highlights.
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The FBI Should Stop Attacking Encryption and Tell Congress About All the Encrypted Phones It’s Already Hacking Into
4th Amendment? What's That?
Federal law enforcement has been asking for a backdoor to read Americans’ encrypted communications for years now. FBI Director Christopher Wray did it again last week in testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. As usual, the FBI’s complaints involved end-to-end encryption employed by popular messaging platforms, as well as the at-rest encryption of digital devices, which Wray described as offering “user-only access.”
The FBI wants these terms to sound scary, but they actually describe security best practices. End-to-end encryption is what allows users to exchange messages without having them intercepted and read by repressive governments, corporations, and other bad actors. And “user-only access” is actually a perfect encapsulation of how device encryption should work; otherwise, anyone who got their hands on your phone or laptop—a thief, an abusive partner, or an employer—could access its most sensitive data. When you intentionally weaken these systems, it hurts our security and privacy, because there’s no magical kind of access that only works for the good guys. If Wray gets his special pass to listen in on our conversations and access our devices, corporations, criminals, and authoritarians will be able to get the same access.
It’s remarkable that Wray keeps getting invited to Congress to sing the same song. Notably, Wray was invited there to talk, in part, about the January 6th insurrection, a serious domestic attack in which the attackers—far from being concerned about secrecy—proudly broadcast many of their crimes, resulting in hundreds of arrests.
It’s also remarkable what Wray, once more, chose to leave out of this narrative. While Wray continues to express frustration about what his agents can’t get access to, he fails to brief Senators about the shocking frequency with which his agency already accesses Americans’ smartphones. Nevertheless, the scope of police snooping on Americans’ mobile phones is becoming clear, and it’s not just the FBI who is doing it. Instead of inviting Wray up to Capitol Hill to ask for special ways to invade our privacy and security, Senators should be asking Wray about the private data his agents are already trawling through.
Police Have An Incredible Number of Ways to Break Into Encrypted Phones
In all 50 states, police are breaking into phones on a vast scale. An October report from the non-profit Upturn, “Mass Extraction,” has revealed details of how invasive and widespread police hacking of our phones has become. Police can easily purchase forensic tools that extract data from nearly every popular phone. In March 2016, Cellebrite, a popular forensic tool company, supported “logical extractions” for 8,393 different devices, and “physical extractions,” which involves copying all the data on a phone bit-by-bit, for 4,254 devices. Cellebrite can bypass lock screens on about 1,500 different devices.
How do they bypass encryption? Often, they just guess the password. In 2018, Prof. Matthew Green estimated it would take no more than 22 hours for forensic tools to break into some older iPhones with a 6-digit passcode simply by continuously guessing passwords (i.e. “brute-force” entry). A 4-digit passcode would fail in about 13 minutes.
That brute force guessing was enabled by a hardware flaw that has been fixed since 2018, and the rate of password guessing is much more limited now. But even as smartphone companies like Apple improve their security, device hacking remains very much a cat-and-mouse game. As recently as September 2020, Cellebrite marketing materials boasted its tools can break into iPhone devices up to “the latest iPhone 11/ 11 Pro / Max running the latest iOS versions up to the latest 13.4.1”
Even when passwords can’t be broken, vendors like Cellebrite offer “advanced services” that can unlock even the newest...
In all 50 states, police are breaking into phones on a vast scale. An October report from the non-profit Upturn, “Mass Extraction,” has revealed details of how invasive and widespread police hacking of our phones has become. Police can easily purchase forensic tools that extract data from nearly every popular phone. In March 2016, Cellebrite, a popular forensic tool company, supported “logical extractions” for 8,393 different devices, and “physical extractions,” which involves copying all the data on a phone bit-by-bit, for 4,254 devices. Cellebrite can bypass lock screens on about 1,500 different devices.
How do they bypass encryption? Often, they just guess the password. In 2018, Prof. Matthew Green estimated it would take no more than 22 hours for forensic tools to break into some older iPhones with a 6-digit passcode simply by continuously guessing passwords (i.e. “brute-force” entry). A 4-digit passcode would fail in about 13 minutes.
That brute force guessing was enabled by a hardware flaw that has been fixed since 2018, and the rate of password guessing is much more limited now. But even as smartphone companies like Apple improve their security, device hacking remains very much a cat-and-mouse game. As recently as September 2020, Cellebrite marketing materials boasted its tools can break into iPhone devices up to “the latest iPhone 11/ 11 Pro / Max running the latest iOS versions up to the latest 13.4.1”
Even when passwords can’t be broken, vendors like Cellebrite offer “advanced services” that can unlock even the newest...
The New York Times Is Having An Embarrassing Meltdown Over Josh Hawley’s Existence
New York Times reporters debased themselves by asking Josh Hawley's middle school principal and former prom date for comment on the Republican senator.
Just before the third chapter of “How I Became A Famous Novelist,” Steve Hely’s 2009 satirical novel lampooning the publishing industry, he includes a fake New York Times Best Seller list. The No. 4 Nonfiction slot goes to “Needs Improvement In All Areas,” an attack on President George W. Bush, written by his former kindergarten teacher.
That happened for real today when The New York Times broke the news that an administrator from Sen. Josh Hawley’s middle school disapproved of his politics.
Barbara Weibling is quoted condemning her former middle school charge. Left unsaid by The New York Times is that Barbara Weibling is a left-wing activist. She is a small but committed donor to Democrats, and a perusal of her Facebook page shows she’s not exactly an unbiased educator. Her avatar is a flattering portraiture of Vice President Kamala Harris in the foreground, with President Joe Biden in the background.
She posts about her strong dislike of Fox News (where this reporter is a contributor) and love of Russia collusion conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. She posts outlandish left-wing claims from a group called “Occupy Democrats.” In between the supportive posts of socialism, Bernie Sanders, and Biden are attacks on Republicans going back to Reagan, at least. Is it really news that her dislike of Republicans extends to a former student at her school?
As silly as the whole thing is, the Times’ Elaina Plott and Danny Hakim debased themselves further by — and I’m in no way joking here — asking Hawley’s high school prom date for her thoughts. His prom date. HIS PROM DATE.
“I’ve been very disappointed to see who he has become,” said Kristen Ruehter-Thompson, who is pictured here in an online fundraiser from a few years ago with her family:
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