Tag Archives: regulation

Cell Phone Searches

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The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday police must almost always obtain a warrant before searching mobile devices seized when arresting someone….

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the Court’s unanimously held opinion, said

Modern cellphones aren’t a technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans “the privacies of life.”

Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cellphone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant[.]

With this ruling the Court, among other things, placed the contents of cell phones outside the permissible warrantless searches allowed pursuant to an arrest that’s for the safety of the police (to ensure, for instance, the arrestee has no weapons or other devices that he could use to harm the arresting officer(s) and/or to attempt escape) and to safeguard related evidence until a warrant otherwise could be obtained.

Someone wrote earlier that this is the ruling that was warranted.

The opinion can be read here.

Gina “Joe” McCarthy is Speaking Again

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In a recent speech to the National Academy of Sciences, the EPA Administrator had this to say in decrying her critics:

…claiming that research is secret if researchers protect confidential personal health data from those who are not qualified to analyze it—and won’t agree to protect it.

By whose definition are the folks who want to see the data for themselves deemed not qualified, Madam? You’re the one keeping the data secret, on what basis do we take your word for it?

Won’t agree to protect what? On what basis do we even conclude the data are personal, when you won’t let us see it—especially given how easy it is to redact the personal identifiers without compromising the data themselves?

Hmm….

IRS’ Computers

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During Monday night’s House Oversight Committee hearing, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen tried to deflect blame for the missing Lerner Emails by claiming that the IRS’ computer systems were outdated, obsolete, prone to PC hard drive crashes, and it’s all due to lack of funding:

It is not unusual for computers anywhere to fail, especially at the IRS in light of the aged equipment IRS employees often have to use in light of the continual cuts in its budget these past four years. Since January 1 of this year, for example, over 2,000 employees have suffered hard drive crashes.

The IRS has, despite all those enormous budget cuts, a $1.8 billion IT budget. Regarding those obsolete systems, The New York Times had some thoughts:

After five years, a project to replace the Internal Revenue Service’s aging file-keeping computer system with modern technology is so far behind schedule that the IRS has told the prime contractor that unless it improves its performance by the end of the month [31 December 2003], the government may have no choice but to fire it.

The project, which was expected to cost $8 billion when completed, has spent less than $1 billion so far, but it is already 40% over budget for what it has done, according to the IRS Oversight Board, an independent watchdog body that Congress created in 1998.

And this:

”This is not about a one-time delay,” said Larry Levitan, chairman of the Oversight Board. ”Every single major project under way experienced a significant delay in time and overrun in budget—not two or three out of five, but five out of five. What we have here is a five-year track record of absolute consistency of cost overruns and delayed deliveries.”

In fact, some parts of the computer system upgrade project had fallen 27 months behind schedule in those five years.

There’s this update from Bloomberg:

The upgrade, which will allow the IRS to process the returns on a daily instead of a weekly cycle during the 2012 filing season, is part of a business systems modernization program, begun 12 years ago, that also includes overhauls of the agency’s electronic tax filing and data retrieval systems.

To get even this far, the IRS had to dumb down the project and not include, as originally planned and scheduled, retirement plan and business tax records in the database upgrade part of their project.

Of course, Turn-around Artist and part-time IRS Commissioner John Koskinen knows this history, but that’s a small point here. The larger point is that the IRS has had lots of time and lots of money with which to upgrade its systems—including the PCs its personnel have on their desk, PCs (and OEM hard drives) that cost jingle money compared to their systems upgrade project. In fact, were I to buy an adequate PC from Dell (adequate: no knock on Dell, meaning satisfactory for the job) for each of the 89,500 IRS employees, it would cost me just $125 million out of that $1.8 billion budget, or about 7% of the budget—and this would be expense that wouldn’t need to be repeated for four or five years.

Koskinen’s attempt to blame his “lost” emails on poor Congressional budget decisions is just another example of his, and the IRS’, general mendacity.

Aside: how well were the data on those 2,000 hard drives backed up?

IRS and Internal Emails

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Like a lot folks, I’m skeptical about the…accuracy…of the IRS’ lately claim that they can’t find Lois Lerner’s emails from before 2011.

My skepticism flows from a number of sources:

  • Why are they only now discovering the loss, a year after all that documentation was subpoenaed by House oversight committees?
  • The IRS claims a hard drive crash is at the heart of the loss—on what basis are we to believe that a single hard drive held all those documents?
  • The IRS’ hard drives—actually, the material stored on them—like all government hard drives/data, and like all such materials in the private, competitive sector, are backed up nightly: what are we to believe happened to all those backups?
  • Are we expected to believe that a professional IT crew would be so careless as to leave a single hard drive at the core of such a critical system? That they would leave all those backups at mercy of a single point of failure?

Note to those of you who believe the IRS’ claim: perhaps I can interest you in some beachfront property north of Santa Fe.

A Step in the Right Direction

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[A] bill announced Thursday by Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Senator John McCain (R, AZ) would allow veterans who wait 30 days or more for VA appointments or who live at least 40 miles from a VA hospital or clinic to use private doctors enrolled as providers for Medicare, military TRICARE or other government health care programs.

This is clearly a step in the right direction, but this bill absolutely does not complete the reform of the VA. Why should a veteran have to wait 30 days before he can see a non-VA doctor that he could see tomorrow at urgency or in a few days to a week otherwise?

Why should a veteran have to drive 39 miles to a VA facility, driving past a non-VA doctor’s office just 10 miles away?

Why should a veteran be required to see a government-designated doctor when he could see one that he prefers those 10 miles away?

No. The final way, the complete way, to reform this VA is to disband it and let our veterans see the doctors they choose to see at the medical facility they and their doctor deem appropriate, with the VA’s budget paid to the veterans as vouchers.

The Sanders-McCain bill, it’s claimed

also would let the VA immediately fire as many as 450 senior regional executives and hospital administrators for poor performance.

Again, a useful step, but this cannot be a final one. Disbanding the VA and returning all of the VA’s employees to the private sector clears this problem away, also, and with finality.