Last week I wrote a brief blog post about New Zealand’s attempt to criminalize a video taken of the infamous Christchurch mosque shooting, leveling penalties of up to 10 years in prison for possession and 14 years for sharing it.  New Zealand, apparently, has a “Chief Censor’s Office” that gets to make decisions about what its residents may and may not see.

Today, the Chief Censor has doubled-down, now banning a document published by the shooter explaining his reasons for killing 50 Muslims as they prayed

The banned manifesto of the shooter, whose name I don’t really care to spread, clearly lays out the motivation behind this act of terrorism. The tl;dr version is that the shooter is a self-admitted racist who believes that non-white immigrants will take over “white countries” because of the combination of unchecked immigration and declining birth rates among white people.  In other words, this man is a white supremacist.

There are really two ways to address terrorism: 1) to take away the means, and 2) to address the root cause.  New Zealand, as many countries, has decided to go exclusively with the former, banning all semi-automatic weapons in a country where guns were already quite regulated.  But terrorists always find a means to accomplish their goals, whether with homemade bombs, speeding trucks, hijacked airplanes, or otherwise.

New Zealand’s approach not only fails to try to remedy underlying causes, but actually prevents its residents from gaining any insight into the same by hiding a primary source that reveals the motivation in detail.  At the same time, they place an authoritarian boot on the free speech rights (let alone gun rights) of their people with little benefit as future terrorists accomplish their goals via different means.

We can’t defeat terror by ignoring what motivated the terrorist.  Without my personal support for any of the ideas expressed therein, here’s the manifesto (.pdf).  Don’t click if you’re in New Zealand — that will be 10 years.

The stopping of random drivers to check for sobriety without cause is a search that barely meets constitutional muster.  In 1990, the U.S Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 split decision that sobriety checkpoints are legal (Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990)), but part of its decision considered that drivers were free to avoid those checkpoints by making a u-turn.  About a dozen states have outlawed the practice.

If a part of the constitutionality of a search depends on one’s ability to avoid it (just like the “if you don’t like it, just don’t fly” argument in favor of TSA nonsense), then a means for obtaining knowledge of an impending search is necessary. Subsequent cases have made clear that citizens have the right to warn others of police activity: for example, judges in Florida, Kansas, and others have ruled that there is a constitutional right to flash headlights to warn other drivers of speed traps.

Yet, New York police have always had a thing for arresting citizens for “interfering” with them verbally, despite New York law (and possibly the Constitution, absent some pretty compelling circumstances) quite clearly stating that such a charge requires physical interference, intimidation, or interference with telecommunications systems (case ruling against the police when interference is non-physical, listing other cases where police lost the same arguments time and time again).  It’s therefore no surprise that an NYPD attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Waze, the driving directions app that allows you to flag checkpoints:

Individuals who post the locations of DWI checkpoints may be engaging in criminal conduct since such actions could be intentional attempts to prevent and/or impair the administration of the DWI laws and other relevant criminal and traffic laws. The posting of such information for public consumption is irresponsible since it only serves to aid impaired and intoxicated drivers to evade checkpoints and encourage reckless driving. Revealing the location of checkpoints puts those drivers, their passengers, and the general public at risk.

Irresponsible?  Maybe criminal?  Given that the Supreme Court has, to date, not allowed secret checkpoints. that seems far-fetched.

The letter was written by Ann Prunty, who lists herself as “Acting Deputy Commissioner, Legal Matters.”  A review of State Bar records shows that she is a licensed attorney, which means she has the duty to avoid sending out letters like this without a good-faith basis for her assertions.

Of course, Ms. Prunty declined to respond to my request for clarification.  I’ll take that as an indication that she’s full of shit.

One silver lining: if the police do actually arrest someone for using Waze, this letter makes not just the individual officer, but the City itself, liable for the false arrest, since it’s now the official policy (“pattern or practice,” if you will) of the government.  Perhaps Ms. Prunty should think before she speaks and puts the taxpayer’s dollars on the line.

This blog has been quiet as I study for the February 2019 California Bar Exam, but I couldn’t help but notice the buzzing around how the government shutdown has affected the TSA.

CNN is now reporting that 10% of TSA screeners are calling out sick, while on a random day that number is in the 3% range.  That doesn’t quite give the full picture.  At some airports, the call out rate is much higher, and management has been forbidden from releasing statistics for specific airports while begging airports with lower call out rates to ship their employees around the country.

Those that have been showing up clearly have less regard for doing their job.  Screeners at New York’s JFK airport have taken to using the PA system to play rap music.  Those at Washington State’s SEA are busily protesting outside the airport.  And at airports across the country, TSA is literally asking travelers for donations of food, as if they were homeless on a street corner:

I feel for government employees that are going through tough times right now because we have a President who acts like a child.  (“Let’s get our way on border security by crippling our government, including those who secure the border!”).  The shutdown should be ended and no wall should be funded.

But if there were actually terrorists about to strike our nation but for the TSA, they’d have done so.  It’s almost like the whole premise behind the need for the TSA is manufactured to take our rights and our tax dollars with no proportional benefit to our safety.

(No updates on any of my court cases.  No idea if they’re even being considered during the shutdown.)

It’s been a slow fall here at the Professional Troublemaker blog, as I prepare to finish law school in just 2 more weeks. There haven’t been any substantial updates on any of my lawsuits since the summer, as they work their way through the courts.

But, today I got a letter from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office indicating that they’ve completed the registration of a trademark for “Professional Troublemaker.” Near the beginning of the year, I sent in an application, largely as a way to get some experience with trademark law. Filing trademarks can now be done entirely online and registration of a simple mark comes with a fairly reasonable $225 fee, so long as you complete the process without any paper filings.

I’m not sure I got too much useful experience or learned a whole lot from the process — I spent half an hour submitting online forms, gave them the filing fee, waited about 8 months, and got my mark with no hassle — but it’s always interesting to me to see how another area of law works.

So, watch out, imposter troublemakers: the name is mine!

(Why would I pick the name Professional Troublemaker? What is a “profesional troublemaker?”)

The ordinary citizen, and even most police officers, in the U.K. cannot legally own a gun.  As a result, gun crime is fairly low, yet murder in London has still reached record highs, surpassing New York City, as a result of stabbings.

Their response?  To implement tight “knife control” and start stopping-and-frisking people on the streets to find people carrying around anything pointy.

Police departments all over England are bragging on social media about the “weapons sweeps” they are conducting.  The recoveries have included ordinary scissors, screwdrivers, pliers, a file, and even a butter knife.  When questioned (well, mocked) about the butter knife on Twitter, Hackney Police said, “Thanks for your insightful & original retort. The fact remains, a ‘butter knife’ in the chest will kill as surely as a bayonet.”

What’s worse, they’re bragging about what they call “stop-and-search,” their version of the mostly-defunct “stop-and-frisk” that the NYPD used to unconstitutionally search 800,000 people in one year alone, finding weapons less than 2% of times.  The NYPD insisted that the program was responsible for a drop in crime until they were ordered to stop by a federal judge and crime stats in New York continued to improve.

It seems difficult to find the rules describing the circumstances under which English police may search an individual on the street, but as far as I can gather — and knowing they have no constitutional amendment against unreasonable search — it’s whenever an officer has reason to be suspicious.  (I welcome corrections if anyone can find an official policy.)  And good Brits will bend over and take it, because as this retired British police officer mused:

We hear the statistics that suggest intelligence led stop and search gets positive results in a third of all cases, but what we don’t know is what happens when an officer decides not to stop and search someone they are suspicious of. Does that person then go on to do something terrible?

No, actually, police are suspicious of everyone, and most will not go on to commit crimes with concealed screwdrivers.

Here in the States, I think there is reform we can do to make it more difficult for people who shouldn’t have a gun to get one.  But today we hear useful idiots like Larry King and retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens call for a full repeal of the Second Amendment — literally calling for the government to take our guns.

Apparently, that doesn’t stop murder: people are really good at finding ways to kill each other.  The correct solution is to remove the desire, whether motivated by mental illness, religious hatred, or otherwise.  The incorrect solution is what has led the U.K. on a path to tyranny and dry toast.