Eideard

Eric Schneiderman with Eric Holder announcing DOJ investigation of foreclosure fraud
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase were sued by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman over the use of a mortgage database that the state said led to improper foreclosures.

The banks’ use of the database, known as MERS, misled homeowners, undermined foreclosure proceedings and created uncertainty about ownership interests in properties, the state said in the complaint filed today in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

“The banks created the MERS system as an end-run around the property recording system, to facilitate the rapid securitization and sale of mortgages,” Schneiderman said in a statement. “Once the mortgages went sour, these same banks brought foreclosure proceedings en masse based on deceptive and fraudulent court submissions.”

The lawsuit comes three days before a Feb. 6 deadline for states to join a proposed multistate agreement over foreclosure practices said to be worth as much as $25 billion. Last week, he was selected by the Obama Administration to help lead a state-federal group probing misconduct in the packaging and sale of residential mortgage-backed securities…

The state’s complaint…states that MERS eliminated the ability of the public and homeowners to track the purchase and sale of properties through the traditional public records system. That information is stored in the MERS private database, which Schneiderman called unreliable and inaccurate. The mortgage industry has saved more than $2 billion in recording fees with the system, according to the complaint.

Banks’ use of the registry, coupled with “faulty and sloppy” document preparation, has resulted in foreclosures being filed against New York homeowners where the foreclosing party lacked the authority to sue, Schneiderman said.

By relying on legally invalid mortgage assignments using MERS, foreclosure judgments have been obtained “through fraudulent and illegal means,” according to the complaint.

Go get ‘em, Eric!

The U.S. government’s list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to the United States or within its borders has more than doubled over the past year, a counterterrorism official told CNN…

The “no fly” list produced by the FBI now has approximately 21,000 names on it, according to the official, who has knowledge of the government’s figures. One year ago about 10,000 individuals were on it.

Only about 500 people currently on the no-fly list are Americans, the official said…

The United States can now ban people from flying who are “deemed to be a threat to national security” or who had gone to terrorist training camps, said the official. The earlier standard was to block only those considered a specific threat to try to bring down a plane…

…Analysts can now use single-source information, if it’s considered credible, to recommend someone for one of the government’s terror watch lists, including the no-fly list…

The government also has a much larger list, called the Terrorist Screening Database, with approximately 510,000 names currently on it. The smaller no-fly list is a subset of that.

About 1,000 changes are made to the catalog of possible terrorists each day. Names are added and deleted, or more information is included on individuals.

If I ever intended to fly again, I’d probably take the time to harass the bureaucrats in charge of this crap to see if I made the list, yet.

Actually, I refuse to travel anywhere in the world I can’t drive to in my old pickup truck. Courtesy of George W. Bush, Homeland Insecurity and the TSA.

Funeral parlor uses a pickup truck to haul away bodies in Acapulco
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The launch this week of a comprehensive official database of drug-related killings around Mexico provides a new insight into the complexity of the conflict with criminal groups that traffic drugs into the United States.

Until now, the public relied mostly on tallies elaborated by national media outlets or on sporadic – and sometimes confusing – figures released by different government institutions.

Many in Mexico have therefore welcomed the publication of a unified set of data that for the first time includes not only fallen gang members, but also police, soldiers and innocent civilians killed in the fight against the cartels.

However, that positive development has been overshadowed by the grim scenario that the figures depict – and some complain that they only show one, even if the most tragic, aspect of the conflict.

According to the new database, the total number of people killed in the conflict between December 2006, when President Felipe Calderon came into power, and the end of 2010, stands at 34,612…

Total number of victims in drug-related violence in Mexico, per year

December 2006: 62
2007: 2,826
2008: 6,837
2009: 9,614
2010: 15,273

At least 89% of the fatalities are suspected gang members killed in turf wars between the different organisations that compete for control of trafficking routes into the US.

RTFA. Investigate the arguments for and against Calderon’s policies.

And I don’t know – do you think there will ever be a positive outcome?

A row has erupted in the United States centering on the ownership of a gay teenagers’ database.

The owner of XY Magazine and its associated website – which catered for young homosexual boys – filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. XY’s creditors have applied for the firm’s one remaining valuable asset: its database of one million users. But the Federal Trade Commission has expressed its concerns and said the sale “could violate Federal law”.

The issue of selling databases is not new, but it is the sensitivity of this particular database that is catching the attention of lawmakers.

The list contains details of tens of thousands of young men, the majority of whom will be gay.

Writing on the technology blog Read Write Web, Curt Hopkins summed up the concern felt by many users.

“The selling off of private information, gathered under the supposition of privacy, is bad enough,” he wrote.

“Even worse if you’re forced into it.

“And positively untenable when the information is connected to kids who are dealing with a dawning sexual reality that in some instances is even more fraught than what straight kids go through,” he added.

The point is made by a UK commentator that “information shouldn’t be used for a purpose other than for which it was originally intended.” Hard to administer or enforce in the era of data-mining. A process which – in and of itself – is free of value judgements.

However – the big word – when you add the context of many societies governed by ideologies ranging from dislike to hatred, fear to bigotry, questions of privacy originally guaranteed by an online contract should be substantial. And pre-eminent.

Illustration by Jordan Pote

Police officers are now routinely arresting people in order to add their DNA sample to the national police database, an inquiry has alleged.

The review of the national DNA database by the government’s human genetics commission also raises the possibility that the DNA profiles of three-quarters of young black males, aged 18 to 35, are now on the database.

The human genetics commission report, Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?, says the national DNA database for England and Wales is already the largest in the world, at 5 million profiles and growing, yet has no clear statutory basis or independent oversight…

The commission says the policy of routinely adding the DNA profiles of all those arrested has led to a highly disproportionate impact on different ethnic groups and the stigmatisation of young black men, with the danger of their being seen as “an ‘alien wedge’ of criminality”…

The chairman of the commission, Prof Jonathan Montgomery, said: “It’s now become pretty routine to take DNA samples on arrest. So large numbers of people on the DNA database will be there not because they have been convicted, but because they’ve been arrested.”

He said the commission had received evidence from a former police superintendent that it was now the norm to arrest offenders for everything possible. “It is apparently understood by serving police officers that one of the reasons, if not the reason, for the change in practice is so that the DNA of the offender can be obtained,” said Montgomery, adding that it would be a matter of very great concern if this was now a widespread practice.

The report…argues the database creates “pre-suspects” who are the first to be checked whenever a new crime is entered. This leads to a “no smoke without fire” culture that may be pervasive and hard to overcome.

This is a chilling admission of how far – everything that civil liberties campaigners feared – has come. A cabal of neo-Nazi police superintendents wasn’t required. Dopey useless politicians – not slimey right-wing nationalists – provided the framework.

There’s even a bit of techno-jargon to cover the process. Function creep.

The DNA of most innocent people arrested in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will not be kept for more than six years, the Home Office has said…

The move comes after the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that the National DNA Database was illegal…

Ministers defend this as a proportionate tactic that protects the public, rather than a principled but simplistic stand for privacy. The problem is that there is a lack of data on how many crimes have been cracked thanks to retaining DNA from innocent people…

That leaves critics saying anyone in this category has been judged “not guilty – yet”. If the plan gets through before the general election, it will be challenged, testing ministers’ claims to have balanced privacy with a duty to protect the public.

Wasn’t there once a standard of constitutional rights being based upon principles rather than expedient policies enacted by a government run by fear-filled cowards?

How can people be judged temporarily innocent?

Gotcha!

A blood-swollen leech found at a crime scene eight years ago has led Australian police to an armed robber.

The leech dropped off Peter Cannon as he and an accomplice tied a 71-year-old woman to a chair in her remote home in the Tasmanian woods and stole several hundred dollars in cash in September 2001.

Officials extracted blood from the leech that they believed was likely to have come from one of the two suspects. They identified Cannon as that culprit when he was arrested last year on unrelated drug charges and authorities for the first time recorded his DNA profile.

Sally Kelty, a forensic science researcher, said the case could be the first in which investigators had used DNA extracted from a bloodsucker such as a leech or a mosquito to solve a crime…

Detective Inspector Mick Johnston, who was involved in the police investigation, said the leech was the only forensic evidence found at the crime scene. He said he was happy with the guilty plea, especially for the victim, Fay Olson.

“She’s waited a long time for closure to this matter and it’s nice to be able to deliver that,” Johnson told ABC radio.

Parasite catches parasite!

Five police forces which challenged a ruling that they should delete records on criminal convictions from their database have won their appeal.

The court of appeal said convictions, however old and however minor, can be of value in the fight against crime. The court said that as a result the retention of that information should not be denied to the police.

The police added if the original ruling had been upheld, the result would have been a “liars’ charter” – where people would be able to deny criminal convictions on job applications if they knew the deletion deadline had passed…

Three judges ruled that retaining information was far easier to justify than actually disclosing the information to others…

“Although principally used for police purposes, these records are also critical to the courts, the Criminal Records Bureau, the Independent Safeguarding Agency, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Home Office, who all supported this appeal.”

But Anna Fairclough, a lawyer for the civil rights group Liberty, said the judgement “forgets the privacy rights of millions of people”.

Some so-called libertarians take an absolute position on all questions of privacy. They just don’t realize when they’re contradicting themselves.

HR boffins should be bright enough to decide about minor childhood offense vs. gang loyalty. If not, then, they should be the target of legal action. Longterm histories available to police are no more than a tool. Differentiated between civil and political; but, still only society’s record-keeping.

As Congress debates the government’s role in health care, a new report finds that state and federal officials failed to detect millions of dollars in Medicaid prescription drug abuse.

An audit of the government program in five large states found about 65,000 instances of beneficiaries improperly obtaining potentially addictive drugs at a cost of about $65 million during 2006 and 2007 — including thousands of prescriptions written for dead patients or by people posing as doctors…

The states targeted by the GAO — California, Illinois, New York, North Carolina and Texas — accounted for 40% of Medicaid’s prescription drug payments in fiscal years 2006 and 2007. They are not fully taking advantage of federal databases or technology that could spot fraud, the report said.

The GAO found:

• About 65,000 cases where Medicaid beneficiaries visited six or more doctors and up to 46 different pharmacies to acquire prescriptions — a practice known as “doctor-shopping” that allows purchasers to exceed the legal limit of drugs.

• Sixty-five doctors or pharmacists writing or filling prescriptions after being banned from Medicaid, some for illegally selling such drugs.

• About 1,800 prescriptions written for dead patients and 1,200 prescriptions “written” by dead physicians.

Obama’s proposals on digitizing medical records could bring a crushing decline in this kind of fraud. As the Feds roll it out the biggest problem will be dragging some states into the 21st Century. And this kind of spot-check can and should be routine throughout the system.

Here in New Mexico – now that we’ve brought the state’s unemployment/employment departments back from outsourcing in India – they still managed to buy a software management package that has missed peoples’ unemployment checks several times. IT is still ruled by political hacks.

Alberta Hutterites have lost their fight to be exempted from a law making digital photos mandatory for drivers to get new licences in the province. The Hutterites, a Christian sect that believes being photographed violates their faith and way of life, have been allowed to carry special driving permits since 1974 – the year the government introduced photo licences.

But the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 4-3 on Friday to uphold provincial rules that went into effect in 2003 that make a digital photo universally mandatory for all new licences. “The goal of setting up a system that minimizes the risk of identity theft associated with drivers’ licences is a pressing and important public goal,” Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin wrote.

“The universal photo requirement is connected to this goal and does not limit freedom (of) religion more than required to achieve it.”

When Alberta offered the Hutterites a comprise in 2003 allowing permits without photos – with the proviso that photos must still be taken for a database – the Hutterites refused.

The Hutterites believe being photographed violates the second of the Ten Commandments forbidding idolatry.

And that’s about where serious legal discussion comes to an end.